You Are A Weirdo

Toss a text to YAAW HQ.Take a walk on the wild side with your historian host as we unearth some of the big-picture insights of environmental history. Forage in the wilderness, stroll around a giant pie, and hear about what ancient folks did for a living. You’ll also find out why you can’t build enormous pyramid-like buildings without things like beer, bread, kings, priestesses,

Toss a text to YAAW HQ.It bears repeating that we live in strange times. Take, for instance, duplication technology. Today, no matter who you are, you can draw an image or scribble out some text, and copy it as many times as you’d like. Yet when we consider that copying tech in historical perspective, we discover that this ability is new. For most of the human past, only wealthy

Toss a text to YAAW HQ.Which is more valuable: diamonds or water? The seems obvious, but splash some holy water into the mix and you’ll see that this answer is a lot messier than you might at first think. Join your new favorite historian-podcaster guy on a journey through time and around the world to better understand why holy water defies most economic logic. Along the way you�

Toss a text to YAAW HQ.Did the framers of the U.S. Constitution set up the country’s government to be a republic or a democracy? Some folks have surprisingly strong opinions on this question, often with good reason. Yet the words republic and democracy have very similar meanings, so what’s the big deal? The answer has to do with the ways that the historic founders of the USA th

Toss a text to YAAW HQ.Anticipation. It's so thick you can scoop it out of the air with a soup spoon. Yes my friends, Season Two of the award-imagining You Are A Weirdo podcast is coming soon.If this dramatic trailer is any indication, it's going to be epic.Support the Show.Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

Toss a text to YAAW HQ.In the time it takes you to put on just one elbow pad, you can access hundreds of cutting-edge news articles from all around the globe. Yet making sense of international events can be tricky. To really get it, you need to understand something about historical context.Take for example the present-day situation between the United States, the People’s Republic

Toss a text to YAAW HQ.Understanding the historical rise of mass media is not just about the tech. It’s also about how people used—and abused—those new ways of communicating with the public. That picture becomes clearer when you realize that new innovations in amplification and broadcasting coincided closely with the rise of nationalism in the Western world. Successful nation

Toss a text to YAAW HQ.You’re presumably reading this description because you like to listen to podcasts. And you can listen to podcasts because clever people invented loudspeakers a century-and-change ago. And loudspeakers were not possible without the invention of electronic amplifiers. Which were not possible without vacuum tubes. Which are a lot like light bulbs.What was it l

Toss a text to YAAW HQ.We take for granted our present-day ability to make ourselves as obnoxiously loud as we want to be. Yet being able to pump up the volume of an individual voice—to make it so deafening that it can easily reach all 140,000 ears of a stadium full of 70,000 people—is a brand-new development in the big picture of the human past.Vibe with your favorite professi

Toss a text to YAAW HQ.Studying history can help you become a better, more informed leader. Yet a lot of so-called advice from 'history' out there tends to oversimplify the historical record. History is big and complex; reducing this enormous field to a bunch of digestible soundbites makes it appear small and simple.So what would happen if we tried to follow historical leadership a