One curious mind, one topic at a time, no guardrails. Some weeks it's science, some weeks it's a strange piece of history, some weeks it's a question that kept me up at night. If you're the type who opens 30 tabs and enjoys the company, you're home. New rabbit hole every week.
4 episodes
In February 1803, fishermen on the coast of eastern Japan pulled ashore a sealed vessel unlike anything in their maritime vocabulary — rounded hull, iron construction, glass windows, and a young woman inside who spoke no recognizable language and refused to release a small lacquered box. Four separate Edo-period texts record the encounter. Whether those accounts are truly independent of one another is the question the historical record has never resolved.
Charles Hall spent roughly two years as a weather observer in the Nevada desert near Nellis Air Force Base. He came back with a story about a race of extraterrestrial beings — tall, white-skinned, telepathic — operating there with the knowledge of U.S. military command. Decades later, that story hasn't collapsed. The more interesting question is why — and what it reveals about how certain accounts resist falsification.
In early 2024, Anthropic was quietly buying millions of physical books, feeding them through hydraulic cutting machines, scanning the pages, and discarding the originals. A federal court has since ruled that legal. The same company separately paid $1.5 billion to settle claims over pirated digital books used for the same training project. Those two outcomes, and what connects them, are what this episode is about.
In 2025, Niantic sold Pokémon Go for $3.5 billion — and immediately made clear that wasn't the real asset. What the company kept was a database of 30 billion street-level images, built largely by players who thought they were catching fictional creatures. How that database was constructed, what players understood about their role in building it, and what it's now worth — that's what this episode is about.