Professor Avi Loeb is a former Chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University, founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is also the head of the Galileo Project - the Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts. We talk about the US government's "secret retrieval program" testimony by David Grusch, UFO and UAP sightings,...

Stanley Stepanic is an Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia. To date he has published three textbooks that have been released in recent editions - these are "Dracula or the Timeless Path of the Vampire," "Russian and East European Film", and "Russian Folklore". In addition to such publications, Professor Stepanic has been very active in the public sphere, giving a variety of presentations, primarily concerning the VAMPIRE. We talk about vampire...

Stuart Vyse is a behavioral scientist and writer with a PhD in psychology and BA and MA degrees in English Literature. He's a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, as well as a contributing editor for the Skeptical Inquirer magazine. His first book, Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition won the William James Book Award of the American Psychological Association. In 2020 he wrote a book called Superstition, published by Oxford...

Professor Patrick McNamara has over 15 years of experience working directly on the problem of the nature and function of dreaming. He has been the recipient of grant awards from the National Institutes of Health, to further study sleep and was awarded the Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience from Boston University. He did a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Aphasia Research Center, Boston VA Medical Center. He has published over 50 scientific papers as well as several books on the neuroscience of...

Mike Rothschild is a journalist and author, focused on the intersections between internet culture and politics as seen through the dark glass of conspiracy theories. Since 2018, he has specialized in examining the QAnon conspiracy cult and is one of the first journalists to reveal its connections to past conspiracy theories. He is the author of the seminal work on QAnon, "The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything.""We talk about QAnon's...

Agustín Fuentes is a professor of anthropology at Princeton University. His research focuses on the biosocial, delving into the entanglement of biological systems with the social and cultural lives of humans, our ancestors, and a few of the other animals with whom humanity shares close relations.He has written many books, but we mostly discuss his latest one, which is called "Why we believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being;" in it Professor Fuentes examines our capacity to believe.We...

Anil Seth is a professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he is also Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. His latest book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, is a Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller, a New Statesman Book of the Year, an Economist Book of the Year and a Guardian Science Book of the Year. His TED talk on consciousness has more than 13 million views and is one of TED’s most popular science talks. We talk...

Bill Schutt is Professor Emeritus of biology at LIU Post and a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. He is the author of Dark Banquet: Blood and The Curious Lives of the Blood-Feeding Creatures and Pump: A Natural History of the Heart, which is his latest book. In 2017 he published an astonishing book called Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History, which is what we discuss in this episode... We also talk about cannibalism's rise in contemporary Hollywood, Christopher...

Dr. Lisa Sugiura is a Reader in Cybercrime and Gender at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Portsmouth, Themes Strategic Innovation Fellow and the Deputy Director of the Cybercrime Awareness Clinic. Her research focuses on online deviance, and technology facilitated gender-based abuse and sexual violence. She has published on topics including the online pharmaceutical trade, online research ethics, and rape culture online. She is the author of the books:...

Professor Chris Stringer has worked at The Natural History Museum London since 1973. He is now Research Leader in Human Origins and a Fellow of the Royal Society, and is also a Visiting Professor at Royal Holloway and UCL. His early research was on the relationship of Neanderthals and early modern humans in Europe, but through his work on the 'Recent African Origin' theory of modern human origins, he now collaborates with archaeologists and geneticists in attempting to reconstruct the...

The Partial Historians is a renowned podcast about ancient Roman history, hosted by historians dr. Fiona Radford and dr. Peta Greenfield, who discuss, spar, and laugh their way through different aspects of the Roman world... We talk about the first Roman Emperor's scandalous daughter, Julia the Elder, but also about sassy Roman parties, unforgivable affairs and the endless cycle of the struggle for power.

Edward Slingerland is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, where he also holds appointments in the Departments of Psychology and Asian Studies. He is an expert on early Chinese thought, comparative religion and digital humanities. Besides numerous academic books, translations and edited volumes, Professor Slingerland is the author of the best-selling book "Drunk - How we sipped, Danced and stumbled our Way to Civilization", which...

Toby Jones has just finished his PhD at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where he is also teaching. His work focuses on the irruption of the Mongols onto the larger world scene focusing on their invasion of the Persianate world. The topic of his research is ‘Loyalty in the Turco-Mongol World' - through it he considers the Mongol invasions and their impact on the cultures around them. We talk about Chinggis Khan, Mongol feasts, Conquest, Ruthlessness, their Sense of Humour and the Role of...

Bill McGuire is a Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London, a co-director of the New Weather Institute and was a contributor to the 2012 IPCC report on climate change and extreme events. His books include A Guide to the End of the World: Everything you Never Wanted to Know and Waking the Giant: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Volcanoes. In his latest book Hothouse Earth: an Inhabitant’s Guide, Professor McGuire explains the...

Mostafa Minawi is an associate professor of history at Cornell University and the director of the Critical Ottoman and Post-ottoman studies. He is the author of "The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz", as well as the very recent "Losing Istanbul: Arab-Ottoman Imperialists and the End of Empire". His short video ‘The rise of the Ottoman Empire’ he made with TED-Ed has almost a million views on Youtube and is just the coolest introduction into the...

Prof. Massimo Pigliucci has a PhD in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Connecticut and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Tennessee. He is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His research interests include the philosophy of science, the nature of pseudoscience, and practical philosophies like Stoicism and New Skepticism. He is the author or editor of 16 books, including the best selling How to Be A Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a...

Dr. Mathias Nordvig is a visiting assistant professor of Nordic and Arctic studies at the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder). He teaches subjects on Viking history, Nordic mythology, folklore, Arctic culture and society, and Danish language. Dr. Nordvig earned his PhD in Nordic mythology in 2014 at Aarhus University in Denmark, his native country... In this episode, we talk about persistent stereotypes we hold about the...

Dr. Peter Struck is Professor and Chair of the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his A.B. at the University of Michigan and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His primary research interests are in the history of ideas about the construction of meaning, with specialties in myth, literary criticism, and divination. His book Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of Their Texts won the C. J. Goodwin Award from the American...

Dr. Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel is a Scholar and Historian who holds a Bachelor's degree in Physics, a BA in History and a PhD in Medieval Cultures from the University of Barcelona. She has been awarded a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship to carry out her research project ILLITTERATAE at Queen Mary University of London. We talk about Women's Spirituality, Mysticism, the Inquisition and the accusations of Witchcraft in the Middle Ages.

Dr. John Aberth is a medieval historian, author and professor. He received his M.A. in Medieval Studies from the University of Leeds in England and his Ph.D. in Medieval History from the University of Cambridge. Professor Aberth is the author of ten books on Medieval History, focusing mostly on the Black Death of the late Middle Ages. In this episode we talk about the origins of the bubonic plague, the devastation it caused during the Middle ages, the many unsuccessful ways it was treated,...

Dr Jonathan Mijs is a Dutch sociologist who earned his PhD at Harvard University and is currently teaching at Boston University. His research describes the beliefs people hold about economic inequality, its causes and political consequences. It especially highlights the process through which citizens - especially young ones - learn about inequality and come to make sense of poverty and wealth.His works have been featured in The Guardian, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Harvard Business...

Dr. Julia Rucklidge is a Professor of Clinical Psychology in the School of Psychology, Speech and Hearing at the University of Canterbury and the Director of Te Puna Toiora, the Mental Health and Nutrition Research Lab.Her TEDx talk, ’The surprisingly dramatic role of nutrition in mental health’ has been viewed over 4 million times, and she recently co-authored a book, The Better Brain: Overcome Anxiety, Combat Depression, and Reduce ADHD and Stress with Nutrition, which was released in...