Temporada 1
After the immigration episode, and after hearing that presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy proposed tying voting rights to those under 25 to the ability to pass the civics exam, we take on the civics exam. We go through several of the questions that appear on the civics exam to see if we'd be able to pass. We didn't study at all before hand, and I think we did okay. But that's an interesting question, should voting be tied to some level of competency, or knowledge of how the government currently works?
This episode we get into the history of US immigration. We try to cover a lot of the laws that were passed as well as talk about some historical and current immigration statistics.
We spend some time talking about the history of the Olympics as well as some memorable moments from the Olympics. We were looking for something a little more upbeat, and the Olympics is all about being uplifting.
We go deep into tin foil hat territory again with a rambling discussion on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The story has everything that makes for a good conspiracy. the death of a powerful figure, conspicuous evidence, conflicting witness statements, multiple government investigations, multiple confessions made years after the fact that contradict the official narrative, signs pointing to the government, the mob, or even just the lone gunman. We haven't got a clue what happened, but looking into it got the old conspiracy juices flowing.
We discuss a little history of the Supreme Court, a few landmark cases, like Marbury V Madison, a landmark case from 1803 where the supreme court suggests an act of Congress, the Judiciary Act of 1789, is unconstitutional, or more recent cases like Students for Fair Admissions V Harvard, as well as a few in between. Then we go off track for the last half hour with some discussions marginally related to the supreme court.
We looked into some of the more famous psychological experiments, like the Milgram Experiment, Harry Harlow's experiments involving monkeys and their need for comfort as babies, the Stanford Prison Experiment, and more
We discuss NATO, talking about the origins of NATO, the expansion of NATO, and what it actually does
We went into this episode looking for strange events that have occurred in history. It originated with the Tunguska Event, an asteroid or meteor strike that hit earth in 1908, but we discuss some other strange things, like the unexplained deaths of some Russian skiers, the carbon dioxide escape at Lake Nyos in Cameroon that killed 1700 people, and a solar flare that sent charged particles from the sun that could power telegraph stations.
We're back, this time talking about prediction markets. Prediction markets are pretty close to an online stock exchange where you buy "shares" in random future events. Similar to the commodities market, where you might invest based on whether you think there will be more or less grain harvested next year, but focused on non commodities, like whether or not AI will take over the world.
We're in over our heads again as we look into the recent collapse of several banks in what might be the start of a new banking crisis. Three banks recently collapsed and we look into it, trying to understand what is going on.