We assume the people holding the power to end the world must be fundamentally different from the rest of us, totally rational and unshakable. This episode is a deep dive into J. Robert Oppenheimer, who proves the opposite. The father of the atomic bomb was contradictory, restless, and acutely human, and that is precisely what made him both indispensable and disposable.

We trace his upbringing in a wealthy New York Ethical Culture household, the early Harvard and Cambridge years, the breakdown that nearly ended him, and the rebirth at Göttingen under Max Born. We follow him to Berkeley and Caltech, where he built American theoretical physics from scratch, and into the Manhattan Project, where General Leslie Groves chose him precisely because he was the only physicist capable of synthesizing every relevant discipline at once and becaus ...