Explore every episode of the podcast Let's Learn Everything!
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 113: Rediscovered Organs & Bird Watching | 24 sept. 2026 | 01:54:29 | |
Wait, how are we rediscovering organs in 2026?? Or... are we? Well let's learn about the history and fads of the insides of our bodies! And what is bird watching, why do we all love it, and how casual and competitive can you get with it? Images we talk about: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! The Name Website We also learn about: Sources: Organ sources coming soon! Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 112: Life in Exclusion Zones & Every Single Character | 10 sept. 2026 | 01:58:28 | |
What happens to life inside exclusion zones like Chernobyl? Is it good? Bad? Or something much more interesting? And what happens when you try to codify every single character from human language? Well, it definitely leads to some fascinating linguistic rabbit holes! Images we talk about: Przewalski’s horse (yes that’s how it’s spelled) Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Actually defining it made it creepier, the zone rouge, we an area of Earth uninhabitable from war, chernobyl release over 100 radioactive elements, they really need to name the zone of alienation the zone of doing taxes, the liquidators actually did a good job of stopping the spread, is this a rewilding experiment? Ella deleted emails to poach this topic, Przewalski’s horse (yes that’s how it’s spelled), technically feral vs wild horses, I’ve reached the nuance center of my nuance pop, why isn’t it my job so sample chernobyl frogs, nearly all pine trees near chernobyl were wiped out, “the selective pressures of radiation”, bright birds used up their carotenoids for color, we’re doing nuclear ecological biochemistry, god that was an ugly laugh, maybe its counterintuitive for the small things - no this one sucks, the slow horror of a lack of decomposition, the ecosystem is not rewilded it’s entirely new, the Korean DMZ is like an ecological semi permeable membrane, DMZ ecology research institute, the DMZ has 40% of Korea’s endangered species, it’s a pitstop along the east asian australasian flyway, endangered cranes have bounced back in the DMZ, the DMZ crane watch, the cranes and natterjack toad require human farming to thrive, synonyms of nuance and thrive, Baarter economy standing ovation, conflictful chicken, Unicode is the ISO standard for text on computers, ASCII’s 128 characters is surely enough right? why do you have a period accurate phone? it turns out other cultures want to use the computer, there are 159,801 characters in unicode, the basic multilingual plane sounds like startrek shit and it kind of is, I mean it’s not like it has cuneiform except it does, braille unicode exists for a reason, braille doesn’t just map one to one with letters it also has contractions, contracted braille is a stenography, tweeting more in japanese, 101,996 CJK characters, Max Woolf’s Big List of Naughty Strings, after Mamdani was elected I had to learn how to pronounce the bismillah, “Bismillah is the Przewalski’s Horse of this topic”, I said we shouldn’t dive into the history of a language halfway through a topic but fuck it, LR0’s terrific Arabic typography essay, arabic script can be perfectly justified, “the justification lives inside the words”, Kashidas stretching across a map made it click for Tom, maing the bismillah beautiful, we all just want to make text look cool, the ottoman printing press ban myth, the cursed lost printed quran, oh my god is this the unifying thing, weirdly internet explorer had kashida justification for 1 year? Inshallah you find on the internet what you’re exploring for. Sources: Chernobyl Frogs Image Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| Recast: Ella on That's Absurd, Please Elaborate | 27 août 2026 | 01:06:27 | |
Due to some house woes, we're recasting Ella's excellent appearance on That's Absurd, Please Elaborate, where they actually solve a meme and invent Pee Day. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 111: Astronaut Cady Coleman, Life in Space, and What Astronauts Learn | 13 août 2026 | 01:29:40 | |
What does an astronaut actually learn in training? And what surprises them about having to live in space? Well, fortunately astronaut Cady Coleman is here to answer these and many more of our questions!! See us live in London! LETSLEARNEVERYTHING.COM/LIVE See Tom live in NYC! OurFindingsShow.com Images we talk about: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Astronaut school, “the mission is exploration and only a part of it is human spaceflight”, the telerobotic surgery was real, living in NEEMO, Cady learned to remove a gallbladder, “what is it that I have to remember is not being simulated well?”, oh the telerobotic surgery was happening under water, it’s about sharing what you’re learning at the same time, spending 11 days underwater, bedrest studies in hawaii are actually a toll and a service, communication is key even in space, trust us space food is going to get old, not every day of training is remove 10 gallbladders, putting yourself in the picture humanizes it, which way is up? sleep flashes from cosmic rays, liquid sensors in our neck make you pee when you lie down and reduce blood volume in space, you can’t cough to hide your pee on the ISS, the future of the ISS, astronaut feet facts, Paolo and Cady’s toenail system, learning to fly in zero g, “you learn to live in 3 dimensions”, losing things in zero g sucks, CO2 buildup for the group photo, not washing clothes upset the balance, it’s all about fluid physics, “it’s all about interfaces between solids and liquids - and up in space it’s the biggest game in town”, peeing in space is easier than camping, how you determine your space order with feet, the domino effect of space suit sizes, your space suit is your space ship, IT’S LESS MATERIAL, there are people who are still waiting their turn, “how do you make sure these voices are heard when their presence is not missed?”, how to work for change collaboratively, you shouldn’t have to work so hard to participate, “oh that’s going on the website Cady”, one small step for you and one big step for democracy. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 110: Horsepower & Makeup | 30 juil. 2026 | 01:46:40 | |
What even is horsepower? Is it a silly unit of measurement, or actually an underrated marvel?? And how old is makeup? Why do we do it? And what historic looks can you steal for your next night out? What are the flaws in scientific publishing, who's responsible, and how can we fix it? ALSO SEE US LIVE IN LONDON!!! LETSLEARNEVERYTHING.COM/LIVE Images we talk about: Papyrus Image Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: I’m taking horse pills to get their powers, we can answer questions without getting klaxonned, abbreviated for french reasons, the meter is 1 ten millionth the distance from the north to south pole, I’m going to be talking about power “oh god”, power is the movement of a mass over time, you’ll notice nowhere in that definition did I mention horses, James perfects the steam engine, you can’t just say “hey this engine will get us to the industrial revoltuion” you have to sell it in horses, come up with your own unit of power dweeb, a horse can produce 15 horsepower, you’re about to have a lot more nickels, there was a metric and imperial horsepower, all the international names for hosepower, watt SI unit is on first base? the father son and the holy ghost of electronics (the amp, volt, and watt), we didn’t have a unified unit for power before horsepower, Thomas Edison measured lightbulb efficacy by horsepower, IT WASN’T AN IRONIC CHOICE IT WAS CAUSE AND EFFECT, this isn’t a podcast it’s a slumber party, Caroline and Ella’s metallic blue eyeliner/facepaint, webster’s definition is somehow too broad and too narrow, prehistoric pigemtns may have been body paint, Ella’s surprisingly informative ancient egyptian ASMR video, from kohl to green malachite, caroline hiding the sexy bits of the papyrus from us, this makes my tummy hurt, fish palettes, ancient greek prostitues were required to wear lipstick, modern man or ro-man, a woman buys lotions and perfumes with cheating in mind, Elizabeth I’s lead and vinegar makeup, painting on fake veins, plucking hairs to match the queen’s forhead, the optical illusion dot, Caroline’s favorite fad: beauty patches, it’s so wild how excluded darker complexions are in the market when this topic started in ancient egypt, perhaps makeup imitates the moment of an orgasm, im inventing new sexism: men are blurry, we finally just asked women why they wear makeup, wearing makeup because we have to vs we want to, for other or ourselves, the ro-manosphere. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 109: Scientific Publishing | 16 juil. 2026 | 01:18:04 | |
What are the flaws in scientific publishing, who's responsible, and how can we fix it? ALSO SEE US LIVE IN LONDON!!! LETSLEARNEVERYTHING.COM/LIVE Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: We almost do the same grim joke, the live show will have 50% more hosts than this, before publications there were societies and books and letters, in 1665 a Henry Oldenburg of the royal society starts “Philosophical Transactions”, the longest continuous journal (ignoring the time Olderburg was put in a tower for criticizing the king), the discovery of Jupiter’s red spot and also a deformed calf, Newton’s Optics was published in Philosophical Transactions first, Science has bad SEO, the doubling time of papers is 14 years since the 1950s, Ella’s peer review process, errors can be missed and biases affected, not paying reviewers is a bug that’s labelled as a feature, government funded research can still be privately owned, we’ve all agreed “processing fee” just means bullshit, there’s some things I don’t want to be “fun”, Elsevier has a 38% profit margin while Alphabet’s is 32%, editorial resignations in protest, I’m excited to add Robert Maxwell to my Arya Stark list of people, Maxwell died on his yes-that-Ghislaine-Maxwell Yacht, the scheme to buyout scientists for their papers, cover upfront costs - own copyright - flood with new journals - reap the subscription costs, “jesus wept”, retractions are growing by about 20% each year, I’m buying Ella a dictionary so she can learn what “fun” means, fool me 239 time shame on me, paper mills, predatory journals are pay to win, the Chinese restaurant metaphor keeps staying accurate, no it’s not nature our journal is nurture, is this finally rock bottom? the public review curate model, the pros and cons of preprints, diamond open access, the nelson memo, “I think the Ghislaine Mawell death yacht is fun”. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 108: Quicksand and Other Childhood Worries & The Undying Game of Pinball | 02 juil. 2026 | 01:59:40 | |
We all thought quicksand would be a bigger deal than it is, but what is the science behind them and all the other worries I had as a kid? And how does pinball reflect the changing cultures of our time, and could now be the best era of pinball? ALSO SEE US LIVE IN LONDON!!! LETSLEARNEVERYTHING.COM/LIVE Things we Talk About: Bagatelle Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Ella’s spoon collection is much more important than our live show, the never ending story, quicksand was in 3% of in the 1960s, the problem with gen z is they’re not afraid of quicksand, quicksand is reverse oobleck (sheer-thinning), the settled sand at the bottom requires the force of lifting a car, quicksand is unfortunate physics circumstances burying you, 11th century quicksand art in the Bayeux Tapestry (also Haley’s comet), we’re less dense than quicksand so you’d float at your waist, you could listen to this podcast twice while hanging out in quicksand, Ella cried so much she couldn’t cross the piranha plank, piranha fear is President Roosevelt’s fault, you know you’re making fun of a ten year old child right now, my main takeaway was what a cogent president he was, piranhas reloading their teeth, piranhas have 10x the relative bite force to size of a crocodile, piranhas aren’t carnivores - they’re opportunistic omnivores and a skittish prey species, the cow just walking out of the piranhas, it’s like two truths and a lie but all three are true, ARE WE DOING SPIDERS GEORG, spiders have acute mechanoceptors, tarantulas aren’t just hairy for fun, debunking the Lisa Birgit Holst debunking, a 50 spiders salute for georg, Beans Britain is a statistical outlier and should not be counted, spiders georg as a stats teaching tool, spiders georg was NOT an outlier, the moment Tom and pinball fell in love, we’ve been throwing balls at pins since ancient Egypt, indoor parlor games were for the aristocracy, fixing the pins to the table with bagatelle, the depression sparked the start of pinball’s craze, evolving their legs back, truly pinball is what caused the depression, pinball was the avocado toast of the time, pinballs were literally turned into billy clubs and bullets, pinball was banned for 34 years in new york city, the historic humpty dumpty machine first gave us flippers in 1947, pinball was cooler than porn, the bootles, it’s games sex and games AGAIN - but this time it’s bad, Suzanne Ciani’s digital design for Xenon, guess the pinball cabinet from the sound, the sopranos’ profanity filter, NBA fastbreak isn’t a basketball themed pinball - you are playing basketball, Dave demonstrating a Tap Pass, pinball is the most open it’s ever been, finding cabinets is a somehow even nerdier version of birdwatching, oh nooo don’t send me pictures of pinball cabinets. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| Second London Live Show! 1pm Sunday Oct 18th! | 29 juin 2026 | 00:03:34 | |
We've added a SECOND live show in London, and it's a Sunday matinee! See all the details at LetsLearnEverything.com/live Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 107: The Sci Guys, Acupuncture, and THAT Dolphin Story | 18 juin 2026 | 01:24:31 | |
Corry and Luke from the Sci Guys podcast join us, at last completing elaborate 4 year scheme to have them on! We learn about whether acupuncture is bullshit, and learn a bit more about That famous dolphin story. We also talk shop about mistakes, debunking, and curiosity! Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: I’m biggly judging, the only thing I love more than science is a weird bit, Caroline’s 4 year plan to get in a zoom call with these bozos, kind of feels like you came to the top of the mountain and came down to meet us, Brian Cox does Not follow Tom, I know something that will fix Ella’s connection, the corry-luke scale, the peripheral nervous system, free opiod receptors, endogynous, different kind of needles for that opiod, fake accupuncture, treating sever hiccups, min-maxing heroin, it’s tricky to study pain, maybe therapy works more than accupuncture, by the way I don’t need you to share everything, dolphins weren’t so great at finding land mines, I’ll just leave some dead air, an open bar for editting, the sensory deprivation tank, you’re paying for this open bar Tom, I won’t tell you the name of the paper but I will tell you about lisa simpson, was really hoping the apartment would have a dolphinarium, now do your duolingo, this was all to communicate with aliens, Tom tries to have a teachable moment, well someone was certainly “arriving”, raising a chimp as a human, Bunny’s backlash, weird studies, language is complicated and we don’t even think about it so we underestimate it, did we not all read coco transcripts in college - oh i guess not, Corry’s corona mistake, double checking even when we know someone’s wrong, can you believe there are podcasts where people try to learn everything? a meta message not about being right but about science, QI’s mistake rate, the science debunking complex can get toxic, when we debunk it’s not with antagonism but curiosity, the mould effect saga, I think what you were trying to say correy is that it’s important to foster curiosity. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| The Best of Everything 2026 | 04 juin 2026 | 01:59:53 | |
It's the Best of Everything! The episode where we look at the topics that YOU thought were our best from the past year, and chat some behind the scenes about them! It's a great place to start and a great time to brush up on things you may have forgotten. Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: You wouldn’t marry a husband, oh here comes the vitamin guy, you think we’ll still have history, you missed a spot, literally having to ask for extra time, we don’t learn like computers - relearning is normal, the I’ve just turned 30 pilgramage to Japan, I’ve ruined the algorithm, oh YAY, excited for marriages and reality fracture, 30 seconds of laughter. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 106: The Polygraph & Dentistry History | 21 mai 2026 | 01:58:12 | |
You may know the polygraph is junk science, but what is the real science of lying and what wild turns did the polygraph take to get to today? And how old is dentistry? If ancient cave men didn't brush why do I have to? Well it turns out for good reason, and some fascinating dental science. ALSO SEE US LIVE IN LONDON!!! LETSLEARNEVERYTHING.COM/LIVE Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! Go to https://surfshark.com/learneverything or use code LEARNEVERYTHING at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN! We also learn about: 2 truths and a lie, the jeremy kyle show, the first lie from the devil to eve (or when children first lie), the official stance of the podcast is lying is good and cool, deontic reasoning and theory of mind, flexible and explicit TOM, Ella aces the Sally-Anne test, discovering new advanced levels of lying, lying is normal for kids it’s not evil, lying is complex… but what if it wasn’t and we could just know, James Mackenzie’s original polygraph, the polygraph actually worked (just not for lying but for cardiology), sphygmomanometers, proto-feminist William Marston, back then just thinking women had a theory of mind made you a proto feminist, Tom falls down the rabbit hole of Marston’s feminism, what’s the difference between a lie you believe and the truth, Marston is the first to bring the polygraph to court in Frye vs the United States, the polygraphs turns into a one band band machine, Marston invented wonder woman and the lasso of truth, table the feminism of wonder woman another time, if corporations are people they should all go to therapy, polygraphs are still a 2 billion dollar industry, police firefighters and paramedics still take polygraphs, Caroline pre-empts the but, a polygraph is not a machine you need the interpreter, lying is useful, it’s fun to lie so who’s your favorite co-host, wow we can bond over private healthcare, dentistry asmr, tooth decay is from bacteria acid, stone age morocco acorn sweets, you can blame agriculture for cavities, fossilized plaque can give us an oral history, determining women did a job from paint in teeth, fuck I drank the paint water at least no one will know, did you say we were kissing the rats or was that my inner monologue, would you like to read the tooth worm poem? how could this possibly get to a tooth worm, most of recorded human history we believed in tooth worms, the earliest example of dentistry was a week ago, sorry it changed a week ago, an ancient beeswax filling, a 59,000 year old tooth hole, what’s a worse hyphenate than barber-surgeon, blacksmith barbers, traveling tooth pullers, so many jobs I’m glad don’t exist, a medieval dentist clown is literally someone’s worst nightmare, victorian job questionnaire, What The Eff is That, dental tools that look like weapons made in a dream, I didn’t realize until we got into this how much I hate teeth! the truth of my soul is private in Germany, Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| Vote for the Best Of Everything! LetsLearnEverything.com/vote | 20 mai 2026 | 00:02:45 | |
It's that time of year to vote for the Best Of Everything! https://www.letslearneverything.com/vote Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 105: The Marine Carnivore Question & Collecting | 07 mai 2026 | 01:58:39 | |
Are there more carnivores in the ocean than land? Yes! But... why? And what does that teach us about how we study ecosystems? And what constitutes a collection? Well it goes way back in time, and can cover anything and everything interesting, and maybe even teach us about ourselves and each other. Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Oh yeah that topic’s gonna hit, only 5% of fish are herbivorous compared to 30% of terrestrial animals, zoopharmacognosy, carnivora is not all carnivores and not exclusively carnivores, hypercarnivores eat 70% or more meat, polar bears are some of the most carnivorous animals we know of, grizzly bears only eat 10% meat, osteophagia, suckin on bone, trophic levels, Ella’s clearly an apex predator but are all humans, trying to beat the trophic level high score, let us know your level in the discord, average trophic levels, humans are 2.2 on average, trophic jorg, lopsided biomass pyramids, there are simply less plant diversity in the oceans, land predators hunt animals with at least 45% of their body size whereas whales do .01%, oh yeah aquatic animals don’t have paws or storage, aquatic carnivores have homodont dentition, trophic cascades, sea urchins can turn otter bones purple, hunter collector society, don’t pre-empt my question, the earliest collection we know of is from 105,000 years ago, shell collectors were just like me fr, coin collecting was a hobby of kings, a quick detour for the worst pope, but maybe Pope Boniface VIII is just like me for real, I like collecting 50 and 100 dollar bills actually, the wunderkamer or cabinets of curiosities, the industrial revolution ignited collecting, Americans turned British spoons into collecting, Ella’s love spoon, say the line Ella, this is really a “what’s wrong with Ella” topic, Edward Wharton-Tigar’s cigarette card collection and incredible quotes, David Attenburough convinced him not to take his cards with him into the 8th ring of hell, you’ve activated my trap card, magpies don’t collect shiny things and may have neophobia, animal collection, the cursed bug katamari, it’s like if I collected cards with boobs AND HE JUST LIKE ME FR, pack rat brain activation, a pack rat piss detour, amberat, collections represent our ability to abstract and think of the future, and that’s why I should get another spoon, Freud’s toilet hypothesis for collecting, Baudrillard on collecting, collecting builds yourself, They Collect What? baggers, I now collect banana friends. Sources: So, once again there are actually too many sources to fit here, it literally won't let us put them all here hahaha so please find the sources at https://www.letslearneverything.com/105-sources Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| Preview: Frogs & Improv | 30 avr. 2026 | 00:57:47 | |
Caroline's Frogs campaign and our improv class were some of our favorite bonus episodes we've done, so we wanted to share a sample of what they sound like! If your interest is piqued, you can hear the rest AND support the show at www.LetsLearnEverything.com/join Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| MaxFunDrive Bonus: Tom's Casters on Casters | 27 avr. 2026 | 00:23:27 | |
Folks we're halfway through the MaxFunDrive! And to keep the celebration we have Tom chatting behinds the scenes with other Max Fun hosts! For all the details about MFD perks, the livestream, and how to support the show, go to LetsLearnEverything.com! Timestamps: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 104: The Anthropocene Argument & Sound Effects | 23 avr. 2026 | 02:26:24 | |
What is the Anthropocene? No really, who came up with it, when does it start, and why does that matter? Well it involves nuance, scientific beef, and a surprising amount of freaky little guys. And we all know of some sound effects we love, but what is their history, where are the weird places they've shown up, and what can they teach us about art? Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: The human dominated geological time frame, this is actually a geology topic, let’s get our rocks off, the geological timescale, clues in the rock layers, the geologic calendar, the international chronostraographic chart, Eons Eras Periods Epochs Ages, GSSPs are physical places, a long cambrian tangent, the burgess shale was a rare cambrian preserver, trilobites are the alpha male body plan, opabinia had 5 eyes and one claw, hallucigenia actually makes Tom recoil, index fossils, Ella just loves these little freaks, Ella literally has a graptolite fossil, the SPICE extinction, title drop halfway through the topic, wait nvm we have to talk about the holocene, in 2024 they declined the anthropocene proposal, are we covering the anthropocene or the 24 years of its proposal? Jan Zalasiewicz ignobel lick, heavily acronymized science beef, a person dabbing is the anthropocene GSSP (or fossilized air bubbles in ice), Jan vs Jan, maybe the anthropocene is just an Event, insects are the canary in the mass extinction coal mine but they’re also not in the record, humans make up a third of the mass of large vertebrates - and the rest are mostly things we eat, a t-rex wishes to be the most abundant species and a monkeys paw curls, chicken bones in the fossil record, we’ve pushed back the next ice age 50,000 years, don’t clip me dabbing at nuclear weapons, when does the anthropocene start? 1952 with the plutonium shift, there was a most popular album at the start of the anthropocene, era dates are changed all the time, a spicy retirement letter, did you ask him about the email - I mean I did, rocks are political, we’re not in the anthropocene but let’s see what happens, make this design juicier please, sound effects can be realistic or symbolic, the siren whistle slip sound, the real sound of bald eagles, sound effects are treated more like a commodity than an art and a history, we don’t know if ancient mesopotamians beatboxed, Ella shredded so hard on the thundersheet she bled, sound effect started in plays, shakespeare and kabuki pioneered realistic and symbolic sound effects, tsuke, the first radio sound effects from the 1921 world series broadcast from Jersey, the walking surfaces at the BBC, 1920s sound effect rooms, sound effect records, who would buy this? ME!! what do you mean you survived the great depression traveling america for sound effects, 2 headed turntables designed for vinyl sound effect DJs, Jack Foley, the Bristol Old Vic thunder machine’s audio tricks, stealing John Dennis’ thunder, canning laughter from the Red Skelton show, this isn’t a real game, fine it was a good game and I win, recreating pacman with waves, pacman’s noise is so icon it created an onomatopoeia, Ben Burtt also loved the lightsaber, that was a great buzz, sound effects are both the truth and a lie, freesound.org, male_thijs_loud_scream.aiff Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| MaxFunDrive Kickoff! Ella's Casters on Casters | 20 avr. 2026 | 00:25:52 | |
IT'S THE MAX FUN DRIVE!!! We kickoff with a crossover "Casters on Casters" with Ella chatting behinds the scenes with other Max Fun hosts! For all the details about MFD perks, the livestream, and how to support the show, go to LetsLearnEverything.com!
Timestamps: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 103: Sage The Bad Naturalist & The Frog Mushroom Mystery | 09 avr. 2026 | 01:22:35 | |
Why aren't mushroom animals? Why is this mushroom growing out of a frog?? WHAT KIND OF MUSHROOM IS TOAD?!?! Well Sage the Bad Naturalist is here to answer all our festering fungus questions! Things we Talk About: Sponge Lifecycle Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Maybe some day I’ll get to be on this podcast, don’t ask scicomm dad! fungal anatomy, mushrooms are just the short lived fruiting body, fungi don’t have seeds or leaves or photosynthesize, Fungi were just the weird plant for a while - just Jerry, fungi don’t have vasculature their more spongy, fungi are genetically closer to animals so why didn’t Jerry come to our family? coral are animals, coral and fungal reproduction cycles, you’re going to learn so much in this one Tom, “that’s cant be the reason why”, consequences of the divergence aren’t the reason - the divergence is the reason, we should have been wrong more right!, this is planet chitin, dark fungi, fungus is made of bug, oh we’ve found the thing that actually makes me want to throw up on the podcast, protect our chitinous brethren, the mystery of the mushroom growing out of a frog, sage’s frog theory whiteboard, no one has ever seen this before, first time we’ve seen it does not mean first time it’s happened, mucusy coincidence, the return of amphibian chytrid fungus, the scientists have moved on but Sage hasn’t, botanical anarchy, slowly dropping out of grad school, odd jobs, its fucked up that make up affects views, Toad is a bunashimeji, remember toad with legs is made of bugs, blewits are underrated, drawing on the artist’s conk mushroom. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 102: The Vitamin Saga & The Evolution of Fairies | 26 mars 2026 | 01:55:17 | |
Why are there so many vitamins, what even IS a vitamin?? Well Tom finally understands, and takes us on a tour through their infuriating past. And how did the cheerful fairy we know and love today, evolve into its current form? Well we'll only tell if you can answer our riddles three and- or you can just listen to the episode. Things we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Will vitamin c cure me or murder me? more people died of scurvy than combat on the seas, Lind’s biblical scurvy experiment painting, vitamin Pee, maybe oranges are the fifth humor, beri beri, the gelatin comission, come onnn man it’s the 1800s give me a break, we know proteins carbs fats and minerals but something’s missing, STUDY MINERALS THEY SAID - YOU’LL WIN A NOBEL PRIZE THEY SAID, vital amines but they’re not amines, wait are vitamins like fish?? drop the e just vitamin, *mymymymy* all the vitamins are completely different?, some vitamins only exist for a few picoseconds in a supercollider, a bunch of vitamins got pluto’d, Vitamins are like a title, vitamer, VITAMIN D IS A HORMONE, wait maybe hormones are vitamins too, we haven’t talked about how vitamins work because they do Too Many Things, “we’re trying our best but sometimes our best isn’t good enough”, lifting the shadow of death, fitnessgirl250 actually has a PhD, food science is an applied science, the LLE supplement has all the dropped vitamins, vitamins are perfect for capitalism, there is not silver bullet, you can’t supplement your way into a healthy life, an appearance from she/her Caroline, the rainbow magic fairy books, we support evil fairies, the fickle house brownies, realizing fairytales are fairy tales, both high and low class could blame fairies, dressing boys as girls to protect them from the fae, booktok loves hot Rumpelstiltskin, American leprechaun traps, fae - fatah - the fates, when did fairies evolve wings, distinguishing from angels through insectification, fairies may have shrunk to be less threatening, Tom doesn’t know what a panto is, Victorians established the modern fairy, fairies went from robbing cribs to being trapped in the nursery, Cicely Mary Barker’s flower fairies, the collectability of fairies, 350 fairy books in 5 years, the Cottingley fairy hoax, fairies went from being about protecting sons to empowering girls, spelling fairy or faerie, Evyn Fong’s insectoid fairies, the review corner riddle, weaponizing review corner to talk to us. Semba: The Discover of the Vitamins --- Wiki: Parī (Peris) Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 101: Why is the Sky Blue & Speech Disfluency | 12 mars 2026 | 01:46:14 | |
For episode 101, we're challenging ourselves to make a technically family friendly, swear free episode! Why is the sky blue? Well it turns out it took a lot of science to understand why! And what is speech disfluency? Well it's like... um... you'll see! Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: it’s like playing mozart for children, mystery spires, atmospheric optics is responsible for all the bangers, they didn’t have a word for blue but they could perceive it, davinci and newton were on the right track, and thus the liberal lie of the greenhouse effect was born, Tyndell was just trying to clean an air sample and saw it turn blue, Baron’s used to be useful at least, Tom’s mind gets rocked by Rayleigh scattering, why isn’t the sky purple, When was the sky blue? the great oxidation event, sky is atmosphere, why is the sun so tiny OH ITS FAR AWAY, Ella pulled a Tom at the intro, Ella’s filler montage, no swearing no fillers challenge, there’s no fillers in the speech we watch on TV and movies, we actually um-dope our podcast in post, people used filler words in the past too, it’s found in poems and the earliest recorded sounds, the valley girl like, natural language corpuses, the 2 genders are uh and um, fillers in other languages, parasite words, uh is almost universal, the function of filler, backchanneling, measuring um reaction times, a visit from Gretchen, um is like a swiss army knife, like as quotation marks or hedging, right *slaps knees*, the power of saying something which technically means nothing. StellarNet: A Brief History of the Sky’s Blueness Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| Out Sick Recast: SciShow Tangents w/ Tom! | 26 févr. 2026 | 00:53:10 | |
Tom & Ella are out sick! So enjoy this recast of when Tom was healthy and on SciShow Tangents! OR enjoy our 2 hours on the Project 4 Awesome livestream, basically a video podcast! OR check out all our other stuff at https://www.LetsLearnEverything.com/ Thanks for your patience y'all! - Tom, Ella, & Caroline Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 100: Everything | 12 févr. 2026 | 02:17:12 | |
You asked, and we finally answered, today we are Finally, actually learning everything! Something that is definitely possible and easy to do. Caroline covers infinity, which can include basically anything, Ella covers what everything is made of, and Tom does the rest! Simple, right? Images we Talk About: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Infinity is the amount I love you guys - oh I made such a noise of disgust, my infinity could beat your infinity, quoting The Fault in Our Stars, ancient Greeks had a horror for the infinite, Euclid refused to use infinity, we have no physical proof that any item can be infinite, turning water into wine and counting to infinity, next time someone says I love you infinity plus one call them a number annihilator, pre-scowling, we ask Caroline a million questions about sets, sets offer a new language for math, “actually Ella they use the word transfinite”, Caroline rage baits Ella, Ella loves Cantor’s diagonal argument but people at the time HATED it, Cantor was a “corrupter of youth”, the universe is everything, god dammit is there more than matter, pigeons and pizza and Ella’s giant gengar plush are made of quarks and leptons, ordinary matter is just 5% of the universe, 26.8% is dark matter and the rest is dark energy, dark energy and matter are not interchangeable - dark just means we can’t observe them, your MOM is massive, 1933 dark matter is theorized to make the math work, dark matter is not a theory it is an observation of missing mass, the differing mass of the bullet cluster, halos of dark matter around galaxies, red shift in every direction, don’t @ me about the accelerated expansion of the universe, dark energy is the mysterious force that keeps the universe expanding, heat death or re-contraction, dark matter and dark energy are warring siblings trying to pull everything together and apart and we’re stuck in the middle, list of all wikipedia pages, OH NO IT’S INTERESTING, monk stuff, the exclamation mark came during the humanist era of the renaissance, oh no we printed the ironic bible! inverted exclamation marks, exclamation mark haters, old comics had exclamation marks for periods! Making Beowulf Scream, Lo! per my last email, our show didn’t start with an exclamation mark - it snuck its way into being beloved, no one is sure how the exclamation mark ended up in programming languages, DO anthropomorphize the exclamation mark, please don’t be disappointed we didn’t stop the podcast, We Didn't Stop the Podcast. We Didn't Stop the Podcast Lyrics Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 99.5: Iszi Lawrence, Getting to Ancient Egyptian Heaven, and Storytelling | 29 janv. 2026 | 01:14:46 | |
The author, historian, and person of many fascinations Iszi Lawrence teaches us how to get into ancient Egyptian heaven! Plus we learn about a bit of everything else from dinosaurs to medieval almond milk! Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! Images we talk about: We also learn about: Todays question is how to take on two attackers, “I really recommend violence if you have neurodiversity”, Ma’at, getting into the Egyptian afterlife is an escape room, why Egypt was geographically perfect, I’m going to put a mastaba on my mastaba, there were ancient Egyptian archaeologists of ancient Egypt, you don’t think with your brain that’s weird, Allan’s mummified body in the King’s College London library, the mummification industry, dodgy ibis mummy dealers, pyramids were a giant sign that said “ROB ME IM RICH”, King tut also packed too much underwear, Anubis guides you through a video game level of challenges, the hall of two truths and a lie, weighing your heart in court, Ammit has the head of crccodile body of a tiger legs of a hippo my perfect woman, your heart has to way no more and no less than a feather, the scarab is a pay to win heart silencer, pubs were public houses when you brewed too much beer and it was women’s work! almond milk was around during the medieval times, we are story brained and we pay attention to the weird things not the boring ones, he showed me his whip scorpion, nanotyrannus, why do you like dinosaurs - why do you like eating? Anurognathus, toddlers comes from drunken walking, sad means not sober, the suffragette jiu jitsu dojo, the tring tiles was teen jesus. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| Recast: Escape This Podcast - Oceananigans | 15 janv. 2026 | 01:51:00 | |
While we take some time to rest and plan out the new year, enjoy our episode of Escape This Podcast as the three of us use cleverness and chaos to solve this escape room! Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! Images we talk about: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| New Year Q&A 2026 | 01 janv. 2026 | 01:48:35 | |
It's the new year! Which means it's time to learn about the most interesting thing... ourselves?? We answer YOUR questions with OUR answers, so learn a bit more about us, science, and the show! Links we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: I was in the recording I know how long it took, tick correction corner, Caroline you gotta wrangle us, the ugly stepsister, City the Animation, Superman, playlist linked above, The Mars House, Levinia, Peak, Megabonk, Animal Crossing, Despelote, duck wraps, I’m an anytime burrito fan, falling out of and back in love with sciences, the Vera Rubin Observatory, lysosome mitochondria and ribosome, organelle astrology, AI and carbon pedantry, Ella’s PhD journey, solar system chocolate bar, our horror movie archetypes, experimenting on our cohosts, pride and prejudice romance, centaur anatomy, researcher blogs rock, scheduling and actually starting, what we hate and love about the show, we don’t have to be friends, podcasting is good for the brain actually, dream guests, Caroline runs, the rhythm game search, burnout planning and accepting mistakes and communal burnout watch, collecting magnets and yarn and weird pokemon figures, Dalek on a trampoline, why Tom wears a hat, bingo cards over resolutions, Ella’s getting marri- WELL TOM’S GOING TO MAGIC CON VEGAS BABY. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 99: The HaLearnDays! 2025 | 18 déc. 2025 | 01:47:54 | |
The HaLearnDays are here!! And with it come learning, laughs, and fun facts from us and friends of the show, as well as a few surprise new friends! Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: As Hank always says: wah wah wah wah wah, it says that I should complain in the script but I like it, Egg nog is just raw eggs right? redacted is such a beautiful name, rock paper scissors video content, drunk bats slur their echolocation, bats carrying bats, weekend at burniesing Livingston, I’d carry any of you for nine months, Pi and PIE from father and son, do you think J and Gretchen got their gifts at the same store? philology, proto-indo-european, the FART of the lego head, Ella’s heart grows 3 times its size for bacronyms, lego heads pass in about 2 days, chickadees growing and shrinking their brain connections, testing bird barcoding in the chickadome, I wish I could delete part of my brain to watch eternal sunshine again, davinci would have made that flying machine earlier if he had red sauce, tomatl is nahuatl not even proto-indo-european, we can all agree tomatoes smell evil, 150 years before tomatos and pasta combined, alphagal syndrome from ticks, once bitten twice allergic, Tom Scott gifts a can of rice pudding for us to open, allegedly LLE is a money laundering scheme, Mission Impossible morse code, the hidden code in LLE’s theme, Edison was the first to notice backmasking, the Eligibles Car Trouble, here’s to my sweet satan, winners don’t do drugs, raise a cup to our sweet satan. Sources: Bats Flying Drunk Paper More sources will be added soon! Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 98: Extremophiles & Astrology | 04 déc. 2025 | 02:03:20 | |
What are the most EXTREME lifeforms on Earth, and how are they surprisingly important to study? And what is the long yet recent history of astrology, and why do we reach for it? Things we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: We’ve put tardigrades through every red bull task imaginable but they’re NOT extremophiles, extremotolerant vs extremophiles that thrive, thermophiles at 122 celsius, anglophiles, what would it suck to experience, psychrophiles, acidophiles and alkaliphiles, hypobarophiles experiencing 500x our pressure, oligatroph, polyextromophiles, life has found a way in so many extreme places, the chernobyl black mold, not just growing towards radiation but eating Hot Particles, fungi have survived harsh radiation in the Earth’s past, melanin lets the fungi handle and perceive radiation safely, it’s similar to photosynthesis though in the same way a tsunami is similar to a glass of water, conan the bacterium can live inside nuclear reactors, DNA redundancy, krill that makes antifreeze proteins, osmoconfromers, acidophile taken to a lab and finally thriving at .7 ph, it’s also hard as hell to capture and study and keep these extremophiles alive, extremophiles gave us PCR, we also us extremophile e coli, bioremediation is what I took when I failed bio and was tutored by an extremophile, we have so much to do-actually that was pretty funny, bioplastics, what extreomophiles teach us about astrobiology, letting some bacteria chill on the outside of the ISS for 3 years, damn girl you’re making me re-evaluate the limits of life, our nuanced and conflicting feeling on astrology, yay we get to read our horoscopes- wait fuck why am I happy about that? babylonian horoscopes, star charts for things like seasons actually were right, the Enuma Anu Enlil collection of omens, what’s your mother’s maiden name and pincode horoscope, the legacy of the endless pig, uh oh we’re having fun talking about horoscopes, medieval astrology in the royal court and the sciences, before we knew about the earth going around the sun the stars explained the seasons, in the 1700s astrology was seen as a sham, of course royal watching tabloids bring about astrology 2.0, scraping the bottom of the barrel for anything to say about princess margaret, globe conflict 2 electric boogaloo, a pims advert is a rich text, the horoscope test, god the people yearn for therapy, the barnum effect, zodiacs are part of our culture - so something to connect with, the correlation of uncertainty and horoscope popularity, how to manage uncertainty without horoscopes, video games offer a structure and challenge and reward that can help people cope with hard times. Sources: --- 2013 Paper: The Solar Eclipse Omen Texts from Enūma Anu Enlil Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| Submit your Q&A Questions! | 01 déc. 2025 | 00:02:38 | |
http://www.LetsLearnEverything.com/q It's time to submit your questions for our annual Q&A episode! Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 97: Sneezing & Parable MythBusters | 20 nov. 2025 | 01:50:55 | |
What, when, where, why, and how... do we sneeze? There's a surprising amount of mystery to the thing we do all the time, and a lot to learn about! And how many parables and metaphors that we use are actually true? Let's actually dig in to the research and bust some myths!! I mean... break some... falsehoods!! Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Caroline was inspired by being sick, theories of sneezing, sneezing in the odyssey, Aristotle said burping and farting are not divine, 25 sextillion molecules in every breath, it’s a wonder we’re not sneezing all the time, sneezing only goes to your brain stem, a sneeze can send particles 8 meters, what ion channel? last year we made sneezless mice, le petite mort and le petit orgasm, the incredible mid-sneeze mouse diagram, we’re gonna talk about - ghoooosts, A.C.H.O.O or the photic sneeze reflex, our explanations for sneezing reflect our understanding of science at the time, snatiation, S.N.A.T.I.A.T.I.O.N, sneezing from getting horny, pee chills, a sneeze is just a more obvious indicator that wires get crossed, diagnostic sneeze testing, finding the first sneezing animal, the earliest diaphgram, chickens sneeze, African wild dogs voting by sneeze, dolphins chuffing, bugs aren’t part of the sneeze club, unlike the mythbusters we won’t be blowing up cars, okay maybe a few, if you put a frog into boiling water it won’t jump out it will die, boiling frogs in search of the soul, the climate change metaphor works for brain dead leaders, the survivorship bias meme plane, the image is fictitious but Abraham Wald is even cooler, America’s Bletchley - The Statistical Research Group, some people believe the heads had bodies, oh my god they did, the walking Moai, the deforestation happened before the people, invasive rats without a natural predator, pretending we’re surprised about colonialism being the culprit, we didn’t need to do carbon dating to find some of these answers guys. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 96: Fossoriality & Movie Censorship | 06 nov. 2025 | 01:42:16 | |
How have animals adapted to the digging lifestyle, and can that help us explain the Devil's Corkscrew? And what are the various ways movies can be censored across the world, and what does that tell us about the world itself? Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Daemonelix or the Devil’s Corkscrew, well Tom I hope one of your facts beats Ella’s giant sloth fact, only nerds know the word fossorial, why dig is easy - how dig is harder, mole skeletons are hyper specialized, moles are herd to catch and keep, I dig holes for me, is that couscous? the silica gel of pasta, x-ray videos of moles digging in couscous, devil’s corkscrew deja vu, first and deepest lizard burough, one of the most stable egg environments for an 8 month incubation, it turns out helixes are more common than we thought, Put! Lizards! In! Couscous! Peter Jackson’s braindead, video nastys, wow blaming media for crime we’ve never heard that before, video nastys were an easy ban because politicans didnt care about them, a microcosm of the moral panics of the time, the military entertainment complex, the US doesn’t have any outright movie bans… but they do have the hayes code, self censorship, no picture show lower the moral standard of those who see it, the commercial influence on self censorship, charlie shackleton’s paint drying film, poilitical movie bans reflect real alliances and tensions, denmark’s only ever banned the disney skeleton dance, Denmark’s freedom of speech is what the US thinks it is, don’t be mean to the military uwu, only 34 foreign films can be shown in china every year, the censorship is coming from inside the house, a Bohemian Rhapsody without mention of sexuality, Tilda Swinton played an asian character to get around mentioning Tibet, World War Z was changed even though it never aired in China, why are you making me defend these bad movies, censorship is as strong as the weakest link in the chain that’s profitable, “it’s all just crazy and some food for thought, thank youuu” Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 95: 🎂 Superheavy Elements 2, Craftivism 2, and Tom's List | 23 oct. 2025 | 02:22:27 | |
It's the podcast's birthday!! So Tom has a few ideas he wants to pitch to Caroline and Ella... but first! Ella and Caroline finally revisit the topics they promised! What are the WILD stories behind the race to discover new elements, and what are the real nuancy nuances of craftivism? Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: How do we prove this is real, we pinky promise, a refresher in the form of a pop quiz, we didn’t make the elements - except for some we did make, is the gift plutonium? we never thought we’d have another element heavier - and then you happened! the quizkids element reveal, the increasing specificity of Stan’s Apartmentium, just keep adding and smashing its just math - really expensive math, the long island ice tea of nuclear materials is in the bomb, scraping new elements off the filters of flying through a mushroom cloud, the edge of the periodic table was a cold war battle field, the feuds of the transfermium wars, perhaps sodium seaborgate, while they were bickering over naming Germany discovered 5 new elements, it’s like a railgun you nerd, linear vs circular accelerators, it’s like hotwheels tracks, we could’ve designed this! “how can we differently smash this stuff?”, I’m hype about a filter, only Victor Ninov could run GOOSY, “the most audacious fraud in scientific history”, lying about discovering an element and then discovering it before people catch on to the lie, 3 elements wasn’t enough, Oganessian co discovered 14 elements - the most of anyone, I mean really we all co-discovered this topic, “we hit this wall of super heavy elements being bastards”, Goosy 2 Electric Goosyloo, you’re smashing billions of particles per second over months to hopefully get 1 atom, calcium beam of milk, the theoretical island of stability, superstable superheavy elements, disappointment on the horizon, domestic arts for political and social change, I sure wish someone had done research into this nuance, oh fuck that was supposed to be me! the arts and crafts movement was activism for crafts not crafts for activism, fucking up golf courses for women’s suffrage, some suffragettes didn’t want to include working class women, imprisoned women were given sewing needles to reform but they just made incredible protest art, Madres de Plaza de Mayo, a sense of solidarity through craft, lets tonally tokyo drift this episode baby, comparing and contrasting with the pussy hat, craft ins and yarn bombing, craftivism defies expectations and engages community, “appealing” activism, craftivism is a piece of the puzzle not the whole solution, it’s a useful tool in the toolkit, Hoisin Duck Wrap - Irn Bru - Yogurt, Tom gets a tattoo and regrets it, stopping by Tom Scott’s spinoff podcast show, Tom’s gifts, putting it to the test who’s the strongest cohost, the podcast can officially hop! Sources: Kit Chapman's "Super Heavy: Making and Breaking the Periodic Table" Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 94: Paranormal Psychology & Defunct Halloween Traditions | 09 oct. 2025 | 01:41:26 | |
We know ghosts aren't real, but what is real is the way our brains make us imagine the creepy things that go bump in the night. What about our psychology makes it so easy to be spooked? And we've all heard of costumes and pumpkin carving, but what are the weirdest old Halloween traditions, and what can we take into our own traditions? Things we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Skeleton Shattering Science Topic, anomalistic psychology is the science of ghost busting, NOT parapsychology, the first step to a ghost is someone who believe in ghosts, following the format of ghost hunting shows, spooky believers are often predisposed pattern recognizers, the Australian sheep goat scale, suggestion not priming, creepyness via agent detection, a haunted house is evolutionarily designed to be spooky to us, the scary feedback loop, no infrasound does not vibrate your eyeballs, pattern recognizing apophenia, it’s a wonder humans aren’t scared all the time, it’s actually good we don’t consciously perceive every single thing, wait the static says subscribe to the podcast?? I think she’s saying her hips DO lie, the yeti, hiring a magician on halloween, Ella’s pattern recognizing brain can sense Tom’s bit voice, all the names Halloween goes by, Samhain was basically new years eve, Mary Blain’s Games for Halloween and her caveat, Silent Supper or Reverse Dinner, don’t play snap dragon, imagine risking third degree burns for a RAISIN, the heat map of words for the night before Halloween, mischief night or Halloweeneen, youth honor day, the worst boy police, did you pull a bisexual cabbage? why is everything so romantic?? silent supper seems cute until you’re sprinting over a fence and smashing a window, bobbing for apples is FERAL, our tradition of a spooky episode. Sources: 2021 Paper- Super-natural fears Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 93: Unsolved Math Problems & Video Game Controllers w/ Ellen Weatherford | 25 sept. 2025 | 01:53:51 | |
Wait... ELLA is doing a math topic?? Not only that but she finds the beauty in searching for answers among the toughest math problems. Then, friend of the show Ellen Weatherford takes us through a tour of video game controllers. My favorite is the- wait how did we end up talking about World War 2?? Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Today Caroline is played by Tom and Tom is played by Ellen, I’ll fall on the bad british accent sword for our guests, Ellen speed runs failing math, famous bad lawyer Fermat, I’m learning about math?? from Ella??? Ellen’s Last Theorem: lentil’s cure cancer, “mathematics like any science requires advancements and research and discovery”, basic math starts as early as mesopotamia, a brief history of mathematics, I gotta make math to describe this apple, math begets math, new ways to solve old problems, is this problem hard or will it take thousands of years to solve, the oldest unsolved math problem is 2000 years old, you’re scientifically wrong that all numbers are perfect, we know of 52 perfect numbers, merseene primes and perfect numbers, we don’t know if odd perfect numbers exist, Hilbert’s 23 unsolved math problems, it’s not the answers to the questions - its the tools built to solve them, new list just dropped - the millenium prize problems, the million dollar prize doesn’t account for inflation, the power of an interesting question, multidimensional play-doh, bumblebee - the tesseract! the poincare conjecture had only not been solved in the third dimension, perelman turns down the fields medal, they can offer a million cause if you solve it you’re only thinking about play-doh and 10 dimensions, is the mellenium prize problematic? eh, after researching a lot… the Riemann hypothesis actually probably won’t break cryptography, pure mathematics deserves the benefit of the doubt for its purpose, go forth with Ella’s blessing, new Ella loves math and libertarianism, I don’t know if the convergent evolution argument for controllers holds up in court, Ellen’s radical definition of a game, I don’t think the gate should be closed but don’t push me through it, the murky search for the first video game, Birdy the Brain - the Tic Tac Toe machine, controllers transmit human intention into a computer, some of the first controllers used dials, I was going to say the manhattan project as a joke, a brief and unexpected nuclear disarment detour, Higinbotham doesn’t like being remembered for tennis for two, Space War! the Magnavox Odyssey, some controllers were tabletop not handheld, Atari stole pong, the anatomy of a controller, stolen valor for logitech controllers piloting submarines, kids and parents learning to use controllers, Ella thought RT and RB meant top and bottom, rumble is purely for experience not input, the game.com had the first touch screen, a urinal controlled driving game, interviewing resident elderly expert Donna Jones. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 92: The Chemistry of Computers & The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 | 11 sept. 2025 | 01:54:30 | |
What does chemistry have to do with computers? Well it might just be the best way to understand what's actually going on inside a CPU! And how could there have been a moon hoax back in 1835? Well it involves cosmic pluralism and Edgar Allen Poe so buckle up! Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: BOOOO, a first time interview for this podcast, tom tries to define an integrated circuit, semiconductors, being mid at conducting is vital, silicon silica and silicone, quartz is one of the most abundant minerals and it’s just silica, the metalloids, transistors are so important but so vague, Caroline and Ella were not expecting a trans rights joke, for once of your jokes deserved more appreciation, the quest to make the smallest switch, semiconductors or on the edge of flipping between conductive or not, vacuum bulbs, The Tyranny of Numbers, photo-lithography, etching shrinking then stenciling a circuit, then computers would help make computers, Moore’s predictions of the future of computing, wait did you just explain Moore’s Law? my new graphics card comes with a new unified theory of physics, transistors are now the width of a few strands of DNA, quantum troubles, relying on moor’s law can stifly creativity, but also making transistor’s smaller is interesting science! Ella & Caroline never thought they’d understand computers like this, it’s almost like they’re going to announce they’re discovering aliens, cosmic pluralism, Sir William Herschel discovered Tom’s Anus, we were in a way disproving life on other planets, Gruithuisen sees roads on the moon, “the power of imagination on the man is large”, alien theories sold papers, Edgar Allen Poe’s SciCom satire, quoth the lunarian - nevermore, the daily drops escalated the and on the fifth day we got moon racism, the etchings of lunar life, lets get bibles and colonialism on the moon baby, Richard Adams Locke is the true author, Herschel was on a research trip while this was going down, it sounds like we’re the perfect team for a hoax, aside from being a critique of science communication it also made bank and made the sun the most bought newspaper in the world, Locke’s non denial denial, selling property on the moon, this changed journalistic standards, the occasional hoax actually isn’t okay but fine, Herschel actually thinks it’s hilarious, Locke X Poe collab balloon hoax, this sparked a trend of science fiction. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 91: Lauren Gawne, Is Pointing Rude, and Gestures Studies | 28 août 2025 | 01:28:39 | |
Is pointing rude? I'm sure it's a simple question with a simple answer that won't completely break our brains in rethinking all we take for granted about gesture. Also, what is Lauren’s holy grail lost media of gesture studies? Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Diverse but incredibly niche interests is the sweet spot, studying the holes in emoji, Tom wasn’t a rude pointer child like Ella, the Disney point, when you point you don’t direct to the end of your finger - you psychically project forward, dogs and horses are great points - cats not so much, we are the only primate that points in the wild, you likely pointed before you spoke, ITS CALLED THE INDEX FINGER BECAUSE IT POINTS LIKE AN INDEX, non index pointing, “that is one lens through which we could consider this”, lip pointing in Encanto, travel guides will simplify to pointing is rude because it’s complex and nuanced where it’s rude, we haven’t even gotten to rainbows, taboos for pointing at specific things, who dude watch where you’re pointing it’s threatening, what if hypothetically a host just went to japan and pointed a lot, Japan is often on the linguistics bingo card, pointing is the pronoun system in ASL, spacial pronoun tracking, you can be a better pointer than someone, gesture and speech have different strengths, Tom’s gestures are more honest than his words to his cohosts, pointing was some of the earliest emoji, “medieval illuminated manuscript marginalia creators would be disappointed with you Ella”, the finger pointing came before the arrow, “we had hands before we had writing”, gesture studies is still new and very interdisciplinary, the way you study gesture is every way, you gesture bigger in loud environments, computers are good at reading hands but not hands in context, the only thing Tom can correct Lauren on is that it was Just Dance not DDR, gesture is ephemeral to study, a huge reason we have gesture study now is video exists, the holy grail lost tapes of gesture, using gesture studies to prove the nazis wrong, are gestures are both for you and the person you’re talking to, I’m not analyzing your gestures if what you’re saying is interesting, metaphorical gesture space, we move ideas around like little apples, you’ll never be able to watch a ted talk again, the archery V myth, exploiting the ambiguity of gesture, we’ve been gesturing with communicating for so long and only reading and writing so recently - so of course we yearn for emoji, “we’re adding the body straight back in the moment we get the chance to”, the rate of literacy is weird, Lauren insisted no emotion on the head shake emoji because it’s not universally negative, sign language has gesture, for the Aymara language the future is behind you - i cant see whats going to happen, iconic resources, cognitive linguistics is obsessed with our meat puppets, we all experience the same gravity and that influences how we think, part of the joy is being the meat puppet. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 90: Octopuses & The Paralympics | 14 août 2025 | 01:46:57 | |
How strange are octopuses really? We're going to be debunking some claims, then rebunking them with some real, amazing facts about our fellow earthlings. And what the history of the paralympics? What can we learn from its attempts and its failures and its importance in sports? See Tom's Science Game Show in NYC! Things we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Censoring octopussy, 3 science communicators get rabid over a dubious study, octopi are so smart they could only have come about from fertilized eggs aboard an asteroid, cephalopods evolved a central nervous system independently with ganglia, the “head” of an octopus is where there other organs are, octopi don't have 5 brains but they do have a lot of distributed neurons, each sucker is a finger-nose-tongue that can make decisions on its own, octopi have terrible hand eye coordination but can learn to be better at it, Ella thinks “man this would be a great topic for the podcast”, octopi are aliens in the metaphorical sense - and maybe it’s a bad metaphor, I’m not a playing I’m developing flexible behavioral strategies, octopuses play pully downy rather than keepy uppy, the criteria of play, we thought Ella was going to compliment Tom but of course that wasn’t it, octopus cities have populations between 2 and 11, Ella’s gerrymandering octopus city, its more about shared resources and cheaper rent than grand designs, octopus color changing is way more than just pixel cells, but… octopuses are colorblind, their sucker opsins sense color and send directly to chromatophores, octopuses can know a color without seeing it, these are amazing earthling behaviors, Ella was looking for a simple un-nuanced not heavy misc topic, the first Stoke Manderville games, fuck you we’re doing our games on the same day, the organizer of that first game had uhhhhh bad views on disabled people, the Paralypics grew really fast because there was a huge demand for it, Ella loves murderball, goalball and boccia are Paralympic unique sports, the classification system of the Paralympics, the work that goes into the classification system and the flaws and harms it can sometimes have on the athletes, as human as it is to run fast it’s human to cheat, the Spanish ID baseball scandal halted ID sports for 10 years, how the Paralympics and the public views the Paralympians, Ella unfortunately doesn’t solve ableism by the end of the topic, I hear enough of Tom on the show already. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 89: Understanding Blood & Peculiar Percussion | 31 juil. 2025 | 01:30:24 | |
Blood! We all have it, but how much do we know about it? And more importantly, what was the journey of understanding to get there? And just how deep can the history of these peculiar percussion instruments go? Well we'll be criss-crossing across the planet today to find out! Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: 5 liters of blood over 60,000 miles, humoral theory, phlegm - yellow bile - black bile - blood, I’m from house sanguine - our fire is strongest in our season of spring, humoral theory was around for 1500 YEARS, blood letting, a leeches detour just for Caroline, very few leeches actually suck blood, the exportation of leeches for blood letting made them endangered, we nearly killed the leeches in nearly killing us, leeches are sometimes used today after reconstructive surgery for their enzymes, Nafis’ circulatory system would not be believed for 400 YEARS, these time skips are killing me, Harvey was ALSO NOT BELIEVED, we stan Harvey cause he got witches acquitted, the government and church’s ban on blood transfusions, 1818 was the first recorded successful transfusion, 1658 Jan Swammerdam first saw “oval particles” but this was 7 years before the word “cell” was used, pop quiz on what the parts of blood do, don’t draw your blood while driving, blue and green blood in crustaceans and leeches, antigens and antibodies, “I hope this will be of some use to mankind”, sodium citrate helped blood stay fresh for transfusion, god medicine fucking rules, we reinvented humors with blood personality types, the humors are stored on the antigens obviously, “do you know what my blood type is, for no reason, I’m fine, it’s a podcast thing”, Tom has a slumdog millionaire moment because he was working on another video, there are 48 recognized blood groups each with dozens of antigens, having your own bloodtype means having your own bespoke horoscope, we’re averaging one blood group discovered a year, the journey of understanding blood is the journey of science, it’s hard to tell if rocks were used for a cup song routine, Caroline & Ella fall in love with the quijada, it’s a literal death rattle, “play my bones when I die”, make a jawbone that won’t break, the much sillier vibraslap can still sound good, vibraslap on All Along the Watchtower, the whip/clapper/slap stick, comedia dell’arte, the slap stick was a literal stick to make a slap sound, the christmas rise in slapsticks, the armenia alchemist Avedis Zildjian, since we were working with metal we went listen to this taaah tah tah taaah, a perfeclty clear cymbal is just a bell, a cymbal is crafted chaos to sound good, mmm this wine is very trash but not pingy, now we know Ella’s partner wasn’t just making shit up about cymbal sounds, confirming our sources for this wild Zildjian story, what do you think about this instrument?? I can’t stop making chocolate cymbals! Ringo made people want to drum, finding out Sabian is from the Zildjian family is like finding out Wendy’s last name is McDonald, a percussionist can literally touch history from all across the world, it’s about the reviews we don’t read. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 88: The Evolution of the Placebo & Postage Stamp Art | 17 juil. 2025 | 01:47:14 | |
Chances are you know what a placebo is, but... how does it really work? And what can its evolution teach us about science, medicine, and ethics? And how much art can fit a tiny postage stamp? Well enough to fill a whole history of debate, drama, and ducks. Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: The word placebo has escaped academic containment, fake mourners saying “I will please the lord”, placebo paint on birds wings, placebo as sham, The Royal Commission on Animal Magnetism, not that kind of animal magnetism, placebo as psychology, is this going to be a running bit, defining placebo not in reference to something else, “a person’s psychological response to being treated”, things like healing through time or pressure to answer are Not placebo effects, placebo effects are tricky to study, animals can get the placebo effect, goo goo ga ga am I in the contwal gwoup? conditioning rats that a smell means reduced pain, the internal and external factors of placebo, the placebo effect is actually doing things in your brain, of course we talked about that before on episode TWENTY EIGHT, Ella loves brain action, you can consciously fail a placebo but unconsciously pass it, the nocebo effect, it may be just in your head but your head is a lot of things, the murky ethics of placebos, doctors are mostly prescribing harmless placebos when patients ask for one, Caroline & Ella’s sleeping pill and recovery position placebos, HOLY SHIT PLACEBO EVOLVED INTO CHARIZARD HELL YEAH, some placebos work when you tell people it’s a placebo, placebo pills take 2 twice daily, wait is this actually just about the importance of transparent and accessible and trustworthy medical care?? the American Philatelic Society, Tom used stamps as stickers, Ella’s friend’s giant mimic stamp, the public was aroused by post office reform - not just us! every contestant of the first stamp contest was revoked, it took 4 artists to design the first stamp, no monarch stamps unless they’re hot, the Universal Postal Union is the second oldest international organization, the absolutely HATED train stamp, philatelic propaganda, Operation Cornflakes, the Citizen Stamp Advisory Committee’s incredible process, so you’re saying we can’t make an Iraq War stamp, so you’re saying the UK can make a 9/11 stamp, stamps are of the most visible pieces of art, the duck stamp is the only art competition sponsored by the government, the super bowl of wild life art, are you a celebrity if oyu haven’t won a DEGOT? stamp advisors with reduction glasses, duck stamp royalty, Broome’s incredible spite art, stamps didn’t have to be art - but we’re glad they are. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 87: Mating Rituals & True Crime | 03 juil. 2025 | 01:51:18 | |
Just how complicated can animal mating rituals be, and why did they even evolve them at all? And why is true crime Everywhere, and what can we learn from breaking down what makes it feel so icky? Also see Tom's new Game Show in NYC this Sunday! www.OurFindingsShow.com Things we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: the adorable death watch beetle, the deep sea “ah fuck it - you’re here” approach, of course the man on the podcast thinks reproduction is easy, why are people on hinge so picky, hermaphrodite sea bunnies, there’s plenty of fish in the sea and the sea is fucking huge, sexual ornaments, peacock feathers made Darwin SICK, sexual ornaments to identify you’re doing it with the right species, you can hang your sexual ornaments all year long for other purposes, finch dating shows, carotenoids from skilled foraging make a brighter pigment is an indicator trait, or just go to a tanning salon, going to the gym is the same - false muscles, active at night - gives you a fright - active at day - wants to get laid, wow flies give eye contact during courting - that’s better than a lot of humans, the fly cha cha slide, drosophila simlish, nuptial gifts, Women! Want! Regurgitated Nutrient Liquid! the arms race of jumping birds, the “I’ll have what she’s having theory”, dancing mannequins, intermediate level of asymmetric arm movement, if anything the study shows how comical it is to try to boil down human mating, the famous shirt smelling study, what are you trying to show with a human mating study? we shouldn’t be reductive for human mating or for animal mating either, ascribing the gender binary to worms, there is no one easy tip to dating in nature, a double banger for nuance, early crime tabloids like Illustrated Police News, Jack the Ripper was dubbed by the press after all, the prison chaplain’s broadsides, nature’s cruel step-dames or matchless monsters of the female sex, I can’t stop myself from coming up with names fro these murders, true crime lit was a best seller at public hangings, some broadsides sold 30x more than the news, the unmissable attraction of La Morgue de Paris, American Murder Ballads didn’t need you to be literate, true crime as an indicator of media trends, the vicious cycle of true crime consumption, icky entertainment motivations, working against the wishes of survivors, if only the victim had had our sponsor - simply safe, the commodification of people’s suffering, what stories do we choose not to tell, true crime seems to say there is “right” kind of victim, but true crime isn’t irredeemable. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| The Best of Everything 2025 | 19 juin 2025 | 01:45:46 | |
Listeners voted for their favorites topics of the past year, so join us as we chat and relearn the best of everything! Support us with a Max Fun Membership! The best awards in podcasting that feature hosts named Tom, Ella and Caroline, the best cohost award is a tie (for Charlie and Teddy) actually introducing ourselves again, Tom is the hot one and the funny one, everyone loves dinosaurs, satisfying questions I never thought to ask, no one at the Igs knows Tom, the nuanced story of the propoganda of the propaganda, hey they happen to be some great topics we’re talking about, I had to put jokes about how bad we are so that we could compliment each other later, you can go back and discover Ella’s, we love an experimental episode as well as a classic episode, we love the quirky younger sibling of things, the World Games are coming up soon - get hype!
Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 86: Eyevolution 2 Eyelectric Boogeyeloo & Digital Piracy w/ Sabrina Cruz | 05 juin 2025 | 01:49:36 | |
How many eyes do these animals have, and more importantly what are they doing with them? And how long has copyright piracy been around, and would YOU download a car? Also Ella finally drops her fake british accent. Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: How many jingles does this man have up his sleeve?? 2 eyes or not 2 eyes, what do you need glasses for - to see boobs? why have an odd number of eyes when it’s a BOGO deal developmentally, even more amazing than his eye of agamoto - Dr Strange has 2 camera eyes, “I grow fearful of the untrue eye”, bull frogs can’t doom scroll, the pineal eye is a skylight to the pineal gland, ommatidia means little eye, each compound eye only sees one image from the thousand of ommatidia, this is Caroline’s first eyevolution rodeo - we can’t answer all the questions, now you can be annoying correcting people about bug vision, ocelli are also called little eyes, triangular ocelli flight stabilization, Robobee, ocelli are useful because they’re auxiliary, they’re a fast different readout, there are so many more interesting sci fi choices for eyes, maybe they evolved ocelli to not crash when they see a sexy bug, having zero eyes would be going to far, oh wait nevermind, where we’re going we don’t need eyes, “not the implications”, well I’ll answer one of those questions, what do you need eyes for looking at boobs? YEAH I DO ACTUALLY, he complex eyes like a telescope of scallops, THEY DON’T EVEN HAVE A BRAIN, have we gone too far? the living square mirrors in scallop eyes, no one believed scallop TV would work, fair use and fair dealings, early book sellers were book copiers, authors did not make profits on early copies, Martial was the first person to be reposted on 9gag, the library of alexandria operated like OpenAI, book publishers after the printing press were like Universal Music Group - concerned over their rights - not artists, crown approved ABC books, the mid 1600s is the first use of piracy of intellectual property, ruining vinyl records with the cassette tape skull and crossbones, the 2013 Hugh Jackman Oscars performance, Napster’s origins and Metallica’s not so metal killing of it, Piracy was a technical and social phenomenon, YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A FONT, video game antipiracy that reminds you of the creative mind behind the product, none of this is legal advice, the cost of piracy is easy to calculate but the benefit is impossible to measure. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| Vote for the Best Of Everything 2025! | 29 mai 2025 | 00:02:42 | |
Vote for your favorite topics at LetsLearnEverything.com/bestof before Sunday June 8th!!! Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 85: David Bennett & Why Humans Like Harmony in Music | 22 mai 2025 | 01:28:39 | |
What is it about harmonies in music that just sounds so good? Can science (and our amazing musical guest David Bennet) help us get to the bottom of it? Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Listening to Carly Rae Jepsen academically, the musical expert said Caroline has good music taste, I’m down hereeeeee, harmony is just the interaction of any two notes, Tom thinks about high school choir harmony all the time, even babies like harmony, even the oldest flutes have the same holes in them, octaves are so similar we call them the same note, watchmojo ranking of intervals, Carly Rae Jepsen - It Has Many Notes!, a spicy dissonant interval can be good in moderation - like a spicy seasoning in food, Tom is just grinning getting to ask these music questions, we invited you as a guest and you bring this dissonance to our home?? the messy sounding tones match to messy looking ratios, why can we even distinguish pitch? we use pitch in communication so much, animal sounds are the only things that make pitch, animals can recognize intervals, we call bird song song - but to them it’s probably more like language, it sounds cheesy - but in every human voice there’s a harmony, we’re asking the question backwards - we needed to understand harmony to be able to decipher a pitch, hearing the difference between notes IN YOUR HEAD, what we hear in our head is different than the world around us, harmonies are audio cheesecake - something we evolved to enjoy pumped to the max, “we can make cheesecake with our mouths”, cheesecake is just molecules, did you not have to learn human evolution in music school? oh my guilty pleasures are Tchaikovsky’s later works, Ella humble bragging about her spotify wrapped, this is going to come off as hostile but hasn’t enough already been said about the Beatles, how different generations experience the Beatles, more like DavidLegoStopMotion, it took 5 years after a dissertation on how to have a career as a musician on youtube, try song ideas and listen to them later, music theory is Descriptive not Prescriptive, liking technical music, the only way you’ll practice is if you enjoy it, the dopamine hit from the cheesecake of practice, can you send that advice to my mom 10 years ago, but you did practice… yeah, teenagers are good at learning instruments because they have free time, start learning music with the music that you love, learning sheet music at the same time as playing is like learning to write as you’re learning to speak, you learn to write after you’ve practiced speaking for years, you’re full of good ideas David who knew. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 84: Tree Talk & Trading Card Art | 08 mai 2025 | 01:40:13 | |
Can trees talk to each other? And how does that personifying metaphor square with the actual science behind it? And what can we learn from the stories of art on trading cards throughout history? Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! The answer is yes maybe sometimes and no, talking tree folklore, communication as transferring information, The Secret Life of Trees, Caroline WAS vegan, plants feel pain - GOOD, tree self defense, secondary metabollites, you got me AND Ella to write that down, tannin defense mechanism, volatile organic compounds, giraffes avoiding nearby leaves after eating, maybe trees are eavesdropping, mycorrhizal networks, could it be diffusion or a baby tree suckling on its mother, do a stanford prisoner experiment for trees, that tree is giving mother, mother trees - altruistic fungi - and the perils of plant personification, literally talking to trees, your first priority shouldn’t be to not be boring - maybe second, respect for the organisms that are fundamentally unlike us - their unfathomable lives, the modern boom of trading cards, trade cards, mass produced color images were cool and novel, how many credits for that chromo? absurd advertising from the 1800s, anthropomorphic fruits and veggies were all the rage, trade cards were a microcosm of marketing-invention-and collecting, Ella’s baseball impression, looking at a mainstream sport through the nerdiest lens imaginable, cigarette baseball cards, Doug McWilliams photographed 8% of all major league baseball players, oh right photography is an art, and so is building relationships with players, cards began to stand on their own, Richard Garfield wanted baseball cards for nerds, Magic and Pokemon credit their artists - but YuGiOh does not, Yuka Morii’s sculpture cards, Adam Rex’s Terror, Richard Thomas’ Hyalopterous Lemure, Julie Baroh flipping off her classmates, companies screwing over artists, it’s still art in spite of being a piece of cardboard. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 83: The Most Boring Element & Solving Shakespeare's Accent | 24 avr. 2025 | 01:32:48 | |
What is the most boring element, and just how boring could it possibly be? Turns out: VERY! And how can we decipher what Shakespeare sounded like, and who among us can lay claim to his accent? Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We’re not going for the easy sappy answer, what makes something boring? all the oxygen stans updating wikipedia, the most boring is obviously bohrium, thulium is used in lasers and x-rays, about 24 grams of astatine per planet, shout out Sir Martin Poliakoff, the 4 elements that came from pitchblende, Caroline stop anthropomorphizing protactinium, the isotope brevium, you could have been called abracadabra and instead your legal name is Actinium’s dad, wow what a fascinating [Rn]5f 26d7s2 ground state electron configuration! give me more random letters and numbers Tom! protactinium is there if your smoke detector is old, the global ocean conveyor belt, THC (Thermal Haline Circulation), that’s the ocean bit- anyway here’s something completely different about protactinium, paleoclimatology sounds a lot like protactinium, Ella realizes the turn, HE DID IT, whoa Caroline doing thumbs up to climate change, they’re de-extincting William Shakespeare, where better to waste my time pursuing this than Let’s Learn Everything, shakespeare is typically performed in received pronunciation, wait this is secretly a UK vs US topic! I’m surprised it took you 3 years to figure out we just keep you for your American accent, Americans have vestigial roticity, the universal beauty of two dudes yapping, what a strange elitism to claim to have Elizabethan English, Appalachian claims of shakespearean accents as a way to boost image, if you want to know what people sounded like back then… look at what people wrote about it! more one to one spellings like “philome” for film, we can deduce the accent from rhymes and puns, I loov this topic, Tom’s accent gets miscalibrated, an open midback is really stylish these days, open mid back unrounded vowel, Ella can move your tongue with her mind, I see why this gameshow didn’t make it to television, don’t wast a reem on a droom, the Rorscach test of the Original Pronunciation created by David and Ben Crystal, flecks of every dialect, “it’s a sound that reminds people of the accent of their home, and so they ten to listen more with their heart than their head”, “American English simply isn’t good enough for Shakespeare”, the Sundry Boroughs of New York baby! the language of Shakespeare is dead but alive in English everywhere, Shakespeare was meant to be played for the public - so it should be spoken like the public, Shakespeare's accent belongs to all of us! Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 82: International Space Law & Taxidermy | 10 avr. 2025 | 01:51:32 | |
What laws are there to worry about in the moon? And what does space law teach us about Earth law? And what can we learn about societies throughout history from the lens of stuffing dead animals? Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: The splash zone of intro to astronomy, space NCIS, the bedrock of 1967 outer space treaty, the first earthling in space (2 tortoises), countries are responsible for their damage and no WMDs, that big tangible moon in the sky, unprecedented lunar traffic this year, potential water ice on the moon could be the next big space race, there’s no moon water regulation, no nation can own the moon, buuuut can an individual - former ventriloquest and used car salesman own the moon?? god don’t call it “untapped resources on the moon”, you can’t own the moon but can you own its resources, there’s a legal officer for the UN officer of outer space affairs! we can allll frack the moon (except no one signed the treaty anyway), we can’t even agree to share moon resources One Day, only “safe and sustainable” space mining allowed, it doesn’t have to be legally binding to make countries want to follow it, a radio telescope on the far side of the moon would be SICK, sorry about all the space junk us 3 put up there, 90 metric tons of re-entry, suing nasa over space debris, if it launched from florida and hit florida it’s actually local state space law, satellite light pollution, satellites don’t die they just crash into a farm upstate, starlink burnt 120 satellites in 1 month alone, there’s no laws about safely deorbiting - no one has to do this, how we treat space is a microcosm of how we treat earth, space law is real, why can’t we bring our optimism from space back to earth instead of the other way around? Ella’s mouse doing drugs, the art of skin arranging, apologies to our ancient Egyptian listeners, the various techniques of Egyptian preservation, arresting from decay, Frederik Ruysch’s wet specimens, crocodiles make a lot of sense for the first taxidermy cause they’re big and leathery - anyway it was hanging in a church…, Tom loses his mind about A SECOND TAXIDERMIED CROCODILE IN A CHURCH, a croc that’s at least from 1623, The Great Italian Taxidermy Crocodile Road Trip, about one third of the british population went to the 1851 great exhibition, the telescope and taxidermy exhibition sounds like a trap for Caroline and Ella, “whimsy and anthropomorphism in taxidermy of the Victorian era”, anthropomorphic taxidermy was considered grotesque, taxidermy didn’t die we just stuffed it back up, environment taxidermy requires knowing an animal inside and out (pun intended), the degrees of ethical taxidermy, ethical is not a binary, it depends on your personal code of ethics, taxidermy as a lens of moral feelings through history. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| Preview: The Lab Rat Games | 27 mars 2025 | 00:38:21 | |
Welcome to the (preview for the) Lab Rat Games! The GAME show where we compete to learn anything and everything interesting! We love putting games into our topics, so what happens when we make a whole show of them, with each of us hosting their own section! Plus! We're joined by friend of the show and competitive chaos combatant, Sabrina Cruz! Support us with a Max Fun Membership! Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 81: Dinosaur Diet Detectives & Proto-Podcasts | 20 mars 2025 | 02:12:38 | |
How can scientist's unravel the mystery of what dinosaurs ate? Well the clues are right in front of our eyes, or should I say their teeth! And poop! And listener you may already know what a podcast is, but how did proto-podcasts in a chicken coop give us the DNA for what we love, and how did podcasts even happen? Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Deep Dive Discovering Dino Diets, dinosaur time, imagining us discovering a new animal, well we know it doesn’t eat nerds, Ella describes teeth perfectly - “is that what you meant to say Tom?”, the mouth is the first stomach, we found the teeth of the first herbivorous dinosaur before the body - and before we had the word for dinosaur, cinderella/goldilocks teeth, dental microwear, food print, the topography of a grasshopper’s mandible, teeth can be more indicative than stomach content, maybe you just tried in and out for the first time when you got captured by aliens, dinosaur teeth are the old coins of ancient civilizations, egg eating oviraptors, it’s not just us but experts that are confused about oviraptaurs teeth, reconstructing the crime scene of a bit mark, this case has been closed for 70 million years! the tarbosaurus seems to have separated the chicken leg to make eating easier, a tyrannosaur leaving a tooth in the scene of the crime, they not only got bit but lived to tell the tale, this proves tyranosaurs hunted living animals - and weren’t just scavengers, hard foods stay in the stomach longer, some dinosaurs used Gastrolith rocks as stomach teeth, rocks natures teeth, Bromalite can be regurgitalite or coprolite, 580 million year old worm poop, we didn’t think grass was that old then we found it in dinosaur poop, we put dinosaur poop in a particle accelerator, we’re not looking at poop - we’re constructing the foodchain of dinosaurs, an ancient egyptian podcast, podcasting is NOT an oral tradition, the chicken coop boys, Sybil’s Little Ham Radio Show 20 years before a woman on proper radio, the Titanic sinking sped along radio restrictions, Tom skipped over the cassette before because its science impact was small but its misc impact was huge, explaining cassette tapes at a high frequency so it doesn’t hurt old people to hear, Lou Otten, the syrian cassette archive, mixtapes, Caroline’s family mix CDs, Tom’s custom Jack’s Mannequin Mix CDs, Pacific Horticulture Magazine being delighted that someone’s interested, Tom’s Magic Corner, I knew it was some journalist doing their thing, apple didn’t come up with podcasting - not even the name, journey back to 1999, the dream of RSS, what’s that facebook shaped cloud on the horizon? the dream of hosting your own feed, somehow podcast RSS survived, podcasts are the Horshoecrab of the internet, “wherever you get podcasts” is amazing, The Lab Rat Games! Sources: NHM London: Iguanodon Teeth Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| Tom, Ella, and Caroline join MFD Spring Break | 17 mars 2025 | 01:20:29 | |
It’s not MaxFunDrive without a wild kickoff spectacular! Former real-life VJ and host of MTV's Spring Break 1999, Dave Holmes, takes your favorite MaxFun hosts through some wacky ‘90s- and Spring Break-themed mini games!! Featuring: Dave Holmes, Jeremy Bent, Oscar Montoya, Dimitry Pompée, Tom Lum, Ellen Weatherford, Alex Schmidt, Brenda Snell, Drea Clark, Alonso Duralde, Dan McCoy, Jordan Morris, Manolo Moreno, Ella Hubber, Caroline Roper, Ella McLeod, John-Luke Roberts, Justin McElroy, Clint McElroy, Mike Cabellon, Sierra Katow, Hal Lublin, Danielle Radford, John Moe, Christian Dueñas, Christian Duguay.
Timestamps: (00:00:00) Intro
Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 80: Ify Nwadiwe, The Science of the Peasant Railgun, and a Panoply of Nerdery | 13 mars 2025 | 01:16:19 | |
Host of Um Actually and nerd of many domains Ify Nwadiwe joins us as Tom helps him deconstruct the infamous Peasant Railgun from D&D. Could it actually work? And can we come up with something even more powerful using real science? We also dig into nerdery old and new, and see if Ify can convince Ella and Caroline to embrace their home country's greatest export: Warhammer. Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: After this black hole research I do appreciate my family more! we’re here to game, what is a peasant? stealing science experiments for DnD campaigns, Caroline and Ella are delighted to learn the Peasant Railgun for the first time, convincing peasants to hands across america, pandering to the audience telling them their smart, My Monster Manual is On the Origin of Species, a peasant message system/computer, let people accelerate things to the speed of light! I shouldn’t let my players do WHAT, and remember kids DONT use a bong because it gets you SO HIGH, I’m reading between the lines Gary would want us to do this, the real rail gun, UM ACTUALLY ITS A PEASANT COIL GUN, rail guns are more common in fiction, the strength of a rail gun tears itself apart and creates a fireball, Ify would make each peasant in the line roll, if your players try to make the railgun say yes then show them the picture, the peasants have the means of production and destruction - they should unionize, the fastest manmade object, the manhole cover isnt the fastest object recorded, mission to touch the sun, gravity slingshot, it’s not the mass of the planet its the orbit, its not a magnet - its a magnet on a bullettrain, DMs watch out for artificer space programs, the duke of musk keeps stealing our government funding, Morgan you’re welcome to play beyblades with Ify any time, marrying bratz and digimon, England’s main export is Warhammer, can Ify convince Ella to play Warhammer, should we do a separate zoom just talking about nerd stuff? online writing forums, audio books are real books, be mean in magic, playing DnD on stage vs at home, playing true to your character. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||