x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

PODCAST

pplpod

pplpod is a podcast about people, places and lots of other stuff. Each episode takes a deep dive into the lives, choices, and legacies of fascinating figures from history, culture, music, and beyond. From icons who shaped entire generations to hidden stories that deserve the spotlight, pplpod brings you closer to the people behind the headlines and the legends.Thoughtful, engaging, and story-driven, pplpod explores what makes these lives extraordinary—and what we can learn from them today.

history music history

All Episodes

23:16

Konrad Lorenz: The Nobel Laureate With a Nazi Past...

pplpod ·

2026/06/17

Konrad Lorenz won the Nobel Prize for his work on animal behavior, including his famous studies of imprinting in greylag geese. He also joined the Nazi Party, wrote papers applying his theories to racial hygiene, and spent years after the war minimizing his involvement.This episode examines how Lorenz founded the field of ethology while carrying a political past that permanently complicated his legacy.His discovery of imprinting and what it revealed about instinctThe Nazi Party membership and his

en

20:24

Jules Verne: Why the Father of Science Fiction Was...

pplpod ·

2026/06/17

Jules Verne wrote about submarines, space travel, and circumnavigating the globe decades before any of it was possible. He is often called a prophet of technology. He was nothing of the sort. His genius lay not in predicting the future but in dramatizing the anxieties of his own era.This episode reexamines Verne's legacy and argues that his novels were less about what was coming than about the Victorian obsession with progress, conquest, and the limits of human ambition.How Twenty Thousand Leagues

en

20:18

Allen Ginsberg: The Man Who Howled at Moloch

pplpod ·

2026/06/17

Allen Ginsberg stood up in a San Francisco gallery in 1955 and read Howl, a poem that put the Beat Generation on the map and landed its publisher in court on obscenity charges. For the next four decades, Ginsberg was the public face of American literary rebellion.This episode follows him from his early life in Paterson, New Jersey, through the Six Gallery reading, the obscenity trial, and his later years as a countercultural elder statesman and unlikely member of the literary establishment.The Six

en

20:39

Tom Wolfe: The Man in the White Suit Who Rewrote...

pplpod ·

2026/06/17

Tom Wolfe wore white suits, picked fights with the literary establishment, and invented a style of journalism that read like fiction. From The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to The Bonfire of the Vanities, he chronicled American status anxiety with a precision that enraged his subjects and thrilled his readers.This episode traces Wolfe's career from his early newspaper work through the New Journalism movement to his bestselling novels, examining how a Virginia gentleman became America's sharpest

en

25:34

John Stuart Mill: The Boy Raised as a Thinking Machine

pplpod ·

2026/06/17

John Stuart Mill began studying Greek at three, Latin at eight, and had read most of the classical canon before he turned twelve. His father designed a radical education meant to produce a perfect rational mind. It nearly destroyed him.This episode traces Mill's journey from a childhood of relentless intellectual drilling through a devastating mental crisis to his emergence as one of the most important philosophers of liberty and utilitarianism.The extraordinary education his father James Mill

en

11:45

Plotinus: The Philosopher Who Mapped the Architecture...

pplpod ·

2026/06/17

Plotinus constructed a vision of reality as a cascading emanation from a single unknowable source he called the One. His Enneads shaped Christian mysticism, Islamic philosophy, and Renaissance thought, yet he remains less known than the Plato he claimed to be merely interpreting.This episode explores how a philosopher from Roman Egypt built a metaphysical system so powerful that it dominated Western thought for a millennium.How the One emanates into Mind, Soul, and the material worldWhy Plotinus

en

15:33

Pablo Neruda: The Poet Whose Bones May Hold a Murder...

pplpod ·

2026/06/17

Pablo Neruda died twelve days after the Pinochet coup in 1973. The official cause was cancer, but his driver and personal assistant said he was injected with something at the hospital. Decades later, forensic scientists found a suspicious bacterium in his exhumed remains.This episode traces Neruda's life from his early love poetry to his Communist politics, his Nobel Prize, and the forensic investigation that may yet prove his death was an assassination.How Twenty Love Poems made him famous before

en

20:49

Roger Penrose: The Physicist Who Argues Consciousness...

pplpod ·

2026/06/17

Roger Penrose won the Nobel Prize for proving that black holes are an inevitable consequence of general relativity. But his most controversial claim has nothing to do with astrophysics. He argues that human consciousness arises from quantum processes in the brain, a theory most neuroscientists reject.This episode examines his career from singularity theorems with Stephen Hawking to his bold hypothesis about microtubules and quantum coherence in neurons.His proof that black hole singularities are

en

22:27

Louis de Broglie: The Aristocrat Who Accidentally...

pplpod ·

2026/06/17

Louis de Broglie was a French duke who submitted a doctoral thesis so bizarre that the physics faculty asked Einstein to evaluate it. His claim that particles behave like waves turned out to be correct and helped launch quantum mechanics.This episode tells the story of how an aristocrat with a background in medieval history stumbled into one of the most consequential ideas in 20th-century physics.His proposal that all matter has wave-like propertiesWhy his thesis committee was baffled and turned to

en

24:29

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek: The Fabric Merchant Who...

pplpod ·

2026/06/17

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was a Dutch cloth merchant with no scientific training who built his own microscopes and discovered bacteria, protozoa, and spermatozoa. He was the first person in history to see the invisible world teeming inside a drop of water.This episode tells the story of how a self-taught tradesman from Delft outperformed the professional scientists of the Royal Society and opened the door to microbiology.How he ground lenses capable of 270x magnification by handHis discovery of

en

19:25

Stefan Zweig: The Writer Who Inspired The Grand...

pplpod ·

2026/06/17

Stefan Zweig was the most translated author in the world during the 1930s. When the Nazis rose to power, he lost his homeland, his audience, and his reason to live. He and his wife took their own lives in Brazil in 1942, leaving behind a farewell note of devastating calm.This episode traces Zweig's rise as a literary celebrity in Vienna, his exile across three continents, and the despair that led to his final act, a story Wes Anderson later drew on for The Grand Budapest Hotel.How he became the most

en

21:26

Rosalind Franklin: The Third Man of the Double Helix

pplpod ·

2026/06/17

Rosalind Franklin produced the X-ray crystallography image that revealed the structure of DNA. Watson and Crick used her data without her knowledge. She died of ovarian cancer at 37, four years before they collected the Nobel Prize for the discovery she made possible.This episode tells the story of Franklin's scientific brilliance, the gender politics that undermined her, and the decades-long effort to restore her to her rightful place in the history of molecular biology.Photo 51 and what it

en

24:31

Bonnie and Clyde: The Brutal Reality Behind the...

pplpod ·

2026/06/17

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were not glamorous outlaws. They were desperate, violent, and on the run through the rural South during the worst years of the Depression. They killed at least 13 people, slept in stolen cars, and were riddled with bullets in a Louisiana ambush.This episode strips away the Hollywood mythology and reconstructs what the Barrow Gang actually was: a small, panicked band of criminals whose fame far outstripped their competence.How the Depression and the Texas prison system

en

20:29

The Nobel Prize as a Death Sentence: When the Highest...

pplpod ·

2026/06/17

For some laureates, the Nobel Prize marked the beginning of the end. Writers who won it stopped writing. Scientists who won it lost their edge. A few were driven to depression, alcoholism, or worse by the weight of the world's highest honor.This episode examines the dark side of the Nobel Prize and asks why the recognition meant to crown a life's work so often became the thing that ended it.The writers who produced nothing significant after winningHow sudden fame disrupted the routines that made

en

21:43

Peter Abelard: The Medieval Philosopher Who Invented...

pplpod ·

2026/06/17

Peter Abelard argued that sin lies not in the act but in the intention behind it, a claim that scandalized 12th-century Paris. His affair with Héloïse, his castration at the hands of her uncle, and his repeated condemnation by the church made him one of the most dramatic figures in the history of philosophy.This episode traces how Abelard's ideas about ethics, logic, and language transformed medieval thought, and why his love story with Héloïse remains one of the most celebrated in Western

en

21:20

William Burroughs: The Writer Who Shot His Wife and...

pplpod ·

2026/06/17

William Burroughs killed his wife Joan Vollmer in a drunken game of William Tell in Mexico City in 1951. He spent the rest of his life writing some of the most transgressive literature in the English language and claiming that an entity he called the Ugly Spirit had guided his hand.This episode examines his life from a privileged St. Louis childhood through the writing of Naked Lunch, the cut-up experiments, and his late-career cult status, asking whether his art redeemed or merely obscured the

en

21:54

Freeman Dyson: The Subversive Genius Who Refused to...

pplpod ·

2026/06/17

Freeman Dyson unified quantum electrodynamics, designed a nuclear-powered spacecraft, challenged climate orthodoxy, and argued that biotechnology would become a household art. He won every major physics prize except the Nobel and spent his career crossing boundaries that other scientists respected.This episode traces how a British mathematician became one of America's most original and unpredictable scientific minds.How he proved Feynman's and Schwinger's approaches to QED were equivalentProject

en

19:47

Frederick Sanger: The Quiet Man Who Sequenced Our DNA

pplpod ·

2026/06/17

Frederick Sanger won two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, a feat matched by almost no one in history. He sequenced the amino acids of insulin and then developed the method that made DNA sequencing possible. He did all of this with so little fanfare that most people have never heard his name.This episode tells the story of the most self-effacing genius in the history of science and the two breakthroughs that changed biology forever.How he determined the amino acid sequence of insulinThe Sanger sequencing

en

18:16

Federico García Lorca: The Unsolved Murder of Spain's...

pplpod ·

2026/06/17

Federico García Lorca was arrested by Nationalist forces in Granada in August 1936, taken to a hillside, and shot. His body has never been found. The killing of Spain's most celebrated poet became one of the defining crimes of the Spanish Civil War.This episode traces Lorca's life from the Andalusian countryside to the stages of Madrid and New York, and examines the political and personal motives behind his assassination.How his poetry and plays captured the spirit of Spain's avant-gardeHis time in

en

20:27

William of Ockham: The Fugitive Monk Who Invented...

pplpod ·

2026/06/17

William of Ockham gave philosophy its most famous rule: do not multiply entities beyond necessity. He also spent years on the run from the Pope, excommunicated for arguing that the church had no right to own property.This episode traces how a Franciscan friar from a Surrey village became one of the most influential logicians of the Middle Ages and a political fugitive whose ideas about poverty nearly toppled papal authority.What Occam's Razor actually says and how it has been misusedHis nominalist

en

7,536 results

Similar Podcasts

The History on Film Podcast

Ross Lennon

Today In History with The Retrospectors

The Retrospectors

The Old Front Line

Paul Reed

pplpod

pplpod

Based on a True Story

Dan LeFebvre