Some Topic - The Podcast

During World War II, Polish soldiers adopted a young Syrian brown bear named Wojtek. Eventually, they officially placed him on the unit’s rolls so he could continue traveling with them. Wojtek rode in military vehicles...

On March 3, 1876, pieces of what appeared to be meat began falling from a clear sky over a farm in Bath County, Kentucky. The event became known as the Kentucky Meat Shower. Samples were examined. Newspapers spread the...

What happens when a Philadelphia botanist accidentally becomes one of the most important foreigners in Afghanistan? In this episode of Some Topic, Nick and Brett continue the unbelievable saga of Hosea Harlan, the...

What do nursery rhymes, Viking invasions, child sacrifice theories, Roman engineering, oil tycoons, and an Arizona tourist attraction all have in common? Somehow... London Bridge. This week on Some Topic, Nick and Brett...

In 1835, the New York Sun began publishing reports claiming that astronomers had discovered life on the Moon. Not microscopic life. Forests, strange animals, intelligent beavers, unicorn-like creatures, and winged...

Bubble Wrap began as a decorating idea. In 1957, engineers Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes sealed plastic material together to trap pockets of air and tried selling the result as textured wallpaper. It failed. Then...

In 1925, Victor Lustig managed to sell the Eiffel Tower. There was only one problem. It was not his to sell. Posing as a French government official, Lustig convinced scrap-metal dealers that Paris had secretly decided...

What happens when four sleep-deprived idiots fly into Montana, immediately throw themselves into freezing whitewater rapids, and then attempt to conquer two of America's most iconic national parks in a single long...

In 1975, a serious physics paper appeared with a Siamese cat listed as one of its authors. Physicist Jack Hetherington had written his paper using the word “we,” only to realize the journal preferred singular language...

Napoleon Bonaparte survived some of the largest military campaigns in European history. According to one famous historical anecdote, he was also forced to retreat from rabbits. After the Treaties of Tilsit in 1807, a...

In this episode of Some Topic, the Conspiracy Corner opens its doors once again to one of the most enduring and misunderstood ideas in modern culture: the Illuminati. What begins as a chaotic, joke-filled back-and-forth...

In this Conspiracy Corner deep dive, the hosts take a hard look at Atlantis and ask the question that has haunted history buffs, crackpots, and curious listeners for centuries: was it ever real, or just one of the...

One of the earliest webcams existed because computer scientists were tired of walking to an empty coffee pot. In 1991, researchers at the University of Cambridge aimed a camera at the coffee machine in their building’s...

The 1904 Olympic marathon in St. Louis might be one of the strangest sporting events ever held. Runners faced extreme heat, clouds of dust, almost no water, traffic on the course, spoiled fruit, and competitors making...

Some Topic returns with another chaotic deep dive where history, comedy, and completely unqualified aviation analysis collide at cruising altitude. Nick and Brett open the episode in full signature form, immediately...