For over a decade, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and Sweden have consistently ranked among the happiest nations on Earth—but why? We dig into the research behind the World Happiness Report, separate fact from political myth, and explore whether strong social safety nets, low governmental corruption, public trust, and the Nordic model of government really do create happier lives. Along the way, we also examine the decades of propaganda, misconceptions, and ideological battles that have shaped how many Americans think about Scandinavia—and ask what lessons, if any, the United States should take from the world's happiest people. Fuck yeah, bro.
Jul 10
1 hr 5 min
In Key West, Florida during the Great Depression, an obsessed German radiology technician, Carl Tanzler, became convinced that a dying young woman named Elena de Hoyos was his supernatural soulmate. After her death, his delusion led him to commit one of the most bizarre and disturbing acts of grave robbery in American history. We explore the strange intersection of obsession, tuberculosis, embalming, mental illness, and necrophilia in yet another dark, weird, and fascinating episode.
Jul 6
2 hr 58 min
For at least sixteen months in the 1920s, Earle Nelson terrorized North America, murdering at least twenty-two women while drifting from city to city under false identities. Known as the Gorilla Man and the Dark Strangler, Nelson was a deeply disturbed sexual predator whose life was marked by childhood tragedy, mental illness, brain injury, prison sentences, and multiple escapes from psychiatric institutions. This is an especially wild one.
Jun 29
2 hr 26 min
In February of 1978, five friends left a college basketball game in Northern California and seemingly vanished into thin air. Months later, four of them were found dead deep in the wilderness, miles from their abandoned car, while the fifth remained missing. Nearly fifty years later, the Yuba County Five remains one of America's strangest unsolved mysteries—a baffling case filled with unexplained decisions, bizarre clues, and theories ranging from tragic misadventure to murder and conspiracy.
Jun 24
1 hr
On June 28th, 1969, New York City police expected another routine raid on a gay bar. Instead, they found a community that had finally had enough. This week, we explore the long history of anti-LGBTQ+ persecution in America, the explosive events of the Stonewall Riots, and how a few nights of resistance helped ignite the modern fight for queer liberation.
Jun 22
2 hr 41 min
On a December night in 1991, four teenage girls gathered at an Austin frozen yogurt shop for what should have been an ordinary evening of work, pizza, friendship, and weekend plans. Instead, they became the victims of one of the most brutal and baffling crimes in Texas history - a case that shattered Austin's sense of safety and led to further tragedy.
Jun 15
2 hr 36 min
Long before serial killers became podcast and true crime doc celebrities in the US, there was Joe Ball: a bootlegger, bar owner, womanizer, and suspected murderer who kept a pit full of hungry alligators behind his Texas tavern. In the late 1930s, as women connected to Ball began disappearing one after another, rumors spread that "The Alligator Man" wasn't just feeding stray animals to his reptiles—he might have been feeding them people...
Jun 12
49 min
A young British glamour model flies to Milan for what she believes is a routine photo shoot in 2017 — and vanishes into one of the strangest kidnapping cases in modern true crime history. Drugged, stuffed into the trunk of a car, and allegedly marked for sale on a dark web sex auction by a shadowy group called “Black Death,” Chloe Ayling’s story quickly spiraled into an international media frenzy filled with bizarre twists, contradictory behavior, and public skepticism.
Jun 8
2 hr 21 min
In April of 2020, while the rest of the world fixated on the terrifying early days of the Covid pandemic, a 51-year-old denturist in rural Nova Scotia launched one of the deadliest mass shootings in North American history — murdering 22 people across 13 horrifying hours while disguised as a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer. We dive deep into the shocking failures, bizarre details, and devastating human stories behind these attacks: a case involving fake police cars, burning homes, biker gang rumors, domestic violence, smuggling, and a law enforcement response so chaotic it still fuels outrage and conspiracy theories years later.
Jun 1
2 hr 19 min
For decades, hundreds of thousands of desperate people (maybe even millions) traveled to rural Brazil seeking miracles from João Teixeira de Faria — better known as “John of God” — a self-proclaimed psychic surgeon who claimed spirits healed others through his body. But behind the stories of supernatural cures, celebrity endorsements, and spiritual enlightenment lurked allegations of fraud, manipulation, and horrific abuse.
May 25
2 hr 28 min
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