ADHD and the Theory of All the Things is a podcast born from one of the most recognizable parts of ADHD: relentless curiosity.
Hosted by Andrew Perry, each episode follows a single question down the rabbit hole to uncover the history, science, psychology, and human stories behind the ordinary things we often take for granted. From photography and clocks to coffee, sleep, Apple, money, friendship, and everything in between, you’ll discover how everyday things became extraordinary.
You don’t need to have ADHD to enjoy this podcast. You just need to love asking, “Why?” If you’ve ever lost an afternoon chasing one fascinating question after another, you’ll feel right at home.
This isn’t a lecture or a textbook. Think of it like a conversation around a campfire with a good friend, uncovering forgotten stories, and making complex topics surprisingly easy to understand.
Because every ordinary thing has an extraordinary story. And once you know it, you’ll never look at the world the same way again.
A firehouse looks modern, but the idea behind it is ancient: someone stays ready for a disaster that will not make an appointment. We start a three-part arc on emergency services by pulling apart the oldest one, fire, and following the long road from bucket brigades to today’s all-hazards fire department. Along the way, we keep circling one big question that connects every siren you’ve ever heard: how did we decide who comes when something goes wrong? We go back to a world where fire lives i...
1 Sept 2026
The Ancient Dream Dictionary Was Basically Google
You go to sleep in your own bed and wake up with the lingering feeling that you were somewhere else entirely. That split reality is the hook that sends me down the rabbit hole: why does the sleeping brain create a full world with people who do not exist, places you have never been, and emotions that hit like they are happening right now? We start where humans started, with ancient dream meaning. From Egypt’s Chester Beatty Dream Book to Greek healing temples and rulers who took dream omens s...
26 Aug 2026
How Your Brain Rebuilds Your Past
A memory can hit you like a physical place. You can see the kitchen, hear the music, feel the moment and yet the brain is not pressing play on a recording. We pull apart the uncomfortable truth that remembering is reconstruction, and that the act of recall can quietly change the thing you feel most sure about. We start with Henry Molaison (H.M.) and the neuroscience that reshaped what we know about the hippocampus and long-term declarative memory. His story shows why “memory” is not a ...
18 Aug 2026
BONUS: The Hidden History Behind Cake, Candles, And Wishes
There’s a cake on the table, tiny flames flicker in the dark, everyone sings the same melody, and then you’re told to do something oddly specific: make a secret wish and blow the fire out. We all accept it as “normal” which is exactly why we wanted to pull the whole birthday ritual apart and ask the deceptively simple question behind it: why do humans celebrate the day we were born? We trace the history of birthdays through the unglamorous essentials that make them possible like calendars, y...
18 Aug 2026
How Your Brain Builds Reality From Electrical Signals
A railroad blast in 1848 drove an iron rod through Phineas Gage’s brain and somehow didn’t end his life, but it did reshape who he seemed to be. That story pulls me straight into one of the strangest questions in neuroscience: if a small change in brain tissue can change personality, where does the “self” actually live? I take you from early misconceptions that placed thought in the heart to the evidence Hippocrates and Galen built from head injuries, then into the microscopic breakthr...
4 Aug 2026
The Science And History Behind Your Nightly Shutdown
You spend nearly a third of your life unconscious, unable to hunt, react, or protect yourself and somehow nature decided that was the best deal on the table. That contradiction is where we start: if evolution trims anything that hurts survival, why does sleep exist at all, and why do so many species share it? I follow the trail from ancient dream beliefs to Aristotle’s shift toward natural observation, then into the modern world where gas lamps, electricity, and factory schedules turned nigh...
29 Jul 2026
Listener Rabbit Hole: The Squishy Toys
A squishy dinosaur. A stress ball. A sticky hand that somehow never fully dries out. We all know the feeling, you pick it up, squeeze it once, then immediately squeeze it again. When listener William asked where the squishy “goo” actually comes from, we thought we were headed to a toy factory. Instead, we landed in chemistry labs, accidental discoveries, and a hundred-year timeline of material science. We walk through the real building blocks behind modern squishy toys: polymers (those long ...
29 Jul 2026
Who Decided What Time It Is
Nobody has ever seen time. You have seen clocks, sunsets, birthdays, and countdown timers, but time itself stays invisible while quietly controlling when we wake up, eat, commute, meet friends, and fall asleep. That mystery sent me down a rabbit hole that starts with a simple question: who decided what time it is, and how did the whole world end up agreeing on the same numbers? We trace the history of timekeeping from the moment humans first realized the sky wasn’t random. Farmers needed sea...
21 Jul 2026
A Hole In The Wall Started Your Selfies
A photograph feels simple until you ask the one question that started it all: how do we make the picture stay? We follow that question back more than 2,000 years to a tiny hole in a wall, an upside-down street scene, and the discovery that light follows rules. From Mozi’s early explanation of inverted images to Aristotle’s eclipse crescents under a tree, and Ibn al-Haytham’s experiments that helped define modern optics and the scientific method, the origin story of photography is really a sto...
20 Jul 2026
Season 1 Trailer
Each week we take a deep dive down a rabbit hole. You never know where we will end up. Whether it’s the history of photography or how Crocs are made. We will follow the rabbit hole wherever it may lead. Send us Fan Mail A RedBug Studios Production Follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/1EWmPbzrsJ/?mibextid=wwXIfr
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