Remember that neat, tidy version of history and science you learned in school? The one with brave explorers discovering continents, brilliant inventors having a single "eureka!" moment, and a food pyramid that was definitely going to make you healthy?
It turns out, a lot of it was wrong.
Welcome to Half-Truths, the show dedicated to unlearning the myths, half-truths, and outright fabrications that have become common knowledge.
In each episode, we take one "fact" you thought you knew and trace it back to its source. We'll uncover the surprising context, the political spin, and the often more fascinating truth that got left out of the textbook. This isn't just about trivia; it's about understanding how the stories we're told shape our world.
Get ready for the "aha!" moments that will make you see the past—and the present—in a whole new light.
If you enjoy the show and want to support it, you can buy me a coffee:
https://paypal.me/podcast8
You have heard the stories since childhood, and you have heard them in the same tone people use for the worst things in the European past, the dungeons, the racks, the auto da fe, the grand spectacle of ecclesiastical cruelty, the Spanish Inquisition as a byword for a kind of religious sadism the modern world has mercifully left behind. The picture is almost entirely a picture. The actual numbers, the ones in the archives, tell a story that is genuinely brutal in some parts and surprisingly bureaucratic in others, and the gap between the popular picture and the archival record is one of the most thoroughly documented cases of successful propaganda in the early modern world.
If you enjoy the show and want to support it, you can buy me a coffee:
https://paypal.me/podcast8
3 Oct 2026
EP77 - The Old Saying Was Never About Physics
You have heard the saying your entire life, and you have heard it with the confident tone of a person sharing a piece of folk wisdom that has the force of a natural law. The saying is not folk wisdom, and the physics is so simple that the National Weather Service has a page debunking it, and the Empire State Building has been hit roughly twenty three times a year for ninety years.
If you enjoy the show and want to support it, you can buy me a coffee:
https://paypal.me/podcast8
30 Sept 2026
EP76 - The Sun Was Never Yellow
You have been told since childhood that the sun is yellow, and the children's drawings, the emoji on your phone, and the weather icon all agree. The colors are slightly wrong, and the reason is one of the most beautiful small pieces of nineteenth century physics, Rayleigh scattering.
If you enjoy the show and want to support it, you can buy me a coffee:
https://paypal.me/podcast8
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