Fool's FAQ

Somebody will eventually tell you that sharks are older than trees. It sounds like a fact invented at 2am to win an argument. So is it true? We find out.. ──────────────── Enjoying the show? Follow Fool's FAQ and drop a 5-star rating & review - it's hands-down the best way to help other curious people find us. Want to support the show? Toss a few bucks in the tip jar → Buy me a coffee ☕️ Hunt...

You reach for your phone and the screen says 11:11. Later a receipt totals $11.11. Then it appears again the next night, right as you're thinking about something you badly want to happen. So why that particular minute, and does anything actually happen when you stop and make the wish? ──────────────── Enjoying the show? Follow Fool's FAQ and drop a 5-star rating & review - it's hands-down the...

A blurry strip of film shot in 1967 turned local folklore into a national obsession. People have been hauling plaster casts, hair samples and shaky footage out of the woods ever since. So what does all that evidence actually add up to, and what would it take to settle it? We answer: Does Bigfoot Exist? ──────────────── Enjoying the show? Follow Fool's FAQ and drop a 5-star rating & review - it...

February 1959. Nine experienced hikers cut their way out of their own tent in the middle of the night and walked into the snow without their boots. None of them came back alive. So what was inside that tent that made leaving seem like the safer option? We tackle one of the most notorious mysteries in history. ──────────────── Enjoying the show? Follow Fool's FAQ and drop a 5-star rating & revi...

Teeth the size of a grown man's hand keep turning up in cliffs and riverbeds around the world. Hollywood took those and built a monster still cruising somewhere in the dark. So what did those teeth really belong to, how big was it, and is anything like it still out there? ──────────────── Enjoying the show? Follow Fool's FAQ and drop a 5-star rating & review - it's hands-down the best way to h...

Everyone has heard it. Lightning never strikes twice in the same place, usually said to reassure someone that the worst has already happened and will not come back around. So where did that idea come from, and does the sky actually work that way? ──────────────── Enjoying the show? Follow Fool's FAQ and drop a 5-star rating & review - it's hands-down the best way to help other curious people f...

You finish a normal meal, drink a glass of water, and somewhere in there you may have swallowed tiny pieces of plastic. They are turning up in blood, lungs, placentas, and brain tissue. So are we quietly poisoning ourselves, or have the headlines outrun the evidence? ──────────────── Enjoying the show? Follow Fool's FAQ and drop a 5-star rating & review - it's hands-down the best way to help o...

A cloud looks like nothing at all. It drifts, it changes shape, it disappears. So the question sounds like a joke right up until you remember that clouds are made of actual water, and actual water has actual mass. We get into what a cloud is really made of, how you go about weighing something you can fly straight through, and the arithmetic that turns a fluffy white shape into a hard number. There...

Something happens, and salt water starts leaking out of two holes in your head. It's so normal nobody stops to question it, and from a survival standpoint it makes almost no sense at all. So why do we do it? The answer may have less to do with you than with everyone watching. ──────────────── Enjoying the show? Follow Fool's FAQ and drop a 5-star rating & review - it's hands-down the best way...

Ask a five year old why the sky is blue and you'll get a shrug. Ask an adult and you'll get a confident sentence with the word atmosphere in it, followed by a long pause when you ask the follow up. We get into what's actually coming at you from the sun, what the air does to it on the way down, and why the tidy explanation most people carry around falls apart under one simple question. Everybody th...

There are something like 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone. Run the numbers and the universe should be crowded. But nothing has ever shown up. A physicist noticed that contradiction over lunch in 1950, and it has bothered scientists ever since. There's an equation that tries to work out how many civilizations are out there. Seven variables, and almost nobody agrees on a single one of them. ───...

For two thousand years the Library of Alexandria has stood in for everything humanity has ever lost. It's near the top of every list of history's great tragedies. Ask what was actually in it, though, and the answers get vague fast. Scrolls, obviously. How many? Which ones? Gone how, and gone when? Historians have been arguing about it for longer than the library was open. Today, we answer it. ────...

Everybody learns the same fact in school. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. It's on the patent, it's in the textbooks, and it leaves quite a lot out. On the very same day Bell filed his patent, another man filed a claim of his own. And a third had been working on the idea for years before either of them, but couldn't afford to keep his paperwork current. What happened next involves a c...

Seven days, seven names. You say them constantly and have probably never once wondered where they came from. The trail runs through Roman planets and Norse gods, and some of the names sitting on your calendar are older than the calendar itself. One day broke ranks with all the others, and it isn't the one you'd guess. ──────────────── Enjoying the show? Follow Fool's FAQ and drop a 5-star rating &...

For most of human history, nobody knew what was making them sick. The leading theory blamed bad air, and it held for centuries. Then a few people started noticing things nobody else was looking at. A hospital ward with a death rate that made no sense. A neighborhood water pump. A flask with a strangely shaped neck. Almost nobody believed any of them at the time. One of them was ruined for being ri...

Every other business in America wants your money seven days a week. Car dealerships, across most of the country, will not sell you a car on a Sunday. It isn't tradition, and it isn't dealers being generous with their weekends. The real reason is written into law in a surprising number of states, and it started long before anyone was selling cars. ──────────────── Enjoying the show? Follow Fool's F...

It's on t-shirts, on posters, and on the walls of coffee shops in the ‘90s. Everybody can recite it. Almost nobody can tell you what it means. Three letters and a number, written by a 26 year old patent clerk in a paper only three pages long. He wasn't sure he was right at the time. What it's actually claiming about the chair you're sitting in is stranger than the physics lesson you're expecting....

Somewhere in the history books there's a war so short most people assume the number is a typo. Real warships, real casualties, two actual governments. It started with a sudden death, a palace, and a man who decided not to ask permission. Britain gave him a deadline. He ignored it. How long it actually lasted is the part nobody believes. ──────────────── Enjoying the show? Follow Fool's FAQ and dro...

Everybody knows Van Gogh cut off his ear. Almost nobody knows why. The real answer starts about ten years earlier, with a man who had already failed at four careers and hadn't yet picked up a paintbrush. What happened between then and that night in Arles is stranger than the version you've heard, and so is what he did in the hours right after. One argument, one night, and a century later historian...

A bird can land on a power line carrying thousands of volts and feel absolutely nothing. Touch that same line yourself and it kills you instantly. So what does the bird know that you don't? We get into what is actually keeping that bird alive, and why it has almost nothing to do with the bird. You'll hear why electricity is far pickier about where it travels than most people assume, what changes t...

Scientists are almost completely certain that 85 percent of the matter in the universe is something nobody has ever detected. So how does anyone know it's there? We get into the astronomer who noticed something was wrong back in 1933 and got ignored for thirty years, and the woman who proved him right by doing nothing more complicated than watching how fast stars move. You'll hear why galaxies sho...

Six of the seven wonders of the ancient world are gone, so how does anyone actually know they were ever there? We get into who wrote the list and why it stopped at seven, from the Greek word theamata to the poem by Antipater of Sidon that leaves out the Lighthouse of Alexandria entirely. You'll hear why Oxford scholar Stephanie Dalley places the Hanging Gardens of Babylon at Nineveh under Sennache...

Was the "unsinkable" Titanic actually sunk on purpose, or has that theory just refused to die for over a century? We get into the wildest Titanic conspiracy theories still circulating today, including the Olympic swap theory, insurance fraud claims involving the White Star Line, and how these ideas have held on despite decades of maritime records, survivor testimony, and wreck evidence contradicti...

Could someone else actually take control of your mind through hypnosis, or is that just something movies made up? We get into the real history of hypnosis, starting with Franz Mesmer's animal magnetism theory in the 1770s and the scientific investigation that debunked it, through James Braid coining the term in 1841. You'll also learn what brain imaging research reveals about suggestibility, why m...

Did Odysseus really take 10 years just to sail home from a war that only lasted 10 years itself? We get into what actually happens in Homer's Odyssey, from the Cyclops Polyphemus and a visit to the land of the dead, to the real structure behind the story's famous hero's journey. You'll learn how ancient Greek mythology shaped this epic, why the story skips around in time instead of telling things...