The Mighty Philbert Podcast

Send us Fan Mail Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, Gen X was warned about everything from nuclear war and killer bees to razor blades in Halloween candy. But while we were worrying about those things, America was experiencing something genuinely terrifying: a dramatic rise in serial murders. Ted Bundy. John Wayne Gacy. David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam. Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker. It seemed...

Send us Fan Mail Grief doesn't follow a schedule. It doesn't come with an expiration date, and nobody gets to tell you when you should be over it. Join me LIVE on Saturday, October 24, at 7 PM as we explore David Kessler's book Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief . We'll discuss the five familiar stages of grief, Kessler's proposed sixth stage, the different ways peo...

Send us Fan Mail Remember when a black-and-white television show could scare the living hell out of you? For Gen X, Halloween wasn't just about costumes and candy. It was about late-night monster movies, creepy television specials, horror hosts, and the nightmares that followed us to bed. In this second episode of our Gen X Halloween trilogy, we're revisiting The Twilight Zone , The Oute...

Send us Fan Mail Growing up Gen X, many of us heard the same warning: "What happens in this house stays in this house." But what happened when the family secrets weren't simply embarrassing? What happened when the things children were told to keep quiet about were the very things they needed help with? In Episode 2 of Things We Never Talked About, But Should Have , we're examin...

Send us Fan Mail Halloween was different when we were kids! We had homemade popcorn balls, caramel apples, school costume contests, pillowcases full of candy, and the freedom to roam all over town. Today, Halloween often means organized events, trunk-or-treat festivals, costume restrictions, and curfews. But has Halloween really changed for the worse, or are we just remembering the magic of childh...

Send us Fan Mail Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s wasn't always the carefree adventure we remember. While Generation X was riding bicycles, watching MTV, and surviving the Satanic Panic, America was confronting a growing teenage suicide crisis. Television movies, after-school specials, public-service announcements, and songs like Rick Cua's "Don't Say Suicide" attempted t...

Send us Fan Mail We grew up alone. We watched the American family change. Now it's time to talk about what happened when Gen X grew up and started relationships of our own. In the first episode of this series, we explored the latchkey generation and the independence so many Gen X kids learned growing up. In Episode 2, we looked at the divorce boom of the 1970s and '80s and asked why so m...

Send us Fan Mail On September 30, 2026, Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Gail Pike by lethal injection. She survived. As of this video, Pike is reportedly in critical condition, Governor Bill Lee has halted Tennessee's remaining 2026 execution and ordered a third-party investigation into what went wrong. But what happens legally when someone survives an execution? Can the state simply t...

Send us Fan Mail Generation X grew up during one of the biggest transformations of the American family in modern history. Divorce rates soared during the 1960s and '70s, reaching historic highs just as Gen X was growing up. More than a million American children a year were being affected by divorce by the 1970s. So what happened? Was it no-fault divorce? Feminism? Women entering the workforce...

Send us Fan Mail Generation X has become known as the “latchkey generation.” We came home from school, unlocked the door, called Mom at work, made ourselves something to eat, watched TV—and somehow managed not to burn the house down before our parents got home. But why were so many of us home alone in the first place? In this episode, we're going beyond the Gen X nostalgia to look at what was...

Send us Fan Mail What if something unusual in your blood became evidence of an ancient extraterrestrial experiment? Rh-negative blood is a completely real genetic variation—but around it has grown one of the strangest collections of theories we've encountered on Carpe Noctem. In this episode, Adie and Phil explore the real science behind the Rh factor, Rh incompatibility during pregnancy, and...

Send us Fan Mail Remember when there was absolutely NOTHING to do? Not “nothing good on Netflix.” Not “I've already watched everything on YouTube.” I mean genuinely... nothing. Your friends weren't home. Nothing was on TV. It was raining outside. You'd already played your Atari. Eventually, you were reduced to reading the back of the cereal box or just lying on your bed staring at t...

Send us Fan Mail We were promised the Information Age. Every library. Every newspaper. Scientific research. History. Art. Music. Knowledge from around the world—all available from our computers. And here's the weird part: It actually happened. We now have access to more information than previous generations could have imagined. We can learn almost anything, look up almost anything and communi...

Send us Fan Mail Vinyl records. Paperbacks. Film cameras. Old iPods. Wired headphones. “Dumb” technology. Some young people are even deliberately looking for ways to spend less time staring at their phones. And as a Gen Xer, my first reaction was basically: Wait... you WANT this stuff?! We spent decades making everything faster, smarter, easier, and more connected. So why is a generation that grew...

Send us Fan Mail Gen X may have been the last generation to grow up in a world where being unreachable was completely normal. We left the house, made plans in advance, drove without GPS, encountered busy signals, waited for answering-machine messages—and occasionally disappeared for hours without anyone launching an investigation. Then the phone escaped from the house. Cell phones became smartphon...

Send us Fan Mail What if Cheers, Frasier, MASH*, Law & Order, The X-Files and hundreds of other television shows were all part of the same universe? And what if that entire universe existed inside the imagination of one little boy? It all goes back to the bizarre 1988 finale of St. Elsewhere, when Tommy Westphall stared into a snow globe containing St. Eligius Hospital—and accidentally inspire...

Send us Fan Mail Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were friends—but their radically different beliefs about the supernatural eventually helped tear that friendship apart. Houdini spent years exposing fraudulent mediums and séance tricks. Conan Doyle, creator of the famously logical Sherlock Holmes, became one of Spiritualism's most passionate defenders. So who was right? Tonight on Car...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, this confused Gen Xer goes down the "It's Me, It's Verity" rabbit hole to find out who—or what—Verity actually is and why this bizarre Minecraft horror character has caught on. But the deeper I went, the more familiar the whole thing started to feel. Gen X had HAL 9000, WOPR, Skynet...and, God help us, Clippy. Maybe every generation takes the t...

Send us Fan Mail You remember it. You're absolutely certain you remember it. There's only one problem. It apparently never happened that way. Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s. The Berenstain Bears were the Berenstein Bears. The Monopoly Man wore a monocle. Fruit of the Loom had a cornucopia. Darth Vader said, “Luke, I am your father.” At least…that's how millions of people...

Send us Fan Mail Deep beneath the border of France and Switzerland sits the Large Hadron Collider — the largest and most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed. Operated by CERN, it was built to help scientists answer some of the biggest questions about matter, particles, and the universe itself. But according to some conspiracy theorists, CERN may have discovered something else entirely....

Send us Fan Mail On February 3, 1959, the world lost Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper in one of the most famous tragedies in music history—a day forever remembered as "The Day the Music Died." But what if the tragedy didn't end with the plane crash? Over the decades, fans have noticed an unsettling pattern. Musicians, friends, family members, producers, and even peopl...

Send us Fan Mail There are monsters who hide in the shadows... ...and then there are those who hide in plain sight. Wayne Adam Ford was a former Marine and long-haul truck driver who spent years traveling California's highways. To everyone around him, he looked like an ordinary truck driver trying to make a living. Behind the wheel, however, he was hunting vulnerable women whose lives deserve...

Send us Fan Mail Today, Adie and I discuss the conspiracy theory, "Project: Monarch". Is this today's version of MK Ultra? Has mind control gone to a Manchurian Candidate level? Is Brittney ok? Join us for all this as we delve in deep! #mightyphilbert #genx #mkultra #projectmonarch #celebritymindcontrol #manchuriancandidate

Send us Fan Mail Nothing like those old conspiracy theories that turned out to be true, like this one. After WW2, our own government began to experiment on American citizens without their consent through a program called MK Ultra. In this classic episode of Carpe Noctem, Adie and I cut through the BS and get into what really happened. Might want to brace yourselves for this one! #carpenoctem #migh...

Send us Fan Mail Some books tell a story. Others challenge everything you thought you knew. In this premiere episode of Carpe Noctem, Phil and Adie take a thoughtful look at Collateral Damage by Mark Shaw—a book that explores possible connections between the deaths of Marilyn Monroe, President John F. Kennedy, journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, and Robert F. Kennedy. Rather than telling you what to bel...