The Smart Cookies podcast

Daniel McClellan is a scholar of the Bible and religion, and an honorary fellow at the University of Birmingham's Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion. He's also the co-host of the Data over Dogma podcast and runs a brilliant Tik Tok channel where he tackles common questions and misunderstandings about the Bible. In this amazingly illuminating conversation we talk about the orig...

Chris Stringer is a physical anthropologist celebrated for his work on human evolution, as well as a research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London. He comes back to Smart Cookies to share of his vast knowledge on my favourite archaic humans, the Neanderthals. We discuss their origins, culture, language, technology, interbreeding with Homo Sapiens, their eventual extincti...

In the second part of the fantastic conversation about the FRENCH REVOLUTION with historian David Andress, we discuss the downward spiral of Louis XVI, the relentless reign of terror, the bloody civil wars that rocked France... as well as the eventual rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Professor David Andress is a renowned historian of the French Revolution at the University of Portsmouth. In this episode we talk about the prelude to arguably the most important revolution of all time, the deteriorating social conditions before the storm, the emerging class of urban revolutionaries, the that were ideas driving them... as well as the events that finally push France into irreversib...

Thomas Lockley is Associate Professor at Nihon University College of Law in Tokyo, where he teaches courses about the international and multicultural history of Japan and East Asia. We talk about the REAL HISTORY behind the "Shogun" TV show, but also about feudal Japan, the Samurai, the arrival of Europeans... as well as Prof. Lockley's latest book "A Gentleman from Japan."

Peter Heather is Chair of Medieval History at King's College London. Some of his most famous books include The Fall of the Roman Empire, Rome Resurgent, Christendom , and most recently Why Empires Fall: Rome, America and the Future of the West . We talk about the last days of the western Roman empire, the role of barbarians, the rise of the Persian empire, decadence, popular cliches, the worst Rom...

Alison Rowlands is a Professor of European history at the University of Essex researching witchcraft of the early modern period in central Europe. We talk about medieval beliefs in the supernatural, witch trials, the Inquisition, torture, the role of gender in accusations of witchcraft, as well as witchcraft in popular culture.

The Illegals was a network of sleeper agents created by KGB, who were sent into western countries, pretending to be ordinary citizens. Jack Barsky was a young German man when he signed up and became one of the few Illegals who sent straight into the belly of the beast - into the US. We discuss his early life in East Germany, the KGB training he went through in Moscow, his mission in the US, the ev...

Jacob Mikanowski is a Polish-American journalist, writer and academic who's recently published an amazing book on the history of EASTERN EUROPE called "Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land." Jacob and I talk about the origins of Slavs, the surprising role of slavery in early kingdoms, the colourful medieval Slavdom, as well as modern stereotypes and our unique sense of hum...

Uwe Boll is an infamous German film director, a Hollywood outcast consistently panned by critics, who produced and directed more than 30 films, working with some of the biggest names in show business. We talk about his everlasting passion for film, humble beginnings, first feature, developing a hard skin, hanging out with Mike Tyson and boxing his critics in the ring.

Most of us believe our lives are ordered by reason, or at least some kind of a sensible narrative... However, much as we hate to admit it, chance, randomness and chaos all play a crucial role in our lives (as well as our societies) - and that's exactly what Brian Klaas, associate professor in Global politics at University College London, wrote a phenomenal book about (called Fluke: Chance, Chaos a...

I talk to Norman Ohler, the author of the best-selling book Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany. We discuss the hidden history of widespread drug use in the Third Reich, the mass consumption of methamphetamines by the German army, as well as Adolf Hitler's spiralling dependence on "injections" administered to him by his doctor, Theo Morell.

Brent Lee is an ex-conspiracy theorist who's managed to escape the rabbit hole after dwelling in its depths for 15 years. These days he's known as the host of the "Some Dare Call It Conspiracy" podcast, through which he's trying to help people who are still caught up in these beliefs. We talk about his descent into the bizarre world of conspiracies, the impact they had on his personal life, his be...

Dr. Michael Rowe is a Reader in modern European History at King's College London. Over the last two decades he has published extensively on the period of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. In this episode of Smart Cookies we talk about Napoleon's rise, his personality, conquests and defeats, as well as his relationship with Josephine and finally, bout Ridley Scott's divisive Napoleon biopi...

Dr. Tobias Jones is a researcher, historian and lecturer of Mongol history at Leiden University. Back by popular demand, he returns to Smart Cookies to talk about some of the most powerful women of the Mongol Empire. We also talk discuss upbringing and the role of Mongolian women, the ancient custom of bride kidnapping, levirate marriage, whispers of warrior women, and Marco Polo doing kung-fu in...

Bruce Greyson is a Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neuro-behavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, who has studied near-death experiences for more than 45 years and is one of the world’s leading experts on their science and significance. He is the author of After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond, co-author of Irreducible Mind and co-editor o...

Tariq Ali is a writer, filmmaker and a leading figure of the international left since the 60s. He is a long-standing editor of the New Left Review and a political commentator published on every continent. His books include The Clash of Fundamentalisms, The Obama Syndrome and the latest, Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes, which we discuss in this episode. We also talk about Churchill's racis...

During one of the most dramatic summers in recent memory, filled with record breaking temperatures, devastating wildfires and destructive floods, a bombshell report released by the IISD exposed the fact that our governments are pumping RECORD amounts of money into big oil... I talk to one of the reports' authors, Tara Laan, to figure out WHY. We also discuss climate anxiety, the relationship betwe...

Professor Avi Loeb is a former Chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University, founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is also the head of the Galileo Project - the Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts. We talk about...

Stanley Stepanic is an Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia. To date he has published three textbooks that have been released in recent editions - these are "Dracula or the Timeless Path of the Vampire," "Russian and East European Film", and "Russian Folklore". In addition to such publications, Professor Stepanic has been very active in the public s...

Stuart Vyse is a behavioral scientist and writer with a PhD in psychology and BA and MA degrees in English Literature. He's a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, as well as a contributing editor for the Skeptical Inquirer magazine. His first book, Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition won the William James Book Award of the Amer...

Professor Patrick McNamara has over 15 years of experience working directly on the problem of the nature and function of dreaming. He has been the recipient of grant awards from the National Institutes of Health, to further study sleep and was awarded the Ph. D. in Behavioral Neuroscience from Boston University. He did a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Aphasia Research Center, Boston VA Medical Cen...

Mike Rothschild is a journalist and author, focused on the intersections between internet culture and politics as seen through the dark glass of conspiracy theories. Since 2018, he has specialized in examining the QAnon conspiracy cult and is one of the first journalists to reveal its connections to past conspiracy theories. He is the author of the seminal work on QAnon, " The Storm Is Upon Us: Ho...

Agustín Fuentes is a professor of anthropology at Princeton University. His research focuses on the biosocial, delving into the entanglement of biological systems with the social and cultural lives of humans, our ancestors, and a few of the other animals with whom humanity shares close relations. He has written many books, but we mostly discuss his latest one, which is called "Why we believe: Evol...

Anil Seth is a professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he is also Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. His latest book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, is a Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller, a New Statesman Book of the Year, an Economist Book of the Year and a Guardian Science Book of the Year. His TED talk on conscio...