A Little Knowledge

This week, Jackson dives into dragons, mythical creatures, and some of the bizarre animals lurking beneath the ocean. His star witness? The cuttlefish, a strange little sea creature whose ability to change its appearance somehow becomes evidence that dragons may have actually existed.

Joe, feeling increasingly enlightened, contributes whenever he can while Jackson explains how mythical creatures may have evolved from real animals, mistranslations, exaggerations, and stories brought home by travelers returning from exotic lands.

Could centuries of storytelling turn an unusual animal into a dragon? Could a giant squid become a sea monster? And most importantly, has the cuttlefish finally cracked the case?

Probably not. But we now have a little knowledge about it.

This week on A Little Knowledge, we dive into Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, metaphors, and the strange ways we use language to explain the world around us.

Meanwhile, Joe tries his damnedest to derail Jackson at every possible opportunity. Jackson, somehow, refuses to take the bait and keeps dragging the conversation back on track.

Literature, language, questionable interpretations, and one host desperately trying to ruin the lesson. Just another week of having a little knowledge.

This week on A Little Knowledge, Jackson takes us down the rabbit hole of the Ark of the Covenant, and Joe does his best to figure out what the hell he's talking about. We dig into the Ark, its biblical significance, the mystery surrounding it, and why people have been fascinated by it for thousands of years.

Along the way, Joe tries his best to relate to the story while Jackson attempts to keep things on track. What exactly was the Ark? What happened to it? And will Joe actually learn something before the episode is over?

We may not find the Ark, but we'll definitely walk away with A Little Knowledge.

This week, we dive deeper into the strange world of curses. From the so-called Kennedy curse and the witchcraft behind some of history's most famous superstitions to the Salem witch trials, we try to figure out why people have believed in curses for centuries.

Then we bring it all the way to baseball, where curses, superstitions, rituals, and a little bad luck have become part of the game itself. Are curses real, or are we just really good at finding patterns when things go wrong?

This week on A Little Knowledge, we're getting a little supernatural. We talk about the occult, curses, blessings, and self-fulfilling prophecies, and how much power these ideas can have simply because we believe in them.

Joe and Jackson look back at growing up in a time when our exposure to news and media was much more limited. Before the internet put nearly every answer at our fingertips, a lot of what we knew about the strange and unexplained came from family, friends, television, books, rumors, and whatever information happened to make its way to us.

As usual, we attempt to separate fact from folklore with just enough knowledge to probably get ourselves cursed.

This week on A Little Knowledge, we take a questionably researched trip through the modern history of joke telling, from the 1800s to today. We look at how jokes have changed over the years, what people found funny in different eras, and how humor became such a big part of popular culture.

Jackson gets personal, talking about his family, the jokes he grew up with, and what humor has meant to him throughout his life. Joe also shared a few jokes of his own... unfortunately, those jokes will never see the light of day because Joe had the good sense to edit them out before the episode reached the public.

It's history, family, questionable humor, and the occasional moment of good judgment. In other words, it's another episode of A Little Knowledge.

This week on A Little Knowledge, we look back at our history with telling jokes, where we learned them, who we learned them from, and how our sense of humor changed as we got older.

We talk about our fathers' very different senses of humor and the lessons we picked up along the way about what gets a laugh, what crosses the line, and what probably should've never been said in the first place. We also get into why racist and degrading jokes have never sat right with us, and how learning what not to say can be just as important as learning how to tell a good joke.

This week on A Little Knowledge, Joe and Jackson put down the research and start telling each other jokes. And somehow, Jackson's Uncle Dewey ends up becoming the star of half of them.

We trade jokes, see who can actually make the other one laugh, and discover just how many punchlines can involve one unsuspecting uncle. Then Joe reaches way back into the family history to tell the completely, absolutely, definitely true story of how his great-grandpappy met Billy the Kid.

Jokes, Uncle Dewey, questionable family history, and very little actual knowledge. Pretty much exactly what you'd expect from A Little Knowledge.

This week on A Little Knowledge, we're talking about something almost everyone does—swearing.

Why do humans swear in the first place? Why do certain words feel so much more satisfying than others? Joe and Jackson share some of their favorite swear words, talk about where our colorful language comes from, and dig into a little of the history behind profanity.

And because apparently swearing wasn't enough, we also travel way back to take a look at the earliest known written joke—proving that humans have been trying to make each other laugh (and probably offend each other) for thousands of years.

It's language, history, bad words, ancient jokes, and just enough actual information to be dangerous. In other words… A Little Knowledge.

This week, Joe and Jackson dive into the surprisingly fascinating world of swearing. They swap stories about growing up, the role bad words played in their families, and how their early exposure to profanity shaped the way they think about language today. Along the way, they explore why humans swear, why certain words carry so much power, and whether cursing is really as bad as we've always been told.

The conversation then takes an unexpected turn into classic '80s comedies like The Three Amigos and The Jerk. Are these movies still hilarious, or have changing social norms and cancel culture changed the way we watch them? Joe and Jackson debate whether comedy should be judged by the standards of its own time or by today's expectations—and, as always, they don't pretend to have all the answers.

From childhood memories and family traditions to profanity, nostalgia, and the evolution of comedy, it's another episode filled with curiosity, laughs, and just enough knowledge to get everyone arguing afterward.