Facts Machine

Hail to the Chief! It's an episode of Facts Machine all about U.S. presidents. Listen to find out why it's not safe to run for president in 2020, how to win friends and influence people to crowdfund your mausoleum, and which president was arrested for speeding in a horse-drawn carriage.

“More intellectual than I expected.” Our listeners should expect nothing less from an episode of Facts Machine all about poop! Would you believe that in this episode we discuss the natural philosophy of Aristotle, the finer points of long-term space exploration, AND cutting-edge (or should we say, “surface-level”) biomimicry in engineering? Just to be clear, though, this is definitely an episode about poop. There will be jokes.

Top of the morning to ya! In honor of St. Paddy’s day, we’re Dublin down on this week’s theme: Guinness! Listen to find out why nitrogen is “an obvious gas”, how the t-test was invented by a Guinness employee, and how “factual fisticuffs” inspired the Guinness Book of World Records!

This week, Facts Machine becomes FaXXX Machine as Emily, Rob, and Noah discuss facts of a more...intimate...nature. Get your mind in the gutter with our titillating (hehehe) tales about the Urban Dictionary of the Victorian era, that time when Hemingway and Fitzgerald compared their penises at the Louvre, and a divine foreskin of purportedly cosmic proportions.

Have your lassos, pistols, and...sarsaparilla (?) at the ready, because this week Facts Machine is comin' atcha with some Wild West facts! Tune in to learn about real life re-enactments of your favorite dysentry-ridden computer game, the dromedaries that were once at home on the range, and the most infamous stagecoach robber in frontier herstory. Yee-haw!

You can learn a lot in a New York minute, but you can learn even more in sixty! Facts Machine is back with an episode all about our hometown, the Big Apple. Listen to learn why The Strand bookstore is the last shop standing from New York's legendary Book Row, why electric cars caught on in the 19th century only to be undermined by fragile masculinity, and why a New York sculptor has been creating monuments to fictional disasters all over the city.

It would be criminal to miss this episode of Facts Machine! Let us steal your attention with gritty tales of (surprisingly) true crime, featuring Ohio bank robberies, anti-Stratfordian conspiracy theories, and mysteriously damp socks. Do your ears some justice and tune in!

Noah, Emily and Rob are back with a BAN-tastic episode all about bans, censorship, and prohibitions! Listen to find out why Ray Bradbury should have gone with Fahrenheit 2577, why you should watch your back if you’re the king who banned coffee, and which beloved children’s book character is not allowed in a Polish playground because he doesn’t wear pants. But be quick, before you know it, we could be banned too!