Her birth name was Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst. She was born on the second of May 1729 in Stettin, Prussia. She was brought to Russia at fifteen as a bride for the future Tsar.

She converted to Russian Orthodoxy. She learned Russian. She read Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot while her husband drank and played with toy soldiers. When her husband became Tsar she staged a coup. He was arrested. He died in custody. She ruled Russia for thirty four years. She corresponded with Voltaire.

She built the Hermitage. She established the first state-funded higher education institution for women in Europe. She had herself inoculated against smallpox to encourage her subjects. Two million Russians followed.

She expanded Russia enormously. She also crushed a serf rebellion with ferocity and made serfdom more entrenched. She died of a stroke in 1796. She was sixty seven years old. The horse story is a lie spread by her enemies.

This is her actual story.

#CatherineTheGreat #MinistryOfMind #HistoryPodcast #Podcast #Russia #Enlightenment #Hermitage #History #Psychology #HumanNature #Transformation #PodcastClip #Empress #Voltaire #Romanov #Wisdom #MindsetPodcast #RussianHistory

His name was Alfred Bernhard Nobel. He was born on the twenty first of October 1833 in Stockholm. He invented dynamite. He held three hundred and fifty five patents. He grew enormously rich supplying the explosives that built railways and mines and also killed soldiers in wars across the nineteenth century.

He was called the merchant of death. In his final years he became obsessed with how history would remember him. On the twenty seventh of November 1895 he signed his last will and testament in Paris. He left the bulk of his fortune to establish prizes for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace.

He died on the tenth of December 1896 in San Remo. He was alone. His family contested the will. The first prizes were not awarded until 1901. The Nobel Prize is now the most recognised mark of human achievement on earth. This is the story of the man behind it. And the question his life poses. Can a single document rewrite a legacy?

#AlfredNobel #MinistryOfMind #HistoryPodcast #Podcast #Nobel #NobelPrize #Dynamite #Sweden #History #Psychology #HumanNature #AncientWisdom #Transformation #PodcastClip #Legacy #Peace #Wisdom #MindsetPodcast #Invention

She was born around 1869 in the village of Olgossa in Darfur, Sudan. She was a member of the Daju people. She described her childhood as happy. She said she did not know suffering as a young child. At approximately seven years old she was kidnapped by Arab slave traders. The trauma was so complete that she forgot her own birth name.

Her kidnappers gave her the name Bakhita,Arabic for lucky. She was bought and sold over a dozen times across twelve years. A Turkish general's wife had her tattooed with one hundred and fourteen cuts of a knife packed with salt. She bore those scars for the rest of her life. She came to Italy with an Italian consul.

An Italian court declared she had never legally been a slave. She was free. She chose to stay with the Canossian Sisters. She was baptised in 1890 by the future Pope Pius X.

She served in Schio for forty five years. She died smiling in 1947. She was the first Black female saint canonised in the modern era. This is her story.

#JosephineBakhita #Bakhita #MinistryOfMind #HistoryPodcast #Podcast #Sudan #Africa #Canossian #Slavery #History #Psychology #AncientWisdom #Transformation #PodcastClip #Faith #Christianity #AntiTrafficking #Wisdom #MindsetPodcast

His name was Adolf Hitler. He was born on the twentieth of April 1889 in Braunau am Inn in Austria. He was the son of a customs official and a woman who adored him.

He dreamed of being an artist. He was twice rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He spent years homeless in Vienna. He found belonging in the German army during World War One. He experienced Germany's defeat as a personal betrayal. He became Chancellor of Germany on the thirtieth of January 1933.

He ordered the systematic murder of six million Jewish people and approximately five million others. He died by suicide in a Berlin bunker on the thirtieth of April 1945. He was fifty six years old.

This episode is about how this happens. How an ordinary person becomes capable of this. The verdict is shadow. Absolute. Unambiguous. Without qualification.

#Hitler #Holocaust #MinistryOfMind #HistoryPodcast #Podcast #WorldWarII #NeverAgain #History #Psychology #HumanNature #Transformation #PodcastClip #NeverForget #HolocaustRemembrance #WeimárRepublic #Germany #Wisdom #MindsetPodcast #NaziGermany

Her birth name was Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhiu. Gonxha means flower bud in Albanian. She was born on the twenty sixth of August 1910 in Skopje, what is now North Macedonia.

She left home at eighteen to become a nun. She arrived in India in 1929. On a train to Darjeeling in 1946 she heard Christ calling her to serve the poorest of the poor. She founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950.

She built hospitals and orphanages and dying houses across the world. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. Her letters published after her death revealed that she had not felt the presence of God for the last fifty years of her life.

She served anyway. Every day. For fifty years. In darkness. This is the most important thing about her.

#MotherTeresa #MinistryOfMind #HistoryPodcast #Podcast #Calcutta #India #Missionaries #NoblePeacePrize #WomensHistory #History #Psychology #AncientWisdom #Transformation #PodcastClip #Faith #Christianity #DarkNight #Wisdom #MindsetPodcast

His name was Maewyn Succat. He was born around 385 in Roman Britain. His father was a deacon. His grandfather was a priest. He was not raised with strong religious feeling.

At sixteen he was kidnapped by Irish pirates and sold into slavery in Ireland. He spent six years alone on a hillside tending sheep. In that solitude he became deeply devout. He heard a voice in a dream telling him his ship was ready.

He escaped. He walked two hundred miles to the coast. He found a ship. He returned to Britain. He became ordained. He had another dream. He heard the voices of the Irish calling him back. He went back. He was not the first Christian missionary to Ireland. He was the most transformative. He never formally received a university education.

He wrote about the shame of it his entire life. He championed women, the poor, and slaves. He died approximately 461.

He was never formally canonised. Ireland has claimed him ever since. This is his story.

#SaintPatrick #MinistryOfMind #HistoryPodcast #Podcast #Ireland #Celtic #Christian #Missionary #History #Psychology #AncientWisdom #Transformation #PodcastClip #Faith #Christianity #StPatricksDay #Forgiveness #Wisdom #MindsetPodcast

Her name was Simone Adolphine Weil. She was born on the third of February 1909 in Paris to a Jewish family. She entered the École Normale Supérieure at nineteen, one of the most elite institutions in France. She left to work on the assembly line at Renault. She fought in the Spanish Civil War.

She had a mystical experience in a chapel in Assisi that she spent the rest of her life trying to explain. She refused baptism into the Catholic Church because she would not join any institution that excluded anyone. She fled Nazi-occupied France and worked with the French Resistance in London. She refused to eat more than the ration allowed to people living under occupation.

She died of tuberculosis and malnutrition on the twenty fourth of August 1943. She was thirty four years old. Her grave was anonymous for fifteen years. Her writing fills twenty volumes. This is her story.

#SimoneWeil #MinistryOfMind #HistoryPodcast #Podcast #France #Philosophy #Mystic #WomensHistory #WorldWarII #History #Psychology #AncientWisdom #Transformation #PodcastClip #Faith #GravityAndGrace #Attention #Wisdom #MindsetPodcast

His birth name was Lesane Parish Crooks. His mother changed it to Tupac Amaru Shakur when he was one year old. Tupac Amaru was a Peruvian revolutionary executed by the Spanish. She said: I wanted him to have the name of revolutionary indigenous people in the world.

His mother Afeni was a Black Panther who defended herself in court while pregnant with him and was acquitted of one hundred and fifty six charges. He was born one month after the verdict.

He studied Shakespeare and ballet at the Baltimore School for the Arts. He wrote poetry before he wrote rap. He was convicted of sexual assault.

He was shot five times in a New York studio and survived. He was shot four times in Las Vegas in September 1996. He died six days later. He was twenty five years old. He had already recorded enough music for four posthumous albums.

He was never finished. This is his story.

#Tupac #TupacShakur #2Pac #MinistryOfMind #HistoryPodcast #Podcast #HipHop #BlackHistory #BlackPanther #Baltimore #History #Psychology #HumanNature #Transformation #PodcastClip #Poetry #Legacy #Wisdom #MindsetPodcast

Her full birth name was Marie-Bernarde Soubirous. Everyone called her Bernadette. She was born on the seventh of January 1844 in Lourdes, a small town at the foot of the French Pyrenees. Her family was desperately poor.

They lived in a former prison cell. She was fourteen years old and gathering firewood when the visions began. She saw a young lady in a grotto by the river. Eighteen times. Nobody else could see her. The Lady told her to dig in the mud for a spring. She dug. Water came.

The Lady said her name was the Immaculate Conception. Bernadette did not know what that meant. The Church interrogated her for years. She never changed her story. She moved to a convent far from Lourdes. She never went back. She died at thirty five of tuberculosis.

Lourdes became one of the most visited pilgrimage sites on earth. She was canonised not for her visions but for the simplicity and holiness of her life. This is her story.

#Bernadette #SaintBernadette #Lourdes #MinistryOfMind #HistoryPodcast #Podcast #France #Apparitions #MarianApparition #History #Psychology #AncientWisdom #Transformation #PodcastClip #Faith #Christianity #OurLadyOfLourdes #Wisdom #MindsetPodcast

His name was Athanasius. He was born around 293 in Alexandria, the greatest intellectual city of the ancient world. He became Bishop of Alexandria at approximately thirty five years old. He was exiled five times by four different Roman emperors.

He spent seventeen of his forty five years as bishop in exile. He was fighting for one word. Homoousios. Of the same substance. The word that defined whether Jesus Christ was fully God or a lesser created being.

It sounds like a theological abstraction. It was the question that determined what Christianity would become. He held the line alone when every emperor and most of the church had turned against him. His phrase became famous across the Christian world. Athanasius contra mundum.

Athanasius against the world. He died peacefully in Alexandria on the second of May 373. He was right. This is his story.

#Athanasius #MinistryOfMind #HistoryPodcast #Podcast #Alexandria #EarlyChurch #Nicaea #Arianism #History #Psychology #AncientWisdom #Transformation #PodcastClip #Faith #Christianity #NiceneCreed #AthanasiusContraMundum #Wisdom #MindsetPodcast