Help Us Out With This

Ruby May Valentine joins Nick and Paul to talk all things Minecraft, the ridiculously popular and ever-replayable game of crafting and creepers. Ruby takes us through getting started with a fresh Minecraft "seed," the game's basics, cool stuff like redstone engineering, and eventually turns Nick into a convert.

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Snakes on planes, snakes on trains, snakes on podcasts...who's going to do something about all these snakes?!

Tanner Harvey could. The professor and doctoral candidate joins Nick and Paul to talk about venom, deceptive zoo gift store plushies, and letting a snake chew on your hand for 15 minutes for a YouTube video (which we do not recommend).

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You remember books, right? Those hardcover or paperback collections of pages with words on them. No doubt you've read one or two in your time on this lovely planet. Well, Nick and Paul's guest on today's episode has probably read closer to one or two thousand works of literature — books, poems, you know it — and has a particular penchant for the American-produced corner of the bookshelf.

Trevor Strunk of the No Cartridge podcast joins the show to tell us how America's published works help tell its story even through fiction, the best ways to stay on top of contemporary lit, and lament bad Amazon book reviews.

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It's hard to describe Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Cats." We could try, but we figured it was probably better to have a theater pro come on and do it far better than we ever could. Anika Chapin of Goodspeed Musicals helps us digest it all; from the insane character names, to that infamous 2019 movie adaptation, to figuring out how to appreciate stories through the eyes of a child, we go deep into Jellicle Theory.

CW: Mention of rape as part of a character back story

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Under the sea, everything's better down where it's wetter, take it from Tom Quigley. Tom joins the show to give us the scoop on sea slugs, underwater life as Pokémon, the majesty and importance of coral reefs, and the different ways you can keep yourself...warm...in a wetsuit.

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Dr. Kate White — a literal, bona fide expert! — joins the show to talk about how we learn and understand language, how changes in technology both help and hinder that process, and just how big of a messy melting pot American English is these days.

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Brian McElhaney, SNL writing alum and one half of the comedy duo BriTANicK, joins Nick and Paul to pull some podcast magic out of a hat (or microphone) and talk about why magic is still secretive, how the greatest magic tricks cause us to question our reality, and why we want to be fooled and lied to.

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Vaccines are pretty amazing things. And they're in the news a lot these days! But getting people to actually take vaccines, especially in less developed nations and areas of the world, can often be a true challenge.

Lauren Braun, co-founder of the Alma Sana Project, joins Nick and Paul to talk about what it's like starting and running a non-profit from the ground floor up, and how Alma Sana's bracelet system helps doctors and patients stay on a regular vaccination schedule in countries across the world.

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Snakes painted on sides of heads. Comparisons to Alexander the Great and Michael Jordan. Things this wild and outlandish can only come from the world of...darts?

Nick and Paul are joined by actor and noted darts buff Dan Radcliffe to learn a bit about "The Power," Fallon Sherrock, and how to make a darts match sound like an epic moment in history.

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Cricket is one of the toughest things in the world for Americans to understand, next to taxes and traffic circles. So, we did what any reasonable person would do and invited a real, verifiable Englishman on to help us out.

On this stuffed episode, Tim Sorrell (@Swisslet) does his best to tell us how cricket is actually played in a way even Americans can understand, and why these 5-day-long matches can actually be really riveting throughout. It'll really bowl you over! Ha!

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Further Reading: espncricinfo.com

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