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Utopia was written as a joke. Bishops, billionaires and Henry Ford tried to build it anyway. Here’s how that went.
In the Season 7 finale of History’s Greatest Idiots, we trace 500 years of people trying to build paradise. Thomas More’s Utopia was a joke about an island on a river with no water, so why did so many people treat it as a blueprint?
We visit the Mexican towns a bishop built from its pages in the 1530s, George Pullman’s company town and the strike that broke it, and Henry Ford’s doomed Midwestern suburb in the Amazon rain forest, Fordlandia. Then it’s Britain’s quainter efforts, from King Charles’s Poundbury to Portmeirion, home of The Prisoner.
Then we look at today’s Utopian dreamers: billionaires! Saudi Arabia’s shrinking megacity The Line, California Forever, and Prospera, the private city now suing Honduras for $11 billion. And in North Korea’s Propaganda Village, the lights come on by timer in buildings nobody lives in.
So which utopias actually last? The answer is less glamorous, and more hopeful, than you’d think.
https://www.patreon.com/HistorysGreatestIdiots
https://www.instagram.com/historysgreatestidiots
https://buymeacoffee.com/historysgreatestidiots
Editor: Sonika Chandel
https://www.fiverr.com/sonikachandel05
Logo Design: Sarah Chey
https://www.fiverr.com/sarahchey
Peter Thiel thinks evil is underrated, Elon Musk thinks empathy is a weakness, and Zuckerberg wants to sell you friends. Why are billionaires so out of touch?
In this episode of History’s Greatest Idiots, we dig into the strangest things the world’s richest people have said lately, from Thiel’s Ferrari theory of good and evil and his lectures naming Greta Thunberg as a modern Antichrist, to Sam Altman’s plan to sell you intelligence on a meter.
We look at Palantir’s eyebrow-raising manifesto (and the remarkable coincidence of who runs its UK arm), and at how Ed Sheeran’s handling of the Macklemore tour row left fans feeling he’d lost touch with his roots.
Then we get into the science. What the Stanford Prison Experiment really shows (it’s not what you were taught), why wealthier people literally look at strangers less, and how extreme wealth removes the one thing everyone else has: someone willing to tell you no.
https://www.patreon.com/HistorysGreatestIdiots
https://www.instagram.com/historysgreatestidiots
https://buymeacoffee.com/historysgreatestidiots
Editor: Sonika Chandel
https://www.fiverr.com/sonikachandel05
Logo Design: Sarah Chey
https://www.fiverr.com/sarahchey
Two mad scientists: one transplanted goat glands into prisoners, the other may have eaten a king's heart. These men discarded the rules of society in pursuit of their own insane goals.
In this Greatest Hits episode of History's Greatest Idiots, we revisit two of the strangest careers in the history of science.
Dr Leo Stanley spent nearly four decades as chief surgeon at San Quentin State Prison, where he performed more than 10,000 gland implants using material from goats, rams, boars, deer and death row inmates, convinced he could cure crime and reverse ageing. He was also an enthusiastic champion of eugenics sooo...ooof.
Then we have William Buckland, the Oxford geologist who named the first dinosaur, Megalosaurus, tried to eat his way through the animal kingdom (reportedly ranking mole and bluebottle as the worst things he ever tasted), had a coprolite (fossilised dung) dining table, and is said to have eaten the preserved heart of Louis XIV at a dinner party.
Two baffling men who's lives exist as proof that being recognised as a pioneer and completely unhinged/unethical can sometimes be true of the same person.
https://www.patreon.com/HistorysGreatestIdiots
https://www.instagram.com/historysgreatestidiots
https://buymeacoffee.com/historysgreatestidiots
Logo Design: Sarah Chey
https://www.fiverr.com/sarahchey
Every generation since the turn of the 20th Century has believed the world was ending due to all-out war. This one's no different.
Danish intelligence says Russia could attack NATO within months. Drones keep turning up over airbases in Poland. Putin talks peace while calling Ukraine's own defense "state terrorism."
It's easy to feel like we're on the brink, so this episode asks whether we actually are, or whether "the end is near" has just always been the loudest voice in the room.
We separate what's documented (hybrid sabotage, election interference, drone probing) from what's speculation (an imminent land war, a full NATO invasion), look at why doom-mongering has sold since long before Twitter existed, and work out who benefits from keeping people frightened.
Then a proper, honest risk assessment, no scaremongering, no false comfort either.
https://www.patreon.com/HistorysGreatestIdiots
https://www.instagram.com/historysgreatestidiots
https://buymeacoffee.com/historysgreatestidiots
Editor: Sonika Chandel
https://www.fiverr.com/sonikachandel05
Logo Design: Sarah Chey
https://www.fiverr.com/sarahchey
While headlines about economic collapse, environmental destruction, and the end of humanity are grabbing attention around the world, a much more immediate issue is set to stop AI in its tracks.
Aspects of the development of the AI industry are so misaligned that they can't possible be put right in their current form.
And the speed with which they are pulling away from each other should be one of the biggest news stories in the world right now (but, as usual, nobody seems to be paying attention to the infrastructure).
This is how Lev Myskin and Ben Markwart discovered 'The AI Three Clock Differential', what it means for the future of the only issue that all sides of the political spectrum agree on, and why it essentially spells the end of the AI boom before any financial bubbles or world-ending cataclysms could really take hold.
https://www.patreon.com/HistorysGreatestIdiots
https://www.instagram.com/historysgreatestidiots
https://buymeacoffee.com/historysgreatestidiots
Artist: Sarah Chey
https://www.fiverr.com/sarahchey
Every generation gets its own strongman politician. Every generation gets to watch them fail. Here's why Strongman Politics never works.
From Julius Caesar and Mussolini meeting their demise in the Roman Senate and the gates of a lakeside house respectively, to Berlusconi losing power three times and still dying a senator, Bolsonaro's 27-year prison sentence for an attempted coup, and Nigel Farage being filmed on hidden camera discussing how to funnel foreign money into Reform UK , this is the complete(ish) history of strongman politics, why it keeps happening, and why it always eventually collapses. Plus: the psychology of why people keep falling for it, and what's behind it.
https://www.patreon.com/HistorysGreatestIdiots
https://www.instagram.com/historysgreatestidiots
https://buymeacoffee.com/historysgreatestidiots
Artist: Sarah Chey
https://www.fiverr.com/sarahchey
A dancing marquess who blew through approximately £70 million in today's money in six years, and a miner's grandson who took cash from a Harrods billionaire to ask questions in Parliament. Wales has produced some characters.
This Greatest Hits special revisits Henry Paget, the 5th Marquess of Anglesey (the Dancing Marquess who converted his family chapel into a theatre, spent everything he had being magnificently, defiantly himself, and died broke and tubercular in Monte Carlo at 29), and Neil Hamilton (born in a Gwent pit village, grandson of coal miners, who became a Conservative minister and had to resign after The Guardian accused him of taking £2,000 per parliamentary question from Mohamed Al-Fayed).
https://www.patreon.com/HistorysGreatestIdiots
https://www.instagram.com/historysgreatestidiots
https://buymeacoffee.com/historysgreatestidiots
Artist: Sarah Chey
https://www.fiverr.com/sarahchey
Andy Warhol said there was nothing behind the surface. The CIA, Valerie Solanas, and John Lennon all disagreed.
Born in a two-room shack in Pittsburgh to Slovakian immigrants, Andy Warhol became the most famous and influential artist of the twentieth century.
He invented Pop Art, redefined celebrity, predicted social media before the internet existed, and coined the phrase "fifteen minutes of fame" before anyone knew what to do with it.
From Campbell's Soup Cans and the Factory to managing the Velvet Underground and founding Interview magazine, this is the complete story of the man behind the wig.
We also cover the CIA's covert use of American art as a Cold War weapon, the 1968 shooting that changed him permanently, his complex relationship with the AIDS crisis, and why John Lennon once refused to open a hotel door because Warhol was on the other side of it with a camera.
https://www.patreon.com/HistorysGreatestIdiots
https://www.instagram.com/historysgreatestidiots
https://buymeacoffee.com/historysgreatestidiots
Artist: Sarah Chey
https://www.fiverr.com/sarahchey
Every generation finds something new to bet everything on. Then they act surprised when it stops working.
From Dutch tulip mania and England's South Sea Bubble to Spain's silver empire, the Amazon rubber barons, Nauru mining its entire island into a moonscape for fossilised bird poo, Iceland's banks collapsing within a week in 2008, and the $725 billion being spent on AI infrastructure against $12 billion in consumer revenue, this is the complete(ish) history of economic bubbles and the remarkable human capacity to learn absolutely nothing from any of them.
Plus: what you can actually do to make yourself as economically invulnerable as possible before the next one arrives.
https://www.patreon.com/HistorysGreatestIdiots
https://www.instagram.com/historysgreatestidiots
https://buymeacoffee.com/historysgreatestidiots
Artist: Sarah Chey
https://www.fiverr.com/sarahchey
A man who sleep-walked America into the Civil War, a president whose administration was so corrupt his own Attorney General went to prison, and the commander-in-chief who escalated Vietnam while privately admitting it was unwinnable.
History's Greatest Idiots is taking a well-earned break, and leaving you with three of the worst presidents America ever produced to keep you company.
This 3.5-hour Greatest Hits special revisits James Buchanan (ranked the worst president in US history by multiple scholarly surveys), Warren G. Harding (Teapot Dome, corruption, and a cabinet that made his predecessors look competent), and LBJ (the Vietnam War, the Gulf of Tonkin deception, and the presidency that broke the Democratic Party for a generation).
https://www.patreon.com/HistorysGreatestIdiots
https://www.instagram.com/historysgreatestidiots
https://buymeacoffee.com/historysgreatestidiots
Artist: Sarah Chey
https://www.fiverr.com/sarahchey
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