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Lemmings Don't Leap: A podcast about things you likely know but are probably wrong about
By Allan BritnellHistory
Lemmings Don't Leap: A podcast about things you likely know but are probably wrong about episodes
- The Five False Fact About Animals Episode
In our second Five False Facts episode, we explore five commonly held beliefs about animals that are wildly wrong. From the age of dogs to the short-term memory affliction of goldfish... Um, we forget where we were going from here.
5 min - The Vikings Episode
The Vikings episode explores far and wide the history of Vikings, also known as Normans and The Rus, today the namesakes for Normany, France and Russia. Most importantly, we'll point out a key falsehood about their helmets.
6 min - The Misquotes Episode
This is the first Five False Facts episode of Lemmings Don’t Leap. Each False Facts episode takes a quick look at five different but related facts. That’s facts with air quotes around it.
For this episode, we’re going to look at historically famous misquotes, ranging from Marie Antoinette to Neil Armstrong, with a little Humphrey Bogart in the mix.
8 min - The Christopher Columbus Episode
In the Christopher Columbus episode of Lemmings Don’t Leap we debunk a few myths about the Italian explorer, most notably that his trip to the New World in 1492 didn’t finally prove that the Earth was round. Find out more by listening to this episode and exploring the Show Notes at the end of the Transcript.
7 min - The Lemmings Episode
In this premiere episode of the podcast, we'll explore how the population boom-and-bust cycle of the Norway lemming led to a widely held belief that the animals commit mass suicide rather than starve. It's also a wide-ranging motif in pop culture, largely in the form of saying that if someone blindly follows the herd without considering any consequences, they're a "lemming." Find out more by listening to this episode and exploring the Show Notes at the end of the Transcript.
6 min - 1 min
- 2 min
About Lemmings Don't Leap: A podcast about things you likely know but are probably wrong about
From the publisher's feed
About Us
The Lemmings Don’t Leap podcast is developed, researched, written, and narrated by Allan Britnell. Allan studied journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University (back when it was…
called Ryerson Polytechnic). It was there that he first learned about and grew to love the idea of substantive fact-checking. In short, for publications that follow the practice, every single factual detail within a story is verified, ideally by at least two or three different sources, before it is published. This ranges from the spelling of a quoted source’s name and their age and job title, if given, to stats, figures, and even facts shared within a quote.
Early in his career, he did a lot of fact-checking work for various Canadian magazines (Toronto Life, Cottage Life, Homemakers, etc.) While checking a nature article for Cottage Life, he first stumbled upon a 1981 episode of CBC’s Fifth Estate, which exposed how a Disney documentary crew faked the filming of lemmings suicidally leaping off a cliff into the ocean.
Probably from seeing the original Disney documentary, Allan thought he knew for a "fact" that lemmings committed mass suicide when faced with food shortages. But it turns out it simply wasn't true. Which got him wondering what other "facts" he'd be told that were wrong.
That kernel stuck and slowly grew until now, when it finally leaps forth as Lemmings Don’t Leap: A podcast about things you probably know, but are likely wrong about.
Why make the Lemmings Don’t Leap podcast?
Does knowing that lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide change anything in your day-to-day life? Probably not.
Does learning that Christopher Columbus had nothing to do with proving that the Earth was round have an impact? Not really, but it does give you a quick roundup of facts to spew if you ever find yourself trapped in conversation with a Flat Earther.
Will it change anything in your life knowing that Vikings didn’t wear horns on their helmets? Unless you’re planning on making a historically accurate Halloween costume, not likely.
But I firmly believe that facts matter. And in our increasingly digital, social media-obsessed, AI-driven world, it can be hard to sort out truth from fiction. My goal with Lemmings Don’t Leap is to encourage people to think twice about the “facts” they take for granted, and cast a critical lens on the information that they’re bombarded with on a daily basis.
I also hope you enjoy learning these little tidbits of history and culture as much as I do.
Disclaimer
This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes. Every factual element of each episode is cross-checked using credible sources and verified to the best of our ability.