Overheard at National Geographic

By National Geographic

Society & Culture

What's Overheard at National Geographic about?

Come dive into one of the curiously delightful conversations overheard at National Geographic’s headquarters, as we follow explorers, photographers, and scientists to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world. Hosted by Peter Gwin and Amy Briggs.

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Trapped in the icy waters o...

07.11.2023

For centuries, the Northwest Passage, the long-sought sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through northern Canada, was a holy grail of Arctic exploration. Even now, sailing through it isn’t guaranteed. Mark Synnott, a National Geographic Explorer, writer, and ...

Overheard at National Geographic episodes:

07.11.2023 Trapped in the icy waters of the Northwest Passage For centuries, the Northwest Passage, the long-sought sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through northern Canada, was a holy grail of Arctic exploration. Even now, sailing through it isn’t guaranteed. Mark Synnott, a National Geographic Explorer, writer, and ...
07.04.2023 Playback: Modern Lives, Ancient Caves There’s a lost continent waiting to be explored, and it’s right below our feet. We’ll dig into the deep human relationship to the underground—and why we understand it from an instinctive point of view, but not so much from a ...
06.27.2023 Playback: This Indigenous Practice Fights Fire with Fire For decades, the U.S. government evangelized fire suppression, most famously through Smokey Bear’s wildfire prevention campaign. But as climate change continues to exacerbate wildfire seasons and a growing body of scientific research supports using fire to fight fire, Indigenous groups ...
06.20.2023 Playback: Rooting, from Into the Depths National Geographic Explorer Tara Roberts is inspired by the stories of the Clotilda, a ship that illegally arrived in Mobile, Alabama, in 1860, and of Africatown, created by those on the vessel—a community that still exists today. The archaeologists and ...
06.13.2023 Playback: Ancient Orchestra Sound on! From conch shells to bone flutes, humans have been making musical instruments for tens of thousands of years. What did prehistoric music sound like? In an episode originally published in November 2021, follow us on a journey to ...
06.06.2023 Playback: A Skeptic's Guide to Loving Bats Blood-sucking villains. Spooky specters of the night. Our views of bats are often based more on fiction than fact. Enter National Geographic Explorer at Large Rodrigo Medellín, aka the Bat Man of Mexico. For decades, he’s waged a charm offensive ...
05.30.2023 How queer identity shapes Nat Geo Explorers Why would a scientist brave the stench of a car full of rotting meat on a 120-degree day? What can a unique whistling language teach us about humans’ connection to the natural world? And how does queer identity shape the ...
05.23.2023 A Mexican Wolf Pup’s Journey into the Wild For centuries, Mexican gray wolves roamed the Southwest. But as cattle ranches spread, wolves became enemy number one, and by the 1970s the subspecies was nearly extinct. But after the Endangered Species Act was passed, the U.S. embarked on an ...
05.16.2023 Playback: Deep Inside the First Wilderness On assignment in the canyons of the Gila Wilderness, Nat Geo photographer Katie Orlinsky has a fireside chat with Overheard host Peter Gwin about telling stories through pictures. She chronicles how she found her way—from growing up in New York ...
05.09.2023 She Sails the Seas Without Maps or Compasses For nearly 50 years, a group of Hawaiians have been sailing on traditional voyaging canoes using the methods that early Polynesian explorers relied on to navigate the Pacific Ocean—without maps and modern instruments, and relying on the stars, ocean waves, ...
05.02.2023 How Anne Frank’s Diary Survived Most people have heard the name Anne Frank, and many have read her diary, which details her and her family’s time spent in hiding during the German occupation of Amsterdam in World War II. Less known are Miep and Jan ...
04.25.2023 The Dark Reality Behind India’s Festival Elephants Asian elephants have been captured and tamed by people in Southern Asia for thousands of years as war machines, beasts of burden, and part of religious festivals. It’s a practice that continues to this day, but some activists are beginning ...
04.18.2023 What Will it Take to Save the Savanna Elephant? As the CEO of WildlifeDirect, Paula Kahumbu has dedicated her life to saving space for wildlife to thrive in Africa and building healthy relationships between humans and wild elephants. Paula got her start in wildlife conservation by measuring Kenya’s stockpile ...
04.11.2023 The Woman Who Knows What Elephants Are Saying For almost 50 years, National Geographic Explorer Joyce Poole has been carefully watching the elephants of Kenya’s Amboseli National Park. Over that time she’s gotten to know them by name and has started decoding their sounds, smells, and body language ...
04.04.2023 Exploring Ramadan and Earthlike Exoplanets Follow a day in the life of an astronomer searching for planets beyond our solar system as she explains how she observes Ramadan and celebrates her family’s traditions. Astronomer, astrophysicist, and National Geographic Explorer Munazza Alam is the daughter of ...
03.28.2023 From the Frontlines to the Shorelines National Geographic photographer David Guttenfelder is no stranger to dangerous situations. After graduating from college, he left his life in rural Iowa to cover the 1994 Rwandan genocide, an experience that kicked off a decades-long career of reporting on war, ...
03.21.2023 Can You Picture That? This Photographer Can and Does Photographer Mark Thiessen, who’s worked on staff at National Geographic for over 30 years, likens his job to a Swiss army knife—versatile enough to tackle many kinds of assignments. Even when the subject is challenging, he approaches each assignment with ...
03.14.2023 Scenes from Nigeria's Baby Boom With 224 million people, Nigeria is Africa's most populous country. By 2050, it could crack the global top three with some 375 million people. In the second of our two-part series on the global population passing eight billion, National Geographic ...
03.07.2023 What Women in China Want There are more than 8 billion humans on Earth, according to the United Nations. And for decades, China has had more people than any other country. But now, China’s population is declining. As soon as this year, it could lose ...
02.28.2023 The Soul of Music: Meklit Hadero tells stories of migration This episode is part four of The Soul of Music—Overheard’s four-part series focusing on music, exploration, and Black history. Our guest this week is Meklit Hadero, a Nat Geo Explorer and Ethio-jazz musician. Meklit is the creative force behind the ...
02.21.2023 The Soul of Music: Exploring Chief Xian's ancestral memory This episode is part three of The Soul of Music—Overheard’s four-part series focusing on music, exploration, and Black history. Our guest this week is Grammy-nominated trumpeter Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, formerly known as Christian Scott. Chief Xian sits down with ...
02.14.2023 The Soul of Music: Sampa The Great returns to her roots This episode is part two of The Soul of Music—Overheard’s four-part series focusing on music, exploration, and Black history. Our guest this week is Sampa The Great, a Zambian-born rapper, singer, and songwriter. Sampa spent most of her childhood living ...
02.07.2023 The Soul of Music: Rhiannon Giddens excavates the past This episode is part one of The Soul of Music—Overheard’s four-part series focusing on music, exploration, and Black history. Our guest this week is two-time Grammy award winner Rhiannon Giddens, a singer, songwriter, and banjo and fiddle player. A self-described ...
02.02.2023 Introducing: The Soul of Music National Geographic turns 135 in 2023. In February 2023, to celebrate exploration and commemorate Black History Month, National Geographic’s flagship podcast, Overheard, will feature musicians and National Geographic Explorers in conversation on music and exploration. This is just one of ...
01.31.2023 Unfolding the Future of Origami The future is bright for origami, the centuries-old art of paper folding. In recent decades, scientists, engineers, and designers have pushed origami beyond its traditional roots and applied its patterns to fascinating technologies like foldable kayaks and tiny robots that ...
01.24.2023 What Happens After You Uncover Buried History? The 1619 Project was a New York Times Magazine endeavor that explored the ways the legacy of slavery still shapes American society. The story exploded into cultural consciousness in 2019, and has since become a book, a podcast, and now, ...
01.17.2023 The People and Tech That Power Nat Geo Cameras that drop miles beneath the ocean surface. Handmade art that reveals the secrets of archeological sites and extinct animals. For 135 years, National Geographic has pioneered new ways of exploring and illuminating our world—and now you can meet a ...
01.10.2023 Meet an Imagineer Who Built a Wish Last summer, Disney Cruise Line released its fifth and most technologically advanced cruise ship yet: Disney Wish. We’ll meet Laura Cabo, a creative executive at Walt Disney Imagineering, who shares the excitement and challenges in designing a cruise ship that’s ...
01.03.2023 How Sharks Devoured My Career When Nat Geo Explorer Gibbs Kuguru was in college, he found himself trying to choose between two terrifying futures: going free diving with sharks off the coast of South Africa or, even scarier, studying for the MCAT. Since then, he’s ...
12.27.2022 The Nurse Keeping Explorers Alive For 17 years, nurse Karen Barry’s office at National Geographic headquarters has served as an important stop for journalists, photographers, and explorers in need of vaccines and medical advice before they set out on expeditions all over the globe. We’ll ...
12.20.2022 What Science Tells Us About Living Longer Scientists are hard at work trying to understand what causes aging and how to help people stay healthy for longer. Biologist Matt Kaeberlein breaks down the science of longevity and tells us how he’s using a robot to test 100,000 ...
12.13.2022 Presenting: ESPN's "Pink Card" Today we bring you a high-stakes story from ESPN’s 30 for 30 Podcasts—a tale of women’s rights, history, and soccer. As Iranian women took to the streets in fall 2022 to fight gender inequality, they also targeted sports. Iranian women ...
12.06.2022 The People Behind the Photography National Geographic photographers seldom do their work alone, especially those who journey out to far-flung places. This week, we’re shining a light on local collaborators—people whose names don’t show up in the credit line for a photo but who are ...
11.29.2022 There’s a Bear in My Backyard Sure, we love bears when they show up in books or cartoons. But what if one is outside our window? Human-bear encounters are becoming far more frequent as development continues to spread and people and bears seek similar resources of ...
11.22.2022 Playback: The Real-Life MacGyver in Nat Geo's Basement In the basement of National Geographic’s headquarters, there’s a lab holding a secret tech weapon: Tom O’Brien. As Nat Geo’s photo engineer, O’Brien adapts new technologies to capture sights and sounds previously never seen or heard before. In this episode, ...
11.15.2022 Pictures of the Year Every year, National Geographic rolls the year into a collection of photos for its “Pictures of the Year” issue. It’s a mysterious process, and we’re about to share it with you. We’ll see what baby carriages are like in Greenland, ...
11.08.2022 Who Inspired Wakanda's Warrior Women? The fictional, fearsome, and all-female Dora Milaje in the movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever were inspired by a real group of African warriors: the Agojie. Nat Geo contributing writer Rachel Jones shares the history of the Agojie and discusses the ...
11.01.2022 Wayfinding Through the Human Genome National Geographic Explorer Keolu Fox grew up hearing stories about his ancestors, Polynesian navigators, and the men who in the late 1970s led the first Hōkūleʻa voyage to Tahiti. As the first Native Hawaiian with a Ph.D. in genomic sciences, ...
10.25.2022 Presenting: Greeking Out by National Geographic Kids National Geographic Kids' Greeking Out is a kid-friendly retelling of some of the best stories from Greek mythology. This episode, "Akhenaten The Heretic King," is all about King Tut's father and how he attempted to reset Egyptian religion and politics. ...
10.18.2022 The Hole Where King Tut’s Heart Used to Be One hundred years since the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, archaeologists are still puzzling over the mysteries of his mummy. Why was he covered in “black goo” and buried without a heart? And how did his tomb remain hidden for ...
10.11.2022 Exploring Pristine Seas National Geographic Explorer in Residence Enric Sala quit academia to explore and protect the sea. On his journey to keep the ocean pristine, he has swam with jellyfish in Palau, gone diving in the Arctic, and got acquainted with sharks ...
10.04.2022 What the Ice Gets, the Ice Keeps In 1915 Ernest Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, sank off the coast of Antarctica, stranding the crew on drifting sea ice. Shackleton’s desperate rescue mission saved all 28 men. But for more than a century afterward, the location of Endurance eluded archaeologists—until ...
09.27.2022 What You Do Counts Some of the most crucial countries in the global fight against climate change are in Latin America, and yet there are few resources on the crisis for Spanish speakers. Eyal Weintraub, a 22-year-old National Geographic Young Explorer and climate activist ...
09.20.2022 Searching for a Butterfly in a Conflict Zone Photographer Rena Effendi’s father, a Soviet entomologist, collected 90,000 butterflies in his lifetime. But there was one species he couldn’t capture—Satyrus effendi. Effendi takes on the quest to track down the endangered butterfly named after her father, but to do ...
09.13.2022 A Man of the World Go behind the yellow border to meet the family that made National Geographic an American institution. Gilbert M. Grosvenor’s 60-year career followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather—but he learned that sometimes he had to do things his ...
09.06.2022 Inside the Epic World of Bertie Gregory In a collaboration with National Geographic television, we follow 29-year-old adventurer and filmmaker Bertie Gregory on a nail-biting journey to some of the harshest, most spectacular corners of the world. Join guest host Drew Jones as he sits down with ...
08.30.2022 Playback: Why War Zones Need Science Too It’s a jewel of biodiversity, the so-called Galápagos of the Indian Ocean, and might also hold traces of the earliest humans to leave Africa. No wonder scientists want to explore Socotra. But it’s also part of Yemen, a country enduring ...
08.23.2022 The Problem With Superchickens Scientists recently discovered a fascinating paradox: when they bred together superproductive, egg-laying hens, they found the chickens produced fewer eggs. We examine what went wrong with these so-called superchickens, and we look at human examples of this phenomenon—a high school ...
08.16.2022 What It Takes to Keep America Beautiful The U.S. is home to some of the most beautiful, incomparable places on the planet, from the pristine Shi Shi Beach at the Makah Reservation in Washington State to the Couturie Forest in New Orleans. But as climate change and ...
08.09.2022 The Triumph and Tragedy of Indian Independence When India and Pakistan gained their independence from Britain, a border was drawn between the two new countries. The split started a chain reaction of violence that led to one of the largest forced migrations in human history. More than ...

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