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Sidequests
Sidequests episodes
- What the Pope’s Surgery Can Teach the Rest of Us
Pope Leo XIV’s lung cancer was found during routine screening. Days after he announced the diagnosis in St. Peter’s Square, surgeons in Rome removed one lobe of his right lung.
Dr. Steven Goldberg, Chief Medical Officer of HealthTrack and a practicing physician, joins me to walk through what happened in the operating room and why removing the whole lobe isn’t cause for alarm. He also explains the three pathology details that will determine whether surgery alone is a cure. Along the way, he discusses why adenocarcinoma is the lung cancer most often found in people who never smoked and who should ask their doctor about low-dose CT screening.
The Pope’s prognosis looks hopeful, and the lesson for everyone else is to ask the screening question before symptoms appear.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
11 min - Where Does the Death Penalty Stand in the US?
Tennessee gave Christa Pike two lethal doses, and she survived. The Pentagon planned to livestream a firing squad execution until President Trump called it off.
Criminologist Dr. Matthew Robinson of Appalachian State University, author of Death Nation, joins Keith Conrad to explain what these stories reveal about capital punishment in America. He discusses why public opinion rarely shifts for long, how Pike could argue she can’t be executed twice, and why pickpockets once worked the crowds at public hangings. He also explains why lethal injection, the method that looks the most clinical, fails more often than any other.
Robinson isn’t arguing about whether some people deserve to die. His question is whether the death penalty works as government policy, and the evidence suggests it doesn’t.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
27 min - From the Wright Brothers to Chuck Yeager in Only 44 Years
In the span of a single human lifetime, humanity went from wondering if flight was possible to breaking the sound barrier. This episode of Sidequests tells the story of that extraordinary leap — and the moment it all came together over the Mojave Desert.
But this isn’t just a story about one pilot and one flight. It’s about the compressed, almost unbelievable pace of change that made that moment possible — and what it says about what human beings can do when the circumstances demand it.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
12 min - The Reality of Modern Deployments and Military LeadershipThe USS Abraham Lincoln spent ten months at sea. It left port in peacetime and came home from a war, and port calls were ruled out because every nearby harbor was within range of Iran. Rich Kolko, a former Navy P-3 pilot and retired FBI agent, joins Keith Conrad to separate fact from viral photos. Kolko explains why the deployment's toughness was circumstantial rather than a failure of planning, and why social media is showing Americans what sailors have always gone through. He also weighs in on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's agenda, including cutting admirals and generals, creating a new autonomous warfare command, and bringing in outsiders to fix procurement. His verdict is that some ideas are overdue and others need a second look, but the drone war won't wait. The truth usually lies somewhere in the middle, and so does the work.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
25 min - The Great Chicago Fire: The Cow, the Comet, and the City That Burned
Everyone knows how the Great Chicago Fire started. The problem is, that story probably isn't true.
On October 8, 1871, a fire tore through Chicago and destroyed one of the fastest-growing cities in America. The official explanation became legend. But the real story — the one historians eventually uncovered — is far more interesting, and far stranger, than the version most people learned.
In this episode of Sidequests, we look at what actually happened that night, why the myth took hold so completely, and one wild theory that might just change how you think about the whole event.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
11 min - What the Pope’s Surgery Can Teach the Rest of Us
Pope Leo XIV’s lung cancer was found during routine screening. Days after he announced the diagnosis in St. Peter’s Square, surgeons in Rome removed one lobe of his right lung.
Dr. Steven Goldberg, Chief Medical Officer of HealthTrackRx and a practicing physician, joins me to walk through what happened in the operating room and why removing the whole lobe isn’t cause for alarm. He also explains the three pathology details that will determine whether surgery alone is a cure. Along the way, he discusses why adenocarcinoma is the lung cancer most often found in people who never smoked and who should ask their doctor about low-dose CT screening.
The Pope’s prognosis looks hopeful, and the lesson for everyone else is to ask the screening question before symptoms appear.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
11 min - Fifteen Days to Leave a WarThe United States spent twenty years in Afghanistan and about fifteen days leaving. Documentary filmmaker Michael Pack joins Keith Conrad to discuss his new Wall Street Journal film, The Path to Zero, which traces the decisions that turned a planned withdrawal into the chaos of August 2021. Those decisions include a Doha agreement the Taliban had already broken, military advice that went unheeded, the abandonment of Bagram Air Base, and an evacuation announced far too late. Pack explains why the blame belongs to more than one administration, what "moral injury" means for the Marines who worked the Kabul airport gates, and why the belief in a reformed "Taliban 2.0" may be repeating itself in the war with Iran. Enemies usually tell you who they are. The hard part is believing them.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
18 min - The Man Who Single-Handedly Stopped World War IIIJust after midnight on September 26, 1983, a Soviet early-warning system reported that nuclear war had begun. One officer had minutes to decide whether to believe it. What he chose — and why — may be the most consequential individual decision of the Cold War. This episode of Sidequests tells the full story of that night: what was actually happening in the world that made the moment so dangerous, what the officer saw and how he reasoned through it, what had actually gone wrong with the system, and why the version of this story that made him famous gets the most important detail wrong — in a way that makes the truth considerably more interesting.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
9 min - That Time Gene Roddenberry Survived a Plane Crash and Saved the DayOn June 19, 1947, a Pan American flight went down in the Syrian Desert in the middle of the night. Engines failing, fuselage on fire, fifteen people killed on impact — including everyone in the cockpit. Among the survivors was an off-duty 25-year-old pilot named Gene Roddenberry, riding as a passenger. With broken ribs, he pulled people out of the burning wreckage, organized the survivors, improvised shelter from a life raft, and walked four miles across open desert to find help. Almost twenty years later, he created Star Trek. This is the story you've probably never heard about the man who imagined humanity's future in the stars — and what he did the night the sky fell.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
12 min - Antietam: The Bloodiest Day in American HistoryOn September 17, 1862, the Battle of Antietam produced nearly 23,000 casualties in a single day — the bloodiest in American military history — and ended in a military stalemate. Lee retreated. McClellan didn't pursue. But Lincoln interpreted the Confederate withdrawal as a Union victory and used it to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation five days later, transforming the Civil War from a fight to preserve the Union into a fight to end slavery. This episode of Sidequests covers Antietam: the lost Confederate orders that should have given McClellan a decisive advantage, the brutal fighting at the Cornfield and Bloody Lane, and how a bloody draw on the battlefield became one of the most consequential political moments in American history.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
10 min
About Sidequests
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