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Sidequests
Sidequests episodes
- Is It Possible to Own the Moon?In 1980, Dennis Hope filed paperwork claiming ownership of the Moon and sent formal notice to the United Nations. Nobody objected. So he started selling. This episode of Sidequests traces how a struggling used-car salesman from San Francisco built a multimillion-dollar real estate business on a gap in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, generated roughly twelve million dollars in revenue, sold property to Ronald Reagan and Tom Cruise, created his own interplanetary government, and was never successfully stopped by any country on Earth. Whether it's legal is still, technically, unclear — which is exactly the point.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
13 min - The Sinking of the RMS Titanic: Part Nine - Carpathia and Californian
Episode 8 of our ten part series The Titanic Disaster covers what happened after the ship disappeared — five hours of darkness and cold in the lifeboats, the arrival of Carpathia at dawn, and the ship that sat ten to twenty miles away watching distress rockets and did nothing. It’s a story with a clear hero and a clear villain, and both earned their reputations entirely.
The free episode covers Carpathia’s race through the ice field, the rescue operations at dawn, and the SS Californian’s catastrophic inaction. The premium episode goes deeper on the lifeboats themselves, the long-term trauma survivors carried for the rest of their lives, and the grim work of body recovery off Halifax.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
15 min - The Lavish Funeral of a Pickled GeneralAntonio López de Santa Anna was President of Mexico eleven times, fought the Texas Revolution, and declared himself the Napoleon of the West. He was also the man who, after losing his leg to cannon fire, had the limb preserved, paraded through Mexico City in a glass coffin, and buried with full military honors. Then a mob dug it up. Then he accidentally helped invent bubble gum. This is the strangest footnote in Mexican history — and it's an actual foot.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
8 min - Why You Can't Escape the Spam Call EpidemicAmericans received 52.5 billion robocalls in 2025 — 160 per person, per year, most of them offering loans you never applied for. But where do these calls actually come from? This episode of Sidequests traces the full ecosystem: the fake websites harvesting your data, the brokers selling it dozens of times over, the overseas call centers placing millions of calls at near-zero cost, and the reason blocking individual numbers never works. Plus: what you can actually do about it, and why pressing 2 to be removed makes everything worse.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
16 min - The Sinking of the RMS Titanic: Part Eight - The Sinking
Episode 8 of our ten part series The Titanic Disaster covers the two hours and forty minutes between the collision and the moment Titanic vanishes. The bow descends, the stern rises, the ship breaks in two, and 1,517 people die in water that is four degrees above freezing. The free episode follows the evacuation — the band assembling on deck, the lifeboats launching half-empty, the separations, the discipline that held longer than anyone had a right to expect, and the screaming that started the moment the ship disappeared and stopped thirty minutes later when there was no one left to scream.
The premium episode goes deeper on the people who made extraordinary choices in those final hours — those who refused to leave, those who dressed for death, those who stayed at their posts, and the ones history has mostly forgotten.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
15 min - NASA's Missions That Never FlewNASA has announced plans for a permanent lunar base. Which is exciting — and also something NASA has announced before. This episode of Sidequests covers the missions that were seriously planned, thoroughly engineered, and never flew: a human Venus flyby designed around existing Apollo hardware, a nuclear rocket engine that actually worked and could have reached Mars in the 1980s, a U.S. Army Moon base proposal from 1959 that predated the Space Race, and a space station that fell out of orbit while the shuttle that could have saved it sat grounded two years behind schedule. The history of spaceflight isn't just what launched. It's also the remarkable futures that almost were.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
15 min - When Weather Became the Main CharacterFive moments in history when weather wasn't background — it was the deciding factor. A Scottish meteorologist's forecast that made D-Day possible. The Atlantic storms that destroyed the Spanish Armada when cannons couldn't. The Russian winter that turned Napoleon's invasion into one of history's greatest military catastrophes. The typhoons that protected Japan from Mongol conquest — twice — and gave birth to a legend that would echo into World War II. And the ice-choked Delaware River that nearly stopped Washington's Christmas crossing, then made it succeed.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
16 min - The Sinking of the RMS Titanic: Part Seven - Iceberg Right Ahead
Episode 7 of our ten part series The Titanic Disaster covers the last day. Sunday, April 14 — church services in the morning, elegant dinners in the evening, ice warnings arriving all day and going mostly unacted upon. Then, at 11:39 PM, Frederick Fleet sees a dark shape ahead. He rings the bell three times, grabs the telephone, and delivers the four words that ended an era: “Iceberg right ahead.”
The free episode covers the full day — the warnings that accumulated and were set aside, the wireless operator who was too busy sending passenger messages to deliver the most critical ice report to the bridge, the final dinner parties, and the collision itself. Then the aftermath: passengers making snowballs from ice chips on the forward deck while, below the waterline, six compartments were already flooding. Thomas Andrews calculating the mathematics. Captain Smith learning there were over a thousand people aboard with no lifeboat space. The evacuation beginning — too slow, too late, with boats launching half-empty into the dark.
The premium episode goes deeper on the four figures whose decisions shaped everything: Frederick Fleet, William Murdoch, Jack Phillips, and Edward Smith.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
16 min - The Year Without A Summer
A volcano no one had heard of explodes. The sun goes pale. And somehow humanity responds with monsters and bikes.
This Sidequest looks at 1816 — the Year Without a Summer. Famine in Ireland. Food riots in France and Germany. Mass westward migration out of New England as families abandoned farms that simply wouldn’t grow anything. Religious revivals. Apocalyptic panic. And in a villa on a cold, gray Lake Geneva, a group of writers stuck indoors by relentless storms who decided to pass the time with a ghost story contest.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
9 min - Operation Cornflakes
By 1945, the Allies had tried nearly everything to undermine Nazi Germany from the inside. Leaflets dropped from planes. Radio broadcasts. Forged documents. And then someone in the Office of Strategic Services — the forerunner to the CIA — had an idea that was either brilliant or completely unhinged, possibly both.
What if they weaponized the mail?
This week's Sidequests covers Operation Cornflakes: the Allied psychological operation that used bombed mail trains, counterfeit Nazi postage stamps, and fake German newspapers to slip anti-Nazi propaganda directly into the hands of ordinary German citizens — delivered, unknowingly, by actual German postal workers.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
8 min
About Sidequests
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