During one of the most dramatic summers in recent memory, filled with record breaking temperatures, devastating wildfires and destructive floods, a bombshell report released by the IISD exposed the fact that our governments are pumping RECORD amounts of money into big oil...

I talk to one of the reports' authors, Tara Laan, to figure out WHY.

We also discuss climate anxiety, the relationship between pollution and health, climate summits, COP28 and climate activism.

Stanley Stepanic is an Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia. To date he has published three textbooks that have been released in recent editions - these are "Dracula or the Timeless Path of the Vampire," "Russian and East European Film", and "Russian Folklore". In addition to such publications, Professor Stepanic has been very active in the public sphere, giving a variety of presentations, primarily concerning the VAMPIRE.

We talk about vampire origins, Count Dracula, the Blood Countess, Nosferatu, symbolism, vampire incarnations in pop culture and... Morbius.

Mike Rothschild is a journalist and author, focused on the intersections between internet culture and politics as seen through the dark glass of conspiracy theories. Since 2018, he has specialized in examining the QAnon conspiracy cult and is one of the first journalists to reveal its connections to past conspiracy theories. He is the author of the seminal work on QAnon, "The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything.""We talk about QAnon's humble beginnings, it's meteoric rise and it's status after the 2020 presidential election... We also discuss conspiracy theories in general, as well as Bill Gates, the Reptoids, JFK, the attempted coup in Germany, the pervasive underlying thread of anti-Semitism, and of course, the infamous "Mattress Conspiracy."

Bill Schutt is Professor Emeritus of biology at LIU Post and a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. He is the author of Dark Banquet: Blood and The Curious Lives of the Blood-Feeding Creatures and Pump: A Natural History of the Heart, which is his latest book. In 2017 he published an astonishing book called Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History, which is what we discuss in this episode... We also talk about cannibalism's rise in contemporary Hollywood, Christopher Columbus, 2Pac and Keith Richards.Oh, and we can't get past the time Professor Schutt ate a woman's placenta while doing research for his book.

Dr. Lisa Sugiura is a Reader in Cybercrime and Gender at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Portsmouth, Themes Strategic Innovation Fellow and the Deputy Director of the Cybercrime Awareness Clinic. Her research focuses on online deviance, and technology facilitated gender-based abuse and sexual violence. She has published on topics including the online pharmaceutical trade, online research ethics, and rape culture online. She is the author of the books: Respectable deviance and The incel rebellion: the rise of the manosphere and the virtual war against women.

We talk about the Andrew Tate "phenomenon", different Manosphere groups, the Red and Black pill concepts, Incels and the dangers of (self-)indoctrination.