You Are A Weirdo
Doug Sofer
All episodes
Best episodes
Seasons
Top 10 You Are A Weirdo Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best You Are A Weirdo episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to You Are A Weirdo for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite You Are A Weirdo episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
You Repeat Yourself You Repeat Yourself
You Are A Weirdo
02/13/24 • 39 min
It bears repeating that we live in strange times. Take, for instance, duplication technology. Today, no matter who you are, you can draw an image or scribble out some text, and copy it as many times as you’d like. Yet when we consider that copying tech in historical perspective, we discover that this ability is new. For most of the human past, only wealthy elites could clone massive stacks of duplicated materials. Printing has been around for a surprisingly long time, but easy access to portable copying technology is a clear sign of the peculiarity of the present-day.
Join your favorite professional historian on a journey around the globe—to Indonesia, Iraq, China, Germany and Virginia—and find out about how the arts and sciences of duplication have changed over the centuries, and how that journey teaches us about our fundamentally odd world. Along the way, you’ll get to hear a professional historian’s expert audio simulation of a copying technique that dates back nearly 40,000 years. And you’ll hear shocking statements about Thomas Jefferson’s elbows.
Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com !
Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.
History Is in Your Nature—And Nature Is in Your History
You Are A Weirdo
07/12/24 • 29 min
Take a walk on the wild side with your historian host as we unearth some of the big-picture insights of environmental history. Forage in the wilderness, stroll around a giant pie, and hear about what ancient folks did for a living. You’ll also find out why you can’t build enormous pyramid-like buildings without things like beer, bread, kings, priestesses, and pants. And you’ll discover how an ancient, fantastical story about magical beasties and a man who lives like a gazelle can still help us to understand some genuine things about the real past. Most important, learn why you need history in order to really understand humanity’s connections to the natural environment.
You can find the sources for this episode along with lots of other good stuff at findyourselfinhistory.com .
Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com !
Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.
Season Two Trailer
You Are A Weirdo
09/13/23 • 4 min
Anticipation.
It's so thick you can scoop it out of the air with a soup spoon. Yes my friends, Season Two of the award-imagining You Are A Weirdo podcast is coming soon.
If this dramatic trailer is any indication, it's going to be epic.
Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.
Your Democracy Is A Republic—and Vice-Versa
You Are A Weirdo
11/27/23 • 42 min
Did the framers of the U.S. Constitution set up the country’s government to be a republic or a democracy? Some folks have surprisingly strong opinions on this question, often with good reason. Yet the words republic and democracy have very similar meanings, so what’s the big deal? The answer has to do with the ways that the historic founders of the USA thought about history—specifically the histories of the democracies and republics that came before them. To make things even more confusing, the Constitution’s authors got some of their history secondhand, through one of their favorite political philosophers, Charles Montesquieu (1689–1755), who had some very specific—and surprising—things to say about republics and democracies. Check out this episode to learn why many people of the past would find many of our present-day political debates on this topic to be especially odd.
Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com !
Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.
You Eat Funny
You Are A Weirdo
12/14/22 • 35 min
You take a totally normal trip to the supermarket to buy some totally normal meat. But what you purchase comes in a geometric shape that looks nothing like the animal that it originally came from. In this episode, we learn that modern meat-buying is utterly bizarre when compared to the meat-acquisition experiences of virtually all humans for virtually all of our species' past.
Discover how and when our animal products turned into disks. And cylinders. And cubes. And oozy concentrates. And--hot soda?
Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com !
Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.
Your Tea Comes with Baggage
You Are A Weirdo
01/25/23 • 44 min
How did tea become British when tea plants usually grow in far-away places like India or China? This history of this leafy beverage travels thousands of miles over thousands of years. It’s a story of human brutality and suffering on a global scale, but also of innovation and increasing connection among the peoples of earth. We even explore the origins of Southern sweet tea. At the end, you'll discover why that seemingly innocent teabag comes with strings attached.
Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com !
Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.
You Hear Dead People
You Are A Weirdo
01/10/23 • 38 min
Shuffle enough random songs and you're certain to hear singers who are no longer among the living. Before 1877, hearing voices of the dead would have been a supremely blood curdling experience. Yet we weirdos of today routinely listen to the sounds of the departed; we usually don’t even think about it. The invention of the phonograph fundamentally changed that aspect of the human condition, and altered how human-made sounds could travel through both space and time. Understanding how people reacted to this technology when it first arrived can reveal something important about who we’ve become.
Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com !
Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.
You Don't Get The Joke (Probably)
You Are A Weirdo
12/28/22 • 29 min
You might think you have a totally normal sense of humor, but then you hear a joke from the past and it sounds like it came from some other dimension. That's when you realize once again that your normal can be another person's weird.
Join your new favorite podcaster-historian host on this journey through space and time, and open your mind to myriad manners of mirth-making. Along the way, you'll meet some fancy-pants anthropologists, a hungry international traveler, a possibly crazy dude from Kansas, some talking animals, a U.S. Senator, and a gassy Sumerian, among many others.
You'll also find out far more about lusty sea creatures than you'd ever thought possible from a history podcast.
Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com !
Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.
Your Network Is Disconnected
You Are A Weirdo
02/10/23 • 39 min
When you’re online, you meet all kinds of people. You play games with them, you LOL at their jokes, or care-emoji-hug them when they’re feeling especially sad-emoji. But within the broader context of the human past, these are brand-spanking-new ways of interacting with other members of your species. How did communication become so disembodied these days—literally separated from our human bodies? In this episode, we explore different ways that people have connected to one another over time, and investigate the historical roots of today's long-distance communication. In the process, we learn how our current ways of interacting with one another are simultaneously connected and disconnected from those who preceded us.
Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com !
Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.
Yes, You Have New Bananas
You Are A Weirdo
02/25/23 • 39 min
Today, bananas are just a delicious, fruity fact of life. But being able to buy these curvy, golden delicacies in places where it’s too cold to grow them is actually a very recent development in the big picture of human history. Understanding the banana's past actually tells us a lot about the modern world—about economics, politics, technology, and even why we keep getting annoying popup ads for magical fruit-based cures.
Join your favorite professional historian on this golden, slightly curved voyage through time, from the ancient Indian Ocean region through the present-day Western world. Discover how the banana has been adored throughout the ages. Explore why this fruit was once feared as a threat to civilization itself. And find out why bananas are as much a part of the Industrial Age as more obvious products like steel or petroleum.
Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com !
Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.
Show more best episodes
Show more best episodes
FAQ
How many episodes does You Are A Weirdo have?
You Are A Weirdo currently has 18 episodes available.
What topics does You Are A Weirdo cover?
The podcast is about History, Comedy and Podcasts.
What is the most popular episode on You Are A Weirdo?
The episode title 'Your Tea Comes with Baggage' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on You Are A Weirdo?
The average episode length on You Are A Weirdo is 35 minutes.
How often are episodes of You Are A Weirdo released?
Episodes of You Are A Weirdo are typically released every 18 days, 5 hours.
When was the first episode of You Are A Weirdo?
The first episode of You Are A Weirdo was released on Dec 14, 2022.
Show more FAQ
Show more FAQ