Advertise on podcast: Alternative History

What is TIME, how and who invented TIME? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do we (& why do we) suffer and die? Is there anything after death? What to make of it? How to live through it.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode of Fault Lines asks what beliefs actually are, and how they have shaped every layer of human life — from the wiring of the brain, to morals and ethics, to religion, ideology, national identity, culture, and the stories we still kill and die for. Most people treat beliefs as truths they discover. I treat them as tools temporary chemical tubes invent so they do not feel like accidents on a rock spinning around an ordinary star. The tools work. They have built cities, laws, art, and the occasional mass grave. Whether they are true is a different question from whether they are useful. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of Fault Lines, we strip down the machinery of human decision-making to find out if free will actually exists, or if it is just a comforting story we tell ourselves.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

War is a story we tell ourselves to make killing feel like something other than killing. This episode traces that story from ants and chimpanzees to holy wars, glory, and drone strikes — and asks who's actually cashing the cheque. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You are a temporary biochemical blob on a random rock in space - eating, breathing, excreting, and massively overestimating how important you are. In this episode of Fault Lines, we take a scalpel to the human condition: your ancient monkey mind, your limited senses, your cognitive biases, your dependence on air, water, food and toilets, and the brutal role of luck in your life. Drawing on Buddhist, Vedantic, Taoist, African, Arab and Western thinkers, we argue that you do not need to be a genius to thrive — you just need to be 1% more aware than everyone else sleepwalking through existence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What is a leader, actually? Not the word on a job description. Not the chapter in a self-help book. The thing itself. In this episode of Fault Lines, we go looking for it across five thousand years of human history. We begin with Julius Caesar weeping in front of a statue — not because he hadn't started, but because he had, and it still didn't feel like enough. From there we move through wolf packs and elephant herds, through the hunter-gatherers who led by competence and sat back down when the competence was no longer needed, through Alexander the Great and the father who built everything he stood on, through Ramesses II and the seductive trap of believing your own propaganda, through Ashoka — the conqueror who walked a battlefield and changed everything about who he wanted to be. We cover Napoleon's name-memory and what it tells us about recognition. Catherine the Great arriving in a foreign court with nothing but her mind. Churchill refusing to negotiate not because he had a plan but because defiance was the plan. Gandhi moving an empire without ever commanding an army. Lee Kuan Yew building a nation from nothing using reason and reality as his only ideology. And then the other side. The charisma that isn't leadership. The nice person problem — the quietly catastrophic leader who cares too much to make the call. The credit-hoarder. The team-blamer. The decision that was never made, and what that costs. We close with two men almost nobody has heard of — Vasily Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov — who between them demonstrate, in a tin box under the ocean and a bunker outside Moscow, that leadership does not require an empire or a crown or a statue. Just two of three things. At the right moment. In the right room. Fault Lines is a solo narrative podcast covering history, philosophy, geopolitics, finance, and markets. Direct, intellectually provocative, and grounded — narrative-driven but conversational. Never neutral. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Imagine if the most powerful thing in your life doesn’t exist in any physical way, can’t be jailed, can outlive you, and yet decides how you work, what you earn, and even who goes to war. This episode takes the corporation off the balance sheet and puts it under a microscope, tracking it from risky spice voyages and the East India Companies, through empires, world wars, Standard Oil, Gazprom, GM, and Indian state giants. You’ll see the whole thing from three angles at once — worker, owner, manager, and realise the corporation isn’t a building or a logo, it’s a story we tell together that has teeth, armies, and a passport. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every war has two sets of heroes. Every religion has one true god. Every country has a flag worth dying for. None of that was your idea. Fault Lines explores the oldest trick in human history — how kings, priests, newspapers, governments, algorithms, and AI have always shaped what you believe, who you fear, and why you fight. From the Troubles in Northern Ireland to Nazi Germany, the Cold War, and the Ukraine war, this episode traces the machinery of manufactured reality across all of human civilisation. The tools change. The mechanic never does. A Fault Lines deep dive into propaganda, narrative control, identity, and the one question that cracks the spell. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every civilisation that ever collapsed thought it was permanent. The Romans didn't think Rome would fall. The Byzantines were debating theology while cannons were being built outside their walls. The Soviets woke up one morning and the system just wasn't there anymore. And the Syrians who had jobs, homes, and schools in 2010 were on rubber dinghies in the Aegean by 2015. This episode traces four thousand years of societal collapse — from the Bronze Age to Iraq, from the Black Death to Weimar Germany — and finds the same patterns hiding inside every disaster. The warning signs nobody acted on. The institutions that failed faster than anyone expected. The moment trust between neighbours dissolved. And the raw, ground-level human cost — the food, the water, the people lost, the identities destroyed. societal collapse, fall of Rome, Bronze Age Collapse, Black Death, Weimar Germany hyperinflation, Soviet Union collapse, Iraq War aftermath, Syrian civil war, Libya failed state, how civilisations fall, survival history, geopolitical history podcast, narrative history, civilisation collapse explained Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Everything you use today — your phone, your food, your hospital, your heating — runs on fossil fuels. Every single bit of it. This episode makes the case that the Industrial Revolution was never really about industry. It was about extraction. Coal, oil, gas, and the minerals beneath the ground built the modern world, power every great nation, and feed half the people alive on earth today. And nobody — not one person — has turned it off. A clear-eyed, no-nonsense look at the substance that built civilisation and the uncomfortable truth about what happens if it goes away. Topics covered: fossil fuels, energy history, industrial revolution, geopolitics, oil and gas, energy poverty, great powers, USA Russia China, Haber-Bosch, plastic, artificial intelligence, extraction economy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You enjoy your weekend. You have rights at work. Your kids go to school instead of a factory floor. None of that was inevitable. All of it was fought for. And the intellectual ammunition behind almost every one of those fights traces back to one difficult, brilliant, frequently broke German philosopher — Karl Marx. This episode is not about gulags. It is not about the Cold War. It is about the idea. Where it came from, why it spread to every corner of the planet, and why you — whether you love Marx or loathe him — are living inside his world right now. From the factories of Manchester to the cobalt mines of the Congo, from Victorian Britain to modern Vietnam, this is the story of the most successful ideology in human history. You have already benefited from it. Whether you know it or not. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Capitalism is the story every modern economy tells about itself. But is anyone actually living it? From prehistoric obsidian traders to trillion-dollar bailouts, this episode traces the real history of capitalism — the version Adam Smith theorised, the version Karl Marx feared, and the version governments quietly practice while publicly preaching the free market gospel. We go inside the 2008 financial crisis, the 2020 pandemic stimulus, and the uncomfortable truth that in America, France, and China alike, the rules of capitalism apply rigorously to the small — and get suspended gracefully for the large. True capitalism may be the biggest myth the modern world has ever agreed to believe. capitalism, free market, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, 2008 financial crisis, Federal Reserve, stock market, geopolitics, economic history Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It started with a seating arrangement. In the summer of 1789, a group of men in a Parisian assembly hall sorted themselves by how radical they wanted their revolution to be — and accidentally invented the political map the entire world still uses today. Left. Right. Two and a half centuries later, we're still sitting in the same seats. This episode traces how a framework born from France's crisis got exported through empire, industrialisation, and the Cold War — until it started breaking under the weight of a world it was never designed to explain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every human civilisation that has ever existed invented gods. Not the same gods - but gods. The Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Vedic poets of ancient India, the Greeks, the Norse, the Aztecs — all of them looked up at the same sky and came back with completely different stories about who made the world, and why. In this episode, we ask the oldest question: why do humans worship at all? We move from the Enuma Elish of ancient Babylon — the world's oldest creation myth — through the gods of Egypt, the Rigveda's radical Hymn of Creation, the psychology of William James and Carl Jung, the neuroscience of religious experience, and the philosophical traditions that tried to answer the question of meaning without a god at all. We cover: Mesopotamian mythology, Egyptian religion, Vedic gods, monotheism, Buddhism, Stoicism, the psychology of belief, and what the human brain does when it prays. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.