Dan's Rabbit Holes

Episodes

• The Populist Right Wrecks Economies — Then Loses Anyway — A century of data says the populist right really does make countries poorer, more corrupt and less free — yet the strongmen keep getting voted back out, and more than half of these democratic slides reverse.
• Belgium: The Rich Half Is Done Paying for the Poor Half — A country invented in French, ruling a Dutch-speaking majority — now that majority owns the language, the money and the government, and is quietly deciding it might not need Belgium at all.
• Why Moral Movements Win — and Why Veganism Is Stuck at 1% — History's moral victories didn't win the argument — they made the right thing cheap and the wrong thing shameful. Veganism has done neither, yet.
• FIFA: The Last Regime Fell for Bribery. This One Made It Legal — The 2015 scandal was criminal, so the system caught it. Gianni Infantino's real achievement was making FIFA's corruption legal — and you can't prosecute that.
• Recycling: What's Real, and What's Just a Nice Story — Recycling is three different numbers wearing one word — and for most of what you carefully sort, the honest word isn't 'recycled,' it's 'delayed.'
• Roman Engineering: 1,000 Years Ahead of Everyone Else — Rome did not just build marvels — it industrialised precision. The proof of how far ahead it got: the world needed a thousand years to catch up.
• Römische Ingenieurskunst: 1.000 Jahre allen anderen voraus — Rom hat nicht einfach nur Wunderwerke gebaut — es hat Präzision industrialisiert. Der Beweis, wie weit es voraus war: Die Welt brauchte tausend Jahre, um aufzuholen.
• The Young Male Problem: The West Has Too Few, Not Too Many — The West does not have too many young men — it has too few, and a status collapse the screen kept off the streets is now landing at the ballot box.
• Jumper’s Knee: Why Rest and Injections Fail, and Load Wins — It's not an inflammation you can rest or inject away — it's a tendon that stopped healing, and the proven cure is the load that broke it.
• Football Tactics: The Whole Game Is a Fight for Space — Lines, channels, pressing, overloads — every intimidating term in football is just language for one hidden game: controlling space.
• One Nation: How a 6% Party Topped Australia's Polls — A party that won 6.4% of the vote last year now leads the national polls — and the global far right says that's no accident.
• Australia: The Lucky Country Just Ran Out of Luck — A once-in-history China boom hid a stalled economy — now the boom's fading and the bill is coming due.
• Stoicism Isn’t About Not Feeling — It Became Modern Therapy — The word 'stoic' means the opposite of the philosophy: Stoicism was never about numbness but about feeling the right things — a method so sound that modern psychology rebuilt it into cognitive behavioural therapy.
• Meditation Quiets the Brain Network That Steals Your Life — What every meditation tradition for 3,500 years — and the flow you find on a bike — are secretly doing is the same thing: switching off the self-narrating brain network where nearly half your life and most of your unhappiness live.
• Weight Training Is a Longevity Drug (at a Tiny Dose) — Grip strength predicts death better than blood pressure, and lifting is a longevity drug — at a smaller dose than you think.
• The Happiness Data: You’re Chasing the Wrong Things — Fifty years of happiness data say you adapt to almost everything you chase — and never adapt to the relationships you let slide.
• The Pandemic You Already Forgot — and What It Cost — Forgetting COVID isn't a flaw in your memory — it's the most reliable thing pandemics do, and it's quietly erasing the lessons before the next one arrives.
• Arsenal Built the Stadium First — and It Cost Them a Decade — How a munitions team kept getting huge by building the cathedral before it had a congregation — and why the 2026 title is the payoff of a 20-year bet.
• The Teals Just Became the Thing They Swore They'd Never Be — The teals built their whole brand on not being a party — then formed one, at the exact moment the two-party system is cracking at both ends and One Nation is polling ahead of Labor.
• The 65,000-Year Country: On the Timescale That Actually Matters, Everything Since 1788 Is the Last Five Minutes of the Day — The gap you can measure today is not an ancient condition — it is the still-open wound of how recently, and how violently, the longest continuous human story on Earth was interrupted.
• The Murdoch Paradox: One Family Owns Most of Australia's Newspapers — and It Buys Less Power Every Year — Australian media is among the most concentrated on earth, and the laws meant to stop it were repealed in 2017 — yet the barons keep losing elections, because the country quietly stopped listening through the channels they own.
• Who Really Runs Australia: How 2% of the Workforce Can Sack a Prime Minister — In Australia, power has never tracked how much you make or how many you employ — it tracks how credibly you can threaten to walk away, and how loudly you can say so.
• The Iron Ore Insurance Policy: How Australia's Richest Person Bought a Populist Party — and Why a "Battler" Movement Is Quietly Working for a Mining Magnate — Gina Rinehart's most valuable asset isn't a mine — it's a political party branded to look like its enemy.