Dan's Rabbit Holes

Episodes

• 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Less Power Every Year — Australian media is among the most concentrated on earth, and the laws meant to stop it were repealed in 2017 — yet the barons keep losing elections, because the country quietly stopped listening through the channels they own.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.