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Half as Interesting

Season 2022 · Episode 57

Why The Ringling Bros. Operated A Secret Spy Agency

0.06mSeptember 28, 2022

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Episodes

Episode 1Why Don't Artificial Flavors Taste Accurate?
Episode 2The Bug That Created "Free Public Wifi" Networks That Didn’t Work
Episode 3The Fake Buildings That Hide LA's Massive Oil Industry
Episode 4Why The Letter Q Has Only Been Legal In Turkey For 8 Years
Episode 5Why Flights Through China Take Such Weird Routes
Episode 6The Software Bug That Blacked Out the Entire US Northeast
Episode 7Why There is a Giant Floating Prison In New York City
Episode 8Why So Many Jails Are Painted This Exact Color
Episode 9How Disney Legally Issued its Own Currency for 29 Years
Episode 10Why There’s An Empty Skyscraper In The Middle Of Times Square
Episode 11How to Start Your Own Town
Episode 12The Glitch That Kept Sending The FBI To A Tiny Kansas Farm
Episode 13Why Hundreds of Mazdas Tuned to 94.9 Broke Simultaneously
Episode 14Why Chicago Secretly Bulldozed Its Own Airport Overnight
Episode 15Why April 11, 1954 Is The Statistically Most Boring Day Ever
Episode 16Why Do Americans In Old Movies Sound British?
Episode 17Why This Sound is Illegal to Play
Episode 18You've Sent 124,882 Topic Ideas. Here are the Worst Ones.
Episode 19Why You Never Take a 90-Degree Turn in Casinos
Episode 20Why Farmers Can’t Legally Replant Their Own Seeds
Episode 21Why So Many Airport Runways Cross the US-Canada Border
Episode 22The Man Who Broke The Internet By Deleting 11 Lines of Code
Episode 23Why You Can’t Be Fired in China If You Have This Stamp
Episode 24How Stenographers Type at 300 Words Per Minute
Episode 25The 360-Page Proof That 1+1=2
Episode 26Why Steel from Before 1945 is Weirdly Expensive
Episode 27⍼ - Why Nobody Knows What This One Unicode Character Means
Episode 28How New Cars Trick You With Pre-Recorded Engine Noise
Episode 29Why Cancun is the Mathematically Perfect Vacation Destination
Episode 30How Sommeliers Can Taste Which Year Wine is From
Episode 31Why Thousands of Chinese Tourists Started Coming to a Random British Village
Episode 32Why Almost Every Microwave is Made by the Same Company
Episode 33How Coca Cola (Actually) Keeps Its Secret Recipe Secret
Episode 34Why All U-Hauls are Registered in Arizona
Episode 35Minitel: France’s Alternate Internet That Survived Until 2012
Episode 36Why The NYPD Has An Office in Singapore
Episode 37Why GPS Automatically Shuts Itself Down Above 1,200 mph
Episode 38How an Australian Senator Won With 0.51% Of The Vote
Episode 39Why the United Nations Runs Its Own Airline
Episode 40The High Five Was Invented in 1977 (Yes, Really)
Episode 41The CIA’s Manual on How to be Annoying
Episode 42The ATM Glitch That Gave Out Infinite Money
Episode 43Why the US Keeps Trying To Buy Greenland
Episode 44The Single Australian Farm That’s Bigger Than 49 Countries
Episode 45Russia’s Terrible New Offbrand McDonald’s
Episode 46Why There’s a Massive Runway in the Middle of Florida’s Swamplands
Episode 47Why The London Underground Makes Itself Hotter Every Year
Episode 48Why The Vatican Has A Giant Research Telescope in Arizona
Episode 49Why Chess Strategy Changes Every Year
Episode 50The Shoe So Good the Olympics Declared It Cheating
Episode 51We Ranked Every Mistake We Made This Year
Episode 52The Science Behind Why Friends Smell Like Each Other
Episode 53Why You Don’t Want To Live On the US-Canada Border
Episode 54The Man Who Owns All The Bread In Israel For Eight Days A Year
Episode 55How To Design A Completely Unbreakable Encryption System
Episode 56Why National Parks Can’t Figure Out What To Do With Your Poop
Episode 57Why The Ringling Bros. Operated A Secret Spy Agency
Episode 58Why It Takes Pixar 3 Years To Render A Movie
Episode 59Why No One’s Sure If This Is Part Of The US Constitution
Episode 60Why It Was Illegal For 47 Days to Slice Bread in the US
Episode 61The US Army’s Universal Camouflage: A Terrible Mistake
Episode 62Why US Signs Look Different Than The Rest Of The World’s
Episode 63Why There Are No Ambulances In Jerusalem
Episode 64Somaliland Is Independent. So Why Does No One Recognize It?
Episode 65Why DC's Shaped Like That
Episode 66Why This is The World’s Most Dangerous Dam
Episode 67All The Very Real Passports Not Issued By Countries
Episode 68The NFL’s Secret Plan For If All The Players Die
Episode 69Why One Company Technically Owns Every Stock in the US
Episode 70The McDonald’s McPizza: A Huge Failure
Episode 71Roosevelt Island’s Pneumatic Trash System
Episode 72Spotify’s Mathematical System For Determining Your Music Taste
Episode 73Toki Pona: The Language You Can Learn in a Day
Episode 74The Weirdly Massive Problem of Blocked Public Land
Episode 75Why Cardboard Cops Work (Even If You Know They’re Fake)
Episode 76How the US Sends Top Secret Information Around The World