Shows
Scientific Giants - Minds that Shaped Human HistoryCharles Darwin - Father of Natural Selection and EvolutionToday we push open the door of a quiet house in Kent and step into a study where the drawers have labels and the labels are promises: barnacles, bees, seed dispersal, pigeon skulls, earthworms, questionnaires from far‑flung correspondents bound with red tape. The room smells of paper, camphor, and the faint sourness of spirits used to preserve delicate things. On a table lies a sheaf of pages tied with string and weighted with a stone; on the wall hangs a map with a penciled track looping from Plymouth to Brazil to Tierra del Fuego, up the spine of th...
2025-11-2232 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersAnaxagorasIn the middle of the fifth century BCE, a ship from Asia Minor cuts across the Aegean, its hull packed with grain, oil, and pottery. Among the passengers stands a man in his early forties, with the face of someone used to thinking more than talking. He is leaving his home city, Clazomenae, in Ionia, heading toward Athens, which is not yet the cultural capital it will become, but already a restless, ambitious democracy. This man brings with him a different way of thinking about the world, one born on the Ionian coast but sharpened in solitude: a vision...
2025-11-2232 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersEmpedoclesEmpedoclesOn a bright Sicilian morning in the fifth century BCE, the city of Acragas rises from the sea in terraces of stone and dust. Temples crown the ridge above, their columns catching the sun. Below, olive groves and vineyards climb the slopes. In the streets, merchants call out prices, children weave through the crowds, and somewhere, perhaps in a house near the city wall or walking among companions on a country path, moves a man whose reputation will swell to legend: physician, prophet, poet, wonder-worker, and philosopher. His name is Empedocles, and he will try to...
2025-11-2132 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersZeno of EleaZeno of EleaIn the hot light of a fifth-century afternoon, the road leading into Elea is dusty and rutted. A small crowd has gathered at the edge of the agora, men in worn tunics, boys who should be running errands, a few visiting merchants resting their packs. At the center stands a tall, lean man with sharp features and an intensity that makes even idle listeners a little uneasy. He is not offering a prophecy, nor telling stories of gods and heroes, nor selling cures. He is asking questions about motion, about plurality, about the most...
2025-11-2133 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersPherecydes of Syros 580–520 BCEPherecydes of Syros c. 580–520 BCEIn the early sixth century BCE, on the rocky island of Syros in the Cyclades, far from the philosophical ferment of Ionia and even further from the great Greek cities of Italy and Sicily, there lived a strange, quiet, solitary thinker whose influence would ripple outward in ways neither he nor his contemporaries could have fully imagined. Pherecydes—sometimes written Pherekydes—occupies an unusual position in the history of philosophy. He stands between myth and reason, between poetic cosmogony and speculative argument, between epic storytelling and metaphysical system-building. He predates Pythagoras, overlaps with T...
2025-11-2029 min
The American PresidentsWilliam Henry HarrisonWilliam Henry Harrison enters the line of presidents like a figure carved from the timber of the Old Northwest—raw-edged, weather-tested, built more out of marching orders than out of pamphlets. He is not the architect of a doctrine; he is an officer trained to turn geography into sentences that can be obeyed. Before his presidency reduces itself in popular memory to the arithmetic of thirty-one days, he has already lived the better part of the republic’s first half century as a surveyor’s son, a soldier who learned the frontier’s grammar, a territorial governor who turned treaties...
2025-11-2019 min
The American PresidentsJames A. Garfield James A. Garfield steps onto the national stage with the air of someone who has already worn half a dozen lives and is suspicious of fame because it looks too much like a costume. He is born in a one-room cabin in Orange Township, Ohio, the last child of a widowed mother who has nothing to offer but work and the belief that work is convertible into dignity. The boy is small, eager, and afflicted with a restlessness that in a harsher age might have been called fate: he runs away to the canal, becomes a mule driver, learns...
2025-11-2031 min
The American PresidentsMartin Van Buren Martin Van Buren enters the American story not as a battlefield silhouette or a thunderous orator, but as a tactician born to a borderland of languages, a boy of Kinderhook whose first music was Dutch and whose adulthood would be devoted to translating popular feeling into the grammar of power. He is small, immaculate in dress, soft in voice, and relentless in purpose. Where others carve reputations with swords or pamphlets, he builds something less theatrical and more durable: an apparatus that makes consent repeatable. He believes parties are not diseases of the body politic but its circulation; that...
2025-11-2034 min
The American PresidentsAndrew JacksonAndrew Jackson enters the American chronicle as a refusal that never cooled. A teen in a war, ordered by an enemy officer to polish a pair of boots, he answered with a no that earned steel across his face and set the pitch of his life. The slash did not create his temper; it certified it. Orphaned by the Revolution’s chaos and sickness, hardened in the Carolinas where arguments were settled by nerve before they were settled by law, he learned the world’s first lesson early: that authority often arrives as a boot, and dignity sometimes begins as a...
2025-11-2027 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersPythagoras 570–495 BCEIn the Greek imagination, there are few figures who sit more uneasily between history and legend than Pythagoras. Say his name today and most people think of a schoolroom diagram: a right triangle, some letters along its sides, and the neat little relation a² + b² = c². But if you were to step into a meeting of his followers in southern Italy in the late sixth century BCE, the man at the center of that future textbook figure would look nothing like a harmless geometry teacher. He would seem more like a founder of a religious order, a philosopher of cos...
2025-11-2031 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersAnaximenes 586–526 BCEOn a clear morning in Miletus, the air feels almost weightless. A faint breeze moves between the houses, stirring dust in the streets, filling sails in the harbor, rising as a shimmer over the tiled roofs as the day warms. Most people barely notice it unless it fails; only when the wind drops and the city lies still in heavy heat do they realize how much their comfort depends on something they cannot see. For Anaximenes, the third of the old Milesian inquirers, that invisible element was not an afterthought but the key to everything. Where Thales had said...
2025-11-2033 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersAnaximander c. 610–546 BCEIn the bustling, sun-baked streets of Miletus, where merchants argued over grain prices and sailors cursed the shifting winds, there lived a man who tried to think past the edge of the visible world. To most people in that Ionian city, the horizon at sea was a simple line: beyond it lay other ports, other gods, other dangers. For Anaximander of Miletus, that hazy band between water and sky was something more. It was an invitation to imagine a structure larger than anything the senses could directly show. Where others saw the earth as resting on something—water, pillars, th...
2025-11-2033 min
The American PresidentsNathaniel Gorham – Acting President of Congress (1785–1786)Nathaniel Gorham’s turn in the chair began not with trumpets but with the small, exacting necessities that keep a weak government from collapsing into embarrassment. The famous man elected to preside—John Hancock, emblem of independence, governor of Massachusetts, a name large enough to be a logo—was largely absent, held at home by illness, comfort, and the quiet calculations of a state politician who knew where his power actually lived. Congress could not wait for a celebrity’s joints to loosen. It needed someone who would come to the room, count the votes that existed rather than the ones...
2025-11-1925 min
The American PresidentsRichard Henry Lee – President of Congress (1784–1785)Richard Henry Lee’s tenure in the chair arrives in the afterglow of a miracle and the onset of a long migraine. The miracle was the war’s end—Washington’s graceful bow at Annapolis, the definitive treaty now in hand, the last redcoats filing onto ships. The migraine was everything that followed: soldiers’ certificates turning to dust in taverns, creditors knocking at doors, frontier fires flaring where maps pretended to make peace, states bargaining with themselves about whether promises made as a Union might be honored as a state. Into that atmosphere, in late 1784, came a tall Virginian whose fame...
2025-11-1927 min
The American PresidentsElias Boudinot – President of Congress (1782–1783)Elias Boudinot – President of Congress (1782–1783)In the last hard winter of the war, when rumors of peace traveled faster than pay and slower than hunger, a compact, careful New Jersey lawyer with a Huguenot name took the chair of Congress and tried to carry a country across the narrow bridge between victory and legitimacy. Elias Boudinot did not have the theatrical silhouette of a general or the lapidary sentences of a pamphleteer. He had instead a habit of exactness, a tenderness for procedures that protect the weak, and a talent for guiding a room without scalding it. In N...
2025-11-1927 min
The American PresidentsJohn Hanson – Often mythologized as “first president under the Articles” (1781–1782)John Hanson – Often mythologized as “first president under the Articles” (1781–1782)The story most people hear about John Hanson arrives as a neat provocation: before George Washington there was another “first president,” a dignified Marylander who held the office under the Articles of Confederation and whose name we somehow forgot. The claim survives because it flatters the appetite for secret histories and because Hanson, when you look closely, does sit at a hinge in time—with a gavel but without an army, receiving dispatches from generals and ministers while presiding over a government that called itself the “United States in Congre...
2025-11-1913 min
The American PresidentsJohn Hancock (again) – Elected but largely nonresident/absent (1785–1786)The second time John Hancock’s name was lifted to the top of Congress, it was less a summons to govern than a bet on the power of a signature. The war was over; the treaty had been ratified; the chair in the national chamber had begun to pass each year to a different steward who kept the papers moving and the façade intact. In that rotation, which felt at once ceremonial and necessary, the delegates reached for a figure whose autograph had become the emblem of independence. They chose him again, the man whose ink in 1776 had swe...
2025-11-1924 min
The American PresidentsArthur St. Clair – President of Congress (1787)Arthur St. Clair’s year in the chair feels like a hinge cut out of iron: heavy, cold to the touch, load-bearing in a way that is easy to miss if you only glance at the door it is holding up. In February 1787 he took his seat as President of the United States in Congress Assembled at a moment when the Confederation government had very nearly taught the country to stop expecting anything from it. The treasury was a rumor; requisitions sounded princely and worked like charity; British garrisons still sat in the old Northwest as if the treaty th...
2025-11-1929 min
The American PresidentsCyrus Griffin – Final President of Congress (1788–1789)Cyrus Griffin – Final President of Congress (1788–1789)Cyrus Griffin’s season in the chair arrives like the last careful breath before a long swim—measured, deliberate, and entirely aware that the air he is gathering must carry more than just himself. When he takes up the gavel as President of the United States in Congress Assembled, the Confederation is already living in the tense quiet after a decision. The states have argued, pamphleteers have boiled ink into prophecy and panic, and a closed-door summer in Philadelphia has offered a new frame with a larger appetite for power and a tighte...
2025-11-1927 min
The American PresidentsJohn Jay – President of the Continental Congress (1778–1779)John Jay – President of the Continental Congress (1778–1779)On a gray December afternoon in 1778, a slender man with a narrow, thoughtful face and a faint scar along his cheekbone took the chair at the front of a crowded hall in Philadelphia. Outside, the city still bore the marks of recent occupation: broken shutters, gouged doorframes, the memory of redcoats. Inside, the delegates of the Continental Congress shuffled papers, murmured, coughed into handkerchiefs. A flag with thirteen stars hung at one end of the chamber, newly familiar and not yet mythic. The war had entered its fourth year. France was...
2025-11-1926 min
The American PresidentsHenry Laurens – President of the Continental Congress (1777–1778)Henry Laurens – President of the Continental Congress (1777–1778)In the hard winter of 1777, when the wind off the Susquehanna cut through wool and warmed breath froze to mustaches, a cluster of men in borrowed rooms tried to keep a country alive with ink. Philadelphia had fallen to the British; Congress had fled first to Lancaster for a day and then to York, a market town that suddenly found itself hosting the nearest thing to a national government. The delegates slept above taverns and stores. Their desks were scarred pine laid with quills and candle stubs; their letters went out...
2025-11-1928 min
The American PresidentsThomas McKean – President of Congress (1781)Thomas McKean – President of Congress (1781)Thomas McKean entered those working days with the blunt tools of a self-made lawyer and the stubbornness of a border man. Born in 1734 in the Pennsylvania backcountry to parents of Ulster-Scots stock, he learned early that order was something you built, not something given. He read law in New Castle, Delaware, gathered clients one case at a time, and moved quickly into the tangle of local power: clerkships, assembly seats, the dry, relentless business of committees. He was precise by habit and pugnacious by temperament. When the Stamp Act jolted the colonies in...
2025-11-1910 min
AI - An Uncertain FutureAI - Geopolitical UnravelingAI destabilizes alliances by eroding trust, accelerating conflict, and empowering asymmetric actors. This episode explores how deepfakes and cyber campaigns fray diplomacy, while autonomous weapons shrink the margin for error to milliseconds. Smaller states and groups punch above their weight, while superpowers suspect each other of hidden capabilities. Traditional institutions falter. The unraveling looks less like a single war than a steady corrosion of order, a fog war where mistrust becomes the default.Selenius Media
2025-11-1828 min
The American PresidentsJohn Hancock – President of the Second Continental Congress (1775–1777)John Hancock – President of the Second Continental Congress (1775–1777)In May of 1775, when John Hancock rose from his seat and walked slowly to the front of the chamber in Philadelphia, he was walking into a role that did not quite exist yet. The Second Continental Congress had reconvened under a new sky. Between its first and second sessions, there had been gunfire at Lexington and Concord, blood on New England grass, and British troops penned up in Boston by angry farmers turned soldiers. Peyton Randolph, the dignified Virginian who had presided the previous fall, was once again chosen as p...
2025-11-1525 min
The American PresidentsHenry Middleton – Second President of the First Continental Congress (1774)Henry Middleton – Second President of the First Continental Congress (1774)On a humid afternoon in the fall of 1774, when the air in Philadelphia still held a faint memory of summer, the delegates to the First Continental Congress returned from dinner to find that something had shifted. Peyton Randolph, the Virginian who had presided over their sessions with grave, measured calm, was gone—summoned back home by illness and obligations. The chair at the front of the hall was suddenly vacant, and with it the fragile center of their improvised national politics. The men from New England, the middle colo...
2025-11-1522 min
The American PresidentsPeyton Randolph – First President of the First Continental Congress (1774)In the autumn of 1774, long before anyone could imagine a “President of the United States,” a group of men gathered in Philadelphia and improvised a government. They did not call it that, not yet. They called it a Congress, a meeting of colonies that still—at least officially—claimed loyalty to George III. They were petitioners, not revolutionaries, or so they told themselves. Inside the long, echoing hall where they met, the air was thick with tobacco smoke and unease. No one knew whether this gathering would end in reconciliation, arrest warrants, or something no one had words for yet. At...
2025-11-1518 min
Eastern Philosophy for BeginnersAshoka - From Conquest to DharmaToday we meet a ruler whose life is a hinge between two worlds: the world where empire is measured by blood and borders, and the world where a king kneels before conscience and tries—against history’s habits—to govern for the welfare of all beings. His name is Ashoka, third emperor of the Maurya dynasty, who reigned in the third century before the common era. If Mahavira showed us the rigor of personal nonviolence, and the Buddha taught a path of liberation one mind at a time, Ashoka tried to move a continent’s politics by turning remorse into pol...
2025-11-1324 min
Eastern Philosophy for BeginnersConfucius - The Teacher of HarmonyIn a small walled town in ancient China over two and a half millennia ago, a child was born who would become one of history’s most influential teachers. This child, born in 551 BCE in the state of Lu, was named Kong Qiu – later known to the world by the Latinized name Confucius, meaning “Master Kong”. At the time of his birth, China was not a unified empire but a patchwork of feudal states. The once-glorious Zhou dynasty was in decline; its authority had fragmented, and local lords ruled their domains like independent kingdoms. It was an age of politica...
2025-11-1350 min
Scientific Giants - Minds that Shaped Human HistoryAntoine‑Laurent LavoisierToday we unlock a small laboratory in Paris where the air is weighed as carefully as gold and names are chosen with the seriousness of treaties. On a bench sit a water‑sealed gasometer, a balance so sensitive that breathing on its pans could ruin an afternoon, glass retorts with long swan necks, a furnace that keeps its temper because the person who tends it keeps his. In this room a familiar world of elements will be sorted again, and a rumor with a pleasing name will be weighed and found wanting. The man is Antoine‑Laurent Lavoisier. He will...
2025-11-1326 min
Scientific Giants - Minds that Shaped Human HistoryIsaac Newton - The Father of GravityToday we climb a narrow stair in Cambridge, run a palm along a scarred table, and pause at a pinhole cut in a shutter that turns noon into a blade. On the table lies a prism, a small triangle of glass that, to most hands, would be a trinket for teasing color out of sunlight. In these hands it becomes a witness. A beam slants in, strikes the glass, and falls on the opposite wall as a band of colors, edged cleanly enough that you can count where red surrenders to orange and where violet stops pretending to be...
2025-11-1229 min
Scientific Giants - Minds that Shaped Human HistoryLouis PasteurToday we unlock a laboratory door in Paris and a faint sweetness greets us—a broth of sugar and yeast, a tang of wine gone wrong, the metallic breath of steam. On one bench a row of glass vessels stands like a choir, each with a long, swan‑curved neck. On another, flasks cradle broths that were boiled and then left to cool under arches of glass that invite air but trap dust. A small flame licks at a burner; a hand adjusts it until the liquid shivers and then calms. The hand belongs to a man with a larg...
2025-11-1229 min
AI - An Uncertain FutureAI - IrreversibilityIntegration crosses thresholds beyond which rollback is impossible. This episode details how AI dependency accumulates in grids, hospitals, finance, and cognition itself. Safety nets erode as human skills atrophy. Even flawed systems cannot be removed without collapse. The control problem, once a thought experiment about future superintelligence, is already here at the societal scale. From here on, solutions will require more AI, not less, because the old systems no longer exist.Produced by Selenius Media
2025-11-1224 min
Eastern Philosophy for BeginnersBuddhaPicture an old sage riding on the back of a water buffalo, departing the gates of an ancient city as the sun sets. This wise old man is Laozi – literally “Old Master” – the legendary philosopher of ancient China. According to tradition, Laozi grew weary of the moral decay and turmoil of his time. In his twilight years, he chose to leave civilization behind, traveling westward toward the mountains, seeking solitude. At a frontier pass, a guard named Yinxi recognized the sage and begged him to record his wisdom before he vanished into the wilderness. Laozi stopped and composed a slender...
2025-11-1137 min
AI - An Uncertain FutureAI - Multipolar ASI: Endgame of Rival AI Systems?As AI capabilities advance, multiple powers—nations, corporations, even warlords—race to attain artificial general intelligence. Episode 10 envisions the endgame when more than one actor holds an AGI or even an artificial superintelligence (ASI). The episode examines scenarios of a multipolar AI world, where no single entity can monopolize superintelligence. It asks: what happens when rival AIs, each pursuing their creators’ interests, collide? Through speculative yet plausible future vignettes, we see the terrifying game theory of multiple superintelligences. In one outcome, a dominant AI achieves decisive superiority, subjugating all competitors and the human population along with them. In another, evenly...
2025-11-0936 min
Pioneers of Psychology and PsychiatryErik Erikson – The Eight Ages of the SelfIdentity, crisis, and the lifelong journey of becoming.A fair-haired boy of about ten stands outside his school in Karlsruhe, Germany, clutching his satchel and fighting back tears. It is the early 1910s, and young Erik Homburger – not yet Erik Erikson – has just endured another confusing day of taunts. At his Jewish temple school, his classmates sneered that he looked too Aryan, calling him goy, an outsider, because of his blue eyes and blond hair. But in the neighborhood streets, other children chased and mocked him with anti-Semitic slurs, seeing only that he was being raised in a Je...
2025-11-0624 min
Pioneers of Psychology and PsychiatryKaren Horney – Against FreudCulture, gender, and the feminist revolt inside psychoanalysis.Karen Horney stood at the podium with a steady gaze, the low hum of anticipation filling the lecture hall. It was 1941 in New York City, and she was about to address a crowd of psychoanalysts and students on why she had broken away from orthodox Freudianism. This was not just an academic lecture – it was a declaration of independence. As she surveyed the expectant faces, Karen could not help but recall the winding path that had brought her here, from a rebellious girlhood in Germany to this pivotal moment of...
2025-11-0131 min
AI - An Uncertain FutureAI - Civic Architecture and ProcurementCity governments are early adopters of AI in policing, benefits, and administration. This episode examines procurement as a lever for public values. Contracts determine audit rights, data ownership, and appeal processes—yet are often signed with little debate. Some municipalities experiment with transparency registries and public input, but most chase cost savings. The civic architecture built today will determine whether AI in government supports citizens’ agency or reduces them to managed objects.Produced by Selenius Media
2025-11-0119 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersMichel FoucaultMichel Foucault is the philosopher who taught us to question how knowledge itself can be a form of power. He was a French thinker who didn’t look like a typical academic sage studying timeless truths from an armchair. Instead, he prowled through archives of asylums, prisons, and clinics to uncover how modern society quietly defines what is normal and what is deviant. Born Paul-Michel Foucault in nineteen twenty-six in the provincial city of Poitiers, France, he came of age in a country rebuilding after World War Two. He studied philosophy and psychology in the elite halls of Paris, ju...
2025-10-2918 min
AI - An Uncertain FutureAI - Synthetic Media and the Collapse of TrustDeepfakes, voice clones, and algorithmically tailored propaganda blur the line between real and fabricated. This episode shows how authenticity collapses when seeing is no longer believing. The danger is not only that people fall for fakes, but that truth itself becomes contestable. In such a fog, accountability erodes, propaganda flourishes, and democracy weakens. The battle for trust will define whether societies can hold a common reality in an AI-saturated media landscape.Produced by Selenius Media
2025-10-2920 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersHannah Arendt Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in Hanover, Germany, to a secular Jewish family. She grew up in Königsberg (Immanuel Kant’s city), raised largely by her mother after her father died when she was seven. Brilliant and strong-willed, Arendt studied philosophy at university under some of Germany’s greatest thinkers – including Martin Heidegger at Marburg (with whom she had a youthful love affair) and Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg. She completed a dissertation on St. Augustine’s concept of love. But Arendt’s academic career in Germany was cut short by the rise of the Nazis in 1933. As an outspoken J...
2025-10-2718 min
AI - An Uncertain FutureAI - Education in the Machine AgeAI tutors and grading assistants can personalize learning or hollow it out. This episode explores the fork in the road: augmentation that frees teachers for mentorship, or automation that reduces education to standardized modules. Equity concerns loom—will wealthy schools enrich human teaching with AI while poorer districts replace it? Beyond efficiency, the question is cultural: do we define education as delivering content, or as shaping citizens? AI magnifies whichever answer we choose.Produced by Selenius Media
2025-10-2621 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersMartin HeideggerMartin Heidegger was born in 1889 in Messkirch, a rural Catholic town in southwestern Germany. His upbringing was humble; his father was a sexton. Young Heidegger was initially headed for the priesthood – he even started seminary – but he developed an intense interest in philosophy (spurred by reading Brentano) and switched to studying that at the University of Freiburg. He earned his doctorate and then worked under Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology.By the 1920s, Heidegger’s own philosophical ideas were taking shape. In 1927, he published Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), a groundbreaking and notoriously difficult work. In it...
2025-10-2411 min
AI - An Uncertain FutureAI - Ownership and the StackWho controls the means of intelligence? This episode examines the AI infrastructure stack—chips, cloud, data, and models—now concentrated in a few corporations and nations. Like oil or steel in earlier eras, AI has become a chokepoint of economic and geopolitical power. Open weights promise freedom but accelerate misuse; secrecy entrenches oligarchy. The debate over ownership is not academic: it determines whether AI becomes a public utility or a rent-extraction machine.Selenius Media
2025-10-2229 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersSøren KierkegaardSøren Kierkegaard was born in 1813 in Copenhagen, Denmark, the youngest of seven children of a wealthy wool merchant. His father was stern, deeply pious, and prone to guilt and melancholy – traits he passed to Søren. Kierkegaard grew up in a house haunted by a sense of sin and religious intensity (his father believed he’d cursed their family by an impious act as a boy, and indeed many of Søren’s siblings died young, fueling that tragic belief).Kierkegaard studied theology and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. He wasn’t a diligent student at first –...
2025-10-2113 min
Pioneers of Psychology and PsychiatryAlfred Adler – The Striving for SuperiorityEpisode Title: Alfred Adler – The Striving for SuperiorityPodcast: Pioneers of Psychology and Psychiatry Season 1: The Birth of the Mind (1860–1930) Produced by Selenius Media & The Artificial Laboratory.In this episode, we turn to Alfred Adler, the Viennese doctor who believed that what truly drives human behavior is not sex, fear, or fate — but the will to overcome. A sickly child who once overheard a doctor say he would not survive, Adler grew up determined to prove him wrong. That early struggle shaped his lifelong conviction that humans are defined by their striving — their urge to rise abo...
2025-10-2118 min
AI - An Uncertain FutureAI - The Illusion of ObjectivityAlgorithms are marketed as neutral, but their outputs mirror the biases of their training data and objectives. This episode investigates risk scores in courts, résumé filters in hiring, and recommendation engines in media—systems that appear objective yet quietly perpetuate inequity. The problem is not intent but opacity. Decisions dressed in statistical rigor command deference, even when wrong. Without transparency, appeal, and accountability, algorithmic judgment becomes a new disguise for old prejudices.Selenius Media & The Artificial Laboratory
2025-10-2023 min
Pioneers of Psychology and PsychiatryCarl Jung – The Shadow and the SelfIn this episode, we enter the world of Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who broke away from Freud to pursue a deeper vision of the mind — one that reached beyond the personal into the collective. For Jung, the psyche wasn’t just a battlefield of repressed desires; it was an ancient landscape filled with myths, archetypes, and symbols that spoke to all of humanity.He called it the collective unconscious — the vast, inherited memory of our species. From this realm emerged the archetypes: the Hero, the Shadow, the Anima, the Wise Old Man — timeless patterns that shape ou...
2025-10-1837 min
AI - An Uncertain FutureA History of the AI DreamThroughout history humans have imagined and strived to create artificial beings with intelligence. From ancient legends of mechanical servants to modern deep learning systems, the story of artificial intelligence (AI) spans millennia. This script traces that journey in a series of thematic chapters, each highlighting a phase in the evolution of AI. We begin in the realm of myth and legend, travel through early mechanical inventions and philosophical ideas, and arrive at the cutting-edge AI of today, examining capabilities, limitations, and future implications.Produced by Selenius Media
2025-10-171h 39
AI - An Uncertain FutureAI - Timeline and Purpose: Integration v. InnovationInnovation dazzles, but implementation and integration take years. This episode explores the adoption curve—why authoritarian systems accelerate while democracies deliberate. The drivers are greed, control, power, but also curiosity and care. Resistance slows reckless rollouts, yet convenience pulls adoption forward. The key question is purpose: what is AI for, if so much of its use bends toward control?Selenius Media.
2025-10-1422 min
Pioneers of Psychology and PsychiatryIvan Pavlov – The Dog, the Bell, and the ReflexFrom saliva to behaviorism — the roots of conditioning.Pavlov did not come to psychology by intention. He came from the hard school of physiology, a discipline that prized measurable processes and unromantic claims. He trained hands to do delicate surgery on small nerves and glands, and he built apparatus that could give the body a chance to tell the truth without theatrics. Digestion, to him, was a symphony of secretions and muscular waves; he wrote a great treatise on it and won the highest prize his profession could bestow. In 1904 the Nobel committee called his name for di...
2025-10-1129 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersFriedrich NietzscheFriedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Röcken, a village in Saxony (now Germany). His father was a Lutheran pastor who died young; Nietzsche was raised in a pious household of women (mother, sister, grandmother). A precocious student, he excelled in classical philology (the study of Greek and Roman texts). At 24, he became a professor at Basel, Switzerland – extraordinarily young. But academic life didn’t suit his fiery spirit for long. He was deeply influenced by composer Richard Wagner (they were friends for a time) and by the philosophy of Schopenhauer (the idea of life as driven by irrational will...
2025-10-1135 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersImmanuel KantImmanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, a provincial capital on the Baltic Sea (today Kaliningrad). He was raised in a modest artisanal family and educated in a pietistic Lutheran tradition that stressed duty and virtue. Young Kant was intellectually precocious. He studied at the University of Königsberg (never venturing more than a hundred miles from his birthplace his entire life). After some years as a private tutor, he became a professor at Königsberg and taught there for four decades.Selenius Media & The Artificial Laboratory
2025-10-1113 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersDavid HumeA stout, rosy-cheeked old man lies propped up in bed, greeting his visitor with a gentle smile. It is the summer of 1776 in Edinburgh, and David Hume knows he is dying. Yet there is no fear in his clear grey eyes—only mild amusement at the anxious expression on young James Boswell’s face. Boswell has come to see whether the great skeptic is frightened to meet his Maker at last. But Hume, ever composed, chuckles softly. He spins an imaginary tale for Boswell: perhaps, he says, he might bargain with Charon, the ferryman of Hades, to grant him a fe...
2025-10-1131 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersSimone de BeauvoirSimone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 into a bourgeois Parisian family. Her father was a traditionalist who once ruefully said, “Simone thinks like a man!” – noticing her fierce intellect. Beauvoir was indeed precocious and very independent-minded. After World War I, her family lost much of its wealth, but they still prioritized a good education for Simone. Deeply religious as a child, Beauvoir experienced a loss of faith in adolescence and thereafter declared herself an atheist – but one with a strong sense of ethical drive.Beauvoir studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, where in 1929 she became the youngest person (and only...
2025-10-1114 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersJean-Paul SartreJean-Paul Sartre was born in 1905 in Paris. His father, a naval officer, died when Sartre was an infant, so he was raised by his mother in his maternal grandfather’s home. As a child, he was small, sickly, and partially blind in one eye (which gave him his signature walleyed look). But he was precocious and developed an early love of literature. Sartre studied philosophy at the elite École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he met Simone de Beauvoir, a fellow philosophy student who would become his life-long companion and intellectual collaborator (their open partnership – they never married – became n...
2025-10-1116 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersAlbert CamusAlbert Camus was born in 1913 in Mondovi, French Algeria. His background was humble: his father was an agricultural worker who died in World War I when Camus was a baby, and his illiterate mother of Spanish origin raised him in a poor neighborhood of Algiers. Despite hardship (they lived in a two-room apartment; Camus later said he never forgot the silent suffering of his mother, which informed his outlook on human resilience), Camus excelled in school. He was a bright, athletic young man – passionate about football (soccer) and the outdoors of the Mediterranean.Selenius Media & The Artificial La...
2025-10-1114 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersRené DescartesToday we enter the seventeenth century, a moment when philosophy took a decisive turn into what we now call modernity. Our guide is René Descartes, born in 1596 in La Haye in France, a man whose restless mind and relentless pursuit of certainty reshaped the intellectual map of Europe. He is remembered for his famous declaration, cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I am – a phrase that became the rallying cry of rationalism and the cornerstone of modern philosophy. But Descartes was not only a philosopher. He was also a mathematician, a scientist, and a mor...
2025-10-1118 min
AI - An Uncertain FutureAI - Labor, Wages, and the Consumer ParadoxAutomation promises efficiency but shrinks the wage base that underpins consumer demand. This episode explores how AI hollows out the labor market, compresses wages, and erodes the social contract. Universal basic income emerges as a stopgap, but it cannot restore meaning to lives defined by work. Without redistributing gains through ownership or co-design, society risks a paradox: abundant output with too few consumers able to afford it, and a populace adrift in purposelessness.Selenius Media & The Artificial Laboratory
2025-10-1125 min
AI - An Uncertain FutureAI - While We Were SleepingAI integrated itself into essential services without public debate. Contracts embedded models in schools, hospitals, and city IT systems. The transition was subtle—dashboards, assistants, fraud detection—but irreversible once habits formed. This episode examines how adoption happened through procurement, not referendum, and how institutions traded resilience for optimization. When outages occur, there is no manual fallback. A city that never voted for AI wakes to find its systems cannot run without it.Selenius Media & The Artificial Laboratory
2025-10-1123 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersJohn LockeIn this episode of Philosophy for Beginners, we turn to John Locke (1632–1704), the philosopher of liberty and natural rights. In his Two Treatises of Government, Locke argued that all people are born with rights to life, liberty, and property, and that governments exist only to protect those rights. If rulers become tyrants, the people have the right to resist. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding advanced the idea that the mind is a “blank slate,” shaped by experience and education. Locke’s defense of toleration and consent became a cornerstone of modern democracy and influenced revolutions across the world.Produc...
2025-09-1713 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersHeraclitus - Panta Reieraclitus on Change and the Search for BalanceWhat if the very thing that unsettles you—change—is also the key to inner steadiness? In our debut episode on Philosophy Now! we trek back to Ephesus (circa 500 BCE) to meet Heraclitus, the loner philosopher who claimed that “all things flow” and that “character is fate.” His surviving fragments—fewer than a hundred cryptic lines hit harder than ever in an era of 24-hour news cycles and zero-sum reasoning.Produced by Selenius Media - the team behind Philosophy for Beginners.
2025-09-1714 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersAquinas: Faith and ReasonAquinas: Faith and ReasonCan faith and reason truly work together? In this episode of Philosophy for Beginners, we explore the thought of Thomas Aquinas, the medieval scholar who sought harmony between Aristotle’s philosophy and Christian theology.Aquinas argued that reason could uncover truths about the natural world, while faith revealed mysteries beyond reason’s reach. His Summa Theologica became a cornerstone of Western philosophy and theology, shaping debates on ethics, law, and the nature of God.Join us as we uncover how Aquinas united faith and reason — and why his vision contin...
2025-09-1710 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersMichel de MontaigneIn this episode of Philosophy for Beginners, we turn to Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), the French nobleman who withdrew from public life to a tower filled with books and invented a new form of philosophy: the essay. Montaigne believed that wisdom comes not from building grand systems but from examining ordinary experience with honesty and doubt. He wrote about friendship, death, custom, and the body with candor that still feels startlingly modern. By asking “What do I know?” Montaigne taught that humility and skepticism can be virtues, and that philosophy should help us live well rather than argue endlessly.Prod...
2025-09-1712 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersTitle: Niccolò Machiavelli – The Morality of PowerTitle: Niccolò Machiavelli – The Morality of PowerIn this episode of Philosophy for Beginners, we leave the humanist gentleness of Erasmus and step into the sharp world of Florentine politics with Niccolò Machiavelli. Civil servant, diplomat, dramatist, and author of The Prince and Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli has been remembered as ruthless and cunning — but his deepest concern was the survival of the state. What does it really take to hold power, to govern effectively, to preserve liberty against invasion and corruption? We explore his hard-eyed honesty about human nature, his vision of virtù and fortuna, and his end...
2025-09-1713 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersBoethiusWhat does it mean to find hope when fortune turns against you? In this episode of Philosophy for Beginners, we explore the life and thought of Boethius, a Roman statesman whose fall from power gave rise to one of the most influential works of medieval philosophy, The Consolation of Philosophy.Guided by the figure of Lady Philosophy, Boethius wrestled with questions of fate, free will, and the nature of true happiness. His reflections shaped centuries of Christian and philosophical thought — from Dante to Aquinas — and still offer wisdom for anyone facing hardship today.Join us as w...
2025-09-1709 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersHypatia: The Philosopher of AlexandriaHypatia: The Philosopher of AlexandriaWelcome to Philosophy for Beginners. Today, we turn to Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 360–415 CE), one of the most remarkable figures of late antiquity. A mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher, Hypatia became a symbol of intellectual courage in a world of political and religious upheaval.In this episode, we’ll explore her life as a teacher at the great Library of Alexandria, her contributions to philosophy and science, and the tragic circumstances of her death that made her a martyr for reason and free inquiry. Hypatia’s legacy endures as a reminder of the...
2025-09-1715 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersMarcus Aurelius - Emperor & PhilosopherMarcus Aurelius was both emperor and philosopher, a man who ruled the most powerful empire of his time while quietly recording his private reflections on life, duty, and mortality. In this episode, we explore The Meditations—a work never meant for publication, yet which has become one of the most influential texts in Stoic philosophy. We’ll see how Marcus wrestled with power, loss, and the fleeting nature of existence, and why his wisdom continues to guide readers in search of resilience and inner calm.Produced by Selenius Media and The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1733 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersAristotleIn this episode of Philosophy Now, we guide you through the essential philosophy of Aristotle, exploring his groundbreaking ideas on matter, form, and the purpose of life. Discover how Aristotle’s teachings on potentiality and actuality shape our understanding of the natural world and our place within it. Featuring dramatized insights and practical reflections, this journey into Aristotelian thought offers timeless wisdom for modern living.Produced by Selenius Media. Enjoy!
2025-09-1726 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersPlatoStep beyond the cave and into the mind of Western philosophy’s most enduring voice. Plato is the 3rd episode in the podcast Philosophy for beginners that unpacks one a western philosopher at a time in bite size 15 minute episodes. Whether you’re a newcomer to philosophy or a seasoned thinker revisiting old friends, Plato offers a fresh, cinematic gateway to the conversations that shaped our intellectual heritage—and still shape our future.Produced by Selenius Media - the team behind Philosophy for Beginners.
2025-09-1712 min
Western Moral Philosophy For BeginnersSocratesIn this episode, we dive into the life and legacy of Socrates, the enigmatic figure who changed the course of Western philosophy without writing a single word. Join us as we explore his relentless questioning, his infamous trial, and his profound ideas on ethics, virtue, and the examined life. From the streets of ancient Athens to his final moments with hemlock, we uncover why Socrates remains a symbol of intellectual courage and why his method still challenges us to think deeper today.Produced by Selenius Media - the team behind Philosophy for Beginners.
2025-09-1712 min
Classical Music GiantsJohannes Brahms – Tradition and DepthBrahms looked back to Bach and Beethoven even as he carried Romanticism forward. His symphonies, chamber music, and songs balance structure with passion, discipline with lyrical beauty. In Brahms, the classical and the Romantic find their most powerful reconciliation.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1709 min
Classical Music GiantsGeorge Friederic Handel – Majesty and DramaGeorge Frideric Handel – Majesty and DramaHandel’s career spanned opera houses and royal courts, with music that captured both grandeur and emotional depth. From Messiah to the Water Music, Handel fused spectacle with humanity, writing melodies that became woven into public life and remain instantly recognizable centuries later.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1709 min
Classical Music GiantsJohann Sebastian Bach – The Architect of HarmonyJohann Sebastian Bach – The Architect of HarmonyIn this episode of Classical Giants, we step into the sound world of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose mastery of counterpoint and harmony defined the very language of Western music. From the organ lofts of Leipzig to the grand suites and sacred works that still inspire awe, Bach united technical brilliance with profound spiritual depth. His compositions, from the Brandenburg Concertos to the Mass in B minor, reveal a mind that balanced mathematical precision with transcendent beauty. Though underappreciated in his own lifetime, Bach’s music became the foundation upon which cent...
2025-09-1725 min
Classical Music GiantsJoseph Haydn – Father of the SymphonyJoseph Haydn – Father of the SymphonyHaydn shaped the forms of the symphony and string quartet, setting the stage for Mozart and Beethoven. Working under patronage, he balanced invention with accessibility, creating music that blended wit, elegance, and structure. His symphonies brought order and delight to Europe’s concert halls.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1709 min
Classical Music GiantsJoseph Haydn – Father of the SymphonyJoseph Haydn – Father of the SymphonyHaydn shaped the forms of the symphony and string quartet, setting the stage for Mozart and Beethoven. Working under patronage, he balanced invention with accessibility, creating music that blended wit, elegance, and structure. His symphonies brought order and delight to Europe’s concert halls.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1709 min
Classical Music GiantsWolfgang Amadeus Mozart – The Prodigy of GraceWolfgang Amadeus Mozart – The Prodigy of GraceMozart’s genius seemed effortless, producing operas, symphonies, and concertos that overflow with clarity, balance, and emotion. From The Marriage of Figaro to the Jupiter Symphony, Mozart combined technical mastery with profound humanity, capturing the light and shadow of life in perfect proportion.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1709 min
Classical Music GiantsLudwig van Beethoven – The RevolutionaryLudwig van Beethoven – The RevolutionaryBeethoven stormed the boundaries of classical form, writing music of fierce individuality and raw power. His symphonies, piano sonatas, and string quartets embody a heroic struggle that reshaped music forever. Deaf yet undaunted, Beethoven gave the world a sound of defiance and triumph.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1710 min
Classical Music GiantsFranz Schubert – The Lyric VoiceFranz Schubert – The Lyric VoiceSchubert poured poetry into music, from intimate Lieder to expansive symphonies. His melodies sing with longing and tenderness, painting landscapes of emotion. Though his life was brief, his music endures as a testament to the beauty of fleeting moments.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1710 min
Classical Music GiantsRobert Schumann – The Romantic ImaginationRobert Schumann – The Romantic ImaginationSchumann blended dream and reality, his piano cycles, symphonies, and songs full of personal voices and poetic visions. His music captures both joy and melancholy, reflecting the Romantic spirit of inner worlds made audible.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1708 min
Classical Music GiantsFrédéric Chopin – Poet of the PianoFrédéric Chopin – Poet of the PianoChopin transformed the piano into an expressive world of its own. His nocturnes, mazurkas, and études combine virtuosity with intimacy, national pride with universal poetry. Every phrase seems to sigh, whisper, or blaze, creating an unmistakable voice of longing and lyricism.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1710 min
Classical Music GiantsFranz Liszt – The Virtuoso ShowmanFranz Liszt – The Virtuoso ShowmanLiszt dazzled Europe with performances that seemed superhuman, yet he was also a composer of depth and innovation. From symphonic poems to visionary piano works, Liszt pushed the boundaries of technique and imagination, inspiring generations of musicians.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1708 min
Classical Music GiantsGioachino Rossini – The Maestro of Wit and CrescendoGioachino Rossini – The Maestro of Wit and CrescendoRossini turbocharged opera buffa with blade-sharp ensembles, rocket-propelled overtures, and the signature Rossini crescendo—turning timing into ecstasy. From Il barbiere di Siviglia and L’italiana in Algeri to La Cenerentola and the grand sweep of Guillaume Tell and Semiramide, his bel canto lines made voices sparkle and stages fizz.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1710 min
Classical Music GiantsArnold Schoenberg – The Liberator of DissonanceArnold Schoenberg – The Liberator of DissonanceSchoenberg shattered tonality’s frame and taught dissonance to live at home—evolving from late-Romantic glow (Verklärte Nacht) to expressionist speech-song (Pierrot lunaire) and the twelve-tone method that rewired the century. From Five Pieces for Orchestra and the Piano Suite to A Survivor from Warsaw, he forged a modern grammar of necessity, not ornament.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1708 min
Classical Music GiantsDmitri Shostakovich – Witness of an EraDmitri Shostakovich – Witness of an EraShostakovich’s symphonies speak in whispers and shouts, veiling protest in irony while capturing the terror and resilience of life under Stalin. His music is both deeply Russian and universally human, testifying to endurance under pressure.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1709 min
Classical Music GiantsJean Sibelius – The Architect of Northern LightJean Sibelius – The Architect of Northern LightSibelius grew symphonies from the smallest cells, forging vast forms where silence has structure and time tightens like a drawn bow. From the Violin Concerto and the hammer-blow cadence of the Fifth to the single-span Seventh and the shadowed forest of Tapiola, his music speaks with granite clarity and inevitability.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1723 min
Classical Music GiantsRichard Strauss – The Architect of Operatic Shock and GraceRichard Strauss – The Architect of Operatic Shock and GraceStrauss bent the late-Romantic orchestra into modern theater: tone poems that swagger and wink (Don Juan, Also sprach Zarathustra, Till Eulenspiegel) and operas that blaze and melt (Salome, Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier). From Elektra’s cataclysm to Rosenkavalier’s waltz-lit tenderness and the valedictory hush of the Four Last Songs, he turned orchestration into psychology.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1721 min
Classical Music GiantsIgor Stravinsky – The Chameleon of the CenturyIgor Stravinsky – The Chameleon of the CenturyFrom the riot of The Rite of Spring to the neoclassicism of his later works, Stravinsky reinvented himself and music with each new era. His rhythms, colors, and daring remain a touchstone of modern music’s audacity.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1708 min
Classical Music GiantsPyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky – Emotion and ElegancePyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky – Emotion and EleganceTchaikovsky’s music unites Russian soul with Western forms, from ballets like Swan Lake to sweeping symphonies. His gift for melody and emotional directness makes his works beloved worldwide, shimmering with elegance and heartfelt intensity.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1708 min
Classical Music GiantsVerdi - dramatist of the human voiceVerdi the dramatist of the human voice—turning private feeling into public theater from Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La traviata to Aida, Otello, Falstaff; choruses that fueled the Risorgimento, recitatives cut to the bone, arias that argue, forgive, and refuse to forget—crowned by a Requiem that prays like opera and thunders like history. Produced by Selenius Media and The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1707 min
Classical Music GiantsVivaldi, - Venice’s “Red Priest”Vivaldi, Venice’s “Red Priest” who turned the Baroque concerto into high-voltage theater—hundreds of glittering works driven by blade-sharp ritornellos, coloristic orchestration, and rhythmic lift; from weather-drunk storytelling in The Four Seasons to the radiant sacred pages of the Gloria. Produced by Selenius Media and The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1712 min
Classical Music GiantsRichard Wagner – The Music DramatistRichard Wagner – The Music DramatistWagner transformed opera into mythic drama, weaving endless melody and massive orchestration into works like The Ring Cycle and Tristan und Isolde. His vision reshaped music’s future, for better and for controversy, making him one of history’s most influential figures.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1709 min
Classical Music GiantsMaurice Ravel – The Alchemist of ColorMaurice Ravel – The Alchemist of ColorRavel fused watchmaker precision with luminous orchestral color, turning classical forms into glittering modern myths. From the iridescent dawn of Daphnis et Chloé and the inexorable spiral of Boléro to the diabolical Gaspard de la nuit, the jazz-lit Piano Concerto in G, and the haunted whirl of La Valse, his craft makes perfection feel inevitable—and new.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1711 min
Classical Music GiantsRachmaninoffRachmaninoff: Exile, iron technique, and melodies built like architecture—concertos that breathe, symphonies that toll like bells, and late works (Symphonic Dances) that stare the 20th century down without flinching. Produced by Selenius Media and The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1724 min
Classical Music GiantsGiacomo Puccini – The Poet of the Human VoiceGiacomo Puccini – The Poet of the Human VoicePuccini fused cinematic pacing, luminous orchestration, and speech-like melody to turn ordinary lives into operatic lightning. From La Bohème and Tosca to Madama Butterfly and Turandot, his music makes love and loss feel immediate—intimate, volatile, and impossible to shake.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1710 min
Classical Music GiantsSergei Prokofiev – Irony and LyricismSergei Prokofiev – Irony and LyricismProkofiev’s music sparkles with wit, bite, and melodic grace. From Peter and the Wolf to the ballet Romeo and Juliet, his works balance sardonic humor with heartfelt lyricism, embodying the contradictions of the 20th century.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1710 min
Classical Music GiantsClaudio Monteverdi – The Inventor of Operatic TruthClaudio Monteverdi – The Inventor of Operatic TruthMonteverdi put words in command, shaping the seconda pratica so harmony served drama. From the clear-spoken revolution of L’Orfeo and the radiant ceremony of the 1610 Vespers to the worldly candor of Ulisse and Poppea, he turned speech into music and made opera modern.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1719 min
Classical Music GiantsFelix Mendelssohn – The Lyric ClaFelix Mendelssohn – The Lyric ClassicistMendelssohn fused Classical clarity with Romantic color—reviving Bach for a new era and shaping concert life as composer, conductor, and prodigy. From the windswept “Hebrides” Overture and fairy-lit A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the sunlit “Italian” Symphony and the singing Violin Concerto, his music moves with grace, intelligence, and light.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1710 min
Classical Music GiantsGustav Mahler – The Symphonist of the UniverseGustav Mahler – The Symphonist of the UniverseMahler’s symphonies contain entire worlds—song, dance, sorrow, and transcendence. Expansive yet intimate, his music wrestles with life, death, and meaning, bridging Romanticism and modernism in a monumental body of work.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1708 min
Classical Music GiantsClaude Debussy – Impressionist of SoundClaude Debussy – Impressionist of SoundDebussy painted with tone instead of brush, dissolving old harmonies into shimmering colors. From Clair de Lune to La Mer, his works capture atmosphere, subtlety, and suggestion, opening the door to modernism.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1707 min
Classical Music GiantsHector Berlioz – The Orchestral DramatistHector Berlioz – The Orchestral DramatistBerlioz turned the orchestra into living theater—obsession forged into form in Symphonie fantastique, choral cathedrals raised in the Requiem, and program music proved capable of thought, argument, and flame.Produced by Selenius Media — Music by The Artificial Laboratory.
2025-09-1717 min