Odd facts, researched past the punchline.
Your Brain on Facts follows strange trails through history, language, food, money, disasters, and pop culture. It suits curious listeners who like facts with context, caveats, and a narrator who enjoys the weird turn as much as the answer.
PRESS PLAY
Your Brain on Facts is a curiosity engine disguised as a trivia show. It starts with the kind of question that might come up at dinner, then keeps going until the simple answer gets complicated. A topic like rubber ducks becomes a story about childhood icons, charity races, state lottery law, and ocean-current research. A food episode moves from cream cheese to processed slices to chicken tikka masala and the blurry borders between invention, adaptation, and national pride. The show likes odd objects, but it is just as interested in the systems around them. Money, court decisions, shipping routes, public memory, and scientific credit all become fair game. Moxie gives the material a sharp, conversational pace without turning it into loose chat. The episodes feel written, checked, and edited, with room for asides that keep the research from becoming stiff. The humor is dry and occasionally blunt. It often works by puncturing a grand historical image with a practical detail. Pirate life gets scurvy, doldrums, supply failure, and no romantic gloss. Famous burglaries include a famous painting theft and a paperwork-based building theft, but the interest lies in how institutions miss what is happening in front of them. The show is also willing to go dark when the subject does. Its hidden-history material on Rosewood, Tulsa, and Chicago treats racist violence, official failure, and erased memory as central facts rather than background context. That range is the appeal. It can be silly about bath toys, exacting about legal tender, and grave about lynching and segregation without changing into a different program. Listeners get a voice that enjoys pedantry, admits uncertainty, and gives sources space to matter. The show is especially strong when familiar knowledge turns out to be backwards, incomplete, or built on a story people stopped questioning. It is trivia with connective tissue. The payoff is not just knowing a fact, but understanding why that fact survived.
Made for: For listeners who enjoy history, trivia, language, food origins, maritime lore, and cultural myths with a skeptical comic edge. It especially suits people who like facts that arrive with context rather than listicle speed.
What sets it apart: The show pairs brisk general-knowledge storytelling with source-aware caution and a distinctive dry wit. It can handle rubber ducks and processed cheese in one lane, then shift to Rosewood, Tulsa, and structural racism with appropriate seriousness.
Host Moxie LaBouche brings you a weekly half-hour of things you didn't know, things you thought you knew, and things you never knew you never knew. Topics range from the history of nursing to the Balinese funeral rite David Bowie requested, from the origin of the Vulcan salute to the theft of Canada's strategic maple syrup reserve. This is your brain on facts. yourbrainonfacts.com
Moxie gets you from rubber ducks to ocean currents before your skepticism finds its shoes.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A brisk, curious episode where familiar history keeps slipping into stranger, less settled shapes.
Episode 200 treats history as something lively and unsettled, following facts as they shift in use, memory, and retelling. The Sound of Music becomes a story about popularity in South Korea, where a Seoul cinema owner cut the songs to fit in more screenings.
A $2 billion building and an unnoticed Mona Lisa theft turn heist mythology into something stranger and more fragile.
Famous thefts do not always look like thefts, and Your Brain on Facts uses that mismatch as its hook. Moxie moves from the Mona Lisa, whose disappearance was not noticed right away, to the Empire State Building, which the New York Daily News managed to steal on paper in 2008.
Rosewood and Tulsa's Greenwood violence reveal how rumor, erasure, and official power shape memory.
Rosewood, Florida, opens the episode through a pale yellow house, framed as the lone survivor of racist violence that was quickly buried. The story then moves to Tulsa's Greenwood district, where an elevator encounter turns into an assault report, a rumor of attempted rape, a…
A sharp comic history of barter, counterfeit coins, inflation, and the penny's staying power.
Money starts here as a household-level problem, not an abstract system. Barter breaks down because the person with the stone axe does not need a ground sloth pelt, and a nanny goat is worth more than a water jug.
Overlooked lives, read from the sources, talked through warmly.
Mike Duncan narrates Rome's full history solo, from Aeneas to Romulus Augustulus's exile in 476.
Your Brain on Facts Episode 200, Part 2 pairs reindeer nose physiology with trivia on Jethro Tull, Coney Island, and Quebec's July 1 moving day.
For episode 200, Your Brain on Facts host Moxie runs a rapid-fire 'Fast Facts' format packed with dozens of trivia items and guest contributions from other podcasters celebrating the milestone.
Host Moxie of Your Brain on Facts explores heists and thefts that don't fit the typical caper mold, opening with the Empire State Building's fraudulent 2008 deed transfer as a teaser.
In this encore episode, Your Brain on Facts host Moxie examines three under-documented incidents of racial violence: the 1923 destruction of Rosewood, Florida, the 1921 Tulsa massacre that destroyed the Black Wall Street neighborhood of Greenwood, and the 1919 Chicago race riot that followed the drowning of teenager Eugene Williams.
["Your Brain on Facts uses Strange Currency to move from barter and commodity goods to cowrie shells, wampum, dolphin teeth, and Yap's six-ton ray stones.", "Moxie LaBouche connects Nara Japan's 708 copper coins, the 735 smallpox epidemic, and a 760 record that said as many as 50% of coins were fake.", "The episode then explains fiat currency, the UK gold standard in 1821, the U.S.
Moxie LaBouche's "Your Brain on Facts" episode traces foods whose names point to one place while their recipes came from another, including Philadelphia cream cheese, General Tso's chicken, fortune cookies, chimichangas, queso dip, and Pad Thai.
Your Brain on Facts host Moxie traces the rubber duck from Peter Ganeen's 1949 patented "uncapsizable duck," which sold 50 million units before the patent expired, through Charles Goodyear's 1839 vulcanization process that made real rubber viable.
Your Brain on Facts' 'Dread Pirate Misinformation' continues a two-part look at pirates and the Age of Sail, opening with how scurvy killed more than two million sailors between Columbus's voyage and the adoption of steam engines.
Host Moxie LaBouche introduces a special live interview episode with Javier Leyva from Pretend and Criminal Conduct.
This episode covers the 1990 Kahnawake Mohawk land protest and the violent encounter of two young sisters, highlighting untold stories of marginalized groups.
Host Moxie LaBouche covers multiple Halloween-related historical topics requested by patrons, starting with the facts and fiction behind Vlad Dracula.
Moxie discusses Banned Book Week and a controversy where pastors tried to ban a display of banned books, focusing on LGBTQ-themed books.