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June 18, 2025 47 mins

EPISODE 139 | A Numbers Game: Mathspiracies

Guest: Gary Arndt, writer and host of the Everything Everywhere Daily podcast

We aren't really very good with numbers, so naturally we've come up with a lot of wacky ideas about them. Gary Arndt talks about numbers of all sorts, like why Pi is stupid, why prime numbers are cool, why the Fibonacci sequence isn't all that, when math leads to murder and much more.

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SECTIONS

  1. 02:25 - Numeracy rates, gambling is (usually) a sucker's bet, numerology, the Bible Code, p-hacking, Equidistant Letter Sequencing (ELS)
  2. 13:09 - The Hidden Hand of Mathematics, the Ultraviolet Catastrophe and the birth of quantum physics, the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Ratio
  3. 20:05 - Pi, tau, the Cult of Pythagoras, irrational numbers, transcendental numbers, squaring the circle, Alex Jones and math, the real number of the Beast
  4. 28:51 - Why people believe conspiracy theories
  5. 30:13 - Angel numbers, the "meanings" of numbers
  6. 33:43 - Numbers stations
  7. 37:25 - Prime numbers, Prime Target TV series, trapdoor functions in cryptography, Al-Khwarizmi, double entry bookkeeping, the idea of zero, zero and null are different
  8. 43:20 - Base-10, base-12, base-60, and our timekeeping and calendar systems
  • Music by Fanette Ronjat

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