Tristan flies solo without Scott (now on baby duty) and brings in Phil and Kevin from the Pixelit podcast to crack open Nan Madol, the stone complex sitting on a coral reef in Pohnpei. Ancient Aliens says it was built by giants from the stars who ran a hybrid breeding program before culling the survivors. The actual story is way better: a feudal dynasty extracted so much labour from its people that they got overthrown, after which the survivors built one of the most deliberately decentralized political systems in the pre-modern Pacific. Then the episode follows a much weirder thread: how Helena Blavatsky's occult race theory became Lovecraft's cosmic horror, became a Cthulhu tabletop sanity mechanic, became Erich von Däniken's plagiarism, became the History Channel's "romance television for men" pitch deck, and became modern Great Replacement panic.

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Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Max

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