The Inca Empire was the largest and most sophisticated state ever created in the pre-Columbian Americas, stretching along the Andes from present-day southern Colombia to central Chile and Argentina by the early 16th century.
What makes it historically significant is that the Inca managed to build and administer this enormous realm without many technologies that Eurasian civilizations relied on, such as iron tools, wheels, draft animals, or a conventional writing system.
As great as its accomplishments were, its fall at the hands of the Spanish was just as dramatic and sudden.
Learn more about the Incan Empire on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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The History of Tobacco
03/03/2026 | 16 mins.
When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, members of his crew observed the Taíno people offering them dried leaves as gifts.
They had no clue why, but they soon found out that native people smoked the burning leaves, and when they brought these leaves back to Europe, it became a sensation.
It created a demand for the product, which lasted for centuries and defined entire economies, until research in the 20th century found that it was doing far more harm than good.
Learn more about tobacco and how it shaped the world on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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Questions and Answers: Volume 40
01/03/2026 | 16 mins.
March is upon us. Here in the northern hemisphere, the days are getting longer, temperatures are getting warmer, and people are about to go nuts over college basketball for several weeks.
There is an old saying that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. That might be true, but I tend to think that March comes in like a question and goes out like an Answer.
Stay tuned for the 40th installment of Questions and Answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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Edgar Allan Poe
28/02/2026 | 15 mins.
Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most influential and haunting voices in American literature, a writer whose imagination reshaped horror, detective fiction, science fiction, and the modern short story
Poe lived a life marked by poverty, personal loss, and professional struggle, yet from that turbulence he forged works of enduring power such as The Raven, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Fall of the House of Usher.
His poetry explored obsession, beauty, and grief, while his tales of psychological terror probed the darkest corners of the human mind.
Learn about the life, death, and legacy of Edgar Allen Poe on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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Learn something new every day!
Everything Everywhere Daily is a daily podcast for Intellectually Curious People. Host Gary Arndt tells the stories of interesting people, places, and things from around the world and throughout history. Gary is an accomplished world traveler, travel photographer, and polymath.
Topics covered include history, science, mathematics, anthropology, archeology, geography, and culture.
Past history episodes have dealt with ancient Rome, Phoenicia, Persia, Greece, China, Egypt, and India. as well as historical leaders such as Julius Caesar, Emperor Augustus, Sparticus, and the Carthaginian general Hannibal.
Geography episodes have covered Malta, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Monaco, Luxembourg, Vatican City, the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, the Isle of Man, san marino, Namibia, the Golden Gate Bridge, Montenegro, and Greenland.
Technology episodes have covered nanotechnology, aluminum, fingerprints, longitude, qwerty keyboards, morse code, the telegraph, radio, television, computer gaming,
Episodes explaining the origin of holidays include Memorial Day, April Fool’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, May Day, Christmas, Ramadan, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Canada Day, the Fourth of July,
Famous people in history covered in the podcast include Salvador Dali, Jim Thorpe, Ada Lovelace, Jessie Owens, Robert Oppenheimer, Picasso, Isaac Newton, Attila the Hun, Lady Jane Grey, Cleopatra, Sun Yat Sen, Houdini, Tokyo Rose, William Shakespeare, Queen Boudica, Empress Livia, Marie Antoinette, the Queen of Sheba, Ramanujan, and Zheng He.
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