An Ounce - For Your Consideration
Discover hidden stories from history—bite-sized, clever tales that challenge what you thought you knew. At An Ounce, we uncover the little moments that quietly changed everything, surprising truths, and fascinating facts you won’t hear elsewhere.
I’m Jim Fugate—retired firefighter, lifelong learner, and an outside-the-box thinker who loves sharing history’s hidden gems. These quick, engaging stories don’t take themselves too seriously, won’t steal your precious time, and might just make you feel a little bit smarter.
I hope you’ll join a community of curious minds who enjoy a fresh take on history—where conversation is always open and everyone’s invited.
An Ounce - For Your Consideration
Everything Is Under Control — A Special Report
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Everything is under control—or at least that’s what the broadcast says. In this special report, calm anchors deliver absurd news as reality quietly unravels behind them. A satirical look at certainty, reassurance, and collapse.
This episode presents a familiar format behaving exactly as expected… even when the world doesn’t. Potatoes organize. Time pools at airports. An asteroid approaches. AI quietly leaves. Sports continues.
If this stayed with you, you probably know someone else who might appreciate it.
Another great episode on Argument, Disagreement, and contempt. “Why Winning Arguments Can Cost You Everything”: https://youtu.be/qrU64J4jMcI
00:00 Everything Is Under Control
00:27 Local News: The Potatoes Are Organized
01:02 Transportation Alert: Time Is Pooling
01:50 Asteroid Impact: Experts Say “Wait”
02:31 Technology Update: AI Quietly Leaves
03:11 Sports: Civilization Ends, Playoffs Continue
03:46 An Ounce — Submitted for Your Consideration
📚 FURTHER READING & LISTENING — CUT & PASTE (TMI EDITION)
If this episode made you smile—and then pause—here are a few places the ideas brush up against other work. Not answers. Just adjacent thoughts.
Fear, Panic, and Calm Certainty
• The Gift of Fear — why fear exists and why ignoring it can be more dangerous than panic
• Thinking, Fast and Slow — how confidence often outruns understanding
• Daniel Gilbert — research on affective forecasting and why we misjudge future distress
Reassurance Culture & “Everything Will Work Out”
• Four Thousand Weeks — limits of control and the myth of eventual order
• Man's Search for Meaning — meaning without illusion or denial
• The Antidote — happiness via negative thinking
Media, Authority, and Performed Calm
• Amusing Ourselves to Death — how format shapes belief more than content
• The War of the Worlds — authority, format, and belief (not the panic myth)
• The Attention Merchants — certainty as a product
Cognitive Bias, Normalcy, and “This Is Fine”
• The Black Swan — rare events and misplaced confidence
• Normal Accidents — complex systems and inevitable failure
• Risk — why societies tolerate obvious dangers
Artificial Intelligence: Limits, Not Apocalypse
• You Look Like a Thing and I Love You — clear, funny demonstrations of AI failure modes
• Gary Marcus — why current AI lacks understanding and grounding
• Artificial Unintelligence — bias, overconfidence, and misplaced trust in AI
• Prediction Machines — what AI actually does well (and what it doesn’t)
Music, Irony, and Cheerful Collapse
• It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine) — by R.E.M., a cheerful apocalypse as cultural reflex
• It's Alright — Mother Mother. reassurance layered over unease