You can be soaring silently with no engine at all for around five thousand dollars, or working two years toward an airline captain's seat for two hundred thousand. First in a new series comparing pilot licensing around the world, this episode covers the full Australian picture: gliding, gyrocopters, and the powered aeroplane ladder from RAAus through to a commercial licence. Hours, real costs, medical requirements, and how each pathway connects to the next.

Look! Squirrel! Your attention span is selective, not short.

An unscheduled episode. Dolly Parton died this week at 80, and I sat down to talk through her journey from a one-room Tennessee cabin to global icon, the songs, the Imagination Library, and why her death has hit so many people so hard. Curiosity, unfiltered, unapologetic, this time with a lump in the throat.

https://donate.imaginationlibrary.com/

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal declared the Waffen-SS a criminal organisation. Then it carved out an exception for one group of soldiers wearing the same uniform.

This episode covers the Latvian Legion, roughly eighty thousand men, most of whom never chose to be there, caught between two occupying powers in the middle of World War Two. The history of conscription, the small minority who genuinely volunteered and committed real atrocities, and why this is still a live political argument in the Baltics today.

Content note: this episode covers Nazi occupation, forced conscription, and war crimes, including the Holocaust in Latvia. Not one for the kids.

Look! Squirrel! Your attention span is selective, not short.