History with teeth, politics with memory.
Weird, Wicked, and Wild is a history-and-current-events conversation with a sharp eye for power, hypocrisy, and social damage. Jimmy Wills and Jeremy Caton move between presidential damage, authoritarianism, masculinity, vulnerability, and fast-moving headlines.
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Weird, Wicked, and Wild is a politically charged history show about how old patterns keep resurfacing in present-day life. Its central move is comparison: a strange or notorious episode from history is placed beside the anxieties, rhetoric, and institutional failures of the moment. Jimmy Wills and Jeremy Caton keep the format conversational. They trade reactions, jokes, clarifications, and sharp judgments while returning to researched historical claims. The show is not detached. It is openly concerned with authoritarianism, political cruelty, and the ways leaders turn fear into power. Several episodes track the damage done by U.S. presidents, asking how presidential harm should be measured and how the present compares with the past. Donald Trump is treated as a major recurring subject, especially in relation to executive power, political chaos, and inherited dysfunction. The show also widens beyond presidents. One episode uses toxic masculinity and the idea of the "real man" to talk about emotional repression, shame, and vulnerability. Another works through fascist patterns, including dehumanizing rhetoric, frustrated middle-class appeal, and examples tied to Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Umberto Eco's framework. The news-oriented A Week in the Wild episodes give the feed a faster pulse. Those installments react to federal government developments, Cory Booker's Senate speech, the Signal-chat controversy involving Jeffrey Goldberg, and the election of a new pope. The pacing can jump from Latin church language to Lord of the Rings jokes to alarm over democratic decline. That mix is the point. Weird, Wicked, and Wild suits listeners who want history with an edge, not a museum voice. It is funny when it can be, uneasy when it has to be, and usually most interested in what power does to ordinary people.
Made for: For listeners who like historical storytelling tied directly to present-day politics, culture, and social conflict. It especially suits people comfortable with blunt political commentary and morally charged conversations about power.
What sets it apart: The show combines researched historical framing with the loose energy of two friends arguing through the news. Its shorter current-events episodes sit beside longer thematic arcs, so the feed can move from papal smoke to presidential damage without changing its core lens.
Welcome to Weird, Wicked, & Wild, a new hard-hitting podcast about the world we live in and how we got here. Part storytelling, part conversation, we're two old friends talking about what we've learned--or failed to learn--from our histories. In our show, we'll explore the historical record to find the weirdest, wickedest, and wildest takeaways from the great--or not-so-great--stories from the past that help us make sense of where we are now.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Historical case studies and candid conversation reveal how authoritarian politics repurpose tradition, fear, and heroic myth.
Weird, Wicked, and Wild turns historical ideas into tools for examining authoritarian politics. Jimmy Wills and Jeremy Caton work through the material as a conversation, with research and writing credited to Dr. James Wills.
Augustus never ages in marble; you get a history lesson with a raised eyebrow.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A heated political roundup on tariffs, imprisonment, and power when the news turns unsettling.
A Week in the Wild turns current events into a pointed argument about judgment, power, and the public cost of political decisions. Jimmy Wills and Jeremy Caton move from tariff and stock market chicanery to the case of Mr.
A loose, self-aware pass through current events, anchored by a Hall of Fame list and a Greenville flag dispute.
The episode ties a 2025 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame list to a Greenville flag dispute, and it does so with a clear sense of what it is and is not doing.
Fear and authority shape what people accept as real, and the episode keeps that idea front and center.
The episode links an evangelical Christian upbringing to Plato's cave and then to authoritarian power, using those images to show how fear can make frightening shadows feel real.
A brisk conversational roundup that stays close to facts, resists spin, and keeps pace with the week’s oddest federal stories.
A Week in the Wild uses Jimmy Wills and Jeremy Caton to make current events feel immediate and conversational, opening with Cory Booker’s 25 hours and four minutes on the Senate floor before shifting into the Signal discussion.
A punchy, loose history discussion about heroes, militarism, and the cost of worshipping strength.
Weird, Wicked, and Wild treats heroism as something shaped by weight and consequence, moving from private ideas of heroes into Sparta, sacrifice, and the cost of training boys for war.
A Roman deep dive that uses Eco, Augustus, and image-making to show how tradition gets weaponized.
Weird, Wicked, and Wild opens with Eco's first fascist tenet, the cult of tradition, and uses it to show how Roman legitimacy grows out of myth, bloodlines, and image.
A plainspoken take on authoritarian habits and why community still matters.
Weird, Wicked, and Wild starts with a sharp warning about authoritarianism in the United States and across the Western world, then stays with the familiar machinery behind it: fear, scapegoating, and the way a frustrated middle class can get pulled in.
Phoebe Judge narrates true crime history and interviews the authors who uncovered it.
Dramatized deep dives into American history, from the Galveston hurricane to Harper Lee's Mockingbird.
Dana Schwartz narrates the violent lives of monarchs, warlords, and queens.
Tracy Wilson and Holly Frey narrate overlooked history, from Courbet's realism to IUD regulation.
The hosts analyze the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S.
In this introductory episode, co-hosts Jeremy Caton and Dr.
Weird, Wicked, and Wild uses "Mos Maiorum" to connect Umberto Eco's "cult of tradition" to Roman politics.
Weird, Wicked, and Wild's 'Death Before Dishonor' asks why heroism so often gets linked to death, martyrdom, and political violence.
Hosts Jimmy Wills and Jeremy Caton open A Week in the Wild by characterizing Trump's tariff rollout and subsequent 90-day pause, announced via a post signed 'DJT' (his company's stock ticker), as textbook insider trading, citing Marjorie Taylor Greene's stock gains and China's 145% counter-tariff as part of the fallout.
Weird, Wicked, and Wild opens with a childhood account of being told that calling on Jesus could stop a kidnapping, then uses that memory to frame fear and reassurance as the same message.
A Week in the Wild opens with Jimmy Wills and Jeremy Caton saying they are reacting to current events rather than reporting the news, then they jump into the 2025 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame list.
Hosts Jimmy Wills and Jeremy Caton launch a new news-roundup segment called "A Week in the Wild," opening with Senator Cory Booker's 25-hour, 4-minute Senate floor speech that broke a record previously held by segregationist Strom Thurmond.