Imagine if you will that you're a 15 yr old boy, you've never met your father, and your mom died soon enough after your birth you don't remember her. You're raised by an aunt and uncle until one day your dad Niccolo and your Uncle Maffeo roll back into town and he's like "Hey I'm your Dad. Let me tell you about a guy named Kublai and a place called China." Two years later at 17, your dad decides it's time to return to China and the court of the Great Khan and you're coming along. After a dicey first leg of the trip where you may or may not have killed your first man, then almost due of Tuberculosis, you find out your Dad and Uncle have an all access pass for pretty much anything once you're within the Khan's lands, ANYTHING. You meet the Great Khan and he takes a shine to you and for the next 17 years you work for the Khan traveling throughout his empire as a representative under his protection. Marco would travel all over China the return to regale the Khan with stories of his own land in only the way that Marco could. He had a level of access to Kublai's Mongol Empire thats almost impossible to wrap your head around, but we're gonna try. Join us this week as we get Historically High and kinda erotic on Marco Polo.

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Without a doubt the closest the planet has come to nuclear war occurred between October 16th-28th 1962. The Cold War was at its peak. Brought there by the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion about 18 months earlier by "Cuban Exiles", with pretty obvious support from the United States. With nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey and Italy the U.S. had a huge advantage over the Soviet Union if it ever came to the first strike in an atomic conflict. Cuba and the Soviet Union decided nuclear strike parody was fair and thus began the process of moving nuclear capable missiles into Cuba and within 100 miles of Florida. Constant surveillance of Cuba by the United States discovered nuclear launch sites being constructed putting John F. Kennedy into a situation with razor thin margins for error. For 13 days the world stood on the brink, with JFK and Nikita Khrushchev playing a game of chess with nuclear annihilation as the stakes. So many things should have gone wrong, so what ended up going right? Join us this week as we get Historically High on The Cuban Missile Crisis.

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We're gonna go ahead and apologize in advance for any stumbles through this one. Sir Isaac Newton possessed a kind of brilliance that is very hard for the majority of people to really wrapped their heads around, and that includes us. Known as the Father of Modern Physics he didn't just help shape our understanding of the science of the natural world (not nature but the laws that govern nature, gravity, optics, movement, etc) but he deciphered a lot of the mysteries within it. He developed calculus because the math of his time wouldn't help him solve the questions he had. He discovered that light is made of a spectrum of colors that exist at all times even if we can't see them, and he revolutionized the understanding of gravity and planetary rotation. He was also human, who suffered from human flaws, vindictiveness being a pretty evident one. But as with most genius there can be a mania that lies beneath. Join us as we get Historically High on the smartest man we've covered to date.

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