What the Fact | Official Trailer

The year 536 AD, the sun vanished. Not for an hour, not for a day, but for eighteen months. Crops failed, famine swept the globe, and a mysterious fog plunged half the world into a cold, dark twilight. That is the kind of story Connor Tomlinson, known to many from Love on the Spectrum, is here to unpack in his new podcast, What the Fact. Alongside co-host Carter Roy, Tomlinson promises to take a single, often surprising fact from history and pull the thread until the whole tapestry unravels.

The show’s format is simple: three facts per episode, each one a doorway into a deeper story. The trailer offers a handful of these entry points, each designed to upend a common assumption. The year 1816, for instance, is not just another year in the 19th century; it is "the year without a summer," a climatic catastrophe triggered by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the year prior. 1650 is a date that marks a different kind of darkness, likely pointing toward the aftermath of the Thirty Years' War or a period of intense global cooling known as the Little Ice Age. And 536 AD, the most dramatic example, is now understood by historians as the worst year to be alive, a period of volcanic winter and plague.