Nerdish vs Simposeum

Nerdish is a learning app that helps you grow your general knowledge. The articles inside are our own — written to show you things you'd never thought to look up, feed your curiosity, and help you learn more about the world. You can read them or listen to them, and most take about ten minutes: why people like spicy food, what Nefertiti actually looked like, how the internet crosses oceans. What's inside: - Articles we write ourselves. Each one starts with a question our editors find interesting, and gets researched properly before it's written. - Topics from the life around you. Sleep, coffee, déjà vu, the internet, Nefertiti — things you pass by every day without wondering about them. - Our own writing framework. It keeps every article interesting and concise, but still genuinely educational — a lot of thought went into getting all three at once. - Built as microlearning for adults. Short chapters of a couple of minutes each, designed to fit a phone screen and a busy day. - Audio for everything. Read it, listen to it, or follow the text while it plays. - Historical photographs, archive material and artwork alongside the text, with facts and details in the margins. - A wide range of subjects, from the human body to ancient history — and the connections between them. We built Nerdish for people who: - would rather spend phone time on something better than socials. Same ten minutes, different outcome. - enjoy learning random things for no particular reason. Curiosity doesn't need a goal attached to it. - want to stay mentally sharp. Reading something unfamiliar is a small habit that keeps the mind working. - want to find their way back to reading. Short pieces are easier to start with than a book you've been meaning to open for months. - want to have more to say — about art, history, or why the sky is blue. Why it works: There's no way to measure general knowledge and no point where you have enough. But it's what you're using when you read the news, or decide whether something sounds true, or find a solution that came from somewhere unrelated. Hardly any of us sets out to work on our knowledge. Nobody ever taught us how — there's no course in general knowledge, nowhere obvious to begin. So it stays on the list of things you'd like to do. Nerdish works because the mechanism is already there. Curiosity is what built your general knowledge in the first place, and it doesn't need much — an interesting question and ten minutes. And knowledge doesn't stay in separate piles. We write science with its history in it, history with its culture, and culture with the people behind it — nothing is only about one thing. Pick a topic, read or listen, learn something you'd never thought to look up. That's how general knowledge grows. Learn with us about: - Health and the human body: sleep, memory, ageing, and how the body actually works. - History: ancient empires, revolutions, great discoveries, and the people who changed things. - Science and technology: space, evolution, physics, AI, inventions, and everyday phenomena explained properly. - Daily things: why déjà vu happens, how coffee was discovered, where common ideas come from. - Art and culture: painting, music, architecture, design, literature, and the movements behind them. - Food: where dishes come from and why we like what we like. - Famous people: the lives behind the names. Welcome to being Nerdish with us! Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/

Simposeum puts history's great thinkers in conversation with you. Philosophers, psychologists, theologians and rhetoricians, from Heraclitus to Hannah Arendt, answer in their own voice and reason from their own work. ASK A THINKER Put a question to Kant, Simone Weil, William James or Augustine and get an answer in the register they wrote in. Substantive answers are grounded in the thinker's writings, retrieved from their texts as you ask, and cited to the passage, so you can see where an idea comes from and check it. For the ancients whose books are lost, they reason from the fragments and reports that survive. WATCH THEM ARGUE Set two thinkers against each other on a question that divides them: Hobbes against Rousseau on human nature, Hume against Aquinas on whether reason can prove God, Marx against Keynes on capitalism. Or convene a panel of several and listen to them take each other on. LEARN IN THEIR COMPANY Courses written from the primary sources, each taught by the thinker or narrated around them: Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, Freud's unconscious, the history of how madness has been named, the arguments for the existence of God. Lessons come with the paintings, documents and diagrams of their period, and with questions that test what you understood. LISTEN Press Listen and hear a reply read aloud in a synthetic voice made for that thinker. It keeps playing with your phone locked. FIND THE RIGHT MIND Describe what you are wrestling with and Simposeum suggests the thinkers who worked on it. FREE Every account gets free credits every week. Reading a course costs nothing; conversations and lessons with a tutor draw on the credits. Simposeum's thinkers are AI. Their replies are generated, not recorded, and can be wrong; the voices are synthetic, not recordings. Simposeum is not affiliated with any of the thinkers, their estates or their publishers.