The Ridiculous Origin of the Modern Calendar

Ridiculous History

iHeartPodcasts

History, Society & Culture

4.3 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The calendar is... ridiculous. Since the earliest days of civilization, humanity has tried to measure the passage of time on Earth through any number of systems. In today's episode, Ben, Noel and Max discover how millennia of trial and error led to the modern Gregorian calendar, which we all still just pretend is a normal thing in the modern day.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Ridiculous History is a production of IHeart Radio. Welcome back to the show, fellow ridiculous historians.
0:29.4	Thank you, as always so much for tuning in.
0:33.0	We are recording this on July 31st, which is a Thursday.
0:38.4	And July and the concept of Thursdays are just things that got made up at some point.
0:44.7	It's true.
0:45.2	It's sort of like money.
0:46.2	We just agree that it makes sense.
0:49.0	Yeah.
0:49.7	Oh, and that's a good story for both this show and stuff.
0:53.5	They don't want you to know our sister podcast.
0:56.5	Let's welcome to the stage, of course.
0:58.5	Big thanks to our super producer, Mr. Max Williams, as well as the one and only Mr.
1:06.1	Noel Brown.
1:07.3	It's about time.
1:09.0	Oh, it is about time.
1:11.7	Does anybody really know what time is?
1:13.9	I wasn't being snooty. I was just making a poorly placed time reference because that's what we're talking about.
1:18.1	The timing was great.
1:20.0	They called me Ben Bullen and folks, as you may tell, from today's banter at the top, we looked around and we had a conversation
1:32.4	many months ago that kind of sprang out of earlier conversations on different shows.
1:40.1	The calendar, why? Why is it a thing? It's imperfect. We looked at it in a leap year episode previously. Leapier. Still can't wrap my head around. Leave me. I'm not working for me. Right. Exactly. If you say so, Max. If you say so. Approximately. Yeah, approximate. I told you that logic, Noel, and you're like, I still don't get it. I'm like, yeah, I'm just going to keep saying it that way.
2:02.4	Just to compound the issue.
	...

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