UNESCO World Heritage: Preserving the Best of Humanity
Stuff You Should Know
iHeartPodcasts
4.5 • 82.7K Ratings
🗓️ 23 April 2026
⏱️ 42 minutes
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Summary
Humanity’s created a lot of neat things over the eons and starting in the 1940s, the UN created an agency focused on preserving those things for the whole world and future people. But that mission is in danger of becoming only about branding and money.
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.0 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:04.0 | Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. |
| 0:14.0 | Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and this is stuff you should know. And this is a fairly rare edition where we do an episode that we decided to do within the last few episodes. We don't usually turn around that fast. Usually it's like seven to eight years. Yeah, this is a quick one. And Julia turned this around for us pretty staty. |
| 0:40.7 | Mm-hmm. |
| 0:41.3 | I just made that up. |
| 0:42.4 | Sure. |
| 0:43.0 | But I get it. |
| 0:44.0 | I think everyone knows what we mean. |
| 0:45.0 | But we're talking about UNESCO World Heritage Sites. |
| 0:49.7 | UNESCO standing for, which I never knew. |
| 0:52.5 | I'm glad I know this now. |
| 0:53.5 | The United Nations Educational, Scientific, |
| 0:56.1 | and Cultural Organization, |
| 0:58.1 | whom in 1972 |
| 1:00.8 | drafted this treaty |
| 1:02.9 | to preserve world heritage as a whole, |
| 1:07.3 | whether it's, as we'll see, |
| 1:09.1 | like a place or a thing. And they even |
| 1:12.3 | expanded later into like, you know, cultural processes and customs and traditions. |
| 1:18.7 | Yeah, and that's where this idea came from. We were doing our episode on contortionism, |
| 1:23.0 | and we found that Mongolia was turned down for getting world heritage protection for their contortionist history. |
... |
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