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Mar 2020
48m 59s

The Tale of the Cowboy Philosopher

Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam
About this episode

In 2009, an old man died in a California nursing home. His obituary included not just his given name, but a long list of the pseudonyms he'd been known to use. In this episode, which we originally released in 2019, we trace the life of Riley Shepard, a hillbilly musician, writer, small-time con man and, perhaps, a genius.

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