In This Broadcast

Don’t say a gay man never did anything for you.

Before artificial intelligence had a name, one queer mind laid its foundations.
In this episode, Dany and Claire head to wartime Britain to meet Alan Turing—a shy, brilliant mathematician whose ideas not only helped defeat the Nazis but also built the logic that powers every modern computer.

We trace Turing’s journey from precocious schoolboy and his first love, Christopher Morcom, through Cambridge, Princeton, and the theoretical birth of the “Turing Machine.” Then, inside the secretive halls of Bletchley Park, Turing and his colleagues at the Government Code and Cypher School go head-to-head with Enigma—Nazi Germany’s unbreakable cipher.

Armed with nothing but intellect, caffeine, and a few thousand wires, Turing designs the “Bombe,” a machine capable of decoding enemy transmissions faster than any human could. The result changes the course of World War II—and the course of human history.

But while Turing’s logic machines win the war, his own story is just beginning—and the peace that follows will demand a different kind of courage.