Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchHow the Bermuda Triangle Was Invented
Episode 6313
A naval collier with 306 aboard vanishes without a distress call. Five military bombers disappear, and the rescue plane sent after them explodes. The…
1 week, 4 days ago
How Sumerians Built and Destroyed Civilization
Episode 6312
Check the clock on your phone: 60 seconds, 60 minutes. That base-60 system was invented over 5,000 years ago by the Sumerians, a people whose origins…
1 week, 4 days ago
How Stalingrad broke the German army
Episode 6311
A German officer watching the city burn recorded that the street dogs threw themselves into the freezing Volga to escape: "Animals flee this hell... …
1 week, 4 days ago
How Silk Weaving Programmed Modern Computing
Episode 6310
The most famous image in early computing is not a vacuum tube or a line of code. It is an 1839 portrait of an elderly man, woven entirely from silk u…
1 week, 4 days ago
How Nobel laureates nearly broke Wall Street
Episode 6309
How did a room containing two Nobel laureates in risk management build a money machine that nearly destroyed the global financial system? Long-Term C…
1 week, 4 days ago
How Mount Pelée Erased Saint-Pierre
Episode 6308
On a May morning in 1902, the "Paris of the Caribbean" was wiped out in minutes. Saint-Pierre, Martinique, a sophisticated harbor city of up to 30,00…
1 week, 4 days ago
How Mansa Musa crashed the gold market
Episode 6307
In 1324, a king went on a road trip and spent so much gold along the way that he crashed the economy of a neighboring world power for over a decade. …
1 week, 4 days ago
How Jerome Kerviel Nearly Broke SocGen
Episode 6306
No cigars, no conspiracy, no stolen cent. Jerome Kerviel, son of a blacksmith and a hairdresser from Brittany, an average student with a degree desig…
1 week, 4 days ago
How James Watt hacked the steam engine
Episode 6305
The boiling kettle story is a myth, likely manufactured by his own son as a 19th-century PR campaign. James Watt did not invent the steam engine and …
1 week, 4 days ago
How Hairspray and Styrofoam Robbed Antwerp
Episode 6304
Two floors beneath Antwerp's diamond district sat a vault straight out of a billionaire's security fantasy: infrared heat detectors, seismic sensors,…
1 week, 4 days ago