History Unplugged Podcast

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The Loss and Re-Discovery of the $20 Billion Imperial Spanish Treasure Ship Feb 12, 2026

Show notes

The most valuable shipwreck of all time is the San José galleon—an 18th century Spanish ship that carried 11 million gold coins, silver, and emeralds—and worth $20 billion in today's currency. It sunk in a battle with British ships during the War of Spanish Succession and remained completely lost for centuries.
That is until a clue to its final resting place was found by the most unlikely person: Roger Dooley, a Cuban-American underwater explorer who helped establish Cuba's national diving program and spent years scouring Caribbean waters for sunken shipwrecks at the behest of Fidel Castro. Dooley wasn’t looking for the San José. But an accidental discovery in the dusty stacks of a Spanish archive led him to the story of a lifetime, the tale of a great eighteenth-century treasure ship loaded with riches from the New World and destined for Spain

Though a diver at heart, Dooley was an unlikely candidate to find the San José. He had little in the way of serious credentials, yet his tenacity and single-minded devotion to finding and excavating the ship powered him across four decades, even as he became a man in exile from the country of his birth. As Dooley jousted with famous treasure hunters and well-funded competitors, he slowly homed in on a patch of sea that might contain a three-hundred-year-old shipwreck—or nothing at all.

Today’s guest is Julian Sancton, author of “Neptune’s Fortune: The Billion Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire.” We look at the story of a legendary Spanish galleon that sunk off the coast of, one man’s obsessive quest to find it, and the ongoing fight over excavating this historic shipwreck.

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Thomas Willing: The Revolutionary War Arms Dealer Who Led the First Bank of the United States Feb 10, 2026

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America’s revolutionary war would have almost certainly been lost if not for the colony’s wealthiest merchant. Thomas Willing was a prominent Philadelphia merchant and financier who, in partnership with Robert Morris, operated one of the colonies' most successful importing and exporting firms, specializing in goods such as flour, lumber, tobacco, and sugar, while later using his wealth and mercantile connections to supply the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.

After the War, he brought sanity to the unstable early American economy. America was suffocating under a massive, unmanageable national debt owed to foreign lenders, domestic soldiers, and creditors, and lacking the power to tax effectively under the Articles of Confederation. The currency situation was disastrous, with various state-issued paper monies having depreciated drastically—leading to inflation and a widespread lack of confidence in the financial stability of the new republic. Thomas Willing stabilized the nascent American economy by serving as the first president of both the Bank of North America and the First Bank of the United States, where his conservative fiscal leadership established the nation’s credit and transformed the central bank into the "great regulating wheel" of the country's financial system.
Today’s guest is Richard Vague, author of “The Banker Who Made America: Thomas Willing and the Rise of the American Financial Aristocracy.” We discuss how Willing bankrolled–and in the process helped save–the American Revolution, and then shaped the financial architecture of our young Republic. So powerful was Willing that President John Adams complained that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton were governed by him.

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The Man Who Sold the War: Tom Paine's Journey from Common Sense to Global Firebrand Feb 05, 2026

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Most of us only know Thomas Paine for one thing: writing Common Sense in 1776, which helped kickstart the Revolution by selling hundreds of thousands of copies. But he was far more than a writer. Paine actively served with George Washington's army during its darkest days and then used his pen to advocate for global freedom in both the French Revolution and against organized religion. His revolutionary fervor spanned the globe, leading him to champion the French Revolution with Rights of Man and challenge religious orthodoxy in The Age of Reason/

Paine's later involvement with the French Revolution, his Enlightenment opinions, and his unorthodox view of religion plunged his reputation into a controversy that continues to this day.

Today’s guest is Jack Kelly, author of “Tom Paine's War: The Words That Rallied a Nation and the Founder for Our Time.” We look at how Paine shaped the war. He convinced the colonies that war should grow from a reform movement to a full revolution: The entire British system of hereditary monarchy and aristocratic rule was a form of tyranny, making the case that separation from Great Britain the only logical course for America.

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The Original Body Builders: How Greek Halteres and Celtic Gabal Stone Lifts Built the World's First Strongmen Feb 03, 2026

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Fad workouts have been with us for decades, but they go back much further than we realize. Long before CrossFit, Zumba, P90X, Tae Box, Jazzercise or Jack LaLanne, we had 19th century strongmen. These mustachioed showmen were the first global fitness influencers. They hauled trunks of weights onto steamships, toured the world, then sold exercise equipment through the mail. The most famous was Eugene Sandow, who broke chains, and created with his own body a "manned cavalry bridge" where he would lie down while men, horses, and a carriage were driven over his body. He even fought a lion in front of an auditorium and won, although the lion was almost definitely sedated.

Today’s guest is Connor Heffernan, author of “When Fitness Went Global: The Rise of Physical Culture in the Nineteenth Century.” In this episode, we discuss:

Ancient Egyptians were basically doing CrossFit thousands of years ago. They trained with swinging sandbags that look exactly like modern kettlebell flows.
One of the first exercise practices to experience globalization was Indian club-swinging. Indian club-swinging, originating from the heavy training clubs used by Indian wrestlers and soldiers for centuries, was observed and adopted by British military officers stationed in India during the early 1800s.
Early diet culture was a carnival of quack science. Victorian fitness magazines were filled with miracle tonics, starvation cures and pseudoscientific meal plans. Many of our “new” diet trends are rebranded versions of schemes first marketed with sepia portraits and dubious testimonials.

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Truman’s Deep Regret at the Atomic Age He Created Jan 29, 2026

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In the eight decades since the United States deployed the most destructive weapon ever used, conventional wisdom has held that American leaders were faced with a difficult choice: Invade Japan, which would have cost millions of Japanese and Allied lives in bloody combat or use the fearsome atom bomb in the hopes of convincing the Japanese emperor to surrender. President Truman—in what many have come to regard as an immoral decision—ordered the military to drop the bomb.

Today’s guest is Alex Wellerstein, author of The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age. Wellerstein offers a more complex and nuanced portrayal of Truman, showing a president entangled in secrecy, rushing against time, and operating with limited information. Contrary to the long-held belief that Truman was the decisive force behind the bombings, this book reveals how he was largely unacquainted with the specifics of Hiroshima and Nagasaki's targeting until after the fact.

Wellerstein explains how there was no formal decision to use the bomb, nor did President Truman likely know that Hiroshima or Nagasaki were heavily populated cities. Once the bombs were dropped, Truman began a years-long struggle for control of the awesome power of atomic weapons, the ramifications of which are still felt today.

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How Soccer Created African and Latin American Nations Jan 27, 2026

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National pride often comes from shared heritage—like a common language or ethnic background. Religious Nationalism can be seen in historical Russia, where being part of the Orthodox Church was considered key to being Russian, even if you spoke a different language, whereas Ethnic Nationalism is like modern Mongolia, where having the same Mongol background is what counts as national identity, even if people follow different faiths.—but for the small nation of Uruguay, that feeling of unity was forged not in a parliament, but on a soccer pitch. When the Uruguayan national team, La Celeste, stunned the world by winning the 1924 Paris Olympics, it was more than just a sports victory. That triumph created a profound, shared, and globally recognized national identity, transforming the soccer team into a powerful symbol that helped bond the country together in a way politics had struggled to achieve.

Soccer’s ability to literally bring nations into existence has only grown with the growth and spread of the World Cup. Since 1930, the World Cup has become a truly global obsession. It is the most watched sporting event on the planet, and 211 teams competed to make it into the 2022 tournament. From its inception, it has also been a vehicle for far more than soccer. A tool for self-mythologizing and influence-peddling, The World Cup has played a crucial role in nation-building, and continues to, as countries negotiate their positions in a globalized world.

Today’s guest is Jonathan Wilson, author of “The Power and the Glory: A History of the World Cup.” We look at history of the matches and goals, the tales of scandal and triumph, the haggling and skulduggery of the bidding process, and the political and cultural tides behind every tournament. Jonathan Wilson details not merely what happened but why, based on fresh interviews and meticulous research. The book is as much about the legends of the sport, from Pelé to Messi, as it is about the nations that made them, from Mussolini’s Italy to partitioned Germany to controversy-ridden Qatar.

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The Sawmill – Along With Gunpowder and the Printing Press – Created the Modern World Jan 22, 2026

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The wind-powered sawmill was invented around 1592 in the Netherlands, immediately transforming the nature of labor and industry. This mechanical marvel replaced slow, muscle-powered sawyers, allowing timber to be cut for shipbuilding and construction up to 30 times faster than manual labor, radically lowering the cost of wood products. It used a crankshaft to convert the windmill's rotating motion into the linear, up-and-down movement required for sawing wood, essentially creating an early, powerful assembly line factory. This mechanization allowed for unprecedented, rapid timber production, which quickly made the Dutch rich and enabled the massive expansion of their global fleet and construction projects.

This invention, whose significance has been overlooked, has been researched by today’s guest, Jaime Davila, author of “Forgotten: How One Man Unlocked the Modern World.”

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Gears, Gold, and Global Peace: A Steampunk Bitcoin Journey Through an Alternate 20th Century Jan 20, 2026

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We have paper money today because it functioned as an IOU, certifying that the holder could redeem it for an equivalent amount of physical gold or silver from the bank's vault. That’s where the English pound got its name as it matched a specific weight of gold (or silver). This was the gold standard, and this is how banks operated for centuries. But it was largely abandoned after World War I, when governments prevented the withdrawal of gold by suspending the convertibility of their paper money into gold to conserve national gold reserves for purchasing vital war supplies and to allow central banks to print money for financing massive military expenditures. Governments abandoned linking their money to anything at all, giving central banks full control over the money supply. Printing money has led to inflation, national debt, and financial instability, which ultimately fueled the creation of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin as a decentralized, mathematically-scarce alternative.

What if things hadn’t happened this way? What if the gold standard survived the Great War? Today’s guest, Saifedean Ammous , imagines this scenario in his new book The Gold Standard: An Alternate Economic History of the 20th Century.” The story begins with a fictional divergence in 1911: French aviation pioneer Louis Blériot partners with the Wright brothers to create the Blériot Transport Corporation (BTC), an airplane-based, peer-to-peer gold-settlement network. This innovative system quickly becomes a secure alternative to central banks. When World War I starts, the BTC offers Europeans a way to export their wealth to neutral countries, escaping central bank war inflation. This triggers a global financial panic in September 1915, bankrupting the world's central banks, abruptly ending the war, and strangling fiat money in its cradle. With the collapse of central banking and the establishment of a free-market, decentralized gold standard, a radically different 20th century unfolds. Hard-money savings become plentiful and cheap, accelerating technological progress, increasing energy production, and fostering a world of appreciating money and declining prices.

Without the ability to print money to fund expansive projects, governments become more accountable, transforming into mere service providers whose citizens expect better service at a lower cost. This thought-provoking narrative suggests that the absence of central bank financing could have prevented major 20th-century conflicts, eliminated chronic inflation, and ushered in a "Century of Affluence" based on lower time preference, long-term investment, and voluntary governance.

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Before the Cold War, Russia and America Were the Closest of Distant Friends Jan 15, 2026

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Nearly a century of Cold War tensions between the United States and Russia hide the incredibly close friendship that the two nations enjoyed before this period. From America’s colonial founding in the 1600s to the eve of World War One, the two distant nations relied on each other in a surprising number of ways. Each country was searching for allies on the world stage, and this culminated in a "blueprint for friendship" during the 1860s and 1870s, spurred by mutual conversations around the abolition of slavery and serfdom. However, this amicable distance dissolved following the Russo-Japanese War, which introduced cycles of mutual stereotyping and a damaging "war of images," where Americans saw Russian authoritarianism and Russians saw US imperialism and racism. Despite these emerging tensions, the relationship continued its characteristic oscillation, with both countries drawing inspiration from one another, leading to a brief "wartime honeymoon" at the start of World War I.

To discuss this forgotten chapter in Russian-American history is today’s guest, Victoria Zhuravleva, one of the authors of “Distant Friends and Intimate Enemies: A History of American-Russian Relations.”

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The Horrifying Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the Titanic of the Great Lakes Jan 13, 2026

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One of the worst nautical disasters in recent American history is the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald. On November 10, 1975, the “storm of the century” threw 100 mile-per-hour winds and 50-foot waves on Lake Superior. The ship found itself at the worst possible place, at the worst possible time. When she sank, she took all 29 men onboard down with her, leaving the tragedy shrouded in mystery for a half century.

The sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald is so strange because the ship was exceptionally large and strong, and would normally be able to shrug off storms like this. At 75 feet wide and 729 feet long, the Fitzgerald was at the time of her launch the largest ship on the lakes, and she repeatedly broke her own records for the largest loads, the fastest runs, and the biggest season hauls throughout her career. She was a champion heavyweight, sprinter, and workhorse, all in one.

To make the sinking stranger, she suddenly disappeared in a bad storm on Lake Superior without sending any distress calls despite having a massive modern radio system. The most widely accepted theories for the disaster include the ship hitting a shoal, suffering a structural failure like a broken back, or being overwhelmed by massive "three sisters" rogue waves.

However, some less common and conspiracy-like theories suggest the crew did not properly close the hatch covers, the ship was actually split by a UFO, or that it was the victim of a secret Coast Guard experiment gone wrong.

Todays’ guest is John Bacon, author of “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” We explore the vital role Great Lakes shipping played in America’s economic boom, the uncommon lives the sailors led, the sinking’s most likely causes, and the aftermath for those left behind.

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