The story goes that the Dutch went so mad for tulips that people traded their entire life savings for a single bulb, then the market crashed and ruined the nation. But the actual historical evidence paints a completely different and far more interesting picture.

This episode looks past centuries of exaggeration and 19th-century propaganda to find out what really happened during the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s. Since the term is still used for everything from the dot-com bubble to crypto, understanding the real story matters more than you think.

• How the Dutch Golden Age, fueled by the world's first joint-stock mega-corporation, created the cash-rich conditions for speculation
• The biological irony that the most prized flame-streaked tulips were caused by the tulip breaking virus, which slowly destroyed the bulb and creat ...