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 created extreme scarcity
• The winter air trade in taverns, where traders signed paper forward contracts over wine, and the silent February 1637 auction where the bubble snapped
• How Charles Mackay’s vivid 1841 account invented the myth, while Anne Goldgar’s archives found fewer than half a dozen people actually ruined
• The legal loophole theory: a proposed decree turning contracts into options capped buyers’ risk at a tiny fee, making the parabolic prices a rational gamble rather than madness