Fighting Assumptions Podcast

“The Great Wall of China is the only human-made object visible from space”. It is etched into our collective consciousness. It appears in travel brochures, old textbooks, and pop culture. It is a testament to human engineering and the sheer scale of ancient empires.

There is just one tiny problem: It is completely not true.

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We’ve all heard the story. It’s 1492. Christopher Columbus stands before a panel of grim-faced Spanish inquisitors and skeptical “experts.” They point at his maps and scoff, warning him that if he sails too far west, his ships will tumble off the edge of the world into a void of sea monsters. Columbus, the brave visionary of the Enlightenment, insists the world is round.

It’s a great story. It’s also complete historical fiction.

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We’ve all been sold a story. It’s a story reinforced by every museum diorama, every plastic toy in a sandbox, and every Jurassic Park sequel.

The story goes like this: 66 million years ago, a massive asteroid the size of a city slammed into the Earth. A tragic, abrupt end to the Age of Reptiles, making way for the Age of Mammals.

It’s a great story. It’s dramatic. It’s tidy. It’s also fundamentally, scientifically false.

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We think of Vincent van Gogh as a ‘unappreciated genius’ who only got recognition after his death. During his life he only sold a few paintings. The truth? He spent years dominating art sales.

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We all know the story of Blockbuster laughing Netflix out of the room. It’s business folklore. It’s also an incomplete narrative that hides a much darker, more complex tragedy about corporate sabotage and the high cost of short-term thinking.

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We use “lemming” as a metaphor for mindless conformity, based on the belief that these rodents commit mass suicide off cliffs. The only problem? The entire phenomenon was staged by cinematographers in the 1950s.

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