CLASSIC: Were Tulips Really The Bitcoin of the 1600s?

Ridiculous History

iHeartPodcasts

History, Society & Culture

4.3 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

In the 1600s, residents of the Dutch Republic were -- according to the story -- absolutely bonkers for tulips. A market sprang up around the tulip trade, and people began paying in advance for tulip bulbs, negotiating increasingly extravagant financial agreements and, in some cases, even using tulips as currency. This Tulipmania is often presented as the first economic boom and bust... but how accurate is that claim? What really happened? Join Ben and Noel as they separate the fact from fiction.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	fellow ridiculous historians, we are on the high seas. And as a result, we are doing a run of
0:06.8	classics here. Guys, remember cryptocurrency back when it was tulips? Whoa, that's very meta, Ben.
0:14.6	I'm having to parse that one out. Yeah, it's still around, but there certainly was a time where
0:18.5	it was the beanie baby of our era. And now the
0:21.8	beanie baby of our era is Laboooo. So I don't even know where to start with all of this stuff.
0:26.3	Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. Noel, back in 2018, you and I asked each other, what happened with the
0:34.6	Dutch Republic and Tulips? It's often used as a textbook case in marketing classes, the world round.
0:43.7	But is this tulip mania truly an economic boom and bust?
0:49.6	We're going to find out.
0:50.9	Yep.
0:51.8	Let's talk about speculative flowers on ridiculous history.
0:57.0	This is an I-Heart podcast.
1:01.8	Malcolm Gladwell here.
1:03.2	This season on Revisionous History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in
1:07.8	northwest Alabama, where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control.
1:12.9	And he said, I've been in prison 24, 25 years. That's probably not long enough. I didn't kill them.
1:19.4	From Revisionist History, this is The Alabama Murders.
1:23.7	Listen to Revisionous History, The Alabama Murders on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:31.8	Are there any pictures of you online?
1:33.5	Then you could already be in a massive police database without even knowing it.
1:37.5	Clearview scrapes together images from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Venmo accounts.
1:43.1	I'm Dexter Thomas, host a Kill Switch,
	...

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