Episodes

Before the name meant green machines and polished steel, John Deere was just a man walking west — away from a small Vermont town, away from debts he couldn't pay and trouble closing in, away from a pregnant wife and a child left behind in the cold. Was it survival, or was it abandonment? This episode of the MR. HANSoN Podcast refuses to answer that question too cleanly, because the truth never did. Born in 1804 and shadowed early by a father lost at sea, Deere became a skilled blacksmith who ma...

In the late 1940s, a struggling young man ran a hot dog stand in San Bernardino, California — and watched the line across the street wrap around a small Mexican café that was outselling him every single day. He didn't feel envy. He felt curiosity. That one habit of mind would turn Glen Bell into the founder of Taco Bell and reshape the way an entire country eats. This episode of the MR. HANSoN Podcast tells the Glen Bell story straight: a poor Depression kid and Marine Corps cook who didn't inv...

He was born in the red dust of a defeated South with no money, no name, and no empire waiting for him — just a single leaf of cured tobacco in a boy's hand. By the time James Buchanan "Buck" Duke was finished, he had built and lost one of the most total monopolies in American history, then turned around and built a second empire out of falling water and electricity, then poured his fortune into hospitals and a university that still carries his name. In this episode of the MR. HANSoN Podcast, we...

Jack Daniel built one of the most recognizable names in the world, and it killed him over a safe he couldn't open. This episode of the MR. HANSoN Podcast tells the full story of the man behind the square bottle and the black label — and the master distiller history almost erased. Born in a year no record kept, orphaned of his mother and unwanted by his stepmother, Jack Daniel ran away as a boy into a hard Tennessee where whiskey was currency, medicine, and survival, and almost all of it was terr...

Ice Cold Empire: The Adolphus Busch Story is the fourth episode of MR. HANSoN Podcast, Season 2 — Empire Builders. It tells the true story of how a German immigrant boy, the twenty-first of twenty-two children, crossed an ocean with almost nothing and built the largest brewery on earth — not by making a better beer, but by building the system that carried beer across a continent for the first time in history. Born in 1839 in the town of Kastel near Mainz, Adolphus Busch grew up inside his father...

Florence, Italy. 1908. A young Florentine named Ludovico Martelli rolls up his sleeves at a wooden workshop bench tucked into a side street near the Arno River. Glass bottles of imported French perfumery line the wall behind him. The air smells of eucalyptus and bergamot and lemon peel. Above the door, his name. Just his name. He doesn't know yet that the small distribution business he is about to spend the next twenty years building will become the soil for an Italian empire that will outlast t...

MR. HANSoN Podcast — "Butter, Beef, and Belief: The Rise of Craig Culver and the Taste That Took Over the Midwest" In a small Wisconsin river town in nineteen-eighty-four, a thirty-four-year-old man stood at a flat-top grill holding a stainless steel frozen custard scoop. He dipped it into a tub of fresh ground beef, pulled back a perfect ball, and dropped it onto the heat. The same scoop, a few hours later, would portion vanilla custard for the day's first dessert. One tool. One hand. Two prod...

MR HANSoN Podcast "The Man Who Wouldn't Stop Tinkering: The Rise of Les Paul" He was told flat-out that what he built wasn't even a guitar. They called it a broomstick with pickups. Eleven years later, every guitar company in America was racing to copy it. This is the cinematic true story of Les Paul — born Lester William Polsfuss on June 9, 1915 in Waukesha, Wisconsin. The boy his teacher said would "never learn music." The kid who heard a ditch digger play harmonica on a sidewalk and never r...