Pulse: Origins

Singularity Pulse News

Everything has an origin. The borders on your map, the food on your table, the price of oil, the language you're reading this in. Pulse: Origins investigates the forces that shaped the modern world — the geography, the science, the empires, and the decisions that quietly determined everything else. Hosted by Roman and Austin. Every Sunday.

Season 1

  1. Episode 1

    The Strait of Hormuz — Act 1

    Four thousand years ago, Bahrain's merchants calibrated their scales to Indian standards — not Mesopotamian ones. That detail reveals who organized Gulf trade and why: the same tectonic collision that built the oil reserves also carved the six-mile bottleneck everything has to pass through. This act covers the ancient Sumerian trade highway, Alexander the Great's unbuilt thousand-ship armada, and the starving Portuguese commander who seized Hormuz Island in 1507 with six ships and a costume change. New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN singularitypulse.news

    17 min

  2. Episode 2

    The Strait of Hormuz — Act 2

    The Route to India: Britain didn't come to the Persian Gulf for the Gulf — it came to protect the passage to India, and it built an entire political order to do it. This act covers how calling Arab sailors 'pirates' became the legal foundation for the Trucial States, why the borders on today's map were drawn to serve an empire that no longer exists, and what happened when Britain announced it was leaving — and the rulers it had installed offered to pay it to stay. New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN singularitypulse.news

    20 min

  3. Episode 3

    The Strait of Hormuz — Act 3

    The Oil Trap: In May 1908, an engineer in the Persian foothills ignored a telegram telling him to shut down and kept drilling. The gusher he struck set off a chain reaction that runs unbroken to the present: Churchill's 1914 purchase of Anglo-Persian Oil, Mosaddegh's nationalization, the CIA coup that reversed it, the Shah's fall, and the revolution that turned Iran's position at the strait from a guarantee of flow into a permanent threat. New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN singularitypulse.news

    29 min

  4. Episode 4

    The Strait of Hormuz — Act 4

    The Prisoner's Strait: Iran threatens to close the Strait of Hormuz every few years and never does — because forty percent of its own government revenue transits the same six miles of water. This act covers the IRGC swarm-boat doctrine, why Lloyd's of London actuarial tables are a more effective weapon than missiles, and China's structural exposure to Hormuz: an industrial economy that cannot function without fuel it doesn't control, flowing through a corridor it can't secure — identical to Britain's position in 1914. New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN singularitypulse.news

    19 min

  5. Season 1, Episode 5 Trailer

    1347: What the Plague Built — Teaser

    1347: What the Plague Built — Teaser: The plague killed half of Europe in two years. The disease is gone. What it built is not. Roman introduces 1347: What the Plague Built — a four-part series on what the Black Death left standing and why it still matters. New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN singularitypulse.news

    1 min

  6. Episode 7

    1347: What the Plague Built — Act 1

    The Black Death did not create the pressure that broke medieval Europe — it revealed pressure that had been building for three centuries inside a social order built on surplus labor. The cities that organized Jewish massacres in 1348 to 1350, researchers found, showed measurably higher Nazi Party vote shares in 1928 and higher deportation rates after 1933, even where the Jewish community had been absent for six hundred years. Roman and Austin trace the load-bearing assumptions of feudal society from the heavy plow to the Statute of Laborers, and the question the episode leaves open is which of those lines are still holding. 0:21 — the material cause of feudal hierarchy, agricultural technology circa 1000 CE 4:22 — the Church's spiritual economy and why it required chronic suffering 5:36 — Genoese ships at Messina, the spread mathematics of the plague 6:32 — Strasbourg, administrative violence, and the Voigtländer and Voth finding 13:13 — canon law, debt cancellation, and the economic function of the massacre 14:34 — the Statute of Laborers and the wage revolution that followed New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN singularitypulse.news

    20 min

  7. Episode 7

    1347: What the Plague Built — Act 2

    The Thing Itself: Where the plague actually came from (Kyrgyz cemeteries, 1338 tombstones, severe drought), why the Caffa catapult story is almost certainly fiction, and what we know — and don't know — about the pathogen: one mile per day overland, 24 by sea, doubling infected populations every 43 days, and possibly not even Yersinia pestis. New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN singularitypulse.news

    22 min

  8. Episode 8

    1347: What the Plague Built — Act 3

    The Statute Nobody Could Enforce: Farm wages doubled in England and stayed doubled for 450 years. The Statute of Laborers tried to freeze wages at 1346 levels and failed fastest where no one was watching — while a Westminster Abbey auditor crossed out inflated payments right next to the seat of power. Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe, the plague produced the exact opposite result: intensified serfdom, divergent political economies, and a fracture line that historians trace to the 20th century. New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN singularitypulse.substack.com

    25 min

  9. Episode 9

    1347: What the Plague Built — Act 4

    What Didn't End in 1353: The Second Plague Pandemic ran from 1347 to 1815, and a Sicilian child born in the generation of the American Revolution grew up with the Black Death as a present danger. Humans cannot acquire long-term immunity to Yersinia pestis, meaning every generation born after 1347 was as vulnerable as the one that lived through it — and in Bombay in 1896, human mortality rates increased for a full decade before falling, not because the human population had changed, but because the rat population had. Austin and Roman trace what the plague's wrong explanations left standing: legal records of exclusion that correlated with Nazi-era violence in cities with no Jewish community for six centuries, secular universities founded to solve a clergy shortage, and a vernacular literature whose argument about whether it should exist was already lost before it was made. 00:00 — Pandemic continuity: the Second Plague Pandemic runs to 1815 04:10 — Human immunity failure and the Bombay 1896 mortality curve 08:45 — Florence's quarantine: correct practice, wrong theory, five centuries of use 13:20 — Secular universities as workforce responses to clerical collapse 18:00 — Boccaccio's Tuscan vernacular as a statement about institutional access 22:30 — Jewish migration east and the second serfdom converging in one geography 27:15 — Voigtländer and Voth: pogrom correlation persists in cities vacant of Jews for 600 years 33:40 — Institutional inertia: structures outlasting every carrier who built them 38:55 — Rats acquire resistance; the pandemic ends through a mechanism nobody could see 43:10 — The plague ended. What it built did not. New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN singularitypulse.substack.com

    21 min

  10. Season 1 Trailer

    Pulse: Origins — Trailer

    Pulse: Origins investigates the forces that shaped the modern world. Each series takes one story — a strait, a plague, a document, a decision — and traces it from its origin to the present day. The stories underneath the stories you know. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN singularitypulse.news

    1 min

Trailers

About

Everything has an origin. The borders on your map, the food on your table, the price of oil, the language you're reading this in. Pulse: Origins investigates the forces that shaped the modern world — the geography, the science, the empires, and the decisions that quietly determined everything else. Hosted by Roman and Austin. Every Sunday.

Information

  • Creator
    Singularity Pulse News
  • Episodes
    10
  • Seasons
    1
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Singularity Pulse News. All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Pulse: Origins