The MR HANSoN Podcast

In 1937, a forty-year-old woman in Fairfield, Connecticut opened her oven and pulled out a failure. The loaf was one inch high. She said later it was hard as a rock, and that it belonged in the Smithsonian as a specimen of bread from the Stone Age. She had never baked a loaf of bread in her life. Upstairs was her nine-year-old son Mark, whose asthma and food allergies were severe enough that the family allergist had told her the mass-produced white bread on every counter in America was likely ma

In a laboratory built for war, a self-taught engineer with no college degree reached into his pocket and found his chocolate bar had melted — with no flame, no heat, nothing but a humming radar device nearby. Almost anyone else would have wiped their hand and forgotten it. Percy Spencer asked why. And in asking, he discovered microwave cooking and changed nearly every kitchen on earth.This episode of the MR. HANSoN Podcast tells the Percy Spencer story straight — including the parts the legend g

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