In June 2013, a maintenance engineer at a Hampton Inn in Duncan, South Carolina noticed something strange: a septic truck kept backing up to a closed Denny’s restaurant. His 911 call would crack open one of the largest environmental crimes in...
The Chattooga River was once a rumor — a hidden stretch of whitewater shared by a few locals, guides, and dreamers. Then Deliverance hit theaters, and a quiet mountain river suddenly belonged to the world. In this episode, Robert sits down with two...
In September 2019, thieves broke into Blenheim Palace and stole Maurizio Cattelan’s “America”—a fully functional solid gold toilet worth $6 million—in under 5 minutes. But this isn’t just a heist story: it’s about an...
In the conclusion of our Chattooga series, we explore the two events that sealed the river’s fate: a blockbuster movie and a landmark piece of legislation. We explore chaotic set of Deliverance, sharing harrowing stories from the cast and...
Episode 2: The Dam Plans and Deliverance Episode Summary: While paddlers like Fritz Orr were just beginning to test the limits of the Chattooga’s wild rapids, other plans were being made to silence them forever. In this episode, we uncover the...
Welcome to the premiere of our new series, Chattooga: The Fight to Keep It Wild. In this first episode, we journey back to a time when the Chattooga’s fate seemed sealed. Like most major rivers in the American Southeast, it was destined to be...
When Hurricane Helene hit Asheville in September 2024, Water Resources Director David Melton watched his reservoir fill eight feet overnight and knew they were in trouble. Within hours, all three main transmission lines were gone, leaving 200,000...
What if the future of water came down to bubbles you’ll never see? Nanobubbles—thousands of times smaller than a grain of salt—are invisible, powerful, and already changing how we treat water, grow food, and even package beverages. In this episode...
What if bubbles were secretly running the world? In this episode, we uncover how these tiny spheres are doing everything from helping shrimp fire plasma blasts to scrubbing ocean plastic, with help from a bubble-obsessed scientist and an artist...
This episode concludes our deep dive into the Table Rock Complex Fire with the dramatic final days of firefighting, including the historic deployment of a DC-10 Very Large Air Tanker and over a million gallons of water dropped from aircraft. Special...