This 2-year-old kid once ruled 1/3 of the world's population...

• Kidnapped at 2.
• Worshipped as a living god
• Controlled an empire of 400 million people.

This is not clickbait. Not a metaphor. Not exaggerated.

Here's the bizarre story of China's last emperor:🧵 Beijing, 1908. Just after nightfall.

A mysterious group leaves the Forbidden City.

Guards. Officials.
An armed escort.

They arrive at a mansion and find a 2-year-old boy hiding in a cupboard.

He screams. He fights. He has no idea he just became emperor of China...

400+ cartoons.
3 years in the US secret military unit.
11 million soldiers manipulated for WWII.

Before teaching kids to read,
Dr. Seuss was training soldiers to kill.

This is how one man changed how America saw war, power, and influence: 🧵 1943. Hollywood goes to war.

Theodor Seuss Geisel reports for duty as Captain Geisel, U.S. Army.

His assignment: Frank Capra's propaganda unit, the First Motion Picture Unit.

Historians buried this story for centuries.

In 1518, an entire city lost control of their bodies...

The cause? Something far more mysterious than any disease.

Welcome to the Dancing Plague and its 500-year-old mystery: 🧵 July 14, 1518. Strasbourg, Holy Roman Empire.

Frau Troffea stepped into the cobblestone street and began to dance.

No music. No celebration. No reason.

Just uncontrollable movement.

What happened next would baffle medicine for 500 years...

The most courageous officer in military history:

Stanislav Petrov.

He defied Soviet protocol, ignored 5 missile alerts, and prevented WW3 with a single decision.

Here's how one man's judgment saved billions of lives:🧵 Midnight in a secret Soviet bunker, 100 meters underground.

Lieutenant Stanislav Petrov mans his station at Serpukhov-15, monitoring for nuclear attacks.

It's just another quiet night shift.

Until...

This is Arthur Conan Doyle.

Author of Sherlock Holmes.

Everyone thought the spy techniques used were fictional...

But for decades, they were studied by the CIA, MI6, and spies.

Here's the story behind the world's greatest detective
—with examples: 🧵
In 1927, Vernon Kell, founder of MI5, admitted that his agents studied Holmes stories for techniques.

But how did it start?

Let's travel back in time before diving into some of the techniques disguised in Sherlock Holmes:

In 1945, the US started kidnapping scientists from defeated Germany.

They were war criminals who built Hitler's rockets...

But overnight, they became America's heroes helping NASA put men on the moon.

Here's the full story: 🧵 US Army's Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) arrived in Germany before the war ended in May 1945.

Their mission:

Grab German rocket experts before the Soviets could...

This is John Nash.
He's the genius behind Game Theory.

His ideas influenced Einstein, Russell, and won him a Nobel Prize in 1994.

Sadly, his legacy is a heartbreaking tragedy.
Here's his story... 🧵 Born in Bluefield, West Virginia in 1928, John Forbes Nash Jr. was a math prodigy.

By 15, he read E.T. Bell's "Men of Mathematics" and could prove advanced theorems...

The most important but also most controversial archaeological discovery by far:

The Dead Sea Scrolls.

They've started wars, rewrote history books, and challenged humanity's deepest beliefs.

Here's what these ancient texts reveal: 🧵 Muhammad edh-Dhib was hunting for his lost goat near the shores of the Dead Sea.

He spotted a cave in the cliffs of Qumran.

Inside he found clay jars with leather and papyrus scrolls wrapped in linen...

In 1994, archaeologists found a 7,000-year-old temple so strange they almost buried it again.

The Göbekli Tepe was by prehistoric hunter-gatherers without metal, tools, or language.

If you think the Pyramid was impressive, this would blow your mind: 🧵 For centuries, locals in Anatolia called it "Potbelly Hill" - just a 50-meter mound where sheep grazed.

In 1963, researchers from the University of Chicago and Istanbul University dismissed it as a medieval cemetery.

Schmidt saw something in their reports that didn't look right...

A "cognitive bias" is a systematic error in thinking that ruins decision-making.

This took me years to learn—I'll teach you in 2 minutes.

11 most powerful cognitive biases I've found: 🧵 1. Parkinson's Law:

Work expands to fill the time given.

When we have more time, we tend to procrastinate and become inefficient.

A good reminder to track your tasks duration and energy level.

The single most valuable skill you can develop:

Thinking with Mental Models.

18 years of school destroyed our critical thinking & decision-making.

I've collected 12 of the most powerful mental models: 🧵
Second-Order Thinking

Most people only consider immediate effects.

Real strategists think 2-3 steps ahead.

When you make decisions, always ask: "What are the second and third-order consequences?"

A "cognitive bias" is a systematic error in thinking that ruins decision-making.

80% are useless—20% will change your life.

11 most powerful cognitive biases I've found: 🧵 1. Parkinson's Law:

Work expands to fill the time given.

When we have more time, we tend to procrastinate and become inefficient.

A good reminder to track your tasks duration and energy level.

Everyone talks about chess legends like:

Magnus Carlsen. Hikaru Nakamura. Garry Kasparov

But one man stands heads and shoulders above all.

Despite 11 World Championships, this prodigy died alone and was forgotten at 64. Here's his story: Bobby Fischer's was THE true chess prodigy:

• Won his first tournament at 9
• Became the youngest US Junior Chess Champion at 13
• Played the "Game of the Century" against IM Donald Byrne at 13

But that's not what makes him special...

In 1985, Stephen Hawking caught pneumonia in Switzerland.

The doctors gave his wife 2 options:
1. Let them end his life
2. Watch him die

So she chose option 3. Here's what she did instead: 🧵 At CERN in Switzerland, Hawking's condition deteriorated rapidly.

His ALS-weakened lungs couldn't fight the pneumonia. Every breath was a battle.

The ventilator kept him alive, but doctors said it was just prolonging the inevitable...

Leonardo da Vinci was the most creative person in history.

He left us over 7000 pages of sketches and notes that, 500 years later, historians yet to decode.

6 times Da Vinci correctly predicted and invented the future: 🧵
1/ Da Vinci's anatomical discoveries...

• First to describe the heart as a 4-chambered muscle
• Recognized coronary artery disease 150 years before physicians

He once dissected 30+ cadavers to understand anatomy:

This is Marie Curie.

• pioneer of radioactivity
• first woman to win a Nobel Prize
• first person to win Nobel Prizes in 2 fields

Sadly, her legacy was a heartbreaking tragedy. Here's How the Genius of Marie Curie Killed Her: (thread)🧵
In 1927, Marie Curie was the ONLY woman among 29 top physicists at the prestigious Solvay Conference.

On top of the world, but the tragic-devil was already waiting for her...

The man who cheated death:

Seneca.

His letters survived 2,000 years and now warn us of the lessons that the West has forgotten.

The Roman emperors tried to destroy them. But these 9 teachings are truly timeless... 🧵 Seneca was born in the same year as Christ & became Rome's greatest Stoic thinker.

He faced banishment, and attempted murder, and was ultimately ordered to commit suicide by Emperor Nero.

Let's understand Seneca's 9 not-so-discussed philosophy...

Isaac Newton was the most dangerous genius ever alive.

The Royal Society hid his papers and journals for 200+ years.

I've collected 5 of his most daring experiments.

Here's what they were hiding: 🧵 Born in 1642 to a poor farming family in England, Newton started life as a tiny premature baby.

• His father died before his birth.

• His mother abandoned him at age 3 to marry another man.

This upbringing may explain Newton later risked his life for knowledge & truth...

The most genius life-saving device of WWII wasn't a weapon, med or vehicle.

It was a metal box floating along the English Channel.

Here's how these "sea hotels" changed combat survival forever: 🧵 WWII made the English Channel deadly for pilots.

80% of airmen died when shot down over water.

Only 50% died over land.

The Germans created something ingenious to help their men survive. But what was it?

The Titanic sank with America's wealthiest men onboard.

J.P. Morgan, who owned the ship, mysteriously cancelled his ticket days before.

Some call it luck. Others call it an assassination.

Here's the conspiracy that haunted the most famous shipwreck in history: 🧵 J.P. Morgan's International Mercantile Marine Company owned the White Star Line.

• Built at a cost of $7.5 million
• 882.5 feet long, 92.5 feet wide
• Marketed as "unsinkable"
• Set sail April 10, 1912

The passenger list included America's elite like:

Osama bin Laden disappeared completely after 9/11.

No phone calls. No emails. No digital footprint.

While hiding from the CIA's most sophisticated surveillance system ever built, he made just one mistake.... (thread) 🧵
Just 4 days before the 2004 presidential election, bin Laden appeared in a new video claiming responsibility for 9/11 more directly than ever before.

It was a painful reminder that the most wanted man on Earth was still free—and feeling safe enough to taunt America.