BBC Studios

And the gold that he's going to bring up from the bottom of the ocean, by all accounts, totally ruins his life.

from 99% Invisible and BBC Studios.

This is a history of the United States in 100 Objects.

I'm Roman Mars.

Thanks, Roman.

If you want to learn more about the story of the SS Central America and how Tommy Thompson discovered its long lost treasure, check out the book Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder.

A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios.

It's hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars.

We're all out of the ordinary.

A few months ago, Roman Mars of the 99% Invisible podcast reached out to me to ask if I would do a story for a co-production he's working on with BBC Studios called A History of the U.S. in 100 Objects.

Roman, in addition to hosting what I consider to be among the best podcasts of all time, gave me my first shot at reporting my own radio story almost 14 years ago.

So when he reached out, I of course jumped at the opportunity to work with him again.

In their initial email, they actually had a specific object in mind for me to tackle.

And as I started reporting the story, it felt like a hyperfixed problem because it's about someone trying to solve a seemingly impossible conundrum.

How do you sell something that most people have never heard of and have no idea how to use? So in partnership with 99% Invisible and BBC Studios, I'm incredibly proud to present my entry in the history of the US in 100 Objects.

I'll put a link to the entire series in the show notes so you can listen to the whole thing.

I think, you know, from my perspective, all of my work when i was editing was through you know oh you know you work for one production you end up meeting a production manager or an exec producer that then says oh look stick around we've got this coming down the pipeline you know and you end up working in one place be that light box or passion or wherever it is for for three or four years on back-to-back projects before you then start moving on again but i think it's fairly common to do that

Andy but I feel quite spoiled if I'm honest it's it's only really hitting me now that um you know I would get calls from people I was thinking I got a you know regularly chat with Mike Davis at BBC Studios about things that we like to see and shows and I did a bit of work with him but everything was starting to become a little bit more part-time can you do a day here can you do you know I And I'm talking specifically visual effects at this point, because my specialism has been that I would say over the past sort of 10, 12, 15 years, probably 15 years that it just migrated into me being more known for that rather than the full kind of production process.

So, you know, we've got a bit of visual effects.

Can you do a bit of consultancy? Can you look at this? Can you look at that? Or could you teach our line producer about visual effects? And the last couple of years, I've definitely noticed that budget shrinking, people are having to become more generalist about these things.

That's in the next episode of Good Bad Billionaire.

Good Bad Billionaire is a BBC Studios production for the BBC World Service.

It's produced by Conor Garrett with research by Hannah Ramazani.

The editor is Paul Smith.

Yes, we have some names.

So Jed Mercurio, a couple from BBC Studios, and...

A couple of Scottish companies.

So they basically said, we want it staying in Wales, and the people that have applied for it aren't in Wales.