Unteachable Courses

A 36‑lecture audio course on the materials that run the modern world-from ore bodies and brines to magnets, batteries, chips, and reactors. Each lecture focuses on one element or mineral, tracing its journey from deposit geology through beneficiation and refining to the devices it powers. We make the flowsheet legible: comminution and flotation; roasting, high‑pressure acid leaching, solvent extraction, and ion exchange; separation to oxides and metals; alloying and specialty powders. See how neodymium‑iron‑boron magnets are born, why lithium hexafluorophosphate matters in electrolytes, where gallium nitride wins in power, how graphite anodes evolve with silicon, and how the uranium fuel cycle and vanadium flow batteries actually work. Markets and politics are treated as engineering constraints. Learn to spot yield killers, read offtake agreements, and separate strategic scarcity from narrative. Test real substitutions-ferrites in small motors, sodium‑ion for short‑range storage, gallium nitride versus silicon carbide-and where performance cliffs block redesign. We map chokepoints beyond the mine: separation capacity, reagents, waste handling, water and energy intensity, and manufacturer qualification cycles. Then we follow the consequences-export controls and quotas, permitting and community consent, tariffs and friend‑shoring, standards and labeling rules. Rigorous, narrative‑driven, and built for the intellectually ambitious, this course is an operator's guide to the science, supply chains, and statecraft of a materials‑constrained century.

A 24‑lecture audio expedition into the world's cartographic glitches-unrecognized states, disputed borders, legal voids, and places you can't enter. We move from café‑tile sovereignty in Baarle, where a front door decides your country, to the 2015 India–Bangladesh enclave exchange, and the 2022 line cut across Hans Island's ravine; from Ceuta and Melilla's fences and tax codes to the Danube where hydrology argues with history; from the Bir Tawil/Hala'ib paradox to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and America's twin sacrifice zones, Picher and Centralia. We make the atlas legible: thalweg versus cadastre, uti possidetis and boundary commissions, counter‑enclaves and neutral roads, patrol lines, CBMs, and maritime geodesy. Trace Fergana's water politics from Golovnoi gates to the Andijan/Kempir‑Abad bargain; India's Himalayan hinge from Siachen and Galwan to Sugauli; the pastoral circuits and patrol lines that keep the Ilemi Triangle ambiguous; and the nested Nahwa‑in‑Madha‑in‑UAE trick. Markets and politics are treated as geography constraints. Learn to read sovereignty by ferries, fuel receipts, and power bills; to separate romantic claims from operational control; to test what‑ifs-who could claim Bir Tawil, what shifts if Sir Creek moves-and to map chokepoints beyond lines: customs regimes, water releases, patrol logistics, recognition cycles. Then follow the consequences-duty‑free ledgers and bunkering margins, quotas and visas, surveillance and tragedy on the fence. Rigorous, narrative‑driven, and built for the intellectually ambitious, this course is an operator's guide to the law, logistics, and lived frictions of a planet whose map won't sit still.