The nurse was trying to save his life. She was killing him. The water dishes beneath every hospital bed were meant to stop the ants. Inside them, mosquito larvae were developing into the insects that carried yellow fever. The nurses filled them fresh each morning. They were breeding death.
Twenty-two thousand workers died before anyone believed the truth. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the hero of Suez, led them to their graves in a jungle he visited exactly once. Eight hundred thousand French families lost their savings trusting a man who was either a fool or a fraud or both.
This episode traces the full arc: from Philippe Bunau-Varilla's ninety postage stamps—one for each senator—that changed history by showing a volcano with nothing to do with the canal route, to the revolution he manufactured and the nation he betrayed. From William Gorgas eliminating yellow fever in eighteen months to David Gaillard, who swore the mountain would yield and gave his life proving it. From the Gold Roll and Silver Roll—white workers paid four times what Black workers earned—to the unmarked graves that stretch from ocean to ocean.
Twenty-seven thousand six hundred people died building the Panama Canal. One death for every ten yards. Most were Caribbean workers who came seeking wages and found graves no one can find today.
On December 31, 1999, the American flag came down and the Panamanian flag rose. The nation created by conspiracy finally controlled its own destiny.
Ships still pass through every day. The engineering still works exactly as designed. And beneath the jungle, beneath the concrete, the dead keep their silence.
They built the canal. They deserve to be remembered.

On May 12, 1797, five hundred and twelve men raised their hands in the Great Council chamber and voted to abolish a thousand-year republic. The last Doge removed his cap, handed it to a servant, and said: "Take it. I shall not be needing it again." Outside, Napoleon's army waited. Inside, a millennium of history ended in an afternoon.
We begin in 452 CE, when refugees fleeing Attila's Huns waded into an inhospitable lagoon and drove inverted forests of wooden pilings into the mud. They built a city that should not exist—and over the next thousand years, they invented the operating system of modern commerce.
The colleganza contract, which limited investor liability to their specific investment, is the direct ancestor of every corporation on earth. Double-entry bookkeeping was perfected by Venetian merchants tracking their pepper shipments. Maritime insurance was first formalized in Venetian contracts. These were not incremental improvements. These were the tools that made modern capitalism possible.
But Venice also pioneered darker innovations. In 1516, they invented a word: ghetto. Jews were confined to a small island near an old foundry—the geto—locked in at night, forbidden to leave. The glassmakers of Murano were prisoners of a different sort, forbidden to take their skills elsewhere on pain of assassination. The Council of Ten could arrest, torture, and execute without trial. When Doge Marin Faliero conspired against the state in 1355, they beheaded him on the stairs of his own palace and replaced his portrait with a black rectangle that still hangs today.
This episode traces the full arc: from stealing Saint Mark's body from Alexandria to hijacking the Fourth Crusade and sacking Constantinople. From a blind, ninety-seven-year-old Doge leading the assault on the world's greatest city to the martyrdom of Bragadin, flayed alive after the siege of Famagusta. From the Arsenal's assembly lines—five centuries before Henry Ford—to Casanova's escape across the palace rooftops. From the spice monopoly that made Venice the richest city in the world to Vasco da Gama's voyage that broke it.
The bronze horses that still stand on Saint Mark's Basilica were looted from Constantinople in 1204. Napoleon looted them again in 1797. They returned in 1815. They have watched empires rise and fall. They are still watching.
Thirty million tourists visit Venice each year. Fifty thousand people still live there. The city that invented modern capitalism has been consumed by its own logic, converted into a product for foreign visitors to experience.
The machines Venice built are still running. The people who built them are long gone. Make of that what you will.

Every night at dusk, the gates of the Frankfurt Judengasse closed. Three thousand Jews locked into 330 meters of cramped humanity. A young boy named Mayer Amschel Rothschild watched the iron swing shut and understood: the only way out was to make yourself indispensable to the people who held the keys.
We begin in the ghetto. The restrictions that governed every aspect of Jewish life. The guild system that pushed Jews into finance because other professions were forbidden. The cautionary tale of Oppenheimer, the Court Jew who served a prince and was hanged when his prince died. Then we follow Mayer Amschel's thirty-year courtship of Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel, a prince whose fortune came from selling German soldiers to the British—blood money that would become the foundation of everything.
The five sons scattered across Europe: Amschel in Frankfurt, Nathan in London, James in Paris, Salomon in Vienna, Carl in Naples. When Napoleon conquered the continent, the Rothschilds hid Wilhelm's fortune and moved forty-two million pounds of British gold through enemy territory to finance Wellington's army. They operated in the heart of the enemy empire, using French banks to fund France's defeat.
This episode traces two centuries of escape and pursuit: from the Waterloo legend to the reality it concealed, from James's palace at Ferrières that humbled an emperor to Louis's Gestapo cell that proved the limits of wealth. Along the way: the Pope borrowing from Jews, Lionel's eleven-year battle to enter Parliament, the marriages that kept the fortune in family blood, and the conspiracy theories that blamed five brothers for controlling a world they could never control.
The physical gates came down in 1806. But other gates replaced them. They always have.
Listen carefully. Somewhere, right now, gates are still closing.

On the night of November 2, 1907, J.P. Morgan locked forty bankers in his private library and refused to let them leave until they agreed to save each other. At 4:45 in the morning, the last holdout signed. The doors were unlocked. The American financial system survived. This is the story of what that night revealed, and why we have never escaped its shadow.
We begin with the run on the Knickerbocker Trust. The rumors. The lines of depositors demanding their money. The decision—Morgan's decision—to let it fail. Then comes the cascade: the Trust Company of America hemorrhaging deposits, the stock exchange minutes from closing, brokers pacing the floor waiting for money that wasn't coming. And Morgan, seventy years old, summoning the bank presidents to his office and informing them what they would do.
The night in the library was something that had never happened before: one man holding the presidents of America's largest financial institutions prisoner until they agreed to cooperate. It raised a question that still haunts us. In a democracy, who should have the power to decide which institutions live and which die?
The Federal Reserve was supposed to be the answer. Created in 1913, designed by Morgan's own men, it was meant to do institutionally what Morgan had done personally—to ensure no private citizen would ever again wield such power. But when the tests came, in 1929 and again in 2008, the institution either failed catastrophically or found itself calling Jamie Dimon, asking the man who runs JPMorgan Chase to do exactly what Morgan did a century before.
This episode traces a pattern that refuses to break: from Morgan's library to the Pecora hearings, from Glass-Steagall to its repeal, from Bear Stearns to Lehman Brothers, from a circus performer placed on a banker's lap to a system still too big to fail. Along the way: the suicide of Charles Barney, the photograph that destroyed the House of Morgan, the secret meeting at Jekyll Island, and the question Morgan posed that democracy has never answered.
The library is a museum now. The tourists take photographs. They do not know they are standing on sacred ground.
But somewhere, right now, someone is preparing to lock the doors. The pattern holds. It has always held.

In 1839, a Chinese official named Lin Zexu destroyed three million pounds of British opium — and triggered a century of catastrophe. The British responded with iron steamships that shattered the Chinese navy in hours. What followed was the Century of Humiliation: unequal treaties, carved-up territory, and a failed scholar's apocalyptic visions that sparked the Taiping Rebellion — a civil war that killed more people than World War I. From the burning of the Summer Palace to the rise of revolutionary movements, this is the story of how the world's oldest continuous civilization was broken, humiliated, and slowly rebuilt itself from the ashes.

On December 31, 1599, 218 London merchants gathered to complain about pepper prices. They left with shares in a joint-stock company—a financial innovation that would accidentally conquer a civilization.
This is the story of the British East India Company: how a trading venture grew to rule 100 million people, how it starved Bengal while raising dividends, how one clerk killed it with paperwork in 1874. We trace the full trajectory from Founders' Hall to empire to dissolution—and explain why the company's children still walk among us.
A story about what happens when profit becomes law. When shareholders become sovereigns. When a corporation eats a subcontinent.

On September 15, 2008, a mathematical model that had passed every regulatory test destroyed the global economy in a single weekend. This is the story of how we built the rules that were supposed to prevent that from happening again, and why those same rules now govern every AI system touching your money.
We begin in the wreckage. Lehman Brothers is dead. Tim Geithner is watching screens at the New York Fed as the numbers turn impossible. The Value-at-Risk models that every bank trusted, that every regulator approved, are spitting out predictions that miss reality by orders of magnitude. The models worked perfectly. The models were catastrophically wrong.
This episode traces the five layers of governance that now wrap around every algorithm in American banking. We start in 1863, when Abraham Lincoln needed to fund a war and Hugh McCulloch built the first national banking system from scratch. We move through Jekyll Island and the birth of the Federal Reserve, through the bank runs of 1933 that created the FDIC, through Ruth Bader Ginsburg's quiet revolution in civil rights law that made algorithmic fairness a federal requirement decades before the term existed.
We meet the regulators who wrote SR 11-7, the obscure 2011 guidance document that became the bible of model risk management. We watch the CFPB demand that banks explain their AI decisions in plain English. And we arrive at November 30, 2022, when ChatGPT launched and broke every assumption the governance stack was built on.
The five layers were designed to prevent the next 2008. But the algorithms they were meant to control have evolved faster than the rules. A journey through 160 years of banking law, mathematical failure, civil rights litigation, and the uncomfortable question of whether we can govern what we cannot fully understand.

The water was warm. That was the strange thing.

On February 14, 1779, the greatest navigator in British history died face-down in the shallows of Kealakekua Bay, Hawaiʻi, struck by blades his own expedition had introduced as gifts. He was fifty years old. He had traveled farther than any European of his age, logging more than two hundred thousand miles across oceans that still behaved like myth.

This is the story of how a farm laborer’s son from a clay-floored cottage in Yorkshire became the man who finished the map of the world. We begin with the beaten earth, the two-room house, the turnip fields and sheep pastures where ambition was supposed to fit inside a lifetime of weather. Then the coal ships of Whitby, where a teenage boy learned seamanship on a brutal coast. Then the Royal Navy, where he chose the hard work no one wanted and discovered that precision could be a kind of power.

This episode follows Cook’s three great Pacific voyages: the transit of Venus that doubled as a clandestine hunt for an unknown continent, the long pursuit of Antarctica to the cold edge of the navigable world, and the final voyage that ended on a Hawaiian beach. Along the way: Indigenous civilizations he encountered but could not fully understand, diseases that traveled in the wake of his ships, the legal fiction of terra nullius that would help dispossess a continent, and the woman who outlived him, burned his letters, and kept her silence for fifty-six years.

Cook solved scurvy’s terror for his crews. He charted coastlines with an accuracy that guided sailors for generations. He sailed farther south than almost anyone had dared. And he opened doors that did not swing shut again.

A journey through the life of a man who wanted to know everything, and learned too late that knowledge always has a cost, and the people who pay it are rarely the ones who asked the questions.

Twenty thousand years ago, a glacier carved a harbor that would become the most valuable real estate on Earth. This is the story of how an accident of geology set off an accident of history, and how Manhattan became Manhattan.
We begin with the ice. Two miles thick. Grinding south until it stopped at exactly the right place, leaving behind one of the deepest natural harbors on the Atlantic coast. We meet the Lenape, who called this island Mannahatta, “the island of many hills,” and built a civilization that endured for thousands of years. Then come the ships.
In 1626, Peter Minuit supposedly “bought” Manhattan for 60 guilders in trade goods. The Lenape had no concept of land as a commodity. They believed they were granting shared use. The Dutch believed they were acquiring property. Both interpretations collapse under what followed. What really began that year was a commercial experiment so ambitious, so ruthless, and so improvisational that it would eventually remake the world.
This episode traces New York from glacier to Hamilton, from the moment the ice retreated to the morning Aaron Burr’s bullet found its mark in Weehawken. Along the way: the Dutch West India Company’s high-stakes gamble, the enslaved labor that built Wall Street in the most literal sense, the Revolution that nearly broke the city, the Book of Negroes recording thousands who seized a narrow path to freedom, and Washington’s tears at Fraunces Tavern as he said goodbye to the men who made him a legend.
New York was never designed. It was patched together. It was financed by speculation, powered by extraction, and built by people who were denied ownership of their own lives. The city that never sleeps began as a city that never stopped calculating, measuring, trading, and expanding.
A journey through 20,000 years of ice, commerce, slavery, war, and the relentless pursuit of profit that, almost by accident, created the capital of the world.