History Unplugged Podcast

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• The 1873 Global Financial Meltdown that Cause 20 Years of Deflation and Destroyed 2 Empires 21.07.2026 44min

  On May 9, 1873, as the Vienna Stock Exchange collapsed and thousands of speculators were wiped out in a single afternoon, young Salbert von Rothschild and two colleagues from the Schey and Goldschmidt banking families were nearly lynched on the floor of the exchange by infuriated stockjobbers and had to be rescued by police. That same evening, oblivious to the carnage a few hundred yards away, the Prince of Wales hosted a gala dinner at the Ministry of Finance, and the following night Emperor Franz Joseph served a state dinner for the assembled heirs to the royal thrones of Europe. Within months, the panic had crossed the Atlantic and destroyed Jay Cooke, the man who had single-handedly funded the Union's Civil War effort, shutting down the New York Stock Exchange for ten days. Today's guest is Liaquat Ahamed, author of 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World. We discuss how the Rothschilds built their fortune smuggling gold across the English Channel during the Napoleonic Wars and became, relative to the size of the global economy, the richest family in history. We look at how Sultan Abdülaziz of the Ottoman Empire and Khedive Ismail of Egypt borrowed their nations into oblivion and were both destroyed for it, why the demonetization of silver was the most consequential economic blunder of the nineteenth century (Milton Friedman blamed it for the worst deflation in recorded history), and how a completely fabricated conspiracy theory about the Rothschilds bribing Congress sold 400,000 copies in the American heartland. Ahamed argues that the 1873 crisis created a twenty-year redistribution of wealth from farmers, workers, and small investors to the bankers most responsible for the crash, fueling populist movements that reshaped politics on every continent.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
• Johnny Appleseed's Trees Were for Booze, Not Pies, and He Dressed Like a Hobo for Marketing Purposes 16.07.2026 53min

  The Disney version of Johnny Appleseed has a cheerful barefoot man in a tin pot hat scattering apple seeds for grateful pioneers to bake into pies. The real John Chapman collected his seeds for free from cidery waste, planted them into strategically fenced nurseries on land he bought ahead of the settlement line, and sold the resulting trees to colonists who used the apples almost exclusively to make hard cider and applejack brandy. He died owning 1,200 acres across three states but never touched the money, because his Swedenborgian faith taught him that suffering in this life meant blessings in the next. He wore coffee sacks as shirts, went barefoot through Ohio winters, and entertained settler children by sticking needles into his calloused feet. Today's guest is Isaac Fitzgerald, author of *American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed*. We discuss how Chapman's father was a Minuteman who fought at Concord and later ended up in debtor's prison, why the Northwest Indian War of the 1790s, one of the worst military disasters in early American history, created the very frontier Chapman would spend his life planting, and how a forgotten Irish frontiersman named Dan McQuay who walked 1,200 miles home from New Orleans through hostile wilderness may have been the real inspiration for Chapman's rambling life.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
• All the World’s Empires Became Nations in Less Than 100 Years, and What That Means for the Next 100 14.07.2026 49min

  For the last 5,000 years, empires ruled the world — Rome administered hundreds of languages across three continents, and the Ottomans governed Christians, Jews, and Muslims under a single legal canopy. The nation-state as we know it is barely a century old for most of the world's population. In 1900, maybe 25 percent of humanity lived under nation. Today, 99 percent live in nation-states — and almost all of them were created in a single, compressed rush after 1945. And this world order could already be giving way to the next. Amazon has a larger GDP than most countries, the Bitcoin network operates outside any central bank's reach, and a 19-year-old with a smartphone can reach more people than most governments. The monopoly is gone. The question is what replaces it. Today’s guest is Rana Dasgupta, author of After Nations. We trace how different nations came into existence and the reasons their nations formed the way they did. France built its national identity through theology, Britain through property, the United States through law, and China through controlling its massive rivers and sidestepping local rulers in the process. We see why all four models are now straining under the weight of planetary problems no border can contain. The post-1945 liberal order wasn't the natural culmination of history but a brief, unusual window of stability between eras of great-power competition. The question isn't whether the nation-state will survive, but what forms of citizenship, governance, and legitimacy can be invented to replace the functions it can no longer perform. If the last great transition produced the nation, the next one will have to produce something we don't yet have a name for.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
• Five Cambridge Graduates Became Soviet Spies and Built Stalin’s Empire 09.07.2026 58min

  The Cambridge Five did more damage to the Western Bloc than any other intelligence outfit of the Cold War. They were five Cambridge graduates who drank gin at the right clubs, moved through the right corridors of British intelligence at the height of WW2, and quietly handed Stalin the keys to post-war Europe. Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, and John Cairncross were recruited for their sympathies to communism because they were radicalized by the wreckage of World War I and the Great Depression. They believed that Soviet communism was the only serious answer. The Five each quickly took up a place in the British government, granting them access to top-secret intelligence that they shared with the USSR, whether decrypted German intelligence obtained from Alan Turing’s Bletchley Park and the Wehrmacht’s latest troop movements, or nuclear designs fresh from Manhattan Project labs. What followed was decades of betrayal so consequential it shaped the entire postwar map of Eastern Europe. They did this not just by passing secrets, but by condemning millions of Poles, Ukrainians, Albanians, and Baltic peoples to Soviet repression when their underground resistance networks were quietly handed over to Moscow. Today’s guest is Antonia Senior, author of Stalin's Apostles, and she explains how she pieced together a story that was designed never to be found, because moles don't leave paper trails, and the Cambridge Five made sure their communications rarely entered any correspondence at all. We see that they did more to cause the Iron Curtain to descend deep into Europe than any other intelligence group.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
• Washington’s Power Went Beyond President or General – He Was a Full-Fledged Patriarch 07.07.2026 54min

  Washington was the perfect man for an impossible moment — aristocratic enough to command the respect of erudite founders like Hamilton and Jefferson, yet only a mid-level Virginia planter who understood ordinary life and could relate to common soldiers because his ancestors had fled the English Civil War with nothing and spent generations clawing their way back into respectability. That family history gave him something neither Hamilton's brilliance nor Jefferson's philosophy could manufacture: a bone-deep understanding of what it felt like to have status, lose it, and rebuild it through sheer force of will. This goes alone with his earliest military experiences in the French-Indian War: he suffered a string of frontier humiliations in the Ohio Valley that taught him the one lesson that would win the Revolution: how to survive losing. Today’s guest is H.W. Brands, author of American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington. We see how Washington's most important acts were preserving through impossible hardships like he did at Valley Forge but also in the moments he chose not to act: not to seize power, not to crown himself, not to serve a third term. He managed Hamilton and Jefferson's explosive feud the way a patriarch manages feuding sons — with exhausted patience and the quiet authority of a man who had already outlasted everything. He ended his presidency with the most radical thing a powerful man could do in 1797, which was to simply go home. All of this made him a patriarch -- a father of an extended family that encompassed the United States -- and crafted the norms that would steady America as a nation for generations to follow.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
• Abigail Adams Beat Warren Buffet’s Rate of Return and Ben Franklin Loved Debt: Personal Finance Lessons From Colonial America 02.07.2026 54min

  Many so-called timeless beliefs about money pitched by financial advisors today (compound interest, real estate, index funds, retiring early) are not timeless pieces of wisdom, but a set of ideas invented within the last century, mostly by accident. In fact, the biggest financial dangers come from building a financial strategy around government rules that seem like they’ve existed forever but can change overnight. In 1913, when the income tax was created, interest on debt was explicitly excluded from taxation. For 70 years, savvy investors borrowed as much as possible and deducted the losses. Then Ronald Reagan changed it in 1986,  in one legislative stroke. Hundreds of thousands of investors found themselves buried under debt they'd structured around a rule that no longer existed Today’s guest is Joseph Moore, author of How to Get Rich in American History: 300 Years of Financial Advice That Worked (and Didn't). We dig into the counterintuitive lessons hiding in plain sight across American history: why Abigail Adams was arguably a better investor than Warren Buffett; how Benjamin Franklin preached against debt while secretly building his printing empire on borrowed money; why one-third of American families once rented out rooms to boarders as their primary wealth-building strategy, until the government outlawed it; and how Dave Ramsey's entire financial philosophy was forged in a single day when the government changed a tax rule and wiped him out. Another lesson with modern parallels is that the FIRE movement — Financial Independence Retire Early — has deep roots in American history, but its most celebrated practitioners were almost always hiding a financial subsidy. Henry David Thoreau, patron saint of anti-consumerism, built his cabin on someone else's land and had his mother bring him food. He later returned to capitalism and ran a successful factory.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
• The Highs and Lows of Roman Slavery: From the Emperor's Advisor to Suffocating in Sulfur Mines 30.06.2026 56min

  When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul he boasted that he killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. This is the truth about the Roman empire: Rome could not function without slavery as it underpinned every single part of their economy. Without the millions of people snatched from their homes in the aftermath of war, kidnapped from the streets, sold into slavery as punishment, or born into it as “home bred slaves”, the Roman empire’s great aqueducts and temples could never have been built. There would be no coins or tiles to find in fields, no limitless manpower for the army and navy that conquered the Mediterranean, no marble palaces or underfloor heating, and certainly no life of unimaginable luxury for the top of Roman society. Slavery in Rome could be very good or bad depending on the job. Highly educated Greek slaves served as physicians, accountants, architects, and tutors for aristocratic sons and daughters. At the bottom of the hierarchy were sulfur mine workers, who worked in toxic, collapsing tunnels and were often blinded by their masters to remind them they would be there for the rest of their short miserable lives. Today's guest is Emma Southon, author of Not Built in a Day: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire. We discuss how Rome evolved from a sanctuary for men fleeing slavery into the most extensive chattel slave system in history, and how Spartacus horrified Rome not by winning battles but by forcing 300 Roman prisoners to fight as gladiators at his co-commander's funeral. We also look at why there was never a Roman abolition movement because Romans understood that slavery destroyed people but concluded this was the slaves' problem, not theirs.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
• A Day at the Gladiatorial Games: Beast Hunts, Mass Slaughter, and Flooding the Colosseum to Reenact Roman Naval Battles 25.06.2026 52min

  A gladiator named Diodorus defeated his opponent Demetrius in the arena, accepted his submission, discarded his own helmet and shield, and reached for the palm branch that marked his victory. Then the referee refused to honor the submission and ordered the fight to continue. Diodorus was killed. His tombstone, which survives, reads: "Murderous Fate and the cunning treachery of the referee killed me, and leaving the light, I have gone to Hades." Another gladiator named Urbicus, who had once spared a defeated opponent and was later killed by that same man in a rematch, left behind the most chilling last words in Roman history: "I advise that he who defeats a man should kill him." Today's guest is Harry Sidebottom, author of *Those Who Are About to Die: A Day in the Life of a Roman Gladiator*. Structured as a single twenty-four-hour cycle from the gladiators' last supper through the morning beast hunts, midday executions, and afternoon combat, Sidebottom's book dismantles almost everything Hollywood has taught us about the arena. We discuss why gladiators were deliberately fattened on barley stew so their subcutaneous fat would produce spectacular bleeding from non-fatal wounds, how Roman senators kept illegally sneaking into gladiatorial schools despite repeated bans stretching across two centuries, why the Colosseum was built on top of Nero's artificial lake using plunder from the sack of Jerusalem, and how Galen pioneered human surgery by first vivisecting a live monkey and then treating wounded gladiators at Pergamum. We also look at why epileptics drank gladiator blood as medicine (and why Roman doctors reluctantly admitted it might work), how twenty-nine Saxon prisoners strangled each other without a rope rather than fight, and why Constantine did not actually abolish gladiatorial combat despite what every Christian source claims.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
• The Black Death’s Global Ripple Effects, and How They Were Felt Outside Europe 23.06.2026 52min

  Of the millions of victims of the Black Death, one was a teenager named Joseph ben Meir Abulafia, who died of the plague in Toledo in 1349 alongside his new wife. His tombstone was inscribed as a conversation with the dead: "I am the man who has seen desolation and destruction, blood and pestilence. The days of my youth were cut short suddenly, in the prime of my life." His unnamed mother survived, left alone and childless, her days filled with "bitter weeping." That inscription is one of seventy-six medieval tombstones from Toledo's Jewish cemetery that preserve the most personal voices of history's deadliest pandemic, a catastrophe that killed an estimated 100 million people in six years and whose aftershocks lasted for centuries. Today's guest is Thomas Asbridge, author of The Black Death: A Global History of Humanity's Most Devastating Pandemic. We discuss how a minor Venetian merchant's business papers, preserved by his widow in a convent, reveal that the medieval trade networks which kept cities fed were also purpose-built to spread epidemic disease across thousands of miles. We look at why the Byzantine emperor wrote about his fourteen-year-old son's death with clinical detachment, how a Franciscan intellectual who had questioned whether other worlds existed died carrying holy water through plague-ravaged Messina, and why the only European king killed by the Black Death was besieging Gibraltar with dreams of marching to Jerusalem when the plague found his camp. The pandemic's most devastating long-term consequences were felt not in Europe but in the Muslim world, where the once-invincible Mamluk Empire was broken by recurrent outbreaks and eventually conquered by the Ottomans, and that this forgotten collapse may have been the true hinge point that set the West on its path to global dominance.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
• The Part of the Declaration of Independence Nobody Reads (Grievances Against King George) Is the Part That Actually Mattered 18.06.2026 48min

  On July 9, 1776, a group of American soldiers listened to the Declaration of Independence read aloud in New York City, then rushed down Broadway and spent several minutes prying a two-ton golden equestrian statue of King George III off its pedestal on Bowling Green. They hacked off the head, sent the body to a Connecticut foundry, and melted it into exactly 42,088 bullets, a number chosen deliberately to evoke the British revolutions of 1642 and 1688. On the road to the foundry, loyalist neighbors in Wilton crept out at night and stole pieces of the statue, burying them in their yards as a quiet counter-protest. Those fragments stayed hidden for centuries until treasure hunters with metal detectors dug them up. Today's guest is Robert G. Parkinson, author of Tyrants and Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence. We look at the 27 grievances that make up the body of the Declaration, the section that Jefferson, Congress, and the British government all considered the essential part of the document but that modern Americans almost never read. We discuss how the very first grievance is secretly about the king vetoing Virginia's attempt to curtail the slave trade, and that the patriots saw themselves not as radical innovators but as the heirs of 1688, conducting the third British revolution in 135 years, and that the Declaration was written not in a moment of triumph but during nine weeks of almost unbelievable catastrophe.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
• Children of Abraham: The 1,400-Year History of Jewish–Muslim Relations 16.06.2026 56min

  For more than 1400 years, the history of Jewish and Muslim engagement has been a complex story of cooperation and conflict. The best known events are hostile encounters (like the 1066 Granada massacre or modern Arab-Israeli wars), they’ve had a multifaceted relationship, from Muhammad’s dealings with Jewish tribes in Arabia in the 600s, Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II sending his navy to rescue Jews from the 1492 expulsion from Spain, to the contemporary tensions currently unfolding in the Middle East. Today’s guest is Marc David Baer: Author of “Children of Abraham:   The 1,400-Year History of Jewish–Muslim Relations.” We discuss how Jews and Muslims lived together in the Middle East and Europe, more often in cooperation than in conflict, for more than a millennium. When Islam emerged in the seventh century, Muslims and Jews were bound by shared religious tenets and common cultural practices, and for centuries afterward, they were often allies. We also discuss Muslim warriors fighting for a medieval Turkish Jewish kingdom on the Caspian Sea, Jewish viziers leading the Muslim sultan’s troops in Spain, and Jewish literary lights and political party leaders in modern Egypt and Iraq. At the same time, religious tolerance did not mean a lack of hierarchy and discrimination. For most of history, Muslims held power over Jews and Islam was promoted as the superior religion.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
• How 10 Whalers Survived Three Years Shipwrecked in the South Pacific 11.06.2026 54min

  In 1832, a New Bedford whaleship called the Mentor struck a reef in the remote Pacific archipelago of Palau. The tiny, 100-foot-long ship began sinking immediately, and the 22 men who made up its crew were thrown into one of the most extraordinary survival ordeals in American maritime history. Ten men vanished the night of the wreck and were never seen again. The survivors found themselves stranded among island peoples with their own complex politics, rival confederations, and fifty years of complicated history with Western ships that the castaways knew nothing about. What followed was a story of captivity, starvation, forced tattooing, a rescue that made everything worse, and a years-long scramble across islands and ocean before the last survivors finally made it home. Today's guest is Eric Jay Dolin, author of "The Wreck of the Mentor." We untangle one of the great forgotten stories of the Age of Sail, and explore how fifty years of British guns and gunboat diplomacy warped Palauan politics long before the Mentor arrived, why the men who attacked the castaways with war clubs also cooked them lavish feasts and wept for their dead, and how crewman Horace Holden kept himself alive on a famine-stricken island when almost everything pointed toward death.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
• The Nobels Built Russia’s Oil Industry, Invented Dynamite and the Oil Tanker, But Were Still Crushed by the Bolshevik Revolution 09.06.2026 44min

  The Nobel family (which are the namesake of the Nobel prize), had a rags-to-riches story bigger than the Rockefellers or Morgans. The Nobel patriarch Emanuel fled debtor’s prison  in 1837. He then travelled east and built a foundation for the largest oil empire in Russian history. Three generations of Nobels invented the world's first oil tanker, stopped the Royal Navy cold with undersea mines during the Crimean War, and outmaneuvered both Rockefeller and the Rothschilds in the world's first great corporate oil war. Then the Bolsheviks arrived. Lenin nationalized everything overnight, Stalin personally targeted the family patriarch for arrest, and the man who quietly made the Nobel Prize a reality had to escape revolutionary Russia in a horse-drawn cart wearing a disguise, with forged papers and three borrowed children to complete the ruse. It is one of the great lost stories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, overshadowing the very prizes that bear the family name. Today's guest is Douglas Brunt, author of The Lost Empire of Emanuel Nobel. We discuss how capitalism and Marxism grew up in the same Russian cities before their catastrophic collision, why Emanuel Nobel defied the King of Sweden to ensure his uncle Alfred's will was honored, and what it actually looked like when Lenin's pen stroke erased three generations of Nobel engineering genius in a single day. We explore this story of oil, revolution, and a dynasty that fueled the world and then vanished.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
• The American Revolution Went Way Outside of America, Pulling in Caribbean Colonies, African Forts, and Chinese Trading Houses 04.06.2026 52min

  The thirteen colonies that became the United States were just half of the British colonies that existed in the 18th century. The empire stretched from New England, south to Georgia and Florida and the islands of the West Indies, east to India, Scotland, and Ireland, and south again to British forts on the West coast of Africa. Because of this, the revolution of 1776 wasn’t isolated to the North American eastern seaboard. It was a world-historical crisis that swept up American Indian nations, Caribbean islands, West African forts, Indian cities, Scottish drawing rooms, German principalities, Cuban harbors, Chinese trading houses, and a fledgling colony in Sierra Leone. The result is a Revolution that was on the one hand a political struggle for the 13 colonies, but it was also a genuinely global catastrophe in which Indigenous nations, enslaved Africans, German soldiers, French philosophes, Caribbean planters, Indian merchants, and Spanish generals all fought for their own competing visions of what "freedom" actually meant. Today’s guest is Sarah Pearsall, author of Freedom Round the Globe. We see how the fight for liberty went far outside the borders of the American colonies. When the British Parliament imposed the Stamp Act in 1765, the protests and violent crowd actions that erupted were not confined to Boston or Virginia,  they broke out with equal fury in St. Kitts, Nevis, Antigua, and other Caribbean colonies. But they chose to stay loyal because they feared slave uprisings more than they resented Parliament. The French alliance that saved American independence at Yorktown drove France itself toward bankruptcy and revolution. And there were at least two would-be fourteenth colonies (British Florida and Quebec) courted by Americans but believed their fortunes were better served in other places than the Revolution. The Revolution was not a contained colonial rebellion. It was a world war, and the Treaty of Paris in 1783 settled the claims of dozens of nations, most of whom had nothing to do with the thirteen colonies.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
• Ford’s Auto Domination Came From a 1909 Race Across America Through Mud-Choked Roads 02.06.2026 53min

  In June 1909, five automobiles lined up in front of New York's City Hall to attempt something no car had ever done: drive all the way to Seattle. The Ocean-to-Ocean Race was supposed to be a publicity stunt for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, but it became something far more consequential,  a 4,100-mile brawl through gumbo mud, quicksand, flooded rivers, and snow-choked mountain passes that would help launch the Model T, expose the wretched state of America's roads, and change the trajectory of the automobile industry forever. Henry Ford entered two stripped-down Model Ts priced at $850 against rivals costing five to ten times as much, betting his company's future on the proposition that a lightweight, affordable car could outrun and outlast them all. Today’s guest is Eric Moskowitz, author of The Hardest, Longest Race. We see the real story is far messier than Ford's victory narrative. The Shawmut Motor Company,  a tiny Boston outfit that had lost everything in a factory fire and entered the race as a last-ditch gamble to survive,  battled the Fords neck and neck across twelve states, only to be sabotaged by bribed ferrymen, blocked by armed guards at river crossings, and ultimately cheated by an illegal engine swap that Ford concealed until a small-town fraud investigator from Idaho uncovered the shipping receipts. The Automobile Club of America stripped Ford of the win and awarded the trophy to the Shawmut, but by then nobody was listening, Ford's dealers had already papered the country with victory ads, and the Shawmut Motor Company was dead. We see that the century of the automobile had the most unlikely origin story.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
• Al Capone’s Missing $100 Million, and the TV Journalist Who Embarrassed Himself to Find It 28.05.2026 52min

  On the night of April 21, 1986, an estimated 30 million Americans sat in front of their televisions waiting for a moment that almost no one alive had ever seen: a live, prime-time excavation of a gangster's secret vault. Geraldo Rivera, recently fired from ABC News and hungry for a comeback, had convinced Tribune Broadcasting to stake its credibility on a two-hour live special built around a single, tantalizing question: what had Al Capone hidden in the sealed basement of his Chicago headquarters? The network flew in IRS agents to handle the expected cash, a county medical examiner to process any bodies, and locksmiths to crack whatever fortress Capone had left behind. What they found, on live television, in front of 30 million viewers, was dirt and a few empty gin bottles. William Hazelgrove, author of Capone's Vault, joins the show to explain why the special was a ratings triumph anyway, and why that's the more interesting story. Capone had been dead for nearly 40 years, yet his myth was so potent, his legend so carefully self-constructed during his lifetime, that the mere possibility of a hidden room full of gold and skeletons was enough to hold the country's attention for two hours. The empty vault didn't kill the spectacle, it completed it, proving that anticipation is a more powerful television engine than any actual revelation. What Geraldo Rivera stumbled into that night, almost by accident, was the blueprint for every reality TV cliffhanger, true-crime docuseries, and hype-culture livestream that would follow in the next four decades.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
• How the Dollar Created America (Part 2) 26.05.2026 51min

  Part 2 of our exploration of how the U.S. dollar is older than the United States itself and has a level of power beyond the Federal Reserve and even beyond the U.S. government. We’re joined by guest Brendan Greeley, author of The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World’s Most Powerful Money.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
• How the Dollar Created America (Part 1) 21.05.2026 51min

  The U.S. dollar's origin story begins not in Philadelphia or Washington, but in a half-frozen mining valley in 16th-century Bohemia, where Saxon miners accidentally named their town after a saint and set the world's dominant currency in motion. That currency's history stretches from a 1518 christening party all the way to the eurodollar markets of Cold War London — and the central is that money is a product, not a symbol of sovereignty. From Spanish silver hollowing out Toledo's workshops to enslaved people serving as bank collateral in antebellum New Orleans, the dollar's history is less a triumph than a series of accidents and power grabs. Today’s guest is Brendan Greeley, author of The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World’s Most Powerful Money, and he explains how colonial Americans invented paper money not as a revolutionary act but as a desperate workaround for chronic small-change shortages — and how that same improvised spirit resurfaced when a Maytag dealer in Iowa printed his own dollars to keep a Depression-era town alive. He also dismantles the myth that Nixon's 1971 decision to close the gold window turned money into "fiat" — arguing that gold never gave the dollar its value, only controlled it. What actually sustained the dollar across five centuries was something more mundane: banks, habits, laws, and the accumulated trust of people who had no other options.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
• From Patriot to Pirate: How Revolutionary War Hero Sam Mason Became a River Outlaw 19.05.2026 48min

  One of the greatest threat to early America was piracy, but it wasn’t found in the Caribbean or Gulf Coast. It was pirates on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Samuel Mason fought bravely at the 1777 Siege of Fort Henry, became a Justice of the Peace in the Northwest Territory, then turned Cave-in-Rock into a strategic base for organized river piracy where he lured flatboat crews with promises of "liquor and entertainment" before robbing and murdering them. Mason thrived because the new republic had weak, fragmented control over its western territories. Jurisdiction overlapped between local authorities, territorial governments, Spanish Louisiana, and American claims. He exploited every gap. His story ended when two of his own men killed him, severed his head, and tried to collect bounty money in Natchez, only to be recognized as outlaws themselves and hanged. Today's guest is Carter Smith, author of From Patriot to Pirate: The Outlaw Life of Sam Mason. We discuss why Mason kicked the infamous Harpe brothers out of his gang because their extreme brutality threatened to draw too much attention to his organized operation. Smith explains how the collapse of frontier order after the Revolution pushed respected veterans into outlawry. Mason wasn't a wandering thug. He was organized, strategic, and dangerous. His life reveals what criminal opportunity looked like when the map said one thing but actual control on the ground said something else.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
• Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs 14.05.2026 46min

  When Russia's Dowager Empress was pregnant with the future Tsar Nicholas II in 1868, she dreamed that a peasant would one day kill her son. The idea terrified her, and for the rest of her days she lived under the fear of this prophecy. It may have come true with the arrival at court of a mysterious, barely literate wandering monk from Siberia, Grigori Rasputin. He had a pale face, long hair and penetrating eyes gave him an almost hypnotic quality. Though he had no official position at court, Rasputin’s hold over the Romanovs became the stuff of legend. Exaggerated accounts of political and financial corruption swirled around him, to say nothing of the stories of his debauchery with the Empress and even her daughters. The consequences of the rumor and conspiracy theories were devastating—when the February revolution broke out in 1917, hardly a sword was raised in the Tsar’s defense. Today's guest is Antony Beevor, author of Rasputin: The Downfall of the Romanovs. We look at how Rasputin was able to wield such power, mostly by tricking the Royal Family into thinking he could heal Tsarevich Alexei’s hemorrhages. We also look at his legendary assassination, in which conspirators allegedly fed him cyanide-laced cakes, shooting him twice, and throwing him into the freezing Neva. Despite his death, nothing changed, as the Romanov dynasty collapsed three months later in the February Revolution and the entire family was murdered by Bolsheviks a year after that. We see that Rasputin was less the cause of the Romanov collapse than its most visible symptom, explaining that when a government is ruled by an isolated royal family, it creates a vacuum that only a swindler or visionary can fill.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.