All episodes

7.5 - Totalitarianism: When an Idea Takes Over the State

7.4 - The First World War: The End of a World Order

7.3 - The Three Branches: Liberal, Socialist, Evolutionary

7.2 - Humanism: Authority Migrates into the Person

7.1 - Nationalism: The Imagined Community

6.10 - Compression: The Clock, the Factory, and Consumption

6.9 - The Industrial Revolution: Energy in Abundance

6.8 - Adam Smith and the Invention of Economics

6.7 - Capital and Credit: How Trust in the Future Creates the Present

6.6 - Enlightenment and Its Opponents

6.5 - The Needham Question: Why Not China, Not India, Not the Caliphate?

6.4 - The Scientific Revolution: The Admission of Ignorance

6.3 - How Should We Live? Three Operating Systems of Morality

6.2 - Kant: The Turn Inward

6.1 - What Can We Know? From Socrates to Hume

5.10 - Compression: Silver, Sugar, Slaves, and the First World Market

5.9 - Colonialism: The Mechanics of Rule at a Distance

5.8 - The Printing Press: When Copying Became Cheap

5.7 - The Islamic Science System

5.6 - Africa Before Colonialism

5.5 - Epidemics, Part Two: The Biological Collapse of the Americas

5.4 - Fourteen Ninety-Two: The Exchange That Rebuilt the World

5.3 - The Other Seafarers: Phoenicians, Arabs, Chinese, Vikings

5.2 - The Polynesians: Humanity's Greatest Feat of Navigation

5.1 - Epidemics, Part One: The Price of Density

4.10 - Compression: Intoxication, Ritual, and the Chemistry of Culture

4.9 - Music: Synchronizing the Group

4.8 - Art: Why Humans Make Images

4.7 - Death: Burial, Mourning, the Afterlife

4.6 - Emotions: Universal or Constructed?

4.5 - Love, Marriage, and the Invention of Togetherness

4.4 - The Invention of Childhood

4.3 - Slavery: The Longest Institution

4.2 - War: The Organization of Violence

4.1 - Us and Them: The Psychology of the Group

3.10 - Compression: Monotheism and Its Price

3.9 - India Thinks: The Self, Suffering, and the Wheel

3.8 - China Thinks: Confucius, Laozi, and the Legalists

3.7 - The Axial Age: When the World Began Thinking at the Same Time

3.6 - From Ancestors to the Great Gods

3.5 - The First Networks: Bronze, Incense, Silk

3.4 - Money: The Most Successful Fiction of All Time

3.3 - The Empire as Operating System

3.2 - Bureaucracy: How the State Learned to See

3.1 - The Law: From Hammurabi to the Idea of the Rule

2.10 - Compression: Patriarchy, the Hardest Case

2.9 - How Inequality Arises, and Why It Always Passes Itself Off as Nature

2.8 - Writing: When Information Left the Brain

2.7 - The Anunnaki: What the Tablets Say, and What Was Made of It

2.6 - Sumer: Why There, Why Then

2.5 - The First City: Çatalhöyük, Jericho, Uruk

2.4 - Domestication: Who Actually Tamed Whom

2.3 - Agriculture: Progress or Trap?

2.2 - Göbekli Tepe and the Limits of Archaeology

2.1 - The End of the Ice Age: A Climate History of the Holocene

1.10 - Compression: The Ecological Footprint Before Civilization

1.9 - The Great Migration: How Humanity Took Over the Planet

1.8 - Language Itself: How Words Are Born, Travel, and Die

1.7 - The Social Brain: Bonding, Rank, Shame

1.6 - The Stone Age Mind in You, and the Limits of That Explanation

1.5 - Shared Myths: How Millions of Strangers Cooperate

1.4 - The Lion Man: The Birth of Fiction

1.3 - The Cognitive Revolution: Language, Gossip, Shared Intention

1.2 - Fire, Cooking, and the Invention of a Long Childhood

1.1 - Why Us of All Species? Human Kinds and a Brain Too Expensive

Preface