Watch anything, by the fire.

Power in America has always been written in back rooms, duelling grounds, and smoke-filled hotel suites — and this is where those stories get told properly. Marty walks you through the scandals that shook the republic, from a third-rate burglary at the Watergate to a sitting congressman caned nearly to death on the Senate floor, from Teapot Dome to the only coup ever staged on American soil. Every word is documented history; it just happens to read like a thriller. Carol keeps the fire going and asks the questions you'd ask.

Old New France kept its ghosts close. Canoes that fly on a devil's bargain, a woman hanged and left to swing in an iron cage, a golden dog carved into a wall as a promise of revenge — these are the stories Quebec told itself through long winters, and they have lost none of their teeth. Marty tells them the way they were meant to be heard: slowly, by firelight, with the river running somewhere in the dark.

The Rock breeds a particular kind of story — salt-cured, hard-won, and haunted. Seventy-eight men frozen on the ice in 1914. A regiment cut down in twenty minutes at Beaumont-Hamel. The last of the Beothuk, painting her vanished people from memory. Alongside the sorrow sit the fairies, the Old Hag, and Norse longships a thousand years early. Sorrow, sea, and spirits from the edge of the Atlantic.

Forget the eyepatches. The golden age of piracy lasted barely a decade, and the people who lived it were stranger and more dangerous than any film. A schoolteacher's son who became Blackbeard. Two women who fought harder than any man aboard and beat the gallows by a technicality. A gentleman planter who bought his own pirate ship. And Ching Shih, who commanded a fleet of hundreds and retired rich and unpunished. Eight true stories, told at the fire.

Every vice was once somebody's fortune. Gin so cheap it nearly emptied London, opium sold at the point of a gun, snake oil poured by men who knew exactly what was in it, and sugar — the quietest and most profitable of them all. These are stories about appetite, and about the people who learned to sell it. Marty follows the money; Carol asks what it cost.

The Bruce Peninsula splits Georgian Bay from Lake Huron, and the water on either side has been swallowing ships for three hundred years. A French barque that sailed into the fog and never came out. A steamer lost with every soul aboard. Keepers who walked out to a light and were never seen again. Told at the fire, the way they are told up there.

Whole worlds have ended before, and they rarely ended the way we imagine. A city frozen mid-meal under Vesuvius. Grid-planned streets on the Indus with plumbing and no palaces. A thousand stone faces on the loneliest island on earth. Marty tells what really happened, and what we invented afterwards because the truth was not strange enough.