Grab your headphones. Today’s newsletter is a list of fun podcasts about the matter on everyone’s mind: money. Plus:

• Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over
• The eyeglasses with built-in, real-time speech transcription
• “Drop Dead City” spotlights a lost era of liberal government

Sarah Larson
Larson is a podcast critic and staff writer.

The recent churn of tariffs, trade wars, and high-stakes financial bullying has forced many of us to think about economics more than usual—and has, perhaps, revealed how little we understand about any of it. Three excellent new documentary-style podcasts focussed on money offer some perspective. Hearing the wild stories they tell, which span decades and continents, you may be inspired to make rational financial decisions—in part because they showcase people who didn’t.

To my delight, “The History Podcast: Invisible Hands,” a BBC series about capitalism and the “free-market revolution,” turns out to be one of the zestiest podcasts I’ve heard this year. It’s narrated by the eighty-six-year-old British broadcaster David Dimbleby, who makes for a shrewd guide through a surprising narrative that includes a Sussex chicken farmer, a wartime parachuting tragedy, a vomiting conservative M.P., turmoil for nationalized industries, and, inevitably, some maddening audio of Margaret Thatcher. Dimbleby’s age, far from a liability, feels like a magic trick—rare is the podcast host in 2025 who can casually weave socioeconomics together with personal memories of the Second World War.

Hosted by the lawyer turned podcaster Nicolo Majnoni, “Shadow Kingdom: God’s Banker,” a hair-raising true-crime series from Crooked Media and Campside Media, is almost too interesting, like a finance version of “The Da Vinci Code.” It tells the story of Roberto Calvi, a banker who worked closely with the Vatican and who, in 1982, was found dead, hanging from Blackfriars Bridge, in London. Majnoni, who grew up in Italy and the United States, also narrates an Italian-language version of the podcast, and he’s a refreshingly skeptical guide to a tale aswirl with conspiracies involving the Vatican, the Mafia, a far-right branch of Freemasons, a mysterious letter to the Pope, and a dead man with bricks in his pockets. Within all that—and of more interest to me—is fascinating context about the interplay between democracy, fascism, communism, and religion in twentieth-century Europe, exemplified by one incredible sequence about Pope John Paul II’s 1979 visit to Communist Poland.

The expertly produced and sound-designed “Sea of Lies,” from the CBC’s excellent “Uncover” series, begins several miles off the coast of Brixham, Devon, in 1996, when two British fishermen—a father and son—make a grisly discovery in the net of their trawler. From there, the host, Sam Mullins, patiently unspools a head-spinning mystery of keen detective work, false identities, embezzlement schemes, and murder, and he does so with an almost amusing level of barely restrained “This story will blow your mind.” But it will—and it makes for a vivid parable about the creative treachery of some financial crime and the importance of guarding against it.

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