One continuous flight

The free opener that sets the tone: from Schopenhauer to Spinoza, at eleven kilometres' altitude. Here you hear how the series thinks, with an open mind and no false certainty.

Stoicism, through an emperor and a slave: not what to believe, but how to act, under power, time and adversity.

Thinking, calculating and artificial intelligence, with an honest word from the narrator about what he himself is and is not.

Faith, dominion and the human urge for greatness, from the temples before the church to the tech moguls and strongmen of today.

Wealth, freedom and morality, from Adam Smith's forgotten second book to the debate that still structures our politics, without taking sides.

From Hammurabi's law in stone to the algorithm that judges you today: three thousand years of trying to replace raw power with rule.

Beauty: from the number in a Greek string and Plato's ladder to the machine that makes it today and the attention economy that uses it as bait.

The great shifts of power, Polybius's wheel, Ibn Khaldun's solvent of luxury, the coin that debases, and why the past teaches mechanisms, never fate.

The counterpart to the part on rise and fall: acting wisely in the present, from the Stoic dichotomy to Taleb's antifragility, without fortune-telling.

Finitude, not as an enemy but as the quiet condition of a life fully lived, from Gilgamesh and Seneca to today's fight against ageing. Life-affirming.

Exhaustion and the gaze of the other, from the noonday demon of the desert monks and Rousseau to Byung-Chul Han and the black glass of the phone. Why we are so tired and so watched, with Alan Watts and the Stoa as counterweight.

The oldest game of power: shaping what people believe by shaping what they see. From Plato's cave and Aristotle's rhetoric to Bernays and the algorithmic feed, with the admission that this book too is persuasion.

Doubt as the mind's sharpest tool, and as a weapon. From Pyrrho and Descartes to the manufacturers who sell doubt as a product. Not a lesson in what to believe, but a route map for choosing your own position.

Humanity's oldest fear and oldest desire: building something stronger than yourself. From Aristotle's self-moving shuttle and the golem to Bostrom and superintelligence, with the question of who is still in charge.