Imagine an island where money is abolished, no one locks their doors, the workday is capped at six hours, hospitals are free, priests can marry and can be women, and there is not a single lawyer in sight. This episode explores Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia through the life of its author, a man who became Lord Chancellor of England, burned religious reformers at the stake, and was executed by his own king. We begin with More’s years living beside a Carthusian monastery, his decision that he would rather be a good husband than a bad priest, and his front-row seat to the enclosure crisis, where landlords fenced off common land for sheep and evicted tenants were hanged for stealing bread.

We then tour the island itself: the fifteen-mile channel dug to sever it from the mainland, fifty-four identical cities, houses rotated every ten years, mandatory farm stints, gold chamber pots, internal passports, and slavery as an alternative to execution. We decode the Greek jokes hidden in names like Hythloday and Anydrus, and examine the Book One dialogue between Raphael and More about whether a philosopher should serve a king. From there we follow More’s real career, his championing of equity in law, his persecution of Protestants, his refusal of the oath of supremacy, and his 1535 beheading, before tracing Utopia’s afterlife in Marxist theory and Vasco de Quiroga’s hospital towns in Michoacan, Mexico.

• Why More chose the Greek word for nowhere over the Latin Nusquama
• How eliminating an idle aristocracy makes the six-hour workday mathematically possible
• Why the narrator’s name translates roughly to dispenser of nonsense
• The timeless dilemma of staying pure outside a toxic system or trying to change it from within
• Why More names pride as the serpent that makes a perfect society impossible