Ep #141: The Limits of Total War: From Gentlemen's War to War in the 21st Century

Ep# 143 Profits, Plunder, and Power: The System That Pirates Built

In this second episode of our pirate series we explore the brutal realities of life during the Golden Age of Piracy and why so many sailors abandoned imperial service for outlaw life on the open sea. Far from romantic adventure, the Atlantic world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was shaped by mercantilism, rigid trade monopolies, violent naval discipline, and extreme inequality. Mr. Palumbo examines how sailors endured disease, starvation wages, corruption, and harsh punishment aboard legal vessels, why piracy increasingly appeared to many as a rational alternative rather than simple criminality, and how pirate crews organized themselves through elected captains, profit-sharing systems, strict internal discipline, and survival contracts designed to align risk with reward. The episode also explores the blurry line between pirates and privateers, state-sponsored raiders legally authorized to attack enemy commerce revealing how governments themselves often encouraged maritime violence when it served imperial interests.

Ep# 142: Markets, Empire, and the Rise of Piracy

This episode explores how the rise of global trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries unintentionally created the conditions for piracy to flourish. As European empires like Spain, England, France, and the Dutch Republic expanded across the Atlantic, they built vast systems of trade connecting sugar plantations, silver mines, colonial ports, and merchant fleets into one emerging global economy. But the ocean could never be fully controlled. Invisible trade routes carried enormous wealth across unpredictable seas, and wherever wealth moved in predictable patterns, opportunity for piracy followed. Mr. Palumbo tries to make the point that piracy was not random chaos, but an economic response to the deeper pressure of demand itself. The same demand that drove empires to build merchant fleets and expand global trade also created incentives for people willing to operate outside the law. As the episode argues, whenever demand becomes large enough, someone will always step forward to meet it—no matter the danger, the violence, or the risk involved.

Ep #141: The Limits of Total War: From Gentlemen's War to War in the 21st Century

In this episode of the Professor Liberty Podcast, we step back from the headlines and trace the evolution of war itself, asking a deeper question: what happens when overwhelming force no longer produces clear victory? From the restrained “gentlemen’s wars” of early modern Europe, where conflicts were limited and civilians largely stood apart, to the industrial-scale destruction of the American Civil War, we follow the steady expansion of conflict beyond battlefields and into the fabric of society. Along the way, we explore how World War I transformed war into a grinding system of attrition, and how World War II pushed total war to its absolute peak, where entire cities became targets and destruction reached unprecedented levels. The result is a world where war is constant but rarely decisive, and where the line between victory and catastrophe becomes increasingly blurred, forcing us to reconsider whether “winning” a war still means what we think it does.

Ep#140: The President and the War Machine

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, unwanted pets and relatives! It’s your favorite obscure social studies teacher, Mr. Palumbo, back with the Professor Liberty Podcast. In this episode, a continuation of the discussion started in Episode 93, “The Citizen and the War Machine,” we zoom in from society at large to the commander-in-chief, exploring how U.S. presidents navigate the pressures of hawkish advisers, the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, and the military-industrial complex. From Woodrow Wilson’s reluctant entry into World War I to Donald Trump’s modern military strikes on Iran, we examine how campaign promises of peace often collide with geopolitical realities, showing how for better or worse, even cautious presidents can be swayed into conflict.

Ep#139: From Iberia to the Great Plains: How Spain Built the Cowboy

In this episode of the Professor Liberty Podcast, we saddle up and ride through history to explore the true origins of the American cowboy. From Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s shout-out at the Munich Security Conference to Spain’s role in bringing horses, ranching, and the vaquero tradition to the New World, to the Comanche’s legendary mastery of the horse that reshaped the Plains, to Black cowboys like Bill Pickett who innovated rodeo culture and bulldogging, we cover it all. We’ll dig into daily life on the trail, food, pay, and the rugged individualism that forged frontier life, while showing how the cowboy is really a tapestry of Spanish, Indigenous, African American, and broader Western European contributions: a living symbol of freedom, skill, and ingenuity that helped define the American ethos.