What was the Hanseatic League?

The Hanseatic League was a medieval trading network that stretched across Northern Europe. Formed in Northern Germany in the 12th century, it was an economic powerhouse of the age. Over the next five centuries, it negotiated with kings, standardised regulations, created outposts across Europe, blockaded ports and even went to war to protect its trading interests. In this episode, Dan is joined by Dr Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, associate professor of medieval history at the University of Amsterdam, to discuss the League's unique structure, operations, and legacy. Together, they examine its innovative and flexible approach to trade, politics, and conflict management. Also, how the Hansa functioned without becoming a formal nation-state and its lasting imprint on European history and economics. To discover more about Justyna's work, please visit: https://premodernconflictmanagement.org/ or her personal page https://justynawubs-mrozewicz.blogspot.com/ Produced by Dougal Patmore and James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore. This was originally released as a subscriber-only episode in August 2025 Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:15Speaker 01

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• 1:26Dan Snow?

  Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. If you explore the quayside in King's Lynn in Norfolk, you will find many beautiful buildings. But one of them I've always been particularly fond of, it's the Hanseatic Warehouse. It's a herringbone brick building, you can see the timber frames. It's right there on the quayside of the great Ouz River. And it's a reminder of a time when King's Lynn was a great port before the river had silted up. Ocean-going ships would come all the way in there and unload their cargo. And this building was one of many in Britain, a key outpost of a remarkable commercial organisation.

• 2:07Dan Snow?

  The Hanseatic League, they had other sites in Britain. In fact, in London, they had a whole area. It was called the Steel Yard, and it's roughly speaking underneath Cannon Street Station today. There was a walled community. They had their warehouse on the river. They had a chapel, counting house, their little guild hall. They had wine cellars and kitchens and residential quarters. The jetties could be accessed directly by seagoing ships. And King's Lynn in London, other outposts in Britain, well, they were just a fraction of the similar sites right across northern Europe, stretching across the Baltic, deep into what is now Belarus or even Russia itself. If you squint a bit, they look a little bit

• 2:49Dan Snow?

  like the beginnings of the colonies that places like Britain and Portugal and Holland were setting up in South and Southeast Asia. But the Hanseatic League wasn't quite like that. It might sometimes feel like a foreign kingdom. It could enter into negotiations. It could even make war. But it wasn't a power. It wasn't something that would become a nation-state like the French or the Dutch. It was something very different. It was an influential, but I find it quite a mysterious medieval trading network. It was a loose collection of merchant elites in all these different places that worked together to secure trading privileges, to maximize their commercial trading, their financial advantages, to reduce internal

• 3:34Dan Snow?

  barriers to trade, to collaborate, and attempt to deal with foreign princes and kings. In this episode, I'm going to try and get to grips with the Hanseatic League. I'm going to see how this informal network of merchants evolved and thrived and became something slightly more solid, slightly more formal, eventually though declining, but leaving a legacy in many European cities. And a legacy in organizations like Lufthansa, the German airline. Its forebear in 1920 deliberately chose the name Lufthansa. It was going to be a 'Hansa of the Air', a nod to the transnational, commercial nature of that organization. Its founders calling

• 4:15Dan Snow?

  it, I think, to deliberately distance themselves from the big hierarchical empires that had just plunged the world into a terrible, terrible war, the First World War. What exactly was the original Hanza? What was the Hanseatic League? And why does it matter today? Well, to find out, I'm talking to Dr. Justina Wabzimrosovich. She's Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Amsterdam. She's going to help me get to grips with the Hanza. Enjoy.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  T minus 10.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.

• 5:03Dan Snow?

  Justina, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

• 5:06Speaker 04

  Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

• 5:07Dan Snow?

  I guess, first of all, are leagues, is this a sort of type of political organisation that was sort of normal-ish at the time, but that we've lost contact with? Or was this innovative? Was it highly unusual?

• 5:20Speaker 04

  So there were several leagues, city leagues, in the Middle Ages, but they were mostly for a certain purpose, for a certain time, and there was a foundational act. So in a sense, I think it's good to start by saying that the Hanza was not really a league. It was something totally different, and it was something confusing both to contemporaries, and it is still to us now, both to scholars and I guess to your listeners as well. So there is this English term, the Hanseatic League, which is widely known. But in a sense, I think we should call it the Hanza to kind of market that it was a different type of beast.

• 5:56Dan Snow?

  Nice. It's like the old, the old quote about the Holy Roman Empire is now the Holy Roman Nor Empire. So the Hanseatic League was neither Hanseatic nor a league.

• 6:03Speaker 04

  It was Hanseatic, in the sense that it was a collectivity, but it was not a league. So in 1469, the English King Edward IV was also quite confused by it. And he tried to push the Hanza, the Hanseatic merchants, who were there discussing their privileges and also their duties, to define what they were. And they were quite good about interning it around by stating what they were not, so that they... In a sense, they were stating that there were not any type of corporate body, corporation, not a trading company. They were really kind of putting the emphasis of what they were not

• 6:44Speaker 04

  in order to avoid collective liability. So there was no common chests, so no common finances, you could say. There was no common representative. There was no oath which they swore to all of them. There was, as I mentioned, no foundational act. So it did not fit in the definitions of Roman law at that time. So it was a nice way to kind of avoid collective liability and state that if merchants from one city committed an act which displeased the English king, then they were not all liable to it. Hence, it was not a league.

• 7:20Dan Snow?

  Nice. A little bit amorphous. Clever. It protects from litigation and, as you say, angry sovereign authorities. Tell me, what's the genesis? How and where does it emerge?

• 7:31Speaker 04

  Yes, there are several theories in a sense in how you should see the emergence of the Hanse. So all the research underlined that it was connected to the city of Lübeck, its foundation in the middle of the 12th century. But actually, the Hanse is not so much about merchants being in a German city, but merchants going somewhere else. So in that sense, the fact that merchants from Cologne and also later Lübeck and other cities ventured to London in the 12th century and established a guild hall, established an organisation on the side, this is the beginning of the Hanse. So merchants from cities around the Baltic and also the North Sea coast went

• 8:11Speaker 04

  to places like England, London, but also to Bruges, to Norway, to Russia, to Novgorod, but also to other places later, to Italy, Portugal, Iceland and so on. So it was very much about this outward movement connected to trade. This is the beginning of the Hanse. Merchants going abroad and getting organised regularly.

• 8:35Dan Snow?

  So that's really interesting. So it's not driven by politics, strategy at home. It's what happens when groups of merchants with similar cultural and religious and geographical connections find themselves together in London or Portugal and think, should we group together here and deal with these crazy Englishmen? It's sort of, it's being formed almost on the periphery and then it's somehow exported back home?

• 9:00Speaker 04

  Indeed, so this is very much this back and forth interaction of interests, privileges, opportunities which arise. So the Hansa means, in a sense, a group of traders. There were several Hanses in the beginning, in the 12th century. But this one grew very much because of merchants coming from various cities who came together. So it's a huge geographical area, in a sense. If you see from the western parts, what is now the Netherlands, there were several cities in the Hansa up to the eastern part of the Baltic. And then they found themselves in, for instance, what is now known as the steel yard in London. And they had to live together, trade together and negotiate their rights with, for instance, the English king.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  And at a certain moment, so in the 12th and the 13th, and especially in the 14th century, they established rules, regulations, but also this kind of collective name of the Hansa, the German Hansa. They got privileges in various places like Norway or Flanders or London as merchants of the empire, merchants coming from the sea cities, underlining the fact that it was very much the maritime trade, but also eventually the German Hansa. Whereby the German didn't mean the kind of Germaness which we associate perhaps with the word now, but it was the German law, the German urban law and the German language.

• 10:24Speaker 04

  So dialects which were being spoken in those cities by those merchants.

• 10:29Dan Snow?

  Okay, so if you're sitting in London, there's a group of Hansa merchants, they're speaking German, they have a legal and linguistic sort of integrity and that you trade with them. But then how does that work back in Lubeck, in these cities, for example, on the Baltic coast of Germany? How are they being forced to collaborate by the actions of their commercial entities they're sending abroad?

• 10:51Speaker 04

  There are guilds established of merchants going, for instance, to Bergen, to Norway, or to Stockholm, or indeed to Flanders. So it is a part of the organisation within the city, which has also a huge impact on the city government. Riches merchants, the Hanseatic merchants, are very often mezz or aldermen and have a huge influence on the politics. And they want to have their interests represented within the city, but also on a larger scale. So what you see from the middle of the 14th century is that representatives from these cities, for instance, bürgermasters, mezz, or aldermen, go to very often Lübeck,

• 11:33Speaker 04

  or another large Hanseatic city, and they meet up for the so-called Hanseatic Diets. So these are week-long meetings where they eat together, they discuss various issues of trade, but also politics, privileges, the law, but also social issues, internal conflicts. They spend time together, they get to know each other, there are family ties, which are very much apparent, and you also internal alliances forged. So this is an internal institution, you could say, of the Hansa, those diets, the meetings. And then they also decide that they need to have a more firm organisation of those settlements

• 12:13Speaker 04

  abroad. So this is very much an interaction between the two, the outside activities and the inside within the cities. These are the same people.

• 12:24Dan Snow?

  So Justina, as someone who's not a medievalist, I'm bringing my terrible modern worldview, I'm totally acknowledging my context as a modern human being. I'm sort of struggling to understand, given the discussions that we are having in the 21st century around the world, or rather, where power and sovereignty ought to lie, that transnational organisations, nativist groups who say, no, we should not be sharing our sovereignty with anyone, you know, it's infringing our rights of self-determination, are any of these discussions sort of presaged in this period? I mean, why is a city in northern Germany, why are they prepared to send their representatives to Lübeck and have those people sort of try and hammer

• 13:04Dan Snow?

  out legal and commercial issues in this kind of transnational group? Are these other cities sort of fine with that? Do you know, they're going to make money? Is there tension within that relationship?

• 13:17Speaker 04

  They do it because they see clear advantages of cooperating. So you see this kind of idea of a collectivity which surpasses the city, which is the kind of physical entity that they all know and they can relate to. But they have the idea of something which is indeed above it. There are no nations at the time, so it's well transregional. There are all kinds of political boundaries that they're crossing while discussing those things. But they see the advantages for mobility of their merchants, of the sailors, of craftsmen who can go to another Hanseatic city and settle there with, for instance, easy access to burgaship rights. They discuss how information should flow, they give each other more access to information.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  They know that when they cooperate and indeed operate as a group of merchants and discussions with the English king, they will get more advantages rights than other foreigners. They know that by coordinating laws, the rules and regulations of trade will be recognizable to each other and it will facilitate trade. They will know what to do when there are counterfeited goods being circulated within their system. So there are a host of advantages and one of them, which I have been researching in the past years, is also conflict management. So they know indeed, answering your question, there will be also internal conflict between merchants, but also between cities, and you have to deal with them, they're part of life.

• 14:45Speaker 04

  So you have to have ways to sometimes prevent them, but also effectively address them. So for instance, in thirteen eighty-one, they had a rule that if two cities were in conflict with each other, then one or more cities in the vicinity was to send representative and try to mediate the conflict. They had several rules on what to do when individual merchants were in conflict with each other, for instance, about debts or inheritances or about goods which never reached another city, for instance, because of piracy or adverse weather. They created several scripts, you could say, how to address those situations and that made it possible to, I think, imagine living in such a larger construct than just one

• 15:30Speaker 04

  city. They had a concept of, an adapted concept of the common good. So before states and nations and what we know that also commonwealth, there was the medieval concept of the common good. So something which was to be advantageous for the inhabitants of one city. Hanssens adapted this concept to the common cities and to the common merchants. So seeing it as something that they were to defend, they were to give access to all kinds of benefits to each other. So you see this very much creativity also on a conceptual level on how to operate it.

• 16:12Speaker 04

  So it's, I think it's a very pragmatic, creative approach and an awareness of the surroundings which surpass the immediate physical world in which you live.

• 16:25Dan Snow?

  Listen to Dan Snow's history on learning all about the Hanseatic League. More coming up.

• 16:35Dan Snow?

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• 18:29Speaker 01

  This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA,

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• 19:19Speaker 05

  After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 19:58Dan Snow?

  Is it quite flexible? Do you get towns and cities sort of crashing out if they profoundly disagree on the regulations around dried fish? Other examples of them just going, right, we're kind of out. And given that there isn't a kind of straitjacketed institutional framework, it means that presumably they can stretch the elastic, they can sort of come and go.

• 20:16Speaker 04

  Indeed. It's a very much a kind of flexible club membership without putting your name even in the club. So it's only in the 16th century that you have lists really of Hanseatic cities. Before you grew into the Hanse, by sending your, as a city, by sending your merchants abroad. Only the 15th centuries there started to be discussions who should actually count as a Hanseatic city. There are several criteria which you could apply to the membership, but it's all fluid. And indeed, it also means that if you're no longer interested in trading as a Hanse, when the advantages disappear, that you kind of slowly make your exit and you just don't

• 20:58Speaker 04

  go to Hanseatic diets, you don't send your merchants abroad and effectively you cease to be a Hanseatic city. But very often it wasn't a kind of official resignation. It's indeed an amorphous network organisation and you flow into it and you can flow out of it. There are very few examples of cities which really make a sense, we get out of here or which are being kicked out of the organisation.

• 21:24Dan Snow?

  So again, Justine, I thought, thank you so much. You've really helped me to understand this. And on the ground, talk to me about merchants' cargoes on the ground, or rather on the water. When you were enjoying a period of being very much in the league, for example, let's just use that language, your merchants would arrive in a port presumably and there was less friction, there's less paperwork, there's immediate protections offered, for example, I suppose of cargoes. It just greases the cogs of this trade, does it?

• 21:51Speaker 04

  It does, and it's a huge network of families and friends. So part of the system was also that you spent quite a bit of time abroad in one of those outposts to learn the trade as a young merchant, being sent by family members. But also as a craftsman, you could be sent to an uncle. When you were a lubekker, you could be sent to an uncle in, to Reyval, Tallinn, to learn tricks of the trade there. There were marriage alliances also being forged also during those Hanseatic diets. So you knew people around. So that was also really part of this system. It was also a social network in that sense. And what always amazes me is when I read the primary sources, is how huge this mobility

• 22:33Speaker 04

  was, not only of the merchants themselves and sailors and craftsmen, but also their family members, the wives, the children, youngsters travelling. There was a lot of traffic on the North Sea and the Baltic and also on the rivers. And the fact that you knew people around, that you knew how the legal system worked, that you understood the language, those dialects of the German, it really facilitated mobility. And that you also very often knew the layout of the cities even. So the law made it quite clear that there should be a marketplace, for instance, or in a town hall. So you also had a kind of imaginary, an idea of how the city should look like, where you

• 23:15Speaker 04

  should go, which elements to find, which made this, well, quite often, I guess, scary medieval world, much more familiar to those people who moved about.

• 23:26Dan Snow?

  As the Hanzer evolves, and you mentioned, for example, getting in a bit of a scrap with Edward III, do they embrace the tools, the language of a sovereign power? Do they develop a military force? They fight people? Do they enter hardcore negotiations with the English crown as sort of equals?

• 23:44Speaker 04

  They do, they very much do. So for instance, they start wars with a Danish king. So on the whole, you could say that they prefer negotiations, diplomacy, because it's cheaper. These are merchants after all, but if needed, they don't shy away from violence, from capturing ships, from blocking ports, from outright warfare. So they do it several times and as a collectivity. And you see here also part of the organisation, some of those cities are active in sending ships and people from the cities, and others contribute through taxes, through money. So there's a whole system of internal negotiations also, how many ships should be sent.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  So they're very well versed in all the strategies and tactics of conflict, both on the large scale, like wars, but also in terms of legal systems and so on, what to employ in order to have an advantage. And I guess this is one of the reasons why this organisation was so long-lived. It's almost 500 years, at a time where lots of changes happened in urban Europe. So I think this is quite a remarkable feat for cities which were under various rulers and undergoing all kinds of changes, crises, including the Black Day.

• 25:06Dan Snow?

  We've seen other types of polities, forms of political organisation, that perhaps war and crisis can concentrate power into individual hands. It can metastasise or evolve into sort of monarchies. Or do you get individuals that emerge that become the sort of talismanic warlike leaders? Or is it always a more consensual, a more discursive sort of oligarchic system?

• 25:31Speaker 04

  It's quite a flat organisation, so there is some hierarchy in terms of cities. And in that sense, also some hierarchy in terms of people, individuals who are leading those cities. But they don't really seek a kind of permanent leadership. Even Lubek is not really an official head of the Hanz. They see it also as a bit of a burden, actually, a responsibility. So they try to divide those tasks. And it's only in the middle of the 16th century that the Hanseatic cities decide that they need a kind of official who will represent them as a whole in discussions, for instance, with the English king or the Polish king. And so there is Heinrich Zudermann, who is a syndic.

• 26:16Speaker 04

  And he gets quite a lot of tasks, a long list, but he's not really a very willing representative. He's complaining a lot that it's too much work. It's actually keeping him from his business. He's also a merchant. He would prefer it to see it as a kind of part-time job. So most of those mayors, burgomasters, aldermen and so on, they represent the cities and negotiations and the Hanseatic diets, but they are also merchants. And you really get the impression that they like this kind of multi-task life that they have. They do not want to focus on one, for instance, a political career. So it's the mix of those two.

• 26:57Speaker 04

  And this creates a situation that you don't really see such individuals who are pushing just for political power. It's more about economics. It's more about trade, about social and capital that they're building. So it's an interesting way of, yeah, a more holistic approach to political life, I guess.

• 27:17Dan Snow?

  Is there ever a point when the Hanz could have evolved into a more imperial or that nation-state structure and competed with the rise of, in the early modern England, Netherlands, Portugal, Prussia, eventually Sweden? Or is it just, it was just never that beast?

• 27:33Speaker 04

  So in the second half of the 16th century, you really see those attempts of reorganization. So with the official that I mentioned, but also writing down rules more firmly, writing lists of members. So then they actually do try to become a league. They realise that the world is changing, so states are becoming a much more powerful. Kings are more powerful, there's more of a distance between the city governments and kings. So they try to do it, but it's in a sense perhaps too late for it. Cities lose quite a bit of autonomy, so it's not really the timing to pursue such an adventure anymore. And we see also a change with trading routes, the Atlantic route is opening up.

• 28:17Speaker 04

  So there's a lot of shifts going on. The Baltic is much more of an area where the Dutch gain supremacy. So in a sense, it's not their path. But I think what is really fascinating about the Hanza is that it shows a different route, which did work for a long time. It's not statehood or a nationhood, but a kind of collective living, acting for hundreds of years, where political boundaries are less important than the networks, the economic and the social and the political networks that are being forged bottom up.

• 28:53Dan Snow?

  That's what I find so challenging and exciting and interesting about the Hanza, because this is a time when the rest of Europe, nation-states are evolving. The fiscal military state, governments that can borrow money, build armies, build ships, fight an enemy. A culture of identity is building. Regional peoples are becoming French or becoming English or Scottish or even British. And the Hanza feels like it was just always on a very different trajectory to that.

• 29:20Speaker 04

  It is, and perhaps if states didn't evolve the way they did, but cities stayed within their power and autonomy, then perhaps the whole of Europe would eventually be a Europe of cities, which in a sense it is becoming in some aspects. Again, you see quite a lot of initiatives of cooperation between the cities. But there was not really the idea of that they were to govern Europe as a really one political block. It's a different philosophy and it's a different trajectory and exciting one. And in a sense, it shows us it's not a given, this nationhood or statehood is one of the ideas we can have as people, as inhabitants of Europe or other parts of

• 30:01Speaker 04

  the world, of cooperation and solving problems, addressing conflicts. So it's not only within such top-down, rigid structures with indeed powerful men on top, but really also bottom-up smaller communities which see the value of cooperation and are perhaps realistic about the risks of cooperation and competition.

• 30:24Dan Snow?

  The Westerhans are an alternative, quite a radical alternative model, which did not survive the hard state power of the 17th century and that period, but could have its time again. It's a completely different way of imagining our political communities.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  It could be seen this way. So in a sense, the Hanses never totally ceased to exist. So in the 17th century, indeed, we have the last Hanseatic diet, which is seen as the end of the Hansa, but several of the cities continued to cooperate and continued to have this identity of cities which don't exist just within their own minds. And since the 1980s, you see this cooperation gaining traction again. So it's more on a cultural, or also economic level that they're doing it. You have meetings of people, both officials, but also just inhabitants of those cities coming together for festivals and exchanging ideas, business ideas and culture. So it still exists in a sense. The Hanses never ceased to exist.

• 31:25Speaker 04

  And perhaps it's a good reminder for us that there are all kinds of possibilities.

• 31:28Dan Snow?

  When mayors of big cities announce sort of bilateral links between Berlin and London or New York, is that the ghost of the Hansa? Is that smaller communities trying to break out from beneath the armored shield of the nation-state to try and forge commonality?

• 31:46Speaker 04

  You could see it, I guess, this way, but it's very often indeed bilateral. And if you make one step further, for instance, in issues like climate change or sometimes political alliances, and there are more cities who decide to join in and we see this emerging on such topics, then it is the ghost or the inspiration perhaps of the Hansa. And some of those cities indeed, which are in the northern Europe, very much evoke this image. It's a positive image of cooperation of what is possible.

• 32:13Dan Snow?

  And as you talk about legacy, the ghost is still there. Of course, the architectural landmarks people will be very familiar with, travelling across that area, Bremen, Lubeck, Hamburg, but also Lufthansa. So the name survives.

• 32:25Speaker 04

  Indeed, indeed. So you see it also in names of schools, for instance, here in Netherlands and all kinds of products. So it evokes something which is sturdy, reliable, which has historical roots and which travels further than just one locality. So there's loads of positive connotations. Obviously, the Hansa was not only about positive aspects, there was, as we mentioned, war and there were obviously also elites which govern the cities. But overall, I think it is one of those fascinating and quite positive examples of historical social interaction to which we willingly look back to and get inspired by.

• 33:10Dan Snow?

  Justinia, I will put your website in the notes of this episode so people can check that out and check out more of your work.

• 33:16Speaker 04

  Thanks so much.

• 33:17Dan Snow?

  Thanks for coming on.

• 33:21Dan Snow?

  Thanks very much for listening, everyone. Before we go, I'll tell you that ever at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of what's new and exciting, after 10 years of the podcast, you can finally watch it on YouTube. We are moving fast and breaking things here, folks. Our Friday episodes each week will be available to watch on YouTube and you can see me, you can see what we're talking about. I'd love it if you could subscribe to that channel over there. Just click the link in the show notes below and you can watch it on your phone, your tablet or even a TV or even a giant cinema movie screen if you have one in your underground lair. See you next time, folks.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 34:55Speaker 06

  Pessimism. It's never going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. Next. So what will? At Optum, we're working every day to connect primary, specialty, and pharmacy care, and help lower prescription costs. Will we fix it all overnight? No, but we'll wake up trying again and again, until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at optum.com.

• 35:27Dan Snow?

  Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and Watch the World's Best History Documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.