In 1928, adventurer Richard Halliburton swam the length of the Panama Canal and paid a toll of 36 cents based on his body weight. In August 2026, a South Korean gas company paid a record $5.3 million at auction just for the right to move a single tanker to the front of the queue. This episode uses that gap to tell the full story of the canal, from Balboa's 1513 journal entry to the drought and geopolitical pressure squeezing it today.

It covers Ferdinand de Lesseps' doomed sea-level plan and the estimated 22,000 workers who died during the French attempt, Theodore Roosevelt's support for Panamanian independence from Colombia, William Gorgas's mosquito campaign, the gravity-fed lock system powered by Gatun Lake, and the 1914 opening. It then follows the 1964 riots, the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, the 1999 handover, the 2016 expansion, and the  ...