Explore every episode of the podcast The Marco Polo Drive

At Villa Malcontenta on the Brenta River, Patrick Zhong sits down with Federigo Foscari, whose family has called Venice, Italy home for nearly a thousand years. Touring the Palladian villa built for his ancestors in 1555, Foscari traces his family's history back to Francesco Foscari, the longest-serving Doge of Venice, who ruled for thirty-four years and expanded the Republic by land just as the seas that built its fortune began to shift. It is a story of a city that became Europe's wealthiest trading hub by doing one thing well: including people, cultures, and ideas from everywhere they came from, because together is further.

At King's College Cambridge, Patrick Zhong sits down with Professor Alan Macfarlane, one of the world's leading anthropologists, for a conversation spanning eight thousand years of Chinese civilization. From the galactic model of empire to the family structures that hold society together, Macfarlane draws on a lifetime of fieldwork across Nepal, Japan, and China to illuminate some misconceptions about the East. A civilization that deep does not break. It bends, regrows, and endures, because together is further.

Tim Yip, the Oscar-winning costume and art director behind Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, joins Jeffrey Sachs and Patrick Zhong for a conversation that moves from history to the present. Yip describes the research behind his costume work, including trips to Mongolia and Pakistan to study warrior dress and the world of Kublai Khan, and the long collaboration with his team to bring that detail to life. The conversation turns philosophical as Yip reflects on AI, the balance of yin and yang, and what he calls the fear at the root of all culture. It is a fitting voice to have at the start of this journey, one shaped by decades of looking closely at how different cultures see the world.

Before setting off across 15,000 kilometres from Rome to Hong Kong, Professor Jeffrey D Sachs, Sonia Sachs and Patrick Zhong pause to talk, not about destinations, but about life itself. Together they explore love, partnership, philosophy, purpose, climate change, artificial intelligence, and what it means to remain hopeful in a world changing faster than ever before. Woven through personal stories and decades of experience is a quiet conviction: that curiosity matters more than certainty, that dialogue matters more than division, and that the greatest journeys are often the ones that transform how we see one another. A conversation for anyone searching not only for where the world is going. but for how to live well within it.