CTRL+Z: Rewritten

Kevin Perez-Allen

On a computer, Control Z is the undo button. When you press it, whatever you just typed gets reversed and allows you to make a different decision. What if you could press Control Z on some of the biggest decisions in history? Every episode, we take a real decision by a real person, rewind it, and build the alternate timeline from scratch. What happens to the country, or the company or society, when the person in the room picks the other door? Sony turned down Marvel's entire character catalog for $25 million.Reagan fired 13,000 air traffic controllers instead of negotiating. NBC almost killed Seinfeld after one episode. King Edward VIII nearly kept the British throne three years before World War Two. What happens if they go the other way? Politics, business, sports, history, and pop culture. New episodes weekly.

  1. 2 days ago

    Emperor Xuande Hits CTRL+Z

    On July 27th, 1433, the officers of the biggest navy on earth lined up in a palace courtyard in Beijing to receive robes and paper money from Emperor Xuande. They had been gone 2 and a half years, as far as the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. Zheng He, the admiral who had led them for 28 years, was not in the line. He had died at Calicut, on the coast of India, that spring. Sending the fleet back out would have cost the emperor almost nothing. The ships were built, and 2,000 tons of pepper sat in the warehouses at Nanjing. The ministers who wanted the ships broken up had paid for every voyage and got none of the income. Xuande had 2 orders in front of him, one that made the fleet permanent and one that left it to the ministers. He signed the second. Eighteen months later he was dead at 35, and the men governing for his 8-year-old son banned the building of seagoing ships. What if he had signed the other one? This week we hit CTRL+Z on the courtyard where the fleet was paid off, and follow the ripple to today: a 78-year-old admiral taking 100 ships out of Fujian, Vasco da Gama carrying 4 cloaks and 6 hats up the beach at Calicut while an agent of the emperor counts his guns, a Spanish captain rounding a bend in the California coast and finding a walled harbor already there, and a Chumash chief on Santa Cruz Island with a Ming customs stamp in his house. The oldest building in Monterey is a Chinese customs house, because in January of 1434 an emperor gave his ministers half the pepper.

  2. 5 Sept

    Decca Records Hits CTRL+Z

    On January 1st, 1962, the Beatles drove 10 hours through snow to a Decca studio in West Hampstead, borrowed the company's amplifiers, and played 15 songs in an hour with Pete Best on drums. Five weeks later, on February 6th, Brian Epstein sat down to lunch at Decca's head office on the Thames and heard the answer. Dick Rowe, the man who chose what Decca recorded, had picked a group from Dagenham instead, 12 miles from the studio rather than 200. Signing would have cost Decca almost nothing. Rowe's own assistant, Mike Smith, wanted both groups and was told he could have one. Epstein had promised Decca's sales department that his family's shops would buy 3,000 copies of any single the group made, which in 1962 was enough to cover the record before it existed. Rowe said years later that the number would have forced him to sign them. Nobody on the sales floor carried it upstairs, and Epstein left with 2 reels of tape in his briefcase. What if somebody had said the number out loud? This week we hit CTRL+Z on the lunch where Decca said no, and follow the ripple to today: a hired drummer at the kit while Pete Best watches through the control room glass, Ringo Starr on a boat to Hamburg for £20 a week, a producer who quits the biggest band in the world over a van driver's wages, an orchestra on a riser in West Hampstead in 1967, and a tour bus outside a red brick building that isn't Abbey Road. The tapes end up in the same company's vault either way, because on the one afternoon it counted, a sales manager finished his coffee and repeated a figure.

  3. 29 Aug

    Pope Clement VII Hits CTRL+Z

    On June 8th, 1528, Pope Clement VII signed a decretal commission — a document giving two cardinals the power to end Henry VIII's marriage on English soil, with no appeal to anyone — and then ordered it shown to the king once and burned. Fourteen months later, on July 23rd, 1529, one of those cardinals stood up in a converted monastery hall at Blackfriars and adjourned the court for the harvest. It never reconvened. Signing would have cost Clement almost nothing on paper. Popes had been dissolving royal marriages for 400 years, and Alexander VI granted Louis XII of France one in 1498 on a case so thin the queen produced witnesses to her husband's boasting. Clement himself offered to bless a wedding between Henry's daughter and Henry's illegitimate son to make the problem go away. What stopped him was a Spanish army that had sacked Rome in 1527 and held him in a fortress for 6 months, commanded by the queen's own nephew. What if he'd let that first document stand? This week we hit CTRL+Z on the annulment Rome refused, and follow the ripple to today: a prince born at Greenwich in 1531, an Englishman in white robes in Rome, a letter from Edinburgh that gets a polite refusal, and a bell tower in Yorkshire with the roof still on it. Nobody ever chisels the abbeys down, because on the one afternoon it counted, a frightened man in Orvieto signed his name.

  4. 22 Aug

    Muhammad Ali hits CTRL+Z

    On April 28th, 1967, Muhammad Ali stood in a line of 46 men on the third floor of a Houston induction center while Lieutenant Steven Dunkley read the rule: take one step forward when your name is called, and the step itself puts you in the Army. The heavyweight champion of the world had spent the morning taking the physical and turning down a ham sandwich. Officers called his name 3 times, warned him that refusing meant a felony, 5 years, and $10,000, and got a written statement instead. The step would have cost him almost nothing. The government had offered his lawyers "all kinds of deals," no combat and no rifle, just boxing exhibitions for the troops, the same arrangement Joe Louis had in World War II. Sugar Ray Robinson begged him to take it. Elijah Muhammad forbade it, and the last man who defied the Nation of Islam was Malcolm X. Ali's feet never moved. What if they had? This week we hit CTRL+Z on the step he refused, and follow the ripple to today: a quiet Sunday in Cleveland, a nickname that stays on a Harlem playground, a swimmer lighting the cauldron in Atlanta, and a roll call at the 2016 ESPYs that runs 1 name short. Nobody ever marches behind Muhammad Ali, because on the one afternoon it counted, Cassius Clay stepped forward.

  5. 15 Aug

    David Chase Hits CTRL+Z

    SPOILER ALERT: This episode discusses the endings of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Lost, Parks and Recreation, Mad Men, The Leftovers, and Ozark. On June 10th, 2007, David Chase ended The Sopranos with a family eating onion rings in a New Jersey ice cream parlor, a bell over the door, and 10 seconds of black. Viewers across the country hit their cable boxes. The Boston Globe's television critic sat through those seconds certain his set had died and taken the review with it. Chase had spent years planning something else. Tony Soprano drives out of the Lincoln Tunnel at the top of all 86 hours of the show, and the last scene sent him back the other way, into Manhattan at night, to a meeting he wasn't walking out of. Then, driving down Ocean Park Boulevard in Los Angeles in 2005, Chase passed a little breakfast place, and a thought arrived: Tony should get it somewhere like that. The breakfast place won. What if it hadn't? This week we hit CTRL+Z on the last pages of the final script, and follow the ripple to today: a song that stays where it was in 1981, a corner booth in Bloomfield that stays furniture, a documentary that ends on an answer, and a decade of showrunners deciding what they owe an audience when the credits come. Nobody ever asks David Chase what happened to Tony Soprano, because 12 million people watched it happen.

  6. 8 Aug

    Nelson Rockefeller hits CTRL+Z

    On May 9th, 1933, guards climbed a scaffold in the lobby of the RCA Building and brought Diego Rivera down mid-brushstroke. His fresco for Rockefeller Center held a portrait of Lenin, and Rivera had refused Nelson Rockefeller's written request to paint it out. The wall got a canvas drape, and 9 months later, workmen chiseled 63 feet of plaster into powder near midnight. Buried in Rivera's refusal letter sat a counteroffer almost nobody remembers. He would trade the mural's nightclub scene for Abraham Lincoln, standing with John Brown, Nat Turner, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Lenin on one side, Lincoln on the other. Nelson, 24 years old, said no. What if he'd said yes? This week we hit CTRL+Z on May 8th, 1933, and follow the ripple to today: a finished fresco drawing Depression crowds past a communist in a capitalist lobby, a congressman waving photographs of the wall on the House floor, a velvet curtain going up in the McCarthy years and coming down for a funeral, and delegates at the 1964 Republican convention booing the man who kept it. Rockefeller Center destroyed the painting, hired another artist, and put Lincoln on that wall anyway. The mural Rivera lost became the most famous artwork America ever destroyed, and the version that survives hangs in an office lobby where tourists walk past it on the way to the elevator.

  7. 1 Aug

    Sears Hits CTRL+Z

    On January 25th, 1993, Sears killed the most famous catalog in American history, and Wall Street applauded. The Big Book was losing up to 175 million dollars a year, and Arthur Martinez, 5 months into the job, chose to eliminate it rather than shrink it. 113 stores closed. 50,000 jobs vanished. The last telephone order came in on May 27th. Two weeks before the announcement, in White Plains, New York, a company called Prodigy passed 2 million subscribers and became the largest online service in America. It sold merchandise on a screen, years before the web. Sears owned half of it. What if Martinez had connected them? This week we hit CTRL+Z on January 25th, 1993, and follow the ripple to today: catalog buyers rebuilding an online store item by item, an electronic Wish Book selling Sega Genesis consoles at midnight, Jeff Bezos choosing books because a 100-year-old competitor already sells everything else, and a dot-com crash that kills every internet store except the ones sitting on real warehouses. Sears spent a century shipping goods to people who couldn't reach a store, built the screen that came next, and dismantled the machine 18 months before the future needed it.

  8. 25 Jul

    John Curtin Hits CTRL+Z

    In February of 1942, the ships carrying Australia's best soldiers were in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and Winston Churchill turned them around without asking. Singapore had surrendered 7 days earlier. Darwin had been bombed 3 days earlier. Churchill cabled Prime Minister John Curtin that the 7th Division was going to Burma, that some ships lacked the fuel to come home, and that the President of the United States agreed. Curtin, 4 months into the job, said no. 4 times. Every Australian prime minister before him had given London what it asked for. The convoy turned south, the men came home, and they held the Kokoda Track and won at Milne Bay, the first clear defeat of the Japanese army on land in the entire war. What if he'd said yes? This week we hit CTRL+Z on February 22nd, 1942, and follow the ripple to today: 5,000 Australians walking 900 miles out of a lost Burma, teenage militia holding a mountain track alone, a division stranded in Ceylon while its country waits, and a nation that signs the same American treaty in 1951 but signs it as a follower instead of a partner. Australia came within one midnight cable of staying a colony in its own head, and the refusal is where the modern country began.

See All (27)

Trailer

About

On a computer, Control Z is the undo button. When you press it, whatever you just typed gets reversed and allows you to make a different decision. What if you could press Control Z on some of the biggest decisions in history? Every episode, we take a real decision by a real person, rewind it, and build the alternate timeline from scratch. What happens to the country, or the company or society, when the person in the room picks the other door? Sony turned down Marvel's entire character catalog for $25 million.Reagan fired 13,000 air traffic controllers instead of negotiating. NBC almost killed Seinfeld after one episode. King Edward VIII nearly kept the British throne three years before World War Two. What happens if they go the other way? Politics, business, sports, history, and pop culture. New episodes weekly.

Information

  • Creator
    Kevin Perez-Allen
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    27
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Kevin Perez-Allen
  • Show Website
    CTRL+Z: Rewritten