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PODCAST

pplpod

pplpod is a podcast about people, places and lots of other stuff. Each episode takes a deep dive into the lives, choices, and legacies of fascinating figures from history, culture, music, and beyond. From icons who shaped entire generations to hidden stories that deserve the spotlight, pplpod brings you closer to the people behind the headlines and the legends.Thoughtful, engaging, and story-driven, pplpod explores what makes these lives extraordinary—and what we can learn from them today.

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All Episodes

20:47

John Bogle and Vanguard: The Index Fund Wall Street...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

John C. Bogle built a firm that handles trillions of dollars and died in 2019 with about $80 million, a rounding error by the standards of finance. That gap was by design. This episode follows Bogle from a family ruined by the 1929 crash, through work scholarships at Blair Academy and a 130 page Princeton thesis on mutual funds that got him hired at the Wellington Fund. He rose to chairman by 1970, pushed a merger with aggressive Boston stock pickers, and was fired when the 1973 to 1974 bear market

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19:49

Jim Simons: The Codebreaker Who Turned Wall Street...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Jim Simons refused to wear socks, chain-smoked through meetings, and answered questions about publicity by quoting Benjamin the donkey from Animal Farm. He also died in May 2024 with a fortune of more than $31 billion. This episode maps the logic of his life: a bachelor's degree from MIT in three years, a PhD from Berkeley at 23, a motor scooter ride from Boston to Bogota, and work in geometry and topology with Shiing-Shen Chern that physicists later found they needed for string theory.In 1964

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21:22

Jesse Livermore: The Boy Plunger Who Made $100...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

While fortunes evaporated in October 1929, Jesse Livermore walked away with roughly $100 million. This episode follows the man often credited with inventing day trading, from a poor Massachusetts farm, where he was born in 1877, to a Boston brokerage where he chalked up stock prices for $5 a week. Watching the numbers all day, he began to see patterns, and at 15 he tested them in the bucket shops, betting parlors that paid out on price moves. He won so steadily that the shops banned him, even when

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21:29

Jay Gould: From 50 Cents to Black Friday and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Jay Gould arrived at a rural school with 50 cents and a sack of clothes. He died with a $72 million fortune, a private steam yacht, and armed guards patrolling his estate around the clock. This episode follows the dairy farmer's son from Roxbury, New York, who taught himself surveying and mathematics, then learned in the Panic of 1857 that a crash is a clearance sale for anyone willing to be unsentimental. He bought out a ruined partner's tannery properties and picked up control of the Rutland and

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13:10

Japan's Asset Bubble: When the Imperial Palace...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

At the 1989 peak of Japan's asset price bubble, the grounds of the Tokyo Imperial Palace were estimated to be worth more than all the real estate in California. This episode follows the chain of unintended consequences that led there, beginning with the 1985 Plaza Accord. The deal to weaken the dollar sent the yen from about 238 to 165 per dollar in a year, made Japanese exports painfully expensive, and tipped the country into the endaka recession.The Bank of Japan answered by cutting its discount

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22:57

Jim Fisk: Circus Runaway, Black Friday Gold Raider,...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

In January 1872, tens of thousands of working-class New Yorkers wept in the streets for James Fisk Jr., a man who had bribed judges, manipulated a president, and helped crash the gold market. This episode traces how a boy born in Vermont in 1835 ran away to join a circus, learned how to sell a spectacle, and carried that showmanship into peddling dry goods, Civil War army contracts, cotton smuggling, and a ruthless short sale of Confederate bonds in London.On Wall Street, Fisk joined Daniel Drew and

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23:33

Jakob Fugger the Rich: The Banker Who Bought an...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Jakob Fugger, born in Augsburg in 1459, amassed a fortune equal to about 2 percent of the European economy. This episode traces how he did it. Sent to Venice at 14, he learned double entry bookkeeping and the mechanics of metal trading at the headquarters of the German merchants. Back north, he lent to silver mine owners in exchange for shares rather than interest, which gave him the metal itself. He then made himself banker to the perpetually broke Habsburgs, paying an archduke's creditors and

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21:03

The Panic of 1907: How J.P. Morgan Locked Bankers In...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

In October 1907, Otto Heinze tried to corner the stock of United Copper and failed within hours. Because his family was tied to several banks, the collapse set off runs that reached the Knickerbocker Trust Company, the third largest trust in New York, which lost roughly 8 million dollars in under three hours and suspended operations on October 22. This episode explains why trust companies were so fragile: they took deposits like banks but kept almost no cash in reserve, and the country had no

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21:28

Ivan Boesky: The Insider Trading Scandal That...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Ivan Boesky told graduating business students at UC Berkeley that the desire for wealth was healthy. Months later he was on the cover of Time under the headline Ivan the Terrible, headed for federal prison. This episode follows the Detroit deli owner's son who earned a law degree without finishing college, married Seema Silverstein, the daughter of a wealthy real estate magnate, and used 700,000 dollars of her family's money to open his own Wall Street firm in 1975.Boesky became the king of risk

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21:11

Ida Tarbell: The Journalist Whose Facts Broke Up...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Ida Tarbell grew up in the Pennsylvania oil fields of the 1860s, surrounded by gushing wells, deadly explosions, and the wreckage left by the South Improvement Company, a secret alliance of railroads and oil interests that crushed independent refiners like her father in 1872. This episode follows how that childhood, a biology education at Allegheny College, and archival training in Paris produced a new kind of reporter, one who treated her subjects the way a scientist treats a specimen.At McClure's

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25:25

John Sutter: The Fugitive Whose California Empire Was...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Johann August Sutter was a failed Swiss shopkeeper facing debtor's prison when he abandoned his wife and five children in 1834 and sailed for New York. By the time he reached America he was calling himself Captain John Augustus Sutter and claiming a military past he never had. This episode follows his roundabout journey through Oregon, Hawaii, and Russian Alaska to Mexican California, where he talked Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado into granting him 48,400 acres in the Sacramento Valley for a

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22:54

Rai Stones of Yap: Giant Stone Money and the Meaning...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

On the Yap Islands of Micronesia, wealth once took the form of limestone disks with a hole in the center, some as small as a saucer and one 12 feet across and roughly 8,800 pounds. This episode explains how rai stones worked as money without ever needing to move. Ownership lived in a shared oral ledger: when a stone changed hands for a marriage, an inheritance, or a political alliance, the community simply updated its memory. One stone that sank in the Pacific during transport kept its full value

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20:12

George Eastman and Kodak: You Press the Button, We Do...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

In the 1870s, taking a photograph meant hauling glass plates, toxic chemicals, and a dark tent into the field. George Eastman, a bank clerk from Rochester, found the equipment unbearable and began experimenting with dry plates in his mother's kitchen in 1880. This episode follows his progress from the Eastman Dry Plate Company to a roll holder, a paper film, and finally the transparent nitrocellulose film patented in 1889 with chemist Henry Reichenbach.The 1888 Kodak camera turned that chemistry

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21:07

The GameStop Short Squeeze: How Reddit Traders Broke...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

By January 2021, hedge funds had sold short roughly 140 percent of GameStop's public float, a number made possible because the same shares were lent out again and again. This episode explains how that structural trap was sprung. Michael Burry and Chewy co-founder Ryan Cohen took stakes in the struggling retailer, and Keith Gill, posting as Roaring Kitty, argued for months on Reddit's WallStreetBets that the stock was undervalued. When retail traders piled into cheap call options, market makers were

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20:52

Frank McNamara and Diners Club: The Forgotten Wallet...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

The legend says that in 1949 Frank X. McNamara finished a meal at Major's Cabin Grill in New York City, reached for his wallet, and found his pocket empty. Mortified, he dreamed up a multipurpose charge card and pitched it the next day to his lawyer, Ralph Schneider, and his friend Alfred Bloomingdale. This episode examines that origin story, including the conflicting accounts of what happened and the claim by press agent Matty Simmons that the whole scene was invented for publicity.Whatever the

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20:25

The Fidget Spinner: A Fake Inventor Story and a...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

In 2017 the fidget spinner was sold to millions of parents as a tool that could ease anxiety, help with ADHD, and sharpen focus. This episode takes the toy apart, starting with the physics. A ball bearing at the center removes nearly all friction, while weighted lobes push mass outward, raising the moment of inertia and turning the spinner into a small handheld gyroscope. The result is a smooth glide and a slight pushback against the hand that people find soothing.The history is messier than the

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24:07

Arthur Andersen: From Uncompromising Honesty to the...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Arthur E. Andersen was orphaned at 16, worked as a mail boy in Chicago, studied at night, and in 1908 became the youngest certified public accountant in Illinois. The firm he co-founded in 1913 rested on a motto inherited from his mother: think straight, talk straight. He insisted that an auditor's real boss is the public investor, not the company paying the fee, and he built the profession's first centralized training program to make that standard uniform across every office.This episode traces how

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21:56

Edwin Land and Polaroid: The Instant Photo Genius...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Edwin H. Land left Harvard after his freshman year to chase one problem: how to control the direction of light. He solved it by embedding microscopic iodine crystals in stretched plastic, creating a polarizing sheet that cut glare. The company he founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1937 sold that material as sunglasses, 3D movie glasses, goggles for military working dogs, and night viewing devices. Then, in the late 1940s, Land collapsed the darkroom into the film itself and gave the world

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23:10

Dogecoin: How a Joke Cryptocurrency Reached an $85...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

In December 2013, IBM software engineer Billy Markus and Adobe marketer Jackson Palmer built a cryptocurrency in a few hours to mock the speculation swirling around Bitcoin. They put a Shiba Inu meme and Comic Sans on a coin forked from Luckycoin, itself a fork of Litecoin. Because it could be mined on ordinary computers and confirmed transactions every minute, Dogecoin drew a million visitors to its site within 30 days and attracted a community more interested in tipping strangers than getting

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20:29

Delmonico's: The New York Restaurant That Invented...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

In 1827, Swiss Italian brothers Giovanni and Pietro Delmonico ran a modest pastry shop at 23 William Street in New York. This episode follows the 200 year life of what it became. Their nephew Lorenzo arrived in 1831 and transformed the business, scouring the markets at four in the morning and building a serious wine list. After the Great Fire of 1835 wiped out the family's properties, they opened a grand building on Beaver Street in 1837, complete with columns they claimed came from the ruins of

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14,003 results

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