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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

21:01

Crazy Eddie: How Eddie Antar's Insane Prices Hid an...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Crazy Eddie was a regional electronics chain so famous that Queen held a press conference there and Dan Aykroyd parodied its commercials on Saturday Night Live. The story begins in 1969 on Kings Highway in Brooklyn, where Eddie Antar, his father Sam M. Antar, and his cousin Ronnie Gindi opened a shop called Sight and Sound that was nearly bankrupt within 18 months. Antar bought out his cousin, took control from his father, and in 1971 renamed the store after his own exaggerated sales persona. Radio

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22:07

Pyramid Schemes Explained: The Math Behind Gifting...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

A friend invites you to a gifting circle: put in $100, bring two people, and be blessed with $800. It sounds like mutual aid, but it is a pyramid scheme, a model in which money comes from recruiting rather than from selling anything to outside customers. This episode works through the arithmetic that dooms every version. If each member must recruit six people, the 12th layer holds 2.2 billion participants, and the 13th would need 13.1 billion more, which is more people than exist. The bottom layer

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18:05

Ruja Ignatova: The Oxford-Educated Cryptoqueen Who...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Ruja Ignatova sits on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list beside cartel bosses and hitmen, yet she holds a PhD in private international law and a master's from Oxford. Born in May 1980 in Ruse, Bulgaria, she moved with her family to Schramberg, Germany in 1990, skipped a grade, and went on to work as a consultant at McKinsey in Sofia. This episode follows how that polished resume became the packaging for OneCoin, the so-called Bitcoin killer she launched in 2014, and how a 14-month suspended fraud

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22:00

The Gilded Age: Railroads, Robber Barons and the Rust...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

By 1880, an average white 10-year-old boy in the United States was shorter and had a lower life expectancy than his great grandfather who fought in the Revolutionary War. That contradiction sits at the center of the Gilded Age, the name Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner coined in their 1873 novel to mock a society painting gold over cheap metal. This episode traces how the transcontinental railroad of 1869 cut the trip from New York to San Francisco from six months to six days, created a single

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21:43

The Hoover Free Flights Fiasco: How a 1992 Promo Sank...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Spend 100 pounds on a Hoover appliance and receive two round trip tickets to the United States worth about 600 pounds. In 1992 the British arm of an 84 year old brand made that offer in earnest. This episode explains why. Hoover had held half its market for almost 40 years, but recession, rivals such as Dyson, and flops like a talking vacuum cleaner had cut profits from 147 million dollars to 74 million between 1987 and 1992. Under pressure from its American parent Maytag and sitting on warehouses

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23:07

Gregor MacGregor and Poyais: The War Hero Who...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Gregor MacGregor was buried with full state honors in a national cathedral in 1845. He had also invented a country, sold its bonds and land in London, and sent hundreds of settlers to a jungle where more than half of them died. This episode asks how one man could be both. Born in 1786 into a Scottish clan whose very surname had once been banned, he bought an army commission at 16, married an heiress, and fixated on rank and uniforms. In Venezuela he earned real glory, leading a 34 day fighting

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19:30

Joan Anderson: The Woman Who Named the Hula Hoop and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Joan Anderson pitched the idea and the name for one of the best selling toys in history, sealed it with a handshake, and watched 100 million units sell without receiving a dime. This episode tells her story. On a trip back to her native Australia in the 1950s she saw schoolchildren twirling bamboo rings around their waists, a craze so strong that Sydney teachers used the hoops in physical education classes and department stores ran out of stock. She had her mother ship one across the Pacific, and

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21:01

Charles Deville Wells: The Man Who Broke the Bank at...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

The man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo is remembered through a music hall hit, a 1935 film, and a stage musical. The real Charles Deville Wells was a serial fraudster. Born in Hertfordshire in 1841 and raised in France, he grew up fluent in two cultures and able to vanish across the Channel whenever one country grew too hot. He was also a real engineer: in 1868 he invented a device to regulate ship propellers and sold the patent for 5,000 francs, about five times his yearly salary. This episode

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20:59

Therese Humbert and the Crawford Millions: The Empty...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

In 1902 a Paris court forced open the iron safe that had backed twenty years of bank loans. Creditors expected the Crawford millions in bearer bonds. They found old newspapers, a trouser button, and an Italian coin. This episode tells how Therese Humbert, born Therese Daurignac to a peasant family in 1856, built that illusion. She learned from a father who waved dubious parchments to claim noble blood, lied her way into marriage with Frederic Humbert, son of a future Minister of Justice, and kept

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21:16

Bernard Ebbers and WorldCom: The $11 Billion...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

In 1983 Bernard Ebbers and three partners sketched a company in a motel coffee shop in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Fifteen years later it completed what was then the largest corporate merger in United States history. This episode traces how Long Distance Discount Services became WorldCom by buying more than 60 telecommunications firms, outbidding AT&T and Sprint for Advanced Telecommunications in 1992 and taking MCI for 37 billion dollars in 1998. Growth by acquisition made Ebbers a titan and left

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12:52

Charles Van Doren and the Rigged Quiz Show That...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Charles Van Doren was a Columbia University English professor from a family of Pulitzer Prize winning writers. In November 1959 he sat before Congress on national television and confessed to being the face of the biggest fraud in early broadcasting. This episode explains how he got there. A 1954 Supreme Court ruling let networks hand out large cash prizes, and NBC launched Twenty-One in September 1956. The first honest episode was a disaster of sweating contestants and dead air, sponsor Geritol was

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23:20

The Hungarian Pengo: The Worst Hyperinflation Ever...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

A banknote with a face value of 100 quintillion, a one followed by 20 zeros, could buy about 20 US cents of goods. That was the Hungarian pengo in 1946, the most extreme hyperinflation on record. This episode follows the currency from birth to death. It was introduced on January 1, 1927 with a League of Nations loan, replacing the ruined korona at 12,500 to one, and its name was chosen to evoke the ring of silver coins on a wooden table. Pegged to gold and backed by reserves that reached 51 percent

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22:27

The 419 Scam: Why Nigerian Prince Emails Are Bad on...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

The email from a foreign prince offering 20 million dollars looks like a joke, yet advance fee fraud takes in billions every year. This episode traces its lineage to the Spanish Prisoner letters of the late 18th century and the Letter from Jerusalem documented by Vidocq in the 1830s, then to Nigeria in the 1980s and 90s, where an oil price crash, youth unemployment, and cyber cafes produced the Yahoo Boys. The name comes from Section 419 of the Nigerian Criminal Code, though the senders may now sit

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21:31

Charles Ingram, the Coughing Major: Millionaire Cheat...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Charles Ingram admitted on national television that he did not know what a googol was, chose it anyway, and won one million pounds on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. No champagne followed, only a criminal investigation. This episode looks at the man in the hot seat: born in Derbyshire in 1963, son of an RAF wing commander, a Sandhurst graduate who became a major in the Royal Engineers and served a UN tour in Bosnia. His wife Diana and her brother had each already won 32,000 pounds on the show, and he

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24:12

The Klondike Gold Rush: A Ton of Gear, Dead Horses...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

In the summer of 1897 the ships Excelsior and Portland docked with holds full of raw gold, and Seattle's streetcar drivers, policemen, and even its mayor walked off the job. This episode separates the romantic myth of the Klondike from what the journey really demanded. The find itself came on August 16, 1896 at Rabbit Creek, made by George Carmack, Skookum Jim, and Tagish Charley, with the claim filed in Carmack's name because an Indigenous man's claim might not have been honored. The stampede

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18:12

J. Paul Getty: The Oil Billionaire Who Haggled Over a...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

J. Paul Getty was the wealthiest private citizen on the planet, and he installed a coin-operated payphone in the hallway of his 72-room English mansion so guests could not run up his bill. This episode tries to reconcile the two men. It starts in Minneapolis in 1892 with strict Methodist parents, follows him to Berkeley and Oxford, and lands on the wound that shaped him: when his father died in 1930 leaving 10 million dollars, the scandal-prone Paul received only 500,000.He answered by building

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19:19

Navinder Sarao and the 2010 Flash Crash: Stub Quotes...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

We expect a trillion dollar disaster to have a trillion dollar villain. The Flash Crash of May 6, 2010 had Navinder Singh Sarao, a point and click trader in a messy childhood bedroom in Hounslow. This episode follows the mechanics closely. High frequency firms had spent billions on straight line fiber and co-located servers to win a race measured in microseconds. Sarao could not win that race from London, so he hired a programmer to rework his software and hacked the traffic lights instead, acting

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21:30

Navinder Singh Sarao: The Bedroom Trader Blamed for...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

On May 6, 2010, the Dow fell nearly a thousand points and a trillion dollars in market value disappeared in 36 minutes. Five years later, authorities pointed to Navinder Singh Sarao, a 36 year old trading in sweatpants from his parents' stucco house in West London. This episode explains how he got there: Regulation NMS linked the exchanges, high frequency firms exploited the milliseconds between them, and Sarao learned to fool their algorithms with huge sell orders he never meant to fill.The story

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25:06

Inside the Boiler Room: Pump and Dumps, Sucker Lists...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

A boiler room is an outbound call center built to push questionable investments through dishonest, high pressure sales. The name is literal: operators once set up folding tables in the cheapest basements they could rent and packed in brokers who were punished for straying from the script. This episode takes the scam apart like a magic trick, showing how three verifiable facts soften a target for the fourth, fabricated one, and how a house stock secretly owned by insiders is pumped with victims'

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17:42

John D. Rockefeller: How the Standard Oil Breakup...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

In 1911 the Supreme Court ordered Standard Oil broken into 39 companies, a punishment meant to end the most notorious monopoly in American history. Instead it doubled John D. Rockefeller's fortune and left him the wealthiest person on earth. This episode traces how that happened, beginning in the chaotic oil boom of Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Rockefeller ignored the gamble of drilling and focused on refining and transport, the toll booth every barrel had to pass through.The turning point came in

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14,217 results

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