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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

19:36

Zimbabwe Hyperinflation: The 100 Trillion Dollar Note...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

At the peak of Zimbabwe's hyperinflation, a banknote printed with a one and 14 zeros could not cover a one-way bus fare. This episode takes the crisis apart piece by piece, starting from a surprising place: after independence in 1980, Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of its region, and its dollar was officially valued above the U.S. dollar. The damage came later. Land reform dissolved the property titles that farmers used as collateral, food production fell 45 percent between 1999 and 2009, bank credit

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21:43

Yahoo: The Giant That Passed on Google for $1 Million...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Yahoo could have bought Google for $1 million in 1998. It declined. Ten years later it turned down $44.6 billion from Microsoft as too little, then sold its core business to Verizon for $4.83 billion. This episode reads the company's life as a corporate tragedy, beginning in January 1994, when Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo built a human-edited directory called Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web. Renamed Yahoo, it became the front door of the early internet, and its

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24:33

The Wirecard Scandal: The 1.9 Billion Euros That...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Wirecard sat on Germany's DAX index with a valuation of 24 billion euros, a celebrated homegrown rival to Silicon Valley. Then, on June 25, 2020, it admitted that 1.9 billion euros, a quarter of its balance sheet, was missing and had probably never existed. This episode reconstructs how the illusion was built. Founded in 1999, the company began by processing payments for pornography and online gambling sites, slipped onto the stock market through a reverse merger with a defunct call center group,

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27:48

Wildcat Banking: Swamp Banks, Nail-Filled Vaults, and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

From roughly 1836 to 1865, the United States ran without a unified national currency. State-chartered banks printed their own paper notes, each a promise to pay gold or silver to whoever walked up to the counter. Wildcat banks exploited that promise by printing far more paper than they could redeem and, by one account of the name, by setting up shop in wilderness so remote that only wildcats lived there. This episode explains how the scheme worked, starting with Andrew Dexter Jr., who bought distant

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22:53

Weimar Hyperinflation: When Bread Cost 200 Billion Marks

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

In late 1922 a loaf of bread in Berlin cost about 160 marks. Less than a year later the same loaf cost 200 billion. This episode traces how an advanced industrial nation destroyed its own money, beginning in 1914, when Germany suspended the gold standard and chose to pay for the First World War with borrowing instead of taxes, betting that a quick victory would let it bill the losers. Defeat left 156 billion marks of debt, and the 1921 London Schedule of Payments added a reparations bill of 132

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24:11

Warren Buffett: From Pinball Hustler to the Oracle of...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

At 14, Warren Buffett filed his first income tax return and claimed a $35 deduction for wear on his bicycle and watch, the tools of his paper route. This episode follows that habit of precise accounting through a lifetime of compounding. He sold gum and Coca-Cola door to door at seven, bought a 40 acre farm at 14, and ran pinball machines in Omaha barber shops at 15. Rejected by Harvard Business School, he went to Columbia to study under Benjamin Graham, who taught him intrinsic value and the margin

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20:43

Toys R Us: How Amazon and a Debt-Fueled Buyout Killed...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

In the summer of 2024, Toys R Us released a promo made with OpenAI's Sora that showed founder Charles Lazarus as a boy dreaming up a toy empire beside a cartoon giraffe. Viewers found it creepy, and the synthetic memory suits a brand that now lives on as licensed intellectual property. This episode tells the full story, starting in April 1948, when Lazarus opened a baby furniture store called Children's Supermart in Washington, D.C. In 1957 he saw that parents buy a crib once but buy toys for years,

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22:58

The Great Diamond Hoax of 1872: Two Prospectors Who...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

John Slack died in 1896 as a coffin maker in White Oaks, New Mexico, keeping quiet about one of the boldest swindles in American history. In the early 1870s he and his cousin Philip Arnold walked into San Francisco banking offices with a handful of garnets and flawed diamonds, played the part of ignorant country prospectors, and let the financiers believe they were the ones taking advantage. With the expedition money, the cousins sailed to London, bought cheap uncut South African diamonds, and had

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30:59

The Tontine: The Last Survivor Bet That Built Early...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

The last survivor pact from old mystery novels and sitcoms is a real financial instrument with a long record. In a tontine, investors pay a lump sum into a trust that pays annual interest to the group. When a member dies, that share is divided among the living, so payouts climb for each survivor until the last one dies and the trust dissolves. The idea takes its name from Lorenzo de Tonti, a Neapolitan banker who pitched it to the French government in 1653 and was turned down. The first working

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23:42

The Cullinan Diamond: Mailed in a Cardboard Box to...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

On January 26, 1905, surface manager Frederick Wells pried a 3,106 carat crystal out of a mine wall in South Africa with his pocket knife, just 18 feet below the surface. The Cullinan was three times the size of the previous record holder, the Excelsior, and it had formed hundreds of kilometers down in the mantle before a kimberlite eruption carried it up intact. This episode traces how a stone of that size was moved, sold, and cut. Detectives guarded an empty safe aboard the RMS Kenilworth Castle

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23:59

Al Capone: Undone by a Tax Bill and an Untreated Disease

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Al Capone ended his criminal career plucking a banjo in an Alcatraz prison band. This episode strips away the Scarface myth to follow the real chronology: a barber's son born in Brooklyn in 1899, expelled at 14 for striking a teacher, schooled in extortion as a bouncer at Frankie Yale's Harvard Inn, and slashed three times across the face by Frank Galluccio. He hated the nickname that followed, hid his left side from photographers, and asked his inner circle to call him Snorky instead.Invited to

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22:02

Tally Sticks: The Wooden Money That Burned Down...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

The word stockholder once meant something literal: the person who held the longer half of a split wooden stick. This episode follows the tally stick from prehistoric notched bones to the medieval English Exchequer, where a length of squared hazelwood became an unforgeable receipt. Notches were cut across the stick to record a debt, then the wood was split lengthwise through the marks. The lender kept the stock, the borrower kept the shorter foil, and because no two pieces of wood splinter the same

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24:37

The Infomercial: From a 1949 Blender Pitch to...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

The infomercial is easy to dismiss as late night filler, but it began as a discovery about dead airtime. In 1949, a 30-minute pitch for the Vitamix blender aired after midnight on WOR-TV in New York and drew more than 130 telephone orders within an hour. The FCC soon capped commercial minutes per hour, and marketers spent the 1970s hunting for loopholes, from album ads padded with long song clips to a station in Tijuana, Mexico, whose signal covered San Diego. When the limits were lifted for

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22:52

Supreme: How a Lafayette Street Skate Shop Became a...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

In April 1994, James Jebbia opened Supreme on Lafayette Street in Lower Manhattan with the clothing racks pushed to the walls so local kids could skate straight in off the street. The staff were downtown skaters such as Justin Pierce and Harold Hunter, the atmosphere was deliberately intimidating to outsiders, and the red box logo borrowed the look of artist Barbara Kruger's anti-capitalist work. That credibility could not be manufactured, and it became the foundation for everything that

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21:40

The 2008 Financial Crisis: How Subprime Mortgages...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

The 2008 financial crisis erased $11 trillion in household wealth, yet half of the poorest American families saw no decline, because they had no investments to lose. This episode starts decades before the crash, with the 1999 repeal of key parts of the Glass-Steagall Act, a political push for affordable housing, and cheap money from the Federal Reserve. Lenders sold adjustable rate subprime mortgages with low teaser rates, and Wall Street bundled them into mortgage-backed securities whose top slices

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23:23

Spindletop: The Texas Gusher That Launched the Oil...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

In the late 1800s, a Beaumont brick maker and Sunday school teacher named Pattillo Higgins led his class up a small hill called Sour Spring Mound, dropped a lit match, and watched the ground catch fire. He was convinced a salt dome beneath the hill had trapped oil and gas, though geologists insisted the Gulf Coast held none. In 1892 he formed the Gladys City Oil, Gas, and Manufacturing Company, only to see pressurized quicksand swallow his equipment at about 300 feet. Broke and mocked, he left his

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23:54

The Dollar Sign: A Spanish Peso Scribble That...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

The dollar sign looks like the purest emblem of American capitalism, yet its origins have nothing to do with the United States. The popular story that it is a U laid over an S, promoted by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged, has no paper trail behind it. Historians point instead to merchants' ledgers, where the plural of the Spanish-American peso was abbreviated as a p with a superscript s. Written thousands of times a day with quill pens, the two letters slowly merged until only an S with a vertical stroke

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21:51

Sneakerheads: How Basketball Shoes Became a $10...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

On Bronx basketball courts in the 1960s and 70s, a new pair of sneakers invited a ritual called stepsies, in which other players stepped on them on purpose. Dirt was proof you played hard. Then hip-hop reversed the code: a spotless Puma Suede or Adidas Superstar became the ultimate display of means and discipline, and mixing rival brands became a serious faux pas. The 1985 launch of Nike's Air Jordan line fused signature basketball shoes with street credibility, and a generation of kids who could

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26:35

Slot Machines: From Chewing Gum Loopholes to...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

The cherries, lemons, and plums on a slot machine were originally flavors of chewing gum, put on the reels to dodge early anti-gambling laws. This episode traces the machine from an 1893 Brooklyn device by Sittman and Pitt, which spun 50 playing cards on five drums and paid out in beer and cigars from the bartender, to Charles Fey's three reel Liberty Bell in San Francisco, the first to pay coins automatically. When California banned the devices, makers disguised them as gum vending machines, and

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24:44

Sears Modern Homes: The 30,000 Piece Houses Sold by...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Between 1908 and 1942, Sears sold more than 70,000 houses through its catalog, each one arriving at the local train depot as 25 tons of material in a boxcar. The idea began in 1906 as a fix for a corporate headache: manager Frank W. Kushel was stuck with an unprofitable building materials department and warehouses full of lumber, nails, and millwork. He proposed bundling it all into complete homes. The first Book of Modern Homes offered 44 styles priced from $360 to $2,890, and families raised the

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