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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

19:52

Kevin Poulsen: The Hacker Who Rigged a Porsche...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

On June 1st, 1990, KIIS-FM in Los Angeles promised a Porsche 944 S2 to its 102nd caller. Kevin Poulsen, known online as Dark Dante, did not dial fast. He took over Pacific Bell's central office switches, seized the station's 25 phone lines, blocked every other caller in the city, and counted his way to number 102. He had been at this since his teens in Pasadena, when he broke into the ARPANET at 17 using a TRS-80.This episode follows Poulsen from fugitive to reporter. The FBI found his trail after

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21:38

Bill Wasik and the Flash Mob: A Prank on Hipsters...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In June 2003, more than 130 people gathered around one expensive rug on the ninth floor of Macy's in Manhattan. Each told the confused salesperson the same story: they lived together in a warehouse on the outskirts of New York and were shopping for a love rug. Then they left. It was the first successful flash mob, and its architect was Bill Wasik, a senior editor at Harper's Magazine who wanted to see whether downtown trend chasers would show up for something meaningless if it felt exclusive.This

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24:11

Ransomware: From 20,000 Mailed Floppy Disks to a...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

The first ransomware attack arrived by post. In 1989 a biologist named Joseph Popp mailed around 20,000 floppy disks labeled as AIDS information to attendees of a World Health Organization conference. On the 90th boot, the hidden program locked the machine and demanded a $189 cashier's check sent to a P.O. box in Panama for the fictitious PC Cyborg Corporation. Popp never stood trial. He was declared mentally unfit, and at one point wore cardboard boxes on his head.This episode tracks how that crude

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22:40

Reddit: Fake Users, Unpaid Moderators, and the Sale...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Reddit exists because Paul Graham turned down an app for ordering food by text message. In the spring of 2005, University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian pitched him My Mobile Menu after a lecture in Boston. He passed on the idea but invited them into the first class of Y Combinator with a new brief: build the front page of the internet. The site launched that June to an empty room, so the founders created hundreds of fake accounts and held conversations with themselves.This

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18:12

eBay: From a Broken Laser Pointer to GameStop's $56...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 1995, programmer Pierre Omidyar listed a broken laser pointer on his hobby site, AuctionWeb, for less than $15. It sold to a collector of broken laser pointers, and the sale proved a theory: with a big enough network, there is a buyer for anything. This episode follows the 30 years that came after, from a site whose first employee, Chris Agarpao, was hired to open envelopes of mailed checks, to a company that went public in 1998 with shares opening at $18 and closing the first day at $53.The

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22:28

Anonymous: From 4chan Pranks to Hacking Russian State...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Anonymous has no face, no leader, and no fixed membership, which makes its life story unusually hard to tell. It began on the image boards of the early 2000s, above all 4chan, where threads vanished quickly and users who posted without a name were all tagged with the same default label. The running joke that this was one hyperactive person gave strangers a shared myth, and in 2006 they tested it by flooding Habbo Hotel with identical avatars and declaring the virtual pool closed.This episode traces

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19:11

Evelyn Berezin: The Woman Who Invented the...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In the late 1960s, a single slipped finger on page 49 of a legal brief meant pulling the paper out of the typewriter and starting the page again. Evelyn Berezin ended that. Born in the East Bronx in 1925 to Belarusian Jewish immigrants, a furrier and a seamstress, she grew up reading her brother's copies of Astounding Science Fiction, enrolled at Hunter College at 16, and studied physics while working full time in the rheology department of a printing ink company.This episode follows her path from a

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20:30

Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The Five-Minute IBM Hack That Became...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Control-Alt-Delete was never meant for the public. In 1981 in Boca Raton, Florida, IBM engineer David Bradley was writing the ROM BIOS for the IBM PC 5150, and the prototype crashed constantly. Every crash meant a hard reboot and a slow power-on self-test of every kilobyte of memory. Bradley spent five or ten minutes coding a keyboard interrupt that would skip the test and restart the machine, then moved on to the next crisis.This episode follows that hidden shortcut out of the lab and into daily

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22:08

Bill Gates: How a Kid Who Hated Losing Built...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Bill Gates has been two very different public figures: the desk-pounding monopolist of the 1990s and the sweater-wearing philanthropist trying to eradicate disease. This episode argues that both run on the same engine. It begins in a Seattle household where card games and swims to the dock at Hood Canal were contests with penalties for losing, then moves to the Lakeside School, where a 1968 rummage sale by the Mothers' Club bought computer time and a teletype terminal for a 13-year-old who became

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21:26

An Wang: The Forgotten Computer Billionaire Who Fired...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 1984, Dr. An Wang was the fifth richest person in America, worth about $1.6 billion and employing 30,000 people. Born in Shanghai in 1920, he immigrated to the United States in June 1945, finished a Harvard doctorate in applied physics by 1948, and went to work with Howard Aiken. There he co-invented the pulse transfer controlling device, which solved the destructive readout problem and made magnetic core memory practical for continuous computing.This episode traces how Wang turned that invention

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23:27

The Bangladesh Bank Heist: A Billion-Dollar Hack...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In February 2016, hackers tried to steal roughly $1 billion from the central bank of Bangladesh without ever entering a building. Malware suspected to be a Dridex variant had been sitting inside Bangladesh Bank's systems since January, watching employees and learning the exact syntax of the SWIFT messaging network. Then, on the night of February 4th into the 5th, as the Bangladeshi weekend began, the attackers sent 35 fraudulent transfer instructions to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.This

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19:02

The Martingale System: Why Doubling Your Bet Always...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Double your bet after every loss, and the first win recovers everything plus a profit equal to your original stake. The Martingale system, which dates to 18th century France, sounds like a law of physics, and it found a natural home at the roulette table, where red or black comes close to a coin flip. This episode shows why it is a trap. The guarantee holds only for a player with unbounded wealth, unbounded time, and a casino that accepts unbounded bets. Take away any one of those and the structure

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20:18

The Dow Jones Industrial Average: Wall Street's...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Every evening the news reports what the Dow did, as if it were a precise reading of the American economy. The number comes from a newspaperman's pencil arithmetic. Charles Dow, a reporter, and statistician Edward Jones founded Dow Jones and Company in 1882 and ran a two-page bulletin, the Customer's Afternoon Letter, around a Wall Street that was opaque to outsiders. That letter grew into the Wall Street Journal. On May 26, 1896, Dow added up the share prices of 12 industrial stocks, divided by 12,

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22:47

The Confederate Dollar: A Currency Backed Only by...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

On Christmas Day 1864 in the American South, a turkey cost $155, a ham $300, a cake of soap $50, and an ordinary suit of clothes $2,700. The money behind those prices was the Confederate States dollar, the grayback, first issued in April 1861 when the Confederacy was two months old. It was a bill of credit with no gold or silver behind it. Most notes promised payment six months after the ratification of a treaty of peace between the Confederate States and the United States, which made every bill a

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21:25

The Gambler's Fallacy: 26 Blacks in a Row at Monte...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

On August 18, 1913, a roulette wheel at the Monte Carlo Casino landed on black 26 consecutive times, odds of roughly one in 68.4 million. The crowd that gathered was sure red was due and pushed millions of francs onto it as the streak ran on. They lost fortunes to a belief that random events keep a ledger. This episode takes that night as the entry point to the gambler's fallacy, using a simple coin toss to show the error: five heads in a row is a 1 in 32 shot before you start, but after four heads

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25:46

Conspicuous Consumption: Why We Go Broke Trying to...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

In 1899, as railroad tycoons and steel magnates crowded into rooms once reserved for old money, Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class and gave the spectacle a name: conspicuous consumption. The new rich had no lineage to display, so they displayed waste, in money and in time. Like a peacock's tail, the cost and impracticality were the whole message. This episode starts there and follows the habit downhill, through Paul Nystrom's pecuniary emulation in the 1920s and James

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20:56

Wampum Was Never Money: The Sacred Beads Colonists...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

Textbooks tend to describe wampum as a kind of early money. For the peoples of the northeastern woodlands who made it, that misses nearly everything. White beads came from the inner spiral of the channeled whelk and dark purple ones from the quahog clam, each drilled by women artisans using a wooden pump drill tipped with quartz, then strung and ground smooth with sand and water. As anthropologist David Graeber put it, wampum was used to rearrange relations between people. Belts recorded treaties,

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22:43

Loss Leaders: Why Costco Loses Money on Every $1.50...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

In 2013 Costco CEO Craig Jelinek suggested to co-founder James Sinegal that the quarter-pound hot dog and soda combo, stuck at $1.50 since 1985, might need a price increase. Sinegal cursed him out for even thinking it. The combo loses money every year, as does the $4.99 rotisserie chicken, and that is the design. A loss leader is priced below cost so that the rest of your cart pays for it, and retailers use basket data from millions of receipts to know exactly what else you will buy once you are

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26:57

Planned Obsolescence: Why Your Phone and Printer Are...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

The phone battery that fades the week a new model arrives and the printer that refuses to scan without cyan ink belong to a philosophy with a century of history. It began in the 1920s car market. Henry Ford built the Model T from durable vanadium steel and wanted it to last forever, which left a saturated market with nobody needing a replacement. Alfred P. Sloan Jr. of General Motors answered with dynamic obsolescence: the 1923 Chevrolet put a restyled body on technology nearly a decade old, and the

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21:05

The Piggy Bank: A 2,000-Year History of Smashing Our...

pplpod ·

2026/10/07

The traditional piggy bank asks a child to protect and feed a ceramic animal for months and then destroy it with a hammer. That paradox is the point. Collectors call it a still bank, a vessel with no moving parts where money goes in through a slot without effort and comes out only by sacrifice. This episode treats it as an ancient commitment device, the same trick as freezing a credit card in a block of ice, built to override a brain that evolved to consume resources on the spot.The story begins

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