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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

22:27

Dennis Ritchie: The Quiet Genius Behind C, Unix, and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In October 2011, days after the world mourned Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie was found dead at 70 in his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, where he lived alone. The news first spread through a short online post by former colleague Rob Pike. Few outside computing noticed, yet the iPhones and MacBooks that made Jobs famous ran on foundations Ritchie built: the C programming language and the Unix operating system he created with Ken Thompson at Bell Labs.This episode follows Ritchie from Bronxville,

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23:49

Vantablack: The Blackest Material and the Art Feud It...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Coat a crumpled sheet of aluminum foil in Vantablack and the ridges disappear. What remains looks like a flat hole cut out of the world. Unveiled in July 2014 by Surrey NanoSystems, the UK company founded by Ben Jensen, the original material is a forest of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes that absorbs up to 99.965 percent of visible light. Photons enter the gaps between the tubes, ricochet until they are spent, and leave as a trace of heat.This episode covers the physics, the purpose, and the

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22:50

Bree Avery and Jessica Lee Rose: YouTube's First Star...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In June 2006 a 95 second video appeared on YouTube, shot on a Logitech webcam in a bedroom dressed with thrift store furniture and a pink feather boa. Its star, a homeschooled 16-year-old named Bree, talked about her strict religious parents and her purple monkey puppet, and viewers adored her. She became the most subscribed channel on the site and the first to reach 50,000 subscribers. She was also entirely fictional, played by 19-year-old film school graduate Jessica Lee Rose.This episode tells

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18:44

Orkut: Google's Forgotten Social Network That...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

On January 22, 2004, Google quietly launched a social network named for the engineer who built it in his 20 percent time, Orkut Büyükkökten. Within months his former employer, Affinity Engines, sued, claiming the site shared code with its own alumni network and pointing to nine identical bugs in both. The product itself was startlingly open: any member could view any profile, and friends could publicly rate one another as trustworthy, cool, or sexy.This episode follows Orkut from side project to

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23:27

Phone Phreaking: The Cereal Box Whistle That Hacked...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 1957 a blind seven-year-old with perfect pitch named Joe Engressia found that whistling a certain note into a telephone made the line behave strangely. He had stumbled on the 2600 hertz tone the Bell network used to signal that a long distance trunk was idle. Because control signals traveled on the same channel as voices, anyone who could produce that tone could seize an unbilled line. John Draper later found the tone in a toy whistle from Cap'n Crunch cereal.This episode traces phreaking from

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25:54

The Breakup of AT&T: How Ma Bell Split Apart and Grew...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Before 1984 the Bell System controlled American communications from end to end. AT&T ran long distance, owned the local operating companies, built nearly all the equipment through Western Electric, and funded the research at Bell Labs. In 1974 the Department of Justice sued, mainly to pry loose Western Electric. Convinced it would lose, AT&T offered a different bargain: keep the factories and the labs, and give up the local phone companies instead.This episode follows that gamble and its

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24:55

Super Glue's Accidental Origin: Harry Coover's Failed...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 1942 Harry Coover Jr. led a team trying to make clear plastic for military gun sights. One compound, cyanoacrylate, stuck to every mold and instrument it touched, so they shelved it as a failure. B.F. Goodrich filed the first patent in 1947, but the real turn came in 1951, when Coover, by then at Eastman Kodak, looked again and saw an adhesive instead of a ruined plastic. Kodak brought it to market in 1958 as Eastman 910.This episode explains both the business fight and the chemistry behind super

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20:06

Deidre LaCarte and the Hampster Dance: A Sibling Bet...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 1997 Deidre LaCarte was an art student at Malaspina University College in Nanaimo, British Columbia, teaching martial arts on the side, when she bet her sister and her best friend over who could draw the most traffic to a personal web page. Her entry, a GeoCities tribute to her pet hamster Hampton, offered rows of four low resolution dancing rodent GIFs and a sped up nine second loop of Roger Miller's Whistle Stop from Disney's 1973 Robin Hood.This episode follows what happened when that page

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22:17

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl Ad: The Commercial the Board...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Apple's Macintosh commercial aired nationally exactly once, during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984, and it is still called the greatest television ad ever made. Directed by Ridley Scott a year and a half after Blade Runner, the 60 second film shows a runner in red shorts hurling a sledgehammer through a giant screen where a Big Brother figure lectures rows of gray, shaven drones. It never shows the computer or names a single feature.This episode tells how close the ad came

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21:32

The CueCat: How $185 Million Vanished on a Cat-Shaped...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 2000, subscribers to Forbes and Wired opened their mailboxes to find a plastic barcode scanner shaped like a cat that they had never ordered. The CueCat, made by Digital Convergence Corporation, promised to spare people the labor of typing web addresses: swipe a printed code in a magazine and your desktop browser would load the page. Investors including Belo Corporation, RadioShack, Young and Rubicam, and Coca-Cola poured in $185 million to make it happen.This episode follows the device from

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24:31

Ariane 5 Flight 501: The $370 Million Rocket Killed...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

On June 4, 1996, the European Space Agency's new Ariane 5 lifted off from Kourou carrying the four Cluster satellites, each about 1,200 kilograms, bound to study Earth's magnetosphere. For thirty seconds the flight was flawless. At 37 seconds the rocket swiveled its nozzles hard to one side, tore itself apart under aerodynamic stress, and self-destructed. Nothing physical had broken. The cause was a few lines of software inherited from the Ariane 4.This episode traces the chain reaction step by

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24:26

Teflon: The Accidental Discovery Behind Nonstick Pans...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 1938 a chemist named Roy J. Plunkett opened the valve on a cylinder of tetrafluoroethylene gas in a New Jersey laboratory and nothing came out. The cylinder still weighed as much as a full one, so he and his assistant sawed it in half. Inside was a waxy, slippery white powder. The gas had polymerized into polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE, a chain of carbon atoms sheathed in fluorine. Almost nothing reacts with it or sticks to it. It was patented in 1941 and trademarked as Teflon in 1945.This

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22:21

LimeWire: From a $72 Trillion Lawsuit to Buying Fyre...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

The recording industry once demanded 72 trillion dollars in damages from a file sharing program, more than three times the gross domestic product of the planet at the time. The target was LimeWire, created in New York in 2000 by Mark Gorton. Written in Java, it ran on Windows, Mac, and Linux alike and connected users directly to one another over the Gnutella network. It also carried a heavy price. Around 30 percent of files on the network contained malware, and the free version once bundled a

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19:00

LulzSec: The 50-Day Hacking Spree That Ended With an...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In the spring of 2011 a handful of anonymous hackers knocked the CIA's public website offline, pulled user data out of Sony Pictures, and planted a story on the PBS site claiming Tupac and Biggie Smalls were alive in New Zealand. They called themselves LulzSec, short for Lulz Security, and said they did it for laughs. The group formed in May 2011 from an older crew known as Internet Feds. Its leader, Sabu, was Hector Monsegur, a 29 year old unemployed IT consultant in New York. Its voice on Twitter

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39:37

Spirit Halloween: The Pop-Up Empire Built on Dead...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 1983, in the Castro Valley Village shopping center in California, Joseph Marver ran a failing women's clothing shop called Spirit Women's Discount Apparel. Watching crowds pour into a costume store across the street, he cleared out the dresses, stocked costumes, makeup, and props, and took in 100,000 dollars in a 30 day trial. The following year he opened a temporary seasonal storefront in a mall. By 1999 he had about 60 locations and sold to Spencer Gifts. Under Steven Silverstein, chief

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46:05

La Marzocco: How a Florence Workshop Engineered the...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

The heavy metal espresso machine on the counter of a specialty cafe very often carries the name La Marzocco. The company began in Florence in 1927, when brothers Giuseppe and Bruno Bambi opened a mechanical workshop. Giuseppe had trained as a brass artisan with the Italian national railway, and he knew steam boilers. Early machines were tall vertical towers that hid the barista from the customer. In 1939 the brothers patented the horizontal boiler, which evened out brewing temperature and, almost by

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20:00

Unimate: The First Industrial Robot, From GM's Die...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In the 1960s a 4,000 pound, five-axis hydraulic arm rolled onto the stage of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. It poured a beer without spilling, knocked a golf ball into a cup, waved a conductor's baton, and played an accordion. The machine was the Unimate, the world's first industrial robot, and the stunt was calculated. Its makers, inventor George Devol and Joseph Engelberger of Unimation, wanted the public to see a precise, obedient helper instead of the mechanical monster of science

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17:28

The Sony Walkman: From Private Soundtrack to Losing...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 1982 the mayor of Woodbridge, New Jersey, banned pedestrians from wearing portable cassette players in public. The device behind the panic had started as one executive's complaint. Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka was tired of hauling the bulky TC-D5 recorder on long flights to hear classical music, so he asked Norio Ohga for a playback-only machine. Engineers gutted a dictation recorder called the Pressman, added a stereo amplifier, and on July 1, 1979, launched the blue and silver TPS-L2 in Japan

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19:43

SCP Foundation: How a 4chan Post Became a...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 2007 a user named Wesley Williams, posting as Moto42 on a 4chan paranormal board, described a concrete and rebar statue that snaps your neck the moment you blink. He labeled it SCP-173 and wrote it as a cold containment report. Imitators followed, the community moved to Wikidot in 2008, and by mid-2026 the English branch alone held over 10,400 SCP objects and 6,300 tales, with 15 official international branches. It may be the largest collaborative writing project in history.This episode examines

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27:07

History of the Phonograph: From Soot Tracings to...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

The earliest known recording of a human voice was made in 1860, almost two decades before Thomas Edison, by a Parisian typesetter who never meant anyone to hear it. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville built a mechanical ear from a funnel, a membrane, and a boar's bristle that scratched sound waves into lampblack. He wanted to see sound, not replay it. His tracing of the folk song Au Clair de la Lune stayed silent until 2008, when scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scanned it and

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14,604 results

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