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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

18:07

Rick Astley: Retired at 28, Revived by the Internet's...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 1987, a 21-year-old Rick Astley released a debut single that hit number one in the US, the UK, and Australia, its booming baritone at odds with the boyish singer shuffling in a trench coat. The video was shot in a week, and he wore his own clothes. By 1994, worn down by the pop machine, he retired at 28 to raise his family. This episode tells what happened next: 14 quiet years, then a bait-and-switch prank that made him the most famous person online without his doing a thing.The prank grew out of

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22:53

Herman Hollerith: The Punch Card Inventor Whose...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

On a train in the American West, engineer Herman Hollerith watched a conductor punch holes in a ticket to record a passenger's hair color, height, and nose, a trick used to stop ticket fraud. Hollerith saw something bigger: if holes could describe a person, a standardized card could encode any statistical fact. This episode follows that idea to the 1890 United States Census, which faced a crisis after the 1880 count took nearly eight years to tabulate by hand.His electromechanical system used

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20:32

Poe's Law: Why Online Satire and Extremism Look...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

You read a post so outrageous you cannot tell whether its author is a sincere fanatic or a deadpan comedian. That confusion has a name. In 2005, during a heated argument about creationism on a Christian forum, a user called Nathan Poe observed that without a blatant display of humor, no parody of a creationist could avoid being taken by someone as the real thing. This episode traces Poe's Law from that single post to a rule that applies to every form of extremism online.The problem is older than the

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23:20

Phishing: From AOL Chat Room Scams to AI Lures and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

On July 15, 2020, the Twitter accounts of Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, and Apple all promised to double any Bitcoin sent their way. The mastermind was a 17-year-old who broke no encryption. He and his accomplices phoned Twitter employees working from home, posed as the IT help desk, and sent them to a fake VPN site, netting about $117,000. This episode uses that breach to explain phishing as a hack of human psychology, delivered by email, phone calls, text messages, and now QR codes.The

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21:13

The Pager: A 75-Year History From Doctors' Leash to...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

The first telephone pager system was patented in 1949 by Al Gross, and the first practical service launched in 1950 for doctors in the New York City area. The device weighed 200 grams, cost $12 a month, and reached 40 kilometers from a single tower. It could only buzz, and physicians hated it, because it invented the condition of being permanently on call. This episode follows the pager from that start through Motorola's transistorized model, the Bellboy shown at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, and

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22:18

Nyan Cat: How a Charity Doodle Became a $587,000 NFT

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In April 2011, Christopher Torres, a 25-year-old artist in Dallas, Texas, was taking drawing requests during a charity livestream for the Red Cross. One viewer asked for a Pop-Tart, another for a cat. He merged them, then animated the result flying through space with a rainbow trail, partly as a tribute to his Russian Blue, Marty. Days later a YouTube user paired his loop with a Japanese song made of a synthesized voice repeating the sound of a meow and titled the upload Nyan Cat. Torres had called

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19:08

NCSA Mosaic: The Forgotten Browser That Sparked the...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In November 1992 there were exactly 26 websites in the world. By August 1995 there were more than 10,000. The difference was NCSA Mosaic, a browser begun in December 1992 by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in a lab funded through the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. Mosaic was not the first graphical browser, but it was the first to place images inline with text on the same page, and by September 1993 it ran on Windows and the Macintosh.This

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27:45

The Barcode: From Morse Code in the Sand to the...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

On June 26, 1974, a cashier at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, scanned a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum. That beep ended a 20-year struggle. It began in 1948 at the Drexel Institute of Technology, where graduate student Bernard Silver overheard a food chain president begging for automated checkout. Silver and Norman Joseph Woodland first tried ultraviolet ink, which was costly and faded. Then Woodland, sitting on a Florida beach, drew Morse code in the sand and pulled the dots and dashes

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21:45

The Mixtape: From Bronx Cassettes to Drake's $12.99...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 2014, Mac Miller made fans build a virtual sandwich before they could download Faces. He could get away with it because Faces was a mixtape, not an album. This episode traces how that label came to carry so much freedom. It begins in the Bronx in the 1970s, where DJs like Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa ran cables from their mixers into cassette decks and sold copies from car trunks and barber shops, and with Les Kippel, who organized Grateful Dead fans into a mail-order tape trading

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24:13

Mirai Botnet: How Hacked Webcams Took Down Netflix...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

On October 21, 2016, Netflix, Twitter, Reddit, GitHub, and Airbnb went dark for millions of people. The weapon was an army of baby monitors, cheap webcams, and home routers infected by malware called Mirai. Its creators were three young men: Paras Jha, known online as Anna-senpai, Josiah White, and Dalton Norman. Jha ran ProTraf Solutions, a company that sold protection against the very kind of attack he was launching, and their first targets were rival Minecraft servers.This episode explains how

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14:14

Microsoft Encarta: It Killed Britannica, Then...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 1985, Microsoft asked Encyclopaedia Britannica to partner on a CD-ROM edition. Britannica said no. Its business rested on door-to-door salesmen persuading parents to spend $1,000 to $1,500 on leather-bound prestige, and a cheap plastic disc looked like a toy that would eat its own profits. So Microsoft licensed the text of Funk and Wagnalls, the encyclopedia sold volume by volume at the grocery store, and built a multimedia shell around it under the code name Gandalf.Encarta launched in 1993 at

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15:03

Microsoft Bob: The 1995 Flop That Gave Us Clippy and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Microsoft Bob arrived in early 1995 as the answer to a real problem: home computers were moving into living rooms, and nested gray folders scared beginners. Code-named Utopia, designed by researcher Karen Fries and marketed by Melinda Gates, it drew on the Stanford theory of Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves that people treat computers like real people in real places. So Bob replaced the desktop with a cartoon house. Click the wall clock for a calendar, the pen and paper for a word processor, and let

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20:47

Marcus Hutchins: He Stopped WannaCry, Then the FBI...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In May 2017, a 22-year-old on a week off sat in his childhood bedroom in Ilfracombe, Devon, and stopped the WannaCry ransomware attack, which had hit more than 230,000 computers in 150 countries and forced UK hospitals to turn away patients. Marcus Hutchins noticed the worm tried to contact a long, gibberish, unregistered domain. He registered it for about $10 to track infections, and the spread stopped. The domain was an anti-analysis check that he had turned into a global kill switch.A few months

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21:59

Mafiaboy: The 15-Year-Old Who Knocked Yahoo and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In February 2000, Yahoo, Amazon, CNN, eBay, and Dell were knocked off the internet within days of each other. Authorities feared sophisticated cyber terrorism. The culprit was Michael Calce, a 15-year-old from the Montreal area who went by Mafiaboy. This episode starts with his childhood: his parents separated when he was five, and at six his father gave him a computer to fill the weekends at the condo. A machine that obeyed every command offered a kind of control his home life did not.On February

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23:48

Lotus 1-2-3: The Killer App That Built the PC, Then...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Type the year 1900 into Microsoft Excel and it still treats it as a leap year. The error is deliberate, copied from Lotus 1-2-3 so that imported spreadsheets would not drift by a day. This episode traces how Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs launched the program in 1983, outpacing a complacent VisiCalc with a spreadsheet, charting, and database package written in x86 assembly that wrote straight to the IBM PC's video memory and refreshed almost instantly.Lotus became so central that buyers judged clone

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21:46

Linus Torvalds: The Reluctant Titan Behind Linux and Git

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Linus Torvalds was named after both Nobel chemist Linus Pauling and the blanket-carrying kid from Peanuts, and this episode argues the pairing fits. Born in Helsinki in 1969 to journalist parents in Finland's Swedish-speaking minority, he started on a VIC-20 at age 11 and, because software was so hard to buy, taught himself to write machine code directly. After 11 months in the Finnish Navy as an artillery observer, he bought an Intel 386 clone in 1991 and began a kernel he described as just a

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21:46

Leo Baekeland and Bakelite: The Basement Lab That...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Chemist Leo Baekeland sold a new photographic paper to Eastman Kodak in a $750,000 buyout, with about $215,000 as his personal share. He never needed to work again. Instead he went back to the laboratory at his home in Yonkers, New York, to attack a supply problem. The booming electrical industry depended on shellac as an insulator, and shellac was scraped from tree branches in Asia, where it was secreted by the lac insect. Baekeland set out to make a synthetic substitute from phenol and

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23:12

LaserDisc: The 1978 Analog Format That Paved the Way...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In December 1978, in Atlanta, Georgia, MCA launched a home video format called DiscoVision with Jaws as its first title. It arrived two years after VHS and four years before the audio CD, and it read a 12 inch disc with a laser. The earliest players used a glass tube filled with helium neon gas. Yet the format was analog: the microscopic pits and lands on the disc modulated a continuous wave, with light acting as a needle that never touched the surface. The result was 425 to 440 lines of resolution

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22:16

Keyboard Cat: Charlie Schmidt's 1984 Tape and the...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 1984, in Spokane, Washington, a bored Charlie Schmidt dressed his cat Fatso in a light blue infant's shirt, sat him at an Ensoniq Mirage keyboard, and worked the animal's paws from below while a VHS camcorder rolled. Then the tape went into a drawer. Schmidt did not upload it to YouTube until June 2007, under the title Charlie Schmidt's Cool Cat, and even then it drew little notice. The internet assumed the cat had died in 1987. Schmidt and his wife later corrected the record: Fatso, born in

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21:50

Kevin Mitnick: From Most Wanted Hacker to Corporate...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In the late 1990s, federal authorities persuaded a judge that an inmate named Kevin Mitnick could start a nuclear war by whistling tones into a prison pay phone. He spent eight months in solitary confinement on the strength of that fear. Mitnick was born in Los Angeles in 1963 and grew up in the San Fernando Valley, where amateur radio taught him that systems run on protocols and that protocols can be bent. At 12 he talked a bus driver into revealing where to buy the transit authority's ticket

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14,604 results

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