pplpod

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 thousa...

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 Jor...

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...

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...

In 1963, 51 financial institutions discovered that $180 million in loans, nearly $2 billion in modern terms, rested on vegetable oil that did not exist. Anthony De Angelis, known as Tino, had already run the meatpacker Gobel into bankruptcy amid suits from Yugoslavia, Germany, and the United States, and the SEC had accused him of borrowing against fictitious inventory. He simply started again with...

Founded in 1896 by Thomas Sperry and Shelley Byron Hutchinson, S&H Green Stamps turned the checkout line into a second economy. Retailers bought rolls of gummed stamps and handed them out by the dollar spent. Shoppers licked and pasted them into 24 page booklets, 1,200 points to a book, then traded filled books for housewares, sporting goods, and appliances at redemption centers with no cash r...

In late 2014, as Bitcoin stories fed a global fear of missing out, Ruja Ignatova and her lead distributor Sebastian Greenwood launched OneCoin. What buyers actually received were educational packages on cryptocurrency trading, priced from about 100 euros to more than 225,000 euros and largely plagiarized from free sources like Wikipedia. The packages came with promotional tokens said to mine OneCo...

Rudy Kurniawan was born in Jakarta in 1976, came to the United States as a student, and ignored a 2003 deportation order after his asylum bid failed. Within a few years he was reportedly spending up to one million dollars a month at wine auctions and pouring legendary bottles for elite collectors, who nicknamed him Dr. Conti for his obsession with Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. In a world that runs...

Ron Popeil began his career shouting over department store noise, slicing mountains of cabbage to prove how fast a kitchen gadget worked. Born in New York City in 1935, he was sent to Florida to live with his grandparents after his parents divorced when he was six. At 17 he moved to Chicago to work at his father Samuel's company, Popeil Brothers, and after six months at the University of Illinois...

Richard Warren Sears was 16 in 1879 when his father lost the family fortune on a speculative stock deal and died soon after. Working as a railroad station agent in North Redwood, Minnesota, he watched a local jeweler refuse a shipment of pocket watches, bought them himself, and sold them to other agents up and down the line. Using the telegraph wire, he turned station agents who knew everyone in t...

In the 1840s, a speculative frenzy wiped out the savings of Britain's middle class and, almost by accident, left behind the greatest railway network the world had seen. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway had proved the technology in 1830, but high interest rates kept money parked in government bonds for more than a decade. Then the Bank of England cut rates, the Bubble Act was gone, joint stock...

In 1921, brothers Theodore and Milton Deutschman opened a Boston shop for amateur radio operators and named it after the wooden room that housed a ship's communications gear. By the early 1960s RadioShack was effectively bankrupt, until leather goods tycoon Charles Tandy bought it in 1962 for $300,000. He killed the mail order catalog, cut 40,000 items down to roughly 2,500, opened tiny strip mall...

In 2018, a cornered fraudster named Morrie Tobin, facing prison over a $165 million offshore stock manipulation scheme, gave federal agents a tip about a Yale soccer coach. That tip exposed the Varsity Blues admissions scandal. Tobin's own trade was older and simpler: the pump and dump. Buy a thinly traded asset where reliable information is scarce, flood the market with fabricated hype, and sell...

In 1975, advertising executive Gary Dahl sat in a bar listening to friends complain about their pets: the feeding, the walks, the vet bills. His deadpan reply was that the perfect pet is a rock. It never dies, never disobeys, and never needs a bath. Most bar jokes end there. Dahl saw a product. He persuaded two colleagues, John Haggerty and George Coakley, to risk their savings, bought ordinary st...

In the spring of 1989, PepsiCo took ownership of 17 Soviet submarines, a cruiser, a frigate, and a destroyer, paid for with soft drink syrup. To explain how that happened, this episode first dismantles the textbook story of barter. Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that early economies ran on swapping goods until the double coincidence of wants forced the invention of money. Anthropologists such as David G...

Compound interest is the bedrock of modern wealth building, yet Roman law and common law once condemned it as the worst kind of usury. Its old name was anatocism: interest charged on the principal plus all the interest already accumulated. Simple interest on $1,000 at 5 percent is a steady $50 a year. Compounding earns $52.50 in the second year, a difference that looks trivial until the curve bend...

Every choice comes with a ghost: the best alternative you gave up to make it. That is opportunity cost, and this episode uses it to redraw how costs are counted. Explicit costs are the receipts, like the bill for fixing a broken printer. Implicit costs are the production time lost while it sat idle, or the salary a founder never draws. Sunk costs, such as $50,000 already poured into a failing rest...

Gerald Ratner built one of the largest jewelry empires in the world and destroyed it with a joke. Born in London in 1949, he took his real education from the shouting vendors of Petticoat Lane Market, joined the family jewelry business in 1966, and as CEO in the 1980s tore up the hushed, intimidating model of the traditional jeweler. Fluorescent orange posters and cut prices turned the shops into...

In October 2013, a man in his late twenties sat in the science fiction section of San Francisco's Glen Park library, running an illegal marketplace that generated an estimated $1.2 billion in sales. Ross Ulbricht was a former physics and materials science student steeped in Austrian economics who spent about six months coding Silk Road and launched it in early 2011 as an experiment in unrestrained...

In August 1971 the British government quietly asked the United States to move $3 billion in gold out of Fort Knox, the financial equivalent of pulling a fire alarm. Under the Bretton Woods system designed by 44 nations in 1944, every dollar could be redeemed for gold at $35 an ounce, a promise that looked safe when America held 574 million ounces. But Vietnam spending, domestic programs, and a hot...

The original emblem of the Knights Templar shows two knights sharing one horse, because they were too poor to afford a second. In 1119 a French knight named Hugh de Payens and a handful of companions, nine in all, offered King Baldwin II of Jerusalem a monastic military order to protect pilgrims on the bandit-ridden road from Jaffa. Given quarters on the Temple Mount, they lived on donations until...

After World War II, Coca-Cola held 60 percent of the cola market. By the early 1980s that share had fallen under 24 percent, and younger drinkers preferred the sweeter taste of Pepsi. CEO Roberto Goizueta, who took over in 1980, declared there were no sacred cows, and a secret effort called Project Kansas produced a sweeter formula that beat Pepsi in blind taste tests, even in the loyal Southeast....

Before they wrote a line of commercial browser code, Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen drafted a 20-page pitch for an online gaming network for the Nintendo 64. When that fell through, they turned to the web. In April 1994 they founded Mosaic Communications, soon renamed Netscape after a trademark clash with the University of Illinois, and rebuilt a browser from scratch under the code name Mozilla, sh...

At its peak, one piece of software consumed 61 percent of external internet traffic on university campus networks. Napster launched in June 1999, created by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker and named after Fanning's high school nickname. File sharing already existed on IRC, Usenet, and Hotline, but those tools were clunky and technical. Napster did one thing, MP3s, behind a simple search bar, and sud...

The first known NFT sold for $4. In May 2014, artist Kevin McCoy and technologist Anil Dash registered a short pulsing video called Quantum on a blockchain during a live presentation in New York, calling the idea monetized graphics and hoping it would help digital artists get credit and payment. Seven years later the same concept produced a market with $17 billion in trading volume, a $69 million...