pplpod

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 1883 Warren S. Johnson, a professor at the Whitewater Normal School in Wisconsin, patented the first electric room thermostat, a bimetallic strip that rang a bell for the janitor in the boiler room, and later used compressed air to open valves automatically. Backed by Milwaukee investors, he formed a company in 1885. After his death in 1911 it focused on large non-residential buildings, then diversified into clocks, automotive seating, lead-acid batteries and, in 1989, a Pan Am facilities management division serving airports, military bases and government space centers.

In 1982 the company adopted a fetal protection policy that barred women from lead-exposed battery jobs unless they could prove they could not have children. The United Automobile Workers sued in 1984. Mary Craig chose surgical sterilization to keep her job, Elsie Nason was transferred to lower-paying work, and Donald Penney was denied leave to let his blood lead fall before becoming a father. In 1991 the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the policy, rejecting the company's bona fide occupational qualification defense under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.

• The 2016 merger with Tyco International moved the legal headquarters to Cork, Ireland, a tax inversion projected to avoid about $150 million a year in U.S. taxes, which Hillary Clinton publicly condemned.
• Tyco's former CEO Dennis Kozlowski was convicted on more than 30 counts after using forgiven company loans, with a $6,000 shower curtain and a $2 million party in Sardinia among the spending.
• After a nine-month trial over the 1986 DuPont Plaza Hotel fire in San Juan, which killed 98, a judge issued a directed verdict clearing its energy management system.
• In 2016 it paid $14.4 million to settle SEC Foreign Corrupt Practices Act charges over a Chinese marine subsidiary that routed about $5 million through sham vendors.
• It cut its workforce 52 percent in six years after the Tyco deal, spun off automotive seating, agreed in 2024 to sell HVAC units to Bosch for $6.7 billion and was hit by ransomware in 2023.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Berlin's Tempelhof stands on land once held by the Knights Templar and later used as a Prussian army parade ground, where French aviator Armand Zipfel and Orville Wright gave flight demonstrations in 1909. It became an airport in the 1920s, around the founding of Lufthansa. From 1934 architect Ernst Sagebiel designed a new terminal as the gateway to Albert Speer's planned Germania: an eagle-shaped limestone structure 1.2 kilometers long with a canopy roof built as a grandstand, which Norman Foster called the mother of all airports. During World War II, Weser Flugzeugbau used its halls to assemble Stuka dive bombers and Focke-Wulf fighters. In 1945 a Soviet charge ignited stored film in a three-level bunker, and the fire burned until the Soviets flooded it with the airport's own water.

In the American sector after the war, Tempelhof became the center of the 1948 Berlin Airlift. C-54 Skymasters landing every 90 seconds wrecked the Marston matting, so between July and October 1948 engineers and German volunteers built two 6,000-foot runways between landings, while pilot Gail Halvorsen dropped candy on handkerchief parachutes. By 1954 it was Europe's third busiest airport. Subsidized West Berlin flights set off a contest between BEA's 53-seat Super Silver Star Vickers Viscounts with hot meals and Pan Am's 128-seat Boeing 727s, and Pan Am took nearly 68 percent of the market within two years.

• Air France's Sud Aviation Caravelles lacked thrust reversers and could not reliably stop on the short runways, forcing a move to Tegel.
• After the 1973 oil crisis, Pan Am and British Airways followed to Tegel by 1975.
• A 2008 referendum to keep the airport open won 60.2 percent of votes cast but only about 21.7 percent of eligible voters, short of the 25 percent quorum.
• Flights ended on October 30, 2008, and three Antonov An-2 biplanes grounded by weather were allowed out weeks later.
• A 2014 referendum banned development on Tempelhofer Feld, a park that protects skylark nesting areas, and its hangars sheltered about 2,500 refugees from late 2015 to 2017.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

On June 27, 2017, radiation monitoring screens at Chernobyl went dark, Maersk's global shipping operations froze, and a chocolate factory in Tasmania stopped. The weapon descended from Petya, ransomware discovered in March 2016 that overwrote the master boot record, showed a fake CHKDSK repair screen while encrypting the master file table, and demanded Bitcoin; a May 2016 version added a fallback payload called Mischa for machines without admin rights. Its authors borrowed from the 1995 Bond film GoldenEye, selling it as Janus Cybercrime Solutions and using an avatar of the hacker Boris Grishenko.

The 2017 attack arrived through a compromised update to M.E.Doc, the standard Ukrainian tax software, whose backdoor ESET says sat dormant for at least six weeks before firing on the eve of Ukraine's Constitution Day. Police who raided M.E.Doc found servers not updated since 2013. The malware spread with EternalBlue, an exploit attributed to the NSA and leaked by the Shadow Brokers in April 2017, plus a modified Mimikatz and PsExec. Kaspersky named it NotPetya: its encryption could not be reversed, and its $300 ransom went to one fixed Bitcoin wallet with a Posteo email account that was quickly suspended.

• About 80 percent of infections were in Ukraine, hitting the National Bank, government ministries and the metro.
• Maersk reported $200 million to $300 million in lost revenue and FedEx a $400 million hit, India's JNPT port stopped, and Princeton Community Hospital in West Virginia replaced its entire network.
• The White House put global damages above $10 billion.
• Zurich American Insurance refused Mondelez's claim under an act of war exclusion; Mondelez sued for $100 million in 2018 and settled in 2022.
• The U.S., U.K. and Australia blamed the GRU's Sandworm group, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied it, and NATO's Jens Stoltenberg warned such an attack could trigger Article 5.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 1965 Alan Stillman, who had no restaurant experience, used $5,000 of his savings and $5,000 borrowed from his mother to buy The Good Tavern, a bar near the Queensboro Bridge on Manhattan's Upper East Side, a neighborhood full of young singles and flight attendants. He renamed it with the Bucknell phrase Thank God It's Friday, painted it blue with red and white striped awnings, hired athletic bartenders in striped soccer shirts and popularized ladies night. Arriving alongside the birth control pill and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, it gave young women a place to go out without a date. Velvet ropes went up, Maxwell's Plum opened across the street, and patrons appear in Robert Downey Sr.'s 1968 film No More Excuses.

Daniel R. Scoggin took Midwest franchise rights and opened a 1972 Dallas prototype with multi-level dining, a raised central bar, scratch cooking, potato skins, frozen drinks and the Bartender Olympics; it doubled the sales and tripled the profits of any earlier location. Stillman merged into Scoggin's company, Carlson Companies bought the chain in 1975, and Stillman went on to found Smith & Wollensky. Fridays went public with Goldman Sachs in 1983, entered the U.K. with Whitbread and by 2008 had 601 U.S. restaurants and $2 billion in revenue. Sales fell to $728 million by 2023 as private equity owners, including Sentinel Capital and TriArtisan, loaded it with debt.

• Stillman claimed his showman bartenders inspired Tom Cruise's character in Cocktail, though the bar Malachy's is said to have predated Fridays.
• Classic stores display a propeller for the bar as engine and a rowing scull holding saddle shoes and champagne for teamwork, leadership and celebration.
• New Jersey's 2013 Operation Swill raided 17 franchise locations that were refilling top-shelf bottles with cheap liquor.
• In 2018 U.K. waiters struck over a policy sending 20 percent of their card tips to kitchen staff, and a 2022 suit over licensed mozzarella sticks with no mozzarella settled for $900,000.
• The U.K. operator entered administration in September 2024 after missing a bondholder filing, the U.S. company filed for Chapter 11 in November 2024, and the U.K. business collapsed again by early 2026.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

T-Mobile US traces back to VoiceStream Wireless, spun off from Western Wireless to win urban markets in the western U.S. using the GSM digital standard. That choice drew Deutsche Telekom, which bought VoiceStream for $35 billion in 2001, largely for its GSM spectrum licenses, and renamed it T-Mobile USA, with ads featuring Jamie Lee Curtis and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Purchases of Omnipoint, Aerial and SunCom followed. By 2011 the carrier was losing subscribers, and Deutsche Telekom agreed to sell it to AT&T for $39 billion until a Justice Department antitrust suit ended the deal in December 2011, leaving a network that had gone nine months without investment.

CEO John Legere launched the Un-carrier campaign in 2013, dropping two-year contracts, paying off rivals' early termination fees and adding Data Stash and Binge On, whose zero rating of Netflix and Hulu fed the net neutrality debate. A 2013 reverse takeover of MetroPCS put the company on the stock market. The Sprint merger, announced in 2018 and challenged in federal court by state attorneys general, closed in 2020 and brought Sprint's 2.5 GHz mid-band spectrum for 5G. T-Mobile then bought Mint Mobile and Ultra Mobile in a deal worth over $1 billion and moved to acquire U.S. Cellular's wireless operations and spectrum for over $4 billion.

• Its 3G launch was delayed because government agencies were still using frequencies T-Mobile had bought for over $4 billion at FCC auctions.
• The last original 2G towers were decommissioned in 2025 and 2026, while Sprint's incompatible CDMA network ran until customers were migrated.
• TVision, built on the Layer3 TV acquisition, was shut down after a few years in favor of partnering with YouTube TV.
• The Communications Workers of America and Germany's ver.di pushed for union rights, and lawmakers including John Kerry and Bob Casey wrote to Deutsche Telekom's CEO.
• Records list T-Mobile among corporate donors to the 2025 White House East Wing ballroom project, and it has partnered with SpaceX's Starlink on satellite-to-phone service.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Sweden began studying a replacement for its Saab 35 Draken and 37 Viggen in 1979 under the Bas 90 doctrine, which dispersed fighters to road runways 800 meters long and 17 meters wide in case main air bases were destroyed. The JAS 39 Gripen was named for three roles in one airframe: Jakt for air-to-air combat, Attack for air-to-surface and Spaning for reconnaissance. The project passed the Riksdag 176 to 167 in 1982 over Social Democratic opposition and was locked into a fixed-price contract in 1983. Saab chose a delta wing with canards and relaxed stability, making the jet inherently unstable and dependent on fly-by-wire software written in Ada.

In February 1989 test pilot Lars Rådeström crashed the first prototype while landing at Linköping because of pilot-induced oscillation, breaking his elbow, and Saab and Calspan spent 15 months reworking the software. In August 1993 Rådeström ejected during a display at the Stockholm Water Festival and the jet came down on Långholmen island, a crash traced to the software amplifying quick stick commands. Once fixed, the design met its goals: a 10-minute air-to-air turnaround by one technician and five conscripts, and 20 minutes for air-to-ground. A 2012 Jane's study put the Gripen C at about $4,700 per flight hour against $25,000 to over $38,000 for the F-35.

• The Volvo RM12 engine is a license-built derivative of the General Electric F404, and a Health and Usage Monitoring System tells technicians what to service.
• The C and D models added NATO compatibility and air refueling; the E and F models carry 40 percent more internal fuel, an F414G engine and the Raven ES-05 AESA radar.
• A 1995 marketing venture with British Aerospace was followed by bribery investigations tied to sales in South Africa, Austria, the Czech Republic and Hungary; only one individual, in Austria, was successfully prosecuted.
• Brazil partnered with Embraer to assemble its Gripens locally, and more than 280 have been delivered worldwide.
• In May 2025 a Gripen E flew three sorties controlled by an AI model named Centaur, demonstrating beyond visual range combat.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Sprint grew from two roots: the Brown Telephone Company, founded by Cleyson Brown in 1899 around Abilene, Kansas, which became United Telecommunications, and the Southern Pacific Railroad, whose trackside telegraph lines grew into a private microwave relay network. In the 1970s Southern Pacific's communications division fought AT&T in antitrust suits and at the FCC for the right to sell spare long-distance capacity, and an internal naming contest produced Sprint, an acronym built from the railroad's name. In the 1980s United Telecommunications acquired the long-distance business, and under Paul Henson it built the first major nationwide fiber optic network, which was highly profitable by 1989.

In 1995 Sprint launched the first commercial all-digital PCS network in the U.S., starting around Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and partnered with Comcast, Cox and TCI on bundled TV, phone and wireless service. The Justice Department and the European Union blocked a $129 billion merger with MCI WorldCom in 1999. In 2005 Sprint paid $35 billion for Nextel, whose iDEN push-to-talk network could not interoperate with Sprint's CDMA network, and in 2008 wrote down $29.7 billion of the deal. For 4G it bet on WiMAX through Clearwire, then abandoned it by 2011 to build an LTE network from scratch.

• Hybrid PowerSource phones packed both CDMA and iDEN radios and had poor battery life.
• Nextel executives left soon after the merger, and Sprint spent billions more buying out regional affiliates that threatened lawsuits.
• SoftBank bought 70 percent and then 80 percent of Sprint for over $20 billion in 2012 and 2013, largely for Clearwire's 2.5 GHz mid-band spectrum.
• Under CEO Marcelo Claure, Sprint opened stores in RadioShack locations, bought 33 percent of Jay-Z's Tidal, sold a windowsill Magic Box booster and hired Verizon's Can You Hear Me Now actor Paul Marcarelli.
• The $26.5 billion T-Mobile merger closed in April 2020, and the Sprint brand was discontinued by August 2020.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In the 1970s Singapore's main airport at Paya Lebar, opened in 1955 to replace Kallang, grew from about 300,000 passengers to 4 million by 1975. A 1972 plan for a second runway there stalled after the 1973 oil crisis, and planners saw that expansion would trap the airport inside the city with jets over homes. In 1975 the government chose a former military air base at Changi on the island's eastern tip, sending flight paths over the sea. Changi opened on July 1, 1981, when Singapore Airlines Flight 101 from Kuala Lumpur landed at 7:10 a.m. with 140 passengers, and it handled over 12 million passengers in its first year. Terminals followed in 1990, 2008 and 2017, and ground was broken for Terminal 5 in May 2025.

Jewel, a 1.7 billion Singapore dollar complex built over Terminal 1's old parking lot in 2019, holds the 40-meter Rain Vortex, the world's tallest indoor waterfall, and is open to the public, not just passengers. In 2025 Changi handled nearly 70 million passengers and 2.08 million tons of air freight, much of it semiconductors and AI hardware, with FedEx Express using it as a principal hub. Traffic fell to 3 million in 2021; Terminals 2 and 4 closed, and Terminal 2 received a three-and-a-half-year rebuild with a 14-meter digital display called the Wonderfall before travel returned.

• In March 1991 four hijackers seized Singapore Airlines Flight 117, an Airbus A310; after a standoff of more than eight hours, commandos killed all four with no passenger or crew casualties.
• In November 2010 Qantas Flight 32, an A380 with 469 people aboard, suffered an uncontained engine failure after leaving Changi and returned with everyone surviving.
• Severed control cables left one QF32 engine running after landing, and crews poured water into it for three hours to shut it down.
• A May 2017 fire in the Terminal 2 departure hall forced an evacuation and the diversion of 40 flights to Terminal 3.
• Auxiliary police forces Certis and AETOS handle armed security, and three airside fire stations and a sea rescue base cover emergencies.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Shake Shack began in 2001 as a hot dog cart supporting the I Heart Taxi art exhibit in a run-down Madison Square Park, set up by Randy Garutti, director of operations for Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group, and prepped in the kitchen of Eleven Madison Park. After three summers, Meyer won a city bid in 2004 for a permanent kiosk serving burgers, fries and frozen custard shakes. That one kiosk eventually averaged $4 million a year, roughly double a typical U.S. McDonald's. Expansion around 2010 went to places such as Lincoln Road in Miami Beach and a rundown Upper East Side block, and international stores opened in Dubai and Kuwait in 2011.

The 2015 IPO priced shares at $21; they jumped 123 percent on the first day to $47 and later hit $90, and the company set a goal of 450 stores. Culinary director Mark Rosati ran scarcity launches, testing the Chicken Shack only in Brooklyn in 2015 and selling tickets a week ahead for a 2018 burger collaboration with Brooklyn restaurant Emily. In 2020 Shake Shack received a $10 million Paycheck Protection Program loan through a per-location rule, and Garutti returned it. Union Square Hospitality Group kept between $11 million and $27 million, though Meyer had said on a podcast that it would be irresponsible for large, well-funded companies to take PPP money.

• A location in Sandy, Utah, was built inside a 90-year-old historic school building.
• A store in Israel, announced before October 7, 2023, opened in February 2024 and drew boycotts during the Gaza war.
• Shake Shack adopted the Better Chicken Commitment in 2016, and in 2025 reported zero percent compliance on its genetic and slaughter requirements.
• In June 2020 NYPD unions claimed officers' milkshakes had been poisoned with bleach; police found no criminality, and the cause was likely residual cleaning solution in the machine.
• Expansion has reached Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, with Brazil and Hawaii targeted by 2027.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Kintaro Hattori began a clock shop apprenticeship in Tokyo at 13 in the 1870s, working at the Kobayashi, Kameda and Sakata shops. In 1881, at 21, he opened K. Hattori, and in 1885 he bypassed domestic wholesalers to buy directly from foreign trading firms in the Yokohama settlement, gaining imported watches and machinery few rivals could get. After moving to Ginza, he became director of the Tokyo Clockmaker and Watchmaker Association at 31 and in 1892 began making clocks as Seikosha, the House of Exquisite Workmanship. A 16-meter clock tower and the Timekeeper pocket watch followed in 1895, and the Laurel, Japan's first wristwatch, in 1913. In 1924 the company dropped the planned brand Glory because it sounded like gorori, a word for tumbling, and chose Seiko, a homophone for exquisite and for success.

Japanese government railways adopted Seiko pocket watches in 1929, and Seiko House Ginza was completed in 1932. After World War II, watchmaking was split between two rival factories, Daini Seikosha and Suwa Seikosha, which competed to out-engineer each other. Seiko entered the observatory chronometer competitions in Neuchâtel and Geneva and took first place overall in Geneva in 1968. On Christmas Day 1969 it released the Astron, the first commercially available quartz wristwatch, its crystal vibrating 32,768 times a second, setting off what Swiss watchmakers call the quartz crisis. The same year it launched an automatic chronograph with a vertical clutch.

• The Astron was priced like a midsize car when it launched.
• The vertical clutch starts the stopwatch by dropping one friction plate onto another, avoiding the jumping seconds hand of side-meshing gears.
• Seiko and Rolex are described as the only fully vertically integrated watchmakers; Seiko grows its own quartz crystals and smelts its own mainspring alloys.
• Spring Drive, introduced in 1999, uses a mainspring to spin a glide wheel that powers a quartz circuit, which brakes the wheel electromagnetically to eight revolutions per second.
• The Spring Drive caliber 9RB2 set a record of plus or minus 20 seconds a year, and Seiko times the World Athletics Championships.