pplpod

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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 Bernard of Clairvaux championed them at the Council of Troyes in 1129. Gifts of land and silver poured in, and in 1139 Pope Innocent II freed the order from local laws and taxes, answerable only to the pope.

This episode separates the history from the legend. Individual knights owned nothing while the order amassed vineyards, fleets, and for a time the island of Cyprus, and its letters of credit let pilgrims travel without coin. Its heavy cavalry was feared from Montgisard to Ascalon. Then the Crusader states fell, and an army with no war and a vast treasury sat in the Europe of King Philip IV of France, who owed it money.

• A pilgrim could deposit funds in London or Paris and receive half of a parchment cut along a jagged line, then match it in Jerusalem to withdraw the equivalent.
• Only about 10 percent of the order's 15,000 to 20,000 members were knights in white mantles. The rest were sergeants, chaplains, and tradesmen who kept them in the saddle.
• At Montgisard in 1177, 500 Templar knights shattered the center of Saladin's army of over 26,000. At Ascalon in 1153, forty knights and their Grand Master charged a breach alone and were all beheaded.
• On Friday, October 13, 1307, Philip's officers opened sealed orders at dawn and arrested Grand Master Jacques de Molay and Templars across France on charges of heresy.
• The Chinon Parchment, found in the Vatican archives in 2001, shows Pope Clement V absolved the leadership in 1308 before dissolving the order in 1312 under French pressure.

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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. On April 23, 1985, the company announced the change and stopped making the original. Within weeks it faced more than 40,000 angry letters and calls and a psychiatrist reporting that callers sounded as if a relative had died.

This episode explains why the data pointed one way and the public went the other. Sip tests reward sweetness that grows cloying over a full can, and blind cups strip away the red can, the script logo, and the memories that shape how a drink tastes. It also covers why selling both colas seemed impossible, how Pepsi gloated, and how the return of Coca-Cola Classic on July 11, 1985 sent sales soaring past Pepsi.

• Focus groups contained a furious 10 to 12 percent who pressured others into disliking the change, a warning management chose to downplay.
• Seattle retiree Gay Mullins borrowed $120,000 to found the Old Cola Drinkers of America, yet in blind tests he could not tell the two apart or preferred New Coke.
• Pepsi's Roger Enrico ran a full-page New York Times ad declaring victory in the cola wars and gave employees the day off.
• Peter Jennings interrupted General Hospital to announce the original formula's return, and company president Donald Keough answered conspiracy theories with: we're not that dumb and we're not that smart.
• When New Coke returned in 2019 as a Stranger Things tie-in, demand crashed the Coca-Cola website and modern reviewers called it refreshing and smooth.

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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, short for Mosaic killer. Netscape Navigator took 75 percent of the browser market in four months, and the August 1995 IPO valued a 16-month-old, unprofitable company at $2.9 billion.

That valuation woke Microsoft. This episode follows the browser war that came next: Internet Explorer bundled free into Windows 95, Netscape clinging to paid licenses while its software bloated, and the January 1998 decision to release its source code to the world. It also traces what outlived the company, from JavaScript, cookies, and SSL to the Mozilla project that produced Firefox, and the slow fade after AOL bought Netscape in a deal that closed at roughly $10 billion.

• Shares were planned at $14, doubled to $28 on demand, and hit $75 on the first day, a shock to Wall Street that became known as the Netscape moment.
• After a June 1995 meeting at which Microsoft allegedly proposed dividing the browser market, Microsoft licensed Mosaic code from Spyglass and shipped Internet Explorer 1.0.
• Brendan Eich created JavaScript, Lou Montulli invented the HTTP cookie so sites could remember a shopping cart, and Netscape engineers developed SSL to encrypt data in transit.
• The open source community found the old code nearly unworkable and rewrote the rendering engine as Gecko, the foundation of Mozilla Firefox.
• In July 2003 Time Warner disbanded the Netscape development team and the logo came off the building, while the name lived on as a discount dial-up service.

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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 suddenly every dorm room had a free record store stocked with hits, bootlegs, and out of print rarities. It also had a fatal flaw: a central server that indexed every shared song.

This episode treats Napster's story as a biography: birth, a short and explosive life, legal execution, and a long zombie afterlife. The RIAA sued within six months, Metallica and Dr. Dre followed, and a court ruled that a company able to monitor its network was obliged to police it. By early July 2001 the network was dark. The brand then passed from Roxio to Best Buy to Rhapsody, on to virtual reality and Web3 owners, and finally to a 2026 shutdown of its music service in favor of an artificial intelligence relaunch.

• After a demo of I Disappear leaked, Metallica sued in April 2000, identified 335,000 users, and delivered close to 60,000 printed pages of names to Napster's headquarters.
• Radiohead's Kid A leaked three weeks before its October 2000 release, and the circulation is widely credited with driving sales instead of killing them.
• Verified usage reached 26.4 million in February 2001, the same month Napster offered the labels a $1 billion settlement over five years and was turned down.
• A judge blocked the $85 million sale to Bertelsmann over the divided loyalties of Napster's CEO, a former Bertelsmann executive. Roxio then bought the brand at auction for $5.3 million.
• Shutting down the central index gave rise to decentralized successors like Gnutella and BitTorrent, which left no single server to sue.

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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 sale by Beeple at Christie's, and a piece by Pak called Merge that brought in over $91 million. By September 2023, researchers found 95 percent of NFT collections had fallen to zero monetary value.

This episode explains what buyers were really getting: a unique receipt on a public ledger, usually without copyright, closer to a certificate naming a star than to owning the star. It follows CryptoKitties clogging the Ethereum network in 2017, the ERC-721 standard that worked like a shipping container for digital goods, and the wash trading, plagiarism, and gamer revolt that soured the boom. It ends with what survives: quiet uses in ticketing, research funding, genetic data, and pharmaceutical supply chains.

• Skeptics mocked the craze with the right-clicker movement, saving million-dollar ape images to their desktops for free and announcing that they owned them too.
• CryptoKitties let players breed unique virtual cats through smart contracts, proving that people will pay for digital scarcity even as the game overwhelmed Ethereum.
• Wash traders moved tokens between their own anonymous wallets at rising prices to fake demand, and a fake Banksy NFT sold for over $300,000 before the money was refunded.
• Ubisoft's NFT announcement video drew a 96 percent dislike ratio and was delisted, while Valve's Steam and the developers of Minecraft banned NFTs outright.
• UC Berkeley auctioned NFTs tied to patents for CRISPR gene editing and cancer immunotherapy to fund research, and geneticist George Church explored tokenizing genetic data so individuals control it.

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MySpace began in August 2003 as a pragmatic copy of Friendster, built in just 10 days by employees of an internet marketing company called eUniverse. Written in ColdFusion instead of Java, it could add features at a blistering pace, and a mailing list of 20 million subscribers solved the empty room problem overnight. Its real hook was freedom: users could edit their pages with raw HTML, and teenagers turned profiles into glittering, chaotic expressions of identity. Bands uploaded MP3s, fans embedded the players, and careers like those of Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, and Taylor Swift took off.

Then came the money. News Corporation bought the site for $580 million in July 2005, and a three-year, $900 million advertising deal with Google locked the company into delivering staggering ad volumes. Pages froze under the weight of third-party ads, spam and malware spread, and users walked across the street to a cleaner Facebook. This episode follows the fall from a $12 billion valuation to a $35 million fire sale, a breach of almost 360 million accounts, and the loss of 12 years of uploaded history.

• In 2005 the founders turned down a young Mark Zuckerberg, who offered to sell them Facebook for $75 million.
• By 2006 the site had passed Google and Yahoo as the most visited website in the United States, and by 2007 it counted over 300 million registered users.
• The Google contract worked as golden handcuffs: any redesign that reduced ad impressions risked violating it, so the cluttered, sluggish pages stayed.
• Facebook overtook the site globally by April 2008 and in the US by May 2009. In 2011 News Corporation sold it to Specific Media, which partnered with Justin Timberlake on a revival.
• In 2019 the company announced a server migration had permanently lost everything uploaded before 2015, including over 50 million songs.

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In late 1967 the New York Stock Exchange had 1,365 members, and exactly one of them was a woman. Muriel Siebert, known as Mickey, was born in Cleveland, Ohio in September 1928 and left Western Reserve University without a degree to care for her ill father. She moved to New York, learned the market from the ground up as an analyst of aviation and aerospace stocks, and founded Muriel Siebert and Company. Then she went after a seat that cost a near record $445,000, and nine men in a row refused to sponsor her.

This episode follows how she broke a perfect bureaucratic loop, then kept changing shape: defender of research-driven brokerage against discount rivals, New York's superintendent of banks during the turmoil of the late 1970s, Senate primary candidate, and head of a public company created through an unusual reverse merger. In her later years she argued for women and minorities in finance in the language Wall Street respects, competitive risk, and tied her firm's underwriting profits to charity.

• The exchange demanded a bank letter guaranteeing a $300,000 loan, a condition never asked of a man, while the banks refused to lend until the exchange admitted her. She was elected to membership on December 28, 1967.
• When the SEC made commissions negotiable in 1975, the change known as May Day, Siebert ran ads attacking discount rates as low ball to protect the research her firm was built on.
• Appointed by Governor Hugh Carey in 1977, she oversaw banks holding about $500 billion in assets, and not one New York bank failed during her tenure.
• After finishing second to Florence M. Sullivan in the 1982 Republican Senate primary, she took her firm public by merging into J. Michael and Sons, a liquidating furniture company.
• Her Siebert Entrepreneurial Philanthropic Plan, created in 1990, shared half of new underwriting profits with charities and gave over $5 million through 2006. In 2016 the exchange named Siebert Hall in her honor, the first room it ever named for an individual.

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A drop-proof phone case can make you more careless with your phone, and that small shift in behavior is the seed of one of the most debated ideas in economics. Moral hazard arises when someone takes on more risk because another party will bear the cost. This episode traces the term from 17th century insurance ledgers, where it meant outright fraud by a policyholder of bad character, to the 1960s, when economist Kenneth Arrow recast it as the rational, predictable result of shifting risk from one party to another.

From there the story scales up. Copays and deductibles turn out to be tools for keeping skin in the game, a response to the principal-agent problem and the hidden actions no insurer or employer can monitor. The 1998 rescue of Long-Term Capital Management, the so-called Greenspan put, and the private label mortgage machine of the 2000s show what happens when nobody in the chain holds the risk long enough to care. The episode also weighs the counterarguments: Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, executives lost fortunes, and flawed models may explain as much as bailout expectations.

• English insurers in the 19th century used the word moral literally, fearing the owner of a failing warehouse who buys fire coverage and then knocks over a lantern.
• Ex-ante moral hazard changes behavior before a loss, like smoking in bed with fire insurance, while ex-post moral hazard appears afterward, as when a fully covered patient demands the most expensive treatment.
• Long-Term Capital Management ran at 25 to 1 with contracts across Wall Street, and New York Fed head William J. McDonough organized its rescue over the fierce criticism of Paul Volcker.
• Agency securitizers such as Fannie Mae kept the default risk, but in private label deals brokers, lenders, and investment banks collected fees and passed the loans along.
• A 2017 Basel Committee report flagged fair value accounting under IFRS 9 and 13, which let banks value frozen assets with their own internal models, in effect grading their own homework.

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In May 1984 a CBS control room descended into panic as a man in a thrift store shirt drained Press Your Luck of more than $100,000 without breaking a rule. This episode tells the story of Michael Larson, born in 1949 in Lebanon, Ohio, an air conditioning repairman and ice cream truck driver who spent his days watching a wall of 12 televisions for ways to get rich. Recording the show on a VCR and studying it frame by frame, he found that the supposedly random game board ran on just five patterns, and that two squares always paid cash plus an extra spin.

Larson spent his last money on a flight to Los Angeles and talked his way onto the show with a hard luck story. Then he held the board for spin after spin while executives searched the rulebook for a reason to stop him. His win became television folklore, but the instincts that beat the game wrecked the rest of his life. The winnings vanished into a Ponzi scheme and a bizarre radio contest gamble, and he ended his days as a fugitive from federal investigators.

• Larson deliberately hit a Whammy on his first spin, using it to calibrate his timing on the studio's heavy plunger after months of practice with a VCR remote.
• He landed on squares four and eight for 29 consecutive spins and finished with $110,237 in cash and prizes.
• CBS reviewed the tape frame by frame, found no cheating, paid him, then reprogrammed the board with 32 patterns and capped winnings at $75,000.
• Chasing a radio contest tied to a dollar bill's serial number, he kept $50,000 in one dollar bills at his girlfriend's house, where burglars stole it during a Christmas party.
• In 1995 he launched a fraudulent marketing scheme that took $1.8 million from 14,000 investors, and he died of throat cancer in Florida in February 1999 at age 49.

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In 1987 an advertising executive named Bob Bernstein was handed a solid gold replica of a cardboard box. The reason says everything about the Happy Meal: its real value was never the food. This episode begins in Guatemala in the mid 1970s, where franchise operator Yolanda Fernández de Cofiño bundled a hamburger, small fries, and a small sundae into the Menu Ronald to spare parents the chaos of feeding children from an adult menu. When the idea reached Bernstein in 1977, he turned a practical fix into entertainment sold directly to the child.

The box got families in the door, and the toy brought them back. Early trinkets gave way to collectible sets tied to films and franchises, a formula that produced Teenie Beanie Baby frenzies along with recalls and parental outrage. By the 2010s lawmakers blamed the toy for fueling childhood obesity, and the company answered with loopholes, apple slices, and a much mocked mascot. Its smartest move came last: selling the same nostalgia back to the grown children it first hooked.

• Bernstein's idea came from watching his son study a cereal box at breakfast, which led him to declare that the package is the key.
• The first major film tie-in, in December 1979, was Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and it introduced the collect the whole set mechanic.
• A 1992 Batman Returns promotion drew such fierce complaints about the film's dark content that the toys were withdrawn.
• When San Francisco required meals with toys to meet nutrition standards, the company began charging 10 cents for the toy separately, while Chile banned toys in kids' meals outright in 2012.
• A 2004 adult meal with a salad and a pedometer flopped, but the 2022 Cactus Plant Flea Market collaboration sold out and its toys were resold at steep markups.