pplpod

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

Rolls-Royce Holdings traces back to 1904, when engineer Henry Royce, who made dynamos and electric cranes, built a car that Charles Rolls wanted to sell; the pair incorporated in 1906. In 1971 runaway development costs on the RB211 jet engine pushed the company into voluntary liquidation, and Edward Heath's government nationalized it. The car division was split off in 1973, and the aerospace business stayed under state control until Margaret Thatcher's government privatized it in 1987. In 1994 it bought the American Allison Engine Company for $525 million, and the U.S. Department of Defense required a proxy board over classified F-35 work. Between 2003 and 2015 it sold engines under TotalCare, a "power by the hour" model that charged airlines a flat fee based on hours flown.

Then came the dark years. The IFRS 15 accounting standard barred booking future service revenue upfront, and restated 2015 profits would have been £900 million lower. In 2016 investigators uncovered a bribery network that used middlemen in Brazil, India, China, Angola and Indonesia from 1989 to 2013, and in 2017 the company posted a record £4.6 billion pre-tax loss that included a £671 million settlement with the Serious Fraud Office. Trent 1000 turbine blades on the Boeing 787 cracked prematurely, and the 2020 pandemic grounded the fleets that paid by the hour, leading to about 9,000 job cuts. Under CEO Tufan Erginbilgiç from January 2023, shares rose from £1 to £11 by July 2025 and the company reached a £90 billion valuation, fifth largest on the FTSE 100.

• Under the old rules, profit from a 20-year service contract offset the loss on building the engine itself; IFRS 15 forced the two apart.
• Faulty Trent 1000 engines needed inspection every 300 hours instead of thousands of flight hours between major checks.
• To survive 2020, Rolls-Royce sold its commercial marine unit to Kongsberg, its energy gas turbines to Siemens and ITP Aero to Bain Capital.
• Testbed 80, a £90 million facility opened in Derby in 2021 with 30-centimeter lead walls, X-rays engines running at 140,000 pounds of thrust.
• The company plans up to 16 small modular reactors in the UK, supplies PWR-3 reactors for SSN-AUKUS submarines, and took $3.52 million from the UK Space Agency in 2023 to design a lunar reactor.

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

Marvel began in 1939 as Timely Publications, an offshoot of pulp magazine publisher Martin Goodman. Its first comic, cover dated October 1939, introduced an android Human Torch and Namor the Sub-Mariner and sold nearly 900,000 copies, and Captain America followed in 1941. Goodman hired a 16-year-old office assistant who became Stan Lee. After the war, as Atlas Comics, the company dropped superheroes and chased trends from westerns and monsters to romance and Bible stories through dozens of shell companies. When DC's Justice League revived the genre, Goodman ordered a team book, and the 1961 Fantastic Four introduced bickering, flawed heroes, followed by Spider-Man and the Hulk. Cold War stories from 1962 to 1965 helped draw college readers.

In 1971 the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare asked for an anti-drug story. The Comics Code Authority refused its seal because the story showed narcotics, Marvel published it anyway, and the code was revised that year. In 1989 Ronald Perelman bought the company in a junk bond leveraged buyout, and Marvel flooded the direct market with variant and foil covers to service the debt. Seven top artists left to found Image Comics in 1992, the speculator bubble burst, and Marvel filed for Chapter 11 in December 1996. A merger with Toy Biz, the Ultimate Marvel line, leaving the Comics Code by 2001 and film licensing led to Disney's purchase for about $4 billion in 2009. In 2026 the comics division is moving from Manhattan to Burbank under editor-in-chief Stephen Wacker.

• Goodman's shell companies meant a failed trend or distributor hit only one entity.
• The 1950s churn trained staff to produce large volumes quickly on thin margins.
• Company-wide crossover events such as Secret Wars drove sales across the line in the 1980s.
• Film rights sold to outside studios kept Spider-Man and the X-Men apart on screen for years.
• In March 2023 the publishing arm moved under Disney Publishing Worldwide.

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

Lockheed Martin formed in 1995 from a $10 billion merger of the Lockheed Corporation, maker of the U-2 and SR-71, and Martin Marietta, builder of Titan rockets and manager of Sandia National Laboratories. The post-Cold War Pentagon encouraged defense consolidation and covered merger costs, including an $8.2 million bonus for Martin Marietta CEO Norman Augustine. By 2024, 73 percent of revenue came from the US federal government and 65 percent from the Department of Defense, across aeronautics, missiles and fire control, rotary and mission systems, and space, with work for agencies from the CIA and FBI to the IRS, Census Bureau and Postal Service. In the 1990s the company supplied texture-mapping graphics for Sega's Model 2 and Model 3 arcade boards, drawing on its flight simulator work.

In 1999 NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter was lost when Lockheed Martin software calculated thruster data in pound-seconds while NASA's navigation software expected newton-seconds. The F-35, won in 2001, made up 26 percent of 2024 revenue, while a 2020 Pentagon review counted more than 800 software defects. Lockheed bought Sikorsky for $7.1 billion in 2015 and in May 2026 announced an $8 to $9 billion Alabama plant for THAAD and PAC-3 interceptors. The Project on Government Oversight ranks it first for contractor misconduct, with over $676 million paid in 88 settlements since 1995. In the second quarter of 2025 it lost $1.6 billion on a classified program that its CEO described as magical and said the public would not learn about for years.

• The company bought the first commercial quantum computer from D-Wave in 2011 and builds the Orion capsule for the Artemis program.
• Engineering runs on a four-tier structure, a concurrent double helix method and Six Sigma discipline across about 123,000 employees.
• A 2015 settlement of $4.7 million resolved charges that Sandia operating funds paid a former congressman to lobby for the lab contract.
• China sanctioned the company in 2020 and 2023 over arms sales to Taiwan.
• Arms makers including Lockheed Martin reported higher sales and profits during the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2022 and 2023.

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

HMS Queen Elizabeth, pennant number R08, is the largest warship ever built for the Royal Navy, christened on July 4, 2014 by Queen Elizabeth II with a bottle of Islay single malt from Bowmore rather than champagne. Defence Secretary Des Browne ordered her and sister ship Prince of Wales in July 2007 for about £4.085 billion. After the 2008 financial crisis the build was slowed, and costs rose to £6.2 billion by 2013. The hull was built in nine blocks at six yards, including Glasgow, Appledore, Rosyth, Hebburn, Portsmouth and Birkenhead, and in 2011 an 8,000-ton lower block was towed 600 miles around northern Scotland to Rosyth. Spreading the work kept shipyards alive during the recession. Her name and the motto Semper Eadem come from the World War I super-dreadnought HMS Queen Elizabeth.

Leaving the Firth of Forth for 2017 sea trials meant surveying a riverbed charted 60 years earlier and clearing three bridges. She reached 32 knots against a 25-knot design speed, and a propeller shaft seal leak appeared that December. In autumn 2018 the Westlant 18 deployment brought the first F-35B ski-jump launch at sea, a backward landing and the first shipborne rolling vertical landing, and she anchored near the Statue of Liberty, a port closed to nuclear-powered US carriers. Carrier Strike Group 21 in 2021 brought her first combat strikes against ISIS, a COVID-19 outbreak among a vaccinated crew and an F-35B crash in the Mediterranean. A Merlin Mk4 ditched in the English Channel in September 2024, killing one crew member, and after a refit at Rosyth from July 2025 she returned to sea in April 2026.

• The ship is 284 meters long with a range of 10,000 nautical miles.
• Twin islands split navigation and flight control, and either can take over the other's role.
• She is three times larger than the Invincible class but needs only 679 crew to operate.
• The automated weapon handling system moves munitions with 50 people instead of about 160, and can run with 12.
• A ski jump with no moving parts replaced catapults to save cost and crew, limiting the deck to jets like the F-35B.

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

BNSF Railway runs about 33,400 miles of track across 28 states and three Canadian provinces with 36,000 employees and more than 8,000 locomotives. Its roots reach back to the 12-mile Aurora Branch in Illinois in 1849, but the modern company formed after Burlington Northern and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe announced their merger in 1994 and outlasted a Union Pacific bidding war in early 1995. When Union Pacific then bought Southern Pacific, regulators gave BNSF about 3,500 miles of trackage rights over UP lines. A planned 1999 merger with Canadian National collapsed after the Surface Transportation Board imposed a 15-month moratorium on major mergers. In 2010 Berkshire Hathaway, already holding about 22 percent, bought the rest in a deal valuing BNSF at $44 billion, Berkshire's largest acquisition.

BNSF earned over $25 billion in revenue and $5.5 billion in net income in 2022. It hauls Powder River Basin coal in unit trains, serves more than 1,500 grain elevators, and runs 100 to 150 trains a day on the Southern Transcon between Southern California and Chicago, double-tracked and triple-tracked at Cajon Pass. It absorbed the Montana Rail Link between 2022 and 2024 and turned aside a 2025 push from Ancora Holdings for a CSX merger in favor of joint intermodal service. A 2023 Federal Railroad Administration report found a gap between leadership's safety claims and workers' experience, and in 2024 BNSF furloughed 360 mechanical workers. In June 2024 a federal judge ordered it to pay $400 million to the Swinomish tribe for running far more traffic across the reservation than a 1991 easement allowed.

• BNSF carries Boeing 737 fuselages by rail from Wichita, Kansas to Renton, Washington.
• A commemorative SD70MAC, No. 9647, painted in merged Santa Fe and BN colors was nicknamed the Vomit Bonnet.
• New terminals include the $1.5 billion Barstow International Gateway and the 4,300-acre Surprise Logistics Center in Arizona.
• In 2014 OSHA ordered BNSF to pay over $526,000 for firing workers at its Havre, Montana terminal who reported injuries.
• A 2023 lawsuit by WildEarth Guardians and Western Watersheds Project ties BNSF trains to 63 grizzly bear deaths in Montana since 2008.

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

The Waldorf Astoria began as two rival hotels on Fifth Avenue, where the Empire State Building now stands. In the 1890s William Waldorf Astor, feuding with his aunt, built the 13-story Waldorf beside her mansion, and her son John Jacob Astor IV answered with the taller Astoria next door. The hotels were joined by Peacock Alley, the 300-foot corridor that gave the name its hyphen; the hyphen was dropped in 2009. After the site was sold for the Empire State Building, a new 47-story Art Deco hotel rose on Park Avenue over New York Central tracks, using purchased air rights, 27,100 tons of steel, 11 million bricks and columns set on lead and asbestos pads to damp train vibration. It opened on October 1, 1931, with a radio address by President Herbert Hoover, but drew only 500 guests for more than 2,200 rooms.

Hotel president Lucius Boomer chose to sell prestige and privacy rather than cut back. An internal carriageway and the private Track 61 platform let leaders such as Franklin D. Roosevelt arrive unseen. The hotel hosted the 1947 meeting that produced the Waldorf Statement and the Hollywood blacklist, the 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace with Dmitri Shostakovich as protesters ringed the block, and the 1954 basement purchase of four Dead Sea Scrolls by Yigael Yadin. IBM introduced its first personal computer there in 1981. Hilton sold the hotel to Anbang Insurance Group in 2014 for $1.95 billion, then a record hotel sale, and it closed in 2017 for conversion to condominiums with about 375 hotel rooms, while 62,000 square feet of interiors gained landmark protection.

• Society columns told readers to meet at the hyphen, which later became a double hyphen resembling an equal sign.
• Guy Lombardo's New Year's Eve broadcasts from the ballroom helped make Auld Lang Syne the midnight song.
• The Who were banned for life in 1968 after a destructive party, then forgiven in 1990 when their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction was held there.
• Herbert Hoover lived in the Waldorf Towers for decades, and Cole Porter kept two pianos in his apartment.
• Frank Sinatra, Glenn Miller and Victor Borge entertained in rooms such as the Wedgwood Room and the Starlight Roof.

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

USS Nimitz, CVN-68, was commissioned in 1975 by President Gerald Ford and is the only carrier of its class named by surname alone. It is now the oldest serving aircraft carrier in the world. Its first crises came fast: in 1979 it deployed to the Indian Ocean during the Iran hostage crisis, and in 1980 it served as the staging platform for the failed rescue attempt that ended with a helicopter crash in the Iranian desert. In May 1981 a Marine EA-6B Prowler, low on fuel after a night bolter, crashed into parked aircraft on the flight deck, killing 14, injuring 45 and destroying or damaging nearly 20 aircraft. Several deck crew who died tested positive for marijuana traces that toxicologists said could not prove impairment, and the case led President Ronald Reagan to set the military's zero-tolerance drug testing policy.

In August 1981 Nimitz aircraft shot down two Libyan jets in the Gulf of Sidra incident. In a 1997 demonstration its air wing flew 771 strike sorties in four days and dropped more than 1,300 bombs. In 2004 its F/A-18F fighters, sent after the cruiser USS Princeton tracked unidentified objects, recorded the Tic Tac video the Pentagon declassified in 2017. A Russian Tu-95 bomber passed over the deck at 2,000 feet in 2008, the ship recovered the first carrier landing of an F-35C in 2014, and its air wing struck ISIS at Tal Afar in 2017. A 2020 COVID-19 outbreak forced a 27-day quarantine. Planned retirement slipped to March 2027 because of Ford-class delays and an 11-carrier mandate, sending the ship around Cape Horn in 2026 and to New York for the Fourth of July naval review.

• The ship displaces about 100,000 tons, roughly the weight of 350 loaded Boeing 747s.
• Two A4W reactors push it past 31.5 knots and allow 20 to 25 years between refuelings.
• Studies after the 1997 exercise found the equipment could have sustained that pace another 12 to 24 hours.
• In late 2025 in the South China Sea, an MH-60R and an F/A-18F crashed 30 minutes apart, and both crews were rescued.
• The carrier logged its 350,000th arrested landing in 2023.

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

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters formed in 1903 when the American Federation of Labor merged two rival groups of wagon drivers, who controlled the final mile between rail depots and businesses. First president Cornelius Shea fell after the failed 1905 Chicago strike, when 25,000 Teamsters backed locked-out tailors at Montgomery Ward and the press reported Shea living in a brothel and throwing parties on union funds. Daniel J. Tobin led from 1907 to 1952, curbing wildcat strikes and pushing locals into joint councils and master agreements. Membership rose from 82,000 in 1932 to 530,000 in 1941, driven partly by organizers Tobin disliked, including the Trotskyists behind the 1934 Minneapolis strike, who built the Central Conference of Teamsters, and Dave Beck's Western Conference.

Beck took the presidency in 1952, and Jimmy Hoffa brought organized crime onto the national stage, working with mobster Johnny Dio in 1956 to charter paper locals with no members to win convention votes. The McClellan Committee, with Robert F. Kennedy as chief counsel, found Beck had taken a $300,000 interest-free loan from union funds; Beck took the Fifth 117 times, the AFL-CIO expelled the union in 1957, and the hearings led to the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959. Hoffa's 1964 National Master Freight Agreement gave the union enormous power, while the Central States Pension Fund financed Las Vegas casinos. Hoffa was convicted of witness tampering, imprisoned in 1967, pardoned by Nixon and vanished in 1975. Trucking deregulation in 1979 cost 30 percent of freight Teamsters their jobs.

• Franklin D. Roosevelt gave his 1944 Fala speech at the Teamsters convention.
• Pension fund money helped build Caesars Palace, the Stardust and the Dunes.
• A 1989 RICO consent decree brought direct elections, and reformer Ron Carey won in 1991 with backing from Teamsters for a Democratic Union.
• A $36 billion federal grant in 2022 rescued the Central States Pension Fund for about 350,000 workers and retirees.
• In 2024 Sean O'Brien spoke at the Republican National Convention, and the union endorsed no presidential candidate for the first time since 1996.

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

When the Plaza Hotel opened on October 1, 1907, about 90 percent of its occupants lived there full time. It replaced an earlier Plaza built between 1883 and 1890 and plagued by financial troubles and shoddy work. In 1902 a syndicate led by builder Harry S. Black and financier Bernhard Beinecke paid $3 million in cash for the site at Fifth Avenue and Central Park South, then the largest all-cash deal in Manhattan real estate. Architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh designed an 18-story French Renaissance chateau that took 27 months and $12.5 million to build, with a sub-basement plant making 15 tons of ice a day, a coal plant and a switchboard of Tennessee marble. Short-term guests paid $2.50 a night and shared the cost of 500 bathrooms and a round-the-clock staff with the wealthy residents, who had a private entrance on 58th Street.

The 1929 crash broke the founders. Black died by suicide in 1930, Beinecke died two years later, and by 1932 half the residential suites were empty; the Grill Room became storage and the Rose Room an automobile showroom. Wealthy widows with inherited trust money stayed on and kept the hotel solvent, and that world of long-term residents later inspired Kay Thompson's Eloise books. Conrad Hilton bought the Plaza in 1943, and in 1988 Donald Trump bought it for $407 million in a leveraged buyout. After a prepackaged bankruptcy he surrendered 49 percent to lenders, and in 1995 he sold it at a loss to a group including Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Elad Properties bought it in 2005 and cut it to 282 hotel rooms and 181 private condominiums.

• Diamond Jim Brady and Mark Twain were early regulars, and the hotel opened during the Panic of 1907.
• Frank Lloyd Wright kept a second-floor suite for five years in the 1950s while designing the Guggenheim Museum.
• F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived and wrote there, and the Beatles stayed during their first US trip in 1964.
• Ivana Trump led a gilded renovation, and the basement Trader Vic's restaurant was shut down.
• Only about a third of today's condo owners live there, with the rest using their units as pied-à-terres.

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

The Panzer IV began in 1934 under the cover name Begleitwagen, or escort vehicle, because the Treaty of Versailles banned German tanks. In Heinz Guderian's plan it was a support tank, firing a short low-velocity 75mm gun at infantry, anti-tank guns and bunkers while the Panzer III fought enemy armor. Krupp rejected a proposed torsion bar suspension in favor of leaf springs on eight road wheels per side, and because the driveshaft ran down the middle of the crew compartment, the turret sat about two and a half inches left of center and the engine six inches right. When the T-34 and KV-1 appeared in 1941, the Panzer III's turret ring proved too small for a long 75mm gun, and the Panzer IV's larger ring made it the main German combat tank, with the Ausf. F2 and Ausf. G leading the 1942 summer offensive.

Upgrades piled on: 80mm front armor, Zimmerit paste against magnetic mines and Schürzen skirts, pushing the Ausf. H from about 18 to 25 tons on the original leaf springs. The tank pitched forward, swayed on straight roads and broke transmissions. The final Ausf. J lost its powered turret traverse to make room for more fuel, swapped steel skirts for wire mesh, cut return rollers from four to three and dropped Zimmerit. More than 8,500 were built, about 30 percent of German tank strength. After the war, Syria bought refurbished Panzer IVs from France and Czechoslovakia, mounted Soviet DShK machine guns on them and used them on the Golan Heights in the 1960s, and in 2023 Russian forces found a wrecked Panzer IV near Kreminna.

• It was the only German tank in continuous production throughout World War II.
• Hand-cranking the Ausf. J turret 120 degrees on flat ground took nearly 30 seconds.
• Schürzen skirts were built to detonate bazooka and PIAT warheads early but tore off in the Normandy bocage.
• Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Finland operated Panzer IVs during the war.
• Syrian Panzer IVs faced Israeli Super Shermans and Centurions in the 1967 Six-Day War and were still under fire in 1973.