pplpod

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

In 1956, MIT engineer Amar Bose bought the audio system with the best published specifications and hated how it sounded. He concluded that frequency response and distortion figures ignored the room and the human ear, since most of what a concert audience hears is reflected sound. With backing from his MIT thesis advisor Y.W. Lee, he founded his company in Massachusetts in 1964. Its first product, the 1966 corner-mounted 2201 with 22 speakers, was discontinued the same year. His 1968 paper rejected numerical test data for judging sound, and that year's 901, with eight of nine drivers facing the wall, stayed in production until 2016.

Bose refused to publish traditional specifications, and his company grew litigious. In 1981 he sued Consumer Reports for libel over a review saying the sound tended to wander about the room. The case lasted 14 years and reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which found no proof of actual malice. His researchers built aviation noise cancellation in 1989, debunked cold fusion claims in 1991 by recreating the experiment, and spent more than 20 years and $100 million on an electromagnetic car suspension whose prototype could leap obstacles. In 2011 he gave most of the company's non-voting shares to MIT, and he died in 2013 at 83.

• Noise-canceling headphones for airline passengers followed by 2000, using destructive interference to cancel engine noise.
• The suspension work became the Bose Ride truck seat in 2010, built to spare long-haul drivers from road vibration.
• Over a trademark on ".2," Thiel Audio had to rename its CS2.2 speaker CS2 2, then released a 2.3 model.
• Bose also sued Harman International over speaker port shapes and Beats Electronics over noise-cancellation patents.
• MIT can never sell the donated shares and has no role in running the company, which keeps it privately held.

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

Wally Byam started out building heavy masonite trailers in his Los Angeles backyard in the late 1920s. In 1936 he introduced the aluminum Airstream Clipper, largely a rebadged Bowlus Road Chief, with one key change: he moved the door from the front to the side, smoothing the nose and cutting drag. It slept four, carried its own water and cost $1,200, about $30,000 today, in the depths of the Great Depression. Its fuel savings made the case, and of more than 400 U.S. trailer builders in 1936, Airstream was the only one to survive.

World War II aluminum shortages halted production, which resumed in 1948, and a plant opened in Jackson Center, Ohio, in 1952. During the 1970s fuel crisis, the budget Argosy line used galvanized steel end caps that had to be painted, hid its link to Airstream until 1973 and introduced the panoramic front window. Boxy SquareStreams in the 1980s were banned, along with painted Argosys, from Wally Byam Caravan Club rallies. After Apollo 11 in July 1969, NASA kept Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins aboard the USS Hornet in a modified Airstream, chosen because its riveted aluminum shell could be sealed airtight.

• In 1981, Airstream's commercial division built a Class A motorhome to serve as a funeral coach.
• The space shuttle Astrovan was a modified 1983 Airstream motorhome, and in 2019 Boeing and Airstream built a new Astrovan for Starliner crews.
• The U.S. Air Force loads Silver Bullet Modules, luxury Airstream trailers, into C-17 cargo planes to carry VIPs.
• Narrower 534 and 604 models for the UK and Ireland are still built in Ohio and often become takeaway food stands in Europe.
• The fiberglass Nest, from a 2016 acquisition, was withdrawn in September 2020, and a 2022 electric concept uses regenerative braking.

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

Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876, but businessman Theodore Vail built the empire, creating the long-distance subsidiary American Telephone and Telegraph in 1885 and buying up local operators. Facing antitrust action in 1913, AT&T accepted the Kingsbury Commitment, letting independents connect to its network in exchange for a regulated monopoly. By the 1930s, Ma Bell held over 80 percent of the U.S. phone market. A 1974 Justice Department suit led to the settlement that took effect in 1984: AT&T kept long distance and Bell Labs, and its local networks became seven Baby Bells.

The smallest, Southwestern Bell Corporation, used the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to rebuild. Under Edward Whitacre, SBC bought Pacific Telesis in 1997 and Ameritech in 1999, then paid $16 billion in 2005 for the struggling original AT&T and took its name and ticker. BellSouth followed a year later, reuniting four of the seven Baby Bells. The new AT&T then paid $48.5 billion for DirecTV in 2015 and over $108 billion for Time Warner in 2018, surviving a Justice Department suit, before about $200 billion in debt forced it to spin both off by 2021 under CEO John Stankey.

• WarnerMedia was spun off to merge with Discovery, and AT&T returned to 5G and fiber, including Lumen Technologies' mass market fiber business.
• A 2024 breach of AT&T's Snowflake workspace exposed call and text logs for nearly all of its cellular customers over six months.
• The China-linked Salt Typhoon campaign targeted the wiretap systems broadband providers keep for law enforcement.
• After the 2016 election, AT&T paid $600,000 to Michael Cohen through a shell company for insight on the Time Warner merger and other policy issues.
• Court records show AT&T gave One America News Network early financial backing and distribution on DirecTV.

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

The AIM-120 AMRAAM grew out of a lethal problem exposed in the ACEVAL-AIMVAL evaluations at Nellis Air Force Base from 1974 to 1978. F-14s and F-15s firing AIM-7 Sparrows had to keep their radars on the target, flying straight while F-5E aggressors with all-aspect Sidewinders closed in, producing a high rate of mutual kills. The 1,000-pound AIM-54 Phoenix could only fit the F-14. Under a memorandum of agreement, the U.S. developed the medium-range AMRAAM while European partners built a short-range missile that became the British ASRAAM. The AMRAAM flies its mid-course on inertial navigation and data link updates, then switches on its own small radar for the terminal phase.

The first official kill came in December 1992, when a U.S. Air Force F-16 downed an Iraqi MiG-25 with a missile marked defective 24 hours earlier. AMRAAMs destroyed six Serbian MiG-29s in Kosovo in 1999, and a Turkish F-16 hit a Syrian L-39 at 45 kilometers in 2020. Its overall probability of kill is about 0.59. In 1994, an AMRAAM and a Sidewinder fired by U.S. F-15s destroyed two U.S. Army Black Hawks over Iraq, killing everyone aboard. In September 2025, a Polish AMRAAM fired at a Russian drone lost its target and struck the roof of a house.

• The RAF's Tornado F3 skipped the mid-course data link, which made its AMRAAMs statistically worse than its older Skyflash missiles.
• Visual mode lets a pilot fire with no target data, and home-on-jam mode follows an enemy's jamming signal to its source.
• The AIM-120C's clipped fins let the F-22 carry six missiles in its internal bays.
• The ground-launched AMRAAM ER pairs the AMRAAM's guidance with an Evolved Sea Sparrow motor, adding 50 percent range and 70 percent altitude.
• China's PL-15 prompted the AIM-260 JATM, while the Pentagon keeps the AMRAAM as its capacity weapon.

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

Archer Daniels Midland began in 1902 when John W. Daniels started a linseed crushing business in Minneapolis, joined the next year by George A. Archer; the company incorporated in 1923. In 1934, its Chicago plant opened ADM's first continuous solvent extraction plant for soybeans, using hexane instead of presses to pull out oil around the clock. ADM moved to Decatur, Illinois, in 1969, and under CEO Dwayne Andreas from 1970, soybean exports grew from $1.5 billion to $7 billion. By 2024 it had $85.5 billion in revenue, more than 44,000 employees and the 35th spot on the Fortune 500.

In the 1993 lysine scandal, ADM executives met competitors in hotel rooms worldwide to divide the market by quota. FBI informant Mark Whitacre, who was embezzling millions from ADM while wearing a wire, recorded leaders calling competitors friends and customers the enemy. Executives went to prison, and ADM paid a record $100 million criminal fine in 1997 and a $400 million class action settlement. Later troubles include $54 million in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act fines in 2013 and a $40 million SEC penalty in January 2026 over inflated results in its nutrition unit, where bonuses were tied to performance.

• ADM was sued under the Sherman Act as early as 1920 over linseed oil price collusion.
• In 2001 it made the first U.S. commercial sale to Cuba since the embargo began, and it later bought Wild Flavors for $3 billion.
• Argentina accused ADM and other grain traders in 2011 of dodging a billion dollars in taxes through transfer mispricing.
• In early 2024 ADM's CFO was suspended and the FBI issued grand jury subpoenas over the nutrition unit's accounting.
• In late 2023 the EPA ordered ADM to halt injections after roughly 8,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide and other fluids leaked underground at its Decatur sequestration well.

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

In the late 1970s, James Dyson, who ran a company making a ball-wheeled wheelbarrow noticed his home vacuum losing suction because fine dust clogged the pores of its paper bag. A late-night visit to a sawmill showed him industrial centrifugal separators that spun dust out of the air with no filter at all. He built a cardboard-and-tape cyclone for his own vacuum, and it worked. His board dismissed it, reasoning that Hoover or Electrolux would already have invented it, and Dyson was ousted from the company. The industry ran on a razor-and-blades model, with disposable bags worth half a billion dollars a year in recurring revenue.

From 1979 to 1984, working in a coach house shed on loans and a private investor's money, Dyson built 5,127 prototypes, about three a day. A North American licensing deal collapsed, a similar machine appeared from the same company, and a costly patent suit ended in a settlement. In 1985 the Japanese firm Apex sold his design as the bright pink G-Force for the equivalent of $2,000. He used that revenue to start Dyson in 1991, defied focus groups with a transparent dust bin, and within a year and a half had the best-selling vacuum in the United Kingdom.

• He cut ties with a Welsh plastics manufacturer within two months over quality and opened his own factory in the Cotswolds.
• A secret electric car project, code-named N526, cost $3 billion and employed over 500 people before he canceled it in 2019 as commercially unviable.
• He fought the European Union for years over energy tests run with empty vacuum bags and won a change in the standards.
• In 2019 Dyson moved its global headquarters from the UK to Singapore, drawing political backlash in Britain.
• The Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology pays undergraduates a salary to work on real products three days a week, and one recent cohort was 40 percent female.

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

In 1902, five businessmen in Two Harbors, Minnesota, set out to mine corundum for grinding wheels and dug up anorthosite instead, a rock too soft to be useful. The Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company moved to Duluth, switched to sandpaper and did not pay a dividend until 1916. Under executive William L. McKnight, 3M built a culture that tolerated failure, and accidents became products: a fluorochemical spill on an assistant's tennis shoe in 1952 led chemists Patsy Sherman and Samuel Smith to Scotchgard, and a failed 1977 sticky bookmark called Press 'n Peel became the Post-it Note after free samples handed out in Boise, Idaho, in 1978 won over 95 percent of users.

3M went on to make Nextel simulated blood for the 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, the first asthma inhaler, the first CFC-free inhaler and the N95 respirator, approved in 1972. During COVID-19, the Defense Production Act and a dispute over exports to Canada led to a C$70 million mask plant in Brockville, Ontario. The legal bills have been enormous: $6 billion in 2023 to settle claims from over 140,000 service members over Combat Arms Earplugs Version 2, and $10.3 billion that year to settle PFAS claims from U.S. public water systems, after an $850 million Minnesota settlement in 2018.

• In 1996, 3M spun off its floppy disk and film business as Imation, shedding 20 percent of sales but only 5 percent of profits.
• The earplugs came with the 2008 purchase of Aearo Technologies; internal emails showed they cost about 85 cents to make and were billed at $7.63 a pair.
• A 2016 whistleblower complaint by competitor Moldex-Metric led to a $9.1 million settlement with the U.S. government in 2018, without admitting liability.
• Contamination from a 3M plant in Belgium has cost the Flemish government over 63 million euros, and Australia sued in May 2026 for over A$2 billion.
• In 2024, 3M spun off its healthcare business as Solventum and named aerospace and defense veteran William M. Brown as CEO.

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

In January 2003, a worm called SQL Slammer, just 376 bytes long, compromised 75,000 database servers in exactly 10 minutes. It exploited a buffer overflow in Microsoft's SQL Server and its desktop engine, MSDE, arriving on UDP port 1434, the SQL Server Resolution Service. Slammer never wrote itself to disk. It lived only in RAM, looping endlessly: pick a random IP address, fire off a copy of itself in a single UDP packet, repeat. Some enterprise servers sent 30,000 infected packets per second, and because UDP needs no handshake, routers had no session to track or throttle.

The real damage came from the network itself. Core routers hit 100 percent CPU and crashed, and BGP updates announcing each crash, then each reboot, flooded the internet's routing tables until administrative traffic became the jam. Bank of America's ATM network went down, Continental Airlines canceled flights, and Seattle's 911 dispatch center fell back to pen and paper. The flaw was no secret: researcher David Litchfield had found it and demonstrated it at the Black Hat Briefings, and Microsoft had released patch MS02-039 on July 24, 2002, six months before the attack. Even Microsoft's own internal networks were infected.

• Rebooting an infected server wiped the worm from memory, but unpatched machines were reinfected within milliseconds of reconnecting.
• The whole payload fit inside one standard packet of about 1,500 bytes, so it never had to split and reassemble.
• Most home PCs were immune because they did not run Microsoft SQL Server, yet the internet still ground to a halt.
• MSDE was often installed silently by third-party software, so many administrators did not know they had a vulnerable server to patch.
• Researchers on the Bugtraq mailing list urged administrators to block UDP port 1434, but the 10-minute window had already closed.

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

The Schwerer Gustav, or Heavy Gustav, was an 80-centimeter German railway gun, the largest caliber rifled weapon ever used in combat and the heaviest mobile artillery piece ever built, at 1,350 tons. It was conceived in the mid-1930s to break the French Maginot Line, whose forts were protected by up to seven meters of reinforced concrete and a meter of steel. Krupp engineer Erich Müller calculated that the job required a 30-meter barrel firing a seven-ton shell. Adolf Hitler visited Krupp in Essen in 1936, the plans were approved in 1937, Krupp delivered the first gun free, and the second, Dora, cost seven million Reichsmarks. Casting the barrel proved so hard that acceptance trials at Rügenwalde slipped to early 1941, long after Germany bypassed the Maginot Line and France surrendered.

The gun rode twin parallel tracks on 40 axles and 80 wheels, and since it could only elevate to 48 degrees, crews aimed it by building curved track. A 25-car train about 1.5 kilometers long carried the parts, and 4,000 men prepared each site, with 250 needing 54 hours to assemble it under the cover of two anti-aircraft battalions. In 1942 it went to the siege of Sevastopol, where a 16-kilometer rail spur was built, and opened fire in June. After 47 combat rounds and about 250 test shots its rifling was worn out and the barrel went back to Essen. Moved near Leningrad, it sat idle when that offensive was canceled. On April 14, 1945, German forces blew it up near Auerbach, and Dora was destroyed near Grafenwöhr on April 19.

• The gun took 30 to 45 minutes per round and could fire about 14 shots a day.
• Five shells knocked Fort Siberia out of action at Sevastopol.
• On June 6, 1942, nine armor-piercing shells destroyed the White Cliff ammunition magazine 30 meters below Severnaya Bay, and the blast sank a boat moored above.
• Its 4.8-ton high explosive shell carried 700 kilograms of explosive and left craters 12 meters wide and 12 meters deep.
• A planned successor, the Langer Gustav, meant to hit London with rocket-assisted shells from 190 kilometers, was damaged by RAF raids before completion.

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

Global Crossing was founded in March 1997 by Gary Winnick, a former bond manager at Drexel Burnham Lambert, with colleagues from the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. It started with a $35 million investment, was legally based in Bermuda while operating from New Jersey, and set out to be a Tier 1 carrier owning undersea and land fiber, becoming the first global provider to deploy IPv6 natively. In 1999 it bought Global Marine Systems and its cable-laying fleet for $885 million, Frontier for $9.9 billion and Racal Telecom for $1.65 billion, and formed the $1.3 billion Asia Global Crossing venture with SoftBank and Microsoft. It reached a $47 billion valuation without a single profitable year. AT&T veteran Robert Annunziata resigned after 13 months with $160 million, and the company lost $1.4 billion in 2000.

Successor Leo Hindery sold the GlobalCenter web hosting unit to Exodus Communications for $6.5 billion in stock that was worth $1.95 billion when the deal closed in 2001. Under Tom Casey, Global Crossing discussed a $650 million capacity swap with Enron, the kind of deal in which indefeasible rights of use could be booked as immediate revenue while the matching cost was spread over decades. In the fourth quarter of 2001 it lost $3.4 billion on $793 million in revenue, and it filed for bankruptcy in January 2002 while paying $600 million a year in interest. Employees lost jobs and pensions, while executives had sold $1.32 billion in stock beforehand, including $420 million by Winnick.

• In 2000 Global Crossing gave $250,000 each to the Republican and Democratic national conventions.
• Lobbyist Anne Bingaman was paid $2.5 million for six months of work pressing the FCC to block a rival U.S.-Japan cable.
• When the Russian submarine Kursk sank in August 2000, the company held a British Defence Ministry contract to operate the LR5 rescue submersible.
• Winnick and other former executives paid $324 million in 2004 to settle securities fraud lawsuits.
• Global Crossing emerged from bankruptcy in 2003 and was bought by Level 3 Communications for $3 billion in 2011.