pplpod

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

Sun Microsystems took its name from the Stanford University Network. Graduate student Andy Bechtolsheim built the first workstation from spare parts and a Motorola 68000, with a memory management unit that let Unix run virtual memory on a desktop. With Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla and Berkeley Unix pioneer Bill Joy, he launched Sun in February 1982, and it was profitable by July. Sun went public in 1986 as SUNW, led the workstation market by 1989, and adopted John Gage's motto "the network is the computer." It moved to its own SPARC RISC processors and built Solaris and the Network File System, and in the mid-1990s James Gosling's Java promised "write once, run anywhere."

Sun gave away software like Java to grow the network and sold expensive SPARC servers to carry the traffic, and during the dot-com boom its stock hit $250. When the bubble burst, bankrupt startups dumped barely used Sun servers, and the stock fell below $10 by late 2002. In 2005 the Sun Grid rented computing at $1 per CPU hour, but it required applications rewritten for Sun's architecture, while Amazon Web Services ran on commodity hardware. Sun bought StorageTek, VirtualBox developer Innotek and MySQL, yet losses mounted. Oracle agreed in 2009 to buy Sun for $7.4 billion, about $5.6 billion net, and the deal closed in 2010.

• Mark Zuckerberg left Sun's faded logo on the back of Meta's Menlo Park sign as a warning to employees.
• Developers joked that Java's motto was really "write once, debug everywhere."
• Sun was described as the world's largest corporate contributor to open source software.
• The UltraSPARC T1, code-named Niagara, ran 32 threads on eight cores.
• After the 2008 crisis the stock lost 80% of its remaining value and Sun cut 18% of its workforce.

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

Silvergate began in 1988 as a Southern California savings and loan and became a bank in 1996, operating three branches with car loans and commercial real estate lending. In 2013 CEO Alan Lane personally invested in Bitcoin, and in 2016 the bank began serving crypto firms that larger banks refused to touch. It built the Silvergate Exchange Network, a 24/7 internal ledger that let exchanges and institutional investors move dollars instantly while the Federal Reserve's systems closed for weekends. Silvergate listed in November 2019 at $13 a share and peaked at $219 in November 2021, and by the third quarter of 2022 held $12 billion in deposits from 1,677 SEN customers.

In May 2021 Silvergate partnered with Meta's Diem project to issue its stablecoin, but the Treasury withheld approval the night before a planned June 29, 2021 launch. Silvergate bought Diem's assets for roughly $182 to $200 million and later wrote off $196 million. It also lent $205 million to MicroStrategy for Bitcoin purchases. After FTX collapsed, deposits fell to $3.8 billion by December 2022, and on March 8, 2023 Silvergate announced a voluntary wind-down, repaying all deposits by November 2023. In July 2024 the SEC, Federal Reserve and California regulators imposed about $113 million in penalties, and the holding company filed for Chapter 11 in September 2024.

• Silvergate had $1.9 billion in assets and 250 crypto clients by 2017.
• Silvergate also put $200 million into Aptos, a startup founded by former Diem employees.
• Senators Elizabeth Warren, Roger Marshall and John Kennedy demanded answers on Silvergate's ties to FTX.
• The SEC said the bank failed to detect nearly $9 billion in suspicious transfers among FTX and related entities.
• An independent examiner was appointed in April 2025 after an internal probe run by the company's own law firm was deemed tainted.

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

Walter P. Chrysler launched Plymouth at Madison Square Garden in 1928 to challenge Ford and Chevrolet. The name, pitched by executive Joe Frazer, came from a binder twine brand trusted by farmers, although the Mayflower badge suggested the Pilgrims. The Model Q cost slightly more than rivals but had hydraulic brakes while Ford and Chevy still used mechanical ones, and the 1931 Floating Power rubber engine mounts smoothed out a four cylinder. During the Depression, Plymouth became the third best selling car in America by 1931 and kept Chrysler afloat. In 1954 Chrysler fitted an experimental gas turbine into a Plymouth Belvedere.

Virgil Exner's 1957 Forward Look styling, sold as "Suddenly it's 1960," pushed production past 726,000, but poor build quality and rust hurt the brand. The 1964 Barracuda beat the Mustang to market by a couple of weeks, and the 1968 Road Runner paired a bare interior with options like the 426 Hemi. Fuel crises, emissions rules and insurers ended that era, and the Barracuda died April 1, 1974. The K-car Reliant helped pull Chrysler back in the 1980s, and the 1984 Voyager became the original mass-produced minivan. By the 1990s Plymouths were rebadged Dodges and Mitsubishis, the PT Cruiser went to Chrysler after the Daimler merger, and the last Plymouth, a silver Neon, was built in June 2001.

• Plymouth paid Warner Bros. to use the Road Runner name and developed a "beep beep" horn.
• The high performance lineup was marketed as the Rapid Transit System, with Richard Petty winning NASCAR races.
• The Reliant's flat floor let a small front-drive car seat six.
• The Voyager was among the first mass-produced vehicles with built-in cup holders.
• Voyager ads featured illusionist Doug Henning, Tina Turner and Céline Dion.

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

Erling Persson opened Hennes, Swedish for "hers," in Västerås in 1947, selling only women's clothing for over 20 years. In 1968 he bought the Stockholm hunting apparel retailer Mauritz Widforss, added menswear and renamed the company Hennes & Mauritz. H&M reached London in 1976, sold online in 1998 and opened on Fifth Avenue in 2000, and it now runs over 4,000 stores as the world's second largest clothing retailer behind Inditex. It produces about three billion garments a year and once held $4 billion in surplus inventory. A November 2004 collaboration with Karl Lagerfeld sold out in about an hour in major cities and began annual designer drops with Stella McCartney, Viktor & Rolf, Versace and Madonna.

The episode then turns to supply chain costs. The April 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh killed over 1,100 people, and in 2011 nearly 300 workers fainted in a week at a Cambodian supplier where the minimum wage was $66 a month. A 2013 pledge to pay a living wage by 2018 fell short, according to later worker interviews. A 2020 statement on Xinjiang cotton triggered a Chinese boycott that cut sales there by up to 40%, and a 2018 "Coolest Monkey in the Jungle" hoodie led to protests and store closures in South Africa. Its sustainability pledges drew a formal greenwashing warning from Norway's consumer authority.

• Wes Anderson directed H&M's 2016 holiday film starring Adrien Brody.
• Sister brands include COS, Arket, Monki and & Other Stories.
• Chinese app stores, e-commerce sites and even ride-hailing apps blocked H&M in 2021; sales resumed in August 2022.
• A 2024 Australian school uniform ad was pulled after criticism that it sexualized children.
• H&M pledged to drop mulesed wool and virgin down and to use 100% recycled or sustainably sourced materials by 2030.

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

General Motors unveiled the Pontiac Aztek concept in 1999 to win Generation X buyers, with designer Tom Peters, later of the C7 Corvette, told to make it extreme. The 2001 production model had to sit on GM's U-body minivan platform shared with the Pontiac Montana, whose tall cowl forced a steep hood and awkward proportions. Built at Ramos Arizpe in Mexico, it was mocked as a gargoyle on launch in summer 2000. Inside it offered 94 cubic feet of cargo space, room for a 4 by 8 foot plywood sheet, a split tailgate with molded seats and cup holders, a removable cooler console, a 400-pound rolling cargo tray and a camping package with a tent, air mattress and compressor.

J.D. Power named it the most appealing entry SUV of 2001, and its Versatrak all-wheel drive used G-rotor pumps and clutch packs rather than viscous couplings. GM needed 30,000 sales a year to break even but peaked at about 27,800 in 2002 and fell to just over 5,000 by 2005, because the young buyers it targeted could not afford a $27,000 to $30,000 vehicle. GM cut prices, painted the cladding, and added a Rally Edition and DVD screens before ending production in December 2004. In 2008 Breaking Bad gave Walter White a drab green Aztek, and by 2015 Edmunds reported millennial demand it called the Breaking Bad Effect.

• GM had projected sales of up to 75,000 units a year.
• An optional head-up display projected speed and radio data onto the windshield.
• Rear stereo controls in the cargo area ran a 10-speaker Pioneer system.
• Steve McConnell's Code Complete 2 uses the Aztek as a case study in design by committee.
• GM replaced it with the Pontiac Torrent on the more conventional Theta platform.

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

John Stith Pemberton, a Confederate colonel with a medical degree, took a saber wound to the chest at the Battle of Columbus in April 1865 and came home addicted to morphine. Working from his Eagle Drug and Chemical House in Columbus, Georgia, he set out to formulate a substitute. In 1885 he registered Pemberton's French Wine Coca, modeled on the French coca wine Vin Mariani but with the caffeine-rich kola nut added. When Atlanta and Fulton County passed prohibition in 1886, he removed the wine, masked the bitterness with heavy sugar, and renamed the syrup Coca-Cola, selling it as a temperance drink. It launched at Jacob's Pharmacy in Atlanta on May 8, 1886, mixed with carbonated water for five cents a glass.

Pemberton claimed the drink treated morphine addiction, indigestion, headaches and impotence, and a glass is estimated to have held about nine milligrams of cocaine. By 1888, ill with stomach cancer and still addicted, he sold pieces of the business to raise cash, leaving three companies selling Coca-Cola and the name assigned to his son Charlie. Asa Griggs Candler bought up formula rights, and after Pemberton died on August 16, 1888 he reportedly offered the widow $300 for the name at the funeral. Candler claimed full ownership by 1889 for about $2,300, incorporated in 1892 and had early records destroyed in 1910.

• The 1886 local prohibition vote is the reason the formula became a sweet, non-alcoholic syrup.
• Candler bought one third of the formula rights for $50 down and $500 in 30 days.
• Charlie Pemberton, an alcoholic and opium addict, was found unconscious in 1894 and died 10 days later at 40.
• Former co-owner Margaret Dozier said in 1914 that her signature on the bill of sale was forged.
• Historical analysis of the transfer papers indicates John Pemberton's signature was likely forged as well.

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

After the September 11, 2001 attacks killed 2,996 people and destroyed the twin towers, whose framed tube design had freed up open office floors, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation ran a master plan competition in 2002. Daniel Libeskind's asymmetrical design won in February 2003, but David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill took over the tower and pushed for a symmetrical, tapering form. Leaseholder Larry Silverstein feared tenants would avoid high floors, and late in 2003 the architects announced a compromise. In 2005 the NYPD's concerns about truck bombs led to a 185-foot windowless concrete base and a setback of 65 feet from West Street, up from 25 feet for the original towers.

Planned prismatic glass panels for the base cracked in testing and were dropped in 2011 for angled glass fins with LED lighting. The cornerstone was laid July 4, 2004, real construction waited until 2006, and the $3.9 billion cost made it the world's most expensive building at the time. Silverstein's argument that the attacks were two insurance occurrences ended in a mixed verdict capping payouts at $4.577 billion for the complex. The Port Authority dropped the Freedom Tower name in 2009, Condé Nast became the anchor tenant, and in 2013 the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat ruled the 408-foot mast a spire, setting the height at 1,776 feet.

• The roof sits at 1,368 feet, matching the original North Tower.
• Removing the mast's fiberglass radome saved $20 million but made it look like an antenna.
• Fuel cells using phosphoric acid generate 4.8 megawatts on site, and the tower earned LEED Gold.
• The 65-foot lobby holds a 90-foot mural by José Parlá.
• New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman called the tower "opaque, shellacked, monomaniacal."

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

George Soros was born Georgi Schwartz in Budapest in 1930. His father, Tivadar, a lawyer and former World War I prisoner of war active in the Esperanto movement, changed the family name to Soros in 1936. In 1944, after the Nazi occupation, the Jewish Council had 14-year-old George deliver slips that his father recognized as deportation notices, and Tivadar told him to warn each recipient. The family survived on forged Christian papers, with George posing as the godson of an official who once took him along to inventory a confiscated Jewish estate. In 1947 he emigrated to England, worked as a railway porter and waiter, and studied under Karl Popper at the London School of Economics.

His grades were not high enough for an academic post, so he entered merchant banking and developed his theory of reflexivity. He moved to New York in 1956 aiming to save $500,000, launched the Double Eagle Fund with $4 million in 1969, and later renamed it the Quantum Fund, which had generated $40 billion in profits by 2013. On Black Wednesday in 1992 he built a $10 billion short against the pound, the U.K. left the ERM and he made an estimated $1 billion. Through the Open Society Foundations he has given over $32 billion, and from the early 2000s his U.S. political spending made him a target of conspiracy theories, Hungarian government campaigns and a 2023 swatting incident.

• Soros reads as "next in line" in Hungarian and "will soar" in Esperanto.
• He lectured crowds at Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park in Esperanto while living on Quaker charity.
• Malaysia's prime minister accused him of crashing the regional currency in 1997, then retracted the charge after meeting him.
• He was convicted in France over Société Générale trades and lost his final appeal at the European Court of Human Rights.
• He funded Solidarity and Charter 77 and smuggled copy machines behind the Iron Curtain.

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

Bruce McLaren was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1937 and grew up in his family's service station. At 15 he won his first hill climb in an Austin 7 Ulster he had helped restore. The Driver to Europe scheme brought him to Britain in 1958, where Jack Brabham introduced him to the Cooper Car Company, and in 1959 he won the U.S. Grand Prix at 22, then the youngest Grand Prix winner. He stayed with Cooper for seven years, drove for Aston Martin and Jaguar, and won the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans for Ford. In 1963 he founded Bruce McLaren Motor Racing, building the M1 in 1964 and debuting the M2B in Formula One at Monaco in 1965.

McLaren cars took 43 wins in the nearly unregulated Can-Am series, close to three times their nearest rival, Porsche. Bruce was developing the M6 GT road car when he was killed testing at Goodwood in 1970, aged 32, and the road car project was shelved. In 1980 the team merged with Ron Dennis's Project 4 Racing, and designer John Barnard's MP4/1 introduced the carbon fiber monocoque to Formula One. Dennis and Gordon Murray later built the McLaren F1 road car, released in 1992, and McLaren Automotive launched as a standalone maker in 2010. Abu Dhabi's CYVN Holdings bought the road car business in late 2024 and in April 2025 merged it with a British EV startup it owned.

• The M6 GT prototype, registered OBH 500H, was designed for an estimated 165 mph.
• The first McLaren race car, the M1, was built as 24 customer cars through a partnership with Elva.
• Rival engineers expected a carbon fiber chassis to shatter under racing loads; it improved both handling and crash survival.
• Only 106 McLaren F1 road cars were produced.
• In September 2026 McLaren announced a 450 million pound investment in its technology center.

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

The 51st Congress, led by Senator John Sherman of Ohio, passed the Sherman Antitrust Act and President Benjamin Harrison signed it in 1890. Its brief text bans anticompetitive agreements and attempts to monopolize, while Senator George Hoar argued that winning business through superior skill was an innocent monopoly. Section 1 covers conspiracies in restraint of trade and Section 2 covers acquiring or keeping monopoly power. Courts judge price fixing as a per se violation and most other conduct under the rule of reason, with a quick look test in between. Defining the market often decides a case, as in the 1966 Grinnell alarm company ruling built on an 87% share of a narrowly drawn market.

The first big targets were workers: in 1893 courts treated a New Orleans general strike as a combination in restraint of trade. The 1937 Apex Hosiery sit-down strike reached the Supreme Court, which sided with the union, and Congress carved out labor through the 1914 Clayton Act and the 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Act. Standard Oil was split into 34 companies in 1911, followed by American Tobacco, AT&T in 1982, Microsoft in 2001 and the current Google litigation. Critics from Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand to the Chicago School's Robert Bork and Richard Posner attack the law, while Representative William Mason argued even one-cent oil could not justify crushing competitors.

• Justice William O. Douglas noted that judges read the act loosely for trusts but with strict literalness against unions.
• The 2007 Bell Atlantic v. Twombly decision requires plaintiffs to show a plausible conspiracy, not mere parallel conduct.
• Rockefeller grew richer after the Standard Oil breakup because the pieces were worth more than the whole.
• A 2018 study in Public Choice linked Sherman's push to his grudge against General Russell Alger over the 1888 convention.
• Economist Thomas DiLorenzo argues the act served as cover while Republicans passed the protectionist McKinley Tariff.