pplpod

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

The Ford Motor Company was Henry Ford's third try. His first venture failed, and its leftover equipment became the Cadillac Motor Company. In June 1903 Ford launched with $28,000 from 12 investors, including John and Horace Dodge, and the investors installed Detroit banker John S. Gray as president. In 1913 the Highland Park plant's moving assembly line broke the Model T into 84 steps and cut build time from over 12 hours to about 90 minutes. The 1927 Model A brought laminated safety glass, and the 1932 flathead V8 came from casting the engine block as a single piece. In 1929 Ford helped build the Gorky automobile plant in the Soviet Union, and in World War II the Willow Run plant built B-24 bombers, at peak one an hour.

At the same time Ford's German and French subsidiaries made trucks for the German war effort under Nazi control, some using forced labor. After the Edsel flop and the 1964 Mustang, the 1990s profits relied heavily on Ford Motor Credit while Ford bought Jaguar, Aston Martin and Volvo. In 2005 its bonds were cut to junk. Alan Mulally arrived in 2006 with the Way Forward plan, closing 14 factories and cutting 30,000 jobs, and raised $25 billion by pledging nearly everything, including the blue oval trademark. Ford avoided a bailout but Mulally urged Congress to rescue GM and Chrysler to protect shared suppliers. In 2025 it dissolved its battery venture with SK Innovation, taking a $19.5 billion hit.

• Joseph Stalin praised Henry Ford in a 1944 letter for his help industrializing the Soviet Union.
• The 1956 Lifeguard package added rear seat belts and a deep dish steering wheel.
• A Ford research lab invented the SQUID, a superconducting magnetic sensor, in 1964.
• In March 2022 Jim Farley split Ford into Ford Model e, Ford Blue and Ford Pro.
• Ford announced it would demolish the Glass House, its Dearborn headquarters for 70 years.

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

Hui Ka Yan, also known as Xu Jiayin, founded the Hengda Group in Guangzhou in 1996, the company that became China Evergrande Group. Riding the mass migration from countryside to cities, he sold upgraded apartments to upper and middle income buyers. Evergrande's October 2009 Hong Kong IPO raised $722 million and the shares jumped 34 percent on debut. He then spread into unrelated businesses: the Guangzhou Evergrande football club, which won the AFC Champions League in 2013, theme parks, Evergrande Spring mineral water promoted by Jackie Chan, and from 2018 electric vehicles, including investments in Faraday Future and the Hengchi brand. Offshore junk bonds at double-digit interest rates funded the expansion.

When China began a deleveraging campaign in 2016, Evergrande raised cash from pre-sale buyers, from suppliers paid in commercial paper and from its own staff, who were given quotas to sell wealth management products. In 2020 the "three red lines" froze new borrowing for developers that breached them, and Evergrande breached all three. It began missing bond payments in late 2021, reported more than $80 billion in losses for 2021 and 2022, and filed for Chapter 15 protection in New York in August 2023. A Hong Kong court ordered it wound up in January 2024, and it was delisted in 2025. Regulators found revenue overstated by nearly $80 billion across 2019 and 2020, and in August 2026 a Chinese court sentenced Hui to life in prison.

• Evergrande lost billions of yuan on its water business before selling its agribusiness division in 2016.
• Pre-sale payments meant for specific projects were used as a general fund to buy land and finance other ventures.
• The inflated revenue came from booking pre-sale cash as revenue before apartments were delivered.
• Its auditor, PwC, faced fines, operating bans in China and an exodus of partners.
• Hui was convicted of financial fraud, corruption and embezzlement, and all of his personal assets were ordered forfeited.

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

Tesla was incorporated in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. In February 2004 Elon Musk, fresh from about $176 million in PayPal proceeds, put in $6.5 million to lead the Series A and became chairman and largest shareholder. He led the Series B and co-led a $40 million Series C that brought in Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In 2007 the board ousted Eberhard, and in October 2008 Musk became CEO. Eberhard sued in 2009; the case was dismissed, and the settlement let Musk call himself a co-founder. His 2006 master plan ran from the Roadster to the mass-market Model 3, which drew 325,000 paid reservations in a week in 2016 and then stalled in what Musk called production hell.

On August 8, 2018, Musk posted that he was considering taking Tesla private with "funding secured," which was false; the SEC charge ended with a $20 million fine and his removal as chairman. Tesla joined the S&P 500 in 2020 and reached a $1 trillion valuation in October 2021. A Delaware court struck down his $56 billion pay package, and shareholders later approved a $1 trillion package in November 2025. In 2025 his alignment with Donald Trump and a government efficiency role coincided with a seven-week stock slide, more than 200 protests and the loss of Tesla's title as top EV maker. The company then dropped the Model S and Model X to make room for the Optimus robot.

• Musk had put roughly $70 million of his own money into Tesla by 2009.
• He wanted an automated "alien dreadnought" factory, but robots jammed tasks like threading wiring harnesses that humans did by feel.
• Institutional shareholders flagged a board that included his brother Kimball Musk and investors tied to SpaceX.
• The Cybercab, unveiled in late 2024, has no steering wheel or pedals.
• In March 2026 Musk launched Terafab, a $20 billion joint venture targeting a terawatt of AI computing capacity.

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

Yang Guoqiang hauled bricks and farmed barefoot before founding Country Garden in 1992 in Shunde, Guangdong. He treated property like manufacturing under the "456" model: launch a project four months after buying land, collect buyers' payments within five, break even within six. The company targeted tier three and four cities, pre-sold flats before the concrete was poured and used that cash to buy the next plot. Managers took 20 percent of a project's profit but also covered 20 percent of losses, and a later plan required top leaders to invest their own money. In 2005 Yang transferred his controlling shares to his daughter, Yang Huiyan, and after the 2007 Hong Kong listing Forbes ranked her, at 26, the richest woman in Asia.

The company expanded abroad with Danga Bay in Malaysia and Ryde Garden in Sydney, and built Forest City on reclaimed land near Singapore for 700,000 people. By 2023 only about 9,000 lived there. A 2018 accident in Anhui that killed six people halted its projects for safety checks. Around 2020 Beijing's "three red lines" curbed developer borrowing, choking the model. Yang Guoqiang stepped down as chairman in February 2023, his daughter took control, and in August the company warned of a first-half loss of $6.25 to $7.6 billion. In October it missed a $15 million bond payment, setting off cross defaults across about $11 billion of offshore debt.

• The company's average time from land purchase to launch was 5.2 months.
• The three red lines measured debt against cash, assets and equity, and blocked new borrowing for developers that crossed them.
• A cross default clause meant one missed payment let holders of the rest of the offshore debt demand repayment.
• Yang Huiyan's rise to the top job at the moment of collapse is discussed as an example of the glass cliff.
• A Hong Kong court postponed a liquidation hearing to January 2025 as the company proposed restructuring $11.6 billion in offshore debt.

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

In 1909 Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was selling simple hats from the Paris apartment of the textile heir Etienne Balsan, testing her designs on the women in his social circle. In 1910 the English polo player Arthur "Boy" Capel funded her shop at 31 Rue Cambon, though its lease barred her from selling clothes. The First World War gave her an opening: with silk scarce and women working, she made fluid garments from jersey, a fabric used for men's underwear. In 1921 the perfumer Ernest Beaux presented numbered samples and she chose the fifth. To sell No. 5 globally she formed Parfums Chanel in 1924 with Pierre Wertheimer, who took 70 percent, while Théophile Bader took 20 percent and Chanel kept 10.

During the occupation she lived at the Hotel Ritz with the German intelligence officer Hans Günther von Dincklage, and in 1941 she petitioned the authorities to seize the perfume company from the Jewish Wertheimer family under Aryanization laws. The bid failed because Wertheimer had transferred ownership to the aircraft maker Félix Amiot. Declassified files list her as Abwehr agent 7124, code name Westminster, and she was sent to Madrid to pass a peace proposal from Heinrich Himmler to Winston Churchill. Detained in September 1944, she was released, an outcome biographers attribute partly to Churchill's intervention. After nearly a decade in Switzerland, she returned in 1953, financed by Wertheimer, to answer Christian Dior's New Look.

• She chose jersey and navy and gray dyes because wartime shortages made traditional luxury materials unavailable.
• Wertheimer's 1940 transfer to Amiot, whose factories built German aircraft, protected the company from her petition.
• The 1953 deal gave Wertheimer all Chanel brand rights in exchange for a lump sum, a 2 percent royalty and her lifetime living expenses.
• The 2.55 handbag, released in February 1955, put a chain strap on quilted leather so women could keep both hands free.
• She was preparing her spring collection when she died on January 10, 1971, at 87.

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

Hudson Yards, on Manhattan's far West Side between 30th and 41st Streets, is described as the largest private real estate development in United States history. For decades the area defeated planners: William Zeckendorf's 1950s expansion, a U.S. Steel housing scheme, Mayor Robert F. Wagner's 1963 plan and a young Donald Trump's convention center pitch for the Penn Central yard all failed, and the Javits Center, finished in 1986, sat in a transit desert. Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff's stadium for the 2012 Olympic bid was defeated in June 2005, which finally freed the West Side Yard for rezoning. Tishman Speyer won the air rights bid in 2008 for $1 billion, then lost the deal in the financial crash, and Related Companies and Oxford Properties took over the 99-year lease.

The developers spent $400 million on a platform built over the Long Island Rail Road storage yard while trains kept running, with supertall columns plunging past it into Manhattan schist bedrock. The city paid for infrastructure through tax increment financing bonds, the developers tapped the EB-5 visa program, and the No. 7 subway extension opened in September 2015. Phase 1 opened in March 2019 with 30 Hudson Yards at 1,337 feet, a seven-story mall and Thomas Heatherwick's Vessel. Critics were harsh: The Guardian's Oliver Wainwright called it a $25 billion architectural fiasco and Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times called it Manhattan's slickest gated community. In May 2020 the Financial Times described it as a ghost town.

• The luxury brand Coach was both an anchor tenant and a lender on a $475 million construction loan in 2013.
• 10 Hudson Yards cantilevers over a spur of the High Line, which was extended to wrap around the development.
• Next door, Brookfield built Manhattan West by sliding prefabricated concrete segments over the Penn Station tracks at night.
• Food critic Ryan Sutton called it the worst place to eat fancy food in New York, and Thomas Keller's restaurant there closed during COVID-19.
• The development opened without a firehouse, prompting complaints from the FDNY union.

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

Abercrombie & Fitch was founded in Manhattan in 1892 by David T. Abercrombie and Ezra Fitch as an elite outfitter for explorers and the wealthy. It supplied Theodore Roosevelt's safaris and Admiral Richard E. Byrd's Antarctic expedition, and it sold Ernest Hemingway the shotgun he used to end his life. As cheaper outdoor competitors appeared, the company clung to its upper crust image, stocking items like an 18 karat gold and onyx chess set in the 1970s, and went bankrupt in 1976. Oshman Sporting Goods bought the name and its prized mailing list for $1.5 million, and in 1988 Les Wexner's L Brands bought the brand.

In 1992 Wexner hired Mike Jeffries as CEO, who built a strategy of "casual luxury" and stores designed to exclude: shuttered windows, club music at about 90 decibels, Fierce cologne pumped through the vents and shirtless greeters. A 2006 interview in which Jeffries said the brand targeted the attractive, popular kids, offensive graphic tees, a $40 million employment settlement in 2004 and an 8 to 1 Supreme Court loss in 2015 over a job applicant's hijab defined the era. In 2023, allegations of sex trafficking were published against Jeffries and his partner, which the company said it was horrified by. Jeffries was out by 2014, and Fran Horowitz, CEO from 2017, rebuilt the brand around brighter stores, inclusive sizing and an adult customer.

• The bankrupt company's most valuable asset was its mailing list of wealthy customers, bought by a Texas chain for $1.5 million.
• In 2011 the company offered a Jersey Shore cast member and his castmates money specifically not to wear its clothes on camera.
• In 2005 a women's group in Pennsylvania organized a "girlcott" against T-shirts with slogans demeaning women.
• A 2009 UK employment tribunal ruled against the company after a worker with a prosthetic arm was moved to the stockroom.
• The rebuilt brand became the NFL's first official fashion partner, starting in 2026.

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

On March 25, 1900, British governor Frederick Hodgson stood before Asante leaders in Kumasi and demanded the Golden Stool so he could sit on it. The British had occupied Asante since 1896 and exiled King Prempeh I, and Hodgson also claimed debts dating from the 1874 war. To the Asante, the stool, said to have descended from the sky in the late 17th century, held the sunsum, the soul of the nation's living, dead and unborn. When the male chiefs met him with silence, Yaa Asantewaa, Queen Mother of Ejisu, declared that if the men would not fight, the women would.

Drawing on the matrilineal networks the British overlooked, she raised about 20,000 warriors. After Captain Cecil Armitage was ambushed searching for the stool, the British held out in a stone stockade 50 yards square while the Asante cut the telegraph, blocked food and built 21 log barricades in the forest. Hodgson broke out toward the coast in June, and Major James Willcocks relieved the fort in mid-July. Asante was annexed in 1902 and Yaa Asantewaa exiled to the Seychelles, where she died in 1921, but the stool was never captured.

• The besieged fort held 18 Europeans and about 500 colonial troops, reportedly two days from surrender when relief arrived.
• The forest barricades stood six feet high and ran hundreds of yards, with loopholes for marksmen.
• A Guernsey newspaper in July 1900 reported a battalion of female warriors in her army.
• In March 1901 David Lloyd George told Parliament the hunt for the stool was like a quest for the Holy Grail.
• Road laborers uncovered the stool in 1921 and stripped some ornaments, and an Asante court sentenced them to death before the British commuted it to exile.

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

The idea of honoring an unidentified fighter predates the First World War. After the defense of Jinju during the 1592 Japanese invasion of Korea, locals built a shrine to all who died on the walls, soldiers and civilians alike, and rites were held every spring and autumn from 1593 until a Japanese edict ended them in 1908. In 1849, after the First Schleswig War, Fredericia in Denmark raised what is considered Europe's first memorial to an unknown soldier, reflecting the shift to conscripted citizen armies.

The modern tradition began when army chaplain Reverend David Railton saw a battlefield grave marked in pencil, An Unknown British Soldier, and proposed a national burial backed by the Dean of Westminster, David Lloyd George and King George V. Britain and France held ceremonies on November 11, 1920, and the idea spread worldwide, from Arlington to Athens to Damascus. Its power depends on anonymity, and mitochondrial DNA testing has already identified the Vietnam War unknown at Arlington, leaving that crypt empty.

• A French officer of Le Souvenir Français proposed burying an unknown soldier in the Panthéon as early as November 1916, and the burial took place under the Arc de Triomphe in early 1921.
• Chile and Ukraine created tombs for an unknown sailor.
• Greece's tomb in Athens, guarded by the Evzones, carries lines from Pericles' funeral oration as recorded by Thucydides.
• Portugal's tomb at Batalha Monastery holds two unknowns, one from Flanders and one from the African theater.
• In 2004 New Zealand brought one unknown soldier from northern France to Wellington to represent more than 18,000 of its First World War dead.

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

By April 1746, Charles Edward Stuart's Jacobite army, back from Derby and based around Inverness, was cut off by a Royal Navy blockade, unpaid and starving. Adjutant General John O'Sullivan chose flat, boggy Drummossie Moor to cover the Inverness road, overruling Lord George Murray. On the night of April 15, the Duke of Cumberland's 25th birthday, when each government regiment was issued two gallons of brandy, Murray led a silent march to attack the camp at Nairn with blades alone. It broke down in darkness and bog, still two miles short at dawn.

Exhausted men scattered to sleep and forage, and many missed the battle on April 16. Modern analysis cuts the opening bombardment to between two and nine minutes. The charge then foundered: the MacDonalds on the left sank in bog, and the center swerved into the right wing, cramming five regiments against Barrell's and Dejean's. John Huske wheeled more regiments into a horseshoe and fired into the mass. Within an hour 1,500 to 2,000 Jacobites were killed or wounded against 50 government dead, and Charles later ordered his rallying army to disperse.

• The Jacobites were told to cut tent ropes and strike at the bulges of collapsed canvas.
• Government soldiers were drilled to thrust their bayonets to the right, past the targe and under the raised sword arm of the next Highlander.
• Smaller .69 caliber French musket balls found on the moor show the Jacobites fired far more than the sword-charge myth suggests.
• A 1752 German thaler found above a mass grave hints at a veteran returning to mourn, and an intact 17.5-pound mortar shell was unearthed in October 2025.
• Between 5,000 and 6,000 men gathered at Ruthven barracks ready to fight on before Charles told them to save themselves.