pplpod

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

Tokuji Hayakawa opened a small metal workshop in Tokyo in 1912, invented the Tokubijo snap buckle, and in 1915 created the Ever-Ready Sharp mechanical pencil, whose name would later become his company's. The 1923 Great Kanto earthquake destroyed his factory and took his family. He moved to Osaka in 1924, founded Hayakawa Metal Works, and by 1925 was selling the first generation of Japanese commercial radio sets. The company became Hayakawa Electric Industry in 1942 and produced the first Japan-made television sets in 1953. In 1964 it released the world's first all-transistor calculator, the size of a cash register and priced at $1,400, followed by an IC calculator in 1966 and a pocketable LSI model under $300 in 1969. It took the name Sharp Corporation in 1970.

In 1973 Sharp released the first calculator with a liquid crystal display. It built Twin Famicom systems and TVs with built-in Nintendo consoles, sold 80,000 low-priced fax machines in the U.S. in their first year in 1984, sponsored Manchester United from 1983 to 2000, introduced a wall-mountable TV in 1992 and launched the J-SH04, the first commercial camera phone, in 2000. Billions spent on LCD plants at Kameyama and Sakai then collided with the 2008 financial crisis, a strong yen and the end of Japan's digital TV subsidies, and in 2012, its 100th year, Sharp lost $4.7 billion. It paid a $120 million U.S. criminal fine in an LCD price-fixing case, sold its Americas brand rights and Mexican TV factory to Hisense for $23.7 million in 2015, and sued Hisense in 2017 over damage to the brand, which Hisense denied. In 2016 Foxconn bought a 66 percent stake for $3.5 billion.

• Sharp's microwave oven with a turntable, introduced between 1964 and 1966, dragged food through the hot spots of standing waves so it cooked evenly.
• The Sakai plant was for a time the only 10th-generation LCD factory in the world, built for AQUOS panels of 60 inches and larger.
• Greenpeace's 2011 electronics guide praised Sharp's TV energy efficiency but faulted its supply chain chemical management and conflict mineral sourcing.
• In 2013 Sharp set a solar cell efficiency record of 44.4 percent, and in 2015 it launched the RoBoHoN robot phone and a $133,000 8K television.
• Sharp dropped its Hisense suit in 2018, regained its U.S. brand rights in 2019, and used its TV clean rooms to make surgical masks in 2020.

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

In 1993, Culinary Institute of America graduate Steve Ells, a former line cook under Jeremiah Tower at Stars in San Francisco, borrowed $85,000 from his father to open a burrito shop in a former Dolly Madison ice cream store near the University of Denver. It was meant to fund a fine dining restaurant: he needed 107 burritos a day to break even and was selling more than a thousand within a month. Modeled on Mission District taquerias, the line ran on fine dining prep, with onions and jalapeños chopped by hand, meats marinated overnight and no frozen food. McDonald's made a minority investment in 1998 and was the largest investor by 2001, pushing drive-thrus and breakfast that Ells refused, while Chipotle grew from 16 locations to more than 500. McDonald's turned $360 million into $1.5 billion when it divested in 2006, the year Chipotle's stock doubled on its first trading day.

After a 1999 article sent Ells to visit factory farms, Chipotle began sourcing open-range pork, and "Food With Integrity" meant no freezers, microwaves or can openers, meat without antibiotics or added hormones, and no GMO ingredients by 2015. That year Chipotle pulled pork from a third of its restaurants after a supplier failed an animal welfare audit. Then came an E. coli outbreak hitting Washington and Oregon, a norovirus incident that sickened more than 140 Boston College students and a salmonella outbreak tied to tomatoes in Minnesota. Every store closed for a day of food safety training in early 2016, and a 2017 norovirus outbreak in Sterling, Virginia was traced to a manager letting a sick employee work. Ells stepped down as CEO in late 2017, former Taco Bell CEO Brian Niccol took over in 2018 and moved headquarters to Newport Beach, California, and Ells left the board in March 2020.

• Ells' father later invested another $1.5 million, and an outside board of directors added $1.8 million.
• Spinoffs Soul Daddy, ShopHouse Southeast Asian Kitchen, Tasty Made and Pizzeria Locale all failed or were shut down.
• Chipotle acknowledged that fresh, non-frozen produce made it more susceptible to pathogens, and began blanching onions and pre-treating some ingredients.
• Under Niccol, Chipotlane pickup lanes fed by a second make line for app orders were built by the hundreds.
• Expansion reached Saudi Arabia, Mexico and South Korea, where opening-day waits hit three hours, while robots called Autocado and Chippy were tested.

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

In April 1946, engineer Tadao Kashio opened a small workshop, Kashio Seisakujo, in Mitaka, Tokyo, machining gears and microscope parts as a subcontractor. His brother Toshio invented the yubiwa pipe, a ring worn on the finger that held a cigarette so workers could smoke it to the end with their hands free, and its success funded the brothers' engineering ambitions. After seeing electric calculating machines at a 1949 Tokyo business exhibition, they finished a solenoid-based prototype in 1954, then rebuilt the design around telephone exchange relays. The result, the 14-A of June 1957, used 341 relays, and the brothers incorporated Casio Computer Co. Ltd. on June 1, 1957, installing their father, Shigeru Kashio, as its first president.

In August 1972 the Casio Mini went on sale for 12,800 yen, about a third of competing prices, selling a million units in its first 10 months and more than 10 million in all. The Casiotron watch with an automatic calendar followed in November 1974, and engineer Kikuo Ibe's "triple 10" pitch for a 10-year battery, 10-bar water resistance and a 10-meter drop led to the first G-Shock, the DW-5000C, in 1983. A rock preset programmed by Casio employee Hiroko Okuda on the 1981 Casiotone MT-40 became the beat of Wayne Smith's 1985 "Under Mi Sleng Teng," ushering in digital dancehall. Casio later left page printers in 2016 and compact digital cameras in 2018, was fined £3.7 million by the UK Competition and Markets Authority in 2019 over restricting online discounts on digital pianos, and suffered a ransomware attack in October 2024. In fiscal 2026, timepieces made up about 67 percent of its roughly 276.2 billion yen in net sales.

• The 14-A replaced multi-column keyboards, where typing 105 meant hunting through hundreds, tens and ones columns, with a single 0 to 9 key pad and one display window.
• Casio's first electronic desktop calculator, the 001, arrived in 1965 and was exported worldwide.
• Toshio Kashio developed the sound generation system for the Casiotone 201, Casio's first electronic instrument, in January 1980.
• The QV-10 of March 1995 was the first consumer digital camera with a built-in LCD screen for framing and reviewing shots.
• The company switched its name from kanji to katakana script in 1960, and by 2026 it had more than 8,200 employees.

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

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the biggest rewrite of U.S. communications law in more than six decades, replacing a framework built by the Communications Act of 1934 around the old AT&T Bell System monopoly. With the Bell System already broken into regional companies and new technologies like cellular and fiber optics arriving, lawmakers aimed for open competition: any communications business could enter any market, local phone companies could offer long distance, and incumbents had to lease their networks to new rivals at wholesale rates. Universal service funds were formalized to subsidize service in rural and low-income areas a free market would skip. It was also the first time the internet was written into American broadcasting and telephone regulation.

Title V, the Communications Decency Act, tried to restrict online indecency, and the Supreme Court struck most of it down on First Amendment grounds. The surviving piece, Section 230, says an interactive computer service cannot be treated as the publisher or speaker of content provided by someone else, shielding platforms from liability for user posts and laying the legal groundwork for social media. The act's separate rules for telecommunication services and information services broke down as voice and video moved onto packet-switched networks, leading to years of legal fights over which rules applied. Instead of thousands of competitors, ownership concentrated: by 2001 four companies controlled about 85 percent of U.S. network infrastructure, and with radio ownership caps removed, major media companies fell from about 50 in 1983 to six by 2005.

• Lifting radio ownership caps let single owners buy hundreds of stations and pipe the same syndicated programming into many markets.
• Ralph Nader called the act corporate welfare for handing broadcast licenses to incumbents rather than auctioning them.
• EFF founder John Perry Barlow wrote A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace to condemn the law.
• Historian Howard Zinn argued it helped erase alternative, community-driven media.
• A Brookings Institution study found that despite consolidation, the act encouraged building and upgrading broadband infrastructure.

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

Zeus surfaced in July 2007 in an attack on the U.S. Department of Transportation. The Windows Trojan spread through phishing emails and drive-by downloads and stole banking credentials two ways: keystroke logging, and form grabbing, which hooks into the browser and copies login data just before it is encrypted. By March 2009 infections were called widespread, and in June 2009 researchers found more than 74,000 compromised FTP accounts at organizations including NASA, Bank of America, Amazon, Cisco, Oracle, ABC, Monster.com and BusinessWeek. With an estimated 3.6 million infected PCs in the U.S., it became the largest botnet on the internet, and its polymorphic engine re-encrypted its code with each infection to slip past signature-based antivirus, a limit Symantec openly acknowledged.

Zeus operators later added fake tech support scares, opening real Windows diagnostic logs to convince victims to pay by card. Turning stolen bank access into cash required money mules, often recruited from overseas with fake work-from-home offers, who opened U.S. accounts under false names and moved funds for an 8 to 10 percent cut. In October 2010 the FBI revealed a crackdown that arrested more than 100 people in the U.S., the U.K. and Ukraine over a ring that stole $70 million from business and municipal accounts. Around then, Zeus's creator claimed to be retiring and passing the code to the author of rival SpyEye, a move security experts called a ruse. Evgeniy Bogachev was indicted in 2014 for GameOver Zeus, which the FBI tied to more than $100 million in losses.

• GameOver Zeus used a peer-to-peer design with no central command server, so shutting down nodes did not kill the botnet.
• Hamza Bendelladj, known as BX1, was arrested at a Thai airport in 2013 and deported to Atlanta, accused of running SpyEye botnets and selling custom Zeus versions.
• Swiss police arrested Ukrainian Vyacheslav Penchukov, known as Tank, in Geneva in October 2022 over the Jabber Zeus crew's attacks on small and midsize businesses.
• Penchukov was extradited in 2023, pleaded guilty in 2024 and in July 2024 received nine years in federal prison and a $73 million restitution order.
• Zeus sellers marketed customizable kits with technical support, an underground software-as-a-service model.

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

Yahoo suffered the largest data breaches in internet history. An August 2013 attack hit all 3 billion accounts, a figure Yahoo did not fully admit until October 2017, and a late 2014 breach exposed more than 500 million accounts, which Yahoo knew of in 2014 but disclosed only in September 2016. Attackers took names, email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and security questions, some stored in plain text, and many passwords were hashed with the weak MD5 algorithm rather than bcrypt. Worse, they stole the cryptographic keys Yahoo used to generate login cookies and forged cookies to enter 32 million accounts in 2015 and 2016 without passwords. Inside Yahoo, CEO Marissa Mayer reportedly clashed with security chief Alex Stamos, hired in 2014 after the Snowden leaks, and denied his team the money and engineers they requested; he left in 2015.

In June 2016 a hacker offered 200 million alleged Yahoo accounts on the darknet market The Real Deal. On September 9, 2016 Yahoo told the SEC it knew of no breaches, then 13 days later disclosed the 2014 hack. A 2017 U.S. indictment charged FSB officers Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin, FBI most-wanted hacker Alexsey Belan, and Canadian Karim Baratov. Belan copied the 500-million-account database and also searched mail for gift card codes, while Baratov used the stolen data to break into 80 non-Yahoo accounts for the FSB. Verizon cut its purchase price by $350 million to $4.48 billion when the deal closed in June 2017, and the leftover company, Altaba, paid a $35 million SEC fine in 2018 for failing to disclose the breach to investors.

• Baratov pleaded guilty, received five years in federal prison and a $2.25 million fine, and published a memoir called Disconnected in 2023.
• A federal judge rejected a $50 million class settlement for lack of transparency and high lawyer fees; the parties settled in 2019 for $117.5 million.
• German cybersecurity agencies advised citizens to stop using Yahoo, and the UK Information Commissioner's Office fined the British branch 250,000 pounds.
• Yahoo's general counsel resigned, and Mayer lost a $12 million bonus and stepped down when the Verizon sale closed.
• Congressional testimony says the perpetrators of the 3 billion account 2013 breach remain unknown.

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

White Castle was built by two men born in 1880: Walter A. Anderson, a short-order cook who by 1916 was testing burgers in converted streetcar diners in Wichita, Kansas, and Edgar Waldo "Billy" Ingram, a real estate and insurance salesman. Starting in 1921 with a $700 investment, they faced a public still frightened of ground beef after Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle described rats and poisoned bait in Chicago meatpacking. Their answer was visible hygiene: small white enamel brick buildings modeled on the Chicago Water Tower, stainless steel and porcelain interiors, open grills, and cooks in spotless white uniforms. Anderson's five-hole patty sat on a bed of sliced onions under the bottom bun, so steam rising through the holes cooked the top and warmed the bread, and the burger never had to be flipped.

Ingram built the machine around it. With no national food distributors, the company ran its own bakeries and meat plants, and Ingram invented a machine to fold disposable paper hats, spinning off a subsidiary in 1932 that made 42 million hats by 1955. Anderson sold his half to Ingram in 1933. In 1934 Ingram moved headquarters to Columbus, Ohio, later closed the original Wichita and Omaha markets as the least profitable, and launched Porcelain Steel Buildings to make prefabricated, movable porcelain enamel restaurants. He refused to franchise or borrow and kept the company in the family, passing through E.W. Ingram Jr. and E.W. Ingram III to great-granddaughter Lisa Ingram, CEO since 2015. With about 345 locations against McDonald's 36,000, scarcity fed a cult following known as the Crave.

• An internal magazine, the White Castle Official House Organ, started in 1925 to share employee news across regions.
• Imitators including White Tower, Little Castle and Blue Bell copied the castles and square burgers but not the supply chain.
• In 1980 officials in Fountain Hills, Arizona ordered 10,000 burgers for a festival, and in 1982 a Dayton DJ shipped 3,000 to U.S. Marines in Beirut.
• The 1982 Hamburgers to Fly program shipped frozen sliders by FedEx in minimum orders of 50, reaching 10,000 a week within months.
• The 2015 Las Vegas Strip opening, its first western expansion in over 50 years, sold 4,000 sliders an hour and closed for two hours to restock.

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

In 1900 Frederick Weyerhaeuser, already a wealthy Mississippi River lumberman, moved west to Tacoma, Washington and with 15 partners founded the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company. Its first deal bought 900,000 acres of Washington timberland from Great Northern Railway magnate James J. Hill, who gained cash for railroad grant land and decades of lumber freight. The company opened the world's largest sawmill in Longview in 1929, just as the Great Depression killed demand for lumber, and survived by opening a Longview pulp mill in 1931 for recession-resistant paper and packaging. It dropped "Timber" from its name in 1959, built its first bleached kraft pulp mill in Canada in 1965, and in 1967 introduced the High Yield Forestry Plan after 30 years of research, treating trees as a 40-year crop.

Flush with cash, Weyerhaeuser drifted into other businesses: in 1975 it bought 3,200 acres and built the new urbanist town of DuPont, Washington, and it added mortgage banking, consulting firms and personal care products. The resulting conglomerate discount led to a long sell-off, including fine paper to Domtar for $3.3 billion in 2006, containerboard and recycling to International Paper for $6 billion in 2008, and homebuilding to TRI Pointe Homes for $2.8 billion. Instead it bought land: MacMillan Bloedel in 1999, Willamette Industries in a 2002 hostile takeover, Longview Timber for $2.65 billion in 2013 and Plum Creek Timber for $8.4 billion in 2016, becoming the largest private timberland owner in the U.S. In 2018 the Supreme Court ruled for Weyerhaeuser against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, holding that land must be habitable before it can be designated critical habitat for the endangered dusky gopher frog.

• The company owns more than 10 million acres in the U.S. and holds long-term management rights to 14 million acres in Canada.
• The High Yield plan required replanting within a year of harvest, fertilizing, clearing competing brush, thinning and breeding straighter, disease-resistant trees.
• In 2010 Weyerhaeuser became a real estate investment trust, which pays no corporate income tax if it distributes at least 90 percent of taxable income.
• Beyond timber, it leases ridgelines for wind turbines, sells carbon credits and leases land for minerals and gravel.
• In 2016 it moved headquarters from its Federal Way campus to Pioneer Square in Seattle.

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

Merck began in 1668 when Friedrich Jacob Merck bought the Angel Pharmacy in Darmstadt, Germany. In 1827 the family business industrialized morphine extraction from opium, later doing the same with cocaine. In 1891 longtime employee Theodore Weicker and 23-year-old George Merck, grandson of the German company's founder, set up an American branch in lower Manhattan with $200,000 from the parent. Under the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 the U.S. government seized 80 percent of the subsidiary, and in 1919 George F. Merck, backed by Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers, bought it back at auction for $3.5 million. The split was permanent: the American company holds the Merck name in the U.S. and Canada and the German Merck Group everywhere else, and they still sue each other, including a 2016 UK High Court ruling and U.S. countersuits.

Cut off from Darmstadt's labs, the American company built its own research engine. Selman Waksman's Merck-funded Rutgers lab discovered streptomycin in 1943, and Merck gave up its exclusive rights for a royalty so seven makers could supply the TB drug. Maurice Hilleman developed the first mumps and rubella vaccines and the combined MMR. William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura developed ivermectin, which Merck donated as Mectizan against river blindness, and the lab produced thiazide diuretics and, in 1979, lovastatin, the first statin. Then came Vioxx, approved in 1999 and withdrawn in 2004 over links to heart attacks and strokes. More than 50,000 people sued, internal emails referred to critical doctors and said the company may need to "destroy them where they live," and Merck settled most suits in 2007 for $4.85 billion, below analyst estimates of $10 billion to $25 billion.

• Before Hilleman's rubella vaccine there were up to 10,000 virus-linked birth defects a year in the U.S.; afterward the number dropped to zero.
• From 2002 to 2005 Merck's Australian affiliate paid Elsevier to produce the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, a compilation favorable to Merck products with no clear funding disclosure on the cover.
• In 2008 Merck paid $650 million to settle whistleblower suits alleging Medicaid overbilling and kickbacks.
• The 2009 Schering-Plough deal, valued at $41 billion, was structured as a reverse merger to keep Schering-Plough's Remicade marketing rights.
• Keytruda earned $29.5 billion in 2024, 46 percent of Merck's revenue, alongside $8.6 billion from Gardasil.

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

Vodafone grew out of Racal Electronics, the UK's largest maker of military radios in 1980. Racal had battlefield radio technology from America's General Electric, and chairman Ernest Harrison asked his head of military radio, Gerry Whent, to find a civilian use for it. Teaming with Millicom in 1982, Racal won the UK's second cellular license on a pitch of fast nationwide coverage, and the network launched on New Year's Day 1985 under a name built from voice, data and phone, with comedian Ernie Wise making the first official call. After Racal floated 20 percent of the unit in 1988, the telecom business was soon valued above its parent, and a 1991 demerger created the standalone Vodafone Group.

Under CEO Chris Gent, Vodafone bought America's AirTouch in 1999 and in 2000 won Germany's Mannesmann in a 112 billion pound hostile takeover, though regulators made it divest Orange. It took 45 percent of Verizon Wireless and from 2001 licensed its brand to local operators through partner networks. Controversies followed: a 2010 investigation found it had routed the Mannesmann deal through Luxembourg, with an estimated tax bill over 6 billion pounds settled for 1.25 billion, and it complied with Egypt's order to shut down networks during the 2011 protests. From 2013 it shrank, selling its Verizon Wireless stake for $130 billion, exiting New Zealand, Ghana, Hungary, Spain and Italy, and spinning off 68,000 European towers as Vantage Towers in 2020. In May 2026 it paid 4.3 billion pounds for full control of its merger with Three UK, approved after it committed to 11 billion pounds of 5G investment and price caps.

• Through Kenyan affiliate Safaricom, M-Pesa let users deposit cash with local agents and send money by text message, bypassing banks.
• SMS for Life in Tanzania used text tracking of malaria drug supplies to cut clinic stockouts from 26 percent to 0.8 percent.
• About 19 billion pounds from the Verizon sale funded Project Spring to upgrade European networks.
• The Italian business went to Swisscom in early 2025.
• In 2026, 62 former UK franchisees filed an 85 million pound High Court claim over sales pressure, which Vodafone settled without admitting liability.