Business History

How the Company Conquered the World

Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith talk with Adrian Wooldridge, co-author of The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea.  Companies are some of the most powerful institutions in the mod...

2026-10-21

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Sam the Banana Man: Gunboats, Coups, and United Fruit

In the late 1800s, a Russian immigrant named Samuel Zemurray spent nearly everything he had on a load of bananas, and turned it into a fortune. But Sam the Banana Man wasn’t just a business tita...

2026-10-14

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Blockers | A Preview of Michael Lewis's New Audiobook

We're here with a preview of Blockers, a new audiobook from Michael Lewis, the author of Liars Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and more. In Blockers, Lewis tells the story of a handful of people who d...

2026-10-07

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Hitler's Gift to the Hippies: The VW Beetle Story Part I – Rerun

Business History is off this week, so we wanted to keep you entertained with a rerun, in case you missed our Beetle episode the first time around. (You can help us win a Signal Award for this episode ...

2026-09-30

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King of the Roll-Ups: The Man Who Created a Trash Empire, Then Built Blockbuster Video

Wayne Huizenga came from a long line of trash collectors. It was a rough, fragmented, mom-and-pops business which notoriously attracted mobsters. But Huizenga set out to buy his small competitors - to...

2026-09-23

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How Warren Buffet Built His Legacy By Finding Value No One Else Could See – Rerun

With the news of Warren Buffett stepping down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, we are revisiting an episode from our two-part series on Buffet. Warren Buffett rose from obscurity to become the ric...

2026-09-19

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Herman Petty's Dream: The Struggles of the First Black American to Own a McDonald's

Herman Petty was a Chicago barber and bus driver who dreamed of running his own business. When his local McDonald's restaurant was abandoned in 1968, Herman approached the company and said he should b...

2026-09-16

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The Battle of Fort Frick and the Anarchist Assassin

Concluding our story of Andrew Carnegie's effort to break the unions at his Homestead steel factory, we look at how the plant boss Henry Clay Frick enlisted a private army of Pinkerton detectives to c...

2026-09-09

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Andrew Carnegie's War with his Workers

In the first of two shows about the fight between the richest man and the unions at his Homestead steel plant - we look at why Andrew Carnegie decided that his workforce deserved a smaller share of hi...

2026-09-02

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George Washington’s Trusted Tavern Guide: The Birth of the User Review

When America’s first president set off to tour his new country, he had no idea where to stay. George Washington slept in some taverns he described as dirty and grim, but also stayed at some deli...

2026-08-26

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The DeLorean Saga: Fraud, Drug Deals and Marty McFly's Car

This is a special crossover episode with Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford.  John DeLorean was a top car executive - but he was too maverick to fit into the oppressive corporate culture of GM. ...

2026-08-19

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The Tangled Story of Instant Ramen

Momofuku Ando told the world he invented instant ramen noodles in a shed in his backyard. In Japan, there's not one, but two museums celebrating this breakthrough. Only Ando wasn't the first person to...

2026-08-12

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Billy Beer: When American Beer Hit Bottom, Then Bounced Back

President Jimmy Carter had a brother, and this brother LOVED beer. Billy Carter was a big 1970s celebrity and a struggling brewery decided to bet on him to revive its fortunes. Together they created&n...

2026-08-05

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The Printing Press: The Invention Built on Debt and Sin

Before 1450, books were written out by hand. It was slow and expensive. But Johannes Gutenberg borrowed a ton of money to create a printing press that could crank out Bibles and pamphlets and document...

2026-07-29

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The Robberiest Robber Baron: The Villainy of Jay Gould

Jay Gould became hugely rich without ever really making a product or offering a service to benefit his customers. Other "Robber Barons" in the 19th century forged steel or pumped oil to make money - b...

2026-07-22

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The Factory That Was Wiped Off The Map (From Cautionary Tales)

Business History will be back on July 22nd - but here's an episode from another Pushkin Industries show we're sure you''ll enjoy, Cautionary Tales. A giant chemical plant near the small village of F...

2026-07-08

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The Nobel Winners Who Almost Crashed the Economy

John Meriwether assembled the smartest team on Wall Street. In the 1980s, he combed Harvard and MIT for geniuses to join him at Salomon Brothers and make the investment bank a fortune with arbitrage -...

2026-07-01

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A Store Owner You Can Trust: John Wanamaker, Returns and the Price Tag

Shopping used to be adversarial. Shoppers and store owners would bargain and haggle over prices. What one person got for $1, the next guy bought for £1.25. And there were no returns. It was unfa...

2026-06-24

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The Boy Scout Who Brought us the Age of Disruption

Why have so many tiny start-ups come from nowhere to take down huge established corporations? Is it because the incumbents were dumb? Harvard Business School professor Clayton M Christensen decided to...

2026-06-17

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The Reporter Who Took Down John D. Rockefeller

At a time when women couldn't vote or freely enter the workplace, Ida Tarbell took on the richest man in America and triumphed. Ida grew up in the Pennsylvania oil fields of the 1870s, and saw how Joh...

2026-06-10

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