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bsnsHistory

bsnsBasics

Every day of the year has a story where business reshaped the world.
And each day, host Ron Trucks takes you through that story - part history lesson, part trivia fun - in less time than it takes to order your Starbucks.
And on Fridays? We cut loose with bsnsBloopers: the missteps, meltdowns, and epic fails that prove business doesn’t always go according to plan.

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S1 · E26253
Today · 11 min
The Wreck That Built a Subway
Fourteen years before the city opened its own subway, a company's decision to keep trains running during a labor strike led to the deadliest crash in New York City subway history. On November 1, 1918, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company pressed an untrained dispatcher named Edward Luciano into service after its motormen walked out on strike, and his train derailed in a Brooklyn tunnel, killing at least ninety three people. The wreck became the political origin point for Mayor John Hylan's crusade against privately run transit, and on September 10, 1932, the city opened the first line of its own Independent Subway System, built and operated without the private companies whose decisions had proven so costly. This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world. Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe. For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com
S1 · E26252
Yesterday · 10 min
The Bug That Got the Credit Wrong
Everybody knows the story: Grace Hopper found a moth in a computer, taped it into a logbook, and invented the word "bug." On September 9, 1947, engineers working on Harvard's Mark II computer really did find a moth jammed in a relay, and it really did get taped into the machine's logbook with the note "first actual case of bug being found." What doesn't hold up is the rest of the legend. The word "bug" had been used by engineers for decades before that afternoon, including by Thomas Edison in 1878, and the logbook entry itself was likely written by someone other than Hopper. What actually happened is that she told the story for the next 45 years until it became permanently attached to her name, a small case study in how a good story from a credible source can outrun the facts. This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world. Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe. For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com
S1 · E26251
Tuesday · 9 min
Beating Donahue, Then Buying Herself Back
It started with a napkin, a dinner date, and a stubborn film critic who wouldn't let a good deal slide. On September 8, 1986, The Oprah Winfrey Show launched in national syndication, two years after Oprah Winfrey had already beaten Phil Donahue in his own hometown market of Chicago. The national launch repeated the pattern almost immediately, but the real fortune didn't come from the syndication deal itself. It came two years later, when Winfrey formed Harpo Productions and took ownership of the show that had made her famous, becoming the first woman in television history to own the production company behind her own nationally syndicated talk show. This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world. Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe. For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com
S1 · E26250
Monday · 10 min
The Bank That Wouldn't Open The Safe
Armed robbers demanded he open the safe. He told them it was locked. It wasn't, and that lie cost him his life. On September 7, 1876, the James-Younger Gang attempted to rob the First National Bank of Northfield, Minnesota, and acting cashier Joseph Lee Heywood refused to open the bank's actually-unlocked safe, falsely claiming it was on a time lock. Armed townspeople converged on the scene, killing two gang members and effectively ending the gang's criminal career for good, though Heywood was shot and killed as the robbers fled. More than 450 banks across the country later contributed to a fund honoring his sacrifice, a moment this episode also uses to examine how far modern bank policy and business insurance have moved from what Heywood chose to do that day. This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world. Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe. For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com
S1 · E26247
Friday · 16 min
Business Blooper: When the 'Hot Donut' Light Went Out
There are brands built around a product. And then there are brands built around a feeling. Krispy Kreme was always the second kind. On April 5, 2000, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts went public on the NASDAQ under CEO Scott Livengood, launching one of the most anticipated food IPOs in American history. The stock hit $50 a share and split twice. What followed was an aggressive expansion from 95 stores in 11 states to 367 stores in 38 states, plus international markets, combined with a push into gas stations, supermarkets, and convenience stores that stripped the brand of the scarcity that had made it magnetic for sixty years. By 2005 the stock had collapsed to under $5, the company had filed for bankruptcy protection, and the SEC had opened an investigation into accounting irregularities that eventually resulted in settlements with three former top executives. The brand that had been built on the promise of a warm doughnut you had to seek out had become just another product on a shelf. bsnsBloopers is part of the bsnsDAILYpodcasts lineup from bsnsBasics, hosted by Ron Trucks. Find more at www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com
S1 · E26246
September 3 · 10 min
The Day An Entire Country Switched Sides
Swedish voters rejected this idea outright, 83% against. Twelve years later, the government did it anyway, in a single morning. On September 3, 1967, Sweden executed Dagen H, switching the entire country from driving on the left side of the road to the right, after years of planning by a dedicated government commission and a public information campaign reaching every household. The change addressed a dangerous mismatch, since roughly 90% of Swedish cars were already built for right-hand traffic, and aligned the country with its only two land neighbors, Norway and Finland. Accident rates dropped sharply in the immediate aftermath before gradually returning close to pre-switch levels within two years, a genuinely mixed but historically significant outcome. This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world. Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe. For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com
S1 · E26245
September 2 · 9 min
The Machine That Never Closed
A frustrated executive stood in a slow-moving bank line in Texas and imagined a machine that could do the job instead. It took 26 years to officially settle who actually deserved the credit. On September 2, 1969, the first ATM in the United States debuted at a Chemical Bank branch in Rockville Centre, New York, promising customers a bank that would "open at 9 a.m. and never close again." Inventor Don Wetzel's magnetic card and PIN system removed the need for a human teller from a transaction for the first time, a shift that grew into more than 1.8 million machines nationwide within a few decades. Credit for the invention stayed contested for years, until the Smithsonian formally recognized Wetzel in 1995, presenting him with an ATM card bearing his own name and a number that had never belonged to anyone else. This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world. Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe. For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com
S1 · E26244
September 1 · 11 min
The Plumbing Company That Broke A Bank Monopoly
Alexander Hamilton stood before New York's legislature and passionately defended a plan to save a grieving city. He had no idea what was actually hiding inside it. On September 1, 1799, the Bank of the Manhattan Company opened for business at 40 Wall Street, born from a charter Aaron Burr had written months earlier under the banner of bringing clean water to New York City after a deadly yellow fever epidemic. Buried inside that charter, and championed unknowingly by his own rival, was a clause allowing surplus capital to be used for banking, breaking Hamilton's Federalist party's grip on the city's finances. The rivalry it deepened outlived them both, and decades later, both men's banking institutions merged into the same modern company, JPMorgan Chase. This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world. Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe. For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com
S1 · E26243
August 31 · 11 min
August 31, 2026: Inventing The Job As They Went
(Content note: this episode discusses a historical case involving violent murder.) A ten-year-old detective department, still recovering from its own corruption scandal, was handed a killer nobody had the tools to catch. On August 31, 1888, Mary Ann Nichols was found murdered in Whitechapel, London, the first confirmed victim of the killer known as Jack the Ripper. With no fingerprint system, no crime lab, and no established protocol for the crimes they faced, Scotland Yard's detectives improvised under enormous public pressure, producing the first documented criminal profile, early crime scene photography, and a stalled decision over funding bloodhound tracking dogs that proved they worked. The killer was never caught, but the methods invented under that pressure quietly became the foundation of modern criminal investigation. This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world. Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe. For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com
S1 · E26240
August 28 · 15 min
Business Blooper: The Beer That Made Milwaukee Infamous
Some business mistakes happen fast. This one took about fifty years to finish playing out. On June 27, 2026, Wisconsin Brewing Company in Verona, Wisconsin sold the last Schlitz ever made, eighty barrels brewed from a 1948 recipe, available only in person, only while supplies lasted. It was a proper sendoff for a brand that had once been the largest brewery in the world. The story of how it got there runs through a series of decisions made in the early 1970s, when Schlitz CEO Robert Uihlein Jr. authorized accelerated batch fermentation, cheaper ingredients, and cost-cutting shortcuts that the company assumed its customers would never detect. They detected them immediately. A 1976 recall of more than 10 million cans and bottles, a 1977 ad campaign so aggressive it was nicknamed "Drink Schlitz or I'll Kill You," and a collapse in market share that ended with the sale of the company to Stroh Brewing in 1982 followed in sequence. When Pabst attempted a revival in 2008, the original recipe had to be reconstructed from scratch because it no longer existed anywhere in the company's records. bsnsBloopers is part of the bsnsDAILYpodcasts lineup from bsnsBasics, hosted by Ron Trucks. New episodes drop every weekday. Follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. Start at www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com
S1 · E26239
August 27 · 11 min
August 27, 2026: The Fifth Beatle's Actual Job
He'd never managed a band before. He built the entire commercial machine behind the biggest one in the world anyway. Brian Epstein discovered the Beatles at Liverpool's Cavern Club in 1961, negotiated their first recording contract, redesigned their public image, and secured their breakthrough American television appearances, all before dying of an accidental overdose on August 27, 1967, at age 32. His assistant Peter Brown became the last person to speak with him and the first to deliver the news to the band, in Bangor, Wales, on the same day. What followed, failed self-management, the creation of Apple Corps, and a bitter fight over new management, revealed exactly how much of the Beatles' business Epstein had been quietly holding together all along. This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world. Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe. For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com
S1 · E26238
August 26 · 12 min
August 26, 2026: The Sound Heard Round The World, Literally
(Content note: this episode discusses a historical natural disaster with significant loss of life.) A volcano in the middle of one of the busiest shipping lanes on earth produced the loudest sound ever scientifically documented, heard 3,000 miles away and felt on barometers worldwide. On August 27, 1883, four explosions destroyed most of the island of Krakatoa in Indonesia's Sunda Strait, killing more than 36,000 people, mostly through the tsunamis that followed, and sending a pressure wave around the globe three and a half times. This episode traces the warnings that preceded the disaster, the global reach of its aftermath, and what got rebuilt quickly versus what never did, before closing on the legal concept of force majeure and why planning for the unplannable matters at any scale, not just a catastrophic one. This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world. Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe. For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com
S1 · E26237
August 25 · 11 min
August 25, 2026: From Food Lines, to College Dorms, to Gourmet
A man who'd just lost nearly everything spent a year alone in a backyard shed solving a problem nobody else had managed to crack. On August 25, 1958, in Ikeda, Osaka, Japan, Momofuku Ando launched Chikin Ramen, the world's first instant noodle product, after a year of solitary experimentation following the collapse of a credit union that had wiped out his fortune. Inspired by watching his wife fry tempura, Ando developed a flash-frying technique that let noodles be stored indefinitely and prepared in minutes with nothing but hot water. Wholesalers initially refused to stock it at six times the price of fresh noodles, but Ando built demand directly with consumers, and the product he invented, along with 1971's Cup Noodles, grew into a global industry now serving over 100 billion servings a year. This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world. Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe. For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com
S1 · E26236
August 24 · 12 min
August 24, 2026: Missing The Start Of Something
Those startup sounds probably still mean something to you. Here's the story of the day they first played for the world. On August 24, 1995, Microsoft launched Windows 95 with a roughly $300 million promotional campaign, licensing the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up" for its commercials, lighting the Empire State Building in the software's logo colors, and giving away 1.5 million free copies of The London Times, the paper's first free issue in 307 years. Seven million copies sold in the first five weeks. What the celebration didn't show was that Bill Gates had already warned his own executives, three months earlier, that the internet was about to change everything, and Microsoft's flagship product still couldn't fully act on that warning in time. This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world. Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe. For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com
S1 · E26233
August 21 · 14 min
Business Blooper: The Future Was Loading
Not every business failure is about a bad idea. Sometimes the idea is exactly right, and everything else is wrong. On May 18, 2000, boo.com shut down at midnight after investors declined a final request for $20 million to keep the company operating. Founded in 1998 by Swedish entrepreneurs Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander, and Patrik Hedelin, boo.com had raised $135 million from backers including Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Bernard Arnault of LVMH, and launched simultaneously across 18 countries in November 1999 with 3D product views, a virtual shopping assistant named Miss Boo, and a multi-currency checkout system in seven languages. The problem was that most home internet users in 1999 were on dial-up connections that couldn't load the site. The company was burning roughly $1 million per week with no financial controller and no plan to slow down. Over 400 employees lost their jobs the day the site went dark. The domain name was eventually sold to a travel company and repurposed as a hostel booking website. bsnsBloopers is part of the bsnsDAILYpodcasts lineup from bsnsBasics, hosted by Ron Trucks. New episodes drop every weekday. Follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. Start at www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com
S1 · E26232
August 20 · 10 min
August 20, 2026: Not Enough Chairs To Grow Into
Four broke football teams met in a car dealership to stop themselves from competing each other into bankruptcy. A month later, the car brand hosting it all didn't survive nearly as well as the league did. On August 20, 1920, representatives from the Akron Pros, Canton Bulldogs, Dayton Triangles, and Cleveland's club met at Ralph Hay's Hupmobile dealership in Canton, Ohio, agreeing to a salary cap and shared rules meant to stop escalating costs and player poaching from destroying every team involved. A follow-up meeting on September 17 expanded the group, renamed it the American Professional Football Association, and elected Olympic champion Jim Thorpe as its first president for his fame alone. The league eventually became the NFL, now worth tens of billions of dollars, while the Hupmobile car brand that hosted its birth collapsed entirely by 1940. This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world. Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe. For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com
S1 · E26231
August 19 · 11 min
August 19, 2026: The Fortune Nobody Saw Coming
A woman built one of the largest fortunes in Gold Rush-era California, and almost nobody around her realized it was happening. Born around August 19, 1814, in a story she herself told differently depending on who was asking, Mary Ellen Pleasant spent decades working publicly as a cook and housekeeper in the homes of San Francisco's wealthiest men, quietly absorbing the financial intelligence they never thought to hide from her. She used it to build restaurants, boarding houses, and a money lending operation that made her one of the richest people in the city, sued successfully to end streetcar segregation in San Francisco in 1866, and told a federal census taker in 1890 that her profession was simply "capitalist." This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world. Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe. For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com
S1 · E26230
August 18 · 10 min
August 18, 2026: Is It Ever Going To Land On Red?
A wheel with no memory convinced an entire room it owed them something, and it cost them millions to find out otherwise. On the evening of August 18, 1913, a roulette wheel at the Casino de Monte Carlo landed on black 26 consecutive times, and as the streak grew, gamblers bet increasingly large sums on red, certain the streak was overdue to break. It finally did, on the 27th spin, by which point the casino had collected a fortune from a false belief now known as the gambler's fallacy. This episode traces the event itself, introduces the related sunk cost fallacy, and draws a direct line from a 1913 casino floor to the same reasoning errors still driving bad investment and business decisions today. This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world. Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe. For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com
S1 · E26229
August 17 · 11 min
August 17, 2026: Four Hundred Thousand in a Field Saves Warner Bros.
Four men set out to fund a recording studio. What they actually built was a financial disaster that became one of the most famous events in American history. Woodstock ran from August 15 to 18, 1969, on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York, drawing an estimated 400,000 people against an original expectation of 50,000, and forcing organizers to abandon paid admission entirely once ticket enforcement became impossible. The festival itself lost well over a million dollars, but a documentary film financed through a risky, internally controversial deal with Warner Bros. recouped the losses, won the 1971 Academy Award for Best Documentary, and helped keep the studio financially afloat at a moment it genuinely needed the win. This is bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world. Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe. For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com
S1 · E26226
August 14 · 16 min
Business Blooper: The Chip That Passed (Through)
Sometimes the product works exactly as advertised, and that is precisely the problem. On January 24, 1996, the FDA approved olestra (oh-LES-trah), a synthetic fat substitute developed by Procter & Gamble researchers Fred Mattson and Robert Volpenhein, who had originally stumbled onto the molecule in 1968 while researching fats for premature infants. By February 1998, Frito-Lay had licensed the ingredient and launched WOW chips nationally, a fat-free line spanning Lay's, Ruffles, Doritos, and Tostitos. First year sales hit $347 million, making WOW the best-selling new food product in the United States that year. But every bag carried an FDA-mandated warning label that mentioned abdominal cramping and loose stools, late night comedy did the rest, and consumer complaints eventually topped 20,000. Sales dropped by half between 1998 and 2000. The WOW brand was quietly retired in 2004. Olestra eventually found its way into eco-friendly deck stains and industrial lubricants. bsnsBloopers is part of the bsnsDAILYpodcasts lineup from bsnsBasics, hosted by Ron Trucks. New episodes drop every weekday. Follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. Start at www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com

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