Podcast Episodes
Back to Search7216: Lead Belly — The Man Who Sang His Way Out of Prison Twice | pplpod
Episode 7216
Lead Belly was serving time for murder when the folklorist John Lomax recorded him in a Louisiana prison. His singing was so powerful that the govern…
1 week, 1 day ago
7220: Maurice Ravel — The Obsessive Watchmaker Who Crafted Perfect Music | pplpod
Episode 7220
Maurice Ravel composed music the way a Swiss watchmaker assembles a timepiece — every gear placed with microscopic precision, every surface polished …
1 week, 1 day ago
7218: Magic Johnson — From Court Vision to Billion-Dollar Business Empire | pplpod
Episode 7218
Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-positive in 1991 and the world assumed he was dying. Instead he built a business empire worth over a billion dolla…
1 week, 1 day ago
7221: Mick Jagger — The Rock Star Who Was Always a CEO in Disguise | pplpod
Episode 7221
Mick Jagger studied at the London School of Economics, and every decision he made after dropping out reflected that education. While Keith Richards p…
1 week, 1 day ago
7211: Larry Bird — How a Small-Town Kid Mastered Every Role in the NBA | pplpod
Episode 7211
Larry Bird grew up in a town so small that basketball was the only way out, and he took it further than anyone from French Lick, Indiana, had any rig…
1 week, 1 day ago
7213: Sergei Rachmaninoff — How He Survived Depression, Revolution, and Exile | pplpod
Episode 7213
Sergei Rachmaninoff suffered a creative breakdown so severe after the failure of his First Symphony that he could not compose for three years. Hypnot…
1 week, 1 day ago
7212: Michael Jackson — How the World's Greatest Entertainer Was Broken by Fame | pplpod
Episode 7212
Michael Jackson was performing professionally at five years old and never had a childhood. By the time he became the biggest pop star in history, the…
1 week, 1 day ago
7215: John Lennon — The Journey from Rage to Stillness and Back Again | pplpod
Episode 7215
John Lennon wrote Imagine and then screamed his childhood trauma into a microphone on Plastic Ono Band. He preached peace while terrorizing the peopl…
1 week, 1 day ago
7214: Joan Crawford — The Relentless Survivor Beyond the Wire Hanger Mythology | pplpod
Episode 7214
Joan Crawford reinvented herself more often than any star in Hollywood history, surviving the transition from silent films to talkies, from ingenue t…
1 week, 1 day ago
7210: Henry Fonda — The Cold Perfectionist Behind Hollywood's Warmest Characters | pplpod
Episode 7210
Henry Fonda spent fifty years playing America's moral conscience on screen — Tom Joad, Abe Lincoln, Juror #8. Off screen he was emotionally remote, s…
1 week, 1 day ago