Little Boxes, Little Balls: Clemmie Dixon Spangler and Kunio Busujima

Zero Sum Empire

In this episode's "Billionaires in the News," Joe and Chad discuss Elon Musk's decision to chief that loud with Joe Rogan to prove to the world that he's a Normal Man. Then they talk about Clemmie Dixon Spangler, the recently-deceased billionaire owner of National Gypsum Co., gypsum's role in the history of American agriculture, the Plaster War of 1820, and the relationship between gypsum mining and the standardization of walls in homes and other buildings. Then they talk about Kunio Busujima (also recently deceased), who made his fortune on the Japanese gambling pastime pachinko. Pachinko is sort of like a cross between pinball and slot machines and it's so popular that in Japan alone it generates more revenue than Las Vegas, Macau, and Singapore combined. NOTE: This was the first episode we recorded and we didn't have our process completely worked out yet. We didn't use our random selector to choose these billionaires. Instead, we chose two who had recently died. In the future, all choices will be selected at random. Also, all future billionaires will be American to make things easier on us in terms of research.