SONY

The hosts introduce Sony as both an influence on Steve Jobs and a company whose portfolio eventually spanned electronics, games, music, and film. Their examples range from Trinitron televisions and Discman players to professional cameras and the Aibo robot. The breadth sets up the episode's central question: how did a company rooted in postwar Japan become a global technology and entertainment group?

The opening also makes the Jobs connection concrete. David recounts how Jobs admired Sony employees' uniforms and later commissioned black turtlenecks of his own. The story frames Sony as more than a manufacturer: it represented a standard of product design and organizational identity that Jobs wanted Apple to emulate.

The story moves back to the summer of 1944, when engineers Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita were assigned to a military project developing a heat-seeking missile. The hosts describe both men as reluctant participants in the war effort and emphasize their awareness of the United States' technological advantage. That contrast matters to the episode's framing: Sony's later identity grew from engineers who saw technology as a way to build for consumers, in a country whose wartime priorities were about to collapse.

Ibuka's fascination with radio had already collided with wartime controls. The Japanese government banned shortwave-capable consumer radios so citizens could not hear foreign broadcasts, and radios were modified to remove reception components. Ibuka continued building radios and listening to allied transmissions, which led him to recognize that Japan was losing the war despite official messaging. The episode uses this tension to show the distance between state control and an engineer's direct reading of technology and events.

Morita entered the story from a very different background: he was the eldest son of a prominent family that had run a sake business for generations, and was expected to inherit it. He attended business meetings as a child, but was drawn to physics, electronics, and American consumer technology. His father allowed him to pursue engineering instead of immediately taking over the family company. The hosts suggest this choice also placed him in a safer wartime role as a naval engineering researcher rather than on a ship, though that counterfactual is presented as their interpretation.

After the atomic bombings and Japan's surrender, Morita recognized that the country faced an uncertain future. He later recalled understanding the bomb's significance as a young physics-trained technical officer, while still believing in his own future. The passage gives the Sony origin story a personal hinge: his confidence in technology and in his own ability survived the collapse of the old national order.

The first chapter ends with Morita trying to prepare colleagues for surrender and with the Emperor's radio announcement on August 15, 1945. The hosts describe a devastated Japan: millions had died, many Tokyo residents were homeless, and the country faced occupation and the end of its military. Against that backdrop, Ibuka returned to Tokyo and started a company. His founding prospectus framed the organization as a stable place where engineers could pursue technology with joy and social responsibility.