Business Wars Wondery

It's 1961 and in a supermarket, housewife Jean Nidetch is about to get a shock that will send her on desperate quest to get thin.

But when her new diet gets tough, she turns to friends for help and inadvertently starts what will become Weight Watchers. And as Weight Watchers rakes in big bucks from weight-loss, a street-tough Philadelphia businessman grabs his chance to become a millionaire.

This episode was originally released as a Wondery+ exclusive

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This episode comes out for free on 03/29 and is available early and ad-free for Wondery+ subscribers.

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It's 1983 and civil war's broken out within Nutri/System. But while CEO Harold Katz fights his franchisees, his former colleague Jenny Craig has grand designs on Australia.


Craig wants to use Australia as a staging post on the way to becoming a U.S. heavyweight, but first she's got to convince women Down Under to diet like Americans. And that's going to be anything but easy.

This episode was originally released as a Wondery+ exclusive

This episode comes out for free on 04/05 and is available early and ad-free for Wondery+ subscribers.

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It's the early 1990s and the diet boom is over. Weight Watchers is now a millstone around Heinz's neck, Jenny Craig's advance has stalled, and Nutri/System's bankrupt and broken.

Faced with tanking sales, the diet giants home need new tricks to get people back on their weight-loss plans. And soon all three are homing in on the same answer – paying celebrities big bucks to convince the public that they're just a diet away from happiness.

This episode was originally released as a Wondery+ exclusive

This episode comes out for free on 04/12 and is available early and ad-free for Wondery+ subscribers.

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It's the 2010s and the weight-loss industry's battling intensifying headwinds. Calorie-counting smartphone apps are attracting millions of users and the diet backlash is getting louder by the day.

This episode was originally released as a Wondery+ exclusive

As the pressure mounts, Weight Watchers realizes it needs to move with the times and reinvent itself. But it soon finds itself facing a conundrum: how to change convincingly without alienating the dieters the business depends on?

We're celebrating the five-year anniversary of Business Wars with a special episode that takes you behind the scenes. We'll delve into how we chose our host and how the first season got off the ground (time code: 1:19). Then we'll explore how we bring the story to life with sound (time code: 17:26). And comedian Josh Gondelman will give David Brown a bit of a grilling (time code: 32:45).

Binge all episodes early and ad-free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/businesswars.

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It’s 1985 and Steve Jobs is fuming after being fired from Apple. He wants a second act, and he thinks he’s found one in Lucasfilm’s unwanted computer division.




But when Jobs buys it and founds Pixar, it soon becomes clear that visions aren't aligned. Jobs wants to create the next-generation of personal computers. But Pixar’s leaders Ed Catmull and John Lasseter have different plans. They want Pixar to make animated movies using computers.




But to make that happen, they need to persuade Jobs to burn through his fortune, and convince Hollywood that a computer animated film can hold its own against the hand-drawn creations of Disney.

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