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Planet Money

Wanna see a trick? Give us any topic and we can tie it back to the economy. At Planet Money, we explore the forces that shape our lives and bring you along for the ride. Don"t just understand the economy – understand the world.Wanna go deeper? Subscribe to Planet Money+ and get sponsor-free episodes of Planet Money, The Indicator, and Planet Money Summer School. Plus access to bonus content. It"s a new way to support the show you love. Learn more at plus.npr.org/planetmoney

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All Episodes

21:23

The history of light (classic)

Planet Money ·

2024/06/05

For thousands of years, getting light was a huge hassle. You had to make candles from scratch. This is not as romantic as it sounds. You had to get a cow, raise the cow, feed the cow, kill the cow, get the fat out of the cow, cook the fat, dip wicks into the fat. All that--for not very much light. Now, if we want to light a whole room, we just flip a switch.The history of light explains why the world today is the way it is. It explains why we aren't all subsistence farmers, and why we can afford to

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23:59

How the FBI's fake cell phone company put criminals...

Planet Money ·

2024/05/31

There is a constant arms race between law enforcement and criminals, especially when it comes to technology. For years, law enforcement has been frustrated with encrypted messaging apps, like Signal and Telegram. And law enforcement has been even more frustrated by encrypted phones, specifically designed to thwart authorities from snooping. But in 2018, in a story that seems like it's straight out of a spy novel, the FBI was approached with an offer: Would they like to get into the encrypted cell

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27:03

So you've been scammed, now what?

Planet Money ·

2024/05/29

We are living in a kind of golden age for online fraudsters. As the number of apps and services for storing and sending money has exploded – so too have the schemes that bad actors have cooked up to steal that money. Every year, we hear more and more stories of financial heartbreak. What you don't often hear about is what happens after the scam?On today's show, we follow one woman who was scammed out of over $800,000 on her quest to get her money back. That journey takes her from the halls of the

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25:36

The junkyard economist

Planet Money ·

2024/05/24

On today's episode, we ride through the streets of San Francisco with a long-time junkman, Jon Rolston. Jon has spent the last two decades clearing out houses and offices of their junk. He's found all sorts of items: a life-time supply of toilet paper, gold rings, $20,000 in cash. Over the years, he's developed a keen eye for what has value and what might sell. He's become a kind of trash savant.As we ride with Jon, he shows us the whole ecosystem of how our reusable trash gets dealt with — from

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27:42

Anatomy of a layoff

Planet Money ·

2024/05/22

By one estimate, 40 percent of American workers get laid off at least once in their careers. And when that happens, companies will often say, "It's not personal. It has nothing to do with you or your performance. We're just changing priorities, making a strategic shift." It's like the business version of: "It's not you, it's me." And just like a breakup, it feels terrible. This happened to a man we're calling V, who was working at the same company as his husband when he got laid off. And for V, the

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25:12

The hack that almost broke the internet

Planet Money ·

2024/05/17

Last month, the world narrowly avoided a cyberattack of stunning ambition. The targets were some of the most important computers on the planet. Computers that power the internet. Computers used by banks and airlines and even the military. What these computers had in common was that they all relied on open source software. A strange fact about modern life is that most of the computers responsible for it are running open source software. That is, software mostly written by unpaid, sometimes even

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18:51

Why Gold? (Classic)

Planet Money ·

2024/05/15

In the past few months, the price of gold has gone way up – even hitting a new high last month at just over $2,400 per troy ounce. Gold has long had a shiny quality to it, literally and in the marketplace. And we wondered, why is that? Today on the show, we revisit a Planet Money classic episode: Why Gold? Jacob Goldstein and David Kestenbaum will peruse the periodic table of the elements with one goal in mind: to learn which element would really make the best money.This classic Planet Money episode

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30:55

Zombie mortgages are coming back to life

Planet Money ·

2024/05/10

Karen McDonough of Quincy, Mass., was enjoying her tea one morning in the dining room when she saw something odd outside her window: a group of people gathering on her lawn. A man with a clipboard told her that her home no longer belonged to her. It didn't matter that she'd been paying her mortgage for 17 years and was current on it. She was a nurse with a good job and had raised her kids there. But this was a foreclosure sale, and she was going to lose her house. McDonough had fallen victim to

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18:51

Inside video game economics (Two Indicators)

Planet Money ·

2024/05/08

Why do video game workers offer labor at a discount? How can you design a video game for blind and sighted players? Does that design have lessons for other industries?These and other questions about the business of video games answered in todays episode. The Indicator just wrapped a weeklong series decoding the economics of the video game industry, we're excerpting some highlights. First, we meet some of the workers who are struggling with the heavy demands placed on them in their booming industry,

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20:40

The birth of the modern consumer movement

Planet Money ·

2024/05/03

Today on the show, the story of the modern consumer movement in the U.S. and the person who inspired it: Ralph Nader. How Ralph Nader's battle in the 1960s set the stage for decades of regulation and sparked a debate in the U.S. about how much regulation is the right amount and how much is too much. This episode was made in collaboration with NPR's Throughline. For more about Ralph Nader and safety regulations, listen to their original episode, "Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader."This Planet Money

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22:57

Hire Power (Update)

Planet Money ·

2024/05/01

(Note: This episode originally ran in 2021.)Millions of American workers in all sorts of industries have signed some form of noncompete agreement. Their pervasiveness has led to situations where workers looking to change jobs can be locked out of their fields.On today's episode: how one man tried to end noncompete contracts in his home state of Hawaii. And we update that story with news of a recent ruling from the Federal Trade Commission that could ban most noncompete agreements nationwide.This

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18:56

The case of the stolen masks

Planet Money ·

2024/04/26

About thirty years ago, Yagya Kumar Pradhan woke up to the news that the temple he and his clan used had been broken into. The temple had been ransacked. And someone had stolen two holy Bhairav masks. Yagya says they had been in his family for more than five hundred years – since the 16th century. Yagya is a kind of Hindu priest for his clan. And he says, these Bhairav masks were very holy. People made offerings to them during Dashaun, a festival held in the fall. Yagya thought the masks were gone

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32:58

How unions are stopped before they start (Update)

Planet Money ·

2024/04/24

(Note: This episode originally ran in 2023.)Union membership in the U.S. has been declining for decades. But, in 2022, support for unions among Americans was the highest it's been in decades. This dissonance is due, in part, to the difficulties of one important phase in the life cycle of a union: setting up a union in the first place. One place where that has been particularly clear is at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.Back in 2008, Volkswagen announced that they would be setting up

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25:27

FTX and the Serengeti of bankruptcy

Planet Money ·

2024/04/19

For the last year and a half, the story of FTX has focused largely on the crimes and punishment of Sam Bankman-Fried. But in the background, the actual customers he left behind have been caught in a financial feeding frenzy over the remains of the company. On today's show, we do a deep dive into the anatomy of the FTX bankruptcy. We meet the vulture investors who make markets out of risky debt, and hear how customers fare in the secretive world of bankruptcy claims trading. This episode was hosted

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17:41

Grocery prices, credit card debit, and your 401K (Two...

Planet Money ·

2024/04/17

What's going on with consumers? This is one of the trickiest puzzles of this weird economic moment we're in. We've covered a version of this before under the term "vibecession," but it's safe to say, the struggle is in fact real. It is not just in our heads. Sure, sure, some data is looking great. But not all of it. What's interesting, is exactly why the bad feels so much worse than the good feels good. Today on the show, we look into a few theories on why feelings are just not matching up with

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20:19

TikTok made me deduct it

Planet Money ·

2024/04/12

TikTok, and other apps like it, are filled with financial advice. Some of it is reliable, some... less so. There are videos about running a business, having a side hustle, generating passive income. And also, there are a lot of tips and tricks, many of them questionable, about saving on your taxes. On this show, we run some of the greatest hits of TikTok tax advice by some bonafide tax experts. We'll talk about whether you can use gambling losses to reduce your tax bill, whether your pets qualify

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17:37

How much does this cow weigh? (Classic)

Planet Money ·

2024/04/10

This episode originally ran in 2015.About one hundred years ago, a scientist and statistician named Francis Galston came upon an opportunity to test how well regular people were at answering a question. He was at a fair where lots of people were guessing the weight of an ox, so he decided to take the average of all their guesses and compare it to the correct answer.What he found shocked him. The average of their guesses was almost exactly accurate. The crowd was off by just one pound.This eerie

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22:50

Japan's Lost Decade

Planet Money ·

2024/04/05

Last month, Japan's central bank raised interest rates for the first time in 17 years. That is a really big deal, because it means that one of the spookiest stories in modern economics might finally have an ending. Back in the 1980s, Japan performed something of an economic miracle. It transformed itself into the number two economy in the world. From Walkmans to Toyotas, the U.S. was awash in Japanese imports. And Japanese companies went on a spending spree. Sony bought up Columbia Pictures

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28:41

The real estate industry on trial

Planet Money ·

2024/04/03

In 2019, Mike Ketchmark got a call. Mike is a lawyer in Kansas City, Missouri, and his friend, Brandon Boulware, another lawyer, was calling about a case he wanted Mike to get involved with. Mike was an unusual choice - he's a personal injury lawyer, and this was going to be an antitrust case. But Brandon knew Mike was great in front of a jury. And that he'd won huge settlements for his clients in the past. So the lawyer friend drops by Mike's office, and pitches him the case. Rhonda and Scott

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23:31

How much of your tax dollars are going to Israel and...

Planet Money ·

2024/03/29

There's been a lot of disagreement in Congress and in the country about whether the U.S. should continue to financially support the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Some taxpayers don't think the U.S. should give Ukraine any money to fight off Russia's invasion. And some taxpayers have concerns about how they might be funding weapons that have been used to kill civilians in Gaza. And there are questions about how much individual taxpayers contribute to war efforts, generally. So in this episode, we attempt

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