Planet Money

The cyber weapon that might have prevented nuclear war. The U.S. and Israel have long been in conflict with Iran over their nuclear development program. Some of that conflict has been out in the open, with bombs and blockades, but some of it has been invisible. Recently some security researchers discovered a cyberweapon likely tied to that invisible conflict. It looks like it was designed to hide on nuclear scientists computers, then throw off their calculations--just as they got close to achiev

29m 42s

Can the government stop you from cutting down your own tree? In many towns and cities these days, removing a tree now requires a permit. You might have to pay a fee, or promise to plant replacement trees. But sometimes, the city won't let you cut down the tree at all, even a tree in your own backyard. That's because trees are important for air quality, for flood control, and for public health. They help keep neighborhoods cool on hot days. But some think that tree protection laws have gone too f

25m 15s

One specific type of affordable housing used to be popular in American cities, kept rents low, then nearly vanished. Is it time to reconsider boarding houses and single room occupancy units? If they lowered rents in cities, why did they go away? We have the history. Then, let’s talk about corporate landlords. They’re blamed for driving up rents. Studies show they do the opposite. When corporate landlords come to town, they do buy up homes, which can raise the price to buy, but at the same time l

17m 47s

One reason the $70 billion supplement industry is set to double in the next seven years? Lax regulation. On today's show, we tell the story of a century-long battle between the U.S. government and … you , the people, blinded by your love of a magic pill. We’re talking about protein powders, pre-workouts, creatine, stuff for gut health, joint health, vitamin C, turmeric supplements. All that. You might not wanna hear this. Sources mentioned in the episode: Marion Nestle, Food Politics Catherine P

34m 54s

Have you ever walked around a street, mall, or airport and noticed two or three of the same franchise restaurant within walking distance? Why might one Starbucks or McDonald’s or Wetzel’s Pretzels sometimes be built so close to another? Are they friends or competitors? And how can that possibly be profitable? Today’s show is one such example. Our pals at Hyperfixed got a knotty question we just had to help them untangle: Why are there so many Wetzel’s Pretzels so close to one another at the Atla

27m 23s

99% of chemicals in our food right now were added without FDA approval. Many were added in secret, through a sneaky loophole built into the 1958 Food Additives Amendment. It was supposed to require FDA approval for new additives. But food companies and chemical makers found a workaround. And the FDA formally okayed the loophole in the 90s — in the process bringing attention to a loophole to the loophole. The FDA has essentially admitted it doesn’t have the capacity to verify the safety of new fo

35m 41s

Tax avoidance -- that is, legally reducing your tax bill -- is as American as apple pie. But the line between tax avoidance and tax evasion is often a grey one. On today’s show, a collaboration with Tax Notes , we listen in on the secret tapes that show how the wealthiest Americans avoid taxes. We trace the lifecycle of a tax loophole: how it was born (in Malta), how it grew, how the Feds cracked down, and how the industry came to its rescue -- with the help of one high-ranking Trump administrat

26m 19s

How does a poor country become a rich country? There's a simple blueprint — or at least, that's what many economists used to believe. But over the years, a lot of rapidly developing economies have stalled out. These countries aren't poor anymore, but they're not rich either. They're stuck in the middle. The World Bank calls this problem the "middle income trap." And if there's a poster child for the middle income trap, many would point to Brazil. For a time, Brazil had one of the fastest growing

26m 58s

Do you work more for more money? Or work less for more time? For some, this is the ultimate economic choice. Every single worker in the European Union is guaranteed four weeks of paid vacation. No matter how long they’ve been at a company. No matter how low paying the job is. Vacation is a right. In fact, all but one of the richest countries in the world guarantees paid vacation, except: the U.S. According to a 2019 study , people in Japan get 10 paid vacation days and 15 paid holidays; in Austr

25m 9s

If you have a credit card, hope to buy a house, or just want stable grocery prices – let’s talk about the future of Fed independence! It’s impossibly important for the Federal Reserve to steer monetary policy without political interference – an ideal pushed to its brink during Jerome Powell’s time as Fed Chair. Powell’s Fed faced a once-in-a-century pandemic, oversaw the economy as inflation spiked to about 9 percent … went back down to nearly 2 percent … and has started to go back up as the U.S

28m 53s

Recently, a listener wrote in with a question about OPEC and oil prices. She was prepping for a camping trip… thinking about how much it costs to fill up her diesel-guzzling camper van at the pump. “It would be so awesome if you guys could do an episode explaining OPEC to us,” she emailed us. She wanted to know: why does OPEC exist? Why does it limit the supply of oil? And now that the United Arab Emirates has dropped out, what will happen to gas prices? We love when our listeners write in (and

27m 33s

Today the WNBA season tips off, but Dallas Wings veteran forward Alysha Clark has already won a high-stakes competition. She – and a Nobel Prize winning economist – were on the team that negotiated a ground-breaking contract for the players. And Alysha wrote all about it in her journal. Alysha is the oldest player in the league – and when she started she was making a yearly salary of about $36,400. The players flew economy, the rookies in middle seats. They doubled up in hotel rooms. The league

29m 18s

Curt Flood was the best center fielder in baseball and one of the game’s highest paid players. He took the St. Louis Cardinals to the World Series three times. Then he got traded to the Phillies. He didn’t want to go. But baseball’s rules said he had no say in the decision. He could either go to Philly or quit the sport. Instead, Flood took Major League Baseball to court. Flood argued that the league should act like any other business and let workers sell their labor to whichever team they liked

28m 51s

In the world of commercial publishing, there are few crowning achievements more coveted than a place on the New York Times Best Seller List. But how does a book actually end up there? There is, of course, a playbook that publishers and authors use to try to gin up enough sales at the beginning of a new book’s life to launch it onto the list. But there is also a world of more shadowy techniques – a whole history of hacking shenanigans going back nearly a century. Today on the show, the fourth epi

46m 45s

It’s way more than fuel costs that pushed Spirit Airlines to the brink of liquidation and led President Trump to muse about “buying” them. Many low cost airlines are struggling due to a canny and calculated set of strategies from bigger airlines that we can think of as ‘revenge of the legacy carriers.’ Today on the show, we go back in time to when Spirit was riding high and pressuring the whole industry to cut costs. We talk with then-CEO Ben Baldanza about his radical vision for cheap air trave

25m 35s

At one point in history, one U.S. company monopolized the rare earths industry. Then China took over the industry. Can the U.S. bring it back? Rare earths are critical to making, like, everything. From smart phones to electric vehicles to microwaves. They’ve also become a powerful political weapon for China, which controls the majority of mining and processing of rare earths. Today, we have the story of the rise and fall of America’s rare earth industry told through that single company. It’s a c

34m 15s

We talk with Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark and Chief Economist at Redfin Daryl Fairweather about two of the biggest issues of our time: AI and housing. We have been crisscrossing America doing live shows to help promote the new Planet Money book. In each city, we’ve been doing interviews with special guests. And since we won’t be able to make it to every city in America (or most cities) we wanted to bring the tour to you! Live show tour and book info. / Subscribe to Planet Money+ Listen free:

29m 45s

Have you noticed a lot of young people getting into antenna-maxxing as alpha? Or, maybe searching for any bit of copium after they fat-fingered and got rinsed? Or maybe they farmed during a yes-fest on Mention Markets resulting in some serious printing? If none of that made sense to you, then we have the perfect episode for you. Prediction markets have taken off in the past few years, using the same legal loopholes as the crypto market to essentially claim they are a “swap,” or “futures market,”

32m 25s

The United States has been at war with Iran since February 28th. And for a month and a half, Iran’s main leverage over the U.S. has been their control over the Strait of Hormuz — a key global shipping route. Iran has attacked ships that try to pass without approval. And recently they’ve insinuated that one part of the Strait — the part near Oman — is not safe. Which means that captains had to go right by Iran’s shores to get through the Strait … effectively creating a chokepoint for the global e

18m 53s

How do bookstores choose the books they stock, and how does that affect what customers read? It may not seem like it, but every shelf in a bookstore is a highly valuable and contested piece of commercial real estate. And for every new book that a bookstore decides to stock, there are thousands of others that did not make the cut. So how do bookstores make those decisions? And how will the Planet Money book fare under the discerning eyes of the booksellers, the final gatekeepers in the long gaunt

40m 52s

Live event info and tickets here. If your company got bought by a private equity firm, how would you feel? Maybe a little nervous? You might find yourself wondering if there will be layoffs. And you’d be right to worry about that. Research shows that while private equity ownership can boost a company’s productivity, it does generally result in job cuts. But one private equity executive is trying to do things a different way – giving workers equity, little cuts of ownership in their own companies

25m 41s

Live event info and tickets here. When ingredient costs skyrocket, companies have three basic options: They can raise their prices (a sort of product-specific inflation), shrink the size of the products (often called “shrinkflation”), or, sometimes, find more creative ways to reduce costs by degrading the quality of their products - which our very own Greg Rosalsky has dubbed as “skimpflation.” The latest alleged culprit? Hershey’s. The Hershey Company is using ingredients in some of their Reese

33m 42s

Live event info and tickets here. For more than 60 years, Cuba has survived on two seemingly contradictory economic strategies: leaning on friendly communist and socialist countries, and flirting with capitalism. And right now it seems the US is making both strategies impossible. Since January, the U.S. has been preventing almost all oil from reaching the island. Doctors can’t get to the hospitals where they work, many buses aren’t running, trucks can’t deliver food and medicine where they’re ne

27m 41s

LIVE SHOW TOUR INFO HERE. New stories, live tapings, special guests, book signings and more. What would you build on a piece of land when all the normal rules go out the window? On today’s show, how the Squamish Nation reclaimed a sliver of prime urban real estate and were liberated from zoning restrictions, to the consternation of their wealthy NIMBY neighbors. We trace the 100 year saga of what might be the most interesting real estate development in North America right now: There’s a violent

22m 24s

When you come across a book at a yard sale or a bookstore, you might pay more attention to the words between the covers than the physical form of the book itself. But content and the form are both crucial to a book’s success. Each book you pull off the shelf, is the product of thousands of decisions, big and small, tying together vast supply chains and armies of workers from around the world. On today’s episode, the second episode in our series : Planet Money sets out to actually write, design,

46m 30s

In the age of TikTok and Polymarket, it can be easy to overlook the humble book. But books are one of the most influential technologies ever invented. From “The Wealth of Nations” to “Das Kapital,” books have the power to shape whole economic systems… and everything else in our world. The market for books can determine which ideas make it to the masses. So when Planet Money was approached to make its own book, not only did it present an opportunity to spread the gospel of whimsical economic info

43m 11s

The cardinal tetra is one of the most popular pet fish in the world. They look like little red and blue sequins. You've almost certainly seen them at the pet store or the fish tank at your dentist's office. They're everywhere. Not so long ago, most of the world's supply of cardinals came from just one place. It's a little town deep in the rainforests of Brazil, where locals still catch these fish by hand. But the business that this town has relied on for decades has come under threat. Recently,

33m 15s

Robby the chef has lots of endearing qualities. He can make over 5000 dishes, he’s a consistent cook, and he’s never late for work. But he’s not a human. It is a 750 lb. stainless steel robot. With a rotating wok at its center. It’s a wok-bot. Automation has changed many industries. But automation only started entering restaurant kitchens in the past couple decades. Which raises the question – what will robots mean for the restaurant industry? How will automation change jobs and how will it chan

25m 40s

Live event info and tickets here. If something is going wrong in your workplace, there's probably a law that explains why. Meetings always seem long, and never end early? There’s Parkinson’s Law, which says work expands to the time allotted, or, restated: meetings will always take up all the time blocked on Outlook calendars. Is your boss bad at managing? Check the Peter Principle, which says people are promoted to their level of incompetence. A good worker does not a good manager make. And yet

29m 35s

What do we want from sports? The very best athletes competing as hard as they know how, putting all their effort and training and natural ability to the test against their opponents. But this time of year, that’s not the product the NBA is putting on the court. Instead, teams at the bottom of the league are competing … to lose, because it could help them get a top pick in next year’s draft. It’s called tanking — it’s bad for fans, and it’s bad for the league. Tanking has gotten especially egregi

30m 20s