Planet Money

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

Episodes

March 13, 2026 25 mins
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 th...
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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 l...
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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, ...
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March 4, 2026 27 mins
Heated Rivalry, the steamy hockey romance show, was made for about $2 million per episode.  That is remarkably cheap for an hour-long drama.

Today on the show, a conversation with Heated Rivalry creators Jacob Tierney and Brendan Brady about their television miracle on ice.

It’s not just that the show was made efficiently and cleverly. Heated Rivalry comes from a Canadian economic system of making TV and movies th...
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February 27, 2026 36 mins
The world of science has been stuck in an existential crisis over whether we actually know the things we thought we knew. Re-running an old study today doesn't always yield the same result. Same with re-enacting old experiments. Collectively, this is known as the “replication crisis.” 

Economist Abel Brodeur has come up with one way to help fix this crisis: he’s invented an internationally crowdsourced surveillance system,...
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    February 25, 2026 18 mins
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    ICE is scaling up, with rapid new hiring. So we ask, has training new officers changed? At what cost? 

    Also, the Trump administration has plans to pour billions of dollars into warehouses for mass immigrant detention centers, which can totally change the economy of some areas. We hear from a rural town in Georgia that wants an ICE facility in its own backyard. 

    These epi...
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    The Supreme Court has spoken. Those big, sweeping tariffs that President Trump imposed early last year? They’re illegal. 

    On today’s show: Why were those tariffs struck down? Will anyone get refunds? And …what about this new 10 percent tariff the President just announced today? 

    Plus — a growing market for tariff refunds.

    Further Listening:

    - Worst. Tar...
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    Greenland has said it is not for sale. Denmark has said it can’t even legally sell Greenland. And at a security conference in Munich over the weekend, U.S. lawmakers spent a lot of time trying to walk back some of President Trump’s recent threats to try to buy, or even take over, the territory. 

    But whether Trump can or will or should try to control or purchase a territory that ...
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    An iconic cartoon character liberated from copyright, journalism from the world of competitive spreadsheeting, a controversial piece of US currency. Each year the Planet Money team dedicates an episode to the things we simply love and think you, our audience, will also love.

    In this year’s Valentine’s Day episode:

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    February 11, 2026 30 mins
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    Today, the story of three inventions. The first, the sewing machine, was created by a selfish and ambitious inventor who wanted all the credit and was willing to fight a war for it. 

    The second, a more modern invention, was made by an Italian inventor who wanted only to connect the world through video, so “evvvvverybody can talk with evvvvverybody else.”

    And, a third in...
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    February 6, 2026 33 mins
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    The recent protests in Iran are about so many things. Human rights, corruption, freedom. But this time – they are also motivated by economic hardship. Hardship caused, in part, by US sanctions. 


    The US has been sanctioning Iran in one way or another for 47 years. But sanctions, as a tool, only work some of the time, and US sanctions on Iran have not always conformed to w...
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    February 4, 2026 29 mins
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    A record number of Americans with poor or just okay credit are behind on their car payments. And once last year’s numbers are tallied, an estimated 3 million cars will have been repossessed in 2025. That would be on par with how bad it got during the Great Recession. What’s going on? And why now? 

    Today on the show, we focus on the micro part of the story to answ...
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    Housing is too expensive. Everyone knows this. Democrats know that talking about it plays well with voters. And now – in a midterm election year – President Donald Trump seems to be focused on it, too. 

    His administration has recently started talking more about affordability. And they’re taking action with two new initiatives that aim to make buying a house easier. 

    T...
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    In the 1990s, Congress created HOPE VI, a program that demolished old public housing projects and replaced them with more up-to-date ones. But the program went further than just improving public housing buildings. HOPE VI was designed to transform neighborhoods with concentrated poverty into neighborhoods that attracted people with different incomes. Some people who moved to HOPE VI neighborhoods earned too much to qualify for publ...
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    January 23, 2026 31 mins
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    Just as every market has its first movers, every religion has its martyrs — the people willing to risk everything for what they believe. Pastor Dave Hodges just might be a little bit of both. He’s the spiritual leader of the Zide Door Church of Entheogenic Plants, in Oakland, California which places psilocybin mushrooms at the center of their religious practice.

    Today on the s...
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    January 21, 2026 36 mins
    Planet Money has teamed up with the company Exploding Kittens to make a board game inspired by the legendary economics paper The Market for Lemons. We’ve decided we want a mass-appeal party game that quietly sneaks in the economics, so that we can report from inside a world that no other Planet Money project has entered: the real shelves at real big box retail stores. 

    We have a great game mechanic and a set of rules. Now ...
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    Venezuela and Chevron have perhaps one of the strangest partnerships … ever? Chevron, one of the world’s most famous and profitable oil corporations, has for decades, been plugging away in Venezuela, one of the world’s most famous and infamous socialist countries. 

    Today on the show, the story of their intertwined histories. Before Saudi Arabia, before Iran… there was Venezuela, the first petrostate. The first country whos...
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    Before President Donald Trump’s first term, he was in a “tight spot” financially, according to New Yorker writer David Kirkpatrick. At the start of his second term, David says, Trump was in an “even tighter” spot. But after just six months into his second term, Trump’s financial situation started looking really good.


    David has done a full accounting for what the family has been up to, and even using conservative estima...
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    Are we in an AI bubble? That’s the $35 trillion dollar question right now as the stock market soars higher and higher. The problem is that bubbles are famously hard to spot. But some economists say they may have found some telltale clues.


    On our latest: How do economists detect a bubble? And, how much should society be worried about bubbles in the first place? 


    Related shows:


    - How to make $35...
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    January 7, 2026 29 mins
    The Afro is one of the most iconic hairstyles of the last century. And one of its main ingredients was a hair product – Afro Sheen. But Afro Sheen did so much more than make Black afros shine. It was the money behind the television show Soul Train, it helped fuel the civil rights movement – all because of an entrepreneur named George Johnson. 

    For decades, Joan and George Johnson owned and ran Johnson Products Company, a B...
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