Planet Money

Book tour dates and ticket info here.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 show, like its 130,000+ members, we’re going to take a trip through the psychedelic mushroom megachurch. We’ll meet one of the lawyers trying to keep psy...

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 all we need is a good name and theme. Turns out, that is way harder and way higher stak...

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 whose entire economy became dependent on oil. With the blessing of oil, an entire economic textbook of complications opened up: from the Dutch Disease, to the resource curse, to mono-economic vulnerability.And...

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 estimates, David says Trump and his family have made almost $4 billion dollars “off of the presidency,” in just about a year.Today on the show: we...

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 trillion ... disappear-What is a bubble? (featuring Nobel prize winning economics Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller)-Wh...

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 Black hair care company out of Chicago. Their intimate understanding of what Black people wanted and needed – for their hair and for their lives –...

We’ve been checking in on the economic conditions in Venezuela for about a decade now. In response to the U.S. strike and the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro this weekend, we’re re-surfacing this episode with an update.The original version ran in 2016, with an update in 2024.Back in 2016, things were pretty bad in Venezuela. Grocery stores didn’t have enough food. Hospitals didn’t have basic supplies, like gauze. Child mortality was spiking. Businesses were shuttering. It was one of the epic economic collapses of our time. And it was totally avoidable...

2025 is finally over. It was a wild year for the U.S. economy. Tariffs transformed global trading, consumer sentiment hit near-historic lows, and stocks hit dramatic new heights! So … which of these economic stories defined the year?We will square off in a family feud to make our case, debate, and decide it. Also, as we enter 2026, we are watching the trends and planning out what next years stories are likely to be. So we’re picking  which indicators will become next years most telling. On today’s episode, our indicators of this past year AND...

With the year coming to a close, we're sharing our most popular Planet Money bonus episode of 2025! As U.S. trade with China exploded in the early 2000's, American manufacturing began to shrivel. Those workers struggled to adapt and find new jobs. It ran counter to how mainstream economics at the time viewed free trade ... that it would be a clear win for the U.S. Greg Rosalsky talks with David Autor about why economists got free trade with China so wrong.  Autor, an MIT economics professor, and his colleagues published a series of eye-opening studies ove...

Most stories keep going even after we set down our microphones and the music fades up. That's why, at the end of each year, we look back and we take stock. We call this tradition "The Rest of the Story." And we bring you updates on the stories we've reported, and from the people we've met along the way.Today, we check in on an engineer and patent attorney who made a safer saw; we get an update on the Planet Money game; an update on money in Gaza; and we have updates on a diamond t...

On the eve of Netflix shoveling a fourish-hour chunk of Stranger Things onto Christmas Day, we visit the past, present, and future of binge-dropped television shows. The strategy of releasing an entire season at the same time has been key to taking Netflix from a little startup that used to lend us DVDs in the mail … to a company so big and powerful, it is maybe going to buy Warner Brothers and own Bugs Bunny and Tony Soprano and the Harry Potter movies.But even Netflix may be flirting with some slightly less binge-y mod...

As a country, we are spending more to get data centers up and running than we spent to build the entire interstate highway system. (Yes, that’s inflation-adjusted.) With tech companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI, data centers have kind of become the thing in the US economy. But along with that growth have come a lot of questions. Like where is all the electricity to run these data centers supposed to come from? And how much are residential customers’ electric bills increasing as a result?On today’s episode, we go to Ohio to...

Welcome to the inaugural Planet Money Pop Culture Draft! In today's episode (a Planet Money+ episode we’re releasing into the main feed) we're gonna go back to the year 1999. Three hosts, Kenny Malone, Wailin Wong, and Jeff Guo, go head to head and each drafts a “team” of economic pop culture. So a movie, a song, and a wild card pick that best represents the Planet Money spirit!It could be a movie related to business or maybe a song about money … as long as it came out in 1999! Listen to hear each of them make the case for...

In 2008, Chicago’s budget was in a bad place. The city needed money. One way to raise money was to increase property taxes, but what politician wants to do that? So instead, Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration looked around at the resources the city had, and thought, ‘Any of this worth anything?’ They opted to lease out the city’s metered parking system — to privatize all 36,000 of its parking meters. The plan: have private companies bid on operating the meters, modernizing the system, and keeping the profits for a certain number of years. In exchange, they would give Chicago...

From nuclear fission to GPS to the internet, it’s common knowledge that many of the most resource intensive technologies of the last century got their start as military R&D projects in government-funded labs. But as Avery Trufelman explains in her fashion history podcast, Articles of Interest, the influence of the US military is, in many ways, even more intimate than that, shaping much of the clothing we all wear everyday. On today’s show, a tale of Army surplus economics. How military designs trickled down from the soldiers on the front lines to the hippies on the w...

A few years ago, the Jamaican government started making an unusual financial bet. It went to investors around the world asking if they'd like to wager on the chances a major hurricane would hit the island in the next couple of years. In finance terms, these kinds of wagers are called "catastrophe bonds." They're a way to get investors to share the risk of a major disaster, whether that's a Japanese earthquake, a California wildfire, or a Jamaican hurricane. This market for catastrophe has gotten really hot lately. And it’s changing the way that insu...

Vote for us in NPR’s People’s Choice Awards: npr.org/peopleschoice AI is already reshaping how people find work. Fewer entry-level jobs, robot recruiters, and ever-changing new skill requirements all add up to a new, daunting landscape for humans trying to find dignified work.Today on the show: two stories from the edges of a changing labor market. First we’ll assess claims that AI is causing a white collar job apocalypse. What does the data actually say? We meet an economist who has found one small but fascinating way to measure the impact of AI o...

Taylor Swift reaches new heights with her latest album, which is both divisive and record-breaking. And it’s fueled by an elaborate series of business choices that propel profits but also chart numbers. Today’s episode comes from our friends at Today Explained, Vox’s lively, smart daily news podcast. Pre-order the Planet Money book and get a free gift. /  Support our show. Subscribe to Planet Money+Listen to Planet Money free: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.This episode was hosted by Noel King. It...

Givewell is a nonprofit organization that gives money to “save or improve the most lives per dollar.” Part of their whole thing is a rigorous research process with copious and specific datapoints. So, in the chaotic wake of USAID’s gutting, they scrambled to figure out if they could fund the kind of projects USAID used to.Today on the show: GiveWell let us in on their decision-making process, as they try to reconcile the urgency of the moment with their normal diligence. We get to watch as they decide if they can back one project, to support health...

Wherever consumer sentiment goes, consumer spending usually goes too. They’re like buddies that do everything together. Consumer sentiment wants a hair cut, its buddy consumer spending does too.But lately, these friends are drifting apart.While consumer sentiment about the economy is down … spending remains strong. And not just that… Interest rates are still high, inflation is growing, tariffs have made the prices of goods go up. And yet, consumer spending looks good. What gives?Today - a consumer spending mystery. Is the economy actually healthy? Or is something distorting our view of the economy...