Planet Money

→ WHAT IT COVERS Spirit Airlines, once America's fastest-growing ultra-low-cost carrier, faces potential liquidation after a second bankruptcy filing. The episode traces Spirit's rise under CEO Ben Baldanza's "Dollar General of airlines" model, then examines how legacy carriers copied budget pricing, weaponized loyalty programs, and rising costs collectively dismantled the budget airline sector.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money traces how the U.S. rare earths industry collapsed from a Molycorp monopoly at California's Mountain Pass mine in the 1960s to China controlling 90% of global processing today, and examines the U.S. government's current multi-billion dollar effort to rebuild domestic rare earth supply chains. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Industrial policy replication:** China's rare earths dominance was built through four specific policy levers: preferential low-cost government financing,...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark speaks at a Planet Money live event in San Francisco, addressing AI's trajectory toward replacing complex human work by April 2027, the economic redistribution problem this creates, and behavioral economist Daryl Fairweather explains how single-family zoning reform and musical-chairs housing dynamics affect affordability.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money traces how Kalshi, a prediction market platform, fought regulators to legalize betting on elections, sports, and world events by classifying wagers as futures contracts rather than gambling. The company now operates in all 50 states and projects a trillion-dollar industry within four years. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Legal classification arbitrage:** Kalshi secured federal legitimacy by convincing the CFTC to classify yes/no event bets as derivatives swaps rather than...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money examines Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz during a US-Iran war, tracing how 20% of global oil supply gets cut off and what a potential toll system means for the future of global trade. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Strait of Hormuz toll system:** Iran's Revolutionary Guard (Sepah Navy) operates a permission-based transit system requiring ships to submit vessel name, flag country, cargo details, and crew nationality.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money traces the commercial journey of its own book through the publishing supply chain, revealing how independent bookseller Fisher Nash at Carmichael's in Louisville evaluates 12,000–15,000 titles per season in 30-second windows, and how Norton's sales director Steven Pace manages print runs, returns, and retail distribution across every channel from airports to cruise ships.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Pete Stavros, a KKR private equity partner, runs an 85-company experiment giving hourly workers equity stakes in their employers. Starting in 2011 with a Minnesota safety equipment manufacturer, the program has created ownership stakes for over 190,000 workers, with some employees receiving six-figure payouts upon company sales. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Worker Equity Communication:** Announcing ownership stakes at acquisition—not silently at sale—drives measurably higher engagement...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Brad Reese, grandson of Reese's peanut butter cup inventor H.B. Reese, discovers Hershey's replaced milk chocolate and peanut butter with cheaper "chocolate candy" and "peanut butter cream" compounds in several product lines. His public campaign coincides with Hershey's announcing a full return to classic recipes by 2027. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Label decoding:** When buying chocolate products, check for the exact phrase "milk chocolate" on packaging.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Cuba's economy collapses under the weight of a 2025 U.S. oil embargo, exposing six decades of structural fragility built on alternating dependence on communist allies — the Soviet Union, Venezuela, China — and capitalist tourism. Havana bike tour operator Yasser Gonzalez Cabrera and economist Ricardo Torres trace how both strategies simultaneously failed.

→ WHAT IT COVERS The Squamish Nation, an indigenous group of ~5,000 people near Vancouver, reclaimed 10.5 acres of ancestral land in 2003 and leveraged their sovereign status to bypass Canadian zoning laws, building 11 skyscrapers with 6,000 rental apartments — a case study in what unrestricted urban development can achieve. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Sovereign Land as Zoning Exemption:** Indigenous nations in Canada are not bound by municipal zoning laws on reserve land.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money traces the full manufacturing journey of its own book, from editorial decisions and scratch-and-sniff experiments to navigating EU deforestation regulations, Trump-era tariff uncertainty, and a final pivot from Malaysia and Turkey to a million-square-foot Lakeside Book Company plant in Crawfordsville, Indiana. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Print-run economics:** Domestic US printing becomes cost-competitive at roughly 100,000 copies.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money traces the complete journey of its own book deal, from initial agent outreach through a 23-publisher speed-dating process, a multi-round email auction, and a final "beauty contest" that resulted in a seven-figure advance from W.W. Norton over a Big Five competitor. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Publishing gatekeeping funnel:** Literary agents receive and filter proposals before editors ever see them. Executive editor Tom Mayer at W.W.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money travels to Barcelos, Brazil — a remote Amazon town where 80% of the economy once depended on wild-caught cardinal tetras — to trace how fish farms in Southeast Asia disrupted this supply chain, and how the town is pivoting from ornamental fishing toward sport fishing tourism to survive. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Sustainable extraction paradox:** Conservation biologist Scott Dowd found that harvesting up to 40 million wild cardinal tetras annually from the Rio Negro is...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money tests robot chef "Robbie," a $36,000 wok-bot by Next Robot, against award-winning Cantonese chef Fung Huanchiang in a three-dish taste competition, while MIT Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu explains how automation displaces and reinstates jobs across industries, with restaurant kitchens now entering that same economic cycle. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Displacement vs.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money revisits a 2018 episode examining four behavioral laws that explain workplace dysfunction: Goodhart's Law, Parkinson's Law, the Peter Principle, and an unnamed social norm theory. Each law originated as satire or a joke but gained empirical support through psychology, economics, and field research across multiple industries and countries.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money examines the NBA's tanking problem — where teams deliberately lose games to secure better draft picks — and evaluates three structural reforms: the Draft Wheel, the Gold Plan (already used by the PWHL), and eliminating the draft entirely (already adopted by the NWSL in 2024). → KEY INSIGHTS - **Incentive Architecture:** Every ruleset creates exploitable incentives.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money examines the Canadian television production model through the lens of Heated Rivalry, a queer hockey romance streaming on HBO that cost roughly $2.2M USD per episode — well below the $4–10M US industry standard — while becoming a surprise cultural phenomenon across North America. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Canadian Production Funding Structure:** Canadian TV productions typically receive 20–30% of their budget from a broadcaster license fee, another 20–30% from combined...

→ WHAT IT COVERS University of Ottawa economist Abel Brodeur created the Replication Games, a hackathon-style event where teams of social scientists spend seven hours checking whether recently published academic papers hold up under scrutiny, addressing a two-decade replication crisis affecting psychology, medicine, and economics research worldwide. → KEY INSIGHTS - **P-Hacking Detection:** Researchers manipulate datasets by running hundreds of analytical variations until results cross the 5%...

→ WHAT IT COVERS ICE doubled its workforce to over 24,000 agents through aggressive recruitment, including $50,000 signing bonuses and waived age limits, while training duration shortened and detention infrastructure expands with $38 billion in new federal funding. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Training reduction:** New ICE recruits receive 14 weeks of training, fewer than previous cohorts and below the national average for state and local law enforcement.

→ WHAT IT COVERS The US Supreme Court rules Trump's sweeping IEEPA-based tariffs illegal, invalidating over $100 billion collected from importers worldwide. The episode examines refund pathways for businesses and consumers, a new hedge fund market trading tariff refund claims, and Trump's immediate pivot to a replacement 10% tariff under Section 122.