Betty Boop, Excel Olympics, Penny-isms: Our 2026 Valentines

Book tour event details and ticket info here.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:The Public Domain Day list from Jennifer Jenkins’ of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain and her colleagues. Jesse Dougherty’s article “Between the sheets at the college Excel Championship” which is behind a paywall. Here is Jesse’s substack. 404 Media’s excellent journalism on the tech that ICE is usingAn ode to the language of the penny, including songs like Pennies from Heaven. The only self-check out that doesn’t waste your time. And we made public domain Valentine’s cards. Download THE OFFICIAL Planet Money valentine here.Pre-order the Planet Money book and get a free gift. / Subscribe to Planet Money+ Listen free: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.This episode of Planet Money was hosted by Kenny Malone. It was produced by James Sneed with help from Sam Yellowhorse Kesler, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, engineered by Cena Loffredo & Kwesi Lee, and edited by our executive producer Alex Goldmark.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Book tour tickets and details here.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 invention that tied them both together across more than a century. The patent pool.How do people get motivated to invent, and how do they get rewarded for their ideas? Usually through a patent. And, when the thicket of patents becomes too thick, how do we simplify, and make it so inventors can work together? The answer will involve bitter rivals, a sewing machine war, the nine no-no’s of anti-trust, and something called a gob-feeder. Subscribe to Planet Money+Listen free: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.This episode was hosted by Erika Beras and Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was produced by Luis Gallo and edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Book tour tickets and details here.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 what experts consider best practices.On today’s episode: What did US sanctions do to Iran's economy? How did they feed into the latest protests and crackdown in Iran? Sanctions are supposed to avert war, but how different from war are they?To learn more about the protests in Iran and the country’s history, check out our great friends at Throughline:Iran Protests ExplainedIran and the U.S., Part One: Four Days In AugustIran and the U.S., Part Two: Rules of EngagementIran and the U.S., Part Three: Soleimani’s IranSubscribe to Planet Money+Listen free: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.This episode was hosted by Mary Childs and Nick Fountain. It was produced by James Sneed with help from Willa Rubin. It was edited by Marianne McCune, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Cena Loffredo and Jimmy Keeley. Planet Money’s executive producer is Alex Goldmark. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Planet Money book tour ticket info and dates here. 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 answer the macro question. First, we hear a favorite story of ours from 2019. We follow the lifecycle of a delinquent car loan from three different perspectives: the salesman, the driver, and the repo man. Then we’ll hear an update from them in 2026 as we try to find out why so many Americans are behind on their car payments. Subscribe to Planet Money+Listen free: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.This episode is hosted by Kenny Malone and Preeti Varathan. It was originally produced by Darian Woods and edited by Bryant Urstadt. Our update was reported by Vito Emanuel and produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler, and edited by Planet Money’s executive producer, Alex Goldmark.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Book tour dates and ticket info here.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. Today on the show, we’re gonna take a close look at these two moves. And ask: Will they work?Subscribe to Planet Money+Listen free: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.This episode was produced by Willa Rubin with production help from Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was edited by Marianne McCune, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Jimmy Keeley and Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.Music: NPR Source Audio - "No Problem,”  “Fruit Salad,” “Checking In” and “Day Dreamer.”Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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 public housing. And some even paid for market-rate housing. The idea was that this would help create new opportunities for the low-income people who lived there and even lift people out of poverty.For years though, there wasn’t a clear answer to whether this approach actually succeeded. A new working paper from Raj Chetty and the team at Opportunity Insights finally provides some answers. On today’s show: Who really benefits when people living in poverty are more connected to their surrounding communities? Are there lessons from the HOPE VI experiment that could apply to other kinds of policies aimed at fostering upward mobility?More about Opportunity Insights’ study and a link to their interactive map here.Pre-order the Planet Money book and get a free gift. / Subscribe to Planet Money+Listen free: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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 psychedelic religious leaders like Pastor Dave from running afoul of the law, and get a peek into how the government decides whether a belief system counts as sincere religion.This episode was reported with support from The Ferriss – UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship. Subscribe to Planet Money+Listen free: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.This episode was hosted by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler and edited by Eric Mennel. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Kwesi Lee with help from Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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 stakes than any of us could have imagined. In the third episode of our series, we learn the importance of a good game name and theme and try to come up with one for our game. Find our previous episodes in the board game series, here and here.Pre-order the Planet Money book and get a free gift. / Subscribe to Planet Money+Listen free: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.This episode of Planet Money was hosted by Kenny Malone and Erika Beras. It was produced by James Sneed and edited by Marianne McCune, fact-checked by Willa Rubin, and engineered by Cena Loffredo and Kwesi Lee. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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, oddly, along for that ride…Chevron. Pre-order the Planet Money book and get a free gift. /  Subscribe to Planet Money+Listen free: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.This episode of Planet Money was hosted by Erika Beras and Kenny Malone. It was produced by Luis Gallo with help from Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was edited by Marianne McCune, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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 look at every new business and business deal and financial transaction that David says likely would not have happened if Trump wasn’t the president of the United States. And we stop at the most innovative ways Trump and his family have made all that.Pre-order the Planet Money book and get a free gift. / Subscribe to Planet Money+Listen free: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts. ??Listen to our playlist on Federal Reserve independence here.Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.Today’s episode of Planet Money was hosted by Sarah Gonzalez and Mary Childs. It was produced by James Sneed, edited by Jess Jiang, and fact checked by Sierra Juarez. Robert Rodriguez engineered it. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy