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 that is completely different from how we do things in the US.

In this episode of Planet Money, in partnership with the Pivot podcast co-hosted by Kara Swisher, we hear about a Canadian production model for making TV and movies and how it’s different from the U.S. model. And we learn what the experience of making Heated Rivalry teaches us about the current state of both industries.

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The original Pivot episode from New York Magazine and The Vox Media Podcast Network was hosted by Kara Swisher, produced by Lara Naman, Zoë Marcus and Taylor Griffin and engineered by Brandon McFarland. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's Executive Producer of podcasts. This episode of Planet Money was hosted by Kenny Malone, produced by James Sneed, edited by Jess Jiang and fact-checked by Lara Naman. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

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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, designed to keep social scientists honest. He calls it the “Replication Games.” 

Further Listening:

• Fabricated data in research about honesty. You can't make this stuff up. Or, can you? 
• The Experiment Experiment 
• How Much Should We Trust Economics?

This episode was hosted by Mary Childs and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It was produced by James Sneed and Emma Peaslee, with help from Willa Rubin. It was edited by Jess Jiang, fact-checked by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler, and engineered by Ko Takasugi-Czernowin. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer. 

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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 episodes were originally published on Planet Money’s sister daily podcast The Indicator.

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The episodes of The Indicator were produced by Julia Ritchey, with engineering by Jimmy Keeley. They were fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Kate Concannon is our show's editor.

This episode of Planet Money was produced by Luis Gallo, with help from James Sneed. It was edited by Planet Money’s Executive Producer, Alex Goldmark.

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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. Tariffs. Ever. 
- Tariffs: What are they good for? 
- What "Made in China" actually means
- The 145% tariff already did its damage 
- Are Trump's tariffs legal?
- Days of our Tariffs 
- Trump's backup options for tariffs 
- What would it mean to actually refund the tariffs? 

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This episode was hosted by Jeff Guo, Mary Childs, and Sarah Gonzalez. It was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler and Willa Rubin. It was edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer. 

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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 doesn’t want to be sold is not the interesting question. What is interesting is how we got to this moment. And, how we might gracefully get out of it. 

Greenland is valuable for its minerals and because of its physical location in the world. (It’s easy to keep an eye on other countries from Greenland).

Our latest: How the U.S. dropped the ball on the rare earths race. And one way the U.S. gets strategic locations without threatening to buy or take over an entire territory.


Further listening: 

- Is Greenland really an untapped land of riches?

- Add to cart: Greenland


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This episode was produced by Willa Rubin with help from Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was edited by Marianne McCune. Fact-checking help from Sierra Juarez. It was engineered by Kwesi Lee and Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

Music: Universal Music Production - "The Attraction,” “Carnivore,” and “Walls Come Out.”

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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:

• 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 using
• An 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.

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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.

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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 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. 

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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.

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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 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 Explained

Iran and the U.S., Part One: Four Days In August

Iran and the U.S., Part Two: Rules of Engagement

Iran and the U.S., Part Three: Soleimani’s Iran

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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. 

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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 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. 

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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.

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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. 

Today on the show, we’re gonna take a close look at these two moves. And ask: Will they work?

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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.”

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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 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.

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