The Indicator from Planet Money

@theindicatorfromplanetmoney · Podcast

Latest segments

• Halloween candy price surge, 2026-10-30
  Adds BLS candy inflation figures
  Adds a fresh official figure to the candy-price story: BLS data showing candy and chewing gum up 7.7 percent year over year, with Hershey's variety pack up about 20 percent. Then recaps cocoa costs, tariffs, the Reese's recipe change and the Indiana chili couple.
• Marquis's business school essay, 2026-10-28
  Questions the Wharton dean on the op-ed
  Puts the abolish-the-MBA argument to Wharton dean Erica James, who calls the op-ed a salacious oversimplification, concedes business schools were complicit in aggressive consulting and finance recruiting, and points to courses like Reforming Mass Incarceration. She and Marquis converge on engaging other disciplines.
• Marquis's business school essay, 2026-10-28
  Explains the case-study sign-off critique
  Marquis himself walks through the essay's argument: abolish means redesign, not closure, and the case-study method is the second pillar of the critique. He says companies must sign off before a case can be published, and that Harvard's early-2000s Enron cases sold a fraud as strategy.
• Marquis's business school essay, 2026-10-28
  Recaps the abolish-the-MBA op-ed
  Opens the episode on Marquis's op-ed, quoting its call to abolish business schools and noting his Cambridge post and earlier stops at Cornell and Harvard. Sets up the debate with the popularity of business majors; no new ground beyond the essay itself.
• Meta's Muse agent launch, 2026-10-27
  Reports Meta's refusal to comment on ads
  Turns to the Muse Charm keychain and the privacy question, then reports that Meta declined an on-the-record statement on whether Muse feeds targeted ads and on Patrick Wardle's security criticism. The refusal is the new fact; the rest is banter about wearing one.
• Meta's Muse agent launch, 2026-10-27
  Brings in Wardle's zero day and Meta's reply
  Brings in the security side of the Muse launch: researcher Patrick Wardle found a flaw in Muse's Mac app and dropped it as a zero day, forfeiting Meta's bounty, while Meta's David Singleton says it was fixed quickly.
• Meta's Muse agent launch, 2026-10-27
  Brings in Kantrowitz on the download numbers
  Brings in Alex Kantrowitz on the free Muse launch: more than 10 million downloads since early September, a free tier of 100 million tokens a week, and his read that Meta built Muse on standard models, shifting the race from intelligence to applications.
• Meta's Muse agent launch, 2026-10-27
  Explains how a free agent gets monetized
  Explains how a free agent gets monetized: ads near the point of purchase, referral fees and subscriptions, with Kantrowitz calling the combination internet gold. Notes Meta's claim that Muse conversations stay isolated from its ad systems.
• Meta's Muse agent launch, 2026-10-27
  Opens with a photographer's first-hand use
  Opens with a first-hand Muse user, a New York photographer who uses the agent for job hunting, apartment shopping and moving her website, and frames the episode around whether the free tool is a genie or a monkey's paw.
• Bots overtake human web traffic, 2026-10-26
  Extends the story into infrastructure economics
  Extends the bot-traffic story into infrastructure economics: Wildani's roads-and-trucks analogy, pay-per-crawl and subscription models, Amazon's Muse ban and a warned agentic bank run. Framing and explanation rather than a new development.
• Bots overtake human web traffic, 2026-10-26
  Brings in a former Cloudflare researcher
  Brings in a former Cloudflare AI research head to explain how AI crawlers differ from humans and how their summaries cut publisher traffic and ad revenue, extending the bot-traffic story into its business consequences.
• Bots overtake human web traffic, 2026-10-26
  Adds a writer's AI email and influencer tales
  Writer Erin Kassane describes AI-written emails from her estate lawyer and algorithm-tuned influencers, then the hosts explain Cloudflare's finding that more than half of web traffic is non-human and the dead internet theory built on it.
• PSA FedEx card heist, 2026-10-23
  Questions the $963,000 estimate and insured values
  Reports the theft as the week's indicator: the truck sat outside PSA with just-graded cards bound for customers, and the driver left it unattended. Notes the $963,000 figure is an estimate that may reflect insured values, and that PSA will compensate customers.
• Hot CPI selloff, 2026-10-23
  Adds Bloomberg's 60% default probability
  Puts a number on the CoreWeave credit story: Bloomberg's 60% five-year default probability. Walks through the lease-and-resell model, the WeWork comparison and Epoch AI's 13-fold annual cost decline, then notes NVIDIA's backstop.
• Ithaca acquires Bumble, 2026-10-16
  Questions Gupta's human-connection rationale
  Turns to the new co-CEO's stated rationale: Gupta's post frames the take-private as a bet on human connection as AI advances, and the hosts note he gave no clear plan for Bumble and that private ownership removes quarterly reporting.
• Ithaca acquires Bumble, 2026-10-16
  Puts a number on the take-private pop
  Puts a number on the take-private pop: Bumble stock returned 119%, with the buyers paying more than double the listed price. Notes Wolfe Herd's women-first framing against two men taking the co-CEO seats.
• September CPI shock, 2026-10-16
  Pulls supercore out of the September CPI
  Zooms in on the September CPI to pull out supercore: services inflation running at a 4.6% annualized rate over three months, a figure the day-one coverage of the print never put on the record.
• SNAP admin cost shift, 2026-10-09
  Breaks down the SNAP cost shift
  Opens Indicators of the Week with the SNAP funding shift: the feds' roughly $17 billion in five-year savings, Georgetown Law's estimate that Mississippi and West Virginia costs could quadruple, and the governors' open letter about leaving the program.
• ACA purge of 700,000, 2026-09-25
  Reports the 700,000 dropped from ACA plans
  Reports the administration's removal of more than 700,000 people from ACA plans, the reasons CMS gives, and the drop from 23 million to about 19 million enrollees, with experts warning of a death spiral.