Category: Series

Super Bowl ads this year relied heavily on nostalgia and surprise –– a few tricks that turn out to embed information into our brains. Today, neuroscientist Charan Ranganath joins the show to dissect the world of marketing to its biological fundamentals and reveal advertisers' bag of tricks.

Charan Ranganath's new book is Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold On to What Matters.

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Any day now, social media platform Reddit is expected to launch an initial public offering (IPO), earmarking shares for its most dedicated users. On today's show, our friends at WBUR podcast Endless Thread help us unpack why Reddit is making this move, and what it might mean for Reddit's stock.

Related episodes:
r/boxes, r/Reddit, r/AIregs (Apple / Spotify)

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Indicators of the week is back! This time, we explore why oil and gas companies are pulling in record profits, whether bad commercial property debt is likely to spark a financial crisis and how much a lost tooth goes for in this economy.

Related Episodes
What could break next? (Apple / Spotify)

What's really happening with the Evergrande liquidation (Apple / Spotify)

How an empty office becomes a home

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Next week, the US Supreme Court will hear a case that pits the Attorneys General of Texas and Florida against a trade group representing some of the biggest social media companies in the world. Today, how we got here, and now the case could upend our online experience.

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Capital One Financial Corporation plans to acquire Discover Financial Services in a $35 billion deal that would combine two of the largest U.S. credit card companies. Today on the show, five big questions about the deal, and the opaque system behind every swipe, tap or insertion of your credit card.

Related:
Planet Money's TikTok on the secret behind credit card rewards

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In business, the million-dollar question is how to get people to buy stuff. But in wildlife conservation, the challenge is: how do we get people to not buy stuff? How do we bring down demand for fur, ivory and rhino horns? Today on the show, the story of a business trying to make lab-grown rhino horns and the backlash that followed.

Check out more of Juliana Kim's reporting for NPR here.

Related:
Supply, demand, extinction (Apple / Spotify)
Rhino Bonds
Shooting Bambi to Save Mother Nature

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It's Indicators of the Week — our weekly look under the hood of our global economy. Today we look at why cocoa prices are soaring, whether India's electoral bonds are bad for democracy and how a typo sent Lyft shares (briefly) soaring.

Related:
Cocoa prices hit a 47-year high before Valentine's Day
Can India become the next high-tech hub? (Apple / Spotify)
Lyft going public: The dual-class share dilemma
Big donors and pay-to-play politics

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In 2023, The Federal Reserve and other banking regulators announced they were making changes to how they grade banks on servicing local communities. This all stems from a 1977 law called the Community Reinvestment Act, which was designed to encourage banks to better meet the needs of moderate and low-income borrowers. However, major banking trade groups weren't too excited about the new rules and filed a lawsuit against the banking regulators last week.

Today on the show, we explain the history of racist housing policies in the United States and how that history informs the banks' fight with the government today.

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