TED Radio Hour

Here's the scenario: A man and his wife are desperate to get to the hospital because she is about to deliver a baby. It's a hot summer day. It's rush hour. They flag down a private car and ask, "How much?" To their surprise the driver wants to charge them four times the normal price of a cab...

Ben Horowitz is a big-time venture capitalist. His firm invested in Facebook and Twitter. More recently, his firm invested some $50 million in startups related to bitcoin, the virtual currency that works like online cash. Ben thinks bitcoin is going to change the way people buy and sell stuff on the Internet.   Felix Salmon, a high-profile finance blogger at Reuters, is a prominent bitcoin skeptic...

Tomato inflation in South America. Coal start-ups in Indonesia. Fat Cats on Wall Street. What do they all have to do with each other? Their fates all rest on the words out of one man: Ben Bernanke.

Last week, we solicited your questions about dating, sex and love. This one came from 17-year-old, Arthur, who lives in Pittsburgh: I am a senior in high school and I have never been on a date. Should I be worried about this? When I do finally meet someone, will I be hurt by my inexperience? On today's show, economist and author, Tim Harford, applies economic theory to Arthur's question. He also tackles polyamory and offers suggestions on how to change your spouse's behavior.

In the mountains of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, there are basically no jobs. Villages are empty of young men, who go elsewhere in Mexico or to the U.S. to find work. On today's show, we meet two cousins from Oaxaca who dream of bringing jobs to their village. Their strategy: Launch a startup to make mezcal, a popular local liquor — then get people in the U.S. to buy it.

On today's show: Three stories about people who, intentionally or not, found themselves breaking the rules. 1. In A City With Terrible Traffic, A Gridlock Economy Emerges 2. Why U.S. Taxpayers Started — And Stopped — Paying Brazilian Cotton Farmers 3. How A Community Bank Tripped On Footnote 1,861 Of The Volcker Rule

For most of U.S. history, there was no minimum wage. A few times, politicians passed laws tiptoeing toward a minimum. But the Supreme Court struck those laws down. On today's show: how the U.S. finally got a minimum wage. It's a story of exploding bakeries, a blue eagle, and a guy who may or may not have been drunk.

To hire new employees, some companies are paying less attention to resumes and more attention to data — and the data are leading to some surprising findings. On today's show, we take a weird hiring test for a call-center job. And we hear what does (and doesn't) predict success for everyone from call-center workers to software developers.

Note: This episode was originally posted in 2011. If you know the right people — and if you can get other criminals to vouch for you — you can go online and buy huge bundles of stolen credit cards. As it turns out, Planet Money knows the right people. On today's show, we sit in with Keith Mularski of the FBI. Mularski got so deep into this world that he wound up running a major criminal website...

A famous biologist predicts overpopulation will lead to global catastrophe. He writes a bestselling book and goes on the Tonight Show to make his case. An economist disagrees. He thinks the biologist isn't accounting for how clever people can be, and how shortages can lead to new, more efficient ways of doing things. So the economist, Julian Simon, challenges the biologist, Paul Ehrlich, to a very public, very acrimonious, decade-long bet...