TED Radio Hour

Everybody likes free. But free can be dangerous, too. Today's show is sort of the flip side free. It is what happens when you take something that was free — and you give it a price, a decision many Internet companies face today. That is a highly risky move, it turns out. And the damage can be enormous. This week, free of charge, Chana Joffe-Walt and Alex Blumberg tell the story of the Red Cross and free doughnuts — that suddenly weren't free any more...

*Not really. But sort of. On today's show, we bring you three Planet Money radio stories, each of which looks at something indicator-ish: 1. The Beige Book: The 'Ask Your Uncle' Approach To Economics 2. The price of gold: What A Falling Gold Price Means For Pawn Shops 3. The price of a pedi-cab ride: How To Spend $442 on a 15-minute cab ride

On today's show, we took a tour of Detroit with a local newspaper reporter and an urban planner. We go see what happened to all the big dreams Detroit has had over the years.

U.S. citizens who want to buy stuff from North Korea have to write a letter to the U.S. government asking for special permission. As regular listeners know, we're sort of obsessed with North Korea. So we decided to try to get those letters. Several months ago, we filed a Freedom of Information Act request. It worked! We recently got a stack of heavily redacted letters...

On our show today, we tell you everything you need to know about the filibuster, including: What Schoolhouse Rock didn't tell us Why Aaron Burr and Jimmy Stewart are the two great villains in filibuster history How Senators can now filibuster bills without having to talk for hours on end * Note: Today's show is a rerun. It originally ran on December, 2012.

1. A Mashup Of Planet Money and American Top 40. 2. An econ summer mixtape. 3. How the top three songs in America explain the crazy transformation in the music business. Those three songs by the way, are by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Justin Timberlake and Icona Pop. They come from last week's America's Top 40. 

Climate change seems like this complicated, intractable problem. But maybe it doesn't have to be. On today's show, we talk to a couple economists about a very simple idea that could solve the climate-change problem: Tax carbon emissions. A carbon tax could be paired with cuts in the income tax. And it would drive down emissions without picking winners or losers, and without creating complicated regulations.

On today's show, we talk to commodities traders to answer one of the most important questions in finance: What actually happens at the end of Trading Places? We know something crazy happens on the trading floor. We know that Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd get rich and the Duke brothers lose everything. But how does it all happen? And could it happen in the real world? Also on the show: The "Eddie Murphy Rule" that wound up in the the big financial overhaul law Congress passed in 2010...

On today's Planet Money, we travel to a place where people are trying to live without government interference. A place where you can use bits of silver to buy uninspected bacon. A place where a 9-year-old will sell you alcohol. It's the Porcupine Freedom Festival, known to its friends as PorcFest. It's the summer festival for people who think we should return to the gold standard and abolish the IRS.

On today's Planet Money, we travel to a place where people are trying to live without government interference. A place where you can use bits of silver to buy uninspected bacon. A place where a 9-year-old will sell you alcohol. It's the Porcupine Freedom Festival, known to its friends as PorcFest. It's the summer festival for people who think we should return to the gold standard and abolish the IRS.