Tracy Alloway: Speaking of formative life experiences and growing up in hidden economic forces. One of the things I learned from this book is that when I was performing as a California Raisin at the age of six, I was actually participating in a government Psyop, explains how we know. You explain that.

Joe Weisenthal: What? You were a baby raisin?

Tracy Alloway: I don't remember a lot from my childhood, but I do remember putting on a purple swimsuit with big white gloves and singing 'I Heard it through the grapevine' as part of some school production.

Joe Weisenthal: Okay, fantastic. I don't think I would be invited to do that, but I do feel I would remember if I did. That does feel formative. I love that.

Tracy Alloway: Okay, so California Raisins. They were part of a government-induced ad campaign for raisins. I had no idea.

Tracy Alloway: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe Weisenthal. Joe, you and I have talked about doing a book at various times.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah, talked about it. That's pretty much it.

Tracy Alloway: We talk about it and then we get a few emails from agents and publishing houses. So much work. And then we get distracted and then we get distracted.

Tracy Alloway: But the one thing I was thinking about is maybe that idea of a recipe book, maybe one we should consider at some point, a cookbook.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah. Supply chain. Yeah, yeah. About the food and the business of it. You totally do that. Maybe some good recipes.

Tracy Alloway: All right, all right. So we are actually going to get our act together and do this. Okay.

Joe Weisenthal: Well, our guests today are people who have actually gotten their act together to publish a book while running a highly successful podcast. It is, of course.

Tracy Alloway: So we're going to learn what to do. We're going to. That's right. Going to take notes. That's right. Actually someone who's written two books now, so I don't really know how she does it. But the through line in all of this is I'm just going to say it. We're going to be talking to one of the Planet Money co-hosts and a longtime contributor to Planet Money, and they've written this new book called Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life.

Joe Weisenthal: And one of the through lines that I think we share between our thoughts and Planet Money is this idea that there are all these hidden economic forces that dictate the way we live.

Tracy Alloway: Totally.

Joe Weisenthal: I mean, there's been especially the, you know, the less I mean, it's always the case, right? But especially in the last several years, which is just the sort of the invisible becoming the visible.

Tracy Alloway: Yeah. Which I guess they're not. Are they the? Yeah. You know, we see how they shape their life, but they're all these things that we take for granted. And now they're in our face and we're only scratching the surface of what we know about them. Right?

Joe Weisenthal: We all became supply chain experts during Covid. We became trade experts during 2025, and now we're all going to become commodity experts given the Iran situation.

Tracy Alloway: Well, without further ado, we do have the perfect guests, right? The people who actually wrote the book, we're going to be speaking with Alex Mayyasi and Mary Childs. So thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

Mary Childs: Thank you for having us. Pleasure to be here.

Alex Mayyasi: It's an honor to finally be the perfect guest.

Joe Weisenthal: Oh, you've been the perfect guest before, I know, but now I'm.

Mary Childs: It's like the sun is shining on me. You know what I mean? I am the perfect guest.

Joe Weisenthal: All right, so why a book? And how did you manage to do it between your actual day job of podcasting?

Mary Childs: Well, this one's easy for me because I did almost no work. Alex did all of the book work, and so that's what I would recommend in terms of division of labor is to not do the work.

Joe Weisenthal: Okay. That's my specialization.

Mary Childs: Still has a place. I think that is good advice, I think. Yeah. So just have a friend who's a longtime contributor. But basically, I think a lot of our work feeds itself, and it's such a different medium and writing and processing, the way that you synthesize some of the episodes is kind of crazy because it's a story in a totally different way. But yeah, it's a very collaborative team effort is what I would say.

Joe Weisenthal: Why don't you talk about your process, Alex? And again, as the one who apparently actually did all the work.

Tracy Alloway: I don't know. Tracy and I are going to have to play rock, paper, scissors if we ever do this. Do all the write the book or just the, I don't know, like a loser.

Joe Weisenthal: I don't want to write. I'm busy. I'm busy because I feel I won, but you know.

Tracy Alloway: Well, okay. Sure. Yeah.

Joe Weisenthal: I'm too scarred from my experience. But it's like, all right. Intuitively, you're doing the reporting for the podcast. You encounter a lot of things, and assembling some of these big ideas into a book makes sense. But then again, the actual process. So how do you go from thinking about, you hear all these things you talk about and learned about, to putting it on paper, kind of?

Alex Mayyasi: Yeah, I think probably the first big decision was really coming up with an organizing principle for the book. So one of the early ideas we had was to think of this book as a field guide. You can imagine leaving your house in the morning and tucking it under your arm to help you as you experience the economic forces outside your door. And then from there, there were some different ideas we had about how to structure the book. There was some thought to maybe start with your younger years, and then increasing sections are as you get older, then retirement. Then we were like, we do end in death, which sounds a little morbid, but then again, I loved the idea of an epilog about the economics of graveyards, which is a fascinating topic. But ultimately, we structured the book about different parts of your life, such as some expected ones: working career, saving, investing, and some that are less expected, leisure, as well as love and family. And so I think from there with this idea of a field guide to the biggest economic forces that shape your life, that impact you, that gave us, and gave me in particular, some ability to look at both some really classic Planet Money episodes that we thought we'd love to get that story in the book, as well as new ideas I had, other members of the team had, and be able to have some filter or criteria, to say, 'Okay, what belongs in this book?' and 'What doesn't?'"

Tracy Alloway: Okay. So speaking of formative life experiences and growing up in hidden economic forces. One of the things I learned from this book is that when I was performing as a California Raisin at the age of six, I was actually participating in a government Psyop. You explain that.

Joe Weisenthal: What? You were a baby raisin?

Tracy Alloway: I don't remember a lot from my childhood, but I do remember putting on a purple swimsuit with big white gloves and singing 'I Heard it through the grapevine' as part of some school production.

Joe Weisenthal: Okay, fantastic. I don't think I would be invited to do that, but I do feel I would remember if I did. That does feel formative. I love that.

Tracy Alloway: Okay, so California raisins. They were part of a government-induced ad campaign for raisins. I had no idea.

Alex Mayyasi: And this is agriculture, right, is an unusual sector. And one thing that is unusual about it is that there are cases where there are government-sanctioned cartels, blessed by the power of the federal government and in fact, enforced by the federal government. The government is often trying to prevent different businesses within a sector from collaborating to try and fix and increase prices. Instead, in some agricultural sectors, like raisins, the US government has historically made an agreement with the raisin growers and said, 'Okay, you are able to form a cartel,' or they often use words like 'cooperative.' So that you can collaborate as an industry, which is nice.

Mary Childs: I never really thought about how different that word lands. It's like, 'Oh, we're part of a dairy cooperative.' It's like, 'Oh, that's great,' because it's just the word for group in Spanish. I feel that's unfair to the word group.

Alex Mayyasi: An economist certainly uses the word cartel non-pejoratively. That's just what's happening here. But you're right. When you think of a dairy cooperative or these different cooperatives, they are all friends here. They are businesses, all working together, often to restrict supply and increase the price. And that's what was going on with the raisin cartel in California, centered in Carmen, where lots of raisins are grown. And I think the economic logic for it is there are things about agriculture that are hard. Sometimes you have all these small farmers that are going to sell to a few processors or dairy markets. So you want them to have leverage, almost like a union. There's also a way if you have a bumper crop one year, then you get a low price, but then the next year if you have a terrible crop, maybe the price is higher, but you don't have that much to sell. So there's no way that the government sees value in allowing them to cooperate to smooth out the supply. And that's what was happening with raisins.

Mary Childs: It also meant that when they had this organization that was responsible for managing the supply of raisins year to year in an effort to smooth things out but also boost the price, they also advertised. So, yeah, their big issue was these singing raisins. And apparently you always wonder, why didn't I know this two years ago? This is a growing interest, you know.

Joe Weisenthal: So again, milk is another one of these things that was collectively advertised for years, just the 'drink milk' campaigns. So mustaches that all the celebrities wear.

Tracy Alloway: But it's interesting musing on this a little further, because we've done a fair number of episodes about agribusiness and gigantic, really powerful, nationwide entities. And whether it's chicken or restaurant supply, of course, a really large company, they solved the coordination problem by being one company. And there's no, you know, they can pass pricing. There is no law as far as I know that says the West Coast manager can't coordinate on prices with the East Coast manager. But then you have these independent entities, a farm, and if they can't, intuitively, if they can't coordinate on some level, whether it's output and price, then how would we ever expect smaller companies to compete against gigantic companies that have that ability to do internal coordination?

Mary Childs: I just love that. It's like, how did we pick raisins? Why are raisins so important? Am I supposed to be eating way more raisins?

Alex Mayyasi: I mean, some people would have strong opinions on that. I think raisins were a big deal. Some really big raisin farms had really boom years during World War Two. They were growing lots of raisins that were bought by the federal government to send to the troops. And I think probably I'm going to, this is not, I've not done a deep dive on this, but I would also assume. Right, the same way that children used to receive an orange for Christmas and be happy about it. I assume also that the sweetness of raisins was much more impressive when we were not just in winter on a daily basis. Now you're the neighborhood villain if you give out raisins for Halloween.

Joe Weisenthal: Or sorry, just to be clear, is it still the same market structure for raisins?

Alex Mayyasi: It has changed for raisins. Okay, you know, the story in the book, and this one comes from a classic amazing Planet Money episode, is about two farmers. They're a couple, ran their farm together. And there was a year in the early 2000s where the leadership of the cartel said, 'Okay, this year we're diverting everyone's diverting 47% of their crop, so not selling it, and instead it goes to the cartel, which in theory, will save it, sell it later and then pass money back.' But in practice, this couple of farmers felt this decision just kind of comes on high down to us. We's not involved. And they spend a lot of that money on, sometimes marketing coups like the California raisins, but other things, administrative costs that they didn't necessarily see a huge benefit from in their opinion. So they decided they felt they'd found a legal loophole where if they did certain aspects of packing raisins themselves, they felt that they therefore were not covered by the legislation and had to be part of the cartel and could sell their entire crop themselves. This led to a stakeout and someone, a guy named Rocky, getting video footage of raisins leaving their farms in a court case. And this ultimately went all the way to the Supreme Court. Imagine staking out raisins.

Joe Weisenthal: And so it was.

Alex Mayyasi: In which way to the Supreme Court basically ended the raisin. Yeah. Because some earlier decisions found against these farmers, the Horns. And they would have had to pay a lot of money, and the cartel would have endured. But the Supreme Court sided with them, said that this is more or less a 'take out of property' situation, and that this should not be enforced by federal law. So the cartel still exists, but more as an organization that maybe does coordination, maybe advertisements, but that farmers like the Horns are not compelled to divert the raisins to anymore. So it really changed the system.

Joe Weisenthal: You thanked the cartel. You briefly mentioned oranges. And this is the other thing I learned. I learned many things from this book, but one thing that stood out to me was this idea that you have Cuties, the orange brand. And you think that's one particular variety of oranges. But actually, it turns out that sometimes it's different fruit. What's going on there?

Alex Mayyasi: Yeah, I mean, I think this was something fun to do with the book that we had this amazing episode about these raisin farmers, the raisin cartel. You can learn about cartels in agriculture. But for the book, there's also this opportunity to show 'Oh, this really represents the commodity trap.' Companies are always in competition, and in a state of perfect competition, their profits go down to zero because they're all busy trying to lower their price, make a better product, which is great for all of us as consumers, but not great if you want to make a profit. So how do you get out of that? A cartel is one way they may be able to boost your price by managing the supply and having pricing power. It was really interesting. The farmers in the episode, and that I spoke to, it turned out they kind of had their own idea. They almost wanted to do it in their own way. They wanted to escape the commodity trap in their own way. So one of them was experimenting with he wanted to sell his own raisin snack packs, and he was putting spicy stuff on his raisins or doing some sweet mixes. And that was kind of his dream, to sell those. And then I think branding is another way that companies are able to have pricing power or customer loyalty. So it is interesting, agriculture, part of the reason you have cartels is because it's really hard to have any pricing power there.

Mary Childs: But this is one of those ways that with Cuties, they achieved brand recognition and pricing power. There are other times I get some other Clementine and I don't like it as much. And then the next time I look for the Cuties and I buy the Cuties. And they probably charge a little bit more, and I'm okay with that because it's a dependable product that I like. And they did it by creating this cute, cartoonish character that many of us have seen on the packaging. And so that's yeah, I think and to your point, it's actually not always the same fruit in the bag because obviously fruits go through cycles. And so when the harvest for one ends and they run out, then they switch to a similar one. But under the same brand name. That's truly successful branding when you have a different product, but it's still recognized as the same thing. It's just trust us. Don't worry about it. You're going to be safe.

Joe Weisenthal: Oh, this conversation is really making me think generally about how, to some extent rare, true free market capitalism is in a lot of different industries. And whether we're talking about really big entities like OPEC came up, or whether we're talking about raisins, it's really hard to have a sustainable industry without some level of coordination, especially if there's a commodified element to what's being sold.

Alex Mayyasi: Yeah. If you want the end result to be that your society definitely has something. There needs to be some degree of stability, dependability, regulation, something in there to make sure that it's actually smoothing those market cycles.

Mary Childs: Yeah. And I think this is why a field of economics that I'm really interested in is market design because I think, right, market design started with some of these case studies of really unusual goods. What a lot of listeners might know, kidneys is a canonical example. Iran is the one place in the world where you can sell a kidney. But most the world, the United States, we're not going to sell kidneys. So how do you match people up? How do you make those 'transactions' happen? But I think market design, with the growth of this field, it's also reached into other things where there certainly are prices. And I think it's also leading to more focus on, as you say, the way that this laissez faire market, that almost feels like it just sprung from the Earth, is not really a thing. There are often rules being made, sometimes very intentionally, sometimes sporadically and random. But I just think about the fact that Wall Street and finances are probably most people's main image of a bastion of pure capitalism. They literally have trading hours, and they close for the day, or they have circuit breakers, where we stop to have. And they're not necessarily that onerous, but they have, there's various I forget the tests that people have to take, the certification tests, and Finra, and certain of these bodies that regulate who can get in. They play a similar coordinating also rules on insider trading rules.

Joe Weisenthal: And then it's also I was thinking while you were talking about Al Roth, the kidney guy. I feel the way that he sees the world is you actually have markets everywhere, and you are choosing to see them or not by what you regulate. So it is always a coordination problem. And you're just like, if you aren't regulating it and allowing this market legally, then you're allowing it in the black market. And that's also a choice. And you're accepting whatever negative externalities come with that. Like in prohibition, it was 'Will you have to buy your liquor from a gangster and maybe get shot?' Is that a good social structure? And we didn't like that. So I yeah.

Tracy Alloway: And it also led to the over-proliferation of speakeasy bars in wealthy cities around the world.

Joe Weisenthal: You mentioned society earlier, and one topic that I think we've both done podcasts on before, and it's a big chapter in your book, is Child Care. Which is a great demonstration in the overall economy of how the prices of goods keep going down. TVs are cheaper than ever and bigger than ever. Meanwhile, child care just seems to be this basket case of a service, and the cost keeps going up. What did you learn from that chapter?

Mary Childs: That's one of my favorites, for obvious reasons. I think it's such a problem that we have across our society that is a problem that came of good things. Economic progress means everybody's got jobs, everybody's wages are going up. The prices for a lot of these goods. As we have technological advancements and improvements in efficiencies, the prices go down. And that's fantastic. Our phones get smarter. No one buys cameras separately anymore unless you're literally a photographer. And then that means all these tech salaries are going up, and labor is getting more and more expensive. And so meanwhile, across the economy, there are all these jobs that are not scalable, that are just people jobs where you have to do them with your hands, and they're kind of bespoke, and they're just you can't make these same technological advancements and make the cost go down. So there's this weird inelasticity there. But those people doing those jobs are, 'I'm making 20 bucks an hour doing childcare or singing on Broadway.' And 'Great. But I could be over here, thinking more about chips and making these technological advancements and feed my family and then some. So what am I doing?' And so they migrate over, which makes the labor supply harder in the child care sector. And you get this. It's just a broken system. So daycares, child care centers, have to operate at razor-thin margins just to be able to get, even though it's so expensive. It's crazy because I've never understood this. Everyone is paying insane amounts for a child. Literally insane. And the child care centers don't seem to actually make that much money off of it.

Joe Weisenthal: That's correct.

Mary Childs: So you just it's such an empirical question, you just go and you stack up each thing. It's like, 'Okay, you got to pay for the real estate. You got to pay for the insurance. You got to pay for the labor.' So that the people are there, and then you're just out of money, even though there are waitlists for longer than the duration of childhood. Right? You get on a waitlist. And 'I think I'm still on waitlist for my five-and-a-half-year-old who's now in kindergarten.' I'm like, 'I just didn't get in,' I guess. And that's because they have to keep these waitlists in order to say 'Okay, to keep their spots filled' so that they can operate. They're basically offering their services at a discount, which is wild because it's so in demand, and they should be able to raise prices. But there's also another thing where because the family making the choice to put their kid in daycare, they have an out. They could just one of them could drop out of the labor force. So that ends up putting a cap on how much you can actually charge. So it's broken in a few different ways. And what ends up happening is you just need intervention. If you want this to be a service, you need intervention.

Joe Weisenthal: This interesting. I actually had not thought about that element, that if you hit a certain price, then one of the parents, usually the mother, will just drop out of the workforce and do it, which is not the same case with health care, right? So, it's just right there. They get, you know, you keep raising the price of a heart transplant. It's like, 'Okay, what am I going to do?' I'm just going to get into heart surgery myself and do this my own. And that's never going to happen. But that's an interesting dynamic in terms of what puts a lid on the potential for, margin expansion.

Mary Childs: Yeah. And our brilliant colleague Sarah Gonzalez calls this 'baby's first market failure' because everyone's, 'I'm willing to pay so much money.' And yet there are lines everywhere. Why are there lines? That's a market failure. It is the fact that there's this cap on the price. And therefore, because people have the alternative, they may not be ideal, of dropping out of the workforce. One member of the couple. And so that's why we're in this place. Really long lines, a market failure.

Joe Weisenthal: One thing that I think about a lot is, I went to an elite university. And I was, in my career, I've been around a lot of people, well-educated. It's the number of people who I would call peers who went into education, setting aside childcare, became a teacher. So I know one. It's really extra. One person, my friends, went to, became a public school teacher. And it's extraordinary to me. The degree to which this career, which many people think is really vital and important to society. And of course, public school teachers, an element of their job is childcare. And that's where people, how disconnected that is from people who have had the privileges of myself and all these people I know, never think about going into that as a career option.

Tracy Alloway: I mean, do you know many public school teachers that you went to college with or anything?

Joe Weisenthal: No. And I absolutely have a friend who works on the tech side of finance. And you were like, he would be such a good teacher, you probably shouldn't do it.

Alex Mayyasi: Yeah. But I think, this way that these parts of the economy that look very similar, they're very labor intensive. They look very similar to the way they did 50 years ago, maybe even 100 years ago. They don't have those crazy productivity gains of factories, of software. It's a very simple idea, but it can explain so much.

Mary Childs: Yeah. And I think one kind of implication of it is that a lot of labor intensive services are things provided by the public, by the government. So, you know, public schools, policing, firefighting, there are technological improvements there and gains to be made, for sure. But they are still they're very labor intensive. And I think part of the reason why, you know, teacher salaries are low, and budget squeeze there is because of cost is, is and it's a you know, I've absolutely like spoken with people in firefighting where this is a big problem that like their labor costs keep going up and lots of places have not therefore also increased.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah. You know, we're not all thinking about cost as either all the time being like of course my taxes need to go up x percent a year to account for cost is ease. But maybe we shouldn't be talking about, like, I think we should be talking about it. Like, if you want to make sure that, like, people can go into firefighting, go into teaching, you know, make a solid wage, afford to live in, especially the really successful cities where there is a lot of growth that is great, but also makes cost as easy even worse, like it is important to think about. That's a very, very strong argument for public subsidies or, you know, the government providing the service and, you know, increasing taxes potentially to.

Tracy Alloway: I like this. I'm facing that line at the end of the chapter is basically just like the it's a good thing the sign of your economy doing well is that your taxes go up forever. It's like, whoa, that's definitely an optimistic way of looking at it for sure.

Joe Weisenthal: Well, one like thought experiment question I had on this was, does I start to change this equation at all in the sense that, okay, the problem here is that you have a bunch of child care workers who see other industries that are making big productivity gains and higher salaries, and they can leave. And then if we have I come in to all these sectors that typically see a lot of productivity gains, like software or other white collar jobs to some of that leakage start to stop.

Mary Childs: I like this question is it's like a reverse backlash that's like dimmest. It's like a bunch of people are going to have to get into home health care because they already see, like most new job creation in the US has been in the health care. They're going to be like, oh, yeah, but I think that's not wrong. Like because all the AI disruption, yeah, collapse is a sector of the economy of the labor market. And then those people need jobs. And so they go into the things that are bespoke human hand jobs like child care and home.

Tracy Alloway: I love it, I love it. This has been my joke idea for a website. I want a vibe code, which is and I'll just say it because it's not just saying, you know, I feel like you've already said it was on a podcast, I think. I mean, it was basically a website and you like enter and there's like, what is your career? What is your education level? And, yeah. And how many years have you worked? And then is it going okay, what will your job be? Post AGI if you click it and everyone just gets returned, the same answer home health care.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah. One exact point to do it. Well, I might maybe I'll make it. Maybe you should do it.

Alex Mayyasi: But I also I think I kind of have a pitch here. So whoever will be like the overlords in our AI future, like, please consider my pitch. Okay. But like, you know, charge you for listening. You know, like, I think it was kind of required and like, I don't know, the arts the early 20 tens. So whenever someone wrote about a four day workweek for basic universal income, you would talk about how John Maynard Keynes made this prediction about, you know, I don't remember exactly how far out, but, you know, an X number of decades, you know, we'll be live. It will be so much richer. This will kind of be our living standard abundance. And therefore we'll be working way fewer hours. Yeah.

Joe Weisenthal: And famously, he underestimated how much wealthier Britain would get, as well as other countries like United States. But of course, he greatly overestimated the idea that he thought we'd be working like 20 hours a week, ten hours a week. But of course, like working hours have stayed quite high. And I think a point I've seen and I'm sorry, I forget who made this point first, but I thought was really smart. I was like, well, it's not. Yeah, we're not all working ten hours a week. But now, like children in the vast majority of the world don't work. And retirees retire. So like we made choices so that, you know, some people could work last and could get an education or have a secure retirement. And I do think, like if we are going to I don't know if it's coming, but if we are contemplating the potential of a world that has so much. Yeah, you know, intelligence on demand, so much automation and so much abundance that we like in theory, don't know what to do with ourselves. Like perhaps allowing parents to not be like, man, I could barely afford childcare. Do I drop out? And it feels like a terrible choice. And instead of being a place where it's like it's a social norm, that like we are wealthy enough that people can drop out to take care of your children during formative years. Like, that's a vision I would love to see people express with excitement more.

Mary Childs: Can I push back just a little bit, which is, as a person, I push back on the that's so nice, but I care too.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah, no, no, no, I mean, I agree, let me work in defense of cans because I've thought about this a lot, which was like, you know, think about like what quote work meant when he wrote the book or sorry when he was writing that. Yeah. And now think about that. Like there are those of us who have like, jobs, literally like writing books and talking and stuff like that. He's like, it's fun, bro. I'm just I'm just saying, like, does it really compare to, like what? Like what Keynes had in mind when he talked about work and labor and toil versus what so many people do in the knowledge? Does that even, like count as work? In other words, like a lot of people really like their jobs these days in a way that I suspect was not the case when teens is writing. And so it's like, are you even are people who like their jobs even, quote, working 15 hours a week and never have to go into a coal mine?

Alex Mayyasi: Yeah.

Joe Weisenthal: Let's just say like the finger. Honestly, this is what he was talking about when he was talking about work. Yeah. And now there are a lot of people that literally never have to do any hours, let alone 15, but any hours of work. Now, I understand that's not everyone, but those are the jobs that are most likely to be sure. Sure.

Alex Mayyasi: But yeah, I'm just saying, like, I think like my decade average might have been more right than yeah,

Joe Weisenthal: I think these are two good defensive games. But the point that like, there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot more leisure time, which just now people actually retire and they're not toiling in fields because they're insecure. And the fact that a lot of people, yes, are getting like self-actualization from their job. Yeah, that feels like a story of progress as well.

Alex Mayyasi: Well, actually, on this note, I mean, there's a lot in the book that is framed like very optimistically. And you make a lot about if you, you know, human advancement and the idea there's the famous chart in there of like, how much you would have to, work in order to afford, like, a certain amount of light over time. Like, there's a lot of human progress in this book. But if you look around in 2026, certainly in America, it doesn't feel like that's necessarily translating into the general vibes. There's this sort of like nihilistic sense of wealth building and economic advancement and people just sort of giving up and thinking that the system is rigged against them and that they're never going to be able to afford a house or whatever.

Joe Weisenthal: In your view, as the authors of a whole book on, you know, a Guide to Economic Life, is that a failure of like, storytelling about how the economy works? Or is that sense, that vibe shift and actual reflection of like secular stagnation in the way the economy works?

Mary Childs: Well, my bias would be the latter, but I didn't write the book, so I want to I do want to let you answer first.

Alex Mayyasi: I think my inclination is like, yes, like both. You know, I think there's both. I think the fact that, I think we see in surveys that people often think that the average American is working more than ever, when in fact you know, we have seen not huge but modest decreases in the amount of time that the average American works. There's often a lot of sense that American, the average American or median American, has become much worse off. That does not match up with statistics. So I think there is absolutely some, like whether it's built in or not, there's pessimism there that's perhaps, you know, maybe it's something about human nature, maybe it's something about storytelling and maybe this book can help, you know, be a positive force in that respect. But I also think, like, you know, this book is absolutely, you know, has chapters talking about big challenges and places where, you know, we have housing shortages. And that's often from people making selfish choices, ones that are rational and understandable, but that that lead to, you know, this problem of housing shortages, high rents, people not being able to afford homeownership. There are other examples. I think also a way I think about it is right, like we have the hockey stick chart growth of the global economy over the last 200 years, and it's incredible. But at the same time, like, you know, I feel that way. I feel anxiety, anxiousness. I don't feel fully secure and optimistic about everything.

Mary Childs: You're not and it's sometimes you can, like, flip on a light switch and get hours and hours you had on the treadmill. And then I forget about it. But I also think it's, you know, it's maybe that way where it's like you can be somewhat comforted by the incredible story of progress we are part of. But probably if we all took that for granted, you know, with the progress continue. And it feels kind of similar. I don't know if you've had experiences, right, like you're working on a project and you're nervous about it and you're tense and. Okay, well, I'll just put this in first person because it's true. Me you can tell me the trivia, but like, you're working on a project, you're tense, you're nervous, you're stressed about it. And as many times as I tell myself you've done similar projects like this before, you figured it out. It went really well at tribal this time, too. I'm absolutely going to be anxious and stressed for quite a bit of that time. You know, some good moments too. But I will be I will have those, you know, that anxiety and whatnot. And like, maybe I could get to a place where I'm just blissful the entire project, but probably some amount of that stress and anxiety is required. And if it wasn't there, I wouldn't actually get to the good outcome.

Joe Weisenthal: I feel in my head there's like, oh, I was so blessed. I could turn on a light switch and I get light and I can afford raisins and all that stuff, and I always go hear people say like, oh, well, you know, you can I get penicillin? And like, you know, the King of England 200 years ago would have died from this infection. Whatever. I understand that my head, it does nothing for me. I go, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it's like I get that and I, I appreciate it. Great. I love this is the cost of freedom like that. But like, it does not do it. It does not actually like on any like real emotional level make me happy and just sort of like I like intellectually we have a Planet Money episode for this. This is the cost of free donuts. Once you start getting something for free, you will not pay for it. So it's not the exact. But like you have these things already, you do not delight in their arrival every time.

Mary Childs: Although I do delight in the arrival of a Marxist and like I feel like actually it's just this whole thing to be so appreciative because you think about how, like they were, the king would have been so jealous of you. I like great, but that's still like I'm exhausted at the end of the day and all this stuff, but it only goes so far. And I think there is a disconnect between like, you know, we've had life expectancy like peak in this country and things are there is there does seem to be some kind of sea change in how our trajectory is going. I think we yes, we can accept that we're way better off than we were 100 years ago. We're not all dying in the mines. Children are working like this is all great. But I think that that there in the past five, ten years, there is this sort of, I don't know, there's a hollowing the inequality stuff, the like the rise of AI and the like future that we all know is going to be very different there in the middle of this enormous transition. I don't I mean, I think we all can accept like the the disconnect between consumer sentiment and the, the data suggests that the data need updating. So just that, like we're not quite collecting in the way that we need to be, there's something missing.

Alex Mayyasi: Yeah. And I mean and not to get Derek Thompson, but I do think a lot of it is societal glue. And we lost the habit. But like, what else. And how do you measure those things. And I think also, you know, we talked before about how often people's survey responses suggest that they think, you know, wages have gone way down, when in fact it's going up. But also like that almost maybe captures a more fundamental truth that like, people are right, that like the average worker is not benefiting as much from economic growth in the US as, as they used to. And so, you know, if the sentiment that like, things have just gotten worse and worse and worse is not quite true, it's absolutely true that like gains are no longer as broadly shared. And yeah, there's a lot of yeah, like I actually I think this is key. Like I think humans have an innate tendency to look at relative gains versus absolute. Yeah. Definitely. Right. Yeah.

Joe Weisenthal: And so you see that like come to the fore right now. All right. I think that's a great place to leave it.

Tracy Alloway: What I thought we're just getting into it. Thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Really appreciate it. And congrats on the book. The book again, is Planet Money a Guide to the Economic Forces that Shape Your Life.

Joe Weisenthal: Joe, that was really fun.

Alex Mayyasi: Yeah, I love catching up with them. That was great.

Tracy Alloway: And it is genuinely like I haven't read the full book cover to cover, but I have been flipping through it and like just the number of interesting things that you can pick out up. Like the oranges. Yeah, fascinating.

Mary Childs: No, I oh, and also sorry, I forgot to ask Alex this, but like one of the few people I found that actually shares my, like, obsession with insurance as a potent force in not just the economy, but in society. I had a I do have an insurance thought that, share with you afterwards for maybe a future episode.

Joe Weisenthal: But I think, like, I find these conversations really interesting and helpful because, like, it's like, sort of like pretty core ideas, like, okay, like, what is the issue with childcare or what is it, you know, what do agricultural cooperatives slash cartels like what problems they actually solve? How much are we actually working and why have we gotten so much richer? But, you know, people are so we feel bad about it. Yeah. It's like these are like pretty big questions and it's pretty obvious. Like they sort of like, if you like think about them, you can get like some interesting places. And so it's good to sort of just like zoom back and like think about some of these things for a while.

Tracy Alloway: Also to your point, it kind of illustrates, once again, like all the decisions that go into the economy in the sense that, like the economy is often pitched, at least in America, as this free market thing just kind of exists. And like, is automatic in many ways and just does its own thing. But actually there are all these active decisions and policies that go into it. Choices about market structure. You know what I was thinking about was one of the things that we've talked about, for a lot on the podcast is that after the great financial crisis, you know, the home, the housing industry got hollowed out, all these homebuilders went out of business, etc. and now we're like faced with a big housing shortage, etc.. What if there had been more coordination among home builders to curb both the upside and the downside, etc.? Would that be more sustainable now, like people would get really anxious about the idea of like idea, sort of like, you know, homebuilder coordination, housing, etc. cities or whatnot. When you look at the cost that we pay for boom, bust cycles, you'll understand why some of these mechanisms get developed and blessed, at least for certain periods of time by the law, etc., because there is a price that you pay for boom busts over time. And so I think like these are actually like pretty interesting questions. It is phenomenal that like we haven't done much for housing in that sense. But we have for reasons, right. There's a cartel or cooperative that exists in order to smooth the boom bust cycle in raising. Yeah. It's funny, like the things that we pick as, I know, socially important.

Joe Weisenthal: All right. Should we leave it there?

Tracy Alloway: Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there.

Joe Weisenthal: Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me @tracyalloway And I’m Joe Weisenthal You can follow me @thestalwart.

Tracy Alloway: Checkout the book, Planet Money a Guide to the Economic Forces that Shape Your Life By Alex Mayyasi.

Joe Weisenthal: Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez @carmenarmen, Dashiel Bennett @dashbot and Cale Brooks @calebrooks And if you want more Odd Lots content, you should definitely check out our daily newsletter. You can find that@bloomberg.com/oddlots And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our discord, discord.gg/oddlots And if you enjoyed this conversation then please leave a comment or like the video. Or better yet, subscribe! Thanks for watching.