Jason Schreier

OK, my one more thing is Planet Money, which is an NPR podcast, but it's also a brand new book that just came out that is really, really cool.

So the Planet Money book is kind of a collection of stories, some of which have been reported in the podcast, some of which are new for the book and all of which have been adapted into text form for the book.

many of which just kind of or all of which just kind of are designed to inform people as to how money works and how the economy works through these kind of interesting narratives.

And it's really cool.

I'll give you guys an example, which is the opening story, which I found absolutely fascinating, which is about these food banks.

And it's about how this this food bank in Alaska had this issue, which is that they were someone donated to them five gallons of pickles and

And they were like, look, we appreciate getting donations, but nobody wants this five-gallon pickles.

We can't do anything with these.

And so this kind of food bank, Feeding America, they looked around and they realized that they had an issue.

And they brought in some economists to try to help them fix it.

And their issue is that essentially they were running it kind of...

I don't know, in almost like Soviet Russia, like a kind of communist style or socialist style commune where you have the centralized location and they just decide, based on whatever information they have, how to distribute the food to different places based on what they think is fair.

And they do it in a way that they hope will be equitable for everybody.

But it was very difficult for them to have enough information about all these different food banks to be able to actually distribute what they wanted.

And so they brought in these economists, and these economists put together a market system.

And they went through different iterations of it, but eventually landed on this idea that every single food bank would get fake money and be able to bid on different food items.

And it would have to be a blind bid, so they wouldn't be outbidding each other.

And what they did was they gave more money to the poorer food banks, the food banks that were in more remote cities, and less money to the ones that had a lot of donations and were in richer cities, better off cities in the first place.

And they found that with this system, they learned so much about how to be more efficient because the prices that these different items would land on taught them so much about how...

to collect and what to collect and what to encourage people to donate and what to buy with their money, that it wound up leading to a way more efficient system, which I thought was really fascinating.