NICK FOUNTAIN, HOST:

Recently, Gizmodo reporter Kashmir Hill tried something nearly impossible for journalism.

KASHMIR HILL: I wanted to see if it was possible to live without the tech giants.

FOUNTAIN: So Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Google. She tried to cut them all out of her life. But I mostly wanted to talk to Kashmir about going off Google because Google is everywhere in my life. And she was like, yeah, if you're going to cut them out, you've got to do way more than just switching search engines and email addresses. She actually asked a programmer to make, like, a gate that wouldn't let anything Google into her life.

HILL: So it meant that, like, Google Analytics didn't load and Google's trackers didn't load and Google fonts, which is apparently used all over the web, didn't load and Google Maps didn't load, which shut down mapping services and...

FOUNTAIN: Yeah, I would be completely lost without that.

HILL: It was a huge problem.

FOUNTAIN: Kashmir's article was kind of mindblowing because, sure, we all know we use Google a lot, but what I didn't know was just how much of the Internet uses Google's infrastructure to do just about everything. For example, one day, she was trying to go on Dropbox to share a file. So she enters her username, her password, and nothing was happening.

HILL: And it turns out that Dropbox uses this service from Google to determine whether or not you're a bot. And so because I was blocking Google, it looked to Dropbox like I wasn't human, and they wouldn't let me sign in.

FOUNTAIN: Because Kashmir was blocked from fonts and trackers and maps and a million other Google things, her Internet was basically broken.

You're saying that it's, like - it's everywhere.

HILL: Yeah, it's (laughter) - like, basically, blocking Google made me feel like I was back on dial-up Internet in the '90s.

FOUNTAIN: And this was just the Google part of her experiment. Remember; Kashmir did this for all of the tech giants.

HILL: Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple in that order. And then in the last week, I blocked all five at once.

FOUNTAIN: Kashmir's article was so good that after I read it, I was just like, why didn't I think of that?

Can I just say - here at PLANET MONEY, we've sent this around, everyone's looked at it, and we are all so jealous of this project.

HILL: (Laughter) Thanks. You wouldn't be jealous if you had to live through it. It was - I must be a masochist.

FOUNTAIN: Well, thank you for doing it so we didn't have to.

HILL: (Laughter) Thanks for sending me a valentine (laughter).

FOUNTAIN: Hello, and welcome to PLANET MONEY. I'm Nick Fountain. Every year, usually around Valentine's Day, we channel our feelings of jealousy and turn them into appreciation - valentines.

(SOUNDBITE OF FREDERIC AUGER AND FLORIAN GAZAN'S "BAISER FATAL")

FOUNTAIN: Today on the show, we're going to send shoutouts to a movie that inspires existential dread, an obscure central bank bureaucrat and a brutal sport that explains a lot about economics.

(SOUNDBITE OF FREDERIC AUGER AND FLORIAN GAZAN'S "BAISER FATAL")

FOUNTAIN: We asked everyone on our team to highlight the things that they loved or were jealous of this year, and, Darian Woods, PLANET MONEY producer, welcome.

DARIAN WOODS, BYLINE: Hey, how's it going?

FOUNTAIN: You were the first to respond, so you're up first. What's your valentine?

WOODS: My valentine's for the Bank of Jamaica, Nick. And I'm not going to say what it is. I'm just going to show you.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)

UNIDENTIFIED SINGERS: (Singing) BOJ - committed to the Jamaica and the economy.

FOUNTAIN: So what I'm seeing is a music video about the Jamaican economy featuring, like, a souped up race car and exchange rates.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)

UNIDENTIFIED SINGERS: (Singing) So consumers can buy more goods with their cash.

WOODS: She's driving to the central bank and in the background with all this reggae music explaining what the central bank's doing about inflation.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)

UNIDENTIFIED SINGERS: (Singing) Inflation targeting - the way to go.

FOUNTAIN: What is the backstory behind this?

WOODS: The backstory goes to this guy, Toni Morrison. He's the head of communications for the Jamaican central bank. Last year, he was sitting in the Bank of Jamaica. There were these big economic reforms going on. And Tony has an idea to explain how the bank is managing price inflation. Central banks have got a lot of tools to do this.

FOUNTAIN: Mostly boring speeches, in my experience.

WOODS: That's their primary tool. But Tony, he's got this other idea - music.

TONY MORRISON: Thinking of using music as a tool came somewhat naturally.

FOUNTAIN: What I love about this is that at PLANET MONEY, we have tried so many ways to explain inflation targeting and the psychology behind it. But these guys - but Tony at the central bank of Jamaica - have just, like, figured out a way to get it stuck in my head.

WOODS: They are smashing it. And there is a serious purpose behind using music to explain inflation. Jamaica's struggled with really high price inflation basically since the '60s. At some point in the 1990s, it was over 70 percent.

FOUNTAIN: Wow.

WOODS: So, like, super high price inflation just going up and up and up. But over the last few years, Jamaica has succeeded in driving the inflation rate down. What Tony told me is that he wants to convince the people of Jamaica that this is going to stick.

FOUNTAIN: Because inflation is psychological in a way, right?

WOODS: So Tony knows that inflation is fuelled by this either vicious or virtuous cycle. If people think prices are going to rise a lot, they'll spend their money faster, further speeding up inflation. If they think inflation will be low, that in itself will help slow inflation. Economists call this anchoring inflation expectations.

FOUNTAIN: And so Tony has figured out a way to explain to anyone and everyone that inflation will stay low. Just trust us.

WOODS: Exactly. So these videos are actually in a way pretty important.

FOUNTAIN: I love this so much. Thank you, Darian Woods, for bringing it to our attention.

WOODS: It's been a complete pleasure to sit at my desk watching reggae videos about economics.

FOUNTAIN: (Laughter).

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)

UNIDENTIFIED SINGERS: (Singing) So consumers can buy more goods with their cash.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Too high or too low, inflation is like the base line in reggae. Inflation is the real heartbeat of the economy.

UNIDENTIFIED SINGERS: (Singing) Inflation targeting - the way to go.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: A message from Bank of Jamaica.

FOUNTAIN: OK. Next up, Noel King, what do you got for us?

NOEL KING, BYLINE: This year, I was wildly jealous of a documentary that appeared on Netflix. It's called "FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened." You saw it, too.

FOUNTAIN: On your suggestion.

KING: Yep. It's about a music festival that happened in 2017, which was arguably the most brilliantly hyped music festival in history. It started with a video on Instagram.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: The actual experience exceeds all expectations into something that's hard to put into words.

FOUNTAIN: Yeah. It's, like, this slickly produced video - drone footage of this private island. They say it's Pablo Escobar's island.

KING: Then there are all of these models on yachts, and they're gorgeous, and they're playing in the water with pigs, which is weird, but it's cool.

FOUNTAIN: And there's a cool DJ.

KING: It looks awesome.

FOUNTAIN: Yeah. It looks like an Instagram influencer's island dream.

KING: So people pay thousands - in some cases, even tens of thousands of dollars - to get tickets to this festival. And then they get off the plane in the Bahamas, and the beach is a parking lot, and the luxury accommodations are damp tents. There are no models anywhere. And there's nothing to eat except cheese sandwiches.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "FYRE: THE GREATEST PARTY THAT NEVER HAPPENED")

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Turn around. Turn this bus right around.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: There was a disbelief on the bus. A lot of people thought that, oh, you know, maybe we're passing through this area. You know, our villa is just on the other side.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: It was like, oh, my God.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Look at the beds. Look at the beds.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: Oh, Jesus. This festival is never happening again. I hope they know that.

FOUNTAIN: Yeah, I remember watching this in real time on Twitter and just kind of laughing about it because basically schadenfreude. But then, we all just sort of filed this away in the cabinet full of millennial failures and moved on with our lives until this documentary came out because it had something kind of special, right?

KING: Yeah, it really did. So Fyre Festival is now a huge legal fiasco. One of the co-founders is in prison. And as a journalist, I could not believe the access they got. They had all of this insider footage, they - the two co-founders copping to the fact that they were selling something that they knew was not real.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "FYRE: THE GREATEST PARTY THAT NEVER HAPPENED")

BILLY MCFARLAND: We are selling a pipe dream to your average loser...

JA RULE: We're selling a pipe dream to [expletive] buyers.

MCFARLAND: To your average guy in middle America.

KING: So I see the documentary, and I get curious, and I start reading about it to figure out how they pulled this off. And it turns out the reason they had all of this damning footage was because the people who'd been in charge of promoting the Fyre Festival were some of the same people who'd produced the documentary.

FOUNTAIN: So this documentary is ethically compromised, so why are you recommending it to our listeners?

KING: Because it's so dead on about what it is to live in the age of Instagram. Like, these incompetent hucksters can inspire people across the world to be so afraid of missing out that even though the organizers don't have enough money or any preparation or any idea how to deliver, thousands of people fall for it because influencers tell them it's cool.

FOUNTAIN: The documentary is "FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened," and it's hilarious. I, too, recommend it. Thanks, Noel.

KING: Thanks, Nick.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SURF BLAZE")

FOUNTAIN: Most of the valentines that we got, I sort of understood. But this next one, which comes from Cardiff Garcia, the co-host of The Indicator from PLANET MONEY - hello, Cardiff.

CARDIFF GARCIA, BYLINE: Hey, Nick.

FOUNTAIN: I do not understand this at all. Go for it.

GARCIA: (Laughter) So my valentine is to mixed martial arts, the sport of MMA. Nick, if you've never seen it before, here's a little clip of it that I'm going to show you now.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)

UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR: And then he clinches - exactly what you got to do.

(CROSSTALK)

FOUNTAIN: Oh, oh.

GARCIA: Yeah. That was a - quite a blow - hit him with a right hook coming out of a clinch...

FOUNTAIN: Gnarly.

GARCIA: ...As we say.

FOUNTAIN: So wait. Why do you like this?

GARCIA: I find it kind of endlessly entertaining to watch. I find that there is such a wide range of strategies that these fighters can employ that it actually is a much more kind of intellectual and intriguing sport than a lot of people give it credit for. But the main reason I gave it the valentine is because it is such a controversial business and because the specific controversies of mixed martial arts as a business are so emblematic of the controversies that exist in the overall U.S. economy.

FOUNTAIN: OK. I was raised in a cocoon where I didn't know anything about violence or economics, so...

GARCIA: (Laughter).

FOUNTAIN: ...Play this metaphor out for me.

GARCIA: Start with this - the UFC, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, is the main promotional organization of mixed martial arts, the one that puts on fights.

FOUNTAIN: It's the only one I've ever heard of.

GARCIA: Yeah, exactly. And it's much bigger than all of its rivals in part because it bought so many of those rivals on its way to becoming huge. And because of the UFC's size, fighters don't have many options for other promotions where they can fight. So the fighters kind of have to accept, like, the really stringent requirements that the UFC imposes on them, including how much it pays them or, as the fighters might say, how little it pays them.

FOUNTAIN: And you've been walking around the office using this big word to describe this relationship between labor and capital.

GARCIA: Yes - monopsony.

FOUNTAIN: Monopsony - what is that?

GARCIA: So in the labor market, a monopsony is when you have a company that is either the only company that employs all the workers in a certain industry or, more commonly, it's by far the biggest employer. So it just has a lot of power, and a lot of fighters have said that that's the UFC.

FOUNTAIN: All right. So bring it back. How does one guy knocking out another guy relate to the economy writ large?

GARCIA: You mean, I haven't made it obvious yet?

FOUNTAIN: No.

GARCIA: So what critics of the UFC say is that because it is part of a monopsony, it has kind of led to, like, a hollowed out middle class within the sport. So you still have some of these superstar fighters who make a ton of money, sometimes millions of dollars for a given fight. And, obviously, the UFC's owners get to keep a huge chunk of the money that's made in the sport. But then you have all these other fighters. Most of the fighters, in fact, who don't make a ton of money, they have to pay for their own benefits and all kinds of other things out of pocket.

And so you end up with quite a bit of inequality within the sport. And what the critics are saying is that that is a result of the UFC being a monopsonist. And in that sense, it could also mirror what's happening in the U.S. economy...

FOUNTAIN: You know, I was about to say, this is sounding kind of familiar.

GARCIA: Kind of familiar now, right? Because economists are increasingly worried that fewer and fewer companies in some industries are controlling more and more of the workers and that maybe that is responsible for some of the rise in inequality that the U.S. economy has seen in the last few decades.

FOUNTAIN: Cardiff.

GARCIA: Yes.

FOUNTAIN: You do Muay Thai, right?

GARCIA: I do, yeah, for 15 years.

FOUNTAIN: You teach me so much about the economy. Will you teach me how to fight?

GARCIA: If you want, man, sure.

FOUNTAIN: Thanks.

GARCIA: You got it.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BIG WINNER")

FOUNTAIN: All right. So far, we've had music videos, we've had fighting, we've had millennial schadenfreude, but this next one, this next one is a little heady because, yes, PLANET MONEY listeners, we do read books. And Ailsa Chang brought us a book today. What do you got?

AILSA CHANG, BYLINE: I did. It's called "In My Father's House." It's by Fox Butterfield, and I love this book. I just disappeared into it.

FOUNTAIN: What's it about?

CHANG: So this was a book that was less about economics, but it's about a topic I love reporting on - criminal justice.

FOUNTAIN: Yeah. We should say, before you were an economics reporter, you reported on criminal justice for, like, half a decade, right?

CHANG: A little more than that.

FOUNTAIN: OK.

CHANG: (Laughter) And what this book does is it explores this question of how criminal behavior can spread across generations within one single family. You know, the question is, is it more nature or more nurture why that happens? And what Fox Butterfield does is he starts with this totally startling statistic, and that is that 5 percent of American families are behind half of all crime in the U.S. I had no idea.

FOUNTAIN: That is wild.

CHANG: It is. I mean, what he illustrates is how crime can spread, like, this contagion moving from parents to children to grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And he focuses on this one family called the Bogles. And he traces them across generations from, like, the 1800s until the present day. And the main character he focuses on is a patriarch named Rooster Bogle.

FOUNTAIN: Great name.

CHANG: (Laughter) Great name - and Rooster is this bad-to-the-bones character. I mean, there's this one scene where he's driving by the Oregon State Correctional Institution with his sons, and he's gazing out at the prison with this sense of nostalgia. And he tells the boys, look carefully because when you grow up, you guys are going to end up there. And he doesn't say it like it's some warning. He says it with pride. Like, it is your destiny. It is your fate to end up in prison one day.

FOUNTAIN: So it sounds like Fox Butterfield falls more on the nurture side of things.

CHANG: Well, he acknowledges that there's nature involved, too. Like, for example, mental illness was passed down generations, and that's genetics to some extent. But what Butterfield does is he builds this case for how much behavior is learned by example because the Bogles, they were this really socially isolated family. They didn't hang out with friends. They didn't hang out with other families. They were just this tight, social unit generation after generation.

So one criminal would be modeling behavior for the next criminal down the line. There was literally a kid who committed his first burglary when he was 4 years old because that's all he saw his dad and brothers doing. And I know all of this sounds incredibly grim, but the book was just so compellingly written. I was engrossed the entire way through.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SOUL SITAR")

FOUNTAIN: The book is by Fox Butterfield. What's it called again?

CHANG: "In My Father's House."

FOUNTAIN: All right. Thanks for the rec, Ailsa.

CHANG: Sure.

FOUNTAIN: Happy Valentine's Day.

CHANG: Happy Valentine's Day.

FOUNTAIN: Shout out to all of you in advance for sending us story ideas. We're planetmoney@npr.org. We put a link to all the valentines at npr.org/money.

CHANG: Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, Darian Woods and Alex Goldmark produced this episode.

FOUNTAIN: And Bryant Urstadt is our editor. I'm Nick Fountain.

CHANG: And I'm Ailsa Chang. Thanks for listening.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SOUL SITAR")

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