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Previously on Planet Money. We are making a board game. Tabletop Games is actually the largest category on Kickstarter. Get out of here.
If you make games, there has never been more competition. This is Orbeo. This is Masterpiece. This is Robert.
We need help, a partner. Welcome to the Excloobians office. Our basic question here is, can we make a board game and where do we start? I think what the next step here is, we do some homework and we do some homework.
Your homework is, give us three themes that are interesting to you. I'm curious to see what you come back with. So we talked roughly what, two weeks ago, three weeks ago? Yeah, somewhere in there.
That is a voice of a long lead, game designer and co-founder of the Exploding Kittens game company. Because we are making a board game. We are partnering with Exploding Kittens and we've got big dreams. To make the kind of game that anyone would want to play.
To make a game that has big economic ideas baked into it. And Exploding Kittens had given us an assignment. We bring them some economic concepts and themes. They see if any of that might have promise for a real game.
Okay, we took the assignment very seriously. We had a full staff meeting where we went deep. We went nerdy. And I believe you had told us to come back with about three ideas.
We've got 17. Oh, this is going to be a fun project. Okay. No, we're all of these 17 ideas like obviously going to be monopoly killers, you know, displace America's most popular games.
Well, who can say? And so we began to pitch. Think about this. There are elves.
They live forever, but they have to plan for retirement. What do they do? What? What does that mean?
Okay. All right. Next idea, apprentice wizards running a bank. So they have the power to create money, but they're apprentices.
So it always backfires. They mess it up. Okay. You don't have to respond to everyone.
You know, I'm settling. I'm letting that one settle. Okay. They weren't all home runs, but some of our ideas did seem to be getting a decent response.
Like when we pitched the game inspired by compound interest, the idea that a small investment can snowball into something massive with enough time. You ever play risk? Yes. Yes.
You just described the mechanic by which armies are built in risk, which is great. I mean really really nice shoulders to stand on there. So I would call that half of an idea. We also pitched a game called moral hazard where you have to decide which failing banks to bail out.
But you may be hurting your future self by teaching those banks that you're going to clean up their mistakes. What you just said, your future self, like there is an interesting game concept I've never seen before where you have two players, you and your future self. We pitched the game called keeping up with the Jones is where you buy things like about to make everyone around you jealous just to learn. Oh no, having this boat card is costing me so much and making me miserable.
Here's why I hate this idea. Let me start there. Um, I think what you have just described as a game with no replay value. Once you understand the properties associated with each card with each item, I don't think you're going to be able to find that same delight when you go through that game again.
We pitched game idea after game idea. It's the same game and you don't know if you're playing within the capitalist system or the socialist system. Oh, that's a fun twist after game idea. Question though about the inflation game.
Like what's the goal here? Probably that. I don't know. We've thought that one through.
Yeah, after game idea. Pro-cyclicality. We don't have to call the game that. Yeah, we're not going to call the game that.
And what we game very clear was that we knew very little about what might work for a new game. Do you think we brought something to the table here today that is useful? Absolutely. I mean, look, there's two ways.
There's two ways the games are born. One is you come up with a gameplay mechanic you absolutely love and then you spend months and months and months trying to find the right thing that will sell properly. The other way is you start off with a really strong theme, something that you know there's already an audience for it. And then you try to find the right game plan mechanic to match with it.
It's like we've done neither here. We just brought it. We have you planted the seeds for a path for the latter. Yes.
And in fact, one of the 17 economic idea seeds that we planted that day would eventually become the planet money game. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Kenny Malone. And I'm Eric Bares.
Planet Money is making a game. We have a partner. We've got some econ ideas. Now we need to figure out how to turn those ideas into a game.
Today on the show, episode two, in our game series, we get to go behind the scenes to see what it takes to make a game. Ideally one that is fun and also chock full of economics, but doesn't feel like econ homework, which perhaps a little harder than we appreciated. By the end of this episode, you listeners will be able to play an early prototype of the planet money game. In fact, we need you to play it and help us perfect it.
But first, the story of that game. This week on sources and methods, every White House has an official counter terrorism plan, a strategy document, basically. But President Trump's new 2026 plan shifts focus to left wing extremism. We're unpacking what's in the document and who influenced it this week on sources and methods.
You can listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. We noticed that some of the most popular board games out there are about economics. Think Monopoly, Settlers of Catan. So we thought we should make a game and along the way, learn about the economics of making a game.
We want our planet money game to be nerdy, to teach people economics. And we want the game to be popular, beloved the world over, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Millions even. Millions.
Yeah. Yeah. And to sell all those games, the key is getting into stores like Walmart or Target. This is partly why we partnered with Exploding Kittens.
They know how to make games, the kinds of games that sometimes get picked up by big box stores. But, you know, let us not get ahead of ourselves. Step one here is, what even is the game going to be? Time for another meeting with Exploding Kittens.
So last time we talked to you, you were the very lucky recipient of 17 incredible economic concepts that we gave to you. That again is Exploding Kittens co-founder, Alon Lee. But there are a bunch of Exploding Kittens folks on this call. It's been a few weeks.
And we hadn't talked at all since our prolific pitch meeting. So we are curious just what happened immediately afterwards? What was the conversation that happened right after that? Oh, sure.
So even when you pitched them to us, we were taking notes and we wrote down like, oh, maybe explore this. Maybe explore that. And so that really quickly got us to like, all right, a lot of these are just not going to work. Like they're just, this feels like school.
It's not going to be fun. What do we do? Oh, yeah. However, Alon and one of Exploding Kittens' game designers, Ian Klayman, tell us that one of our ideas in particular had sparked something special.
So what was the idea that kind of fit? Yeah. So the one that we really got excited about was the market for Lemons idea. Market for Lemons.
Classic. The market for Lemons is an economics paper from the 1970s by Nobel Prize winning economist George Ackereloff. He's also famous because he's the husband of the former Fed head and secretary of the treasury, Janet Yellen. In a nutshell, the market for Lemons paper is about the market for used cars and the problems created from what's known as asymmetric information.
In this case, there is unequal information between sellers and buyers of used cars. Right. A used car seller knows everything that is wrong with their used car, but the buyers do not, and that is a problem. But the reason it's a famous paper is because it shows how this ultimately becomes a problem for both the buyers and the sellers in the end.
What happens is you'll have some dishonest sellers who hide what's wrong with their used cars. Eventually buyers will assume all sellers are dishonest and all used cars are crappy cars, and so the buyers will only offer crappy car prices. Which then in turn means that the honest sellers who actually do have good cars won't bother trying to sell their cars at all. And so we end up with this spiral where nothing's left in the market, but Lemons.
Just bad, crappy used cars. The market for Lemons is an example of how asymmetric information can destroy a market. It can literally lead to market failure. And it's not just a problem for used cars.
Asymmetric information can be an issue in the health insurance market or when a company is trying to hire new employees. And exploding kittens like the idea. They liked the market for Lemons. Is it just because the branding is so good?
Like it is one of the best names of an actual economics paper ever. The name was compelling, but also the plate pattern of two people trying to make a deal where one person has more information than the other. Is a pretty well established game play pattern. Which could be good or could be, you know, wrote at this point, I guess.
It could go either way. Well, understood, but I would say like not overused. Exploding kittens had been playing around with some ideas inspired by market for Lemons. And co-founder Alon Lee was very excited because they had discovered what they thought could be the core part of what could become the planet money game.
In fact, Elon says they were recording the exact moments that this discovery happened. No, it was really like just that is a very rare moment to catch on tape. And I kept like staring over at the camera thinking, oh god, please don't be recording. Please, please, please, please.
We really accidentally captured lightning in a bottle. 100%. Yeah. Go look at the tapes.
And so we present to you those tapes. All right. Go for it. Okay.
So we started off by. We see exploding kittens in the dining room of a house they fronted for a retreat. The dining table is covered in game designer accoutrement. Yeah, blank playing cards and Sharpie markers.
Existing games that can be used for parts. There are four people around this table, including Elon. And they're playing around with some idea that's like, I don't know, what if there's one car seller and everyone else. A car buyer.
Except there's no car per se. There's just four homemade cards that tell the seller whether they have a good car or a lemon. That was fun. I mean, I did like the asymmetric information there of just like you and I were like, oh, it's a good car.
And you guys were like, oh, it's bad car. But it's just not working. They seem to agree. Interesting.
Not fun yet. Interesting. Yeah. They take a break to maybe let some new ideas percolate.
Now, what's important to know about these recordings is that exploding kittens is not testing a game at all. Their cards don't have fancy arts. They're not playing full rounds. What they are testing are different game mechanics.
The most basic atomic level building block of a game. It's the loop that players will do over and over. And if the game mechanic is not sparking, there is no game. Alright, what we said.
Yes. So the thing that the herd of exploding kittens reconvene, and this, we are told, is where the magical planet money game moment is caught on. We see co-founder Elon Lee is now pacing around the room sort of conducting the team. Let's see.
We got a deck. Someone runs and grabs a deck of playing cards. Red cards, bad black cards, good. Sure.
Yeah, red cards, bad black cards, good. Like whatever. They're making this up as they go. And what they come up with is the following.
So, okay, there's still a seller, and that person is going to start by drawing two cards and secretly looking at them. And they're going to see that those two cards are either both good or both bad or one is good and one is bad. Those are the only three options. Then the seller proposes a deal to another player.
They buyer. Like, I want to keep this card and I want you to take this other card. Now, the buyer does not get to see those cards. They simply have to decide.
Do they accept this deal or do they reverse it? Like, no, no, no. You take this card and I want your card. And to be clear, the seller doesn't have to offer one card.
They could offer both cards or no cards. It's a little convoluted to explain. But it really is a surprisingly basic mechanic. Like, the other no deal is the seller bluffing or not.
Yeah, this is a flush out. This is trying to see if there's enough social manipulation here to be interesting. And here is the moment exploding kittens was so excited to show us. It happens literally the first time they try this new game mechanic.
Okay, so the first seller is in. He reaches the playing cards. Try to remember the rules. So, why is good red bad?
That's perfect. He draws two cards. He looks at them. Looks across the table at his buyer.
Looks back at his cards. Looks at the buyer back to the cards. He sort of tilts his head and looks puzzled. Almost as it to say, Oh, wait, what is the strategy here?
A lot is watching him. And he is delighted. Ian chooses to split up the two cards. He puts one card in front of himself, one in front of his buyer.
Now it's the buyer's decision. Should he reverse the deal? No, he keeps it. They both flip over their cards.
Yeah, so not radio friendly words about how this all played out. Because it turns out both cards were bad cards. And Elon is watching all of this fascinated because it has revealed that this mechanic is maybe more strategically complex than he thought. Ian has essentially chosen to eat one bad card in order to avoid the risk of ending up with two bad cards.
You split those because you didn't want to take all the rest. They run another round to test the mechanic again. We're switching cards. Oh, right.
And again. And again. Yeah. There's no way.
Three times. I mean, it is so basic. So basic. But also so clear that it has brought the room to life.
Yeah, let's stop. Yeah. So something is happening here, which I like. Yeah.
And it's definitely a six out of ten. Right. And so that. Elon was explaining to us in our zoom meeting is what a game design breakthrough looks like for exploding kittens.
It started to suddenly work and work really well. I noticed that you could sort of graph the intellectual curiosity like, I guess there's something interesting here. And then suddenly you're yelling more and saying the f-word more to each other. Yeah.
Is that I've never tried to plot that out on a graph that there's a really nice correlation there you just discovered. They were so excited. And we were excited that they were excited. But how to put this?
We did not appreciate the simple elegance of the game mechanic. That's a nice way to put it. No, we were like, that's all like a bluffing game. And in our defense, here's what we were thinking at the time.
We did know this was the earliest stage of development. But whatever this was needed to be the seed for the planet money game. Yeah, shouldn't it literally teach people the big economic ideas behind the market for lemons. Like show players how asymmetric information can destroy a market.
And what exploded kittens that showed us was like fun looking, but it did just look like deal or no deal lying or not lying. Like that was the mechanic. And so we gently tried to offer this feedback. And then it won gently managed our existential crisis and reassured us that he has made a gazillion games.
We want a game that an economist will pick up and say, oh, this is the greatest game. A high school class can play it. And it's like almost like a substitute for reading the paper market for lemons. But also like a 10 year old can play it.
That is the version we want. I love the challenge. I think we are certainly not there yet. Is it going to be smart?
Can we make it smart enough so that we can say here's the economics concept. It's hidden there, but it's demonstrating this thing. I do. Yeah.
Well, here's the beauty of this. We got a really good game. It has a rough outline of this economic principle. And now we need to figure out how you can walk away from the game with that delightful sense of nerdiness where you think like, oh, you fooled me into learning something, but I didn't even realize at the time.
And now that I do, that was really cool. Like if we can get there with this, we'll be in a good place. And it's better to start with a really fun game and try to get there rather than vice versa, which is a much harder task. Basically, a lawn and the exploding kitten screw are like, trust us.
We have an economic idea from you and we have the beginning of a good game mechanic. And in this industry, a good game mechanic, it's rare. It's like discovering a new way to power a game. It is incredibly hard to come up with.
And we have that. The rest will fall into place. Thus began a month's long process of so much prototyping. All right, friends who wants to learn how to play the Planet Money Board game, draft one.
Exploding kittens would send a prototype and in each draft they're sending over more than just a game mechanic. They're sending handmade cards, usually just repurposed exploding kittens cards. And they're sending instructions. Your goal is to make the other players to collect the good cards and avoid the bad cards.
The first player with five good cards wins. And for each of these drafts, a lawn seems to also be making like a million tweaks, running tests, and apparently keeping audio journals this whole time. Okay, we just ran another Tesla Planet Money game and it was good, but not great. So the Tesla say was interesting.
The mechanic is so funny. Just had a great test. I need to make some changes. Listen to a lawn talk to, I guess, a lawn in these recordings.
Did perhaps begin to give us more of an appreciation for the art of what he's doing? Yeah, clearly turning a game mechanic into something that is a game comes with all these questions. Like what is the optimal number of good cards versus bad cards? The deck was completely unbalanced.
Would it be more fun if there were super power cards to let you do special things? Didn't really work. Somewhere over powered, somewhere under powered. Okay, maybe tweak the superpowers.
Make a whole new card. Six of those. Not that big of a bunch. Wait, are there still enough bad cards in the deck to cause chaos though?
Oh shoot, I think only one player can get knocked out of the game. Oh wait, it is never ending. There was the version where everyone was getting bored in between turns, so a lawn tried giving everyone 16 cards in their hands, so they did have something to look at. So they're not bored.
That's great. But there's just massive decision paralysis. Then there was a version where the game took no time at all to finish. Like average gameplay was like four minutes, and ideally it would be closer to 20.
Meanwhile, whenever we would see one of these prototypes of the games, we were still a little worried to be honest. Super power cards, 16 card hands, fine. But like, when is this going to be a game where players live out the experience of being inside the market for lemons? We would go back to exploding kittens with this, like throwing spaghetti at the wall approach.
Like, what if we introduced Monopoly money? What if people are constantly bidding or trading? What if the rule book is 15 pages long? And exploding kittens was very patient with our flying spaghetti feedback.
Sometimes they would make tweaks and sometimes they would have very valuable lessons for us on why our suggestions may not fit into the hyper-competitive, low-margin-world-of-game-manufacture. So, for example, we asked them, would the game have more heft if it took a little longer to play? Like, more than 20 minutes? We'd say the sweet spot for us in general is really to try to hit a 20-minute game, maybe 15 to 20 minutes.
But if we can get maximum entertainment satisfaction, that beautiful sense of mastery start to finish in 20 minutes, we know we have it on our hands. Okay. Why not go longer? That's our executive producer, Alex Goldmark.
Why not go longer? Why is that the special amount? So you want players to be able to go longer, you don't want the game to force them to go longer. The story of exploding kittens is exactly this.
We optimized that game to be exactly 20 minutes, almost every time you play. Okay. Another interesting business lesson. It came for us when we suggested that it was sort of hard during one of the prototypes to keep track of who was close to winning, who was close to losing.
So how fun would it be if there were colorful plastic coins to keep track of all the points, eh? The exploding kittens seem like the idea, but Kelly Volpellac, VP of Creative Operations, told us, we are aiming for a planet-money game made entirely of paper. So it's not a no-on-coins, but it's way better if they're not plastic. So paper is the cheapest.
We love an all-paper game, because that means if we charge $20, we can make money. Cardboard is paper? Yes, okay. Cardstock, the box, we would even consider that paper.
Okay. So, okay, exploding kittens tells us they could add paper or cardstock or cardboard coins if that's what everyone wanted to do. But yes, mixing materials like having plastic coins would drive up manufacturing costs. It might require multiple factories.
And to sell the game in a store like Target or Walmart, we want to keep the price $220 to $25. So we have to keep costs down and keep it to paper if we want to make a profit. Anything you would go from a tree, you can consider that paper. Okay.
So off go the exploding kittens to make even more changes. And as we saw, prototype after prototype, it did start to dawn on us how terrible our idea had been to try and push our game towards a full-on simulation of a market for lemons. Because even a beautiful lesson in that paper isn't just about the challenges when a seller has more information than a buyer, it's about how that asymmetry can cause a market to grind to a halt. So did we really want a game that ground to a halt in order to teach an economics lesson?
I mean, honestly kind of, but we were also beginning to see why that might not have a broadly popular appeal. So, okay. But even if the game wasn't going to recreate a market for lemon-style collapse, could the game mechanic at least get closer to nailing the feeling of real-world asymmetric information correctly? Yeah, because remember the game mechanic.
You've got a seller who looks at their cards, offers a deal, and then a buyer who just decides without any information whether the deal is good or not. That's just a game about bluffing, where one person has zero information and the other has all the information. But when someone is buying a used car, they can see the car, they get some information, and that's fun. It's a more complex, messy version of asymmetric information.
We need something that gets closer to that. And then, Exploding Kittens sends us a new version with this one key change. Alright, here we go. Play the money game.
Take $100 from team. This is the video of Alon explaining the new game version to his team. Let's go over what we just changed. Okay, so hopefully the game in general will go much faster.
And what was this revolutionary change? Well, Alon explains, you're still going to have a seller, they're still going to look at cards, they're still going to offer a deal. But this time... I'm going to show you this one.
Okay, what are you doing here? So you keep your cards, but I'm not taking lines. Yes, the seller now shows one of the cards in the deal. Everyone gets to see it.
That's it. That's the big change. I know, it doesn't sound like much. But suddenly, instead of the game just being about bluffing, the buyer now has some information.
Just like the economic dynamic that exists in the used car market. And really, honestly, out of nowhere, it did feel more like an economics game. We went back to Exploding Kittens one last time. I think the top line note here is we had a lot of fun playing the Planet Money Board game.
Should we just say it? It was great. It was a lot of fun. I love to hear this.
This is a milestone. I think we have a game. I think we have a game. I love this.
I love this. I mean, it was a prototype of a game with handwritten cards and rules that still need a tweaking, but it was clearly a rough draft of a Planet Money game. And we liked it. But the real test is to bring it to the taste makers who can get these games into the targets and wallmarks of the world.
That is after the break. On NPR's Wild Card podcast, musician Noah Kahn says he's learned to live with depression. I think depression anxiety gives you sneaky superpowers in a lot of ways. Like the power of understanding and intensitizing, being able to talk about my flaws about having to be like this terrible taboo thing.
Watch or listen to that Wild Card conversation on the NPR app or on YouTube at NPR Wild Card. Once we had a version of the game that we were happy with, we wanted to bring it to one person in particular. How many games have you played in your life at this point? Oh my goodness.
Over under a thousand. Over. Yeah, definitely. This is Jamie Willanski.
She's a game consultant. Her job is to get games into big box stores. She is in fact the one who first got settlers of Catan into Target. Exploding kittens often hires her to pitch their games to the big box stores.
Ultimately, she is going to know whether this very rudimentary prototype of ours has a chance to achieve one of our wildest dreams. Getting the Planet Money game onto real shelves at real retail stores. I mean, this was a huge moment for us. Like she was going to play a prototype of the game and render judgement.
Alright, so let's actually do the four of us playing. So here's the scene. We're in a hotel lobby with the Exploding Fittens crew and Jamie. The head of game development Thor Ritz.
He runs through the instructions. So I want to deal everyone five cards. We're all crowded around a couple of high top tables. Jamie is in fact sitting just to my left.
Oh, I have one too many. I think. Okay, so Mar and the beautiful artwork on these cards. That voice is Carly McGuinness, President of Exploding Kittens.
She's being sarcastic here because they are literally just homemade cards. There are red cards. They're bad. And green ones.
They're good. Avoid the red ones. Collect enough green ones. Anyone.
And of course the way you collect cards is through our deal making game mechanic. The game begins. Carly, you are going to make an offer to Jamie. You're going to pick three cards.
You've got five in her hand. So Carly, the seller, takes three cards from her hand. She places one of them in front of Jamie, the buyer. Carly, the seller, is essentially saying, I want you Jamie to take this one card.
And I want to keep these other two cards. But don't forget, we now have that key information asymmetry tweak to our mechanic. All the Carly has to do is reveal one of her cards. Carly, the seller, chooses to reveal the one card she is offering Jamie, the buyer.
It is a green number two. A good card. So now Jamie, you know something about the deal that she just offered you. It looks pretty good, right?
Sure does. And now it is all up to Jamie to decide. Take the deal or reverse it. Does she take the sure thing?
The green two? Or does she reverse the deal in hopes that Carly was hiding something even better in the two cards that are still faced down in front of Carly the seller? You don't know anything about this pile? Yeah.
But this pile you know at least has two pretty green. Okay. Now you have to show us? What is it?
I knew it. Yeah, Carly was hiding a much better card. I never trust Carly. Carly, don't you?
Jamie should have risked it and reversed the deal. So I'm watching this first round. Jamie seems into it. So I turn to her and I ask her, do you love the plan of any game yet?
Not yet. Okay. Does it help to know that it is inspired by a Nobel Prize winning paper about the asymmetry of information in the used car market by Janet Yellen's husband? I don't know anything you just said.
We keep playing the game. And Jamie starts dropping these hints that seem like a game. I love a game that has your strategy changes with every single turn. Do you feel like that's happening?
Yeah. At one point between rounds, Jamie tells us what in general she looks for in a game that will work on big box shows. The hallmark of great selling games when you know it's a great game is when you can't stop thinking about it at night when you're going to bed and you're like, God damn it, I really want to play that game again. This game went on and got more heated.
People became more invested as they got closer to getting enough points to win. And eventually all four of us playing could have won. And I'll be honest, I've been leading and I thought I was going to win. We're all one ship away from winning.
Yes! Oh my God! That's insane! I am here to tell me that the underdog won.
Jamie won in the glow of her victory aftermath. We asked her what she thought. Be real. You're making a very excited face.
Okay, here's what I am excited about. I am constantly on the lookout for a new game mechanic that no one else has ever done. And there is not a game out there that I can equate this to. So to me, gamers are going to be excited about playing a new concept.
And it's also mass friendly enough that Mass Retailer and casual gamers will pick it up and have a blast playing it. I mean, we did it. We've got the Planet Money game. Okay, well, hold on.
We've got one homemade copy of a game. And yes, we have been calling it the Planet Money game. The most critical thing at this point is naming it. Really?
Yeah, the name, the title. Because a good title or a bad title will just absolutely sink a really great game. Okay, fine. Title, TBD, workshop, amongst other things to figure out.
And then I would also say the artwork, the aesthetic of what can appeal to the game. And picking the right theme is going to be critical to make it work. All right, well, this is promising. So just as long as we don't mess up the name and the pictures, we can.
The drawing's the naming. That's also we're going to get to in some future episodes. But our game still has kinks to work out, which is why we have a big, big, big announcement sound. The taboo buzzer, ring the operation bell.
The Planet Money game prototype is available for download starting right this instant. Because listeners are beloved intelligent audience. We do need you to help us conduct the largest prototype playtest. I don't know, maybe ever, perhaps?
Now this is our troubleshooting phase, our debugging period. We have about a month to do this. So this is your assignment. Put a game night on the calendar and download the principal prototype of our game.
The link to that is going to be in the podcast show notes, but it is also just planetmoneygame.com. PlanetMoneygame.com. It's going to require little arts and crafts work printing, cutting out cards. But I know you industrious lot can handle that, I trust.
At that link, you'll find instructions for how to play the game and how to send us feedback. Plus, you'll be able to sign up for our big group play along slash ask us anything happening on Saturday, November 1st. Saturday, November 1st. I'll be there.
Erica will be there. Elan Lee, co-founder of Exploiting Kittens will be there. We would love to see you. Also, we should say Elan truly does not stop tinkering with these games.
And so the version that you will download and make at home is slightly different than the version we've been talking about. But all this will be explained at planetmoneygame.com. This is just the beginning. Please stay tuned for updates and let the wild world of asymmetric information be your guide.
This episode of PlanetMoney was produced by James Need with help from Emma Peasley. It was edited by Jess Chang, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Cina Lefredo. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Kenny Malone.
I'm Erica Barris. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. You know that feeling when you hear a great tip and it's like, that makes so much sense.
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