Numlock Sunday: Alex Mayassi talks Planet Money

Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Alex Mayyasi from NPR’s Planet Money, the beloved podcast that invented an entire version of audio storytelling, who is out with a brand new book from the show called Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life, a delightful anthology all about the ways money and the economy affect nearly everything in our daily lives

The book is very fun, and we talked about the Pickle Problem, the what we can learn about automation based on the example of bank tellers, and why insurance is the key to so much of our world.

The book is available wherever books are sold. Alex is a regular contributor to the Planet Money podcast, writes his own Substack, and will be out with a his next project, the Gastronomics podcast available on Spotify, soon. You can find Alex on his website at alexmayyasi.com.

This interview has been condensed and edited.