Planet Money does not want you. Not as a guest, not as an expert on call, and not as the founder with a sharp take on interest rates. What the team wants is a thing it can hold, a place it can visit, or a problem it can try to solve on tape, and you matter only if you can lead them to it. Most people who send pitches to NPR’s economics show get this backwards. They pitch a person and hope a story follows. The pitches that land do the reverse.
That is the core of how to pitch Planet Money, and it explains why so many smart, credentialed people never hear back. The show is not a booking operation. It is a newsroom of reporters who spend weeks chasing a single question, and your job is to hand them a question worth the chase.
Here is how the show picks stories, how to write the email, the test I use before any pitch goes out, which door to knock on, and the T-shirt that proves the whole method works.
How Planet Money picks its stories
Planet Money launched on September 6, 2008, in the middle of the financial crisis. Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson built it after their This American Life episode “The Giant Pool of Money” showed that an audience would sit through an hour on mortgage securities if someone told it as a story. That origin still shapes every episode. The show exists to explain big economic forces through small, concrete scenes.
Robert Smith, a longtime Planet Money host, put it plainly at the Audiocraft podcast festival in 2018, as reported by Talking Biz News. “Our job is to make the abstract real,” he said. He described finding “the little story inside the big idea.” His example was fondue. In Geneva, he ordered a dish that was once controlled by a Swiss cheese cartel, and he used it to explain how cartels work. “People will come for the fondue,” Smith said, “and they will stay for the economic ideas about cartels.”
Read that twice if you are planning a pitch. Planet Money starts with an idea from economics, then goes hunting for a scene that makes it real. If your pitch only offers the idea, you have given the team half the work and left them the hard half.
The second habit to understand is that the team likes to act. Back in 2012, Planet Money reporters David Kestenbaum and Robert Smith shared seven reporting practices, and one of them was “Make your own action.” The show has bought 100 barrels of crude oil and followed them to the gas tank, and it tried to buy the rights to a Marvel character called Doorman for $10,000. Those projects tell you the team prefers doing something to talking about something.
The team itself in 2026 includes hosts Kenny Malone, Erika Beras, Mary Childs, Nick Fountain, Sarah Gonzalez and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, with Alex Goldmark as executive producer and editor. Episodes rotate among them, so there is no single host to target. You are pitching a newsroom.
Write the pitch email they can actually use
Start with the address. Planet Money’s public inbox is planetmoney@npr.org. NPR confirmed it is still in use in July 2026, when the team asked listeners to send their favorite economic ideas from abroad to that address with the subject line Summer School for its annual series. The show does not publish a separate guest submission form, so this inbox is the front door for outsiders.
Write the subject line as the question the episode would answer. “Why does a gallon of milk cost more in one county than the next?” will get opened. “Expert available to discuss dairy pricing” will not. The subject line is your one chance to show you think like a reporter.
Open the email with the scene. Put the reader somewhere: a warehouse, an auction, a contract clause, a strange price tag. Then name the economic idea that scene explains, in one sentence. Then explain why you can get the team inside, whether that means access to a place, a document, a dataset or a person who will talk on tape.
After that, give the context a producer needs to judge the story. Tell them what is new, what is surprising and what is at stake for ordinary people. If there is a number that shocked you, put it in. If there is a document that proves the story, mention it and offer to send it. Do not attach it. Producers who want it will ask.
Keep yourself in the background. One sentence on who you are is enough, plus the reason you are close to the story. If you are a founder, it is fine to say the story involves your company, but the pitch has to work even if your company is a minor character. Reporters can smell a pitch that is really an ad, and Planet Money has a strong public radio sense of where the line sits.
Aim for 200 to 300 words. That is long enough to set a scene and short enough to read on a phone between edits. Send it once, then follow up a single time if you have something new, like a fresh number or a confirmed tour of the place you described.
What is the Fondue Test?
Before any pitch to Planet Money goes out, I run it through a three-part check I call the Fondue Test, named for Robert Smith’s cheese cartel. It asks three questions, and a pitch needs a clear yes on all three.
The first question is whether there is a little story. That means a specific object, place, person or transaction that a listener could picture. A fondue pot counts. A barrel of oil counts. A statement like “inflation is hurting small businesses” does not, because nobody can see it.
The second question is whether there is a big idea. The little story has to open a door to an economic concept that matters beyond the scene, such as cartels, supply chains, incentives, price discrimination or moral hazard. If the story is charming but explains nothing, it belongs on a feature desk, not on Planet Money.
The third question is whether there is action the team can record. Can a reporter go somewhere, do something, try something or watch something happen? Can they buy the thing, follow the thing or test the thing? This is where Kestenbaum and Smith’s “Make your own action” comes in. A pitch that offers only an interview fails this part, because interviews are the least distinctive tape a show like this makes.
Score each answer honestly. If you only have two out of three, go back and find the third before you hit send. Most of the time the missing piece is action, and you can often supply it. Offer access to a factory floor, a negotiation, a pricing meeting, a test the team could run, or a product they could try to make themselves. That small change turns a pitch into a project, and projects are what this show remembers.
The test also tells you when to stop. If you cannot find a little story at all, your idea is probably a better fit for an op-ed or a trade outlet, and that is fine. Knowing how to pitch Planet Money includes knowing which ideas to send somewhere else.
Which Planet Money door should you knock on?
Planet Money is a family of formats, and each one wants something different. Picking the right one improves your odds more than any clever line in the email.
The main podcast publishes longer reported episodes and multi-part projects. This is where the big stunts live and where a pitch with strong action has the best chance.
The Indicator from Planet Money is the weekday spin-off that NPR launched in December 2017. Episodes run about 10 minutes and track a single number or trend in the news. Darian Woods and Wailin Wong co-host it in 2026. If your pitch hangs on a fresh data point, such as a price, a ratio or a survey result that explains something happening this week, The Indicator is a better fit than the main show. Lead with the number and why it moved.
Planet Money Summer School runs each summer as a free economics course in audio form. In 2026 it released episodes weekly until Labor Day, covering ideas like Australia’s water market and New Zealand’s approach to inflation targeting. The team asked listeners to send economic ideas they had seen abroad, with the best ones set to air in the final episode. If your expertise is a policy or market design that works somewhere else, watch for that call each summer.
The team also runs a weekly newsletter and a paid tier called Planet Money+, and in 2026 it published its first book, “Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life,” with W. W. Norton. Longtime contributor Alex Mayyasi is credited as its author, with stories from the hosts. The book shows where the show’s interests run, from ATMs to bank tellers, and reading it is good homework before you pitch.
The newest projects show how outsiders get pulled in. In the 2025 and 2026 board game series, Erika Beras and Kenny Malone set out to make an economics game that was fun to play. They went to Gen Con in Indianapolis, where Lioness Games founder Leonie Grundler explained the tabletop business, and they got design advice from Elan Lee, co-creator of Exploding Kittens. Neither of them pitched a guest spot. They were the right people for a project the team had already chosen. That is how most experts end up on Planet Money, and it is why a pitch that hands the team a project is worth more than any pitch that hands them a guest.
The T-shirt that started with a professor
The best lesson in how to pitch Planet Money comes from a Georgetown economist named Pietra Rivoli. She wrote “The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy,” a book that began when she heard a young activist ask who made her T-shirt and realized she did not know. She traced one shirt across three continents and found that politics and history shaped it more than open competition did.
On November 19, 2010, Planet Money ran a podcast episode built around her book. It was a solid interview, and it could have ended there. It did not. In 2013, the team decided to make its own T-shirt and trace it from cotton field to finished shirt. They launched a Kickstarter that ran from April 30 to May 15, 2013, with a goal of $50,000. It raised $590,807 from more than 20,000 backers, according to Crowdfund Insider. When the series aired in December 2013 across NPR, Rivoli was there as an adviser to the team, as NPR’s own coverage noted. More than 25,000 shirts were sold in the end.
Look at what made that work. Rivoli had a little story, one T-shirt. She had a big idea, the political economy of global trade. And her book contained the action, a trail anyone could follow. She never pitched herself as a guest for a stunt. She published something so concrete that a newsroom could pick it up and live inside it three years later. That is the bar, and it is within reach of any founder or expert willing to find the shirt inside their own story.