This is Planet Money from NPR.

Yeah, it's our 1000th episode.

And to be honest, we spent a lot of time thinking about ways to avoid doing this episode.

There's a lot going on right now.

At one point, we were like, what if we just skip episode 1000?

Go from episode 99 to episode 1001 and just do the big 1000th later when we can throw a real party.

For my personal suggestion, we could suddenly switch to decimal system.

You know, like suddenly it's 999.5.75.875.

We don't ever have to get to 1000.

We can stay young forever.

But then we were like, all right, let's see what the listeners have to say.

And this is when we asked you to send us your favorite moments from Planet Money.

And we listened to a bunch of your suggestions.

And as we're going through them, we notice we've taken you inside a lot of places.

We've taken you inside the world of cheese cartels, the invention of money, libertarian summer camp, the birth of the spreadsheet.

But we've never actually taken you inside our own show.

So we were like, what if we do a planet money about planet money?

I mean, over a thousand episodes, we have developed a kind of formula for what makes a planet money, episode, a planet money, episode.

And we thought, you know what, for the 1000th episode, why don't we just share that formula with you today?

For instance, this thing we just did here told you a little story about not knowing what to do for the 1000th episode,

teased that there was a problem.

This is almost always the kind of thing we do at the top of an episode.

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