Leslie, would you like to take us out?

Nefertides Fjord.

I'm Tricia Bobita.

I'm Greta Johnson.

And this is the Nerdat podcast.

This week we talked to Zoe Chase, likely a familiar name for any fellow NPR nerds out there.

Zoe reports on the economy for Planet Money.

You know, Trisha, one of my favorite public radio stories ever is from Planet Money. It's sort of chemistry related, and I like to nerd out about chem, too. You're not going Walter White on me now, are you? Well, no, I haven't taken chemistry since high school, so that's kind of out of the picture. But this story is super cool. It turns out there's a very practical reason why gold is the element we've used as currency for most of human history and why it's really the best of all 118 elements on the periodic table.

Money that spontaneously bursts into flames?

Bad idea.

Yeah, the Planet Money Gang stories are so good that once they did a story about the

stone money on the island of Yap, and it saved me from about 300 pages of reading in an

economic anthropology class. What, Trisha, you didn't do all the reading? Well, I did. It was just

pretty terrible, dry, academic writing, and I understood the island of Yap's economy much better

after just a few minutes

with Planet Money.

We've put some links to some of our favorite planet money stories at nerdetpodcast.com.

Now, it's time to talk to Zoe Chase.

She's a great radio journalist, but if you see her nerding out with headphones on, odds

are she's not tuned in to public radio.

So I think that I'm a little too focused on radio in general because I think that my hobbies

are also radio related because they're also about like expressing yourself in an audio form,

...