Alex Maiassi

It's amazing.

This episode was produced by Sam Yellow Horse Kessler with an assist from Emma Peasley.

It was edited by Jess Jang, fact-checked by Sarah Juarez, and engineered by Sina Lafredo.

Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

This is NPR.

Thanks for listening.

I probably am making, like, insane expressions while I work.

You know, drinking my coffee and scrunching my hand against my head trying to figure something out.

Totally.

I really wanted the cover of this book to smell like money.

maybe a little bit on the nose.

And at one point I saw an article about how an Indian newspaper had celebrated the mango season by making the cover of that day's newspaper smell like mangoes.

And so I sent a link to that article to Tom and I was like, see, it's possible.

Like we got to make the cover of this book smell like mango.

And he's like, I'll go see what we can do.

I'll go talk to my people.

There was this point where I'd written two chapters of the book.

And these were these totally original chapters that took quite a while.

And it was very obvious that if every chapter takes this long, this book is not coming out anywhere close to on time.

So we obviously need to speed up.