Mondays suck. Especially if you hate your job. But the day doesn’t have to be a total waste. You can now look forward to reading about ReadyMakers who have worked their way into f*&%ing awesome jobs—and maybe find a little inspiration to jumpstart your own career in the process—right here, every Monday.

David Kestenbaum, left, with Planet Money editorial director Adam Davidson during the Planet Money Iron Chef/reporter competition at NYC's Fancy Food show. Photo by Chana Joffe-Walt.

On any given weeknight, if you could peer down into my apartment, you'd be likely to see me cooking dinner while listening to the most recent podcast from Planet Money. The NPR show about economics started in 2008 and won hearts all over the country in February 2009, when it teamed up with This American Life to produce a segment called "Bad Bank," which explained the current financial crisis in simple terms. Here, Planet Money correspondent David Kestenbaum talks about making people laugh and making people think.---KS

VITAL STATS Occupation: Correspondent, National Public Radio
Location: Live in Baltimore, work in DC
Age: 40
First Job: Umm.  When I was 11 years old I did magic shows for kids’ birthday parties.  Three piece suit, business cards, the whole thing.
Best Job: Not that one.
Greatest Professional Challenge: Keeping my desk clean.
Salary During 20s: $25,000

Hi, David Kestenbaum. How did you get that f*&%ing awesome job?
At NPR?  This was 10 years ago. I’d done a little radio work and I said (optimistically) to an editor at NPR “Let’s talk about the ways you can hire me.” I meant it as a joke and fortunately it was taken that way. The editor said “There aren’t any.” But I persisted.  I don’t recommend that strategy to everyone though.

What's distinctive about Planet Money? Were you instrumental in getting the show started?
We do economics in a smart narrative way that’s accessible to non-experts. The project was modeled on an episode of the radio documentary show This American Life called The Giant Pool of Money which explained the sub-prime mortgage crisis. The show was a huge huge hit. My colleagues Adam Davidson and Alex Blumberg were the brains behind it, and Planet Money grew out of that. We originally envisioned do long-form features about the global economy. I spent the summer before our launch reading econ textbooks. And then, almost on the day we’d planned our quiet start, economic-Armageddon began  Fannie and Freddie were teetering, every day something disastrous and completely unprecedented happened. So even though we’re Planet Money, we’ve spent a lot of time in our own backyard. We’re slowly putting the Planet back in though.
 

How did you get your start working in radio? I've heard you have an advanced degree in hard science.
Yes, PhD in physics.  My colleagues tease me about it a lot.

On the show, you make economics entertaining and, dare I say it, even sort of funny. Is there a trick to that?
People don’t give humor enough credit. We have an ear for the absurd, it’s true. And when you mash together the sterile theories of economics with people’s day-to-day lives, something amusing often pops out. But at its best something is funny because it’s revelatory, you’re seeing something in a new way, or understanding something for the first time. That’s the humor I hope people hear in our stories. Economics, like science, is a very powerful lens to look at the world through. We’ve done podcasts on the question “What is money?” and “Why are the poor, poor?” The long answer is that we work really really hard to present the material the right way. It’s much harder than you think. We’ve tried radio plays, and most recently a rip-off of iron chef.
 

What is your typical day like? 
It’s pretty unrelenting. In addition to the radio stories for Morning Edition and All Things Considered, we have a blog, a podcast three times a week, and somehow we’ve done a bunch of hour-long shows for This American Life. I’m typing this on my hour-long train ride to work. I kind of think of the train as part of my office. I’ve never had to record anything here, but I’ve come close.

Have you had any role models along the way, journalistic or otherwise?
My wife!  She’s a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, and totally fearless.

What are the biggest pleasures of the job? What could you do without?
It’s all pretty great, trying to get to the bottom of things and finding an engaging way to tell the story is rewarding.  And I truly love radio, just the sound and rhythm of it, the storytelling. I could do without the stress. There’s a lot of self-imposed pressure. And in the end millions of people hear the story. It has to be accurate and fair.

What advice would you give to someone who wanted to work on a talk radio show someday?
Find a way to get involved with your local public radio station. And check out transom.org,  which has good info about equipment and the craft of putting a radio story together.

You can visit David Kestenbaum on the Planet Money blog. Shows the team has done with This American Life can be found here, here, here and here. The Planet Money podcast is available through iTunes.

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