Imagine you could call up a friend and say, "Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy." Now imagine that's actually a fun evening. That's what we're going for at Planet Money.

We find creative, entertaining ways to make sense of the big, complicated forces that move our economy. That's why we made a t-shirt and traced the supply chain around the world from cotton field to factory; bought 100 barrels of crude oil — paying cash out of a briefcase for fun — then followed it from ground to gas tank; launched a satellite; and built an adorable algorithmic trading Twitter bot, and adopted an abandoned superhero and built a merchandising empire.