Your New Favorite Podcast: Open Account With SuChin Pak

So I was listening to Planet Money yesterday (while I was walking to the grocery store to buy stew meat and mirepoix components for my new slow cooker) and this is what I heard:

Support for this podcast comes from Open Account, a podcast series created by SuChin Pak and Umpqua Bank. Open Account explores, through honest and sometimes comical interviews, our uncomfortable silence around money.

I have to apologize to David Kestenbaum, Chana Joffe-Walt, and the good people at NPR and Planet Money, because I immediately stopped the podcast and began downloading Open Account instead.

It’s so great. Let me just quote SuChin Pak’s opener:

Welcome to Open Account, where we get honest about making, losing, and living with money. I’m SuChin Pak. Conversations about money, culture, power, class — it’s at the center of my identity. I think it’s a combination of being born to immigrant parents, growing up relatively poor, and really living in a world where formal institutions, like banks and anywhere that you had to sign a contract, was really feared and avoided at all costs.

Pak tells us that she “didn’t really have anyone to teach me financial literacy” — in Episode 2, she describes how she bought a car by putting the down payment on a credit card — and Open Account is her opportunity to talk about her own financial mistakes and successes, as well as interview other people about theirs. As she puts it:

People will talk about money in the general sense, but not in the specific sense of, like, where’d you fail, how’d you succeed, how’d you do it.

The first two episodes are just amazing. In Episode 1, Pak interviews Portland Trail Blazers center Meyers Leonard about going from poverty to affluence and how he handled the financial and cultural shift. In Episode 2, she interviews author, comedian, and Daily Show producer Baratunde Thurston about managing money while making his own career.

And yes, she does ask them where they failed, where they succeeded, and how they did it — specifically, how they figured out How To Do Money, because all of us have to figure out how to do money on our own.

This is my new favorite podcast. Maybe it’ll become yours too.

Photo credit: mikey.saltas

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