Pod Insights Planet Money There's no business like dough business About this episode Have you ever walked around a street, mall, or airport and noticed two or three of the same franchise restaurant within walking distance? Why might one Starbucks or McDonald’s or Wetzel’s Pretzels sometimes be built so close to another? Are they friends or competitors? And how can that possibly be profitable?
Today’s show is one such example. Our pals at Hyperfixed https://www.hyperfixedpod.com/ got a knotty question we just had to help them untangle: Why are there so many Wetzel’s Pretzels so close to one another at the Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center Station?
To find out, Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi followed the dough all the way to the top. His journey led him to a jolly pretzel executive, a franchisee with a deep-fried American dream, and a brush with mall security.
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This episode was hosted by Alex Goldman and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. Hyperfixed is produced and edited by Emma Courtland, Amor Yates, Sari Soffer Sukenik and Tori Dominguez Peak. The music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and Alex Goldman. It was engineered by Tony Williams. Fact checking by Naomi Barr. The Planet Money version was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler and edited by Jess Jiang. It was engineered by Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 This message comes from Apollo. Apollo provides access to long duration capital and a broad range of financing capabilities, helping companies drive growth at an efficient cost of capital. Learn more at apollo.com/capital.
0:15 Speaker 01 This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:20 Speaker 02 A few months back, Planet Money got a little economic bat signal from our friends over at the podcast Hyperfixed. Hyperfixed is hosted by one of my longtime favorite radio heads, Alex Goldman. He was previously one of the hosts of Reply All. And for each episode, Hyperfixed takes on listener problems, big and small, and sets out to solve them.
0:40 Speaker 03 Yeah, we get questions as small as a listener said, hey, my favorite bakery shut down, and now I can no longer get the cake that I love. So we got Claire Saffitz, Baker Extraordinaire, to help us figure out the recipe.
0:51 Speaker 02 Love that question.
0:52 Speaker 03 And we also get questions like, should I have children? Which, as you might imagine, is a more difficult question to answer.
0:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's a bigger, scarier one.
1:02 Speaker 02 But thank you for looking into it.
1:04 Speaker 03 Yeah, I do my best. But the question that made us think of you guys was from a listener named Jed Kronfeld because he wanted to talk about his local subway stop.
1:13 Speaker 04 To call it just a subway station, it's underplaying it a little bit.
1:17 Speaker 03 Jed's lived in Brooklyn for the last five years, and the question on his mind had to do with the Atlantic Avenue Barclay Center Station.
1:24 Speaker 04 It connects like nine or 10 different lines, and then it leads to a terminal for the Long Island Railroad. And then on top of that is a whole other layer that is a mall.
1:36 Speaker 03 And to understand Jed's question, you first have to understand what this complex looks like. The Atlantic Avenue Barclay Center Station is consistently ranked as the number one busiest station in Brooklyn. And the reason it's so busy is because this one hub connects downtown Brooklyn to the rest of New York City. It's home to a massive arena, the Brooklyn Nets play there, it's a huge concert venue where you can see artists like Bad Bunny, Bruce Springsteen, Charli XCX. So the subway station itself is super bustling. It's got multiple levels. And then on top of that, you have a shopping mall. And it's in this Escher-like maze that Jed first noticed something strange.
2:13 Speaker 04 On the upper end, in the mall, there is one Wetzels Pretzels.
2:19 Speaker 04 And it looks like any Wetzel's Pretzels. And then within the system, on the top floor, there is a Wetzel's Pretzels. And on the bottom floor, there is another Wetzel's Pretzels. And the spaces that they're in, they look like no larger than a broom closet. It just kind of doesn't make sense. I don't know how you set up one place like that, much less two, much less a third location.
2:44 Speaker 03 If you were to walk a circuit between all of them, how far away are they from one another?
2:49 Speaker 04 You could get to all of them within a minute. It's really that quick.
2:53 Speaker 03 Wow. When did you notice that there were three Wetzel's Pretzels locations?
2:58 Speaker 04 By the time I moved into Brooklyn, like the one in the mall, that was already there. And then about two years ago, the other two moved in. I don't know if they moved in at the same time, but they definitely moved in within the same month. I'm like, what, what are we doing? This is excessive.
3:17 Speaker 03 Underneath Jed's skepticism, there are three questions. First, he wants to understand why there are three Wetzel's Pretzels clustered so close together in the Atlantic Barclays Station. Second, he wants to know if they're competitors or collaborators. And third, he wants to know if any of these locations are actually turning a profit. And we started looking into this and it turned out the Atlantic Avenue Barclays Station was not the only instance of this sort of Wetzel's cluster. Turns out there are also three Wetzel's Pretzels at the American Dream Mall in New Jersey. At the Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance, California, there are three Wetzel's Pretzels.
3:57 Speaker 03 And at the Crypto.com Arena, where the LA Lakers play, there are five Wetzel's Pretzels locations. In fact, the more we looked into it, the more we noticed where one Wetzel's Pretzels location exists, other Wetzel's Pretzels are often very close by. And that's when we decided to call you, Alexi, to try and solve Jed's little mystery.
4:17 Speaker 02 Sign me up. Let's go.
4:19 Speaker 03 What is it about Jed's question that is so interesting to you?
4:24 Speaker 02 I think Jed's question is a question that I have had personally and that I think a lot of us have. It's like exactly in this. Delectable sweet spot, or savory, I guess, in this case, of like, something in the world that is all around us all the time. And so it just felt like one of those things that is like a tiny question and it's kind of funny because it's so small, but it actually touches on like the fabric of cities and just the things we walk around and are surrounded by every day. So I am eager to get out there and hit the streets and figure out what's going on. Go for it. I'd love to hear the answer and not having to go out and do it myself makes it even more enticing to me. Yes, let me do this one. Let me ride.
5:12 Speaker 02 Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi.
5:14 Speaker 03 And I'm Alex Goldman.
5:16 Speaker 02 I think we've all had those moments of looking around the world and all of a sudden you'll be surrounded by three Starbucks on a given street or a handful of McDonald's lining the halls of an airport terminal. Sort of feels like you're watching the ebb and flow of some Titanic corporate battle you can just barely see. So when Jed flagged for us three Wetzel's all within spitting distance of each other, we knew there was some bigger story under there.
5:40 Speaker 03 So today on the show, we go deep inside the pretzel supply chain to find out how Wetzel's took over the subway station. We'll hear of one man's journey to his own salty American dream, learn about consumer behavior and how franchises work, and of course, there will be plenty of twists along the way.
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7:14 Speaker 02 OK, so for today's episode, we're going to hit play on that hyper fix story based on my little reporting journey in just a minute. To set things up, I set out to untangle Jed's pretzel based mystery and then hand it over that reporting to you, Alex and your team to put the episode together.
7:28 Speaker 03 Which worked out great for me because you did all the hard work.
7:30 Speaker 02 You know, I love that for you.
7:33 Speaker 02 And I began my quest in maybe an obvious place by calling up Wetzel's Pretzels corporate. And that is how I met a jovial man named John Fisher.
7:43 Speaker 06 When people say, what's your job? My job is to bring pretzels to the people. I even have a wristband on that says pretzels to the people. It's like kind of our mantra, like wherever there's people, there should be pretzels.
7:52 Speaker 02 John retired just last month, but when I spoke with him, he was the head of development for Wetzel's Pretzels, which means it was his job to help the company's franchisees find and build successful locations. And that mantra, it's not just a catchphrase. It's kind of a shorthand for Wetzel's business strategy. It also holds part of the answer to Jed's questions. And for that, we're just going to play an excerpt of that hyper fixed episode where Alex takes the reins.
8:19 Speaker 03 OK, so remember a couple of minutes ago when Alexi was talking about how this question might be the key to understanding not just why there are clusters of Wetzel's, but why there are clusters of Starbucks and McDonald's and all of these other brands that we see lining the streets of American cities? Well, John can't actually speak to the other real estate strategies behind those other companies because obviously he doesn't work for those other companies. But what he can say with 100% certainty is that the real estate needs of Wetzel's Pretzels are pretty different from the needs of those other companies because pretzels just aren't the kind of product that people go out of their way to buy.
8:58 Speaker 06 People don't get in their car and say, I'm going to go get a pretzel and I'm going to drive to the mall, walk 15 minutes in the parking lot.
9:04 Speaker 03 Going through, try to park in and get a pretzel and then come out, right? They're gonna go to the mall and happen to get a pretzel while they're there. In the world of retail, there's a name for this kind of thing. It's called an impulse product. And unlike destination products, which are the kind of things people go out into the world with the intention of buying, impulse products are defined by the fact that nobody's really planning on buying them. So how do you get people to buy something they didn't plan to buy? For Wetzel's, it's all about bringing pretzels to the people. It's about placing their storefronts in high-traffic, high-visibility areas where people are already walking around, and then placing additional storefronts along that same route to create as many opportunities for repeat exposure as the location can feasibly sustain.
9:49 Speaker 03 The business model is impulse-driven. And so, you know, I'm capturing people at different places, in different times within their route, or I'm even like exposing them to the thought and the smell at one place, where then they see it a second time and they're like, ah, I can't resist.
10:06 Speaker 02 Yes.
10:07 Speaker 03 I escaped once, but not the second time. I need one now.
10:10 Speaker 02 It's a strategy of attrition, of delicious olfactory attrition.
10:15 Speaker 03 I mean, obviously, this part makes sense, right? The more these pretzels are in your face, the more their smell is in your nose, the more likely you are to buy this thing you didn't intend to buy. But the real question for us is, aren't all of these Wetzel's eating into each other's profits? Or are they somehow immune to the laws of supply and demand?
10:35 Speaker 02 How do you think about when it makes sense to have multiple Wetzel's locations in the same broad space versus the risk of cannibalizing your own sales or oversaturating the place?
10:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's really unique. I used to work for a pizza company, and it was a take-and-bake pizza company. You didn't go there unless you planned on buying a pizza. It was an ultimate destination purchase, right? You don't just happen to walk around and buy a raw pizza and, you know, you kind of know that you're gonna go there, right? So what's interesting is you have the ultimate destination type of concepts where you build a store, and if you put a store five miles away, franchisees really Really mad because, hey, I have customers coming from over there and, you know, I'm going to lose 10, 20% of my sales. Wetzel's is kind of the opposite of that. We literally have malls that have five stores in the same mall. Because we're an impulse product. For us, it's really just about, is the mall big enough?
11:31 Speaker 03 Or is there enough traffic and different occasions to support different impulse purchases in that mall? And is there cannibalization when you open a second store? A little bit, but not very much. It's pretty amazing. I think, I was surprised when I got here, I was like, really? You can have two stores in the same mall? I've never seen that before. And now I'm sitting here putting three and four in some malls because it's really about that impulse nature. So they're not going there specifically for you. You know, whether it's a subway, or a theme park, or a stadium, you're going to have different locations based on where the people are to service them. And so, not a lot of businesses can do that. One of the other big factors undergirding this model is that corporate Wetzel's
12:16 Speaker 03 will not let different franchisees open storefronts under the same roof. So anytime you see a cluster of Wetzel's Pretzels in the wild, know that every storefront under the same roof is owned by the same person. They aren't actually competing with each other. And any cannibalization that's happening has been at least partially planned. Also, some franchisees will open additional locations in the same space just to make sure that those spaces don't get taken by the competition. So these clusters function more like a defensive mapping sort of strategy. The other big thing is that the company gets final approval on all franchise locations. And because they've had the most success in malls, and transport hubs, and event spaces,
13:00 Speaker 03 that's where most of these clusters will be.
13:03 Speaker 02 So in this case, it's like, okay, these locations may seem to a layman like me, walking through being like, how, why would you possibly have these two pretzel stands so close to each other? Well, the proof is sort of in the profits.
13:14 Speaker 03 I think you have to look at every concept and what works for that concept, where they are on that. I'll call it.
13:19 Speaker 06 Destination impulse spectrum.
13:21 Speaker 02 Yes.
13:22 Speaker 06 And if you're on the very high side of the impulse spectrum, you probably can get away with having several locations very close to each other to capture the traffic. And if you're on the other side of that spectrum, you probably don't want to think about doing that. It'd probably be a lot of cannibalization and not really work.
13:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:37 Speaker 03 So now we know why these locations are clustered so close together. That is to say, we know why they're there in theory. But we still wanted to know if this strategy was actually working in the Atlantic Barclay Station. Were the three storefronts actually making money? And we knew just who we had to ask.
14:06 Speaker 03 After the break, answers from the man behind the Atlantic Avenue Wetzel's.
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14:30 Speaker 07 This week on Up First, we're in the final days before the midterm elections. And this is one of the wonderful things about politics, one of the wonderful things about humanity. We have all this data, we have all this information, and nobody really knows what's gonna happen. We're gonna follow it day by day through Election Day and beyond. And you can listen to Up First every morning on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kevin Roos. And I'm Casey Newton. And together, we've been tech journalists for decades. Now, we're your hosts of Machine Gods, a new podcast from NPR that makes sense of what AI means for your work, your life, and all of our futures. Twice a week, we'll be exploring the biggest moves in tech and give you unmatched access to the real titans of industry.
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15:20 Speaker 02 Tell me, we talked with fashion designer Daniel Vasevic about why he is in charge of renovating his parents' house.
15:26 Speaker 07 I don't have an architecture degree.
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15:43 Speaker 02 When I first started looking into the mystery of the Atlantic Barclays pretzel cluster, it became clear that the person best equipped to answer Jed's question was a man named Ricky Alom. Because after a little bit of digging, I found out that Ricky owned all three of those Wetzel's pretzels, along with more than a dozen others around the country. Now, for a few weeks, Ricky did not seem super eager to talk to me. But one day, I finally got him on the phone, and he invited me to come visit him at the site of his first Wetzel's pretzel store. It was at a mall deep in suburban LA, kind of place you might associate with valley girls. And in fact, I found out it was literally the mall from the movie Clueless. Okay, testing, testing. It's Alexi. It is Thursday, March 19th at 3:10 Pacific
16:28 Speaker 02 time. I've just gotten to the, I think it's the Westfield Mall in Sherman Oaks, California. And I am on a sort of pretzel mission. I've talked to John Fisher up at Wetzel's Pretzels HQ. He walked me through kind of the basics of how companies think about when it makes economic sense to have a couple franchise locations near each other. But we've come here to get it straight from the franchisee's mouth. Okay, here it goes. Nothing. I've just parked and let's go find Ricky.
17:06 Speaker 02 Okay, so this is a little off story, but it made me laugh so much that I wanted to share. Alexi, you're not much of a mall rat. I'm not. You didn't grow up going to the mall. I actually heard you pronounce shbaro, shbaro, which is a huge red flag for mall rats like me. I thought it sounded elevated. Yeah, it's fancy.
17:25 Speaker 03 So I wasn't surprised to learn that just minutes after you walked into the mall with recording gear and a giant microphone, you got stopped.
17:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, I was like basically immediately intercepted by mall security, who seemed to be kind of sensitive about having random podcasters wandering the halls recording stuff, but I did convince them of the purity of my intentions. And I even started asking them their opinion about this clustering of different types of stores like Wetzel's in the mall. And they just seemed sort of like bored and confused enough that they just let me go. And that's just about when I saw Ricky. I see Ricky in the distance. There we go. How you doing? Good, how are you? Ricky, I presume? Good to see you, man. Good to see you too. What a pleasure. Oh, no problem. Same here.
18:09 Speaker 03 Ricky's been a Wetzel's franchisee for the last 20 years. And the way he tells it, pretzels were kind of like his gateway to his American dream. After moving to LA from Bangladesh in the early 90s, Ricky worked a series of odd jobs, but in his heart, there was always one goal, to have a business of his own. So Ricky opened a liquor store, which failed miserably. Then he started a business that sold painted hermit crabs from kiosks at the mall. And that one worked out pretty well, but he wanted something that felt more permanent. And that's when he started looking at franchises. Pretzels aren't like a big thing in Bangladesh, but his years in the United States taught Ricky that Americans love hot dough.
18:53 Speaker 03 So he opened this Wetzel's in 2004. And within a year and a half, he opened a second location right here in the same mall. Within a year and a half, I opened the second location on the first floor. And that took a hit on this one a little bit. 10, 15% business dropped from the first location. But within six months, it came back. Whatever the business I was doing on the, on the first location, it came back. Second Location is doing its own business. And I think within another few years, I was able to open another location. And in a few years, another location. So yeah, I mean,
19:34 Speaker 03 goal was to open at least one location every other year or whatnot.
19:39 Speaker 02 How many of you opened in total?
19:41 Speaker 03 Seventeen locations, combined east and west.
19:47 Speaker 02 So seventeen locations. I mean, that sounds like a little pretzel empire.
19:52 Speaker 03 So far, so good.
19:54 Speaker 02 And when did you get a sense that getting into the dough business might eventually translate into rolling in the dough?
20:04 Speaker 03 You know, not every dough business is gonna make you the dough, remember? There is always risk, even the proven business. You gotta make sure the location is right. But how do you make sure that a location is right? How do you decide if a mall can support a second storefront? Or if a subway slash mall can support three? We are driven by where people are. Let's put it this way. So we do sit down and count, literally, hand count how many people passing by in front of this potential location. So there is a certain amount of traffic has to pass by and then we open.
20:44 Speaker 03 So to taking that consideration to open a second location is that we do the same thing. Going to the second location, if it's within the same mall or same train station or even the airport or what have you, we do the same counting, how many people passing by? Are this the same traffic, second floor versus first floor? We take all those under consideration before you open the second location.
21:08 Speaker 02 How do you count? Do you have like an app or a little?
21:11 Speaker 03 Well, back in the days, even still as of right now, I have one of those clicker.
21:17 Speaker 03 Yeah, but now you have an app.
21:19 Speaker 07 You have all the sophisticated software and whatnot. Yes, Wetzel's do their due diligence. But at the same time, I like to come in and sit down just like this. And I want to see how many people passing by. And I count literally with the phone. I put a timer and I count.
21:34 Speaker 02 And is there a number that you want to see or some sort of mark you're trying to get to?
21:37 Speaker 07 You got to have fifteen to seventeen hundred people every given hour.
21:42 Speaker 02 OK, fifteen to seventeen hundred an hour.
21:45 Speaker 07 Yeah.
21:46 Speaker 03 Ricky said that he typically want to see these kinds of numbers during high-traffic weekend hours. They might be much lower during weekdays. And Ricky stressed that this is not a perfect science. Sometimes, he says, the foot traffic just doesn't convert to sales in the way you thought it would. And sometimes, the foot traffic you thought you could count on just suddenly dries up. Which brings us to the question at hand about whether or not the cluster of Wetzel's Pretzels at the Atlantic Barclay Station is actually profitable.
22:18 Speaker 03 So when Ricky opened his first Atlantic storefront in 2016, it seemed like a perfect location. As you've already heard, Wetzel's Pretzels does best in places like malls and transit hubs and event centers. And this first location seemed to offer a bit of all of those things. The spot was in a mall, above a subway station, across the street from an event center. And for several years, it felt like getting the best of all of these worlds. And then COVID hit. And like so many other businesses in the city, the Atlantic Terminal Wetzel's was forced to shut down. But the thing is that when the store reopened three months later, the pre-pandemic business just didn't come back.
22:59 Speaker 07 My business dropped compared to 2018 and 19. It dropped forty, almost fifty percent, forty or fifty percent. So I was in a situation that I thought about shutting it down, but I couldn't do it because I have the obligation. I signed the long term contract.
23:19 Speaker 03 Because of this long term lease, Ricky was forced to leave the lights on. And for the next couple of years, he took a loss at the Atlantic Avenue location. And then, one day a few years ago, the landlord came to Ricky with a proposition. He said that he had a couple of retail locations available inside the subway terminal, one on the first floor and one on the second. These locations were about the size of broom closets, and they didn't have kitchens. And technically, they were only about 100 feet from one another. But because they were inside the subway station, they could do something that the mall location couldn't, cater to commuters directly. Ricky didn't really want to take on both locations, but it was an all or nothing
24:01 Speaker 03 deal. So Ricky took both, and his fortunes began to change.
24:07 Speaker 07 Those two satellite locations actually helped me to sustain the business within this mall because upstairs, main location, I'm still suffering.
24:17 Speaker 02 So the idea to expand to the other locations was kind of to offset the losses that were happening in the main one in a way?
24:23 Speaker 07 Not exactly, to be honest with you. My thought was upstairs, that's where I bake my goods. Since I bake it, those two locations, I don't bake anything. I don't make anything. I take the food from upstairs and I just sell it over there. So since I have, it's like a commissary, let's put it this way. Since I have this facility, let's open those two locations. It will be less labor. It's gonna, because I run those two with one person each location. Everything else comes from upstairs. A2Z pretzel, the lemonade, and you name it, the frozen drink and the soda. Everything comes from upstairs.
25:00 Speaker 03 What Ricky's saying is that unlike almost all the other Wettles properties he owns, the Atlantic Barclays cluster is actually so close together, he can run three locations out of one kitchen, which drastically reduces his operating costs, or at least his cost per location. Also, even though these satellite locations are physically close together, because they're on different platforms, they're actually serving different groups of customers. So no matter which way you're moving inside the Atlantic Barclays station, you're going to pass one of Ricky's Wettles pretzels.
25:31 Speaker 02 So maybe just to boil down the question, I think the listeners' question was, you know, passing through the Atlantic Terminal was, how could it possibly be like, make economic sense to have the same business so close to each other in the same space? What's the kind of like boiled down answer to that question?
25:49 Speaker 06 Answer to this is that both location has its own customer. Yes, there are some spillover from the first floor to the second floor, but each location has its own customer.
26:01 Speaker 02 And especially for a product that you're kind of like catching them in a moment, or they're smelling something and deciding to stop and that sort of thing, is that important?
26:09 Speaker 06 Absolutely. It's that product, the smell, the sampling, this is very, yeah, there is no escaping. Let's put it this way.
26:18 Speaker 02 I like it. It feels like we're getting to the bottom of the pretzel logic.
26:23 Speaker 06 Yes, yes. Look, it's, all I'm doing right here, I'm bringing the pretzels to the people. That's all.
26:31 Speaker 02 I've heard that before.
26:33 Speaker 06 There you go.
26:35 Speaker 03 Ricky told Alexi that his Wetzel's locations in the Atlantic Avenue Barclay Station were in fact moving a lot of dough, but we decided to do a little data collecting of our own. So on a random day in the middle of the week, we sent hyperfixed producer Amor Yates to the station and asked her to spend some time simply watching the Wetzel's. Amor lives in Brooklyn and she's been through this station more times than she can count, but this was the first time she'd actually just stood there. And while she was standing, she saw something that she had never seen before, something Jed had also missed on his many trips through the subway station. There was a line. At different moments, at each of these Wetzel's locations, people were stopping to buy pretzels.
27:20 Speaker 03 It was easy to miss them because the transactions were happening so quickly, the lines never got super long. But sure enough, when a subway car would pull in and a wave of people would go by on their way from one place to another, two or three of them would stop. And whether it was because they caught the aroma of warm dough or simply because they were feeling a bit peckish and there were no other grab and go options around at that moment. They decided to buy a pretzel. And presumably, over the course of the day, this was happening enough to keep these businesses in business, which keeps guys like Ricky reinvesting in this model. So as strange as it seems to have so many wettles clustered so closely together, from a business perspective, the recipe works.
28:06 Speaker 04 This is amazing. I'm a gog.
28:08 Speaker 03 Here's Jed again.
28:11 Speaker 03 I've never heard anybody say a gog on this show before. Congratulations.
28:15 Speaker 04 First time for everything, I guess.
28:16 Speaker 03 What is it that amazes you about this?
28:19 Speaker 04 The fact that you guys can make a story out of this, that there's something to find. I was fully expecting you guys to just say, all right, there's nothing here. Thank you so much. It's like, we had fun, but we gotta leave it right here.
28:33 Speaker 06 Thank you for submitting this question, Jed. It was a lot of fun.
28:37 Speaker 04 Thank you, Amor, Alex. Oh, my god. This is... Okay, just as one more thing, I feel like I was given a genie and granted one wish, and I felt like I wasted my wish. And that is absolutely not the case.
28:53 Speaker 06 Not at all!
28:55 Speaker 03 No, this was great.
29:03 Speaker 02 Alex Goldman hosts the excellent podcast Hyperfixed. Every week, they follow listener problems, big and small, into all sorts of strange rabbit holes. I recently liked Desperately Seeking Shogrin about a mysterious band with unknown origins.
29:19 Speaker 03 Hyperfixed is produced and edited by Emma Courtland, Amor Yates, Sarisoffr Sukennic, and Tori Dominguez-Pique. The music is by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and me. It was engineered by Tony Williams. Fact checking by Naomi Barr.
29:32 Speaker 02 The Planet Money version was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kessler and edited by Jess Jang. It was engineered by Robert Rodriguez. And Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
29:41 Speaker 03 I'm Alex Goldman.
29:43 Speaker 02 And I'm Alex E. Horowitz-Gazi. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.
30:07 Speaker 00 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
30:11 Speaker 06 This election season, let the NPR Politics podcast save your time and your sanity. We'll help you understand key races, which polls you can safely ignore, and what might happen if power shifts in Congress. Our short daily episodes come out every afternoon, so you can spend less time scrolling through each chaotic news cycle. Make NPR Politics your hub for midterm election coverage. Follow our podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
30:35 Speaker 07 Oh, Kevin, it feels good to be back. It sure does, Casey. And what a time. The world is talking about AI and what's going on in Silicon Valley. And we are here with a new show to tell you all about it. That's right, Kevin. On our new show, Machine Gods, twice a week, we'll be bringing you the biggest news in tech and bring you unmatched access to the real titans of this industry. You can find Machine Gods from NPR on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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