Episode Transcript
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0:00
Hi. I'm Daniel Alarcon, host of NPR's
0:02
Spanish language podcast, Pallamboolante. This
0:04
season, Superman flies to Chile for some
0:06
real life heroics. A very strange
0:08
dog becomes front page news in Peru.
0:10
Mexican activists infiltrate an Austrian museum
0:13
to tell the story of a controversial artifact.
0:15
And much much more. New episodes every
0:17
Tuesday starting September twentieth available
0:19
wherever you get your podcasts.
0:23
This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:28
The other day, I got a Mizzum with Planet
0:30
Money listener named Rachel come back.
0:34
So I understand you have a story about
0:37
planet money changing lives. Yes.
0:40
I'll start at the beginning. Yeah. That in
0:43
twenty seventeen, I was
0:45
living in Berkeley, California. She was
0:48
working on her PhD and a
0:50
friend walks into her office. Said,
0:52
hey, did you hear that Jeff was on planet
0:54
money? Jeff Lacking. Her
0:56
old friend and ballroom dancing partner
0:58
from college. He was a guest on
1:00
a show we did about free range
1:03
chickens, being eaten
1:06
by Eagles. Jeff's job,
1:08
you may remember, was shooting off these
1:10
explosives to scare the Eagles
1:12
away and make them ruin less products,
1:14
so to speak. And
1:18
there they go. Did you see on
1:20
the backside actually? There goes one right
1:22
now. Okay. We can move them with the
1:24
bird bangers. And when you were listening,
1:27
you know, were you feeling butterflies? I
1:32
think I was more so feeling intrigued
1:35
because his life was so different from
1:37
mine. I was sitting
1:40
in an office, writing
1:42
code to do optimization functions.
1:45
And he's out in a field, you know,
1:48
trying to navigate this bald eagle population
1:51
problem. And then few weeks later,
1:53
Rachel says, you know what? Why not reach
1:55
out? Sounds of a text. I think the
1:57
text said nothing
1:59
more than hey, I I heard
2:02
you on planet money. Hope you're doing
2:04
well. So not a ton of content
2:06
to go off of. It would
2:08
be so weird if he was, like, do a
2:10
phone who dissed. Thankfully,
2:15
I felt confident that he still had my phone
2:17
number. For Rachel and Jeff,
2:19
that one text turned into
2:21
more text, those turned into
2:23
calls, and then She
2:25
went to visit the chicken farm in Georgia.
2:27
I had no idea what was going
2:29
to happen when I flew to Georgia. I just
2:32
more so thought it would be an adventure and a great
2:34
story. Which turns out it was,
2:37
and it led to this
2:39
amazing relationship that I
2:41
have, a a planet money baby, who
2:43
was born twelve weeks ago. Baby. And
2:45
you have a newborn
2:46
kid, congratulations. Clint. Money
2:48
baby. That's crazy. Yeah.
2:51
His name is NOx Frederick, and
2:53
he's adorable. Oh
2:55
my god. Congratulations. Thanks.
2:59
Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Nick
3:02
Fountain. Today, we're gonna
3:04
take Rachel's example. We're gonna reach
3:06
out to guests from Planet Money's past,
3:08
and see how they're doing. Because
3:10
even though we publish people's stories,
3:13
we write these nice tidy endings,
3:15
It's not like the stories end when
3:17
we stop recording. No. No. No.
3:19
They keep going. And so
3:21
we owe it to the people of the stories
3:23
and to our listeners. To
3:26
check back in, see what's happened
3:28
since. It's our annual tradition,
3:30
a show we call the rest
3:33
of the story.
3:47
Of the many stories we published
3:49
this past year, maybe the ones with the most
3:51
at stake were those that
3:53
touched on the war in Ukraine. One
3:55
of those episodes was about a CEO who
3:58
horrified by the Russian aggression in Ukraine
4:00
decided to try to get her employees out
4:02
of
4:02
Russia. The reporter on that story
4:04
was Amanda Aronczyk. Hey, Amanda?
4:07
Hey there, Nick. How's it going? Pretty well.
4:09
Alright. So you talked with the CEO
4:11
again to get an update. Remind us
4:13
her name? Well, we didn't actually
4:16
say her name at the time. Because
4:18
we had to keep it a secret. When
4:20
we first spoke, we were very careful
4:22
to not use your name. We didn't use your company's
4:24
name. What what changed?
4:27
Well,
4:29
first of all, we were able to finally get
4:32
everyone out who was going to get
4:34
out. So that's the main reason. Right?
4:36
Because we didn't want to risk
4:38
naming the name of the company and potentially
4:41
putting all these people who were still
4:43
underway out at risk. But
4:46
since then, we don't do
4:48
anything in Russia anymore. And
4:50
So now we can speak freely, and
4:53
people are no longer afraid. So
4:55
I can say it now. Her name is Natalie
4:57
Kaminsky, She was born in Russia, now
4:59
she's American, and she is the CEO
5:01
of a software company called Jet Rockets.
5:04
And ultimately, she got every
5:06
one of her employees who wanted to leave
5:08
Russia out of Russia. That's more than
5:10
fifty people. And, Natalie,
5:12
she is good at keeping things in perspective.
5:15
Right? She knows there is this brutal
5:17
war in Ukraine. She actually has a sister
5:19
who is trapped there right now. At
5:21
the same time, she's had to manage
5:23
complications with her company. She's had to help people
5:25
start new
5:26
lives, find apartments, enroll their
5:28
kids in new schools, set up an office,
5:31
This is all happening mostly in the neighboring
5:33
country of Georgia. Actually, a funny
5:35
story. You know, when
5:37
we opened the office in Georgia, we
5:39
learned very quickly that Georgia
5:41
doesn't have IKEA. And IKEA, of
5:43
course, is a wonderful resource to furnish
5:45
your office space. It is if you wanna
5:47
you want to furnish an office
5:48
quickly, Ikea. You go to Ikea.
5:51
Well, there's no Ikea in Georgia. So
5:53
they decided that their best plan was to
5:55
actually go get the desk and chairs that
5:57
they left in Russia. They'd
5:59
also left behind all sorts of personal belongings
6:02
because when people left, they
6:04
were often pretending they were just going on vacation,
6:06
so they brought a suitcase or two. So
6:08
Natalie and her team booked some moving trucks
6:10
to go get all of the stuff
6:12
and drive it from Russia to
6:15
the country of Georgia.
6:16
The first time no hassle at all. The
6:19
second time there
6:21
was some interesting occurrence
6:23
at the border, but let me tell
6:25
you, there is nothing apparently that cannot
6:27
be solved. With five
6:29
hundred dollars. All
6:33
problems disappear when it landed
6:35
five hundred dollars cash. So
6:38
with some creative problem solving,
6:40
they've opened their offices in Georgia, a
6:42
bunch of people are relocated. How's business
6:44
going?
6:44
Business is going well.
6:46
Natalie's company, they built software
6:48
and apps for clients, things like they
6:50
recently made a website for selling clothes
6:52
and built a virtual conference app.
6:55
Natalie said that since the war started,
6:57
they have not lost clients and in
6:59
fact have
6:59
grown. So they've had to do this
7:01
other thing that companies sometimes have to
7:04
do when they get bigger. We reached
7:06
seventy six people. So now we
7:08
have this employee well-being manager.
7:11
And he organizes all sorts
7:13
of, like, biking trips and hikes and
7:15
other activities to to help people keep
7:17
their spirits up because still, it's
7:19
almost a year end and it's
7:21
getting hard, you know. People are
7:23
realizing that it's no longer a short
7:25
trip to a new and
7:27
exotic place, you know, they're probably gonna
7:29
stay there for a while, if not
7:31
forever, but, you know, for a long
7:33
time. You know,
7:35
it has been ten months since Russia invaded
7:38
Ukraine, and or doesn't
7:40
seem to be ending anytime soon. Amanda,
7:42
thanks for calling up Natalie and getting that
7:44
update. Yeah. Of course. Thanks, Nick.
7:50
One of the stories we covered this year, and by
7:52
We, I mean, Erica Berris, who joins
7:54
me now. Hey, Erica. Hey, Nick.
7:56
One of the stories was what you
7:58
did about this community outside of
8:00
Atlanta, Georgia, that was trying to
8:02
level
8:02
up, was trying to become a city, and they
8:05
had one Final step, they
8:07
needed to vote on whether or not
8:09
to incorporate to become a city. What
8:11
happened there? Okay. So there's this community,
8:13
Mabelton, and it's kind of part of this
8:15
movement. That's been happening around Atlanta
8:18
where communities have said, hey, we're gonna form
8:20
our own cities. This summer,
8:22
I went to Mabelton, I met with one of
8:24
the organizers Lee Roy Hudgins,
8:26
and everyone calls him trey, so we are
8:28
too. He's lived there most of his life, and
8:30
he's like, Mabelton is not getting the
8:32
investments and attention it could
8:34
get. Or it should get. I've met
8:36
with, like, friends, people
8:38
I grew up with, people I went to high school with, and we
8:40
were eating some wings and talking about it. And then
8:43
finally, we were just like, well, do you guys
8:45
think this is something we should be doing? And they were
8:47
like,
8:47
well, Shari, why don't you do it? And
8:49
so they had this big thing that they had
8:51
to do. They had get the people that would
8:53
be part of Mabelton, that's like seventy
8:55
five thousand people to actually vote
8:57
for it on the ballot in November. How to
8:59
go? Well, I checked in with
9:01
Trey. After the election? Trey, do you
9:03
have a city? We do have a city. It's the
9:05
city of Mableton. Yes.
9:08
Trey says it was a nail
9:10
biter. In any election you just
9:12
never know. And this was a big election.
9:14
Our governor's race was on this election.
9:16
Oh, I know. The whole country was That's
9:18
right.
9:18
That's right. It was the
9:21
last question on our ballots.
9:23
People voted all the way down the ballot.
9:25
Mabel Tim got cityhood with
9:27
fifty three percent of the vote.
9:29
But now they actually have to do all these
9:31
things they said they would do, like force businesses
9:33
to follow local laws and relax
9:35
the zoning laws. The real work.
9:37
Yeah. No. It's the real work, but the thing is
9:39
there's no one yet to do it because there's not yet
9:41
a mayor or a city council or
9:44
any tax revenue to work
9:45
with. You can't just flip the switch on and then revenue
9:48
starts coming in. It doesn't work that way. Uh-huh.
9:50
You know, the county would
9:52
probably need a year. To just
9:54
transition all of their processes
9:57
and all of the different things that they have in
9:59
place for a new
10:00
city. So that will probably take a year or more.
10:02
So one of the things that Mabelton
10:04
is probably gonna have to do is
10:06
the thing that a lot of these other new cities around
10:08
Atlanta have done, which is they
10:10
hire these companies that are like these
10:12
plug and play companies that like set up a
10:14
new city for you. Uh-huh. And you
10:16
kind of pay them after the fact. So you
10:18
are like, come in, do all
10:20
this stuff, and then when our tax revenue comes
10:22
in, we can pay you. There's like a whole little cottage
10:24
industry around that. And so
10:26
that's what they're gonna start doing. And
10:29
they are gonna hope that they can kind of
10:31
deliver on some of those promises that they made when
10:33
they campaigned. Is this nerve
10:34
racking? Yes.
10:38
Yes, it is. Yes, it
10:41
is. Because
10:43
for me, you only get one chance to get it
10:45
done. Right? So yes, it is no racking
10:47
because now it's time for you to put
10:49
up. You know, we
10:51
were just talking before and and talk
10:53
is cheap. You know, so now
10:55
it's time for you to show and tell.
10:58
Alright,
10:58
Erica. Thank you for the update. Happy
11:01
New Year. Happy New Year, Nick.
11:04
In a minute, the answers
11:06
to so many unanswered questions.
11:08
That hundred million dollar deli in New
11:10
Jersey, was it a scam?
11:12
Political pollsters. How they do during the
11:14
midterm? And the question you
11:16
have all been asking we hear you,
11:18
play many records, debut
11:20
song inflation. Is anybody
11:23
listening to it?
11:33
Support for NPR and the following
11:36
message come from Comcast through
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project up Comcast is committing
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one billion dollars to reach tens
11:42
of millions of people with the
11:44
skills, resources, and opportunities
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they need to seed in a digital
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world, from connecting people to the
11:50
internet, to opening doors for the
11:52
next generation of innovators, entrepreneurs,
11:55
and storytellers they are helping to
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create a future that benefits
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generations to come. Project
12:01
Up, building a future of
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unlimited possibilities, more at
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comcast dot com slash project
12:07
up.
12:08
A couple months
12:10
ago, my cohost, Jeff Goe and I
12:12
went to visit PAKipsey, New
12:15
York, and the folks at the Marist College
12:17
polling center. They taught us about polling. They
12:19
taught us how to become pollsters. They taught
12:21
us about the problems of
12:23
modern polling. Jeff joins me
12:25
now to give an update on that
12:27
show. How's it going, Jeff? Hey,
12:29
Nick. It's going great. Now,
12:31
I have not followed how the posters did
12:33
this
12:33
midterm. But, Jeff, you checked in with the folks at
12:36
Marrist, what did they say? Right. And just
12:38
to remind folks, the crux of this
12:40
problem that pollsters are facing right now,
12:42
it's that people, especially young people,
12:44
just aren't picking up the phone. I
12:46
remember it very well I got hung up
12:48
on as well. So many times many
12:50
times. And so and so there's this question,
12:52
right, that we and a lot of other people have been
12:54
asking, are the polls broken,
12:56
or can they accurately predict elections?
12:58
So I called up the director of the mayor's poll, Barbara
13:00
Cavallo, to see how her team did in
13:02
predicting the
13:02
midterms. By the way, Nick, she says,
13:05
hi. Hey, Barbara. It's good
13:07
to see you. How have you been? Great.
13:09
Great. I heard you guys had a
13:11
great twenty twenty two.
13:13
And so did the Meredith fall?
13:16
Full disclosure, Meredith has a working relationship
13:19
with NPR. They do a lot of polls for us.
13:21
Anyway, this was a big year
13:23
for Maersk because they were trying all of these
13:25
new things and turns out everything
13:27
worked really well. This was an
13:29
amazing election for Maersk. And
13:31
for these midterms, their poll estimated
13:34
that overall Republican congressional
13:36
candidates would get three percentage
13:38
points more votes than Democrats across
13:40
the country And when the
13:42
final election results came out,
13:44
Republicans were up two point eight
13:46
percentage points. They nailed it.
13:48
They nailed it. Oh, they totally
13:50
nailed it. It was it was, like,
13:53
right on the nose. It was amazing. So
13:55
they are obviously really happy and
13:57
they credit all the
13:59
new things they were trying. So they
14:01
were texting people to take their
14:03
poll. They were
14:05
asking people to take polls online, and
14:07
so they're just coming up with new ways to reach
14:09
people. Alright, Jeff. But you'll remember
14:11
that you came up with this idea
14:13
that we should try to fix all of
14:15
their polling problems by
14:17
suggesting some questions. And Barbara's games,
14:19
she put them in her polls. How do
14:21
her questions do? Right. So our
14:23
questions were designed to
14:25
not just ask people who they were
14:27
gonna vote for, but who they thought their
14:29
friends and family were gonna vote
14:31
for, who they thought was gonna win the election.
14:33
And the idea is that these questions harness
14:36
the wisdom of the crowds. So
14:38
they're more predictive. And, you know, like, Nick,
14:40
we didn't we didn't, like, invent this. Right?
14:42
Like, we we did we we talked researchers.
14:44
We, like, did our homework. We, like, research
14:46
papers and all this stuff for sure. Yeah. There's, like,
14:48
real evidence that these questions do
14:50
really well at predicting elections. Why are you
14:52
defending this so much? I have a
14:54
feeling that our
14:56
questions did terribly judging
14:58
by how much you're hurt setting this
15:01
up. I'm just
15:02
gonna let Barbara tell you. What we
15:05
found was when we added
15:07
the wisdom of crowds questions,
15:09
it moved it to be more
15:11
Republican. So it
15:13
moved it to be a plus eight.
15:15
A Republican. The swing
15:17
in a mess. Our questions did way
15:20
worse than the marathon.
15:22
That is Barbara.
15:25
I know. But Barbara convinced
15:27
me that, you know, this is what science is all
15:29
about. Right? You try new things, you
15:31
make a new hypothesis, and
15:33
then you gather data. So it's okay to
15:35
be like wrong about stuff because you're
15:37
learning things. So, you know, she was
15:39
actually really happy about how things turned out.
15:41
Of she also, you know,
15:43
nailed the election. Alright,
15:46
Jeff. Thanks so much. Thanks, Nick.
15:49
See you next year in Poughkeepsie again.
15:51
Same time, same pull. Some
15:55
of the best plan of money stories
15:57
unfold as mysteries. And
16:00
most of the time, the mystery is solved
16:02
by the end of the show. But sometimes, the
16:04
mystery is so fresh that we
16:06
published an episode with more questions
16:09
than answers, including
16:11
a show that involves submarine sandwiches,
16:13
and Mary Childs. Hello, Mary Childs.
16:16
Hello. It's a delight to be here.
16:18
Remind us what your show was about.
16:20
Yes. So in twenty twenty
16:22
one, Everyone including but not limited
16:24
to us got obsessed with this
16:26
deli in New Jersey. It's
16:29
sold sandwiches, and
16:31
it was really normal except for the fact that it
16:33
was publicly traded and valued
16:35
at one hundred million
16:37
dollars. That seemed
16:39
weird. Yeah. Because usually, delis
16:41
are not publicly traded. They're not on
16:43
the stock market. Wait. So did
16:45
you actually figure out what
16:47
was going on with the deli ever? Kind
16:51
of. It turned out there was a lot going
16:53
on. And to hear about it, I caught up with the
16:55
CNBC reporter talked to last time,
16:57
Dan Mangan, who chewed
16:59
through every aspect of this story except for I
17:01
would argue the most important one. Did
17:03
you eat a lot of the sandwiches
17:04
from there? No.
17:05
I did. Oh, come on. My boss at the time went down there
17:07
and he said it was pretty good. Even last
17:09
year, it seemed like what was happening was.
17:11
The guys effectively running the company that
17:13
owned the deli were positioning the
17:16
company to get bought. The thinking was they
17:18
wanted to make the shares look
17:20
artificially high, which for reasons that we went
17:22
into on the show last year, would
17:24
help make the company an
17:26
attractive acquisition target so that some
17:28
other company that wanted to be publicly
17:30
traded without the hassle of actually
17:32
going public would come in and buy
17:33
it. And someone did. Someone came
17:36
in and bought the company that owned the deli.
17:38
The deal worked in reality the way it was
17:40
supposed to work on paper, at least that part of
17:42
it did. And then what? So then,
17:44
yeah, it was quiet for,
17:46
you know, a long time
17:48
until a couple of months
17:50
ago. Found out that the justice department
17:52
had indicted three people who
17:54
were intimately involved and also the
17:57
SEC had filed a civil complaint
17:59
against
17:59
us. Three. Nick, I have the indictment. Right
18:01
here, it is one of my many open tabs.
18:03
It charges three guys who owned a
18:05
lot of the shares and what was essentially a shell
18:07
company that owned a real deli that made
18:10
real sandwiches, hometown, International
18:12
Inc. And then this other company, e waste,
18:14
that owned nothing.
18:16
The three guys are charged with twelve counts, and most of the
18:18
charges have the word securities or fraud
18:20
in them. So what they did was
18:23
allegedly was they they
18:25
either structured or aware
18:28
of trading activity that
18:30
artificially pumped up the value these
18:32
stocks by in the case of hometown more
18:34
than nine hundred percent.
18:37
That's a
18:37
lot. That's
18:37
a big percent. It
18:39
is. But in the case of by nearly twenty
18:42
thousand percent. An even bigger
18:44
percent? So it was
18:46
essentially, allegedly, a a pump
18:48
and dump ski. Yeah. I mean,
18:50
halfway because the three guys
18:52
who effectively ran the company never
18:54
got to dump. They never ended
18:56
up selling their shares.
18:58
Maybe because we all were paying so
19:00
much attention to the story. A few
19:02
months ago, two of the three were arrested. They
19:05
have plead not guilty, and the
19:07
third is still at large,
19:09
allegedly maybe in Hong
19:11
Kong. I know. Real
19:13
espionage stuff. Also, the
19:15
deli closed. Dan will never get to
19:17
try those sandwiches. It's a
19:19
tragedy.
19:19
Barry, now that you have had some
19:22
time to Digest I'm
19:24
sorry. This story. Okay.
19:26
Any
19:26
big takeaways? Well, Dan made this
19:29
observation that I really liked, which is that
19:31
the market for stocks like the
19:33
ones we're talking about, which are small time
19:35
but publicly traded. They're
19:37
not traded on a normal exchange. You
19:39
can't go into the New York stock exchange and buy them.
19:41
You have to like find a guy. It's like the Craigslist
19:43
of stocks and that leaves a lot
19:46
of room for shenanigans. But
19:48
Dan says, maybe with this one example of the
19:50
deli where it was just one sandwich
19:52
shop in the middle of New Jersey with no
19:54
growth plan. Maybe it was so egregious
19:57
and we all made so much fun of it that
19:59
regulators might start to take a closer
20:01
look at this market. Mary
20:04
Childs, thank you for that
20:06
update. May you have many
20:08
delicious sandwiches, in this new
20:10
year. Oh, thank you. A hundred million dollars
20:12
sandwich to you too. Probably
20:21
the thing that gave us
20:23
Planet Buddy's staffers the
20:25
most life this year
20:28
was this project by
20:30
our producer James Snead and
20:33
Sarah Gonzalez and Erica Berris and a whole host of other
20:35
people. And that was
20:37
to take this song that
20:39
had been recorded in the seventies about
20:41
inflation and put it out into
20:43
the world and make a planet money record
20:45
company. Sarah Gonzalez is here to
20:47
give us an update about it. Hey,
20:49
Sarah. Hey, Nick. So people, I'm
20:51
sure, listen to this. If not, you have to listen. The
20:54
episodes are called planet money records,
20:56
volumes one and two,
20:58
But Sarah, if they did not listen, remind us what this
21:00
whole project was
21:01
about. Sure. Yeah. So we introduced you a
21:03
couple months ago to a guy named Ernest Jackson
21:06
in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He is seventy
21:08
four years old. Today, he's been singing
21:10
since he was five years old, and he's been
21:13
trying to make it in the music
21:14
industry. His whole life, here's earnest. I've
21:16
never been signed by a label. That's
21:19
my hope and dream.
21:22
So planet money
21:24
Became a record label, Planet Money
21:26
Records, and we signed
21:28
Ernest Jackson. We released one
21:30
of his songs inflation, here's
21:33
that time. What
21:41
you do, and listen to
21:44
what I have. And our plan
21:46
with this song was to sit
21:48
back, see how it did all the
21:50
streaming platforms, and I
21:52
have some updates for you.
21:55
And I know that I have been
21:57
listening to it a bunch and my
21:59
family has been listening to it a bunch.
22:01
Really? Great. Have
22:03
the rest of the people who are not
22:05
paid by NPR. Have they been listening?
22:07
Alright. I'm gonna give you a couple stats. So, like,
22:09
on YouTube music, we have
22:12
about twenty seven thousand streams.
22:14
Alright. Little good,
22:16
not that great. That translates
22:18
to thirty one ish dollars
22:20
for Ernest Jackson.
22:23
So, like, really not that great. Right? But a
22:25
little bit better news. On Spotify,
22:27
our song has more than half
22:29
a million ish streams. Which
22:31
is pretty big. I feel like that is respectable.
22:34
That is a hit. Oh, it's I
22:36
mean, it's not a hit. But apparently,
22:39
these are actually impressive
22:41
numbers. Okay. That's a lot of streams,
22:43
but it all comes down to money. I know.
22:45
How much is Ernest gonna make off of
22:47
this? Alright. For half a million
22:50
ish streams on
22:52
Spotify. Earnest gets,
22:54
like, a thousand four
22:56
hundred ish dollars.
23:00
Yeah. Not great. It's like a little
23:02
bit depressing. These are just
23:04
estimates. They're pretty reliable
23:06
estimates on, like, these royalty calculators,
23:08
but they are you know, still just estimates. So it
23:10
could be a little bit more, but actually more
23:12
likely it'll be a little bit less.
23:14
We won't actually know exactly
23:16
how much money the song made and how much earnest gets
23:18
to keep of that until we get our
23:20
first check-in the mail, which should
23:23
come at the end of this month or
23:25
in early January. We're, like,
23:27
very anxiously awaiting our first
23:29
check on the song. The minute we
23:31
get paid, we're gonna tell you all
23:33
about it. But I do wanna
23:35
remind our listeners that our goal for this
23:37
project was actually to reach a million
23:39
streams. So come on. You
23:41
guys are gonna put it on that New Year's Eve
23:43
playlist. Exactly. We're halfway
23:45
there. It's like so so close, but
23:47
also so so far away. It took us two months to
23:49
get to have a million streams. So, you
23:51
know, for earnest, stream
23:53
the song again, tell your people
23:55
to do it. You actually have to listen to
23:57
at least thirty seconds of the
23:59
song for a two count as a real
24:01
stream that we make money on. The song is
24:04
called inflation. It is by
24:06
Ernest Jackson. You can
24:08
find it anywhere you can find it on Apple Music,
24:10
Spotify, Amazon Music,
24:12
title, YouTube
24:14
Music, Sarah, Thank
24:16
you so much for this update. I can't wait for there's
24:18
gonna be a lot more updates. I would get the feeling. We
24:20
got we got some stuff in in store for
24:22
everyone. Also, thank you to our listeners who
24:24
have been listening to this song for Ernest.
24:26
It's pretty pretty cool. Alright.
24:28
See you. Thanks. It's
24:34
that time of year again. We would
24:36
really appreciate it if you
24:38
supported this show and
24:40
helped us keep doing this work that we
24:42
love so much. The best
24:44
way to do that is to donate to
24:46
your local NPR member
24:48
station. And an easy way to
24:50
find that is to go to donate dot NPR
24:52
dot org slash planet money.
24:54
Please use that URL because then
24:56
the station will know we
24:58
sent you their way. Again, donate dot NPR
25:01
dot org slash planet money.
25:04
Today's show was produced by James Snead,
25:06
mastered by Robert Rhode riguez
25:08
and edited by Jesjay. It was fact checked by
25:10
Sierra Juarez. I'm Nick
25:13
Fountain. This is NPR. Thank you
25:15
for listening and have
25:18
a happy New
25:21
Year. This
25:23
message comes from NPR sponsor,
25:25
Comcast, Through Project Upp, Comcast
25:27
is committing one billion dollars
25:29
to reach people with the skills, resources,
25:32
and opportunities they need to
25:35
seed in a digital world, project up,
25:37
building a future of unlimited
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