"Hacks" creators on collaboration, S5, and the state of comedy

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Speaker 3 Tell you what, we're going to do some news, and then we're just going to sit back and have a chat.

Speaker 3 From American Public Media, this is Marketplace

Speaker 3 in Los Angeles. I'm Kai Risdahl.
It is Wednesday, today, the 13th of August. Good as always to have you along, everybody.

Speaker 3 We are going to talk television in a little bit, specifically the business of comedy right now with the creators of the HBO show Hacks.

Speaker 3 But we are going to begin because it's our job with the business of this economy right now.

Speaker 3 If you're a regular listener, and probably even if you're not, you know that a whole slew of the data we use to understand this economy comes from the government.

Speaker 3 The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the Department of Energy, I could go on, but I won't.

Speaker 3 The challenge, and this is entirely separate from the looming and very real political threat to government data, but the challenge is that the way the feds get that data doesn't seem to be working anymore.

Speaker 3 And that, as Marketplace's abri Benishual reports, is becoming a real problem.

Speaker 4 So to come up with a total of how many jobs are out there, how many were ABID, what's the unemployment rate, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, they just ask.

Speaker 6 120,000, 130,000 different businesses and government agencies, about 60,000 households.

Speaker 4 John Schwabish is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. About two-thirds of households get back to them, and 93% of businesses and governments answer.
Eventually,

Speaker 7 it can turn out that companies just can't answer that on time.

Speaker 4 Erica Groshen is a former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Sometimes it takes months, which is why you get revisions to the data.

Speaker 4 So, a lot of businesses and people do respond, though the number is down a bit. The bigger issue is how many of them sign up to be surveyed in the first place.

Speaker 7 Those rates have also gone down.

Speaker 4 Out of all the businesses the government asks to work with it on the jobs report, the percentage that agree has gone down from 75% in 2015 to just 35% in April.

Speaker 4 In the end, that means an overall response rate of less than half.

Speaker 8 Once you get response rates dropping below 50%,

Speaker 8 you start to get very concerned about what that is actually telling you about what's going on in the economy.

Speaker 4 Paul Donovan is chief economist with UBS Global Wealth Management.

Speaker 8 Because if you see a survey with a response rate below 50%,

Speaker 8 almost by definition, the people who are filling in the survey are a bit weird.

Speaker 4 Not like weird, weird, but they are just not the majority. They might be motivated by anger at the economy or something else that just makes them more eager or able to participate.

Speaker 4 And that can introduce biases. Again, Erica Groshen.

Speaker 7 BLS can correct by weighting. It can correct for the biases that it knows about, differences between industries, differences in employer size, things like that.

Speaker 4 Groshen says with these corrections, the overall accuracy of the jobs numbers hasn't changed much.

Speaker 7 In technical terms, the standard error isn't that much affected because the sample is really huge. What has suffered mostly has been granularity.

Speaker 4 As in, it's harder to zoom into the economy economy to see what's happening in specific locations, specific industries. Basically, the jobs numbers are still good as a Monet.

Speaker 4 Not so good close-up. In New York, I'm Subri Benishore for Marketplace.

Speaker 3 Wall Street today, traders are betting bigly on an interest rate cut come September. We will have the details when we do the numbers.

Speaker 3 Measurement challenges aside, the American labor market clearly ain't as strong as it used to be. That is a problem for workers, of course, but it's also a problem for certain kinds of businesses.

Speaker 3 The jobs platform indeed says postings are down almost 8% year over year.

Speaker 3 Same general vibe for LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter and all the other job sites, which typically charge would-be employers to promote their gigs.

Speaker 3 Marketplace Matt Levin has more on how job sites cope with fewer jobs.

Speaker 9 Salon Manager Brittany Blue at Bespoke Hair in downtown San Diego can see firsthand the labor market may be turning.

Speaker 10 We have had people who, you know, are maybe stretching their colors out a little bit longer. They're maybe not getting haircuts as often.

Speaker 9 That's obviously not great for business, but there is a silver lining. Blue posted a job opening for a front desk coordinator on Zip Recruiter the day before we chatted.

Speaker 9 She's very pleased with the early results.

Speaker 10 We've gotten seven applications just yesterday, and three out of the seven that we've reviewed would be potential candidates.

Speaker 10 We're definitely impressed with the quality of the candidates that we've gotten this time.

Speaker 9 For companies like Bespoke Hair, who are still hiring right now, a softer labor market is pretty great. More impressive applicants, fewer job postings from other companies to compete with.

Speaker 9 For online job sites, though, not so much.

Speaker 13 The overall job market right now obviously is not growing fast and you're seeing declines in job posts.

Speaker 9 Jonathan Stoll is the chief operating officer for Handshake, a job matching platform that specializes in entry-level jobs for college students.

Speaker 9 Usually Handshake makes its money from big companies paying up to seven figures for job posting services.

Speaker 9 But more recently, they found a way to monetize the technology that may be taking away some of those entry-level jobs in the first place.

Speaker 13 We're working directly with the foundational AI models to help them train their models directly through Human Data.

Speaker 9 Human Data here is a doctoral student in music theory or biochemistry hired to make sure chatbots give the right answers to questions on, say, chord progressions or nucleic acids.

Speaker 9 They can earn up to 200 bucks an hour.

Speaker 9 And sure, some people may find it depressing that our nation's brightest young minds are accepting gig work to train their possible robot replacements, but Stoll projects Handshake AI will soon make the company $100 million a year, nearly half its estimated revenue.

Speaker 13 As jobs change, as careers change, as the economy changes, whatever way possible, Handshake needs to evolve and be super agile along that path.

Speaker 9 While job postings have declined in recent months, applications have surged. Boston University marketing professor Andre Fradkin has consulted with companies like Indeed.

Speaker 9 He says while monetizing would-be employers is tough right now, monetizing would-be employees is easier.

Speaker 12 Job seekers are actually going to be willing to pay more because they're really going to be desperate for a job. There are fewer jobs to go around.

Speaker 9 Think LinkedIn Premium or Indeed Pro, which for a monthly fee allows users to see who's snooping their profile.

Speaker 9 Those paid subscriptions also offer something called Top Choice, a digital signal you can attach to your application to tell employers, I really, really, really want this job.

Speaker 9 In an era where ChatGPT can whip up a resume and cover letter in an instant, Fratkin says that signal is more valuable than ever.

Speaker 12 Here you have thousands of applications for a single position. How are you going to set through that?

Speaker 9 Of course, paying for the privilege of just getting your application considered might be a tough expense to swallow, especially if you don't have steady work.

Speaker 9 Rashida Brown got laid off from her six-figure job in customer billing support in January.

Speaker 14 I started applying for jobs in February, and I did some this morning. It's over 400 total.

Speaker 9 400 applications, two interviews. Brown has four kids.
Her husband is still working, but her unemployment benefits run out in two weeks.

Speaker 14 I went into this very foolishly thinking, I'll be fine. You know, maybe I'll take 10K less a year.
And now I'm saying I'll take 50% less and I might be willing to go lower.

Speaker 9 She says she still finds value in LinkedIn, especially the online community of other people looking for work. But she hasn't tried LinkedIn Premium yet.

Speaker 14 I hate to say it this way, but I think it's because I feel that I am very qualified with a lot of experience, a master's degree in business, and I just feel like I shouldn't have to pay for anything additional.

Speaker 9 But she says if she keeps striking out on the job search, she'll at least try the free trial. I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace.

Speaker 3 We're going to do a little life-imitating art thing right now. The art is the HBO Max series Hacks, of which, full disclosure, I am a fan.

Speaker 3 For those perhaps not in the know, though, Gene Smart plays 70-year-old comedian Deborah Vance, who teams up with Ava Daniels, a much younger comedy writer played by Hannah Einbeiner.

Speaker 3 The show is all about the twists and turns of Deborah's career, culminating in the most recent season, season four, with a foray into the world of late night.

Speaker 3 The life part is actually late night today, CBS canceling Colbert and the very business model of late-night comedy very much under the microscope. Hacks season five is already in production.

Speaker 3 The other day, though, the two of the show's creators, Gene Statsky and Paul W. Downs, Downs acts in the show as well.
They both came to Marketplace World Headquarters here in downtown L.A.

Speaker 5 First of all, thank you for coming all the way downtown.

Speaker 15 That's a great question. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 15 We love L.A. We love driving around.

Speaker 5 As do we all. We should say here that you guys are only two of the trio that run this show.

Speaker 5 Lucia Agnello, your wife, partner in professional and personal things, is, I understand, actually at work today.

Speaker 15 She is. She's running the room.

Speaker 5 Yep. She's running the writer's room right now.
What does that mean, running the writer's room? Great question. Really good question.

Speaker 5 Because don't you just put a bunch of people in a room and they write?

Speaker 11 A writer's room is kind of like

Speaker 11 a nine-hour long meeting,

Speaker 11 which sounds, I think, scary.

Speaker 15 Nine is actually humane.

Speaker 5 Nine is humane. I think some rooms are humane.
Some rooms are 24-hour.

Speaker 11 But so Lucia's in the room right now.

Speaker 11 And yeah, when we say run the room, just kind of guiding the conversation amongst our writers, whether it's talking about a story, figuring out the beats of it, or if we're more into a script, like maybe a script has been written and we're going through it and tweaking dialogue and punching it up.

Speaker 5 I read somewhere that when, specifically you three, work together and look at each other's scripts,

Speaker 5 it's more positive than critiquing, shall we say. You just highlight the stuff you like and then you go from there.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, that's something that we, at least Lucia and I learned early on, was that positive reinforcement was the most helpful.

Speaker 15 So we would write the same scene at the same time, swap, and then highlight things that we liked. And then we would come together to combine them.
And we've done that too.

Speaker 5 Yeah, we've done that too.

Speaker 11 It's a good method. The problem is

Speaker 11 it takes more time. It takes a long time.

Speaker 11 As we get closer to production, we then realize we can't be writing the same scene. We need to divide up the scenes.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 15 There's such a mind-meld that I do feel like...

Speaker 15 It would be a little bit redundant to do the same scene at the same time because we know

Speaker 15 we do have a hive mind.

Speaker 5 Well, I mean, you know, especially at this this point, right? You're working on season five. Yes.
You have incubated these characters now in these stories for literally years.

Speaker 5 So there can't be a lot, a whole lot of, oh my goodness, moments, right? I don't know, maybe there are. Well,

Speaker 15 we try to have them. And it's great when you have them still.
I mean, I think that's the key.

Speaker 11 Yeah, that's the challenge. And I think we've all had that experience of a show that you love that then kind of starts hitting the same beats and you maybe don't feel as taken care of.

Speaker 5 Am I right that this is it, right? It's season five and then done.

Speaker 15 Well, we know where we're ending. We've always known that for a long time.
And you really want to service all the stories in the ensemble and sort of give them their due.

Speaker 15 And so we're trying to figure out now how many episodes that will take, and it may take more than we can do in one season, which is 10.

Speaker 5 Sorry, I'm going to jump ahead of my list of questions. How worried are you about sticking the landing on this thing? Because there's a long and bloody trail of amazing series that haven't done that.

Speaker 5 Should we not talk about that?

Speaker 15 No, we're terrified.

Speaker 15 That's the other reason that we're, I think we hesitate to want to finish this season even because we're like, let's push off the very, very last moment.

Speaker 15 That said, the thing that's hard is the flips and tricks that get you to the landing. I think the landing we feel good about.

Speaker 15 It's just, it's still scary because you have people who now love it and feel these characters are real. And so their reactions to anything they do is really intense, which is cool.

Speaker 15 I mean, that's, you know.

Speaker 5 the dream.

Speaker 5 I want to talk about topicality for a minute. And Jen, most of this goes to you since your background is

Speaker 5 late night and writing, and you've been in those writers' rooms. Yep.

Speaker 5 I'm going to assume people have seen the show or at least know about the show, Deborah Vance, Standard Comic,

Speaker 5 right? Well, actually, wait, before I get to this question, how do you guys feel about spoilers, by the way?

Speaker 15 For the season, I think at this point. For season four,

Speaker 5 we are at the top of that. I think so.
For season four, it's okay. All right.

Speaker 3 So, Deborah gets her dream job, late night host.

Speaker 5 Yes. And then it, for a whole bunch of reasons, kind of implodes.

Speaker 5 You wrote this before the Colbert thing happened, before Late Night sort of was on the corporate chopping block, as it were. That's right.
How did you feel watching that happen in real life?

Speaker 11 I mean, just as

Speaker 11 fans of Late Night and the Institution and fans of Colbert, we were really saddened and taken aback by it.

Speaker 11 One of the things we wanted to explore was always this intersection of art and commerce and how the entertainment industry, especially now, is changing more and more.

Speaker 11 And so we knew going into having Deborah have a late-night show, that would certainly be something she encountered and dealt with because she'd never really dealt with that before.

Speaker 11 She's been really kind of like a lone wolf, but now she's put into this corporate meets art environment and there's a whole different set of rules.

Speaker 11 And especially in our current day, there's like a lot of rules that are changing as we're seeing. And so it was, yeah, it was pretty crazy to have written that and then see that play out.

Speaker 5 Paul, you have nice things to say about HBO and the corporate suits, as it were. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And, you know, just because that's where the bread is buttered, I suppose. But I will say, huge Helen Hunt fan, I hated that character.
Oh. Hated that character.
Well, intense. She's intense.
Oh, man.

Speaker 5 I know, I know. I feel like you guys ruined Helen Hunt for me.
I'm so sorry.

Speaker 15 Well, that was her, you know, she honestly, I don't know, she channeled something.

Speaker 5 She really did.

Speaker 15 Because I love Helen Hunt too, and she was so not her when we were working, you know, when we were acting together, it was bizarre.

Speaker 15 But yeah, you know, she represents somebody who is also feeling, I think, pressure from the top down.

Speaker 5 And look, she was trying to help, it was just, it was a little sideways.

Speaker 15 And I actually love that moment in the season when she says, I started my career PAing for Terrence Malik. I would love to just support artists.
I don't just want to give people a digital spin-off.

Speaker 15 That's not where I get my joy. But it's the world we live in, you know? And so she really wanted, I think, Deborah's show to succeed, though I think to Deborah, it just seemed like

Speaker 15 a contrived way of doing business that wasn't the best thing for the comedy. And as a comedian, you know, she's a purist, and that was the most important thing to her.

Speaker 5 Do you all worry that once you're done, it's going to be tough for a show like this about comedy

Speaker 5 to go someplace? Or

Speaker 5 if the show is good enough, it's going to make it, right? So

Speaker 15 I think if the idea is compelling, it can make it, but you need people to champion it.

Speaker 15 And that's why I have spoken so highly of our partners at HBO Max, because even even though, yes, that is where the bread is buttered, as you said, they really have been so supportive of us creatively and took a risk on a show that when you hear the pitch about a woman in her 70s and this young entitled writer she's forced to hire, you know, it's a little inside baseball.

Speaker 15 But we always strive to do is make it as universal as we can and make it appealing to people that aren't in the industry in any way.

Speaker 5 What was the pitch, by the way? Well, it was a script.

Speaker 15 It was a long script.

Speaker 5 Really? So you wrote it, wrote it. Oh, we wrote it.
Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 11 It's a 35-minute pitch.

Speaker 5 Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 15 It was sort of like, here's the log line of the show, and here's what it's really about, and here's this character and her backstory.

Speaker 11 Here's what some episodes would be, which ended up being episodes we've done.

Speaker 15 And here's what the ending is.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 already? Back then, you knew the ending.

Speaker 15 And then, oh, we pitched the last scene. We patched the last scene to the last episode in the pitch, which is, I think, a rare thing, to be honest.
I don't know.

Speaker 5 It's a gutsy move. I mean, I'm no writer, but that seems like a gutsy move.

Speaker 15 And it was discussed by a lot of people. But we talked about it a lot.

Speaker 5 So wait, there are people out there who know.

Speaker 3 Sorry to keep interrupting, but there are people out there who know. Yes, there are executives.
Does that not terrify you?

Speaker 1 I don't think they remember.

Speaker 5 I don't think they remember.

Speaker 15 I think if they didn't buy the show, they don't remember.

Speaker 11 Honestly, executives, I think, hear so many pitches that

Speaker 11 to their credit, they have to hear so many. I've actually had an executive who passed on this show

Speaker 11 years later be telling me what a fan they were and then say, thank God I didn't pass on it.

Speaker 5 And they just

Speaker 5 smart.

Speaker 15 Just keep your mouth shut and go home.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 15 But you know what? HBO Max doesn't know because Susanna Makos, who we pitched to,

Speaker 15 stopped us before we finished and said, I'd like to make this with you, which was amazing. What's that feeling? What's that feeling like? I've never had it before.
It's amazing.

Speaker 11 Because a pitch is so, you know, it can feel so laborious, and you're like, is this hitting?

Speaker 11 Especially you start with COVID, we started doing them on Zoom, and so there's not that in the room feeling. So it can be really scary for you.

Speaker 1 And you're so exposed. You're so exposed.

Speaker 15 You're saying your ideas, and someone can say, no.

Speaker 15 And that's hard. It's, you know.

Speaker 11 Yeah, and the waiting period after is terrible. So to get someone to immediately say yes, you don't have to like wait and go through that is amazing.

Speaker 3 We spoke for a solid half hour. The three of us.
We'll have a snippet in part two coming up.

Speaker 5 First, though, let's do the numbers.

Speaker 3 Dow Industrial is up 463 today, just over 1%, 44,922.

Speaker 3 The NASDAQ added 31 points, just over a tenth of 1%, 21,713. The SP 500 gained 20 points, about a third of 1%,

Speaker 3 64,66. Walmart is extending its 10% employee discount to almost all of the groceries it sells.
That's according to the Wall Street Journal today.

Speaker 3 But the bigger news in the grocery biz is that Amazon is going to start offering same-day delivery of perishable foods in about a thousand cities nationwide.

Speaker 3 It's going to more than double the number of cities is before the year is over. Amazon up one and four-tenths percent.
Walmart slid about two and a half percent today.

Speaker 3 Bond prices, they were up. The yield on the tenure, Tino, down 4.23%.
You're listening to Marketplace.

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Speaker 1 This marketplace podcast is supported by Wealth Enhancement, who understand that dreams don't happen by chance, it takes a plan.

Speaker 1 They're ready to build your wealth blueprint for retirement, investing, taxes, and everything else your financial life brings.

Speaker 1 It reveals gaps and highlights opportunities you may have missed at no cost to you. Find out more at wealthenhancement.com/slash wealthenhancement.com/slash blueprint.

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Speaker 3 This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdahl.
As promised, part two with Jen Statsky and Paul W.

Speaker 5 Downs of Hacks. Can we talk mechanics here for a minute, please? You are a writer.
You're a producer. You're about to be a director.

Speaker 5 You are a writer, producer, director, actor.

Speaker 5 Each of you pick one. What's your favorite, Jen?

Speaker 5 Oh, wow.

Speaker 11 Producing.

Speaker 5 Shocker. Wow.

Speaker 5 Why shocker?

Speaker 11 I don't know. Maybe that's not true.

Speaker 11 I guess writing. I guess at the end of the day, writing is my favorite.
It's producing is a little bit.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I guess writing. Writing.
We'll go with writing. Okay.
Paul.

Speaker 15 The one that I think I get the most kicks out of is acting.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I hear that.

Speaker 15 It's to me the one where I turn everything off, and so it feels like the least amount of work. Like, I find directing to be a lot of work.

Speaker 15 There's so many things to weigh in addition to the creative, whereas, you know, when you're acting, you're just listening to a scene partner and playing.

Speaker 5 All right, now let me throw the showrunner bit out there, there, too, because

Speaker 5 years and years and years ago, we had Michael Schurr on the program a couple of times.

Speaker 5 And he has worked with

Speaker 5 producer.

Speaker 5 And I asked him about the showrunning thing, and I said, How do you learn to do that? And he said, the only way to learn how to do it is to do it.

Speaker 5 Speaking of terrifying and working 40-hour days and all that jazz,

Speaker 5 how do you I mean, Paul, you specifically, how do you act and direct and run the show? How do you do that?

Speaker 15 Well, luckily I have two partners that really help me. I mean, how Mike Sher does it alone, I don't know.

Speaker 15 The thing that you really need to do to learn how to do this is be in writers' rooms, potentially have set experience, and watch people do it.

Speaker 15 But, you know, that's something that the writer strike was really fighting for was more time on set because people need to be trained to make shows.

Speaker 15 And if they have short orders for streaming shows that they're there for 16 weeks and then they're gone, they're not there for the whole process to see all that it takes to make it.

Speaker 5 So that actually goes to the pipeline question, not just comedy, but what it is that you all do, right?

Speaker 5 You start as a baby writer and you're in that room and you don't know anything, and then you proceed and develop.

Speaker 5 Is that harder now, Jen?

Speaker 11 It's certainly harder to find those opportunities. The model has been upended in the last decade or so as streaming has kind of really turned everything upside down and

Speaker 11 network TV and even cable TV, the way it was done for so long was exactly what we're talking about.

Speaker 11 You had a staff and they sat sat in that writer's room and they learned from people who had done it longer than them how to do it. And then you got on set and you saw how the process worked.

Speaker 11 And like, those are all incredibly valuable steps to learning how to run your own show. And if you don't follow those steps, the quality can suffer once you have your own show.

Speaker 1 Are you hopeful for the industry?

Speaker 5 I am. I mean, there was a little bit of a pause.
Let me just say. Well, I am.

Speaker 15 It's so funny because we're now talking, you know, three weeks after Colbert was canceled. canceled, this late night institution, which is the place that a lot of writers get their first job.

Speaker 15 A lot of baby writers start there, and a lot of stand-ups and comedians get their conversation.

Speaker 5 Yeah, so it's I am optimistic.

Speaker 15 I think our show tries to be optimistic. I mean, Deborah Vance leaves her show willingly.

Speaker 5 Right, right, right.

Speaker 15 Because she says, I'm not going to do this.

Speaker 5 Spoiler, by the way, spoiler.

Speaker 15 Yeah, it is a spoiler. Sorry.
I've said this before, but Colbert was a number one rated late night show. I think the fact that it was losing money isn't a Stephen Colbert problem to me.

Speaker 15 It's a business problem. And I think we're in the creative arts to figure things out.
And so I am hopeful that it can happen. But it is scary that there is less opportunity now.

Speaker 11 Yeah, I think there's less opportunity because there's so much outsized pressure put on these properties.

Speaker 11 Like Comedy Central was so great because young people or just people who hadn't done it before were given a shot the way Abby Jacobson and Lana Glazer were giving a shot for Broad City. And that

Speaker 11 was a show that was massively important to us.

Speaker 1 That was his first directing job. Yeah, she was his first directing job.

Speaker 2 Had never directed TV.

Speaker 11 And there was just the way that worked. It was part of Comedy Central.
It was part of a cable package. There was just less pressure on each individual property.

Speaker 11 There's so much pressure now for a show to be a hit right away, to grab subscribers, because it's all been funneled into the streaming model, and to travel globally.

Speaker 11 And yes, comedy does not travel as well always as other genres. And so I think that it is a business problem that is being sometimes said as a comedy problem.
And I don't think it's a comedy problem.

Speaker 11 I think it's a business problem.

Speaker 5 Last thing, and I'll let you guys get back to the writer's room so that Lucia doesn't have to do all the work.

Speaker 17 Season five, you know where the end is.

Speaker 5 It might seem far away now, but you guys are winding down-ish.

Speaker 5 I'm not going to ask you what's next. I'm going to ask you whether you have time now to think about what's next.
Or are you just going to take like six months off and decompress?

Speaker 15 I would love that. I would love to take time off.

Speaker 11 Six months would be great, but I don't think we're going to do that.

Speaker 5 No, we're not going to do that.

Speaker 15 We took two days between season four and five, so I don't think we're going to do that. We are thinking about what's next.
And

Speaker 15 the benefit of making something with your friends is that we also socialize so that when we turn off...

Speaker 3 We don't get sick of each other, sorry.

Speaker 5 I mean, come on. Luckily, we have to.
I love the people I work with, but I'm not going to be able to do that.

Speaker 15 I know, but we did it the other way.

Speaker 5 We found friends and made each other. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Exactly.

Speaker 11 We weren't put together. We found each other.

Speaker 15 It's a chosen family.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 11 So, you know, there were some personal issues that came up throughout this. And we've really been like, I think, forged in fire.
The three of us running the show and just the entire cast and crews.

Speaker 15 There were births, there were deaths. There were, you know, it was just, you know, there's a lot.
We have really become very bonded.

Speaker 5 Thanks, you guys, for coming. I appreciate it.
Thanks for watching. Thanks for having us.
Thanks a bunch. Thank you.

Speaker 3 We will get the video from that interview up eventually.

Speaker 5 I thought it was really good.

Speaker 3 Super interesting. Too much talking, though, on the rest of the show.
Not enough time, so we got to go.

Speaker 3 Our media production team includes Brian Allison, Jake Cherry, Justin Dueller, Drew Jost, Dad, Garyo, Keith Charlton, Thorpe One Collister, and Becca Weinman.

Speaker 3 Jeff Peters is the manager of media production. And I'm Kyle Rizdahl.
We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

Speaker 5 This is APM.

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