What A Day - How Wall Street Ruined Your (and the MLB's) Wardrobe

Episode Date: March 2, 2024

I see London, I see France, I see Shohei Ohtani’s underpants. This week, the MLB kicked off Spring Training with brand new see-through uniforms — yes, you read that right.But it’s not just MLB players’ clothing that’s seemingly crappier, the uniform change is another story in a long line of corporate decisions that have made the clothing we wear worse and worse with each passing year. Max and Erin get to the bottom of how fashion got so fast, telling the story of a little Spanish retailer named Zara that changed the way we shop and a big, bad bogeyman (hint: it’s private equity) that stepped in to accelerate the decline of clothing quality.

Baseball players are mad this week, and so are baseball fans. What did the Houston Astros do now? Well, for once, baseball fans are mad at something that isn't the Astros. Spring training just started, and the new uniforms, courtesy of Nike, are pretty bad. Oh, what's wrong with them? Well, check out this photo a reporter took of Giants infielder Casey Schmidt posing for an official team photo. Do you notice anything?

Oh my god, the pants are see-through? And are those his... Balls in play, Max. Balls in play. I'm Erin Ryan. And I'm Max Fisher. And this is how we got here, a new series where Max and I explore a big question behind the week's headlines and tell a story that answers that question.

What we're talking about this week is not actually baseball uniforms, although we'll come back to what happened there. It's the reaction that I had on seeing all this unfold. And Aaron, I know that you had to. This resonated big time for us because it feels like even Major League Baseball is now falling victim to a problem afflicting all of us. It's not just your imagination. The clothes we buy really are flimsier feeling. They fit worse and they fall apart faster. Not to mention they look cheap. So our question this week, why are all of our clothes suddenly getting worse? The story I want to tell you is about how two major changes in the industry, one came from within and one that was imposed on it by some bad actors in big finance, converged a few years ago into a perfect storm of disaster for the fashion industry.

And that disaster is bleeding out into the closets of consumers around the world and the environment and the economy. And what's happening in baseball is a little different, but again, we'll come back to it. So Max, I want to take you back to a time before these changes began, back to a golden age known as the 1980s. J.C. Penney knows that when you are headed for the top, you need an accomplished wardrobe. One with solid Oxford shirts, striped silk ties,

and two-piece suits that are expertly tailored, classically designed, and have an elegant touch. Wow, you can just hear the shoulder pads. Right, and they're using words in the ad like expert, classic, words that convey durability and quality. For a long time, fashion mostly used highly skilled workers and high

quality fabrics to put out seasonal fashion lines just two to four times a year. That sped up a bit in the 60s and 70s as trendoid teens and hip youths demanded more seasons of clothing. Clothing manufacturers needed to turn things around cheaper and faster, hence the rise of polyester. But mostly the business model held. Well, and this was all good business, right? Even if it required big overhead costs to build physical stores, supply chains, source fabrics, you had family firm retailers and box stores who didn't mind those costs because they were in it for the long haul. This all starts to change with a Spanish retailer called Zara.

Ah, Zara. Heard of it. It's founded in the 1960s, but really explodes internationally in the 80s. And it heralds this transformative new way of running a clothing brand. So I actually have a copy of the New York Times story from 1989 announcing Zara's first U.S. store. Quote, Every week there's a new shipment from Spain, said Juan Lopez, who came to New York to head Zara's U.S. store. Quote, every week there's a new shipment from Spain,

said Juan Lopez, who came to New York to head Zara's U.S. operation. Then the Zara executive goes on, quote, the stock in the store changes every three weeks. The latest trend is what we're after. It takes 15 days between a new idea and getting it into the stores. And here's how the Times summed it up. At Zara, the emphasis is on fast fashion, merchandised, and a coordinated style. And that's actually the first time that I could find the phrase used, fast fashion. So, sorry, Erin, what is fast fashion? A fast fashion retailer produces inexpensive versions of high fashion trends, aka dupes. And it's called fast because they can get a product onto shelves in a couple

of weeks rather than months it might take a traditional retailer to design and ship something. So a celebrity wears a particular dress on a runway. Everybody wants it, but it's probably very expensive and maybe it's hard to find. But Zara produces a cheap knockoff and has 10,000 units in stores worldwide like that. Yeah, you can see why it's popular. And it's great business for Zara. It gave people with Applebee's clothing budgets the chance to wear styles resembling what you might see at Nobu. Take this 2004 ad for H&M's now legendary collaboration with Karl Lagerfeld. Karl, is it true? Of course it's true.

But it's cheap. What a depressing word. It's all about taste. If you are cheap, nothing helps. H&M is making rich people uncomfortable by challenging their exclusive access to high fashion. Yes. So soon fast fashion is everywhere. H&M, Forever 21, Gap, ASOS.

But I'm confused because Zara arrived in 1989, right? But if it's such a great business model, why do I remember fast fashion not really taking over until much later in the 2000s? Well, this might partially be because you weren't in New York City in the 1990s. I'm a hayseed, it's true. You weren't at 59th and Lexington at the flagship store. Trends, especially clothing trends, start's true. You weren't at 59th and Lexington at the flagship store. Trends, especially clothing trends, start there and tended at the time to work their way west. There is, believe it or not, a geopolitical explanation for fast fashion's sudden dominance in the 2000s. Geopolitical. Okay, so I assume that you mean Fiona Apple going on stage at the 1997 Video Music Awards to declare, and she was right about this, this world is bullshit.

Absolutely right, Fiona Apple. Great comments. No notes. No notes, Fiona Apple. Well, Fiona Apple, of course, contributed to this, but also NAFTA. Oh, NAFTA. Okay, now you're taking me back. The North American Free Trade Agreement goes into effect in 1994 and suddenly makes it much cheaper for American fashion retailers to make clothes in Mexico, especially if they're churning out tons of product very quickly to meet fast fashion demand. And then Bill Clinton, who's president at the time, follows that up in 2000 by normalizing trade relations with China, which gives clothing brands and everybody else access to the largest pool of

cheap labor in human history. And things really shift in 2005 when the world put an end to a trade deal, a very old trade deal called the Multifiber Agreement. Multifiber Agreement? What a name. Sounds like a prog rock band. You're catching their show later tonight. A hundred percent. They're playing at the Vic. It was this agreement that had been around since the 70s that said that wealthy countries would limit how much fabric they imported from poorer countries. The idea was to protect European and American textile industries from having to compete with cheaper labor in, say, India. But in 2005, the world's governments agreed to end the multi-fiber agreement, and the

synthetic fabric heyday of the 1970s was about to get a second wind. Okay, I see. So thanks to freer trade and the end of these protectionist policies in the 2000s, suddenly it is very cheap to produce huge amounts of clothing abroad and then quickly ship it into stores in New York or London. And this paved the way for a million little czaras and H&Ms. Yeah, the fast fashion takeover. So I found this New York Magazine story from 2010 about Uniqlo, the Japanese retailer opening its first big store in New York. Quote, built on nearly instantaneous supply chains, the stores deliver the look of the moment, often stolen right off the runway for pennies on the dollar. The average Zara customer doesn't expect to wear what she buys more than about 10 times.

Well, I'm a Uniqlo apologist. Uniqlo is a little different because its clothes are higher quality and usually are staple designs rather than fashion week ripoffs. I will go to battle for Uniqlo. I've got a bunch of their shirts. But it shows how dominant fast fashion had become that Uniqlo works within that model. Consumers now expected to get whatever clothing they want for cheap this minute. And all these chains under pressure from consumers

got in an arms race for who could be fastest and cheapest. So, okay, Erin, that is the first half of our story. Now it's time for that big outside force that drives the second half. And if this were a monster movie, this would be the part where we first see the monster. It's private equity. Honestly, the monster in any story about the horrors of today's consumer economy is more often than not private equity. Unaffordable housing, collapsing news outlets, the rising price of health care. Private equity, private equity, and private equity. We should explain what it is. So, okay, private equity is a type of investment firm that buys companies, restructures them in theory

to make them more profitable, and then sells those companies off. A person who licks all the frosting off the birthday cake before it's served to anybody else? Private equity. Gordon Gecko, the slick villainous banker from the movie Wall Street, private equity. I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them. Well, so what's wrong with that, right? Well, three things, according to a new book called Plunder by the antitrust lawyer Brendan Bellew on the devastation wrought by private equity. Problem number one, private equity firms look to flip companies really quickly. Which means they sacrifice the company's long-term health to extract short-term profits, like by selling off a bunch of the company's assets for a quick buck, or gutting the quality of whatever product that company makes. Sales go up,

costs go down, and the private equity firm sells the company before anyone realizes what happened. And problem number two, after they buy a company, they burden it with a ton of debt and make it pay the private equity firm all sorts of fees. Again, just trying to get back the cash they spent to buy the company, even if it runs that company they just bought into the ground. And number three, the private equity firms use all these shell companies and tax maneuvers to insulate themselves from the consequences of gutting the companies that they buy. There's an example that Brendan Ballew opens his book with. It's really disturbing. In 2007, a giant private equity firm called the Carlisle Group, ominous, bought ManorCare, less ominous, but still ominous, which was the second largest nursing home chain in America. Carlisle mostly paid for the $6 billion purchase with loans,

loans that it transferred to ManorCare. Right. So that is called a leveraged buyout, buying a company with loans that you then force onto your target. And it's usually pretty bad news for the company getting bought. Yes, because now ManorCare suddenly has to pay these huge interest payments on those loans that Carlyle took out to buy them. Then Carlisle sells off nearly all of ManorCare's real estate. So ManorCare also has to pay $500 million in rent to use the facilities it used to own. And on top of all that, Carlisle charges ManorCare all sorts of advisory fees

for the privilege of being gutted. And it's ManorCare's residents who suffer. The nursing homes have to lay off a bunch of their staff. The facilities become overwhelmed by pests. One resident actually dies, which their family argues is the direct result of private equity forcing unsafe practices to save money. ManorCare eventually has to declare bankruptcy. But what do the private equity people care? They've made their money. Okay, so back to fast fashion.

The fashion industry is making so much money with this new model that private equity gets interested. Carlisle, the same spooky firm that blew up the nursing home chain, actually starts the trend in 2008 by buying an Italian label called Montclair and then selling it for a profit a few years later. Private equity gets into fashion in a big way, and it's the same slash and burn. In 2013, another firm buys a part of Aeropostale, the teen-focused retailer. Abercrombie vibes, big in shopping malls. I will never forget how those stores used to stink. The private equity people, in addition to all their other tricks, force Aeropostale to do business with a supply chain company that the private their other tricks, force Aeropostale to do business with this supply chain company

that the private equity firm also owns. Aeropostale gets drained of cash, goes bankrupt, and closes hundreds of stores. This is when I feel like I started to notice my clothes getting worse, like the mid-2010s. So this is just as the clothing companies are getting bought up by private equity firms that cut costs to get that quick buck. Right, and private equity doesn't care if over time you lose faith in the brand. By the time you realize that the quality is dropping at Aeropostale, or that Macy's has turned into a scary rummage sale, the private equity people have gotten out.

But we are just getting started here, because there is another big change in the fashion industry that turns it into a private equity wet dream. Ultra fast fashion. Like so many of today's ills, it's the internet's fault. Oh, it's the internet. Online retailing provides a template for successfully starting a fashion brand without spending the money to build stores. Maybe you don't even make the clothes.

You just find overseas suppliers and connect them with buyers. And instead of running ads in Vogue or on TV, you can just buy a bunch of cheap hyper-targeted Facebook ads or spam a bunch of Instagram influencers with free samples. So this is all catnip for the Gordon Gekko's of the mid-2010s because it means that now they can buy a little online fashion startup for very, very cheap, invest just a little to scale through social media advertising, whatever, and then sell that company off. And that's what happens. Between 2015 and 2016, the number of merger and acquisition deals in fashion double in just one year. Wow. And that's where a little company called ZZKKO comes in.

Sorry, who? ZZKKO? It sounds like one of those fake Chinese brands you see on Amazon. Yeah, I thought it would be a full-size couch, but it was doll-size. Well, you're not far off. It's a Chinese company, and it does traffic in cheap generics. If you've never heard of ZZKKO, that's because shortly after its founding in 2008, it changed its name to the more sound-outable Shein. Oh, yeah, I've heard of Shein. So can you explain why they're a big deal? Sure, straight man. Me know no things. Early on, Shein got compared a lot to a drop shipper because they didn't make any of the clothing themselves. Rather, they sourced it from clothing merchants in Guangzhou, a big manufacturing city in southern China where a lot of everyday items

are produced. Oh, yeah, that was like the iPhone place for a long time. So, as I understand it, Shein's big innovation is that it reduces quality as much as possible to these new extremes to drive prices way down, below even the lows of the fast fashion boom. Yeah, like $4 for a top cheap, $8 for a dress cheap. Whoa. And Shein isn't bound by Fashion Week. They can find new designs to rip off, or sorry, dupe every day by crawling social media and by using these sophisticated algorithms to automatically identify fashion trends in the world, order up imitations, track how those imitations perform on the Shein app, and iterate from there.

I just got a really good idea for a Shein April Fool's Day joke. Okay. Could we just like mess with their algorithm and have them make Spider-Man costumes? I think we get them to make crooked gear. Okay, 100%. So just to recap, in the old days, you got clothes that were designed by professional designers and were made by skilled workers with natural fabrics that took a lot of effort to grow and harvest. Then in the fast fashion era, you got clothes that were designed by skilled workers with natural fabrics that took a lot of effort to grow and harvest.

Then in the fast fashion era, you got clothes that were designed by a corporation to mimic some new trend, were made cheaply enough with synthetic material that you'd wear them maybe a dozen or two dozen times. Now, ultra fast fashion dominates, and your clothes are designed by an algorithm, marketed on TikTok, and made so poorly you might wear it like once. And people like this? Boy, do they. As of 2022, Shein has more than 3,000 suppliers and introduced in a single year 300,000 different items of clothing. Whoa. That's a lot. I can't wear that much.

They're the world's largest clothing retailer. Their app is more downloaded in the U.S. than Amazon's. They are valued at $100 billion. You even see this reflected in youth culture now. Surely, if you're on TikTok, you found yourself in a haul of hauls. Hauls, H-A-U-L? Yes, a haul, which is a massive order of new clothing from a fast fashion brand like Shein, unpacked and described on camera in what's known as a haul video. Guys, it's time for a Shein haul. This is the first fit. So I got these jeans and oh my God, and this top.

You see, you see? So Shein kind of creates this entire new market, which investors go wild for. And they start treating fashion companies like tech startups. So when investors try to determine how much a company is worth, they use a multiple of that company's annual earnings. Like if you want to buy, say, a construction company that makes a million dollars a year, you multiply it by, oh good, well you multiply it by maybe five and you determine that company is worth five million dollars. Oh, but with the rise of Shein and ultra-fast fashion, investors start applying double-digit multipliers, which had been unheard of in the fashion industry. Just like as an example, an app called Numi recently launched in India, and it promises 500 new items every week, each for about $10.

And investors immediately valued this app at $85 million. Max, I cannot emphasize enough that money is fake. It's pretty fake. But many, many people with a lot of money agree that fast fashion companies are worth a great deal right now. Private equity sees a new gold rush in ultra fast fashion. They start buying up fashion companies left and right, whether they're ultra fast fashion or not, trying to get that Shein money. And again, their goal isn't actually to build like a mega profitable company like Shein or make high quality clothes that God forbid people enjoy wearing like my personal favorite

vintage L.O.B. I could have called that. Their goal is to grind down costs and sell off assets for a quick turnaround when it resells the company to someone else. All of this creates enormous pressure throughout the industry to make clothes that are super, super low quality. First, pressure from consumers who increasingly demand speed, lots of selection, and ultra-cheap items. And now pressure from investors who are barnstorming the fashion industry

and want to cut costs even further. And then the pandemic hits. People aren't going out. We're all living between whichever pair of sweatpants is least disgusting. Excuse me, I had three pairs of sweatpants, so. Okay, congrats, moneybags. So as this is happening, if you are, say, the owner of a clothing brand that has been in your family for generations, you hunker down and you ride it out. But if you're one of the many private equity firms that got into this business in the late 2010s looking for a quick buck, you panic.

The preppy brand that rose to fame with its breezy catalog in the 90s, becoming a favorite of Michelle Obama, is now filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. J.Crew goes bankrupt. Barneys, Neiman Marcus, all owned by private equity firms. So when I first heard about all of these bankruptcies, I thought, come on, it's the pandemic. Of course, it's hard for clothing brands. Can we really blame this on private equity? Yes. Yes.

So it turns out the private equity people had saddled these fashion chains with billions of dollars in debt to pay for their own acquisitions, plus huge fees to the private equity people, which means that these companies had nothing left to invest in, let's say, the shift to online retailing, and they had no cushion to survive the pandemic, hence closures, bankruptcies. And just to illustrate, let's say, Max, it was your birthday. Oh, yay. And everybody bailed on coming to your party. And you were sad about it. But I, a private equity friend, show up and offer to take you and your family out to dinner to celebrate.

However, when we get to the restaurant, I eat everybody's food and then I convince your family to disown you and then I leave you with the bill. I'm so cool. I'm a bad friend. You, private equity, are not a nice friend. So in this analogy, I am J.Crew. The people who bailed on my party are the people who didn't become my customers. You are the private equity firm buying me. Our meal is the J.Crew budget that you just ate up. My family and customers you scared away. And the restaurant tab you're sticking me with is the debt you took on to buy me, J.Crew, in the first place. Yeah, I suck.

What the hell? There's a lot of this going around. A report out in 2020 found that in the years before the pandemic, 10 of the largest 14 retail chain bankruptcies involved companies that had been acquired by private equity. Even the companies that did not fall into outright bankruptcy like J.Crew come under enormous strain from the private equity people who now want their money out. Everyday products can only become so shitty before people outside of the business page start to notice. I talked to Meredith Lynch, a writer and popular TikToker who looks at private equity's tendency to make everything, including fashion, worse.

I look at examples like Club Monaco. For years, that was a Ralph Lauren brand. And then in 2021, Ralph Lauren sold Club Monaco to Regent, which is a private equity firm based here in Beverly Hills. And if you look at the quality of the clothing that was being produced pre-sale to private equity versus what is in the stores now, you will notice that the fabrics are not as good. Things are not as lined. Things are more expensive. The experience of shopping is changing because they don't employ as many people. And those are the immediate things that you start to notice as a consumer is that private equity, their goal is to always do more with less. So there's a word for this because it's not just happening in fashion. It's called inshittification.

Inshittification, of course. Yes, the writer Cory Doctorow coined it last year to describe digital platforms like Facebook or Twitter pivoting from attracting users by offering them services to exploiting those users for profit. But he's since expanded it to describe, quote, a great and shit-in-it. And what a great word in which the services that matter to us that we rely on are turning into giant piles of shit. So this feels like that story about private equity gutting nursing homes except happening to everything everywhere? It's not just a private equity thing, but it is often driven by private equity and the pressure it exerts on entire industries. Private equity has also been getting big into healthcare services,

prisons, and buying up big blocks of rental homes and apartments. So I didn't want to mention this when the nursing home thing first came up because it's pretty bleak, but there is a study estimating that private equity involvement in nursing homes is responsible for causing 20,000 premature deaths over the last 12 years, which makes me feel a little whiny for complaining about my clothes. Well, they are connected. So let's try something. Max, do you know what your shirt is made out of? Okay. Let me just check.

Oh, okay. 100% cotton. Wow. One of the good ones. One of the good ones. I did peek in my closet before I came over here and there's a lot of polyester too. So this is what I'm working with here. Just to paint a picture for our listeners, I'm wearing an Acne Studios sweater, which is a high-end fashion brand. Very fashionable.

I thrifted it. I thrifted it. But the fabric content is 65% polyester, 20% cotton, 15% viscose. Viscose? Yeah, that means my shirt is 80% plastic. It's a fancy shirt. Thanks to cost and quality cutting measures by clothing companies trying to maximize profits, synthetic fibers now make up 60% of the material made into clothing. And that number's not getting any smaller. I hear I was feeling so good about trading all of my plastic Tupperware for glass, and it turns out I'm just draped in microplastics all day.

This actually brings us back to the baseball uniforms that everyone's so mad about. Okay, yeah, I'm confused because the uniforms are provided by Nike, which is not an ultra fast fashion startup and is not owned by private equity. Right, but Nike subcontracts to a factory owned by Fanatics. So Nike's not directly making them. And I think it's partly this broader trend of inshittification, which has maybe trickled down even to places where private equity is not involved. You see that in, say, Fanatics, which Nike has hired to do all the actual manufacturing, providing players with few pre-made sizes now

rather than tailoring each uniform. But there's also something particular to athletic apparel here. As athletic apparel gets fancier, it gets lighter, thinner, and is made from more synthetic fabrics. Natural fabrics for all their upsides are not particularly stretchy or moisture-wicking. But these are all changes that in regular clothing we associate with reductions in quality.

Most people in their daily lives do not need their pants to wick moisture away. And if they do, that's their own personal private matter that we don't need to pray into. Okay, so maybe the uniforms actually aren't getting that much worse. They are just changing in ways that remind us of the ways that our clothing is getting shittier. So there's something more important than your sweater's thread suffering from all these changes. The ultra fast fashion model is a disaster for human rights and for the environment. The average American now produces 82 pounds of textile waste each year. Almost all of that ends up in landfills. The microplastics in those synthetic fabrics end up in the ocean,

adding the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles every year. Whoa. And water waste is a really big one, too. A shirt made with fast fashion methods requires 700 gallons of water to produce. That's how much water one person drinks in two and a half years. And a pair of jeans takes 2,000 gallons. And textile dyeing alone is now responsible for 20% of all industrial water pollution. I feel less bad about adding almond milk to my coffee.

Thanks to that pressure to cut costs, 80% of textiles are produced by women aged 18 to 24 and often in countries with weak labor protections. A U.S. Department of Labor investigation found evidence of forced and child labor in the fashion industry in Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Turkey, and Vietnam. And Shein has long battled accusations that some of its clothing is made from forced labor. Yikes. Well, and all of that waste adds up in the atmosphere, too. Like, the fast fashion industry is estimated to drive as much as 10% of global carbon emissions. And

the UN recently said that if consumption patterns continue, those emissions could rise by more than half in the next few years alone. There are other costs to the fast fashion private equity gold rush. Fast fashion is rotten with accusations that companies are stealing designs from small independent designers who normally sell their stuff in their own proprietary stores or on places like Etsy, crowding them out of a market with a much cheaper knockoff. But all hope is not lost. Meredith Lynch, the writer-creator who we heard from earlier,

has pointed out that the same social media that enables PE drunk fast fashion brands to steal and cause harm can also spread the word about private equity and make more informed consumers. Private equity moves in silence. So what social media does is it allows us to become more informed consumers. You can still make the choice to buy from the vendor, but at least you know who you're buying from. And the more we can share about the ways in which private equity is affecting businesses, the better off we are. So we're seeing this awareness

lead to something called slow fashion. Much like this low food movement from a few years ago was a reaction against chains like McDonald's and advocated eating locally made produce and meat, eating organic, eating less processed food. Now, slow fashion is a similar reaction against chains like Shein and all of the consumption habits that go along with that. people looking for tips on how to thrift high quality clothes, mend their old stuff, make their own clothes, and in general, step back from contributing to the massive waste and human rights cost of fast fashion. But these activities take more time and effort than just clicking through an app and getting a new wardrobe in days. You can literally do that in the bathroom now,

just get a new wardrobe. So as a result of the slow fashion movement, the price of thrifted clothing has skyrocketed, which kind of undoes the entire appeal of thrifting. hearing from someone like Meredith Lynch, because I know it's so easy to feel these days like there is nothing we can do as individuals about, say, climate change, because so much of it is driven by corporate polluters or, you know, coal plants in China. And what could I do about that? But fast fashion is a really big chunk of emissions. And that is a thing that I, as an individual person, can do something about. Totally. I'm going to go up to the first teenage girl I see and tell her to be less cool. That's the how we got here promise.

Yes. We're going to berate the teens into making more responsible consumer choices. But if any of you are worried about the baseball players and their translucent pants, because I know you were, Max. I was very concerned. You've been talking about it all week. I've got good news for you. The fan and player backlash might actually lead to Nike and fanatics trying to fix the mess they've made before opening day. Unfortunately, the same thing can't be said for the $25 Timu Balenciaga dupe you just bought for your cousin's wedding that smells like an oil slick, which should be

a lesson that when it comes to clothing, you get what you pay for. A $25 dress, if it sounds too good to be true, it's probably made of oil. Well, Erin, that was this week's How We Got Here. Let's go out with another blast from the good old days of box stores, 80s fashion. Dresses. So easy care, you'll never wear silk again. What a Day is How We Got Here is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Max Fisher, and by Aaron Ryan. Our producer is Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Evan Sutton is our sound editor.

Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vasilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Production support from Leo Sussan, Itsy Quintanilla, Raven Yamamoto, Natalie Bettendorf, and Adrian Hill. And special thanks to What A Day hosts Travelle Anderson, Priyanka Arabindi, Josie Duffy Rice, and Juanita Tolliver for welcoming us to the family.