It's giving ... Valentines

0:00This message comes from Capital One. Capital One offers checking accounts with no fees or minimum. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank for details. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC. This is Planet Money from NPR. Every February here at Planet Money, we dedicate a show to the things in our lives that have been giving us butterflies. That could be an obscure online marketplace or a piece of stunt journalism that we wish we'd thought of first. And then, as tradition dictates, we go out into the world to proclaim our love in the form of a valentine. Which, in the case of my co-host, Sarah Gonzalez, brought me recently to a random parking lot in L.A.

0:48Ha ha ha ha! There she is. Sarah has appeared in the distance. Here I am. Sarah Gonzalez. Alexi Horwitz-Gasi. Happy Valentine's Day. Oh, happy Valentine's Day! All right, so you brought me out to a mysterious kind of shopping center, like a little strip mall. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. What are we doing out here? So the story is, I moved to L.A. from New York, loved New York. Sarah told me how when she first moved from New York to L.A. a few years ago, she encountered this little disappointment. She'd been told the food was going to be just as good in L.A., but every time she tried some new restaurant, she found herself pining for her favorite places in New York.

1:33Then, in the middle of her gastronomic dark night of the soul, Sarah discovered something that put her heart and taste buds at ease. The grocery stores. The New York grocery stores have nothing on the California grocery stores. Nothing. The produce selection. It's just unmatched. Did you bring me here to go to a grocery store? I did. Very romantic. Nothing says Valentine's Day like a grocery store. What is this place? Vallarta Supermarket. Vallarta Supermarket. Now, Sarah said that California grocery stores in general just feel like they have such a bigger selection. So much more produce all year round.

2:16Probably because so much of it is grown here in the state. But also, New York City grocery stores are just smaller than the national average. And in L.A., she now has access to things she could never find in New York. Things she lovingly remembers from growing up in Southern California. Oh, it's fun in here. Look at this. Look at this. Okay, this candy, like this stuff, you have to cross the border to get this kind of stuff. There's agua frescas, like fresh pressed juices being made. A lady making tortillas, hand-making tortillas fresh for you. It feels like you're in a little village. Yes, totally.

2:55There are all these little islands in the store where someone is making fresh guacamole at a guacamole station. There's a tower of ceviche cups to go and a Mexican paleta ice cream section. Could I have a media morchata, please?

3:11Do you see how frothy that looks? Oh my God. It just looks so good. Look at this. Fresh out of the oven. hot torta bread there's this little bread trolley a little magical bread trolley I'm gonna just rip off a piece we need some cheese inside we could dip it in our beans perfect this is an expert move expert level right here this is how you shop at this grocery store you snack along the way it's the only way to do it oh yeah yeah wow this is one of the best snacks in the world baby plums in like a syrupy... This is like a thousand tiny Valentines. It's a sonic love letter to Sarah's favorite grocery store.

3:58Yeah. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Gazi. Today on the show, we hand out the rest of our sonic love letters to all the things that brought us economic joy or learning in the past year. There will be productivity hacks, hot corporate gossip, and a celebration of inefficiency.

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5:10That's the power of a Dell PC with Intel inside. Get yours at dell.com slash holiday. Planet Money lovers, welcome back to the show. It is the Valentine's Day show. Next up, my pal, Nick Fountain. Nick, thanks for being here. Oh, thanks, Alexi. Shucks. What are you shouting out this year? Yeah. So, Alexi, a bit of preface. I'm sure you have had a job. We have all had jobs where we just sit around all day and complain about how the bosses have no idea how things actually get done and how to make them better. It's one of the great pleasures of work. Exactly. But my Valentine this year goes out to a company that I think has figured out how to put that frustration to good use to actually make the company run better.

5:57All right. I'm intrigued. What are we talking here? So I don't know if you know this about me, but I used to work in cabinet making. I was pretty much a sander. That does not surprise me at all. I know you contain vocational multitudes. I've certainly worked a lot of minimum wage jobs. And because of that job, I became familiar with this company called Fast Cap in Washington State, which makes supplies for woodworkers. Very specific. Yeah. And I just kind of got fascinated by this company. Every day, get this, they force their employees to spend the first 30 minutes of the day fixing the stuff in the production process that bugs them.

6:36Whether that's shaving two seconds off manufacturing the most popular product or taking out the trash more efficiently or some sort of hack to clean the bathroom. Every day there's like mandatory improve the process time. And they memorialize their greatest hits on YouTube. Let's go. Richard, 2022, just finished this improvement and I'm making him show it off because it's so cool. What did you do, Richard? So what we're seeing here, there's this guy walking around this sort of factory warehouse space, and he seems to be like ambushing his employees, asking them to talk up their favorite improvements that they come up with.

7:14Yeah, his name is Lucas Holland. He's the head of FastCap's engineering department. And here, for example, he's talking to this one worker, Jamie, who says they used to have this problem. They were getting parts mixed up when they were assembling variations of this one product. And so to fix that, Jamie just color-coded everything. So when you go up to the product itself, you know, oh, this is the color that I need for this product. And the sample also has the same color, so everything matches. So there should be no mistakes. No mistakes. There's actually a term for this that comes from Japanese manufacturing.

7:46It's called poca-yoke. It's this idea that you should streamline processes to make them mistake-proof. And in fact, when I reached Lucas on the phone, he was getting ready to fly to Japan to tour Toyota factories. Why? Because they're the best at manufacturing in the world, and we try to learn everything we can from them. So first of all, I asked him the question of the day. Would he accept my valentine? Yeah. I think he thought that was a little weird. Yeah, it sounds like he's like audibly backing away from you. But then he started telling me about what he finds so useful about this little company tradition.

8:27You know, it's really easy to hire consultants and hire people who come in and try to tell you how they think things should be. But when you get everybody in the company involved in figuring out how to make what they're doing easier, I feel like you get a whole lot more improvement on that. And you get a team atmosphere, too. And talking to Lucas, I couldn't help but be reminded of this idea that comes from economics, which is called total factor productivity. It's the idea that there's this secret sauce to making the economy more productive that can't be explained by increases in labor hours or new machinery.

9:04And a lot of that total factor productivity growth has to do with just being more efficient with our time and wasting less. And watching Lucas's videos, it feels like seeing that happen in real time. Did Lucas say whether he does this in like the non-work part of his life? Oh, yeah. Lucas said when you start thinking like this, you cannot stop cutting little inefficiencies out of your everyday life. Though we did warn, you can try this at home, but do not under any circumstances try to convert your family. We try to caution people not to go home and tell their spouses or significant others how much time they're wasting and they're getting ready and that they can do it 10 minutes faster because it doesn't make anybody's home life happier.

9:47Yeah, that seems like some solid Valentine's Day advice. Definitely. All right. Thank you, Nick. I hope this next year brings you all of the continuous, tiny improvements you desire. Pokeyoke, right back to you, buddy.

10:09Okay, next up, we are joined by our resident sports reporter here at Planet Money, producer Emma Peasley. Hey, Alexi. So what have you brought for us from the wild and wacky world of sports? What's your valentine? Okay. My valentine goes out to this amazing University of Iowa basketball player, Caitlin Clark. Okay. She's on the verge of breaking the all-time scoring record in women's college basketball. And actually, depending on when people are listening to this, she may have already done it. So she's a very good basketball player, but why is she your valentine? So I want to give her my valentine because the way she plays makes me think differently about efficiency.

10:48And obviously, efficiency is a thing economists love. Yes, as do Japanese manufacturers and our own Nick Fountain, as we've learned. Yes. And it's one of the key metrics people use to evaluate athletes. And Caitlin is this incredible scorer. But when you look at this one measure of efficiency, her shooting percentage, basically how many shots she makes of the ones she takes, it is not remarkable. So she's like a mysteriously inefficient superstar. I'm intrigued. Go on. Right, so her shooting percentage is only like 47%, which means she's missing more than half her shots. But focusing on her shooting percentage, this like one very narrow definition of efficiency, misses what makes Caitlin so valuable to her team.

11:34So to help explain this, I called up Aaron Barzlai, the founder of HerHoopStats.com. He's like a basketball wonk. He points out the first thing you have to pay attention to with Caitlin is that she's taking so many more shots than other people. She's leading the nation in shots per game. She's currently at 22. 22 shots per game. Does that mean she's like kind of a ball hog? I mean, people have made that argument about her play style. But what those critics are missing is that it isn't just that she takes a lot of shots. It's the kinds of shots she's taking. There's usually this tradeoff. The more a player shoots, the shots get tougher and tougher.

12:13Tougher and tougher. Like, what does that mean here? So in a basketball game, there are only so many easy chances to score. A lot of people with better shooting efficiency are just taking easier shots, like layups. But in reality, those opportunities are limited. If you're going to keep taking shots, eventually you need to take the difficult ones, where maybe the offense has stalled out or the clock is winding down. And those are the moments when Caitlin shines. So like here, watch this clip from a game last month. Time winding down. They're going to get the ball up in time. Clark for the win.

12:51Yeah!

12:54This is what Caitlin Clark does, folks. Logo threes. It's her signature. Okay, I haven't really watched a lot of basketball, but even I can tell that was pretty sick. Right? Especially from like halfway across the court. Yes, I've watched this clip so many times and I still get chills. And the signature shot of hers is called the Logo 3 because she's taking the shot from around the logo in the middle of the court. It's almost like a kind of Hail Mary shot. Yeah, maybe for other people. But Caitlin has this shot dialed. This is not like a panicky, like hope it works out kind of shot. She is an expert at these.

13:33And that's what makes her so special. Sure, there are more efficient players when it comes to shooting percentage, but some of those players are just taking more of the easy shots. Kaitlin is a great scorer no matter how difficult the game gets. What's unique about Kaitlin Clark, you know, it's almost like being able to turn up the treadmill faster and faster. She can take more difficult shots and hit them, you know, more than most humans. This is what I love about Kaitlin, which gets back to this idea of efficiency. Sometimes I think we chase efficiency for efficiency's sake. We see any amount of waste as bad.

14:09But Kaitlin's willingness to take these freakishly difficult shots is necessarily going to involve some misses that bring her overall efficiency down. But that is totally worth it for Kaitlin and for her team. Iowa is winning more games because of those shots. And now they're one of the top-ranked teams in the country. Sometimes more waste is just what it takes to win. All right. A valentine in defense of inefficiency. Yeah, sort of. Producer Emma Peasley, thanks for bringing your A game. Anytime.

14:50Next up, we have Planet Money executive producer Alex Goldmark. Alex, welcome back. Hi, Alexi. Okay, so what or who are you sending your Valentine to this year? I am sending it to Ed Conway, a longtime editor at Sky News in the UK, and specifically for his book, Material World, The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization. Ooh, sounds elemental. Salt, sand, oil, lots of kinds of things that we cover. And I am sending it to him because when I was reading it, I was like, man, why didn't you call us? We could have made episodes out of so many of these chapters because he goes the literal distance to the ends of the earth to watch these industrial processes and meet the people working there like we like to do in our episodes.

15:36And the book is packed with answers to questions that I didn't exactly have, but now I'm glad to know, like trivia. So I thought I could just give you a couple of the easier trivia in the book. You up for it? Oh, no, I wasn't expecting a pop quiz, but yeah, let's go. It's more like a let's see if we can figure it out together. Okay, the first one, steel. Do you know what is steel? I don't know. Is it like an alloy between iron and some other metal? Yep. Carbon. Iron and a little carbon. And what I found interesting was like if there's too much carbon, it is cast iron. It snaps. If there's not enough carbon, it is wrought iron.

16:17It's soft. So there's like this Goldilocks amount of carbon in the middle that makes it steel. It's shapeable, but very strong. And then you get the thing that makes cars and skyscrapers. Okay. You want another one? Sure. Okay. Oil. You know, there are different types of crude oil, like light, sweet crude and sour crude oil. Yeah. Do you know why it's called sour and sweet? I don't know. It feels like too obvious to say that they actually taste different. Is it? Well, yeah, it is that. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, they taste the way that they're labeled. The fuller answer is sulfur. Sour means there's a lot of sulfur in it.

16:56Sweet has less sulfur, and less sulfur, sweeter, is better. The sour sweet goes back to when people would literally taste it, back when, like, oil was used for lamp oil also. And so sulfur would leave soot. It's worse. It is also worse now because you want less sulfur. And it has to do with how easy or complicated or expensive it is to refine the oil. And so not all oil is equal is the point. All right. I feel like I just listened to a couple Planet Money episodes at triple speed. I didn't even tell you about sand. Sand is the one I was most impressed with. Sand is for next time. Alex Goldmark, thanks so much for sending your valentine.

17:35Thank you, Alexi. Coming up after the break, we send our valentines to a play about the moral gray area of working on Wall Street. and to a gossip show about the juiciest drama this side of the C-suite.

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19:12podcast. Next up, we have Planet Money producer Sam Yellowhorse Kessler. Hello, Sam. Hey, Alexi. So this year, I'm giving my valentine to a play called Manahatta. Yes, you and I both went and saw this play a few months ago in New York. But for our listeners, just give them a quick plot summary. What's it about? Yeah, it's actually two stories told in parallel with each other. One is set during the early history of the Dutch West India Company and the native Leni Lenape people in the island of Manahatta during the 1600s. And the second timeline is more contemporary. It focuses on a Lenape woman who was climbing the corporate ladder at a big Wall Street bank in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis.

19:52So a lot of this stuff feels kind of generally in the Planet Money wheelhouse. But why did you want to give it your valentine? The thing I really loved about it is how it managed to capture this tension that I've been feeling. And I'm sure so many other Indigenous people have too, which is this feeling of being Indigenous, trying to work within this economy. And it just kind of feels like the next chapter of colonization. And it can really feel like this impossible knot to untie. And so I called the playwright Mary Catherine Nagel to talk about it. She is also an attorney and she just had a new baby.

20:25I hope it's okay that I have my newborn baby right here. It's totally okay. And she's very excited about being on the record. What a precocious little baby, already on NPR. Yeah. So Mary Catherine told me that this play and its main character really were based a lot on her own experience working at this New York law firm. So I was living in Manhattan litigating the fallout from the residential mortgage-backed securities crisis. Okay, so she had kind of a front row seat to the housing crisis. Yeah, exactly. And she used that experience to craft the story of the play's protagonist, Jane Snake, who moves from her Lenape community in Oklahoma to work on Wall Street in the heart of what used to be Manahatta.

21:05It's a story of homecoming for a young Lenape woman who breaks down all barriers and rises to the top echelons of Lehman Brothers just to end up questioning herself and who she's truly become. Right. And all of this kind of comes to a head in the play when this mortgage-backed securities frenzy kind of comes home to Jane's family. Her mother ends up losing her home in Oklahoma in a foreclosure. And that's the moment that you see this conflict that Jane has been really trying to run away from, that her success is actually coming at the cost of real lives in her community. And it's a pretty literal moment, like Jane's family is being affected by the work she's doing at Lehman Brothers.

21:43I had to deal with some of the similar questions that Jane Snake has to deal with, which is, you know, is my success here in this non-Native white world, is it making things better for my people? or am I just bringing the negative parts of capitalism to my people in a way that's harmful? This play really captured something I felt, that being a part of this economic system as an Indigenous person can sometimes feel like a contradiction or even like a betrayal in some ways. And talking with Mary Catherine, like it didn't exactly help me resolve that feeling, but sometimes it's just really nice to speak with somebody who gets it, like as another Indigenous person, which is why I wanted to give her my Valentine.

22:23I hope you'll accept my virtual Valentine. Well, thank you. It was very, very lovely and very touching. And I am very honored to accept this Valentine. Planet Money producer Sam Yellowhorse Kessler, thank you so much for bringing us your Valentine. Thank you so much, Lexi.

22:48Finally today, it is time for my Valentine. For that, I've summoned back Nick Fountain to act as my studio confidant. What do you got on your mind, Alexi? Tell me. So I know that our Valentines are usually for something that inspired us or made us jealous. But this year, I wanted to give my rose to something that reminded me of why I fell in love with economics reporting in the first place. Ooh. All right. What do you got? It's a podcast I discovered recently called Corporate Gossip. It's hosted by a sister-brother duo named Becca and Adam Platsky, who do this as sort of a side hustle. And the basic idea behind the podcast is to treat the business world with all of the delicious drama of like a sassy reality TV show.

23:33Ooh, love drama. Like, here's a clip from an episode about the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, David Zaslav. He had just announced a new streaming service with the best name ever, Max. And to top it all off, last year's paycheck just hit the bank. A quarter of a billion dollars. It's giving Robert Baron Sheik. Super chatty, super fun. And so I called Becca Platsky up to give the show my Valentine. And it was just super clear immediately how much she loves this stuff. Like, she studied business in college. She's worked in corporate America for the last decade. And talking to her, she was even waxing enthusiastic about accounting.

24:11Rare. It's like true crime without the murder. When you're getting into auditing and you're getting into forensic accounting and white collar crime. And it's amazing. It's the plumbing of business. And I think one of the most fascinating things you can study. In every episode of Corporate Gossip, Becca and her brother apply that fascination to everything from Peloton to Rupert Murdoch to Bed Bath and beyond. And the thing I love about listening to the show is how much time they take to revel in the most absurd little details. Give me an example. OK, like the time former Nissan executive Carlos Ghosn threw himself a company party at Versailles and then found out that many of his invited guests were not going to show up.