Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - The Company That Cancelled Christmas

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

More than 100,000 families - many of them amongst the poorest in Britain - put money aside for Christmas gifts and other seasonal treats in a savings club called Farepak. It wasn't a bank, and it wasn't great value for money... and it went bust. Kids went without toys, and festive dinner tables were left bare.  Why would someone put their hard-earned money into such a scheme? And what does it tell us about how we often view Christmas as a time for frenzied spending?  For a full list of sources used in this episode visit Tim Harford.com  CAUTIONARY TALES RETURNS 6 JAN, 2023. HAPPY HOLIDAYS AND SEE YOU IN THE NEW YEAR. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Protect our children from being indoctrinated. Stop hurting kids with these politics. This is the story of a Texas town that became the front line of a culture war. A younger teaching generation has been pushing that our kids can be any gender they want to be. And an English teacher caught in the middle. I broke down running in the whole egg. And I think it was, it was, it was, tears not out of sadness, not out of being matched. Stareified. From the team that brought you South Lake, The fear is not out of sadness, not out of being managed. It's terrifying.

From the team that brought you South Lake, this is a six-part podcast series about faith, power, and what it means to protect children in an American suburb. This was a kind of sleeping giant. From NBC News Studios, this is Greatvine. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. Pushkin. It was Friday the 13th, and some people would have expected bad luck.

Susie Hall didn't. She knew, of course, that life could deal out some hard knocks. A decade before, when she was 28, she was attacked in the street in her home city of Edinburgh by three men, who took her purse, her car, and her piece of mind. Now in her late 30s, she was still being treated for depression and anxiety, trying to keep

it all together as the single mother of two young children. But Susie was determined to make the most of things. She was studying law. She knew that could be a pathway to a steady, well-paid job. And she had a side hustle. She worked as a sales agent for a company called Fairpack. It was a Christmas savings club. People would save a little money each week with Fairpack, prudently planning for the expenses

of the holiday season. And then, a few weeks before Christmas, a year of thrift would be rewarded. Fairpac would send out vouchers, Christmas hamper and gifts. Fairpac's customers didn't have to worry about how they'd pay for seasonal gifts and treats. They didn't stretch themselves with credit cards or payday loans. it was all taken care of. Fairpack was a word of mouth business. Agents such as Susie Hall would save up themselves, but they'd also go around collecting money from colleagues, friends and family.

Everyone was saving together. That wasn't easy because most of Fairpack's customers had precious little money to spare, but saving alongside other people provided some friendly peer pressure. It was encouragement to make the sacrifices necessary to set that cash aside. So, no. Suzy Hall wasn't expecting any bad luck on Friday October 13th 2006. But Fairpack had folded, entering bankruptcy proceedings. My heart just sank completely, she said. The message on the website said that no hamper, no vouchers, no goods would be sent out. I know quite a bit about company law and insolvency law.

And you right away, it was really bad. I wasn't sure how bad. I was to find out over the next few days. I'm Tim Halford. And you're listening to Corsion Retails. to cautionary tales. Christmas is a time for laughter and friendship. For making Mary and giving generously for gathering close with family and for that little touch of Christmas magic. I love Christmas as much as anyone, so it feels rather harsh to point out that Christmas is expensive. Nobody really knows how expensive, but the economist Joel Wollfogel has spent years studying

the economics of Christmas, and I trust his estimates. He looks at how much people spend in shops and restaurants in typical months, and compares that spending to the lower end in December? That gives a pretty good estimate of how much extra people are spending because it's the holiday season. When his book about the economics of Christmas was published over a decade ago, Professor Waldfogel reckoned that Americans spent about $66 billion extra in the run up to Christmas. The figure today would be around $100 billion.

A sum so vast, it's literally a meme from Austin Powers. $100 billion. And this isn't just the American consumer gone wild. Around the world, countries which celebrate Christmas see large booms in spending in December, including the UK, my home country, and also home to FairPak, and its unlucky customers. The United States is just one of many such countries. And although not everyone, but not everywhere celebrates Christmas, depending on your beliefs and on where you live, he might instead expect to give and receive gifts for Diwali, eid,

Hanukkah, or even St. Basil's Day. Then there are birthdays, baby showers and weddings. There are many occasions on which we might want to give gifts, or where, even if we don't want to give gifts, we kind of have to anyway. And if the economist Joel Wollfogel is right, we're all trapped by these gift giving traditions. Consider the central problem of Christmas. Choosing the right gift. We all appreciate receiving gifts, even bad ones. It's nice to know someone cares.

But says WorldFogal, let's set aside the gratitude and the pleasure of giving and all the other sentiments for a moment. Let's ask whether we actually give good gifts. I think we carry around in our heads a kind of fantasy version of what gift giving can be. The dream gift will surprise and delight and be so perfectly chosen that it's vastly better than the recipient could have imagined. It might even change their lives. I've received such gifts myself. Perhaps you have too.

Thinking back to Christmas 1984, I remember opening the wrapping paper hurriedly with nervous hands, excited to get the gift inside. Little did I know, the disaster was about to enter my previously happy childhood. But don't worry, it wasn't a disaster for me, it was a catalogue of disasters for everyone else. The gift was a book titled The World's Greatest Mistakes. Some of the stories were absurd. The bride who accidentally married the best man. Some of them were famous tragedies, like the Titanic swallowed up by the

ICC, all of them fascinated me, and I realized, learning from other people's mistakes is a lot less painful than learning from your own. Goodness me, without that Christmas gift, Corsion retails might not exist. But let's be realistic. The gifts we usually buy are much less successful. For example, let's say that you give me a tin of really lovely specialty tea for Christmas, and it cost you $20.

I'd really appreciate the gift. It's so kind of you to think of me. You've noticed that I appreciate the finer things in life. So your gift really is very thoughtful. But unfortunately, I don't like tea at all. I can't stand the stuff. So while the sentimental value of the gesture is high, the actual value of the gift to me is zero. Maybe negative because now I have the hassle of figuring out

how to get rid of this tea. So while we fondly dream of transcendently brilliant gifts, it's a lot more common to receive a gift like that, a book you never read, a sweater you never wear, tea you never drink. And most common of all is the meh gift. You know, I like coffee, say you get me some ground coffee. It's not my favourite and I prefer to ground my own, but it's fine, I'll use it. And I'm grateful to have a friend who took the trouble, but you spent $20 on the coffee.

And if I'd bought it for myself, I wouldn't have paid more than say... $16. The point, says WorldFogel, is that if you spend $20 on yourself, you're only going to spend it on something worth at least $20 to you, probably more. But if you spend $20 on someone else, there's no guarantee that what you buy will be worth $20 to them. You might do the equivalent of buying me a tin of tea. Joel Walfogal didn't want to settle for hypothetical examples. He wanted data.

So in the spring of 1993, he gave a short survey to his Econ 150 students at Yale. They were willing participants, he recalls, better to spend 10 minutes filling out a questionnaire than 10 more minutes listening to Professor Waldfogel droning on about the demand curve. What Waldfogel wanted to know was simple. What gifts had these young people received over the holiday season?

For example, a CD for a band they didn't like, or perhaps a CD they already had, a blouse, wrong size, wrong colour, a garden gnome. How much did the givers paid for the gifts? And leaving aside those questions of gratitude and sentimental value, how much did the recipients value the gifts? And what he found was, well, it was kind of obvious and kind of sacrilegious all at the same time. A gift that costs $20 is worth only about $17 to the recipient on average.

The other $3 is just wasted. Friends and boyfriends and girlfriends do a bit better than this. Grand parents and distant elderly relatives do much worse. Economists have a technical term for this kind of waste. It's called a deadweight loss. It happens when markets don't work properly. Usually a deadweight loss happens because a big company is abusing its dominant market position, or because a government has intervened in the market in

a clumsy way. These are issues economists take seriously. But when WorldFogal published his results in an academic journal with a suitably festive title, the deadweight loss of Christmas, it all seemed like a bit of a joke. Most people cast Wild Fogel in the role of Scrooge, someone who just doesn't understand the true spirit of Christmas. He leaned into the hate when he published his book Scrooge Nomics, with a revised estimate that the Dead Weight L loss of Christmas was actually closer to 20%. That's $4 of waste, $4 of dead weight loss for every $20 of gift giving. In other words, the average Christmas gift is like my so-so bag of coffee. I don't mind getting it, I won't throw it out.

It's just vaguely disappointing. Every year, Christmas brings the same traditions. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, jack frost nipping at your nose, and a seasonal flurry of media interest in Joel Wald Vogel's research. I often write about it in my newspaper column at the Financial Times, and I always get the same response. Most people don't take me seriously. I laugh at economists warning of bad Christmas gifts. Christmas is magical after all. It's that magic that motivates people like Susie Hall and her friends and family to spend the whole year, scrimping and saving and making little sacrifices to put a few more pounds a week

into their Fairpack savings plan. And then came that Friday the 13th. She was going to have to call round her friends and family and tell them that all the Christmas money she'd collected from them as a fair-pack agent. It looked like all that money was gone. Corsion retails will be back in a moment. Protect our children from being indoctrinated. Stop hurting kids with these politics.

This is a story of a Texas town that became the front line of a culture war. A younger teaching generation has been pushing that our kids can be any gender they want to be. And an English teacher caught in the middle. I broke down running in the hole. And I think it was, it was the fear is not out of sadness, not out of being mad. It's just terrifying. From the team that brought you South Lake, this is a six-part podcast series about faith,

power, and what it means to protect children in an American suburb. This was a kind of sleeping giant. From NBC News Studios, this is Greatvine. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. They hadn't had easy lives. Their daughter Laura had been diagnosed with a brain tumour at the age of 5. She died on Christmas Eve 2004. She knew it was Christmas. Leigh told the journalist Steve Bird,

She was very brave. What do you do after a loss like that? For a lot of people, the urge is to keep the old rituals going. My mother died in December many years ago, when my sisters were still children. We buried her on Christmas Eve. But we didn't turn each Christmas after that into a kind of remembrance day for my mother. We wanted it to be normal. Lee and Margaret seemed to have had the same instinct. Two years after Laura's death, they were saving up for Christmas with Laura's younger sisters, six-year-old Amy and baby Alia.

Would it be in Ali's first Christmas? We decided this year should be special. in Arlea's first Christmas, we decided this year should be special. And that means presents. But Lee wasn't lavishly paid, he worked to the seafood processing plant. So to make sure they had that special Christmas, Lee and Margaret had been saving with Fairpack. And now, most of their Christmas money was gone. Maybe all of it. Most experts would advise against saving up for Christmas with a company like Fairpack. There were three reasons why. First, you could often get a better price for those Christmas treats if you just go to a regular supermarket or store and keep your eyes open for bargains. Locking up your money with a savings club means you don't have the ability to shop around.

Second, you don't usually earn interest with a savings club. If you save your money in a bank account instead, you earn a little extra on top. It might not be much, but it's something. Third, if your bank goes bankrupt, you get your money back from a government-backed compensation scheme. That's true in the US, it's true in the UK, it's true in most rich countries. But the same protections didn't apply to people who paid money to FairPak. FairPak wasn't regulated as a bank, it didn't have customers money ring-fenced and set aside. In fact, because it operated to a network of agents,

it wasn't clear who the ultimate customers even were. Legally speaking, FairPak customers hadn't made deposits, they'd paid in advance for goods, those gifts and handpours and vouchers. And if you pay in advance for something and then the company goes bankrupt before you get what you paid for, well, you might get a little back

when the bankruptcy proceedings are finished, but probably not very much. Or, a Susie Hall put it, I know quite a bit about company law and insolvency law, and you right away, it was really bad. It wasn't clear how much Fairpac's customers would get. Maybe 50 pence for every pound they'd saved, maybe just 5 pence. One thing was clear, there was no way they'd get that money in time for Christmas. It would take months,

probably years. After Fairpac collapsed, there was a lot of commentary lamenting the fact that if only FairPak's unlucky customers had understood more about finance, they would never have trusted their savings to the company, and maybe that's true. Or maybe it isn't. FairPak's customers might not have thought about the possibility that the company could simply go belly up, but they did understand what the business model offered them. FairPax customers might not have thought about the possibility that the company could simply go belly up, but they did understand what the business model offered them. One big insight from behavioral science is that we tend to value rewards in the present

more than rewards in the future. That means we struggle with temptation. It's tough to motivate yourself to go out for that morning run when it's dark and drizzling. It's tough to motivate yourself to go out for that morning run when it's dark and drizzling. It's tough to say no to desert. It's tough to resist the impulse to put your hand in the cookie jar if you know the cookies are right there. Fairpacks customers were families who didn't have much and who rarely got the chance to

treat themselves or their children. They understood that they'd be tempted if the Christmas money was just in a regular bank account. And that's not the only clever bit of psychology at play. When we know we might need to resist temptation, one good strategy is to make a commitment to someone that we don't want to let down. I'm more likely to go for that run on a dark and drizzling morning if I've arranged to run with a friend. I'm more likely to resist dessert if I've explicitly promised my wife that I'm not going to eat dessert for a month. It was the same with Fairpack. Being part of the club imposed a little extra social pressure

to save. When an agent like Suzy calls past to collect your weekly subscription. You don't want to have to tell her that you don't have the money, so you make sure you do. Heather Skinner was a Fairpack agent like Susie. The bank savings account was too much temptation. It's easier to take money out of the bank. You'd always be dipping into it. Heather lost 1100 pounds of her own money. At the time, that was about $2,000.

But she was also an agent like Susie, her colleagues, friends and family lost a total of 10,000 pounds or nearly 20,000 dollars. And she had to call round and tell each of them. Heather's main job was as a part-time shop assistant. It wasn't going to be easy to make up for the money she had lost, but she was determined that her children would get the gifts they'd been hoping for, a computer and a bike. I've had to get debt, and I know a few of my customers have.

So she took out a payday loan, fully expecting that she had paid dearly for it because of the painful interest rates. She had saved with Fairpack because she'd been desperate to avoid getting into debt. Christmas loses some of its magic if you're stressed about how much you've borrowed, but after the collapse of Fairpack, she changed her mind. Next Christmas, she vowed, she would get the money first, pay it back later. Pay for Christmas after, not before. Can you blame her?

And she's not the only person who pays for Christmas after, not before. The economist Joel Waldfogel found that in the US, two thirds of December spending is charged to credit cards, and that many people roll over that credit card debt into January and February. This is much more common than it was, say, back in 1980. And it's an expensive way to pay for Christmas. But given the situation, FairPax customers found themselves

in, you can well understand why, like Heather, some people would rather borrow than say. The suffering of Fair Pax customers was particularly cruel. They were vulnerable and desperate to do right by their children, and this was money they couldn't afford to lose. It was sudden and unexpected and horrible. But I think it also tells us something important about the economist Joel Waldfogel, and his idea of deadweight loss.

Remember, Americans alone spend $100 billion on Christmas every year. If world-fogals estimates are in the right ballpark, that's $20 billion of waste just in the United States. Around the world, it's perhaps $50 billion. Not quite a doctor evil meme. It's still an astonishing sum. Just how astonishing becomes clear when you consider that it's a thousand times more than

FairPak's customers lost. Or to put it another way. If a company like FairPak went bankrupt every hour of every day, day and night from Thanksgiving until Christmas day, all the unlucky customers of all the bankrupt fare packs still wouldn't have lost as much as we collectively destroy every year just by picking bad Christmas gifts. Those bad Christmas gifts can seem inherently comical, the tasteless cardigan that will never get worn, the golf souvenir that gets put in a drawer and forgotten. No wonder it appears churlish for economists to look at these individual bits of nonsense

and insist on adding up the deadweight loss, a silly statistic from the ivory tower. I think that's a mistake. That $50 billion is being spent on real resources. Energy that's contributing to climate change, and which instead we could be using to heat our homes. Scairs, raw materials, land, and water and labour, all these valuable inputs could be used to produce things that we really need, or at the very least, things that we really value. This is real money, being spent on real, scarce resources, and it's really being wasted.

And yet when I write columns in the financial times about the deadweight loss of Christmas, people struggle to believe that I'm really being serious. But I am, and I want to help us all solve the problem. After this break. Protect our children from being indoctrinated. Stop hurting kids with these politics. This is the story of a Texas town that became the front line of a culture war. A younger teaching generation has been pushing that our kids can be any gender they want to be. And an English teacher caught in the middle.

I broke down running in the hole. And I think it was, it was, tears not out of sadness, not out of being mad. It's terrifying. From the team that brought you South Lake, this is a six-part podcast series about faith, power, and what it means to protect children in an American suburb. This was a kind of sleeping giant. From NBC News Studios, this is Greatvine.

Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. People have been complaining about the Christmas shopping frenzy for a long time. There are worlds of money wasted at this time of year in getting things that nobody wants and nobody cares for after they're got. That's a character in a short story by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. It was published in 1850. And if that seems early, well,

the commercialization of Christmas came early too. Santa Claus was regularly appearing in advertisements by the 1840s. In 1867, Macy's department store in Manhattan announced it would stay open until midnight on Christmas Eve to accommodate that last minute gift buying spree. We've been trapped by the obligation to exchange gifts at Christmas for a long time. In Beecher Stowe's story, The Good Fairy, one character makes the simple and obvious point

that Christmas gifts don't have to be expensive to carry all the sentimental value of something flashy. After all, if it's the thought that counts, why do we often spend so much and think so little? And here's a conversation from the Good Fairy, in which young Ella and her aunt, Ponda last year's gifts. That ring I gave Mrs. B was $20. And do you suppose Mrs. B was any happier for it?

No, really. I don't think she cared much about it. But I had to give her something because she had sent me something the year before. That one hard, cold, glittering ring that now cheers nobody and means nothing, that you give because you must, and she takes because she must, might, if broken up into smaller sums, send real warm and heartfelt gladness through many a cold and cheerless dwelling, through many an aching heart. I just love the way that the Christmas gift dilemma is so perfectly observed here. Ella

spent $20 on Mrs. B for a useless gift, because Ella had to give something, and Mrs. B had to graciously receive it. It's also pointless, and remember, it's one Fairpack, an hour's worth of real resources being wasted. When Fairpack collapsed, the nation rallied round. Sort of. A fund was set up to replace the lost vouchers, some supermarkets through in a few hundred thousand dollars, some members of Parliament donated a day's salary and solidarity. My lean class, a pop star, raised money for the Compensation Fund by auctioning off a white bikini that she had warmed to great effect on a reality TV show, all very jolly.

But in the end, FairPax customers only got about half their money back, and they didn't get it until almost six years after the company collapsed. years after the company collapsed. The loss was a hammer blow for many savers. Rikusha, a taxi driver from Stockton on Tees in Northern England, had given 600 pounds to Fairpack to buy presents for his three stepchildren. And after Fairpack folded, he was stunned. He became quiet and withdrawn. Then, a month after the bankruptcy, with Christmas just around the corner, he was found dead in the River Tees. Debbie Shah, his widow, told

the local papers that Riku had killed himself. She wondered whether the shock and shame of being unable to provide a proper family Christmas had contributed to the tragedy. I think it's played a part in it, she said. But how much of a part? I'm never going to know. It's clear that people feel real pressure to spend money at Christmas, and some feel ashamed if they don't have it. People laugh at economists' warning of bad Christmas gifts. Maybe it's because we've got it wrong,

but I suspect it just highlights that we economists have bad branding and poor communication skills, because other people seem to get away with delivering the same message, and not just characters in Harriet Beach's sto stories. When religious leaders, such as the Pope, warn that grotesque commercialization is obscuring the true spirit of Christmas, nobody says they're being like Scrooge. In fact, we celebrate the idea of transcending the commercial urges of Christmas. For example, in the book How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Dr. Suse offers us a fable in which all the gifts and all the food are stolen by the Grinch. In the classic reverse Santa Claus move of sneaking down every chimney in the little town of Hville. But the theft doesn't prevent the hooves of Huville gathering together to sing in celebration.

So why didn't Christmas come just the same for Susie Hall and Heather Skinner and Rikusha? Why didn't they just forget the presents and sing carols instead? Because the difference between Fairpack and the Grinch is that the Grinch stole everyone's gifts. But Fairpack just let down isolated families here and there. All around them, everyone else was still giving and receiving gifts. Fairpack just let down isolated families here and there. All around them, everyone else was still giving and receiving gifts. Maybe if the whole country had been saving with Fairpack, we could have made like the who's down in Whoville and all sung together.

But that's not how it works. Instead, being unable to provide for your family and give to your friends at Christmas is a source of isolation and shame. One disappointed fair-packed customer put it best. Most people say kids get too much these days anyway, but I have got four children, all at various ages. Like I say, you can't tell the little two. Father Christmas can call next door, but he can't call here, you know? Exactly.

So what can we do? One answer is suggested by a set of studies conducted by researchers from Stanford and Harvard, Francesca Gino, Francis Flynn and Gabrielle Adams. They asked people to imagine themselves either giving or receiving a gift, expensive or token, from a wish list or a surprise. Givers thought that an expensive surprise would be most appreciated. They thought, picking from a wish list would come across as lazy and impersonal. But recipients didn't see it like that at all. Not only did they prefer to get something from their wish list,

they also said it was more thoughtful, and they were just as happy with inexpensive gifts as pricey ones. This study shows that givers and recipients of gifts see the world very differently. But what's strange about that is that, of course, at Christmas, we're both givers and receivers. We should put ourselves in the shoes of the people receiving our gifts, and since we

receive gifts ourselves, it really shouldn't be too hard. Shortly after the Christmas that Fairpac ruined, I was touched when I read a letter to a newspaper, which said, Tucked inside the gift card attached to the present from one of my closest friends was a letter in which she ventured to suggest that as neither of us really has a need for anything, this should be the last time we exchange Christmas presents. She went on to say that she had been very affected by the collapse of Fairpack with all its consequences. Mentioning that some had lost as much as £2000, she asked what pressure people are under that makes them feel Christmas should cost them so much.

Has Fairpack at least left a legacy that could make enough of a stop and think what we are doing. One does not simply cancel Christmas unilaterally, but we can all play our own little role in shaping the Christmas culture. We can start conversations with our loved ones about the kind of Christmas we want to have. I suspect lots of us don't do that for the reason revealed by the Stanford Harvard study. We think, I'd be happy to get a small gift from a wish list, but I can't suggest that to others because I'm sure they prefer expensive surprises. But if we do raise the subject, we might just find that others are making the same mistaken

assumptions about us. In Harriet Beecher Stowe's story, The Good Fairy, her characters decide to stop giving Christmas presents altogether and make charitable donations instead. That's a step too far for me. I still buy Christmas presents, most of us are going to keep on buying Christmas presents. But I think we should be spending a bit less. And thinking, a great deal more. Or perhaps we should take our lead from the reformed Ebenezer Scrooge.

He knew how to keep Christmas as well as anyone, didn't he? But if you go back and reread a Christmas Carol, you'll see that Scrooge didn't waste his money on extravagant and showy gifts for people who didn't need them. Instead, he gave the Cratchit family food that they desperately needed in the form of a prized turkey, and he gave his nephew the gift of his time at attention, playing games and making merry. Finally, he gave Bob Cratchit the greatest Christmas gift of all.

Money. That's the Christmas spirit. God bless us, everyone. For a full list of our sources, please see the show notes at timhalford.com Corsionary tales is written by me Tim Haford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilly with support from Courtney Garino and Emily Vaughn. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Weiss. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge, Stella Haford and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Meal Abel, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnarrs, Julia Barton, Carly McGleory, Eric Sandler,

Royston Besserv, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Marano, Daniela Lachan, and Maya Canig. Corsary Tales is a production of Cushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review. Tell a friend, tell two friends. And if you want to hear the show ads-free and listen to four exclusive cautionary tale shorts, then sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm-plus. FM slash plus.

Protect our children from being indoctrinated. Stop hurting kids with these politics. This is a story of a Texas town that became the front line of a culture war. A younger teaching generation has been pushing that our kids can be any gender they want to be. And an English teacher caught in the middle. I broke down running in the whole day. And I think it was, it was a big tear. It's not out of sadness, not out of being mad. It's a terrified.

From the team that brought you South Lake, this is a six-part podcast series about faith, power, and what it means to protect children in an American suburb. This was a kind of sleeping giant. From NBC News Studios, this is Greatvine. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.