Speaker 1: Now that s due and I had awkwardly agreed to
Speaker 1: become potential future co parents by putting embryos on ice,
Speaker 1: the question was where we would be putting these embryos.
Speaker 1: Where should I go to freeze? In New York It's
Speaker 1: a paradox of choice. Within ten miles of me, there
Speaker 1: were more than two dozen clinics. It felt paralyzed. This
Speaker 1: seemed like a big decision. I'd talked to so many
Speaker 1: women who would drain their savings accounts to walk away
Speaker 1: with nothing. How could I make sure that I was
Speaker 1: giving us the best chance for success As a woman
Speaker 1: in her mid thirties, I had long been swimming in
Speaker 1: targeted content for fertility clinics.
Speaker 2: Meet Modern fertility, the test that teaches you about your
Speaker 2: eggs and fertility hormones. Today, one in six couples has
Speaker 2: trouble conceiving. So we built an easy way to test
Speaker 2: fertility hormones before you're ready for kids.
Speaker 3: Progeny is a leading provider of fertility benefits.
Speaker 1: Our mission is to help people build their families, Introducing
Speaker 1: kind Body, a new generation of women's health and fertility
Speaker 1: care with a redesigned patient experience that's accessible and intuitive.
Speaker 1: This last one kind Body. It stood out to me.
Speaker 1: Kind Body came on my radar a couple of years
Speaker 1: ago when they opened a location in the Bay Area,
Speaker 1: where I was living at the time. I went to
Speaker 1: their opening party. There was this faux flower arch in
Speaker 1: the entryway and giant gold balloons that spelled out kind
Speaker 1: Body Champagne, of course, and there were a lot of
Speaker 1: women like me, thirties, professional made well jeans and black
Speaker 1: ankle boots. And I'll admit it, I wasn't just there
Speaker 1: as a reporter. This was right after that bad breakup
Speaker 1: I talked about in episode one. Fast forward a few
Speaker 1: years later, I'm now thinking seriously about freezing embryos, and
Speaker 1: I'm curious about kind Body. The company's pitch is that
Speaker 1: it's trying to make fertility more friendly, unaccessible, unaffordable. The
Speaker 1: fertility industry has a bad rap. For kind Body that
Speaker 1: presents an opportunity it stands out from its competitors. Venture
Speaker 1: capital and private equity has poured into this space in
Speaker 1: the last five years. Twenty twenty three was a record
Speaker 1: year for fertility VC deals. Kind Body was the largest
Speaker 1: of those deals. The strong celebrity investors like what Apatro
Speaker 1: and Gabrielle Union. It's raised more than three hundred million
Speaker 1: dollars and open thirty five clinics. But as I look closer,
Speaker 1: it seemed like Kindbody's rapid rise was also illuminating cracks
Speaker 1: in the system. I'm christ and v Brown, and this
Speaker 1: is misconception. When you walk into Chymebody's New York City flagship,
Speaker 1: it feels a bit like a high end salot. It's
Speaker 1: in a storefront on a trendy part of Fifth Avenue.
Speaker 1: There are plush couches with yellow throw pillows in artful disarray,
Speaker 1: chai ceilings with ornate columns, a display of vitamins topped
Speaker 1: with an overflowing floral arrangement.
Speaker 4: Hopefully it doesn't look like your typical doctor's office.
Speaker 1: No doctor I have ever been to Kind Body's founding
Speaker 1: physician fahemos Asan gave me a tour. She told me
Speaker 1: that the aesthetics played directly into kind Bodies mission. It's
Speaker 1: hard to even compare a kind Body to me, which
Speaker 1: I've visited in episode two, met looked like a doctor's office.
Speaker 4: As you walk through intentionally, there's no white coats, there
Speaker 4: are no degrees on the walls, our clinics are really
Speaker 4: intentionally built to be a blank slate for our patients,
Speaker 4: and so we're here to be a partner in your journey,
Speaker 4: not that you're coming to our shrine.
Speaker 1: And this kind of visibility brings in business. The company
Speaker 1: even has a big yellow van that roams the streets
Speaker 1: of cities offering fertility testing for cheap or even free
Speaker 1: as a way to get women in the door. Accessibility
Speaker 1: is also key to kind Body strategy. The company pitches
Speaker 1: employers to offer fertility care as a benefit. In twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two, for example, they struck a big deal with
Speaker 1: Walmart while.
Speaker 2: Mart employees more than two point two million workers, and
Speaker 2: is teaming up with the fertility startup kind Body to
Speaker 2: offer employees access to more than thirty fertility clinics and
Speaker 2: IVF labs across the US.
Speaker 5: It's opening up a brand new facility in northwest Arkansas.
Speaker 6: We say we want to do good by doing well,
Speaker 6: and so you do good by bringing down the cost
Speaker 6: of care to make it more affordable to more people.
Speaker 6: We want to democratize care. That's been our mission since
Speaker 6: the beginning.
Speaker 1: That's kind Body's founder and CEO, Gina Bartesi I told
Speaker 1: her that Kindbody had first caught my attention because of
Speaker 1: its big egg freezing push a few years ago.
Speaker 6: The place you start when you're building a fertility company,
Speaker 6: in my opinion, is you start with egg freezing because
Speaker 6: they have discretionary income. Those women that are thinking about
Speaker 6: egg frasing are not asking about success rates. The IVF
Speaker 6: cases come later.
Speaker 1: This strategy seems to be working for Kindbody. This May,
Speaker 1: it opened to clinic in the ritzy Newport Peach, California,
Speaker 1: and plans to open more in Charlotte, Miami, and San
Speaker 1: Diego before the end of the year. The company told
Speaker 1: me that since twenty twenty two, the number of new
Speaker 1: patient visits has increased by seventy five percent. It has
Speaker 1: also nearly doubled the number of employers who offer kind
Speaker 1: Body as a benefit. It expects to get forty five
Speaker 1: hundred women pregnant this year. They call the babies born
Speaker 1: at kind Body kind babies. In other words, at kind Body,
Speaker 1: business appears to be booming. Multiple clinics that I interviewed
Speaker 1: told me that this sort of growth and investment is
Speaker 1: good for patients. That cost savings and better quality care
Speaker 1: gets passed on to patients when clinics are able to
Speaker 1: expand into big nationwide clinic chains like kind Body, and
Speaker 1: at least on the surface, kind Body have had something
Speaker 1: very appealing to offer. Who doesn't want to feel like
Speaker 1: they're going to a spa appointment instead of the doctor.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back. After my initial fertility testing way
Speaker 1: back in episode one, I made an appointment at kind
Speaker 1: Body for a freezing consultation based on the state of
Speaker 1: my fertility. I wanted to know what to expect if
Speaker 1: I froze. My appointment coincidentally happened to be with Nicolenoys,
Speaker 1: who we heard from an episode one. She was the
Speaker 1: pioneering doctor who helped take egg freezing mainstream. She was
Speaker 1: working there at the time. Kind Body has a little
Speaker 1: calculator in its app which it says it built using
Speaker 1: clinical research. With my numbers, it estimated that I might
Speaker 1: need three or even four egg retrievals to get the
Speaker 1: desired twenty egg number. Kind Body, for the record, said
Speaker 1: the calculator was just meant to quote empower patients with
Speaker 1: information rather than offer a concrete clinical guidance. Nicole sounded
Speaker 1: more optimistic. She said two cycles was all I would
Speaker 1: likely need. I told her I would think about it.
Speaker 1: The next day I checked my inbox. There was a
Speaker 1: flurry of messages from kind Body. I'd been signed up
Speaker 1: for the start of my egg freezing journey. I had
Speaker 1: just nine simple steps to complete. There was an email
Speaker 1: about cost and another email asking if I had any questions.
Speaker 1: Then the next day a nurse called me. I told
Speaker 1: her I was confused why anyone was calling me at all, because,
Speaker 1: as I had told Nicole, I wasn't sure what I
Speaker 1: was going to do or whether I was going to
Speaker 1: do it with kind Body. Over the next few months,
Speaker 1: I got countless emails urging me to do things like
Speaker 1: join the summer freeze for twenty five percent off on
Speaker 1: the kind Body app, I could just add a seventy
Speaker 1: five hundred dollars egg freezing cycle to my shopping cart
Speaker 1: and check out like I was impulse buying a pair
Speaker 1: of very expensive shoes. It reminded me of this kind
Speaker 1: Body infosition I had watched a few weeks earlier.
Speaker 4: We want no regrets here.
Speaker 1: We can't go back in time.
Speaker 7: And we want to make sure that you have all
Speaker 7: options available to you.
Speaker 8: But the longer you wait to come in, so those
Speaker 8: options start to join.
Speaker 1: The kind Bodies. IVF prices range from about fourteen thousand
Speaker 1: dollars to sixteen thousand dollars excluding medication, and depending on location.
Speaker 1: It's New York. Prices were on par with what I
Speaker 1: saw at other clinics in the city, and all of
Speaker 1: those prices were higher than the average price for an
Speaker 1: IVF cycle in the US, which is about twelve thousand
Speaker 1: dollars according to Fertility IQ. I told Pasquale Patrizio about
Speaker 1: my experience a kind Body and ask him when he
Speaker 1: thought about it. He's the chief of the Center for
Speaker 1: Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at the University of Miami, and
Speaker 1: he studied the effect of private funding on the industry.
Speaker 3: For me, what is really not correct, it's the pressure.
Speaker 3: The fact that the next day you already got an
Speaker 3: email and messages from the clinics. Okay, are you ready
Speaker 3: to start? Well, you already told them listen, I want
Speaker 3: to think about but now they are already contacting you
Speaker 3: within twenty four hours. That's already a pressure for you
Speaker 3: to do something that they start to put you in
Speaker 3: the regret that if you don't do it, you are
Speaker 3: really losing the opportunity out and you have now these
Speaker 3: guilty feelings, and so it's a kind of psychological maneuvering.
Speaker 1: When I told kind Body about my experience, they said,
Speaker 1: the idea that it's pressuring patients is categorically false. While
Speaker 1: it does engage in marketing campaigns like seasonal promotions. Kind
Speaker 1: Body said, that's standard across the industry, and the right
Speaker 1: it is standard. Are talked about some of those practices.
Speaker 1: In an earlier episode Across the industry, Pasquali told me
Speaker 1: clinics are often under pressure or peace investors, so they
Speaker 1: push treatments on patients. He wasn't speaking specifically about kind Body.
Speaker 1: Big fertility clinic chains could in theory, save consumers money
Speaker 1: and make treatments more accessible by leveraging their market power
Speaker 1: and lobbying for policy change.
Speaker 3: So theoretically, by doing more volume, you should also be
Speaker 3: able to offer less costly. You know, should be cheaper,
Speaker 3: should be more economical. But this cost potentially cost saving
Speaker 3: I so far, I've not been passed on to patients
Speaker 3: or to payers. If you are working in a state
Speaker 3: with the insurance that that are recovering.
Speaker 1: Actually, by my calculations, when you adjust for inflation and
Speaker 1: include things like the cost of medication. IVF has gotten
Speaker 1: more expensive in the US over the last few decades.
Speaker 3: Not cheaper are we doing good for patients? Law is
Speaker 3: that the patient lost into these business transactions.
Speaker 1: This tension between the bottom line and the patient. It's
Speaker 1: existed for a long time. It goes back to how
Speaker 1: IVF came up in America. Attempts to create special regulations
Speaker 1: for IVF have failed time after time, and a lot
Speaker 1: of that has to do with interference from the anti
Speaker 1: abortion movement. Around the same time IVF scientists were making
Speaker 1: big breakthroughs, the Supreme Court passed Roe v. Wade, which
Speaker 1: rebbed up anti abortion activism. These activists also opposed IVF,
Speaker 1: viewing the destruction of embryos in the course of IVF
Speaker 1: the same as abortion. Their growing political force made lawmakers
Speaker 1: hesitant to weigh in on IVF, even as countries like
Speaker 1: the UK were creating new regulatory agencies for it. It
Speaker 1: also led to a ban of federal embry or research funding.
Speaker 1: There's also not widespread health insurance and fertility insurers normally
Speaker 1: weigh in on the best treatments in IVF. Patients are
Speaker 1: mostly left to figure out for themselves whether they're doctor
Speaker 1: is telling them something they need is really something they need,
Speaker 1: or whether they're being upsold. All that means fertility medicine
Speaker 1: grew up as a business, a marketplace where clinics can
Speaker 1: charge people tens of thousands of dollars to start a family,
Speaker 1: and as the industry has rapidly expanded the scale of issues,
Speaker 1: it's grown too will be right back. Not long after
Speaker 1: I started reporting this podcast, my colleague Jackie Davelus, and
Speaker 1: I both started hearing from people that there were problems
Speaker 1: at kind Body that weren't quite as visible as what
Speaker 1: I had experienced.
Speaker 9: I had gotten a tip from a user on Reddit
Speaker 9: that was commenting on kind of their experience at the company.
Speaker 9: They were a former employee, and they basically told me
Speaker 9: you should really look into those laboratories where these IVF
Speaker 9: treatments are really happening.
Speaker 1: She found that there had been a handful of incidents,
Speaker 1: particularly after the acquisition of another fertility clinic chain.
Speaker 10: Embryos had been mishandled as a result of understaffing and
Speaker 10: inconsistent lab protocols. Three of these accidents occurred in Kindbody's
Speaker 10: Bryant Park lab in New York City, including one where
Speaker 10: a patient's last embryo was damaged after accidentally being left
Speaker 10: out in room temperature. Another incident occurred in a Kindbody
Speaker 10: clinic in Chicago, where staff couldn't find a patient's embryo.
Speaker 1: The patient wanted her embryo genetically tested, but staff couldn't
Speaker 1: find it when they looked where records indicated it should
Speaker 1: have been.
Speaker 10: It was eventually found, but staff had to rifle through
Speaker 10: cride tanks to find it.
Speaker 1: Kinbody told us that these incidents were a fraction of
Speaker 1: the more than seven thousand freezing and IVF procedures that
Speaker 1: they've handled. The company said its incident rate zero point
Speaker 1: two percent, on par with the rate found in a
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen study. They said they weren't understaffed, and they
Speaker 1: disputed that there was an escalation in lab issues as
Speaker 1: the company grew. Some of the employees I talked to
Speaker 1: actually said that even though Cobody's labs did face some issues,
Speaker 1: the equipment and standards at Combody were much better than
Speaker 1: in other clinics where they'd worked. Issues and accidents in
Speaker 1: the lab are by no means unique to any one clinic.
Speaker 1: They're happening across the industry. There have been other allegations
Speaker 1: of things going wrong, like a recent lawsuit that alleges
Speaker 1: a California clinic called Ovation Fertility destroyed embryos belonging to
Speaker 1: at least eleven people when an incubator was cleaned with
Speaker 1: hydrogen peroxide. The suit says that the clinic went ahead
Speaker 1: with transferring the ruined embryos for pregnancy, not realizing what
Speaker 1: had happened. A spokesperson for their company said it was
Speaker 1: an isolated incident which impacted a very small number of
Speaker 1: patients and that the company will continue to implement and
Speaker 1: enforce rigorous protocols to keep patients safe. And then there
Speaker 1: are the cases that have serious ramifications beyond what happens
Speaker 1: at any one facility. In Alabama, for example, several patients
Speaker 1: sued a fertility clinic after a hospital patient wandered into
Speaker 1: the room where their embryos were being stored and took
Speaker 1: them out of the freezer, destroying them. The case went
Speaker 1: all the way to the state Supreme Court, which ruled
Speaker 1: in February that the patients could sue the clinic for
Speaker 1: wrongful death because they are embryos were children. That decision
Speaker 1: temporarily halted IVF procedures at clinics across the state, with
Speaker 1: clinicians worrying they could be sued or worse anytime something
Speaker 1: happened to an embryo in the normal course of treatment.
Speaker 1: But it also put a giant national spotlight on problems
Speaker 1: that can occur away from patient's eyes in IVF labs.
Speaker 5: The issue of fertility misconduct, injuries, mishaps at fertility clinics
Speaker 5: and you know, almost always in the labs of fertility clinics,
Speaker 5: is a much larger issue than any of us knows,
Speaker 5: including myself.
Speaker 1: This is on a wolf. He's an attorney, and when
Speaker 1: it comes to fertility industry shenanigans, he's kind of seen
Speaker 1: it all.
Speaker 5: I cannot tell you the real scope of this problem
Speaker 5: because there is no reporting requirements, there is no central database.
Speaker 5: There is nothing that the public can turn to to
Speaker 5: understand the scope or magnitude of the problem of fertility
Speaker 5: center misconduct.
Speaker 1: Not long after he took its first fertility case, he
Speaker 1: started getting a ton of calls.
Speaker 5: We started getting phone calls from other people, folks who said, oh,
Speaker 5: my embryos were also dropped on the grounds my clinic
Speaker 5: also lost our embryos. Our clinic transferred the wrong embryos
Speaker 5: to us. You know, the list can go on and on.
Speaker 1: He developed a bit of a reputation for these cases.
Speaker 7: Attorney Adam Wolf tells CBS News he plans to file
Speaker 7: a class action lawsuit against the San Francisco clinic this
Speaker 7: week on behalf of the patients. He also filed a
Speaker 7: second lawsuit against the Ahuja Medical Center outside Cleveland.
Speaker 1: Adam's firm even purchased the domain lost embryos dot com.
Speaker 1: Adam says he's handled more than one thousand fertility mishap
Speaker 1: and misconduct cases over the last decade or so. In
Speaker 1: one of his biggest cases, in twenty eighteen, more than
Speaker 1: thirty five hundred eggs, embryos, and other genetic material were
Speaker 1: lost when a cryo tank failed at Pacific Fertility Center
Speaker 1: in San Francisco. Has firm represented about one hundred patients.
Speaker 1: A jury awarded five patients nearly fifteen million dollars. That
Speaker 1: verdict was appealed and eventually settled out of court. But
Speaker 1: I heard this a lot when talking to him. I'm
Speaker 1: not allowed to talk about it. Adam can't talk about
Speaker 1: a lot of his cases because they settle.
Speaker 5: And I would say in eighty or ninety percent of
Speaker 5: our cases, we never even file a lawsuit because it
Speaker 5: is settled with the clinic on terms that include confidentiality,
Speaker 5: such that the public never finds out about it.
Speaker 1: This is why we really have no idea how Cammon
Speaker 1: these kinds of mistakes are. Clinics are required to report
Speaker 1: their success rates, but they aren't required to report their errors.
Speaker 1: A twenty twenty study found one hundred and thirty three
Speaker 1: lawsuits were filed in the previous decade over loss discarded
Speaker 1: or damaged for his in embryos. That is probably only
Speaker 1: a fraction of cases. Adam's caseload a loan seems to
Speaker 1: prove that. Adam says that a lot of the time,
Speaker 1: what goes wrong as a genuine accident.
Speaker 5: A lab tech looks up, you know, thinking about what
Speaker 5: movie he or she is going to see that night,
Speaker 5: and just mixes up embryo one and two. Or there's
Speaker 5: a labeling problem and you know, couple a's embryo is
Speaker 5: either not labeled or labeled with the names of couple B. Right,
Speaker 5: And you could see how that can happen. You can
Speaker 5: people make mistakes, I get it.
Speaker 1: Sometimes, of course it's more nefarious than that You've probably
Speaker 1: heard about people doing twenty three in me and finding
Speaker 1: out that they have all these siblings they'd never heard
Speaker 1: of because a doctor covertly impregnated his own patients. All
Speaker 1: of this is part of why industry critics lobby for
Speaker 1: more regulation. They argue that fewer federal research dollars and
Speaker 1: sparse insurance coverage has let business decisions become a major
Speaker 1: driving force and setting practice standards. So the argument goes,
Speaker 1: we need more regulation to prevent that. One expert suggested
Speaker 1: fortility clinics should be treated like hospitals, which are required
Speaker 1: to report so called never events, the kind of stuff
Speaker 1: that should never happen, like leaving a sponge in a
Speaker 1: patient during surgery or perhaps implanting the wrong embryo in someone.
Speaker 1: People who work in the industry argue that it does
Speaker 1: have the proper amount of oversight.
Speaker 3: The labs are very regulated. In order to be having
Speaker 3: a laboratory data going to perform em brology work, they
Speaker 3: need to be cap inspected, which is the College of
Speaker 3: American Pathologies. They need to be a clear inspected. The
Speaker 3: FDA also comes and does surprise visits. As an average
Speaker 3: we have every two years, all.
Speaker 1: The same rules apply to fertility doctors and labs that
Speaker 1: apply to any medical doctors or labs. In the US,
Speaker 1: most clinics are also members of industry groups that have
Speaker 1: their own sets of standards. Other countries do set more
Speaker 1: rules for fertility practices, though, the UK, for example, as
Speaker 1: a special regulatory body just for fertility clinics. They have
Speaker 1: to get a special license and follow all the guidelines
Speaker 1: in a three hundred and thirty page rule book, including
Speaker 1: requiring two people to always id embryos when they're moving
Speaker 1: around a lab so there are no mix ups. There
Speaker 1: are no specific national fertility clinic regulations like that in
Speaker 1: the US.
Speaker 5: We need to have checks and balances in the labs
Speaker 5: of fertility clinics that greatly minimize and hopefully eradicate those
Speaker 5: types of errors.
Speaker 1: He wasn't talking about any one specific clinic, but one
Speaker 1: thing that really struck me was that his cases are
Speaker 1: often against high volume clinics.
Speaker 5: They're just doing a ton of procedures and it's all
Speaker 5: happening very quickly, and there's pressure to get it done,
Speaker 5: and it leads to mistakes, even if those clinics have
Speaker 5: proper standard operating procedures or SOPs. They're often not followed.
Speaker 1: This explains why we are hearing about more and more
Speaker 1: of these mistakes as clinics backed by venture capital and
Speaker 1: private equity are under pressure to dial up the volume.
Speaker 1: Some patients don't have much insight into that side of things.
Speaker 1: They have no way of knowing if their clinic has
Speaker 1: settled a ton of lawsuits that never made it into
Speaker 1: the public eye. As I considered where I should freeze
Speaker 1: my own numbers, I kept thinking about this. I like
Speaker 1: to make decisions based on data, and most of the
Speaker 1: data I wanted was either non existent or not that reassuring.
Speaker 1: There still wasn't much data on women who had returned
Speaker 1: after freezing their eggs. One reason. YU study found that
Speaker 1: just thirty nine percent of women who did try to
Speaker 1: use their eggs wound up having a baby, so that
Speaker 1: number was high er if you were under thirty eight
Speaker 1: like me. Eventually I decided to freeze my eggs at NYU.
Speaker 1: It was a pioneer in egg freezing and still does
Speaker 1: a lot of freezing research. It had a good IVF
Speaker 1: success rate according to CDC data that I looked at
Speaker 1: after going off birth control and waiting a few months.
Speaker 1: It was finally time to start my freezing cycle. A
Speaker 1: box of drugs the size of a big beach cooler
Speaker 1: a my apartment. Inside were all the supplies I would
Speaker 1: need to rub up my reproductive system. Four types of
Speaker 1: hormones and a shit ton of needles.
Speaker 8: Hold the pen in one hand and with the other hand,
Speaker 8: pinch a fold of skin around the injection area.
Speaker 1: Okay, it's a big boy, have my GOSPATRITTI should just count? Okay, one,
Speaker 1: two of three? Nope, I still didn't go okay, I'm
Speaker 1: not ready. Cannatch it one more time.
Speaker 8: Ensured the entire needle straight into the skin at a
Speaker 8: forty five to ninety degree angle. Press the dose snob
Speaker 8: down as far as it will go.
Speaker 1: Okay, I think I'm ready. One, two, three, I was
Speaker 1: in it. Now the dose reads zero, so I guess
Speaker 1: I did it right. I fucking did it right. Every
Speaker 1: morning and night I was stabbing myself in the stomach
Speaker 1: with two long needles full of hormones that would make
Speaker 1: my bodies production go into hyperdrive. It's day two. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna try this whole injection thing. Hopefully it's slightly less
Speaker 1: frustrating than it was yesterday.
Speaker 6: Day three.
Speaker 4: There we go.
Speaker 1: Okay, second vial of drugs? Oh Saturday? Does that make
Speaker 1: this day four of my cycle? I think I might
Speaker 1: be off book, but I'm terrified of screwing up, so
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna watch the video quickly before I do it.
Speaker 1: Day five of my fertility cycle. Fuck, I just dropped
Speaker 1: the needle. Okay, it's okay. I think I can sterilize it.
Speaker 1: I was responding well to the drugs, but I was
Speaker 1: also so tired and bloated. I'm just generally feeling like crap.
Speaker 1: Eighth day of my cycle. The tiredness is really what's
Speaker 1: killing me at this point. Mix mix, mix, mix mix.
Speaker 1: Needle is ready. Never get here. It wouldn't be long
Speaker 1: before I would know whether this crazy bet would actually
Speaker 1: pay off. So are you ready for it?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 5: What's the news?
Speaker 4: Tell me?
Speaker 1: That's next time? On the final episode of Misconception. This
Speaker 1: series was written and reported by me Christen V. Brown.
Speaker 1: It was produced by Jilda Decarly and Stacey Wong and
Speaker 1: edited by Cynthia Koons. Additional research was done by Tana's Mcjohnny.
Speaker 1: It was engineered by Blake Maples. Our theme music was
Speaker 1: composed and performed by Hannis Brown Special thanks to Shelly Banjo,
Speaker 1: Randy Shapiro, Anna Maazarakis, Jeff Grocott, Lauras Andlenko, and Creighton Harrison.
Speaker 1: Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: If you want to binge the whole series early, go
Speaker 1: to Bloomberg dot com and hit subscribe. Then connect your
Speaker 1: Bloomberg dot Com subscription to Apple Podcasts, or listen as
Speaker 1: we release a new episode each week. See you next time.