Let’s TACO ‘Bout It
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Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon. I'm here with Elizabeth Spires. Hello. I'm here with Emily Peck, who is still at Axios. It's true. Hello, hello. Hello.

And we're going to talk about the inflation. We're going to talk about inflation and whether it's high and whether it's rising and whether it's measurable anymore and whether it matters. We are going to talk about the taco trade. Trump always chickens out. It has become a whole meme.

We are going to talk about books and whether anyone even reads them anymore. We have a Slate Plus segment on the Trump-Musk feud that went from zero to 100 faster than a Tesla Roadster. That's kind of how the segment went. In terms of the velocity of that segment, Emily, where would you put it? It was like zero to 300 miles per hour, Felix. Yeah.

You might even want to subscribe to Slate Plus for that one. In any case, it's all coming up on Slate Money. This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.

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Okay, so Emily, you are the inventor of the inflation. You are the person I go to for all things inflation. And you understand the vibes. You are hooked into the inflation vibes. I remember when the inflation vibes were strong and everyone was blaming the incumbent president, Mr. Biden, for the inflation.

My question for you is, are the inflation vibes equally strong now? And is the incumbent president similarly being blamed? These are good questions. I'll take it in order. The inflation vibes are not as strong in 2025 as they were when we last saw President Biden slowly walking somewhere, shuffling office or whatever, and everyone blamed him for the experience.

expensive eggs and other things. Inflation is still low. If you look at CPI or the Fed's preferred gauge, inflation is in the, with the two handle now, it's not as bad. However,

as I reported this week in Axios, where we miss Felix, there are some worrying signs. There's all these surveys that are done of business, of companies. The New York Federal Reserve does one. There's the ISM index where they talk to companies and all the companies are saying, they're being asked, did you raise prices because of tariffs? And the companies are like, yes, we did. So it's

It just hasn't trickled into the data yet, but prices are being raised by companies for sure in response to the tariffs, just like everyone said would happen. But eggs aren't imported. Right. Eggs aren't imported. And we are self-sufficient when it comes to oil, more or less, give or take.

Which means the only two prices people care about, which is eggs and gasoline, are not inflation. Right. They're not inflation. In fact, gas, where I am, I just spent a very low amount to fill up my tank where I was like, oh, this is great. Wow. Excellent. You know, it's just not as bad. It's not as bad as it was. So basically the vibe I'm getting from you, since we're all about vibes here at Slate Money, the vibe I'm getting from you is there's no real inflation right now.

There is a certain amount of concern that there might be inflation going forwards because everyone who's importing goods is going to pass those tariffs on to consumers. But that hasn't shown up yet.

So therefore, there isn't any public anger yet, partly because there isn't any inflation and partly because it specifically isn't any inflation in eggs and gas. And what's more, even if there is inflation, it's going to be in random imported goods. You know, it's going to be like Barbies or something. And people don't get as upset about Barbie inflation as they do about eggs. It's not something you need to buy every day.

And let's not forget that goods are only 30% of the economy anyway. So maybe all of this worry about tariffs causing inflation is a bit overblown and it could wind up being a bit of a nothing burger. So I don't think that worry is overblown, but I think part of what is happening is that under the Biden administration, people's criticism around Biden were so heavily centered around inflation. And Trump is constantly holding shiny objects in front of the American voters constantly.

in the sense that he sort of creates new problems slash opportunities every day. So people are not as focused on a single economic issue the way that they were during the Biden administration. Here they're worried about, you know, jobs and tariffs and manufacturing. And there's a lot of stuff that really is built into people's everyday economic concerns. And it's not as centralized around that single issue the way it was under Biden. No, I mean,

Inflation under Biden was like 7%, and anyone felt it any time. You couldn't be distracted from it. I mean, it peaked at more than 9%. It got very close to 10%. And I feel like no one is predicting that, even with all of the scared...

you know, extrapolations, you know, the, who was it came out and reckoned that the terrorists would add like half a point to CPI. Like you're not going to get like a terrifying 9% CPI print as a result of terrorists. But to Elizabeth's point, I would say like,

because of some of the shenanigans going on, there is the possibility for certain like issues, shortages, spikes in price for certain sectors. Like, I don't know, maybe you'll destroy me for this, but like the rare earths fight with China that we're going through now. The rare earths fight. So we should probably talk about the rare earths fight because this is fascinating. This is really fascinating to me. Let's go. I,

I didn't know how important they were. We've talked about them before on this podcast, and I can say confidently I walked away not caring about the rare earths. But suddenly I feel I understand them better, that they are very important to magnets, which go in cars, which without them, rut row. It's like the chip thing.

during the pandemic when everyone was all of a sudden like, oh my God, chips are in everything. Like your toaster has chips. We're all going to die. It's kind of like that. We're not all going to die. I'm sorry I said that, but similar. You don't need a new toaster to live. And you don't need a new car to live either. Yeah.

But the fact that there were no new cars because you needed a bunch of these chips and there weren't any chips did mean that there was massive inflation in cars. Right. And if we reach the point where there are no new cars because the car manufacturers need rare earths and they can't get any rare earths, then the same thing will happen and you will have massive inflation in cars and secondhand cars. And Emily is shaking her head and she is wagging her finger and she's like, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh.

I don't think so because it was a very unique set of circumstances that drove that car inflation during that time. There was...

a huge spike in demand for the cars that even if the rare earths mess up the cars, you wouldn't see, just like we were saying with the other kinds of inflation, you wouldn't see the same kind of spike. You'll see an increase in prices, delays buying cars, but the demand won't be so hot. So I don't know if you would see such a crisis. Also, the rare earths are not actually rare. One of the takeaways from our last discussion was just that the rare earths are not actually rare. They're just expensive to extract.

Well, they're not even that expensive to extract. They're just environmentally damaging to extract. And what's happened is that if you try to mine rare earths in any country other than China, you are almost certainly going to have a government that cares about the environment. And the government is going to force you to mine.

mine those rare earths in a way that has a modicum of environmental responsibility. And doing that is just way more expensive than buying the rare earths from China where they don't seem to care about such things. Well, we may have a government now that doesn't care about those things. Well, that's not true, Elizabeth. The fact is that there are a whole bunch of rules and regulations. We can sort of make a rhetorical gesture

that Trump doesn't care about environmental responsibility, which I'm sure he does not. Well, he's made plenty of executive orders to that effect. He's stripped down the EPA. He's tried to destroy a lot of it. 100%. And all I'm saying is that even after all that, the cost of creating rare earths

in the United States, mining, refining, and all the rest of it, which is a filthy, dirty, horrible thing, which no one wants in their backyard or anywhere near in their state. But even if the permissions all come magically, there is enough that you need to do. And there is enough state regulation that there is just absolutely no way that you can do this in a way that is price competitive with China.

It's not something we can compete on. And frankly, it's not something we want to compete on. You're right, they're not rare. They are all over the United States. They are all over Japan. And we just don't have the environmental appetite, basically, to mine them. But the thing that I am fascinated by...

is that we seem to have two things going on at once, which shouldn't be happening at the same time. One is that there are a lot of headlines about China's got a blockade on rare earths. The rare earths are not coming into the United States. This could mean no more cars. This could mean no more, you know, Roombas or vacuum cleaners or whatever, right? There's lots of things that need these magnets.

At the same time, because this is a good old capitalist economy, you know, these rare earths do exist on the planet outside China. And you would imagine that the Chinese blockade would cause the price to rise and they'd be very expensive. But it basically hasn't. They're still dirt cheap. They were always cheap and they're still cheap.

And so I don't like the price signal doesn't seem to be agreeing with the headlines. And that's what's confusing me. That is confusing. Is that we'll talk about it next, perhaps. Is that taco? Do people think the Chinese aren't going to follow through here or they're going to this is just temporary or something? There are stockpiles. I think what people are assuming is exactly that, that, you know,

The amount of rare earths that are floating around the non-Chinese world will suffice to keep us going until China and the U.S. come to some kind of agreement. That's my best guess. This is a little bit like when the International Trade Court in New York

I invalidated all of the tariffs and basically said, none of your, you know, April 2 tariffs have a legal basis. You aren't allowed to do them. They're all, you know, scrapped. And then the following morning, the stock market rose by like 1%. And I was like, wait, why aren't the stonks stonking? And everyone was like, well, because they've seen another move ahead.

And they reckon that like all of these big, loud headlines, whether it's about tariffs being suspended or whether it's about rare earths not making it into the United States, everything kind of like there's this baseline. There's this baseline of like there is trade. There's 10% tariffs. Maybe there's 20% tariffs. Trump is going to be unpredictable. Weird things are going to come at you, but you've got to just ignore the noise. And I think for the time being,

People are ignoring the noise. And the people who are buying their RRFs are not panicking, even if the headlines say that they are. Yeah, so we keep coming around and around to saying like this trade war, you can ignore it for now. And it's not really going to be as disruptive to the economy.

as you might think from reading the headlines. That is the takeaway I am getting from our conversation right now. Well, I think that's the takeaway that I'm getting from the stock market, which is looking very high and very unruffled by the tariffs. I think if stocks were still back where they were in mid-April, we would be feeling something different. I think the market is...

really important in terms of vibe setting. I think it's a long-term game to see the effects of the trade war and the tariffs. The unraveling of all these relationships isn't... Is there a reverse Hemingway quote that I could use? It happens quickly and then very slowly over years. Isn't that how the bond market is pricing it right now? They're looking at long-term risk in a way that equity markets are not.

That's a good point. I don't know. The duration of long bonds and the duration of equities is basically the same, right? I mean, you know, equity is permanent capital. So you would think that long-term risk would be priced into equities just as much as it is into bonds. That's kind of economic, man, thinking that's not what we see in the real world. Equities market is much more responsive to short-term concerns than the bond market, partly because you just have more sophisticated investors in the bond market. They...

are analyzing things a little bit differently. Maybe. I feel like that used to be the case, and now all of the smart investors are always arbitraging the different markets all the time and that in every market. But we're getting a little bit off topic here, which is the inflation.

And the question I have for Emily is about the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Yes. This is a whole subplot to the inflation discourse. Yes. Which is that the BLS has been under a hiring freeze since very early on in the Trump administration. And as a result, it can't calculate inflation.

as accurately as it used to be able to do because calculating inflation is a very labor-intensive thing that involves people going into stores and finding prices. And now they don't have as many people as they used to to go into stores and find prices. And so they wind up having to impute prices rather than find the prices directly. And so the accuracy of the CPI number is going down by some unknowable quantum. Your question?

Your question? Is this a bad thing that we should care about? Felix, yes. And just minutes before I hopped on our Zoom or Riverside or whatever we call it to talk to you guys, I was speaking to the former head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics from a decade ago, Erica Groschen, and she was giving me the download on what's up with the BLS data collection. And so

It's bad this year. I guess headcount is down like 15% at the Bureau of Labor Statistics for all like the Trump reasons that we've talked about. The hiring freeze you mentioned, the return to office, the shuttering of, you know, field offices. So where do we work? That kind of stuff. Just like a lot of disruption for these people. But it's coming after years of what we've talked about on this show before, which is like,

budget cuts, stretched resources, low response rates. This is, by the way, I wrote about this in 2020 and I spoke to Erica Groschen in 2020 and she was like, this is really bad and the pandemic hit response rates and people don't respond to surveys anymore. And

And I feel like Erica Groschen has been banging this drum for a while. And I'm not saying that she's wrong about this. And yes, it is very important that a country have reliable statistics. And historically, the United States has had the best statistics in the world. And it is possible that.

We are entering a world where we no longer have the best statistics in the world. Maybe Canada, maybe New Zealand have better statistics than the United States. Is that so bad is my question. I don't know. I mean, so with the CPI data you're talking about, like, theoretically, you don't need a bunch of people in like Topeka, Buffalo, Lincoln, Nebraska to go into the supermarket to see how much the butter costs. Like there are more sophisticated ways you could collect data to calculate CPI.

Well, you could have like data feeds coming in, you know, like we have the internet now. And they do some digital CPI collection as well, I'm told. I feel like for well over a decade now, we've had this thing called the Million Prices Project, which is, you know, trying to do that. And so prices are on the internet. Why do you need to hire humans? And I'm sure...

You know, Doge was all over this. So and Erica was saying you could move away from a lot of the surveys that the BLS does to collect data from Americans and get more precise data. Like it's very possible to do it now. But there's not enough people to like they're barely keeping up with what they

I'm so sorry to do this. They're barely keeping up with what they do do. And they're not, they don't have the resources to look at modernizing, which long over the long term could become something, but it's not an acute issue. Probably. Yeah.

Elizabeth, right now that we have our hair on fire in a million different directions, Trump 2, even more than Trump 1, is about every day brings a more outrageous headline. Does anyone have the bandwidth to care about the long-term erosion of the capabilities of the Bureau of Labor? Anyway, that. If you're running a big company, you should care about it because a lot of businesses rely on that data for planning and things like that. But

I think another very short-term risk is that Trump has also dismantled some of the advisory boards that the BLS has relied upon to kind of evaluate what they're doing and determine whether the data is correct. And that seems to be in part a political project for him, because if the data coming out of the BLS is unflattering, then undermining it or manipulating it is in his interest. And, you know, there's no evidence that they're doing that.

but it's certainly a risk. Yeah, again, I just have to admit, I find it hard to get excited about the dismantling of an advisory board.

Have either of you ever come across in your entire careers an advisory board that actually did any good? But Felix, that's a red herring. Nobody's concerned about the advisory board specifically. The issue is that if you were reliant on that data to plan your business long term and there is no private sector immediate alternative, then that would be concerning. I mean, I don't think it's the kind of thing voters worry about. That would be concerning, but there are two ifs there.

right? Which is one, you know, if you're reliant on that data to plan your business long term, and I'm not sure that

that, you know, CPI data is hugely important input into most business planning. And then you said, if there is no other private sector alternative, and I think there are private sector alternatives. Not as far reaching, though. And I think when we're talking about the corruption of CPI data, it's not just that. It's basically every data set that the BLS puts out can be affected by this stuff. If they're understaffed, if they don't have the resources, if they're not being modernized, if the people that they rely on to...

helped them evaluate their own work, had their jobs eliminated. I think long-term, you know, it weakens the agency, but it also means that we're getting less potentially compromised data all the way around from the BLS, not just CPI numbers that are off. Although I think the New York Times had a great, like,

explaining why the CPI matters. And they said, first to determine social security every year, the social security payments adjust to CPI. It's how they set federal tax brackets. Contracts between labor and management are indexed to CPI. Payments on certain bonds go back to CPI. It seems important. It seems like really important. It's hugely important. And no,

No, it is absolutely important. And I'm reminded weirdly of the debate about LIBOR, right? When everyone discovered that LIBOR had been manipulated and everyone was searching for a victim and no one could find a victim because no one even knew whether it had been manipulated up or manipulated down. And in fact, it was probably just both. And I feel like with CPI, what we're doing is we're sort of increasing the size of the error bars. And we never really knew how big the error bars were to begin with.

I mean, one thing to consider, too, is that we haven't really evaluated the way that CPI has been calculated in a long time. The last big evaluation was in 1995 with the Boskin Commission, and that was during the tail end of the George W. last term. And there was a lot of talk about it simply because people thought the inflation calculation was politicized in some way, that it was being over-evaluated.

counted and that that was working against the Bush administration. And that's part of what created the rationale for the commission in the first place. And the results of the commission were that they determined that inflation was being over-calculated and it changed the way that the BLS actually calculated CPI.

So this is, you know, it feels like it's a similar discussion coming around now, but maybe for different reasons. Yeah. I mean, you know, the next time we have a next time we have like a technocratic president, he can update or she can update the CPI for the era of the Internet.

We do not have a technocratic president. And yeah, right now, I think we have bigger things to worry about. I, yeah. Would you, is this where, I feel this is where we started and this is where we're ending. Like inflation is important. People care about inflation. Like how you calculate it is important. How you measure it is important. Whether it's high is important. All of these things are important. But in the grand scheme of things right now, it has yet to reach the point of actually mattering really.

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But maybe this is a segue into our taco segment. What do you think is the most important thing right now that people should be worried about? I'm much more concerned about the higher education stuff right now. But yes, let's talk about taco because it is very rare.

that a financial journalist creates a new cycle that lasts for weeks. And Robert Armstrong of the Financial Times take a bow, you did it, you created this thing called TACO, Trump always chickens out, as the sort of ur-explanation of why the stock market is high and why people aren't running around with their hair on fire.

And it really caught on and everyone started talking about it. And it's now become...

this sort of phrase that people throw at Trump and Trumpists as a way of accusing him of being unmanly in some way. Trump hates it. And it's now part of the political discourse as well as the markets discourse. But it was originally a markets term to explain why whenever he came out with a crazy thing about 145% tariffs or something, the markets were like,

take a deep breath and mostly ignore it. And for me, I mean, tell me if you disagree. But for me, I think it is the main driver of why the markets seem so sanguine and healthy right now is that they just don't believe most of the rhetoric coming out of the White House.

Yeah, absolutely. I think John authors in his newsletter said like the markets were taking Trump like very seriously for like a week or two after liberation day and they were falling and it was like the sky was falling. And then that stopped and the delusion just came right back. It snapped right back into place. And I think it's really, it's just a version of the delusion that sort of swept him into the office in the first place where everyone was like,

yeah, he was great for business. He was great for stocks and like, didn't seem to remember that all of what we're seeing now, we saw the last time, you know, all the uncertainty over tariffs. I mean, it's all, it's more this time, I suppose, in Trump 2.0, but it's, taco is just a version of that delusion that's, that's been in place for a long time. But like the first time around, it wasn't a delusion. The first time around, it was real. Like the

US economy until COVID hit was actually fine. Well, isn't the economy fine now? That's my whole point. Like, it's not delusional to sort of tune out the Trump noise and to say, well, the Trump noise notwithstanding, the economy is fine. That worked very well in Trump 1. Damn it.

And this seems to be working okay in Trump too. Yeah. Can't argue with that. Well, I think the reason why it irritates Trump so much is not because it's a, you know, invalid criticism or it's only happening this time around, or, you know, that he feels like he's being accused of playing 3d chess when he was really playing 4d chess. I think,

Part of it is just the ridicule of the insult. You know, he's being called a coward and he personally can't tolerate that because he's certainly gotten plenty of criticism, even during the first term, that he was inconsistent in terms of how he would both, what he would promise, what he would deliver, and how many times he would reverse himself. This isn't new, you know? Yeah. I think the one thing that has weirdly helped him is,

you know, the Democrats opening taco trucks outside the whatever, like is that because it has become political,

It now is something he can write off as a liberal democratic insult. And the liberals and the Democrats have always insulted him and they've always said rude things about him. And, you know, like, is it worse than being called a rapist? Probably not. But, you know, even if it is, it's all part and parcel of the same sort of things that people accuse him of, you know, rightly or wrongly. And as such, I think he can now...

shrug it off. I was very worried for a couple of days there that he would take it very seriously. The first time he heard it in the Oval Office in the press conference, and he really blew up and he was very upset. I was very genuinely worried that he would be like, well, I'm going to keep these tariffs on this time just to show them that I'm not chickening out.

But now I think it's just become standard issue political noise and he can ignore it. I think it still bothers him, but he's constitutionally incapable of sticking to what he said he was going to do because he's just a reactive person. And he's never sort of displayed any kind of consistency with anything he wanted to do.

So I'm not sure he's capable of rolling back that behavior. Although weirdly, the one thing he's displayed consistency on for decades is that he loves terrorists and he thinks we should have more of them and hire of them. Yes. And when they asked him about taco, he was like, this is what I do. I say a crazy high number and then I go back down a little bit. Like he's like, that's how you do it. That's not chickening out. That's the art of the deal. All right.

And like, in a way, he's not wrong. I mean, look at what he did with the UK. It's kind of happening.

I believe, I'm not sure because these things change every millisecond and God knows whether this will be true on Saturday morning when the podcast comes out, but I believe that the UK is the one country in the world that doesn't have 50% steel and aluminum tariffs. Like somehow, you know, it's like, it's all very random. Here you go, car manufacturers, if you need your steel and aluminum to make your cars and you have enough rare earths, just import it from Liverpool. There you go. Yeah. You solved it.

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But let's talk about reading, shall we? Elizabeth, do you believe that people are consuming more books than ever, and especially audiobooks, which are awesome things and I love? Or do you believe that there is a reading crisis and the youngs can't read and the Zoomers don't read to their kids and we should all be rending our clothes in...

consternation that books are going the way of the dinosaur? I think that that latter hypothesis is bullshit. I think, first of all, book sales are up. Secondly, whenever I see articles suggesting that the youngs don't read anymore, they all just reek of this kind of kids these days moral panic. And I don't see it anecdotally in my own life, but also all the educators that I talk to say that's not true.

We had an article we all read in the prep from The Atlantic that sort of alleged that this was happening. And it was very just anecdata, you know. And there was a woman who had been interviewed for it that wrote a whole thing on her blog about...

about how the person who wrote the piece had misconstrued a lot of what she said. And it was really interesting to read because she said, you know, part of what the concern really stems from is the idea that the youngs are not reading certain books that everyone considers or a certain generation considers the core elements of the Western canon. Specifically the Iliad, for some reason. I don't know why the Iliad in particular is required reading for everyone. I felt shame when I got to the end of that piece. I was like, I never read the Iliad.

Oh, no. But you kicked off this whole conversation, Emily, in the slate. Yes, let's get into it. Not with an article complaining that Columbia kids don't know how to read books anymore, but rather with an article complaining that, you know, that 26-year-olds are not reading children's books to their children.

Yes, The Guardian ran a story that said that parents are reading less frequently to their children. They cited data. 41 parents of all ages reported reading to kids now versus 64% in 2012, which is like a big drop. That's 20 points. That's a big drop. That's no joke. And it quotes some parents saying things like...

It's so boring. They always want to read the same books. They interrupt. It's like, yeah, welcome to reading books to kids. But you're supposed to power through. Unlike the Atlantic piece where it was like college kids were like, I don't want to read some dusty old English thing or Greek thing that I don't understand the language anymore.

This is parents not wanting to read very basic picture books to their children. So I did find that a little disturbing. Maybe I am the old. Did you find that one more convincing than the other one? No.

I mean, it had the survey data, so I like that, but I actually haven't had a chance to look at the survey. I could look at it in real time. One little survey-related suspicion I have about that is it seems like there's a big generational divide that could also have something to do with the way different generations self-report.

I think Gen Z is way more likely to be honest about information that they think may be unflattering to them than older generations. I do like this hypothesis that 61% of Gen X said they read to their children, but 50% of those were lying.

And 40% of Gen Z says they read to their children, but they're all telling the truth. Well, it's also, it's a binary question, which most people don't ever, like never read to their children or always read to their children, which is why like if you were doing this, if I really wanted to know the answer to this question, it would be a multi-part question, not just a do you or don't you, because... You would create like a whole Gantt chart. That would be a whole... This survey

is actually not bad um it's from harper collins uk and they say in 2012 55 of kids five to ten were reading for pleasure and now it's down to 32 and that's very believable i mean there's there are a lot more oh if it's the uk i totally believe it because the uk is terrible also the publisher wants you to buy more books and read your kids more fair enough fair enough i

I do think kids do read less than when we were growing up, but maybe I don't know. Damn it. Why are we doing this segment? Not where I grew up. Okay, because I like to sort of do a little bit of media criticism here on Slate Money because I have these sort of two, inside me are two wolves. Oh boy. And one wolf...

gets very, very annoyed at the discourse complaining about media bias and misinformation and disinformation and how you have to be very careful where you get your information and you have to look for primary sources and all of this kind of stuff because the media is untrustworthy. And I find that very annoying. And I think that the overwhelming majority of things you read in any media outlet is 100% true and you can just accept that.

And then also, I do think that media literacy is something that people should care about and think about and people should read stories with a certain degree of skepticism. And it's not...

because of the political leanings of the outlet. It's just because of like the way the journalism sausage is made that certain sort of takes wind up getting rewarded. And it's always like the fun counterintuitive take. If only there was a publication that was famous for counterintuitive takes, you could call it like, to coin a phrase, the slate pitch of

Where I'm going with this is like, you want to kind of reinforce the priors of your audience to some extent, but you also want to surprise them to some extent. So to say like, you know, Yale students aren't reading books anymore kind of does both. But the other story which we have, which I at least have read many, many times over the

is, oh my God, can you believe how many books TikTok is selling? And BookTok is this incredible force. And the youngs are reading more books than ever because suddenly everyone's talking about books on TikTok. And again, it has that kind of frisson of contrarianism to it. Like, oh my God, isn't this funny that this modern medium of TikTok is selling books? It's true that people...

kids read less now. There's more to fill your time with. Like I should have looked up the American Time Use Survey or something like that, but it's just hard to believe that people are reading books the same amount as they used to like 40 years ago before people had, or 10 years ago before people had so many more options.

Do you know what I mean? Although the rise in audiobooks is definitely an indication that people still want to consume the books. And if they can't find the time to sit down and open up a piece of paper, they will listen to it on their headphones. One thing The Guardian said is that it is true now that adults and older people read more than they used to. They're reading more. They're voracious readers. So there's something that happens as you get older. Maybe your life gets more boring. Who can say? That makes you...

read more, but when you're younger, you're not doing it. Well, I think that's probably part of it. But also there's a lot of this discussion kind of elides a point about American culture specifically, which is that I think we have a strain of anti-intellectualism that's just gotten worse over the last decade.

So people just aren't, you know, they're suspicious of higher ed. They're suspicious of the kind of people who read books a lot, you know? So I grew up in a community where people were not really encouraged to read. The books that people aren't reading isn't actually the Iliad. The vast majority of books read are pulpy, fun, enjoyable, lowbrow. That's always been true, though. Romantasy is having a massive hit right now. And...

No judgment. I mean, I'm all in favor of that. But like, if there was a decline in romanticist reading, that wouldn't be because of anti-intellectualism. In fact, there seems to be a big surge in romanticist reading. And I'm like, great. Yeah, that's not really what I'm talking about. I think there's always been a market for pulpy reads. And that's been the most of the book buying market historically, at least in modern times. Yeah.

But I think what is happening is just culturally, it's not maybe not where we are. You know, we have a bunch of overeducated, creative class professionals in a lot of our social circles. But I think in most of the country, it's not as big a value for people that you are well-read. In fact, in many cases, it's considered kind of pretentious. And I think that is an American cultural trend that's happening.

And books and book authors aren't sort of as big a part of the culture as they used to be. Like back in the day, like your Bret Easton Ellis's or whoever were like legit celebrity. You don't think Sally Rooney is bigger than Bret Easton Ellis? I think she is. No, absolutely not.

I really don't think so. How would we measure that? I don't think she's hanging out with A-list celebrities in LA and being fetid in very public ways. I think she could if she wanted to. I bet if we could do a survey and definitely more people would have heard of Brett than they would have heard of Sally. I will take the other side of that bet. Really? And we should try and work out a way of doing that. Like Harry Potter versus, what's the guy now, Rick Riordan, who does the Percy Jackson books. Like Harry Potter wins. Yeah.

always. Like everyone knows J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter. Harry Potter is a once in a century phenomenon. True, okay. But I just, I don't think books have the cultural resonance that they used to. And I think book people would agree. I think it's harder to make a literary superstar who has celebrity quality. Because Oprah retired the book club. I disagree, but I don't have any numbers. So I think talking of numbers, we will just segue into a numbers round. Music

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Emily is smiling because she has a good number. What is your good number, Emily? At first I thought I didn't have a number and I freaked out, but I wrote it down and it's 15. A pro tip to all podcasters out there, if you have a numbers round, try writing down your number before the podcast. That way you'll remember it. Yes. Well, you don't always do that.

No, then that's why I get myself into trouble. He always goes, this is behind the scenes. He'll be like, oh, hang on. And then he grabs his phone and he kind of looks through it and he's like, I've got it. I've got it. Anyways, my number is 15. 15%. That is the share of mainstream movies in this decade, the 2020s, that features some kind of artificial intelligence as a crucial story element.

I thought that was really fun analysis on one of my favorite substacks, Stat Significant, a writer named Daniel Paris. He looked through movies, mainstream movies, like going back to the 80s to see like, do we look at AI as a good thing or a bad thing in the movies? And guess what he found? It's always the baddie, right? It's pretty even.

It's always even? It's even. He counted positive AI as like the droids in Star Wars or the robots in WALL-E, stuff like that, like light fun entertainment. Those are all artificial intelligences, but they're super fun. They're not going to like destroy the world or anything. And sometimes the AI gains sentience and goes rogue and then rebels against their makers. Sometimes for evil. And that's Terminator. Yes. Or it's Hal.

right, from 2001. He's bad, but then there's Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he becomes good and he protects who's a what's a and like is a hero. So it kind of balances out the line sort of right in the middle. Terminator is definitely an AI is bad rather than AI is good. You need a machine to fight the AI.

Is there a correlation between whether the AI is good and whether it is adorable, like a sort of WALL-E kind of thesis? Yeah, you have to. If you're a good AI, you're going to be super, super adorable. Or like Scarlett Johansson. I haven't seen that movie, but I know her voice sounds really pretty.

I do think that if insofar as the AI is explicitly identified as the machine has gained consciousness and there is an artificial super intelligence and all of this kind of stuff, when that happens, it's always bad.

If you have a cute robot in Wall-E, no one ever says, well, look at this wonderful use case of artificial general intelligence. No, but it's right there for you. We could have Wall-E and we could have C-3PO or whatever, and it could be fine.

But the thing about C-3PO is it happens in the past. Oh, right. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Yeah. It's a long time ago. So they just haven't invented AI yet. Elizabeth.

My number is 25, and that's percent, or really it's a quarter in the story. It's like a little over a quarter. A little over a quarter of customers using buy now, pay later systems are now using them to buy groceries up from 14% a year ago.

This strikes me as one of those stealth recession indicators. It's like people are using debt to buy groceries more than they were a year ago. That seems bad. For the record, every single time I buy groceries, I use debt. And I think Emily is the same. Yes. Credit card.

Hats off to us. Okay. You know, I, I take your point. I mean, by now pay later systems specifically, I think. Which to be clear, and this, and I feel like this was actually spelled out pretty well in the story.

Every single instance that was described in that story of people using Buy Now, Pay Later was 0% interest, which is a lot better than the interest you pay if you carry a balance on your credit card at all. But Buy Now, Pay Later is so much less well-regulated than credit cards that you could imagine things going awry. It's true. We will have a whole conversation about this in some future episode of Slate Money. But for the time being, I'm just going to come up with two...

Two, which is the length of the prison sentence in years given to Tim Leissner. Emily, do you remember who Tim Leissner is? One MDB, Goldman Sachs guy. Was a boat involved?

Maybe. Maybe. There was this guy called Joe Lowe, who basically stole billions of dollars off the Malaysian people with the aid of Tim Leissner, who was the partner of Goldman Sachs. And finally now, many, many years ago, and Tim Leissner was this crazy sort of German, I think, Goldman Sachs partner who was briefly married to Kimora Lee Simmons. Yes, yes.

It's all coming back to me now. And he's been like, you know, arrested and free on bail and everything for years and years and years. He was finally convicted, got given a two-year sentence. And interestingly, he's the first senior banker to be criminally convicted of basically anything in forever. No one can remember the last time this happened. So...

It took an obviously illegal scandal and Goldman Sachs totally throwing him under the bus for that to happen. But hey, guess what? A bank was going to prison. Did they ever find Jolo? Nope. He's still in hiding. He's still out there? He's still out there. Everyone kind of assumes he's in China, but no one knows where or...

Yeah. Good book. Billion Dollar Whale, right? Yeah, yeah. Great, great book. But yes, I think that's basically our show for this week. Thanks, everyone, for listening, for emailing us on SlateMoneyAtSlate.com. Thanks to Shana Roth and Jessamyn Molley for producing. And we will be back next week with more Slate Money.

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