Say Goodbye to Hollywood
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We have a show all about the business and finance news of the week. It is going to talk about the reverse ferret from Donald Trump on things like tariffs and firing Jay Powell. Emily, what else are we going to talk about? We're going to talk about the end of Hollywood, Felix.

Is Hollywood ending? Is it over? The Hollywood ending. Find out. Coming up. We're going to find out. Elizabeth, what else are we going to talk about? The Ice Bucket Challenge, which is back. We're going to talk about why people are pouring ice water over their heads. Well, when I say people, I mean teens. But teens are people too. We have a Slate Plus segment about junk fees and the wonderful way in which they're going away. It's all coming up on Slate Money. Slate Money.

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Emily, welcome back. I hate to do this to you, but we took a week off without you and now we're going to be talking about Trump. And you're like, couldn't I have had another week off? Maybe four years. None of us get a week off. I think we should all just get a week off every time we talk about Trump. But yeah, we have to talk about Trump because it's kind of interesting how he is doing what Calvin McKenzie, the famous editor of The Sun in the UK, used to call a reverse ferret.

where he just, it's a little bit of a U-turn without admitting that it's a U-turn. All of these great policies that he announced with great fanfare, like we are putting 145% tariffs on China, or what was the other one that he reversed heritage on? He said he really couldn't terminate Jerome Powell fast enough. Exactly. Like after tweeting up a storm about how he couldn't terminate Jerome Powell fast enough, he then goes out and says,

I never said anything about terminating drone power. I'd never even thought about it. Yeah, and with the tariffs on China, he's like, oh, yeah, tariffs, 145, completely unsustainable. We have to bring them down. It's like, but they were your idea. Yeah.

I feel like a normal person who's not Trump would come up with an explanation that would be like, well, I didn't have this information at the time, or that's not what I really meant. And instead, he just gaslights people and says, I didn't say that, you know, right next to the tweet where he said that. Oceania has always been at war with East Asia. Yeah. Sort of the between the lines here, to use the Axios axiom, is the fact that the maximalist

shock and awe negotiating strategy of coming out and announcing something that is completely outside the bounds of reason, like 145% tariffs or firing the Fed chair. It doesn't work when people will like call your bluff. And I,

With the tariffs, it's just, yeah, the country doesn't work. Like we reported that there was a whole bunch of retailers just came in and saw Trump and said, look, there's going to be empty shelves. Like we need these imports from China.

And then Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, comes out and says, yeah, these are unsustainable. They need to come down. And suddenly, like, the Trump administration is negotiating with itself because then there's no one that they're talking to in China. They're like, we would like to talk to China. We would like to bring it down. We would like to negotiate. It's like the Chinese are just like, well, you're the ones who put the tariffs on. You're the ones who can take the tariffs off. There's nothing to negotiate. And so they're in this weirdly awkward situation.

much like with the Powell stuff. Like he tweets up a storm about firing Powell and the stock market plunges and the bond market plunges. And everyone's like, this is a major threat to Fed independence. And we really care about this and you can't do this. And then at

At some point, he realizes that all he's doing is sending the market down. And there's no upside to this, because even if he did fire Powell, that wouldn't have any effect on interest rates and it wouldn't help. And firing Powell means for Trump, and I don't want to give him too much credit for thinking like this, it means for Trump getting rid of a good scapegoat. So say his economic policies do trigger a recession like most people think is going to happen now.

If Powell is still running the Fed and he is slow to cut interest rates because inflation maybe is also high or blah, blah, blah, Trump has like a great foil to be like, this economy is bad because I have this Fed chair who I can't fire, who's not lowering rates for me. Like, no.

actually makes sense in a way from that perspective to keep him where he is. I don't know if you noticed this, but in his sort of stream of consciousness ramblings, Trump was like, oh yeah, Powell was recommended to me by someone who I'm not a big fan of anymore. Who was it? Turns out that was Steve Mnuchin, who was like the only person

who managed to survive all four years in Trump's cabinet. Now even Mnuchin is in Trump's black book. He's basically a friend of the Slate Money Pod for the number of times he's come up for praise over the past, I don't know, four or five years. We've talked about Steve a lot in the past.

We should get him on the pod. We should get him on the pod. We should do a money talks with Steve Mnuchin. I think that'd be excellent. Although I did see him interviewed in Doha and he chooses his words very carefully. And I feel like he wouldn't be really open and honest. I just would want him to talk about what he was thinking when he and his wife posed with the dollars. Yeah.

I think they were thinking, we're going to put this on our mantle and no one else will see it. And the Cruella de Vil gloves, it was amazing. Any handler seeing that all unfold before them and a picture about to be taken with the blonde wife with the black gloves. Would throw themselves in front of the cameras and be like, no! Stop! You look like villains! But no, that was one of my favorite parts of Trump 1.

So to get back on track, so Trump, like, so he's trying to sort of do the art of the retreat now, or like the time said, blink, blink again, he's backing down, blah, blah, blah. But like, once you head up the mountain with the big boulder and you throw the boulder over the side of the mountain and it's rolling down, can you just be like,

Never mind. How do you stop the boulder then? Like, he started something here. I don't know if he can finish it. I'm really into this metaphor, Emily, I have to say. He went up a mountain. This is like literally a Sisyphean president. The boulder's already crushed people. Yeah, it's crushed people. It's done damage. It's a good question because, yeah, it's doing damage. And even if he...

slashed all of the tariffs to zero tomorrow. A lot of damage has already been done and permanent damage has been done to, you know, the role of America as the center of the global trading system. He has proved that you can't trust America to do anything. Whatever's true today is probably going to be untrue tomorrow. And a 0% tariff on China were he to announce such a thing would last as long as...

you know, until his next conversation with Peter Navarro, which point it goes back up to 200% or something, right? So he has no credibility anymore in terms of being able to promise to do anything because he doesn't keep his promises. I mean, USMCA was a promise that he'd signed into law and he was very proud of and negotiated. And then he tore it up the minute he came back into power. So the idea of having

that he can come out and give other trading partners the certainty they need and other companies who want to import and export with the United States, the certainty they need in terms of coming up with strategic plans over the next

you know, a few years or whatever. He basically, there's nothing he can do to do that because no one trusts anything he says. Yeah, he also is uniquely bad on China. He doesn't understand the dynamics of the country. He thinks that economic policy in 1870 is somehow relevant. And he doesn't realize they have an incentive to just sit back and wait until he caves. You know, they can blame their economic problems on him. Yeah, their ability to withstand economic pain

is so much greater than his. Obviously, a trade war, you know, you can't win a trade war. Both sides lose. But Xi has been sort of voluntarily inflicting economic pain on the country for a couple of years now for various, like, internal political reasons. You know, and he also did that crazy COVID lockdown for a couple of years, which went on much longer than it needed to, you know, and caused a huge amount of economic pain.

He's fine with economic pain, frankly. He's sitting there in his Politburo running the country with complete power. And if there's a weak economy in China, there's a weak economy in China and he's not necessarily happy about it, but he can live with it. If there's a weak economy in the United States and there's a recession and there's a plunging stock market and there's a plunging bond market and the interest rates are going up and all of Trump's billionaire buddies are...

screaming at him, telling him to do something, he can't withstand that nearly as much. So he has to blink first. Yeah. I mean, as much as things may be changing, the United States is still not a dictatorship. The president is still somewhat sensitive to the people, even if the people are billionaires who are friends of

of the president or even, you know, polling numbers. And if literally store shelves are empty, that's not something that's going to sit great with Americans. Like, we couldn't even handle expensive eggs. Right. Like, if you go to Amazon and you can't get what you want in the next day because it's too expensive, like, people are going to freak out. Also, can I just say, Trump needed...

the CEO of Walmart and Target to tell him that 145% tariffs were going to lead to empty store shelves. Like, did no one in the administration, like, flag that as an issue? That's disturbing to me. I think that, like, the Musk-Besson axis probably did tell him that, but he's very good at not hearing what he doesn't want to hear. I get that.

I think it's also about how they tell him, you know, in the abstract, he sort of dismisses things. But the Walmart CEO telling him empty shelves, you know, that's a visual, that's a symbol that would be unignorable. He thinks a lot of this is just very academic. And it puts us at a particular disadvantage vis-a-vis China because...

Part of this is about just basic respect and use of diplomacy, which he doesn't consider a tool in his arsenal. There's a Biden commerce person, the wonderfully named Elizabeth Economy, who pointed out that part of this is China could easily reroute their trade flows. But also they've openly asked that the U.S. approach them with respect and a consideration for mutual interests. And Trump is just incapable of doing that. He thinks of everything as a zero-sum game.

We should mention another thing that Scott Besson said this week, which is germane to this whole conversation, that he was asked in a press conference, like, when are you going to deescalate? He was like, we have to deescalate. And the question was, do you expect this anytime soon? When are we talking about? Is it days? Is it weeks? When do you expect to talk with your

Chinese counterparts. And his answer was, we'll wait and see. And it's both a blessing and a curse that the strongest relationship is at the very top between President Xi and President Trump. And obviously any de-escalation talks would not begin at the very top. Basically what he's saying is the only relationship between the

government is like this weird relationship that she and Trump have. And like, there's no scaffolding lower down. And so there's no one to talk to. There's no one for Besson to talk to. There's no one for Navarro to talk to. There's someone for Greer to talk to. They're just not talking. And Trump is like, oh yeah, we're talking, but he's making it up because the Chinese are coming out and saying like, you know, we're not.

It's also Trump trying to impose the sort of what I guess Barry Ritholtz referred to as the sort of like one guy theory, one fucking guy changes all of this. And that's not historically how the U.S. or China works. But if everybody in the administration has convinced themselves that this is just really a matter of how Trump communicates with Xi directly and nobody else communicates.

really has a say in it. That's an insane position to be in for both countries. Really just, you know, Trump is out there begging China to make some kind of

optical concession, like, you know, give up TikTok or something. And then he'll be like, oh, I've won. This is the answer to the deal. And he'll slash the tariffs. But China's just laughing. China's like, nope, we're not going to give anything to anyone. We're just going to let you stew a bit longer. I've written over the years, like various, you know, career articles about negotiating a raise.

And like the key to negotiating a raise is understand your position with your employer. Are you expendable or not? Like, why would they give you a raise? Like, what do you know about their outside options? Is the job market good right now? Is it bad right now? How are you paid relative to who they could get from outside? How are you paid relative to your people? Like know as much information as you can before you go in and say, if you don't give me a raise, I'm walking. Because you don't want to get in there and say, if you don't give me a raise, I'm walking. And your boss goes,

I'm so sorry, there's nothing we can do for you. And the point is, most people know this. It's pretty basic. When the Trump administration says, this is the art of the deal, if you don't know this basic strategy of coming to the negotiation with as much information about your negotiating partner or opponent, you're not doing the art of the deal. You're an amateur and you're going to get

spanked. And that's what's happening. Also a refusal to understand, you know, Pareto efficiency. How are you getting to a point where both parties benefit as much as they can? It's kind of unbelievable. His entire understanding of negotiation is we have one toy and only one of us gets it. I want to ask though, because one of the interesting things about these reverse ferrets is that they have caused a significant rally in the markets.

We've had some, you know, healthy up days, certainly in stocks, even a little bit in bonds. And I guess my question for you, Emily, is like, is this just a head fake? Or do you think that there is actually a good reason why this kind of change of heart in the White House, even if it doesn't really change anything on the ground, merits a change?

re-rating of the value of the corporate America? I don't know. I cannot explain how the market is behaving and explain it and be 100% right. But I think coming into the Trump administration, there was a belief that the stock market was a restraint on the president's worst instincts and he would react if it goes down or up, like he would adjust policy. The Trump put. The Trump put. I think that

you know, Liberation Day and just everything that happened after that, everyone, there was a period where everyone said, oh, the Trump put is dead. And then we saw people saying, well, now the Trump put is just in the bond market. But I think there was a vibe and markets were ready and hoping that the Trump put would still be a thing. And like markets sort of revert to optimism a lot of the time. So I think they're just, every time he says something that maybe looks like

He's reversing himself. They're like, oh, exciting. Okay, we're back on. We're back on. You know which market hasn't really reversed?

is the dollar. The stocks went up, but the dollar didn't. The dollar is still down near its recent lows. Why do you think that is? Is there less demand for the dollar right now? I mean, tourism is down quite a bit. I don't think it's those kind of flows. I think it's portfolio flows more than real money flows. But I do think that there's at the very minimum what they call a buyer's strike.

which is basically that every week, every month, every year, institutional investors around the world, especially in Europe and Asia, would buy U.S. securities because, you know, they have to invest in something and the U.S. is important, so they would buy U.S. They have now stopped buying the U.S. So that inflow of foreign money into the U.S., which always historically supported the dollar, has stopped.

It is not clear whether there is actually an outflow, but anecdotally, it seems that maybe there is and they're actually selling their U.S. securities rather than just not buying them. But at the very least, that buyer strike would probably explain that one of the main things that had been supporting the dollar is just not there anymore. That's not a good sign. You should write about that, Felix. Maybe I will.

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I will. Yes, Felix, there was a wonderful story in the New York Times about how Hollywood is not a thing anymore. Or as our wonderful producer Jessamyn said in her notes for us, say goodbye to Hollywood, quoting the amazing Billy Joel song. And now I hope it's the earworm that I've just given to our listeners. You can take the Emily Peck out of Long Island, but you can't take the Long Island out of Emily Peck. Never, never.

So anyway, over the past 10 years, film and television production in Los Angeles has fallen by more than a third. It's a lot cheaper now to make your film, to make your TV show, to make your reality TV show, not in Los Angeles. A lot of production is going to Europe, other states that are offering big tax deals and tax incentives.

And workers in Hollywood that are below the line, like camera workers, production workers, the less glamorous but typically unionized roles that pay very well, those people aren't getting work like they used to. And it's to the point where there's a movie called San Andreas, which I believe starred The Rock. Do you know who The Rock is, Felix? Yeah.

I do. Excellent. There was a great Casey Weaver profile of him and everyone thought he was going to run for president. Yes. And he even had a TV show where he's like running for president. And anyway, yeah. San Andreas starring The Rock was about an earth.

in California, but where was it filmed? Mostly in Australia. That's the way it goes now. You can't, it's really hard to get things made. I like the anecdote that there's some game show on the telly where they fly 100 American contestants to do this quiz to Dublin to film it because it's cheaper to fly 100 Americans to Dublin than it is to film it in LA. Yeah, not great. That's the show Rob Lowe is on. The Floor.

The floor. But, um, but yeah, so this strikes me as something quite obvious, which is that if you're providing us a service and your price for that service is literally multiples more than the price that someone else is willing to do the same service for, then people will go and ask that someone else to do it rather than you. Basically what they were saying was that like a

A team of seven grips, if you go shoot a movie in Hungary or somewhere in Central Europe, costs the same as one grip in California. And you're like, okay, I mean, this is definitely skilled work, but this is skilled work that exists in a lot of different countries. A lot of different countries have been doing this for a lot of time. This is not the kind of work where you need skills.

the Californians to do it. Talent is evenly distributed around the world. So if you want to find talented people, you can find them anywhere. And why not pick cheaper people? Like, you know, there's always a budget constraint. So what, like, what did they expect these unions when they were ratcheting up their rates to $50,000 for seven weeks? It like, obviously if you're, you can force people to pay that much, if they hire you, that's fine.

But the flip side of that is that if there's a whole bunch of people somewhere else on the planet who are willing to do exactly the same job for a lot less money, they're going to get the work instead. Well, also, there are other places that have far better tax exemptions programs than California does. I really don't buy the tax thing. Like there was a long standing sort of weird war where every so often, you know, Toronto or

Prague or someone will be like, we're going to give tax incentives to get filming in our country. And it works for a while. And then, you know, eventually it stops. But like, ultimately, it's the wages, you know, it is not the tax code. I thought an interesting thing in the Times piece, which I hadn't really thought about very much is that one reason the wages are lower in these other places, Hungary, Ireland, wherever is because people in those countries get health benefits,

through the government so they don't have to make as much money in salary. Their employers aren't paying their health insurance costs, which I thought was interesting. Also, what's happening in Hollywood is what I think, again, in the piece someone mentioned, you know, Hollywood is becoming like Detroit. Like, you don't need to make cars in Detroit anymore. It's cheaper to make them anywhere else.

And now it's cheaper to make movies anywhere else. And it's not like the Trump administration is going to tariff this one to the rescue. Like that's not even on the table. It's not even possible. You can't tariff Hungarian filmmaking. No. You can't tariff services, right? Or can you? No.

No, you really can't. And service is a bigger part of our economy. So, I mean, I wonder if what's happening in Hollywood will happen in other services. I mean, I guess it already... I'm just... We should be clear that Hollywood is still... Like the West Coast of the United States in general, which would include Netflix, but...

Hollywood in particular in Los Angeles is still the absolute 800 pound gorilla of the entertainment industry. Like all of the companies are there, all of the executives there, all of the money is there. What we're talking about is the nitty gritty, like hands-on work of physically making these shows and these movies, but the industry and the companies are still very much LA based.

It's very like just hollowing out of the middle class, it seems like, of Hollywood. Like these good jobs or good paying roles are no longer as abundant or available. I also wonder if some of it's correction to you because the budgets are all smaller in part because of the streaming wars, which streaming services created a lot of jobs initially. And some of it may just be correction. One of the interesting things that was in the story was all of these people

large capital investments from people like Netflix is spending over a billion dollars building sound stages in Mexico. You know, it's like you can build these things wherever you like. You do not need to build them in industry city in LA anymore, century city or wherever they, you know, like you can build your studio lot anywhere on the planet and they will.

I think something is lost, though, like when you're filming San Andreas, which I haven't seen, in Australia and not California, or you're filming a movie that's supposed to be taking place in LA or New York and you're filming it in Toronto. Like,

It's not as good. Like the art isn't as good when you're like faking the location. Like it's fun to watch old movies that take place in a city, you know, and be like, oh, I know where they are. Like it's just more interesting and fun. I spent a fair amount of time like going on walks around the San Andreas Fault in Northern California. And it's kind of boring and it looks much like anywhere else, to be honest. Fair enough. Yeah. If you want a shot of San Francisco, you can send a drone up and get your San Francisco shot. But everything else. Yeah. Just.

It's all CGI these days anyway. It's fun to see, like, what's the movie, Chinatown, or just some of these old movies shot in the actual place they're supposed to be. Like, that's nice. That's impressive. That's more artistic than I think what's happening now. I'm still going to come out and say that more movies and TV shows are set in L.A. than in any other city. Fair enough. L.A. is always going to be a natural location for all of these things. And it's not like the work has gone to zero. It's just...

It's gone down. So does this matter? I feel like you're poo-pooing. You don't think it matters. Okay, so that was the thing that kind of irked me a little bit about the New York Times piece was that there was this constant implication that like this is bad and something must be done. And please, Gavin Newsom, can you come in and like find a whole bunch of like California state budget to throw at the benighted film industry workers? And you're like, is it bad?

Is it really? They say thousands of middle class workers are like, they're not able to get work. Like, that's bad, right? But by the same token, there are even more thousands of middle class workers in Ireland and Hungary who are getting work, right? Right. But this is all about your lack of nationalism. I'm a bad nationalist. You're not an America firster. It's bad for the US and California, not Ireland. Yeah, exactly. Depends on your perspective.

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Hi, I'm Megan, and I've got a new podcast I think you're going to love. It's called Confessions of a Female Founder, a show where I chat with female entrepreneurs and friends about the sleepless nights, the lessons learned, and the laser focus that got them to where they are today. And through it all, I'm building a business of my own and getting all sorts of practical advice along the way that I'm so excited to share with you. Confessions of a Female Founder is out now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

What's next? Ice Bucket Returns. Oh, Ice Bucket Returns. Can I just say, in preparing to talk about the Ice Bucket Challenge returning, we had to read a bunch of articles. And the last one we had to read was a Slate article from 2014. And I was reading it in a Google Doc, so I didn't see who wrote it. So I read the whole article, and I was like, wow, this is really smart. I'm going to make a note of some of these points so I can bring them up in our conversation. I wonder who wrote this. And I clicked on it, and guess who wrote it? Our leader, our leader.

Our host, Felix Salmon. It was true. Just before I joined Axios, I spent a few months writing hot takes to slate.com. It was fun. I had a similar reaction where I didn't notice the byline until the end, but there was a thing in it that I quibbled with. That's when I looked at the byline. Elizabeth was like, this is definitely Felix because I need to quibble with this one.

We are talking about an article from 2014 that Felix wrote. Yeah, why are we talking about a 10-year-old article, Emily? Because the Ice Bucket Challenge is so back. A 21-year-old student at the University of South Carolina inspired by the original Ice Bucket Challenge.

Started it up again, but this time to raise awareness for mental health because he has a group on campus called Mind or Mental Illness Needs Discussion. And he did the Ice Bucket Challenge and it really has taken off. I did some reporting on this, by which I mean I spoke to my teenage daughter and she said everyone in the school is doing it, everyone in her middle school. So it's fully back.

There's always two parallel goals to this kind of thing. We want to raise money for X. And there's also, we want to raise awareness of X. And it is 100% true that a lot more people know about ALS as a disease now post Ice Bucket Challenge than knew about it before. Not a lot of people have it. And so now a lot of people are aware that it's a thing that exists.

Why it's important for a lot of people to be aware that it's a thing that exists is, I have to admit, kind of defeats me. Oh, I think it's really important. I've thought about this a lot. Oh, okay. Marketing is important, really important. And I think that's under-realized in all walks of life. It's like probably why the Biden administration failed so much. It's like you have to sell your cause and

And it's only to the, well, I don't know if it's only, but it's primarily to the good if there's more awareness of a certain disease for the people who have that disease. So, you know, someone you know has ALS and they tell you and they don't have to spend the next hour

telling you what it is, you already know. You have some awareness of it that's actually important on a micro level. And then on a macro level, if people are more aware of a disease or a problem, I don't know, I haven't seen research, but I think that more scientists, researchers, companies might get interested in developing cures and solutions. I just think raising awareness actually

can be important. It's not like the be all end all. And I think that's very obvious with this mental health challenge, which we can talk about mental health, raising mental health awareness. Like I think that becomes really obvious because like raising awareness of what now and anyways, but I think it is important to raise awareness. Also, it drives policy responses in a lot of cases, maybe not for this administration, but previously if a disease or condition is suddenly on the public radar, that does help

with coalition building around healthcare issues and specific issues, you know, in particular. So I think that this concept of coalition building is an important one. And it's actually weirdly the reason why

I'm deeply skeptical of single-seed charities because they invariably seem to be incredibly bad at that crucial thing, which is coalition building. If what you really care about is doing research into ALS, and actually one of the interesting charts that you can see from the ALS report talking about how their money wasn't wasted, is that the NIH funding into ALS dwarfs

the ALS Foundation's funding, but it was so funny the way they would do it. They're like, we support these various doctors and the NIH supports a whole bunch of people. And guess what? There's an overlap. And the doctors that we support are also supported by the NIH. And so that's like a leverage

But that's the wrong way around. They were not coordinating what they were doing with the NIH. They weren't going along to the NIH and saying, what is your big strategy for ALS? And how can we fill the gaps that you're not funding? They weren't saying, what is the coordinated thing that we're all pulling together in the same direction and trying to look at the various different things? For instance, in Alzheimer's, there's this whole story about how everyone was chasing this one goal.

technique of trying to cure Alzheimer's and it didn't work. And then that meant that all of the other promising techniques wound up getting completely unfunded. Like it would make sense to have, you know, an Alzheimer's foundation or something like look holistically at the whole space and say like, where can we do the most good in like, maybe not the most likely outcome of success, but instead just like maybe something that no one else is funding.

That coordination function just doesn't seem to happen in almost any disease. I think that really depends on, you know, the organization. I know even with the ALS example, they were coordinating with the NIH because the more money they raised, the more they were eligible for matching grants. You know, they have a huge incentive to do that. That's not coordination.

Well, maybe I misunderstood. What do you mean by coordination then? What I mean by coordination is signing on and helping to develop holistic strategy

for researching a disease and then like playing your part in that bigger strategy rather than just making all of your own decisions unilaterally. I think that does happen though. Like I, you know, I've been a little bit involved with some cancer research organizations and they do that. Like a lot of them do do that. Maybe, you know, the smaller the organization, they're less likely to, but... The breast cancer foundations are notorious for like not cooperating with each other and not talking to each other and being like...

you know, incredibly bad at this. Breast cancer is a good example of where awareness really matters because the screening, it's important to get screened and the more people are aware of that, the better. Oh, I wrote a slate piece about why that's fallacious as well, but yeah. Oh, I don't even want to know. Let's not talk about it.

I want to talk about mental health awareness, which is what is the ostensible purpose here. Yeah. My interview with the 14-year-old daughter of mine, I was like, do you know why people are pouring the ice over their heads? And my daughter was like, of course I know, but I don't think everyone knows. So the awareness thing is failing. Also, she said, some people think

it's to do with ALS. There's like a confusion, like this is either mental health or ALS. There's a whole bunch of like ALS stans who are like, you, how dare you do an ice bucket for anything other than ALS? And everyone's like, what? I think that's a good point. You stole our arbitrary symbol. No. Someone said it's like slapping a pink ribbon on an animal rights poster. And I think that's not a bad point. It's a good metaphor. Yes. But,

But I still don't quite buy this awareness thing. So now... What? I think I made a good case. My friends in Alaska have poured ice water over their heads and they...

are doing it something, something mental health awareness, something. And I am now aware that they are wet and I am aware that mental health is a thing. Right. What like, I still don't quite understand what I'm supposed to be aware of or how that's been to make a difference. I don't think it is good. Just to finish up with what my daughter said, she was like, everyone in my generation is aware of, of mental illness, like very aware of it.

very, very, really aware. They all have anxiety. To the point where they're all like self-diagnosing their mental illnesses, you know, and like the surveys that happen where they ask teens, like, are you depressed? The teens are like, yes, because they're aware. So with mental health, it's not an awareness issue. And at the same time, like maybe this guy raises a little bit of money. The Trump administration is like fast pulling awareness

funding for mental health services to the nation's very poor, as are states and cities as well. So there is a need- But Emily, we don't need money for mental health hotlines so long as we all just have awareness. If we're aware. And honestly-

We know cold plunges are very helpful, right, for your self-care. There are a couple of other funny dynamics here. One is that we're a thriving creator economy where people like to do stunts and put them on their TikToks and Instagrams without necessarily really understanding the origins of the stunt. But also with this one in particular, you're supposed to tag people.

So in some cases, it becomes like a little bit of a popularity contest where people want to get tagged so that they're part of this conversation, even if they don't really understand what's underneath it. So I think our listeners should all tag Felix in the new Ice Bucket Challenge. So by the way, apparently the big difference between this Ice Bucket Challenge and the 2014 Ice Bucket Challenge is that the 2014 one was mostly a

Twitter and Facebook thing whereas this one is mostly an Instagram stories thing yes and apparently I know this because it was forwarded to me by email someone like tagged me in their Instagram story and so then I opened up Instagram and I found the story and then I looked at it and it was wet but if

If I hadn't had like a friendly person sending me the email, I would never have known that. And the thing about the Instagram stories is they disappear. And so if you don't open up Instagram and check your red dots or whatever every day, you can get tagged a whole bunch of times and never know it.

But the kids do open up their Instagram and check multiple times an hour. So you're not the demo. Yeah, I feel like I'm just not the person to tag because I'm not Instagram fluent enough. I thought there was another bright side element to this story, which is, you know, the internet has changed a lot since 2014 when this first went viral, mostly for the bad. I feel like we could probably say. I would agree. Yes. And in 2014, when this went viral on Facebook, it was like,

It was kind of like joyful. It was just so nice. Everyone's coming together and raising awareness for this disease and positive, blah, blah, blah. And like, apparently that still happens. So not all of that innocent time is gone in a way. Can we say? Although, like, can we just compare the $100 million that was raised for ALS to the $300,000 that has been raised for the mental health charity? You're like, yeah, it's not really even the same. Not the same. Well, there are no brands doing this one. Yeah, where are the brands?

Yeah, I don't know. Maybe they are. Maybe the brands are on Instagram stories and we're just not online enough to know it. Also, apparently in 2014, Donald Trump did do the challenge, whereas Barack Obama did not. Maybe that's what got us to this place. I refuse to think about that. And instead, I'm going to have a numbers round.

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Elizabeth, what's your number? My number is 14. And that is the number of bananas Google AI told me that I needed to eat every day. Which I think is true. I am 100% down with like, everyone should tell Elizabeth that she needs to eat 14 bananas a day. If enough of us try and reinforce this, she might start believing it. You first.

This happened because I was looking for how much potassium was in a banana and it said 7% of daily value. And it said, therefore, you should eat a minimum of 14 bananas a day. That's math. You can't argue with math a little bit. Well, there's also math around glucose levels that 14 bananas would be very bad for.

I was thinking about this because there's a great story in Wired about how Google AI really doesn't understand idioms, but because it's trained to confidently pretend that it does understand everything, or at least to generate an explanation for stuff. People were feeding things into the AI like, what does never throw a poodle at a pig mean? And the AI would confidently assert that it was a biblical proverb. Another great one was, you can't lick a badger twice.

And so it's not quite hallucinating, but the AI is sort of programmed to assume that it's not a trick question. So it will come up with an explanation. You know, it's a kind of hallucination, I guess. That would be great.

It reminds me of like a certain kind of confident person who any question you ask them, they always have like the explanation. Like my father was like this. He was a professor and anything I could ask him or be like, you know, why is this the way it is? The scientific thing? He'd be like, well, blah, blah, blah. And have some explanation. I don't know if it was right. You know, those people that always, they always know. There's some people who just, I don't know is not their vocabulary. For reasons that are lost to the mists of time. I,

was asking chat GPT this week about quotes from the greatest movie of all time with nail and I, which I can more or less quote the entire movie off the top of my head. So I didn't really need to do this, but I decided I wanted to. And I was like, tell me about quotes from with now. And I, and it created this piece of dialogue from with nail and I, which I need to share with you all with nail says,

Look at my tongue. It's wearing a yellow sock. Sit down for Christ's sake. What's in your toolbox? To which Danny, the drug dealer replies, this is a very well-designed bag. I use it to carry around my necessities. This is a multicolored coat, one of a kind, made by a guy called Irish Tony, contains over a hundred pockets for playing the game.

This is like completely hallucinated. And I have no idea where it came from. That's incredible. It's like, is chat GPT stoned? This is the future of the economy. Like,

We have the education secretary saying we must teach this to the children. Like, really? Why would anyone want to watch with Nell and I when they can just retouch LGBT hallucinations instead? Wow. All right. Emily, what's your number? My number is 182 days, which is how long it took the conclave to elect Benedict XIV in 1740, one of the longer conclaves.

to take place. And I'm interested in this because Pope Francis died. And then I, along with millions of others, then watched the movie Conclave. So now I think I understand all of this. The documentary. Yeah. Yeah. Basically a documentary. But since 1900.

I'm just going to roll with this because I got really into it like a few hours ago and I feel the need to. Since 1900, the average conclave, that's when they lock all these dudes in a room and they say you can't- Cardinals. I mean cardinals. Whatever. Cardinals in red. They wear red, which now I've only just put that together. The cardinals are red and they wear red. They lock them in a room and they say you can't come out until you elect a new pope. But apparently back in the beginning, like in the 1200s-

They literally were like, we are locking you up and we are going to starve you out until you pick a pope. Like they would only give the cardinals like bread and water because one of the conclaves back in the 1200s took like the longest ever two years and nine months to pick one, you know? So after that, they're like, we're locking you up.

Giving the bread and water, like we're going to starve you out. You just make a decision, you guys. So since 1900, maybe the food's gotten better. I don't know what's changed, but things have gotten faster. So I don't think it's going to take 182 days to pick Pope Francis' replacement. But you know what? They ban phones, so they can't use ChatGPT to help them. No.

So that's another reason they want to get the hell out of there so they could like check their Instagram stories and make sure like see if they're like getting challenged. They have no attention span like all of us. So they don't have the patience to sit around for two years. I would be very cross if I had like a thousand day wordle streak and then suddenly I was dragged into a conclave and I had to break that just to elect the new leader of the

christian faith can i just say one more thing in medieval times one of the conclaves they sat them in a place with no roof so like it would just rain on them whatever like they just made it miserable i think they should do that in elections to americans here's a management hack if your people are being indecisive put them in a room with no roof and rain on them yeah um

I'm just going to move on before this goes completely off the rails. My number is 23, which is per the FTC, the number of screens that Uber One subscribers need to navigate through if they want to cancel Uber One. Oh.

You need to go through as many as 23 screens and take as many as 32 actions before they will finally let you cancel your Uber One account.

Unbelievable. So FTC is like, come on, people. So no one's ever canceled an Uber One account is what I'm hearing. I also have an Uber One account that I don't remember signing up for. I feel like I was victimized by some dark pattern. This is also in the FTC complaint. There's a whole bunch of people with Uber One accounts who cannot remember signing up for it. And then they're like, at some point they discover that they have one and they're like, why do I have this? And try and cancel. But then after 22 screens, they just give up.

Yep. That sounds right. What is Uber one even? Yeah. Elizabeth, what is it? What is it? I don't actually know. I presumably it's one of those, like here's a 0.005% rebate for every $200 you spend. You know, it's, it's,

If there's some benefit to it, I don't think I'm seeing it anywhere in the app. I have a Lyft Pink account, but I only do that because it's the same price as a City Bike membership and it gives you all the same benefits as a City Bike membership. And then per Elizabeth, it gives you about five cents off if you use a Lyft. Oh, wow. Wait, Lyft does bikes? Lyft does bikes. It has, yeah, the City Bike and in like San Francisco and in Miami and a bunch of different cities, they have bike shows.

Anyway, I think that is probably enough for this week. We do have a Slate Plus segment on junk fees, which I guess rhymes with the whole Uber One thing. But other than that, thanks for listening to Slate Money. Thanks to Jessamyn Mollie and Shana Roth and Merit Jacob for producing. And we'll be with you with even more Slate Money next week. I'm Leon Nafok, and I'm the host of Slow Burn Watergate. Before I started working on this show,

Everything I knew about Watergate came from the movie All the President's Men. Do you remember how it ends? Woodward and Bernstein are sitting with their typewriters, clacking away. And then there's this rapid montage of newspaper stories. About campaign aides and White House officials getting convicted of crimes. About audio tapes coming out that prove Nixon's involvement in the cover-up. The last story we see is Nixon resigns. It takes a little over a minute in the movie. In real life, it took about two years.

Five men were arrested early Saturday while trying to install eavesdropping equipment. It's known as the Watergate incident. What was it like to experience those two years in real time? What were people thinking and feeling as the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters went from a weird little caper to a constitutional crisis that brought down the president? The downfall of Richard Nixon was stranger, wilder, and more exciting than you can imagine. Over the course of eight episodes, this show is going to capture what it was like to live through the greatest political scandal of the 20th century.

With today's headlines once again full of corruption, collusion, and dirty tricks, it's time for another look at the gate that started it all. Subscribe to Slow Burn now, wherever you get your podcasts.