The Business of Lively vs Baldoni
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- Hello, and welcome to the first Slate Money episode of 2025. This is your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I am Felix Salmon of Axios with Elizabeth Spires, who has been writing in the New York Times about celebrity gossip. - Hello.

with Emily Peck, my friend and colleague at Axios. Hello, hello. We are going to be talking about celebrity gossip on Slate Money. We will explain the whole Slate Money angle to you, and you will be convinced. We are going to talk about net neutrality, RIP.

We are going to talk about the decline of drinking alcohol. We also have a Slate Plus segment about the rise of drinking coffee, where Emily will reveal her embarrassing predilection when it comes to coffee. This is slander. I'm going to file a lawsuit right away to make my case. I'll see you in court, Emily. But in the meantime, I'll see you on the rest of this podcast, which is coming up on Slate Money.

Thank you.

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Okay, so Emily...

I need to ask you a question. Okay. Why is a business podcast called Slate Money devoted to the business and finance news of the week talking about celebrity gossip? Because it's not just celebrity gossip, Felix. It is an event.

volley of lawsuits between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, two entertainers, actors, and media elites, business people. And this is a story about Hollywood, the entertainment industry. It's a story about public relations, how the media works in 2024. It's not

just a gossip story. If you think that this news about Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni and the hit movie, It Ends With Us, is merely a bit of fluffy celebrity gossip, then you are thinking about it all wrong. And that's why we are here to talk about it on Slate Money. So my angle, which appeared on Axios.com, is that this is symptomatic of a much bigger phenomenon

That is the way in which people wanting to make public accusations are doing it through lawsuits. They're not really filing lawsuits for the purpose of, I want a judge to, or jury to, you know, find the verdicts and deliver a judgment so much as this is a PR move in a way of making accusations in public.

And we've seen this in the Sean Combs case. We've seen this in the Leon Black case. We've seen this kind of sort of with Bill Ackman versus Business Insider and in multiple entertainment examples. Emily, you had a couple as well. And it's really interesting to me the way in which the internet has done this, because when you file a lawsuit within minutes, right?

That lawsuit, the full PDF is available on Twitter for people to download. And it's basically a publication and it goes into enormous amounts of detail and no one's, oh, you know, that's too long. I didn't bother reading that whole thing. You know, this is very boring. You're a crap reporter. You know, they're like, oh, wow, this is lots of juicy salacious stuff. And it's a great way of disintermediating the media or allowing the media to write about things that maybe they might otherwise be a little bit

cherry of writing about and also just going straight to the public with something that looks very official and true because people generally there's something truthy about that format you know what I mean well let's just back up and just can we be clear and at least explain a little bit more about why we're talking about this sure

So over the holiday break, news dropped that the actress Blake Lively filed a complaint in California against the actor Justin Baldoni and his production company, I believe, basically accusing them of retaliation. She says she was sexually harassed on the set of the movie. And then she got Justin Baldoni and his producing partner to agree to sort of a list of demands, you know, that they...

CLDR don't sexually harass her on the set of the movie anymore. And then in retaliation for that and out of fear that she would come forward and talk about

They waged this public relations campaign against her that damaged her reputation. So once she filed that complaint, the New York Times published a report on it from Megan Toohey, who's one of the iconic Me Too reporters, Pulitzer winners, who reported on Harvey Weinstein. It made a huge splash.

And then since then, there's been more lawsuits. Justin Baldoni filed his own lawsuit. Blake Lively, who had just initially filed a complaint, filed her own lawsuit. So it's all been volleyed back and forth and covered in the press. And that is why we're talking about it. I just wanted to get that out there. Also, you know, just to complicate things further, there was also a lawsuit, you know, a sort of

intra PR company lawsuit between the woman who ran the PR company and the former employee who was going to leave the PR company who was working with Jason Baldoni. The whole thing is very messy and we don't need to sort of litigate it. But the big picture in terms of what everyone seems to want here is a good reputation. And Blake Lively in the wake of the press campaign for the movie,

had a bad reputation for reasons that may or may not have been justified. When the New York Times article came out, that served to largely turn around her education. It was like a very successful PR move, whatever its merits on the sort of jurisprudential front. Then Justin Baldoni suffered a reputational hit from that article. And so then he filed his own lawsuit against

which was ostensibly a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, which he has no chance of winning, but really, again, is a way of salvaging or an attempt to salvage his reputation, and so on and so forth. And what we're seeing here is an exercise in reputation management being waged through the courts. And I feel on some level, that this is a kind of

waste of time for the courts. The courts, it's kind of not a great look for courts to be dragged into what is really a reputation management thing, but that seems to be where we are. I would push back a little bit on that because I think there are aspects of this that absolutely fit the definition of what you're talking about. I don't think though that Lively's original complaint or her subsequent lawsuit were solely a PR move, but I do think that Baldoni's response was because one of the things about his complaint was

is that what he contests is the retaliation aspect of the lawsuit. And he didn't even push back on the Times on the sexual harassment stuff. And I think it does benefit him if he can make the conversation about retaliation and not the sexual harassment charges. Because in some ways, I think people view the retaliation through public

mechanisms is just part of how Hollywood works. And actually, Elizabeth, you wrote a column about this in the New York Times where you're like, look, I used to work for Gawker. I used to work for New York Post. I know how the PR industry works. None of this comes as a surprise to me. But I guess my question for you is, as someone who knows how the PR industry works and has seen the sort of seedy underbelly thereof, how much of what you saw

emanating from the dark recesses of the PR world, would you consider to be actually illegal? I mean, almost none. There's a difference between unsavory and illegal. So most of the stuff that I was on the receiving end of from sources was not through legal mechanisms. It was largely just working sources the way that you do on any beat. Part of the reason why I don't believe that

Lively's lawsuit was just PR is just that's a wildly expensive and inefficient way to get her point of view out there. I feel like it's very efficient. I feel like there's nothing she could have done that would have had the impact that this had. This was really like a nuclear bomb going off in the PR world. I think in terms of efficiency, it was very efficient in terms of expense.

Yeah. You know, if you hire Wilkie Farr, that's going to cost you a lot of money. But then again, you know, she's rich. Also, I feel like she got her story out so efficiently in that lawsuit in a way that would have been so much harder and less believable.

Blake Lively and her people just approached Megan Tuohy at the New York Times and said, we have a story about Justin Baldoni and how he behaved on set and we want to talk to you about it. And they said, okay. And they do a big interview with her. Then they have to go and fact check that and call like 30 sources to confirm what Blake Lively was telling them. That's very hard. If she puts it all in a public

court filing, then the New York Times or any reporter can go read the filing and write about it. And it takes, it's a day's work, you know, it's nothing. And so if she does that filing, that's so much more of an efficient way. Like just what Felix's piece said, rather than send out a press release or write something on Medium or whatever, it's just so much more a trusted source for it to be covered.

And there's something else here as well, which is that if she talked to the New York Times, then she would have had to talk to the New York Times. In the end, in the New York Times article, there was one incredibly bland quote from her basically saying, I just want to stand up for all of the women or something like that, you know, and she has never gone to this day gone on the record saying anything mean about Justin Baldoni.

That's true, but we don't know what she said off the record. So I would just be hesitant to accept that. One thing I thought was interesting, and I'm curious...

Someone was saying on CNBC of all places this morning that this is all novel because in the past, like a feud like this would have just all happened kind of behind the scenes, whispering, you know, back channeling to reporters, but there wouldn't have been back and forth lawsuits and all this like coming out into the open kind of a thing. And that this is like the new way Hollywood works or the entertainment industry works. We're in some like new era or something. I think part of what's going on here is the,

social media ization of all of this and a huge chunk of lively suit is all about you know the astroturfing attempt to feed twitter and other social networks with pejorative sentiments towards lively and by its nature those

efforts take place in public you know that's what they are their ways of putting tweets out all over the place in a sort of way that is less traceable than most but yeah you can't a lot of the dark arts of PR that used to be very hidden and it used to be just the kind of thing that people like Elizabeth used to know about and now perforce much more public than they used to be well

Well, I think there's another aspect too that Eric's mentioning, which is that now because of social and the things that you're talking about, it's more difficult for PR people to actually control the narrative. So in Baldoni's lawsuit, he points out some examples of his PR people saying, oh, we didn't plant that one. Or here's a place where we said something nice about Blake Lively. But both of those things can be true. It can be true that they did a smear campaign and that not all of what you saw was their work. Because at some point,

Social is such a big part of the way people learn about these things that you can have an actual story or an item that kind of mutates through the social ecosystem and it takes on a life of its own. So if you had one or two bad stories about Blake Lively,

They can easily mutate into several or actual fans or people who don't like her digging up stuff. You're setting a vibe and you're setting a narrative. And then organically, things are growing within the narrative. You know, you're planting a few seeds and then the seeds kind of mutate and then you have a garden. And you can't entirely control it. Certainly, like, you know, if we think about the way reporting worked pre-internet, you know, PR people had a much more

aggressive role in how those stories got made. And now it's sort of like they can sort of work with the system and understand how these things spread online, how people consume media, but they can't control everything that gets out. You know, that sort of muddies the waters a little bit in terms of the retaliation claims or what we understand to be true. One thing I've been thinking about a bit is the way in which Hollywood as an industry is

Reliant on people, the raw general public feeling that certain individual actors have like a good reputation as like being good people in a way that is not.

necessarily you don't really see that in other parts of you know the arts it's not you know the most successful film directors authors composers whatever are like out there with reputations that they really need to protect and work on you know it's just like people judge them by their work whereas

So much marketing for movies is like actors going on talk shows and trying to be perceived as being like a fun, likable, good person. This whole question of like your public reputation becomes core not only to your own earning power, but also to the earning power of Hollywood as an industry.

Yeah, I read about that a little bit in the column because my theory is that people develop parasocial relationships with actors in a way that they don't other types of artists. I

And partly because they see them, you know, act out these narratives in movies and in TV that they feel an emotional connection to. And you have some people like, you know, Ryan Reynolds is a good example where they tend to play a type of role regularly. And, you know, the range of what they do is very specific and maybe narrow. And so people make these assumptions that the roles they're playing say something about them or that, you know, they're a little bit like that in real life. So

So people think they know the celebrities in a way that they just wouldn't think about it that way with a director or an author or somebody like that. That said, I mean, it's not totally correct that reputation management isn't also important for other kinds of artists and celebrities and famous people. I mean, you can't just do anything you want if you're not an actor. Well, no, like you can't do anything you want. You can't go off and be like an absolutely terrible person.

And if you wind up getting canceled as an author or something like, you know, then that will redound negatively. And, you know, if you're JK Rowling and you start going off on Twitter about trans rights, people are going to come at you, you know, but.

You need to be quite extreme for it to hit that level of public reputation. Whereas I think if you're like a movie star, you have a public reputation pretty much whether you like it or not. And even if it's not extreme. Yeah. People need to feel like they like you. I was just listening to someone talk about Timothee Chalamet because he stars in this new Bob Dylan movie. And I guess the Bob Dylan in the movie is very unlikable. So...

He's been doing this like huge press tour behind the movie where he's making his best effort to be the most likable actor in the world. Like he did like Game Day, which is some like, I don't know, college football show. Yeah, he was talking about American football. He turned up to Washington Square Park in a Timothee Chalamet lookalike contest. Just to make sure, like, yes, I'm playing Bob Dylan and he might be unlikable, but I, Timothee Chalamet, am quite likable and relatable. I like football. I go on podcasts hosted by men. Yeah.

Yeah, I show up at my own lookalike contest. Yeah, it's really important to be a good steward of your reputation. Being conflated with the characters you play is sort of a double-edged sword. Do you remember the kid that played King Joffrey in Game of Thrones? It was such a nasty character that he ended up dropping out of acting because people were just being mean to him in real life. Because they thought he was like the character. It's acting people. Yeah.

Guys, let's just remember that what happens in movies is not real life. Wait, but the last thing I was going to raise was despite all this, like there was all this drama when the movie first came out because Baldoni and Lively wouldn't show up at events together. And people are like, why is it? What happened? And there are all these back and forth stories as laid out in all the court filings.

But the movie did really well, like 400 million or something at the box office. And is it a coincidence that I believe Lively's first court filing dropped around the same time the movie debuted on Netflix? She has a back-end deal. She knows she's just getting more publicity for the movie and people are going to watch it on the plane and she's going to get pennies every time that happens. Yeah. Obviously, this is just a way of...

drumming up interest in the sequel. I mean, the timing is interesting and it's interesting that, you know, for all the, you know, that initially her reputation took this big hit maybe because of this

PR campaign from the Baldoni side and people were hating on her. And she says in the lawsuit, she canceled her hosting gig at SNL and she wouldn't do a target event for her beauty line and no one bought the shampoo or whatever. But the movie still sold. It was fine. So I don't know what that exactly says about Hollywood, but just notable.

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Let's talk about something a little bit less fluffy, but it's still Hollywood related, which is that overwhelmingly, I believe a journalist once came up with this concept of post text. And now we are living in a post text world where the internet is not about very low bandwidth words that get transmitted to you anymore. It's now all about high bandwidth video and transmitting all of that video to your computer or your phone is expensive.

So one of the big interesting questions is like, what happens behind the scenes in terms of negotiations and who winds up paying for all of that? And one of the key concepts in this whole debate is this concept of net neutrality, which is if you are an internet service provider or if you are a telco and you are serving up video from Netflix or Amazon or Instagram or Apple or YouTube or whoever,

then you cannot discriminate on the basis of who that video comes from. You can't be like, Netflix paid us a whole bunch of money, so we're going to make Netflix look great, but Amazon didn't pay us a bunch of money, so we're going to make Amazon Prime look shit.

This principle is known as net neutrality, and it has now, Emily, been finally killed? Yeah, it looks like it's finally killed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati said the FCC couldn't implement net neutrality rules anymore.

This net neutrality issue has been going on for, I think, at least 20 years, maybe more since around 2003 when I think it was Columbia law professor Tim Wu who first raised it. And it became this like big rallying cry. And then during the Obama administration, the FCC tried to do it and people were super into it. And there was like...

I was reading up on it in the New York Times, and they talked about how there were net neutrality protests back then. It's just a different time in the world. And then, of course, Trump administration comes in, reverses it, and then Biden comes in, tries to put it in place again. But in all these intervening years, and especially recently, the Supreme Court

has passed these rulings or put forth these rulings that have made it really hard to get any kind of regulation done in the US. And that was the death knell for net neutrality. The Cincinnati court cited this Loper-Bright decision, which we talked about on the podcast a few months ago, which essentially got rid of another principle called Chevron deference. So much lingo, I'm so sorry. But Chevron deference was basically like,

When a law is a little fuzzy, an agency can regulate and bring clarity and courts will give the agency deference. Right. The idea quite explicitly in this decision was under Chevron deference, we used to say, well, the FCC understands this shit and so we'll let them determine what it means. But now we have no ability to defer to the FCC on such things. So we have to go back as judges to the aggregator

actual letter of the law. And weirdly, the letter of the law doesn't go into chapter and verse on net neutrality. And therefore, net neutrality is not something that we can uphold. So now like the judges decide rather than the expert agency. So the only other thing I wanted to say, and maybe this is the second point, I'm breaking the slate money rule of only one point at a time, but I'll just raise it now and then pass the baton to Elizabeth, is that

I think the legal issues here are really interesting. And the fact that the Supreme Court's made it hard for agencies to do regulation is worrying. However, I don't know that it matters that much that we're not going to have these net neutrality regulations. I don't think in 2024 it matters whatsoever.

a whole lot. Because the battle is already lost. The battle is over. And Google and Netflix, who said they wanted net neutrality, they don't really need it anymore. They're very powerful entities. They had it when they needed it. And now they're so big, they don't need it. It reminds me a little bit of Spotify, which used to really need the record labels and was always at risk of having all of its profits just

eaten away in rents by the record labels, which could charge whatever they wanted. But now it's so big that the record labels need Spotify more than Spotify needs the record labels, and Spotify is now worth more than all of the record labels combined. And I think the same thing is happening with something like Netflix. If you're an internet provider,

It used to be that you could hurt Netflix by throttling the speed of Netflix streams. Now, if you throttle the speed of Netflix streams, you just hurt yourself more than you hurt Netflix. And you need that stream to be good in order for people to pay for your service. Yeah, I don't think it really hurts these big companies. I think where there's opportunity for destruction is really the sort of mid-tier smaller companies, especially smaller media outlets, right?

I would say the ruling disturbed me primarily because it seems to be part of a larger political project, which is just stripping agencies of their ability to do their jobs in order to shrink the government and basically make it less functional. But I can absolutely see deleterious effects for companies that are not as large as Spotify and Netflix and Amazon. Can you give me an example? Well, let's say a smaller streaming company, not Netflix. Peacock. Uh,

Well, let's take smaller than that. No, but I mean, that's kind of my point, right? Is that there are no small streaming companies. I mean, I saw like Anil Dash out on the Twitter saying, yeah, this is going to be terrible for Wikipedia. It's like, no, it's not going to be terrible for Wikipedia. Wikipedia doesn't use up, you know, any significant amount of bandwidth. You're not going to have ISPs just blocking Wikipedia because they can now. Now.

I guess maybe the one that springs to mind is the one that might be worried in certain states and jurisdictions is Pornhub.

But even Pornhub is more really at risk of legislation of states saying like, you know, ISPs aren't allowed to serve access to porn. And I think ISPs, given their drivers, are perfectly happy to serve at porn. The porn industry has often been at the cutting edge of innovation when these problems arise. So if that does happen, they'll find workarounds. They'll be ready. The porn industry, like Netflix, like Google slash YouTube, has...

has spent huge amounts of money on optimizing its streaming and making its product as seamless as possible. And I think this is the point that friend of the pod, Shira Overday, made a couple years ago now, which is that the playing field

hasn't been level for years. There is no level playing field that when you are a small to medium streaming company, to use your example, Elizabeth, and you're up against YouTube and YouTube has 64,000 engineers and, you know, unlimited budget to make that thing as smooth as possible. And you don't, then the fact that you either do or don't have net neutrality is kind of beside the point because you can't compete with that.

Yeah, the free and open internet that people were out in the streets, I still can't believe this, fighting for, you know, a decade ago, it doesn't exist anymore. It's not a thing. Those people lost a long time ago. I do want to ask the Slate Money audience here.

to write in on slate money at slate.com if you're one of the people who went out on the streets and protested in favor of net neutrality i wanted to speak to one of those people and see what they're thinking about this today well another thing that part of the reason why i think people were so worked up about it then is that the you know the principle behind the thing is that the internet is a utility and this is part of what's being litigated and all of this

And I think the recent ruling is more about agency authority to do all of this. But it's still, even in the lawsuit, the extent to which they had to sort of define the

what access to information meant. I was discombobulated by it, just trying to parse their argument. And I think that's still a little bit of an issue. If we do consider it a utility, you know, how available does it have to be? What kind of price controls, if any, do we need to implement? Those questions are still, I think, live, even if net neutrality isn't. They definitely are. And we've talked on this show with Shira about the insane price of internet access in the

which I think this is all like tied up in somehow. And as we move to more and more live sports and that kind of stuff getting streamed over the internet, I feel like this problem is just going to get worse. Yeah. And I feel like it's a fight that's, like I said, already been lost when you think about sports going to streaming. I mean, we had regulation and laws that meant like I could turn on my TV and see a local game just for free. And as more things move over to streaming,

move over to the internet. That's not a thing anymore. And you can't look to policymakers or regulators to make that happen for you. Yeah, I don't think there's any reason why a sports game should be free. I guess my point is that if you're the kind of person who was out on the streets 20 years ago, protesting your right to dial up

onto, you know, AOL.com and read Wikipedia. Does that work? Maybe. But like the idea was, this was all a very kind of like, the information is out there and the cost of the bandwidth is low, right? But now, you know, a little bit like anyone paying for cable TV has to pay for ESPN, whether they watch sports or not. Like anyone paying for internet basically has to pay for huge amounts of streaming, whether they stream or not. Hmm.

And so, you know, someone like me who doesn't stream very much winds up paying an absolute fortune for streaming just to read Wikipedia. And that doesn't seem fair either. Yeah.

The other thing I wanted to talk about was the regulation ping pong that I think is going to go away. And I've read and listened to a few people talk about this. You know, every time a new administration comes in, if it's going from Democrats to Republicans or vice versa, the Democrat puts a bunch of regulations in place and the Republican, you know, rolls them back. And you see this all the time in labor law or whatever, you know.

Over time protections, no overtime protections, overtime protections, abortion this, no abortion that, like back and forth. And now with these new Supreme Court rulings, it becomes really hard for the Democrats to do any regulation at all. So there's less of the ping pong. And I was just reading a take, I think on law dork. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the law dork.

saying like this is part of healthy democracy like a different administration coming in and doing different kinds of regulation based on like what voters wanted or you know but I don't think that sounds that great like I think like the

The regulatory back and forth is actually really unhealthy. Like, I think policymakers should be focused on passing laws that don't, like, bounce back and forth every four years. Like, if we had truly wanted net neutrality, Congress should have just, like, passed a law instead of, you know, leaving it to the FCC and, like, a 1996 Federal Communications Act. Like, just freaking pass a law if you want to update the EPA.

pass the law, like don't do the ping pong. And I know like it's fashionable and liberal to complain about the Supreme Court pushing back on regulation and making it harder. But pardon me, maybe I'm a secret Republican. I don't know. I'm kind of like, you know what? Fine. Just make Congress do it. Yeah. If we wanted abortion to be legal, we should have passed the law. God damn it. We had 50 years, people. Come on. We're in such a hyper partisan environment.

where particularly Republicans always behave like an opposition party. So if Democrats do something that actually benefits everyone, Republicans still have a little bit of an incentive with their constituencies to push back on it or overturn it and frame it as a bad thing. But it's way harder to overturn a law than it is to overturn a regulation. Way harder. I'm old enough to remember

when one of the standard pro-business talking points from the Republican Party was that really what business wants is predictability. And the thing that they really hated was this concept of a permanent temporary tax code, that like taxes are going to be

this much this year, and we think we know how much they're going to be next year. But then after that, we have no idea how much they're going to be. And you can't plan for the future. And you can't do financial planning over a 30 year time horizon like public companies like to do when you have no idea what the tax code is going to be the day after tomorrow.

And so predictability and certainty is actually more important in some ways to corporations than just like the lowest possible taxes. They want to be able to plan for the future. And that argument seems to have evaporated a little bit. I think maybe everyone's just

resigned themselves to living in a world of a permanent temporary tax code and like they don't think that we're ever going to live in a world where it's any different. But now I think that is, you're absolutely right, morphed over to the regulatory world where we're now in a world of permanent temporary regulations and no regulation can be expected to be permanent anymore. And that degree of flexibility

flux and unpredictability, yeah, that can't be good for, you know, a long-sighted capitalist. Yeah, it's not good. We didn't need 20 years of ping-ponging on net neutrality. Could have been more efficient use of everyone's time.

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But let's have a New Year's hangover discussion, shall we? Elizabeth, did you have a New Year's hangover? I did, a little bit. I was in Alabama, though. I was with family and friends. But I'm doing dry January as of today, so... What? Wow. My hypothesis, which I'm reasonably certain about, even though, empirically speaking, it's almost impossible to confirm...

is that the number of New Year's hangovers on January the 1st, 2025 was possibly in absolute terms, but almost certainly in relative terms in terms of a percentage of the population at pretty much an all-time low. That people are going out and drinking alcohol

much less than they used to. The number of people drinking on New Year's Eve is probably hitting an all-time low. And then also the amount that people drink on New Year's Eve is falling rapidly. Alcohol is just not a cool drug these days.

And the world has moved on, you know, the youngs especially, because drinking on New Year's Eve is something that young people have historically overindulged in disproportionately. You know, the young famously don't socialize anymore and just, you know, sit at home anyway on Instagram. And like, they're not out there drinking. If they are fucking themselves up in one way or another, it's just as likely to be with marijuana or alcohol.

or something than it is with alcohol. And there's just this big trend of, you know, the glory days of people getting drunk are basically over. And this is good. This is great for public health.

The glory days of people getting drunk and getting in their cars, getting drunk and beating each other up. Exactly. Sadly gone. Exactly. This is good for people not getting beaten up. It's good for people not dying on the roads. It's good for people not dying of cancer. It's basically, it's a public health intervention. And it's one which never, there was no real intervention, right? This was not like a top-down intervention.

by some nanny state regulatory agency to like reduce the amount that Americans drink. This just happened kind of anyway. Well,

Well, we're talking about it because Mexico apparently has, and Filos will translate these numbers for me, Mexico is sitting on more than half a billion liters of tequila. It has a tequila lake, basically. A lake's worth of tequila that it can't sell because tequila became very popular. It was kind of trendy for a while there. And so they massively increased... Because of George Clooney, speaking of the entertainment industry. Well, yeah, George Clooney was early on the bandwagon, to be sure. He, you know, and he, of course...

exited, sold his tequila company for a billion dollars at exactly the right time, which I'm sure it's not worth that anymore because the tequila market is no longer growing. It is shrinking. And in that, it is very much in line with the spirits market and the alcohol market more generally, but tequila is shrinking more than most spirits. And so the poor Mexicans are like, hell, now what are we going to do with all this tequila?

swim in it. The other thing about tequila is it's not like whiskey where you can age it and say like, oh, the fact that we're sitting on it is a feature of the bug. And then we'll be able to, you know, in 10 years, we'll be able to sell 10 year old tequila. And in 20 years, we will be able to sell 20 year old tequila and call it super premium. Like that tequila is not sitting in oak barrels that is going to, you know, allow it to age well. And in fact, because it's sitting in Mexico rather than in, you

cooler climb, it tends to evaporate more quickly. And so it just literally disappears. Also, another factor in this case is just that agave has been super cheap. And so these companies have been producing more tequila because it's cheaper to produce. And now that contributes to the surplus as well. But

But Felix, it's not just like this happened organically. I mean, it wasn't a nanny state thing. And as we're taping on Friday, the Surgeon General is now recommending that they put a more scary warning label on alcohol. Cancer labels. Cancer label. But I mean, there was raising the drinking age to 21, stricter laws on drunk driving. There are labels on alcohol stuff now that I guess were from the late 1980s.

Cannabis legalization. Yeah, there's labels that are like, if you're pregnant, don't drink this. Oh, the pregnant one, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's not good for the reputation of the alcohol. Even if you're not pregnant, you're like, well, maybe I shouldn't, you know.

It's not great. It's not great marketing. Don't operate heavy machinery while you're drinking. Yeah. No podcasting. So, I mean, there's things happening, you know, that have made it more obvious that drinking the alcohol isn't good for you. Although, I mean, of course, there was prohibition a long time ago as well. I mean, there was a time not that long ago where...

You know, Slate Money had a rosé episode and we all just sat around the table and drank various bottles of rosé. I feel like that, yeah, those days are over already. Just within the lifetime of Slate Money, things have changed. I think some of it has to do with, you know, lifestyle influencers. And I think younger people have gotten more into things like, you know, quantifying their fitness regimes and health regimes and things like that.

And so, you know, for our generation, if you were thinking about all that stuff on a regular basis, much less broadcasting it to the public, it was much more kind of, you know, you might be on a diet or something. And now it's just wrapped into all this other lifestyle things. When I was...

hanging out with a friend for Thanksgiving he had his Zuma kid there as well and I'm like okay come here Zuma kid I'm going to teach you to make a Negroni and the Zuma kid was quite appalled and was like I don't drink alcohol I'm like yeah but you still need to know how to make a Negroni and failed miserably and made it quite obvious that he you know broadly disapproved of the whole alcohol thing generally and the Negroni thing in particular

which I found very sad. Some survey data, the share of adults under age 35 who say they ever drank is now 62%.

from 72% 10 years ago. I feel like since you're the wine expert here, how does this affect the high-end wine market, or does it? Honestly, I think the high-end wine market is going to be much more affected by tariffs than it is by broad changes in alcohol consumption, but it has had an impact, and especially it's had an impact on red wine. One of the curious wrinkles to the decline in drinking trend is

is that it has affected red wine much more than it has any other type of wine. Red wines down a lot.

White wine is down a little. I think rosé is still up. Why? It's because red wine gives you the worst headache? Yeah, and it's just the kind of heaviest, sweetest, most tannic. As someone who has participated in this trend, I drink very little red wine these days. I have my own reasons why. But I think, yeah, we're moving to like a lighter alcohol consumption world, not just in terms of quantity, but also just in terms of...

the type of alcohol that we're consuming. We're moving from red to rosé. We're moving from whiskey to white claw. Things are becoming less flavor intense and more sort of light and subtle. I think this is good news.

Except, I guess, for the alcohol companies. Won't someone shed a tear for the alcohol companies? Someone mentioned in a meeting we were in, Felix, that non-alcoholic beverages like non-alcoholic beer, like athletic brewing, that kind of thing, those are selling now. But there's no way they could sell to compete with alcohol. Like no one sits down and drinks like six non-alcoholic beers, but they will sit down and drink six regular beers. Am I wrong? I don't know, man. I occasionally get eye rolls from alcohol.

my wife about the number of spin drifts that I can get through at the city. This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

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We should have a numbers round. Elizabeth, do you have a number this week? My number is 539. And that's the number of complaints that New York's 311 line, which is designed for non-emergency problems, got about illegal animals kept as pets reported by suspicious neighbors.

And this comes from a data aggregation project that the Times did of publicly available information about how 311 was used between December 1st, 2023 and November 30th, 2024. And 311 gets around 2,000 requests a day.

So the biggest requests were for residential noise of all type, which if you've even just visited New York will come as no surprise to you. And then it sort of moves down from there to illegal street parking and stuff like that. But the further down the list you get, the more it's stuff like illegal animals kept as pets. Guys, do we remember the pets?

tiger in Harlem. It dominated the news cycle for like two or three days, about a decade ago. This guy was keeping a pet tiger in his apartment in Harlem and it just got bigger and bigger. And eventually it reached the point where he had to just like open the door very quickly, throw some raw meat in there and close it again because he couldn't be in the same apartment with the tiger.

And he was getting freaked out, but didn't really change his ways at all until the downstairs neighbor complained about tiger urine coming through the ceiling. My husband was the Brooklyn Bureau Chief for the Daily News for a while. And he commissioned a story on this woman in Queens who had over 50 rabbits in her house. And they all had syphilis. No! What?!

I want to be the person who's like, I'm going to test each of these 50 rabbits one by one. Also, I saw a headline. I didn't read the story because I didn't want to know about rats and toilets. Is that a real thing as well? We could talk about that offline. Yeah, we did not want to talk about that. Okay.

My number is 3,810. Okay? Okay. This is a topic that I think is near and dear to us here at Slate Money. 3,810. That's the number of observed banana shoppers in a study written up on a site called fizz.org. The study was to see how best to sell individual bananas. You can't tape them all to a wall in Miami. Okay?

And sell for a million dollars, right? Sometimes bananas fall out of the bunch. No one wants to buy them in the supermarket. They just want to buy a bunch of bananas. They don't want to buy single bananas. So this study, they were like, how can we get people to buy the sad single bananas? So they put up a sign of a banana with a sad face. And the sign said, we are sad singles and want to be bought as well.

And this really helped sell the bananas. They also put up a sign of a smiling, happy banana didn't sell as well. Sad bananas sell better than happy bananas. Exactly. If you anthropomorphize produce, people feel an emotional connection to it. That is correct. And they feel sorry for it and they take it home. Take it home and look after that banana. They connect. They feel lonely too. They relate to the banana. They're like, oh, the poor banana's all alone in the supermarket. No.

I must care for the banana. One of the underrated qualities of the banana is that it looks a bit like a smile. It's one of the reasons why I smile every time I see my concrete banana.

I like because they're like a phone. I like to pick up the banana and do like, hello, you know, and walk out of a room. No one remembers what phones are. People know. You're showing your age. No one talks on the phone anymore. My number is 3.04 million, 3,040,000. And that is the number of

foreign mobile phones that were sold in China in November. So that's mostly Apple iPhones, but it's also a smattering of Samsung and other types of phone. Chinese consumers bought about 3 million of them in November, and that is interesting because it is down basically 50% in a year. Have we talked about this? There is this whole thing where the Chinese middle classes seem to have really...

graduated from coveting Western brands and like luxury brands in China are struggling and Chinese luxury brands are doing very well. And with things like wristwatches and stuff like that, the Chinese brands are doing good. Chinese phones are perfectly good and selling well. And you don't kind of feel like you need an iPhone to show off anymore.

Chinese cars are great. And so no one feels that they need to buy a Tesla anymore. And all of this kind of thing is a big change in the world that the great sort of rise of the Chinese consumer as this force that is going to help

you know, Nike and Starbucks and Apple and everyone else make record profits. Like, I feel like that narrative is slowly coming to an end. I thought that Chinese were buying fewer luxury goods because they had less money these days. Well, there's also that. So it's both. But once you kind of get into the habit of realizing that, oh, well, domestic goods are just as good, you're like, well, maybe I don't need the foreign ones anymore. Plus, if we have a tariff war, the foreign ones are just going to get even more expensive.

On which note, that is, I think, all we have time for this week. Thanks so much for listening and writing in on sleepmoneyandsleep.com. Thanks to Ben Richmond and Shana Roth and Jessamyn Mollie and still Alicia Montgomery and...

Merit Jacobs just turned up in the studio and the whole crew here at Slate who make this whole amazing podcast happen. We will have a Slate Plus segment on Emily. We're doing coffee talk. Coffee. We're going to talk about how Emily has fallen off the wagon and she's drinking coffee again and what kind of coffee she's drinking. Spoiler alert, it's the bad kind. No, wrong.

Obviously, we're going to have a fight. You're going to want to sign up for Slate Plus to hear this. So, yeah, we're going to fight about Emily's coffee habits. But otherwise, yeah, we will be back next week with even more Slate Money. Taxes was feeling so stuck.

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