The Federal Employee ‘Buyout’ Makes No Sense
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Hello, welcome to Sleep Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Herrmann of Axios.

Emily Peck joins me. You also get a paycheck from Axios. It's true. Hello. I'm here also with Elizabeth Spires, who gets paychecks from all manner of places, but not so as I know the federal government. Hello. We are going to talk about the 2.3 million people who do get paid by the federal government and this crazy email they just received this week.

saying, just hit reply to this email and we'll pay you through September and you don't need to do any work. Is this too good to be true? Spoiler alert, yes, it probably is. We are also going to talk about NVIDIA, AI, DeepSeek and what's going on in the markets and the whole world of AI. We are going to talk about bookstores.

and how they are still researching some good news for a change. We have a whole amazing special segment on the price of eggs, which is probably the greatest innovation in podcasting for the past decade. Is it egg-cellent? Emily, it's all coming up on Slate Money.

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Okay, so let's start with the buyout that no one really believes is a buyout. Emily Peck, you have been reporting this from the beginning. You kind of broke the news that the U.S. government, the Office of Personnel Management, was going to go along to effectively all 2.3 million federal employees and say,

If you just reply, resign to this email, then we will pay you through September and you don't need to do any work. This is the messaging from the OPM, even though there doesn't seem to be any legally binding way of them promising this. How has that gone down in the federal workforce?

The federal workers that I have spoken to do not trust any of this. They aren't resigning. I haven't spoken to anyone who is themselves resigning.

replying resign to this email subject line fork in the road, same subject line that Elon Musk sent out to Twitter employees in 2022. They don't trust it. There are these FAQs that the office of personnel management sent out that say, don't worry, we'll pay you through September. If you decide to resign, there's a refreshed FAQ that just came out on Thursday that says,

We would be delighted if you took a vacation while you were on your deferred resignation. Do what you like. It's all great. But nothing in the formal documents given to these workers that they theoretically would sign if they agreed to this.

really anything. The government's only funded through March 14th and the OPM, which sent out this offer, they're not the ones that have the budget to pay these workers, these 2.2, 2.3 million workers. So no one really trusts the

this offer as far as I could tell from my reporting that Trump people in the White House are like, of course you should trust this offer. It's totally in good faith. This is what we want. We don't want you to stay here. And then there's been a lot of reporting and Robert Reich, the former labor secretary under Clinton has this nice short, we can put it in the show notes,

Letter to federal employees that says, do not believe this. OPM does not have the authority to give you a quote unquote buyout. It's not a buyout. And then everyone always mentions that Donald Trump is known for not paying his contractors, going back a really long time.

Well, it's not even just Trump either, because it's, you know, Elon is the person who's been lobbying for this. And if you look at what he did when he took over Twitter, which is basically fire a bunch of people or give them resignation offers, ostensibly where they would get bigger severance packages, and he's still being sued for not paying out those things.

and being sued by ex-employees, even aside from the fact that OPM doesn't have the authority to do this and there's no congressional appropriation for paying out or just authorizing a mass scale firing of federal government employees. But if you were just going to go based on how Elon has done, quote unquote, workforce reductions in the past,

Why would you possibly think that this would work out for anybody? It's not just Trump. It's also Elon. So, okay, so here's my question. Emily, you've been talking to the White House about this. I think it's pretty clear that within the sort of structure of the U.S. budget and where is the money going to come from to pay them through September and all of this kind of stuff is,

The White House just simply does not have the ability to make the promise that it is making. Legally, it's just not there. On the other hand, they are telling you that this is a good faith offer. Do you believe that it is a good faith offer? Do you believe that they're going to try their hardest to pay these people out through September?

I can only tell you what they tell me. And they're like, yeah, this is what we want to do. We want people to resign and we'll pay them through September. Like if you don't want to be here in the federal government, we don't, we don't want you here. I don't know. This is a new administration, right? Like, I don't know how hard they're going to work.

to fulfill their promises. And I wouldn't want to predict that. I think it's just political intimidation. I mean, one thing that's become clear in the last week is that Elon et al don't actually understand how the government works. You know, there's a line from Paul Krugman, his newsletter, where he said, never underestimate how ignorant these people are about the government they're trying to take over.

they are just nihilistically trying to fire people. There's no strategy behind it. So the idea that any of this should be treated as legitimate is mind-boggling to me. And there's already been some backlash, I think, from federal employees. There were screenshots going around yesterday of people in message groups and on boards saying that not only were they not going to resign, it made them kind of dig in their heels and want to double down on resisting these kinds of efforts to encroach on

agency functions. And I mean, this offer was, I think, the most stunning move the Trump administration made. But the White House is also pushing this attempt to reclassify civil servants, the Schedule F thing. Basically, the TLDRs, they want to make it easier to fire civil servants. So only

only political appointees who work for the federal government are so-called at-will employees, like how me and you are, Felix. We could just be fired at any time, and it's perfectly legal. For civil servants, there's more protections, and a lot of them are unionized. It's way harder to fire them. But what the administration, the White House, is trying to do is reclassify a lot of those folks because they say they are in charge of policy and they're actually more political. So they're trying to remove those protections essentially from them at

make it easier to fire them. And in one of the memos explaining how they're going to do this, they say something like, there's a section titled, patronage is still illegal. Yeah.

And one lawyer I spoke to was like, look, if you have to say it, something isn't right. You know, the White House is also doing a return to office push, which also we know leads people to quit. And they're doing their diversity, equity, inclusion purge, which is also leading a lot of people to quit. Plus, they're firing people. Plus, they're firing people. And they are definitely firing people.

people who are not on schedule F and they're making, they're doing a bunch of like very high profile firing. So this one guy who was like in charge of all of the money at treasury who just resigned, they were telling a bunch of like inspector generals and various overseers,

that they were fired, even though they don't have the authority to do that. So on a case by case basis, they are really going around and trying to fire people on an on mass basis. It seems to be harder for them to do that. And so they're trying to schedule F thing, but yeah, the clear drive here is that both Trump and Elon, and I think actually in this, they really do have the support of almost every elected Republican.

has as an article of faith that the federal government is too big and that it really needs to be much smaller. And so the way they want to get there is by getting rid of people one way or another. You know, I don't think that's

really controversial within the Republican Party. Well, I think the extent to which he's doing it is because people, you know, generally Republicans, yes, want smaller government. Yes, they run on rhetoric that government is full of waste. But eliminating 2 million federal jobs is not the same thing as... Well, no, there are 2 million federal jobs. I don't want to eliminate all of them. But they say they want to eliminate like 10% of them.

They're literally saying they made offers to 2 million people. Yeah, they made offers on the expectation that between 5% and 10% would say yes. But Felix, that's still insane. That's an insane thing to do as an across-the-board thing because it's completely nihilistic and it's about reducing headcount for its own sake. They don't even seem to understand what these people do. Right, but Elizabeth, just to be clear, reducing headcount for its own sake is exactly what they are doing. They will absolutely openly say that, yes, what we are doing is reducing headcount for its own sake.

I don't think they would. Like, I think if you said, okay, you know, we have this many people who are experts in cybersecurity, and we have, let's say, 10 people who are the experts that we need, no Republican would get up and say, actually, we need eight for no reason other than just we want to make that number smaller. I think even when Republicans talk about, even when very conservative Republicans talk about smaller government, they generally don't want to create

crippled to the point at which it's not tenable anymore. They don't have any power if that happens, if everything's in chaos and government isn't working properly. I was going to add, it's not just we believe in small government. That's all we're trying to do here is slim it down, make it more efficient. There's also an effort to, I mean, and Stephen Miller has talked about this. This is not me making a judgment. He said, we want to get rid of the leftists in the government, the radical leftists. This is also a

It's an ideological purge as well. He also literally said that 98%, and that's the number he used, of federal government workers were radical leftists. You need to sort of understand the core dishonesty behind all of this. No, but again, I'm not saying that's true. It's clearly false.

But insofar as there is that belief, it becomes easier to understand why they are very happy just saying, we are happy for anyone to leave, because they assume that 98% of the people who leave are going to be radical leftists. No, they don't assume that, though. Stephen Miller's not an idiot. He doesn't think that 98% of members of the federal government, who, by the way, usually stay there regardless of who's in the Oval Office. That's the

The civil service is not even 50% far left. You would have to believe that Stephen Miller was a civically illiterate idiot to believe that he was saying that in good faith, that he really believes that. I do believe that, Elizabeth. I just think he's evil. A lot of the federal workforce, a disproportionately high number are veterans. A disproportionately high number live in the South. These are partisans of all stripes.

The one thing I will also mention here, which is kind of important, is that in the private sector, most companies, if you look at their income statement, their P&L, their biggest cost center is their employees by far. And if you want to save money and you're a private sector CEO, the first place that you look, because it's by far the biggest cost center, is your employees. And you're like, if I can...

you know, get rid of 5% of my employees, then I can reduce my total costs by maybe 4% or something. It's a really big deal. And the US government is kind of unique in this respect. Well, not unique, but very, very special in that the payroll of federal employees is just a tiny percentage.

of the total federal expenditures. Like if you compare it to the amount of money that goes out the door every day in social security and Medicare and Medicaid and interest payments on the national debt and defense procurement and all the rest of it, none of that is going to federal employees. So the amount of savings you can get in terms of the federal budget by doing this is so much lower than the savings you would get if you did this at almost any private sector company.

It's 1.9% of the total budget. And that includes stuff that, you know, a lot of people don't realize are, you know, federally employed people. Americans don't understand what the federal government does because so much of what it does is just not...

immediately visible to them, partly because it works. Yeah. I was also going to point out how small the slice of pie is that federal government workers get. Paul Krugman, I'm obsessed with his sub stack lately, has a great pie chart showing federal outlays and it's just a circle and almost all the circle is orange. And the slice that is for paying workers is a blue slice. And it's like, if it was a pizza pie,

The slice going to people, to federal workers, would be like a third of a slice of pizza, basically, out of the whole pie. Not a lot of pizza. Emily explains pie chart. Emily is now pro pie chart. Oh, I wanted to mention one more thing, which is that in the private sector, they don't do buyouts like this because it's absolutely nuts. Because...

When you want to shrink your headcount because you want to save money because labor is a big cost center and you definitely want to get rid of people, you are strategic about it. You

You look at maybe who your higher cost employees are. Maybe those are the older ones who've been there the longest. So then you say, okay, we're offering a buyout to people who've been here 10 years or longer and we'll pay you based on tenure or something like that. Targeted. Or you ask your managers to lay off the lowest performing people like some tech companies are doing now. Or you target certain departments or you restructure. You have...

That's true in basically all buyouts. And buyouts are a thing that exists in the private sector.

But they're a more targeted strategic thing. They're not a blanket offer. That's not how it works. And you have a plan for how the company is still going to run after those layoffs. Yeah, you have a plan and a strategy. Again, Elizabeth, I think you are maybe overestimating the abilities of some cost-cutting CEOs in the private sector. But yes, broadly speaking, this is true. My final question for you, Emily, is like, let's say that I am a federal employee and

And I have already made up my mind that I want to quit, maybe because I've got a much higher paying private sector job lined up. I am definitely leaving. I am taking this other job.

In that situation, does it make sense for me to reply to this email with the word resign? Only if you already have that other job and it is absolutely 100% guaranteed. And I would say wait until you start the other job because in this economy... We only have until February the 6th, right? Yeah. But in this economy, like we've definitely heard stories of people getting job offers rescinded lately. So I'd be very cautious. ♪♪

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Okay, let's move on to stonks. We haven't had a good old stonk segment for a minute, but there were movements in stonks on Monday. And a lot of people got very excited about this, mainly because the biggest mover was the hottest stonk of the minute, NVIDIA, the chip manufacturer that powers the AI revolution.

fell, what, 14% or something like that on Monday, wiping out $600 billion of market cap, which is a lot of market cap. Like, I'm old enough to remember when there wasn't any company in the world that was worth $600 billion.

And that was just like the intraday delta for NVIDIA. Various other companies, especially energy companies, also fell on Monday. And the total capitalization that was lost came to about a trillion dollars, a lot of money. And for various reasons, all of this was traced back in a kind of weird causal chain to the release of

of a couple of models called V3 and R1 by a Chinese AI company called DeepSeek. And the sort of narrative was that DeepSeek had released these models and DeepSeek had managed to build these models on a bunch of hobbled NVIDIA chips and a handful of unhobbled NVIDIA chips procured before the

Biden administration prevented their export and they did it and they trained this model very cheaply for like $5 million. And all of this was just so much cheaper and so much more efficient than the really, really expensive models being put out by open AI and meta and people like that, that it just proved that all of this massive expenditure on things like NVIDIA chips and the electricity to power data centers was not really necessary. And so people started selling those companies. So,

Elizabeth, broadly speaking, do you buy that narrative? Well, I think the sell-off was an overreaction because China is only about 12% of NVIDIA's revenue generally. So even if what people are worried about is further restrictions, I don't think that that's going to be a big issue. No, I think what people were worried about was NVIDIA's ability to sell expensive chips in China.

the U.S. on the grounds that like those expensive chips, people are going to need many fewer of them because suddenly the Chinese have shown how much more efficiently they can be used. Yeah, it depends on what kind of AI you're trying to develop. The stuff that DeepSeek is trying to develop is heavily focused on mobile usage, PC usage. And a lot of the big market for NVIDIA chips is really for use in data centers and more like business applications and

But given that OpenAI's entire hype has been built around chat GPT because it appeals to a consumer market, it does point to some areas where if you can spin up new models

for way less money than we thought you could or way less capital intensive ways. That kind of makes people rethink the way that they're thinking about the AI market generally. And I don't think that's actually a bad thing. I wrote a piece in Axios on Friday about this, basically talking about the new AI trade and the way that people are now thinking about AI post the deep seek revelations and post the sell-off.

And I do think that broadly speaking, it's a bullish development, right? That when you get a significant technological leap, that is always something that the market generally rewards. And in fact, if you looked at the

Big AI companies like Metro and Microsoft, they wound up going up rather than down in share price. It was really just NVIDIA that went down. And there's a case to be made, good old Jevons paradox that a lot of people were talking about this week, basically says that if chips become more efficient, if you can do more with a chip than we thought you could do with a chip,

then there's going to be more demand for chips rather than less demand for chips because they're going to wind up being used in a whole bunch of new applications. And the people who are buying them all up already are going to be able to get even more

bang for their buck. And so they're going to be even more likely to spend lots of money on them. So that's one part. There's also, I think, a relatively compelling case that the deep seek news shows that NVIDIA doesn't have quite the monopoly that we thought it did. That like, it's going to be easier to use AMD chips or open AI chips or Google chips or meta chips, Apple, they're all developing their own AI chips, right? And so far, none of those have really

gained much traction. But if you use these techniques that the Chinese use, then maybe you will be able to use those chips. And that's just going to mean while the total market in AI chips is going to continue to grow quite strongly, that maybe the market in NVIDIA chips in particular will not.

It's J. Vaughan's paradox, Felix? Yes. He was an English economist in the steam age. And there were steam engines all over England. And trains were going around and whatnot. And then this guy Watt invented a much more efficient steam engine. It turned steam into power much more efficiently than the old steam engine.

And the initial idea that people thought was, well, we're going to need many fewer steam engines now because the steam engines are so much more efficient. But in fact, what happened was that the demand for steam engines went through the roof because the new applications for steam engines could be found everywhere. And so that was the Jevons paradox, which is that when you make something more efficient, sometimes demand for it goes up rather than down. I love that. In my head, it lets me separate things you need from

And things you don't need. Because I was thinking about it in terms of while you were talking about diamonds, because the prices of diamonds are going down. And that's bad for the diamond industry. They want to sell more and more expensive.

But diamonds wouldn't be subject to Javon's paradox because you don't need diamonds, really. I guess maybe industrial ones for any real reason. As you know, Emily, I am the in-house expert on lab-grown diamonds at Axios. I know. And...

And we don't quite have a Jevons paradox situation in diamonds or specifically in engagement ring diamonds in the United States, which is a very specific market. But we're close. We're not that far off because the demand for those diamonds has increased substantially as the availability of diamonds has increased.

become like this flood. Like there's basically no limit to the amount of lab grown diamonds. Obviously natural diamonds, there's a lot of limit, natural limits to how many you can mine. Lab grown diamonds do not have those limits, but you take away the limits and people just wind up buying more

massively bigger diamonds than they ever used to. Oh, yes, that is JVans. And spending almost as much as they used to. The budgets have not come down a lot. They've come down a little. People are like, why don't I just buy three times the diamond for slightly less instead of buying the same diamond for 10% of the price or whatever?

The bottom line is that we should make stuff cheaper. Don't be afraid to make stuff cheaper. And that should be the message to your OpenAI's, to your Sam Altman's. But the tech companies in the US kind of freaked out about all this this week, right? Didn't OpenAI say, oh, DeepSeek, they stole our information. OpenAI, which is like mining all of our content.

Oh my God, it was so like, yeah, the world's smallest violin came out for that one. Oh, really? Deep Seek exfiltrated the information just like you did off YouTube? Oh, cry me a river. But yeah, I mean, we need people making things more efficiently and more cheaply. We need less monopoly. It's like all for the good and for these companies as well. This goes back to something that one of the Trump administrators said about all these federal cuts we were talking about, where they said something like,

Oh, no, it was Mark Andresen who was talking about something else. And he suggested that wage collapses were a good idea because then everything will be cheaper. The Mark Andresen tweet. Oh, my God. I read that thing at least twice.

10 times trying to understand what on earth he was talking about. It's something, something about like if wage collapses, that's awesome because we wind up effectively in like a Star Trek utopia where everything is free. Please, someone, if you understand what the hell the logic is behind this tweet,

Send it in to SlateMoneyAtSlate.com because I could not for the life of me work it out. I'll read it to you because I sent it to a few economists over the weekend. I'm like, oh, maybe I'll write about this. I write about AI and work and wages. So I sent it to three economists. They all wrote back like, I don't know what to say about this. This is crazy. Okay, so the tweet is, a world in which human wages crash from AI logically, necessarily, is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof.

and prices for goods and services crashed near zero.

consumer cornucopia, period. Everything you need and want for pennies. Where would you get the pennies if you're not making... Who is buying the stuff if their wages are at zero? I really love how much heavy lifting the words logically and necessarily are doing in that tweet. It's just a mathematical truth, Emily. Necessarily. It's an accounting identity. You cannot escape it. You are at the mercy of mathematics somehow. But he just...

But, you know, it's like Pascal, you know, like I have a genius proof of this, but it's too long to fit in the margins. It's so obvious. It's common sense, as some people are saying. Many people are saying this is obvious. Common sense right there. Yeah, I would love to explain to me how if no one is making any money because human wages have crashed, who is...

going to even need the goods and services. And a corollary that I think Felix will explain to us in the coming days, if you follow him on Axios.com, where are the pennies coming from? There will be no pennies. There will be no pennies. You get them from selling your organs. But weirdly, I actually...

I had a whole panel discussion about this with your favorite economist, Emily Paul Krugman, when I helped to publish this book called Trekonomics by Manu Sadia. And we did a panel with Manu and Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong at Comic-Con in New York. It was wild. And I'm pretty sure that what Antrisan is talking about here is basically the Star Trek utopia, right? Which is where...

There is no need for money because you have this replicator which can just give you everything you want for free. So commerce becomes unnecessary. But when the replicator breaks, as it will because everything breaks, who's going to freaking fix it? You just go along to your spare replicator and you're like, give me a new replicator. Also, who's paying for the inputs to the replicator? Who makes the replicators? The replicators do. They all make each other. No. No.

It's logically and necessarily ridiculous. Also, can we just say the more adverbs you use, the more wrong you are. That is fact. I have a bias. Is that a logical and necessary fact? Yeah. I feel like this is the Eric Cartman School of Economics, you know, where you just say something ludicrous and people just accept it if you're loud enough. I think that's the Larry Kudlow School of Economics. Well, that's fair, too.

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So Emily, I am looking at you on the Riverside software that we use to record this podcast. You have a lovely shelf full of books behind you. And...

books have been the great survivor of the modern economy. And they seem to be on the upswing and not just books, but specifically bookstores. We've talked a little bit about the resurgence of Barnes and Noble on this show before, but it's worth revisiting because it is still resurging. Elliott Associates, which is a hedge fund and hedge funds, it's not like a private equity turnaround thing. It's a hedge fund. It bought

Waterstones in the United Kingdom had some success turning it around. Then they spent like $680 million and bought Barnes and Noble in the United States, put the same guy in charge, James Dawn. And he is turning that around to the number of independent bookstores in the United States is growing every year and is opening up in all manner of small towns and outer boroughs and everything. And everyone seems to love

not only books, but also buying books in physical bookstores. And this was quite unexpected. Yeah, isn't it great? I'm so into it. James Daunt is this sort of book savior. Yeah.

Come in. He's like the anti-Tom Hanks from You've Got Mail. James Dawn and Elliot Associates, the evil mustache twirling hedge fund. Well, it seems to really be James Dawn's doing. Our producer shared this nice video from the PBS News Era where they talked to him about how he's been turning around Barnes & Noble. They opened nearly 60 stores in the US this year. They're going to open another 60 next year. Sales, I guess, are up a little bit. And he was just like, look,

We're letting local sales associates and managers kind of like pick what books to promote. And he's had this whole thing where he said, we got rid of all the boring books. He was like, we had all these books, you know, for like medical students to buy. They were boring. They can get them on Amazon. We put out the fun books. Yeah.

I respect that. And yeah, he's just done a great job, like making bookstores interesting and fun and feel a little bit independent, even though this is like a mega chain. So this is my question. And the thing that I'm finding difficult to sort of intuitively square here is that for Barnes & Noble, but even more so for the huge number of independent bookstores that are coming up, anytime you buy a book in one of those stores,

you are almost certainly going to be paying more than if you just bought that book on Amazon. Certainly if you're an Amazon prime member and there's like 150 million Amazon prime members in America. So we keep on talking about how people are feeling pinched and how, you know, inflation, something, something, and you know, the price of eggs, we'll come to that in a minute. And

Everyone needs to save as much money as they can at every opportunity. And this seems to be the massive counterexample where people are voluntarily paying more than they need to for books for the privilege of being able to, you know, drive their car to the bookstore and pick it up themselves. One of the things about the

in-store displays is that usually a lot of people are going into those stores now just for the ambiance. They want to be able to browse and then they might buy the book later off of Amazon or on the Kindle. And that part of, I think, what the new CEO has done is that he's renovating the spaces more locally

so that they better reflect what the book market looks like nearby. Sarah McNally, who runs McNally Jackson chain of indie stores here, was complaining because she believes that BNN has ripped off her aesthetic and interior in some of their new local stores, which they probably have. If it's working, then go for it.

I was thinking, I wrote in my notes something like the point you were making before, Felix. Books are essentially a commodity. They're basically all priced the same. So what's happening is that Daunt and Sarah McNally are selling a vibe. They're selling an experience that make you feel more worthwhile and virtuous and

for going to the bookstore. It's a fun, it's experiential to go to the bookstore. It's just, it's something we talk about on the podcast all the time. People pay more for experiences and products that have a certain branding and marketing to them. And that's what's happening here. I think that's exactly right. You get the vibe. And it's just interesting because this is the exact opposite dynamic to the one that caused the rise of Amazon in the first place, right? When

When Amazon killed Barnes & Noble the first time around, it was because Amazon was just systematically undercutting Barnes & Noble, which it continues to do. I mean, I just called up at random the first new book that I could think of, which was the new Chris Hayes book, Simon's Call. And it's on Amazon for like, it's like $3 less than retail price. It's not a massive discount, but it's a discount. And...

In the early days of the internet, people were like, ooh, discount, great, I'll hit that. Whereas now, in this economy of like, I want to pay for experiences and I could make a martini at home for three bucks, but I am willing to go out and pay $20 for a martini if I get vibe with it. There is...

a whole extra layer of enjoying the bookstore experience. And let's be clear about this. The genius of James Dawn is that he made bookstores

an enjoyable place that people wanted to go into rather than the Barnes and Nobles of old, which were just terrible places. Right. Or the old independent bookstores, not all of them, that were kind of like, smelled kind of stale. And like I, a nerd, always loved them, but they weren't that Sarah McNally kind of blonde, wood, spacious,

the vibe is a different kind of a thing. Yeah, what's that wonderful line in the McNally profile where the books need to be on the bookshelves placed so loosely that they will fall out like rose petals. And I like that because it's true. Again, like

If you think back to the independent bookstores of old, there was almost no books were face out. They were all very like austere. And it was very kind of like, we don't care about vibes because we're about the life of the mind. And it turns out that no, you just add some good coffee and some actual sort of

space between aisles and it pays off yeah there's so much personality I think Ann Patchett who is like one of my favorite authors she has a bookstore in Tennessee I think

Parnassus books or something. And people love going there because it's like infused with her personality. Maybe she's making, you know, book selections for people. Like you want to see people's book selections. Just like when people went to the video rental place back in the day, the independent video rental place and like the weird guy who worked there,

say, um, Quentin Tarantino. Yes. Quentin Tarantino. You want to see what Quentin Tarantino is recommending you rent, you know, stuff like that. I think books are like the only medium left where that happens. Like books don't have

Spotify yet. I mean, it's easy to buy digital ebooks and there's Kindle and all that. But like, for some reason, they've stuck around. It's true. And like my favorite local bookstore, You and Me Books on Mulberry Street in New York, it's open until 11pm. They have beautiful golden lighting in there. They have wine, people just hanging out. Where is

it on Mulberry. That's so exciting. It's at the bottom of Mulberry Street. It's great. Go to you and me on Mulberry and support your local independent bookstore. Like near all the Italian restaurants? No, it's south of that in Chinatown, opposite Columbus Park. Thank you so much for this digression. The reason we're talking about this is because there was a big story in Bloomberg about Barnes & Noble's comeback and also a profile of Sarah McNally in Vulture that is wild and worth reading just so you can count up all the names dropped in the profile.

And Bloomberg makes a big thing about how book talk is driving the resurgence, but they don't, as far as I could tell from reading it, offer much evidence that that's true. So I was going to ask what you guys think of that. So book talk is a fascinating phenomenon, and I think it really is driving a resurgence of...

fiction in general and of sci-fi, fantasy, romantic-y type fiction in particular. And also YA. YA books are 100% driven by BookTok these days. It's like this huge, huge driver of sales. Yeah, and it's definitely a thing that the 17-year-olds who have grown up just tapping at phones the whole time, it doesn't even really occur to them to get lost in a book until they find themselves

scrolling TikTok one day and suddenly all of the people they're following are raving about this book and that book and the other book. And it's an amazing way of getting new people into reading books. And then once you start, you join in and you start telling your friends, oh, you've got to read, you know, fourth wing or whatever. You have to. And next thing you know, like you have a whole new generation of book readers and people were really terrified that

this generation wasn't going to be reading books at all. They just didn't have the attention span for it, yada, yada. Turns out they are reading books. They're recommending the books to each other. And what's more...

They're buying these books in physical bookstores. It's amazing. Another factor is just that when e-books started to be a thing, I know a lot of publishers who were a little bit terrified of it because they thought it was going to cut into margins so aggressively that it would ruin the industry. But one thing that happened that nobody really expected was that it really revived demand for backlist books.

And I think that's part of what BookTok does is that somebody will get excited about a book that's not on the current publication schedule. So it's not going to be highlighted on the Today Show or whatever, but it starts going a little bit viral on the Internet and suddenly it's a bestseller because people are into it again. This happened with Bell Hooks' All About Love, which is a fantastic book. But there would have been, without the Internet, without BookTok, it would not have had this out of nowhere kind of revival.

So I think in that respect, if you're focusing on backlist titles, which also, you know, McNally Jackson does that a little bit. They really invested in putting backlist titles on the shelf. Yeah, they have their own imprint, right? Where they're bringing out backlist, like the New York Review. And yeah, read old books. Old books are amazing. Like every few years, Stoner by John Williams has another research and everyone goes, oh my God, that book is amazing. Which it is. It's an incredible book. I bought it. It's sitting on my desk. Yeah.

And where did you buy it, Emily? Amazon. Okay, Gen Xer. I do bookstores and Amazon. I'm all over the place.

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Okay, we have a special new segment called Egg Watch 2025. This will last for one episode or possibly more, depending on how long eggs are at the top of the Google search on what people are searching for. Emily, what is the price of a dozen eggs this week? Here's the latest. $7.09, wholesale price of a dozen eggs per USDA data on trading economics, the website. That is very high.

Egg prices vary from store to store. In some California supermarkets, you can get a dozen for $4. Some other California outlets, $8. Some places, limiting the number of cartons you can buy. Some places, free for all, doesn't matter. The bottom line, egg prices are high. Yes, I did do some reporting. I asked...

someone at the White House, what are you guys doing about eggs? What do you think about the egg crisis? They sent me a quote. I will summarize and quote from it for you right now. First, they blame this on the Biden administration and its slow and ineffective response to the avian influenza outbreak, which began in 2022. It's true that the bird flu is what is causing the problem with eggs right now. Then they told me

Quote, President Trump and incoming U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Rollins will take bold, decisive action to address the crisis. How?

Unclear. Refocusing inspections and protecting the health of the United States plants, animals, and natural resources while simultaneously lowering costs. That's from Anna Kelly, Deputy Press Secretary. And firing inspectors for the USDA. They didn't mention that part. Unclear. I don't know what's going to happen. Presumably that's part of their buyout program. Online and in stories by the media, I'm reading people saying things like,

Why even bother buying eggs? One quote I read this morning said, I'll just go out to eat. Because we all know that restaurants don't need to buy the eggs. They just come magically into the restaurant. I guess the point was it's so expensive to buy the eggs and prepare food at home. I might as well spend a lot of money doing something more fun, such as going out to eat. It's the vibe. Enjoy your breakfast vibe at Denny's. This has been Egg Watch 2025. Moving swiftly on...

Elizabeth, do you have a number? My number is 185,000. And that's the number of eggs a green crab can lay at one time. And

And I learned this from a story about green crab infestation that is affecting the eastern seaboard. Replace all of the chickens with green crabs and we solve our egg problem. This comes from a time story where there are ecologists who are suggesting that we kind of do that, maybe not eggs directly. But green crabs are edible and they are apparently delicious. And the reason why people don't cook them that much is that they're smaller, so...

A large green crab can be like four inches across as compared to like a Maryland blue crab, like nine inches maybe. But they are perfectly edible and people in Italy and Spain already eat them and they're a delicacy. And we don't really have a good way to stop them from massively increasing their population right now.

outside of that, partly because their larva can last on a ship or anything for like 60 days. And normally with other crabs that are not super human in terms of, or super, super crab, I guess, in terms of being able to be resilient in hostile environments, they can survive seemingly anything. One of the guys interviewed in this story said that he had tried to compost a bunch of them. So he thought he'd killed them. He put them in the compost and then discovered later that some of them disappeared. So...

So if you live in, let's say, New England-ish and green crabs are on the menu, do your part for the environment and eat them. Yeah, I'm all into eating crabs. They're delicious. They're just as delicious as eggs. And if crabs become cheaper than eggs, I will happily eat crabs all day long. Crabs and bacon does not have the same ring. Bacon and eggs. Bacon and crabs. Sounds painful. I agree.

going to have like a crab Benedict. Emily, what's your, that needs eggs, doesn't it? What's your number? 71%. That is the share of American women with college degrees born in 1980 who are married. 71%. That's compared to 52% of women who

without college degrees. This is the emerging marriage gap I wrote about in Axios this week, where marriage rates for college graduate women with bachelor's degrees are holding pretty steady while they're declining

kind of steeply for women without degrees. And I was surprised to learn this because when you read the media or listen to some people talk about the single cat ladies, the line you hear is just like, women with educations, they want cats. They don't want husbands. That's what you hear. Yeah. There was the football player, Harrison Buckner, Buckner, I don't remember, who got up as a commencement speaker at a college and told all the women in the audience that they'd been lied to and that they didn't really need to go to college and they should probably stay home and have babies. And

And that's such a potent line of rhetoric for conservatives who are talking, they believe, primarily to a non-college educated populace. But according to your data, you're more likely to be married if you have a degree. Far more likely to be married. I mean, college educated women are getting married later, but they are getting married. Their rates are holding remarkably steady. And that's as

the population of men with college degrees is shrinking because fewer men now go to college and graduate from college. So that, yeah, the female college graduates, they're all going out and marrying down and they're marrying guys who did not go to college. And apparently, according to this research, which I will give to Jessamyn so we can put in the show notes, it's called bachelors without bachelors. Get it? Apparently the college women marry like the highest earning non-college men. So

And there's even a chart that shows the income of the non-college men that are marrying up. I guess you call it marrying up. And it's way higher. And the rest of the men, their incomes are falling and they're not getting married.

married it's kind of a disaster in other words if you are a man and you want to make money in this modern america what matters is not whether or not you go to college it just matters whether you marry someone who went to college yeah also i do need to point out that statistically speaking emily you do have more cats than husbands i have so many cats right now you guys we just got the cutest new kittens how many cats do you have

Currently three cats, Penny, who's quite old now, 18, and then two new cats, kittens, that are, I'm surprised they haven't come in here while we were taping, Fitz and Billy. My number, just to bring things down to earth with a thud, is 25 million.

which is the number of dollars that Facebook has decided to give to Donald Trump in order to settle this ludicrous, very sort of slappy lawsuit that Trump brought against Facebook saying, you kicked me off the platform after January the 6th and you weren't allowed to do that, so pay me money. Of course, they had every right to do that. But by the same token, they kind of are in the mood of paying him money these days.

They're feeling bribey. This is very similar to the ABC settlement that Disney came to with Trump. Reportedly, CBS is also trying to, you know, throw money at him. Basically, the idea is even though these lawsuits that he filed against them are completely baseless, it makes sense to use them as an excuse to pay him money, because if you pay him money, then he will smile upon you and that will be good for your business. Yay.

That's it for the main show this week. We have a Slate Plus segment also on whether Elizabeth Spires has managed to find a CVS which she can unlock to face with her phone. We will try and work that one out. Otherwise, thanks very much for listening. Thanks to Merit Jacob and Jasmine Mollie for producing. And we will be back next week with more Slate Money.

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 at 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.