Trump Math & Techno-Fascism
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Hello and welcome to Sleep Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios with Emily Peck of Axios. Hello, hello. With Elizabeth Spires of New York Times. Hello. And with an incredibly special guest, zooming in from Washington, D.C., the one and only Kyle Chaker. Hello. Kyle, welcome. Who are you? Introduce yourself.

I am Kyle Chayka. I'm a New Yorker staff writer and author. Yeah, plug your books into your on-slate money. All right. Well, so my second most recent book is called Filter World: How Algorithms Flatten Culture.

It's about how digital platforms and algorithmic feeds are bad for the art we consume. I really like people who introduce their book by saying the word colon. The subtitle is important. Like when you sell your nonfiction book, they will be like, okay, but what's the subtitle? I think probably at least 50% of the conversations with my editor are like,

What is the subtitle going to be? But yes, Filterworld, go out and buy it at McNally Jackson or whatever your local bookstore is. Kyle is going to help us talk through...

The rise of the technocrats, which is a subject that he wrote about in The New Yorker this week. We are also going to talk about the guys running the government, people like Scott Besson and Donald Trump and their relationship with the truth and whether it matters whether they're telling the truth when...

They say that the private sector is in a recession or that they're going to sell 5 million gold card visas things. We are going to talk about black spatulas, of course, because we need to know what that was all about. Apparently they were unsafe for a minute, but now they're safe again. We have a Slate Plus segment on expensive food, things like... $18 strawberries. Strawberries and shrimp cocktails and that. There is, of course, an egg watch because we need an egg watch. It's all coming up.

on Slate Money. Get that Angel Reef special at McDonald's now. Let's break it down. My favorite barbecue sauce, American cheese, crispy bacon, pickles, onions, and a sesame seed bun, of course. And don't forget the fries and a drink. Sound good? Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. I participate in restaurants for a limited time. This episode of Slate Money is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from NerdWallet.

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Believe it.

And we've had a couple of examples this week, which make that hard to do. First of all, Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, came out with his big initial speech at the Australian embassy in Washington for some reason and said, oh, the entire private sector in the United States is in a recession. And the only reason we've been growing is because of, you know, Biden throwing money at the federal government or something, something. And.

That's just not true. And then a few days later, Donald Trump came out and said, I'm going to sell green cards for $5 million. I'm going to call them gold cards because I'm Donald Trump. Normal green cards are still green. But if you get one that, you know, is $5 million and it's a gold card, of course, we should mention here as someone who was on a green card for many years, green cards aren't green either. But that's a whole other issue. Wow, I didn't know that. The...

The interesting thing about the Trump announcement was he was like, just imagine how much money we could make for the federal government if we sold 5 million gold cards at $5 million each. In fact, I think we could probably sell 10 million gold cards at $5 million each. And that would be $50 trillion. And that would be enough to pay down the entire national debt and have $15 trillion left over. Wow.

which as a sheer matter of arithmetic, and later on in the show, we're going to talk about spatulas and some bad arithmetic. As a sheer matter of arithmetic, he is not wrong. If you sell 5 million gold cards at $5 million, that is $50 trillion. I was impressed by his math skills, actually.

But the problem is that it's not even close to reality. He's like three orders of magnitude off when it comes to how many of these things you could actually sell. We know how many of these things you could sell because number one, the UK and Australia have both had very similar programs and those peaked at much lower prices at maybe a couple of hundred applications per year.

And number two, the United States has had a very similar program for many, many years. It's called the EB-5. It doesn't cost $5 million. It costs roughly $1 million.

And the thing about the $1 million is it's an investment. It's not just a check you write to the government. So technically, your net worth doesn't go down in the way that it does if you write a $5 million check to the government and your net worth goes down by $5 million. And we know how many people have been applying for EB-5s. I did the math. The last eight full fiscal years that they've been issued, the average was about 8,800.

So that's a very sensible sort of upper bound for how many gold cards you could possibly issue because a gold card is on every single respect worse, less attractive than the EB5. Except it's gold. Except it has the name gold in the name. Exactly. So yeah, we're not selling 5 million of these things. We're selling maybe 5,000 of these things.

And I guess my question for Elizabeth is to what degree does it matter that these announcements from the president or the treasury secretary are just not in the realm of believability? Well,

Well, I think it matters less now than it's going to, because I've sort of been watching Trump voters react to things that they're expecting to happen and then they don't see them happen. Or the administration will say, you know, we're not going to touch this part of the government that actually affects you. And then they see it actually affect them. And I think after a point, you know, people just get tired of not knowing what's going on, even if they don't think that the administration is intentionally lying to them. It does create tension.

an environment of uncertainty. And I get the sense with stuff like this, what happens is Trump says he comes up with an idea because he doesn't actually know how parts of the government work. And then whenever somebody points out that, you know, we already have a very similar program, he just kind of doubles down because his rationale for this new program is that he says that he wants the best and brightest students at the top universities to have an incentive to

stay instead of going back to their home countries if they're, you know, foreign students. But we already have incentives for that. This I absolutely love, right? That this is one of the bright ideas. Again, like arithmetically, it's just wild. One of the bright ideas behind this proposal is that it's a variation of the idea that if you

you know, graduate with a graduate degree in STEM, then you automatically get a work visa or a green card or something, right? Which a lot of the megatypes really don't.

don't like that idea almost certainly won't happen. But what Trump is saying is that, look, if you graduate from Stanford with a computer science degree and then you get a job offer from Google, then Google is just going to write a $5 million check to the government so that you can work for them. And yeah, Emily...

I don't think so, honey. Like, that's not going to happen. That is way too high a price for a Google or any tech company to pay for talent. You just pay a little more for domestic talent. It's very much one of those what could a banana cost moments, right? Yes. Well, you know, you'd pay $5 million to get a good graduate. But Kyle, you're the expert on, you know, sort of semiotics and how these things are both presented and received. Like, what's your take on all this? Yeah.

I kind of like the idea of turning the US into Soho House. You know, you're charging an aspirational amount of money. You're only letting in the best of the best who are really just a bunch of boring bankers and lawyers anyway, and gradually degrading the vibes. I would love to know, like, if Soho House started charging $5 million as an admission fee, like how many people would pay that?

Yeah, I mean, the gold card kind of gives it all away. I think it's like the symbol that you want to have, or it's a direct route to pleasing Donald Trump with a symbol that he enjoys. Maybe you get a gold medal card, like the card could actually be gold. That would be cool. Yeah, Amex does that, right? They have a solid, well not solid gold, but they have like a metal card that is colored gold. It

It shows how bad of an investor Donald Trump is because the magic of immigration, right, is that you let people who need an out from wherever they're currently living and they come to the United States and they take advantage of the resources we have and the educational opportunities and the entrepreneurial opportunities and they become the next CEO of Google or Microsoft or whatever. Right.

Yeah.

Well, again, it goes back to him not actually understanding what programs we have that are available. Part of the reason why Steve Bannon hates Elon Musk is because Bannon wants to do away with the H-1B visa program, which allows companies to hire talented programmers or whoever Trump imagines are not staying when they graduate from Stanford or whatever.

I don't see why there would be any incentive to do what he's talking about as opposed to just keeping H-1B visas. And as far as Felix's question goes, though, I mean, it is interesting to chew on that for a while because...

Does it matter that the president and the treasury secretary are saying things that aren't true? We know that Americans don't trust political leaders anymore anyway. So were they ever believed in the first place? I think the question of does it matter is like really deep and scary. No, I think, I think Emily, that's an incredibly good point, right? Which is that Trump has learned on some deeply, you know, visceral level that,

That for not maybe not most of the country, but for a huge proportion of the country, whenever Joe Biden came out and said something that was true, millions, if not tens of millions of Americans just didn't believe it and wouldn't believe it.

So now he's coming out and saying things that are false and tens of millions of people just don't believe it. But like, it doesn't matter whether it's true or false, because either way, an enormous chunk of the country just isn't going to believe you. So once it doesn't matter whether it's true or false, why not just say the thing that sounds the best? But Kyle, what do you think about whether saying the truth matters anymore?

I feel like it's just projecting an image of a different America now, whether it's the gold visa or the AI-generated video of Gaza Riviera. Like, these things are blatantly false. They don't even seem that appealing to, like, a populist mindset. And yet they're creating this, like, rebranding or these tent poles or a new image of something that he's working toward. And maybe the image is just the point, like...

there's something to see, there's something to click on, there's a new news item. I think that's right. The image is the point. And the image has like this meme power. The Gaza video is a classic example. Like anyone who's seen it once, that thing just sticks in your head. It's incredibly powerful as a meme, as is this idea of the gold card. It's a powerful meme. And he's creating these powerful memes that stick in people's heads. And

And in a world where there is no generally agreed upon yardstick of truth, everyone's just like, oh, you know, great, memes. Meanwhile, what's actually happening is like the doge winnowing away of the federal government. Like there's the images being projected and then there's the reality of things actually happening.

And this is just like phase two of the playbook because first the dictator destabilizes the truth by telling lies or undercutting whatever truth is out there like they did with Biden for four years and Obama. Before that, you say everything they say isn't true. The statistics are lies. You destabilize the truth to the point where then you can lie with ease. No one trusts you. You don't matter anymore. When Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, said the private sector was in a recession, the markets...

didn't really care. That's how much you know no one believes these guys is because the markets, they don't respond. A normal treasury secretary saying something like that, I think, would have freaked people out, right? Yeah, I think if people thought that the treasury secretary was deeply mal-informed, then that would worry the markets. But I think what Steve Mnuchin demonstrated in the first Trump administration...

And remember, he was pretty much the only member of the cabinet to survive the whole four years of the first Trump administration. Is that part of the job of being a successful treasury secretary under Trump is that you go out on the telly and you say things that are just completely outrageous. And everyone's like, what the actual fuck?

And then you go back to the treasury building and you do more or less sensible things. And so long as you perform outrageousness on the telly, Trump will be happy with you. Yeah. I understand Trump supporters wanting to believe anything he says, and then convincing themselves bending over backwards, logically to find an explanation for all of all of it is true. But I,

I am completely baffled by the fact that all of them are so utterly immune to the cringiness of Trump. Like the Gaza AI video is a good example. But also Elon Musk, you know, on TV wearing sunglasses and calling himself a meme generator. I just...

I don't know how normal people read that and think, yes, we want these people in charge of our country. It seemed like another performance. But Kyle, isn't that the playbook that we started already in Trump one with Kellyanne Conway and, you know, everyone just coming out and just being maximally cringe and just sort of, I guess, opening the Overton window of cringe.

The Overton Window of Grunge is very good. Yeah, it seems theatrical. It's like meant to generate the spectacle. But to me, like what struck me so much the second time around is it's more extreme. It's more absurd. It's more ridiculous. It's more like episodes of Veep, I guess.

Cringe too, even cringier. Yes, maximum cringe. Elon Musk in the t-shirt and the jacket with the hat, with the sunglasses. It's just like... In a cabinet meeting. This is believable to no one. It's a TV show even more so this time. His outfit is so wild. I spent like five minutes just staring at the picture of him at the cabinet meeting because it's so cringe. It's so over the top. I can't believe it.

It's amazing, though, like how Elon, arguably even more than Trump, has an intuition for the power of the visual. He knows that if he turns up to a cabinet meeting and stands up while everyone else is sitting down and wears a T-shirt and a baseball cap while everyone else is wearing a suit.

that is going to create a photograph that people are going to see and it is going to underscore all manner of very obvious semiotics. And if you are shameless in the way that Elon is,

then those semiotics only work to your advantage. Isn't that also the Silicon Valley aesthetic though? You know, everybody made a big deal about how the tech industry upended dressing for work because Mark Zuckerberg and other people would show up to investor meetings wearing a hoodie. Yeah. And it's also just the way of using your hoodie or your outfit as a way of standing out in contradistinction to everyone else. If everyone else wasn't wearing a suit, it wouldn't work.

But, you know, it's a little bit like that meme photo of Luigi being perp walked from the helicopter when he arrived in New York and everyone's wearing black and he's wearing bright orange and he's right in the middle. And you're like, oh, this is a great photograph to create an antihero or a hero, depending on how you think about it.

The symbolism is also a little bit like Elon is not part of the government, even though he is. Like here he is standing out. He's the, what, IT guy or whoever he described himself. When actually like he's at the heart of all of this stuff.

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Give it a try after this episode at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. But Kyle, this is actually the perfect segue to talk about your piece in the New Yorker this week, which is all about this intersection of technocrats and government and how this is nothing new. You go back to like Japan in the 1930s.

Yeah, it came from this academic Janice Mimora's work on Japan in the 30s, which I found really fascinating. And her thesis was that the technocrats were the fascists, basically. Her usage of the phrase techno-fascism was technocratic fascism.

And she found that this group of bureaucrats in the Japanese government kind of slowly took power over the course of the 1930s and made themselves the kind of totalitarian rulers of the government, even though they were faceless and not very well known and not popular.

you know, responsible to any kind of voters. They kind of operated under the guise of the emperor and they were who pushed the government into this level of extremism and over committed to World War II. So it was kind of a creepy parallel to the technocrats taking over the government right now and not being responsible to anyone. So if I think about the most technocratic governments, you know, of my lifetime,

I would think very much Obama and then maybe Biden in second place. You know, Obama was the president who came up with the U S digital service and was super technocratic and prided himself on that and had a lot of support within Silicon Valley. Those technocrats of course, were not fascistically inclined. So when and how do the technocrats become fascists?

I think to me, one of the big differences is that Obama still appeared to be in control of the government. Like he was working with these new platforms. He was kind of in league with Zuckerberg or whoever and took advantage of the new possibilities of the internet.

But now it's like the technocrats are there in front of the camera, you know, represented by Elon Musk, really driving the agenda. And I think Janice Mimora made this point to me, too, that the techno-fascist agenda is really toward this collision of capital and governments and is like engaged in really pushing forward technology.

an innovation on an industrial scale. I mean, I kind of get it, but I also look at places like USAID or the National Institutes of Health or NOAA or all of these...

government agencies that are being gutted by Trump. And they are deeply technocratic agencies and they're full to the brim with PhDs. And they are like, in my mind, the platonic ideal of like a technocratic government. I guess what I'm trying to understand here, there seems to be this implication of what you're saying, that if you just give technology

technocrats, their druthers, they will produce something fascist. Whereas what we have seen over decades of these agencies, it turns out if you give, you know, technocrats, their druthers, they do lots of really good work until now. Well, it seems like the big difference, right, is that people like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land, the modern embodiment of this, who all these Silicon Valley billionaires listen to, are really envisioning a sort of, you know, quasi-

privatized government where there's a CEO leader and otherwise there's basically a feudal state, which I think, you know, there's a big difference between that and somebody who works at the NIH and has a PhD. Yeah, exactly. 100%. So, Kyle, explain to me that difference. Like, how do we suddenly...

switch? Is it like as violent of a switch as it seems from the technocrats working for the greater good of the world to the technocrats working for whatever this far right agenda is? I do feel like it's a difference between the public sector and the private sector. Like in this case, the technocrats are coming from Silicon Valley, from these private companies, a lot of which are owned by Elon Musk and

And there is a different agenda. Like the, the techno fascist, let's say goal in this case is not improving the U S's image abroad or creating a broader international piece. It's like pushing forward the Silicon Valley agenda, which I think right now is a lot about artificial intelligence and like

doubling down on microchip manufacturing and data centers. I think in comparing it to the Japan situation again, the technocrats that took over in the 1930s were all from the colonialist projects in Manchuria. So after the Japanese colonized Manchuria and northeastern China,

they created this separate government almost that industrialized that territory. And then once that was done and everything was running, they kind of took the same strategy back to Japan itself. So it is this kind of like separate thing that comes back to take over the main government again. So the difference between a technocrat and a techno-fascist is the technocrat believes in

the public good, the public sector, and the value of government. And the techno-fascist believes we are smart, tech is good, the private sector is better, and we will just do that. Is that the difference? Yeah, I think pushing forward the technological agenda, the technology itself becomes the motivating force of the government. So instead of believing in government and public good, they believe in

technology as a thing that is good and should be advanced at all costs over the humans. Yeah, perhaps it's like a moral goal or the best route to global power. So technology isn't the means to the end. It is the end. I think it is the end itself. Yeah. It very much feels like the end, doesn't it? Yeah.

Is there an analog to the kind of accelerationism part of the techno-fascist movement where, you know, Nick Land and people like that believe that part of what you're going to do is destroy government so that the only option you have left is capitalism? Kyle and I are both, you know, art world adjacent. And if you look at the futurists in Italy in the 1930s or, you

in the UK for that matter, people like Boccioni, that was very much part of their, I mean, there was this thing called the Futurist Manifesto where this is basically exactly what you're talking about. And there's something quite Marxian about all of this as well. There's like this great sort of class struggle that's going on and it all comes to a

violent end of some description and some of it is left-wing and some of it is right-wing and some of it is a little bit more peaceful and some of it is a little bit more sort of glorification of violence. But yeah, absolutely. There's, there's a deep sort of millenarianism in, in what you see in the thirties in many different parts of the world.

With the academics I was talking to also about accelerationism, the question was, what is the outcome of the accelerationism? Like in the short term, accelerationism says chaos is coming. Let's embrace the chaos. Let's exaggerate the contradictions of capitalism and just lean in.

But then the left accelerationists like Marx Strand is like, what will come after is the proletarian revolution and a great communist state. The right version is like, I don't know, maybe an authoritarian power. And then the techno accelerationist idea at the end is the kind of technologized government, maybe automated by AI, and which we're all just subjects.

Fun stuff. At the bottom of it all is just a bunch of people who don't care about human beings. Yeah, this is like so anti-democratic and so anti-humanist. And it just, I can't stop thinking about the Trump voters. Like, I want to know if they were voting to be ruled by robots. Like, I don't think so. I don't think this is what they want either. Definitely not. That's not on their radar, I don't think. Just to sort of like fast forward a little bit, like what we saw earlier

from the accelerationism of the 1930s, both from the fascists and from the communists, was actually an acceleration into communism.

the Holocaust into mass global violence into the second world war, which was like the deadliest thing the world has ever seen. And then that just became so obviously unacceptable and so obviously terrible that then there was that big swing back to the United Nations and the, you know, 75 years of peace ish. And, you know, maybe now that,

There's basically almost no one alive who can remember the Second World War anymore and can personally remember the horrors of it. Certainly no one in government. We are repeating that history. Yeah, and we have a vice president who went to Germany and was like,

People need to stop feeling so guilty about that stuff. Like, JD Vance is like an internet accelerationist. Like, he is the guy who's closest to the Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land wing of all of this ideology. And my favorite, to go back to Felix's Italian subject, my favorite thing about the Italian futurists was that they hated pasta.

Pasta was anti-accelerationist. What? Why? It makes you sluggish. You know, it's weakening the Italian people. In keeping with all of the biohacking that Silicon Valley people are obsessed with. Carnivore diets. The futurists were biohacking themselves by abjuring carbs. That was not a winning message.

Get the Angel Reef Special at McDonald's now. Let's break it down. My favorite barbecue sauce, American cheese, crispy bacon, pickles, onions, and a sesame seed bun, of course. And don't forget the fries and a drink. Sound good? Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. I participate in restaurants for a limited time. This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game, shifting a little money here, a little there, just hoping it all works out?

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Kyle, you've done it again. Perfect segue into biohacking and what we eat. And Emily, do we care about eating microplastics? No. And this is the week I learned about Betteridge's rule. The Betteridge's rule of headlines? Yes. Oh my God. Betteridge's rule of headlines is the number one rule of all journalism. If there is a piece of journalism with a question mark at the end of it, then the answer to that question is always no. So all the stories said...

should you throw away your black plastic spatula? The answer is no. That's the rule. And it turns out to be accurate. There was a study, I guess a month or so ago that came out and said, oh my God, black plastic utensils in the kitchen. They're killing us all. It's really bad. Bleaching into our bodies. We're all made of plastic and we're all going to die. That's not exactly what the study said, but just let me have this. Then

More recently, someone, a scientist, was reading, was actually reading the full study and noticed

A simple math error, right? It was, what's the math error, Felix? It was like six times 70,000 is 42,000. Yes, which is not correct. So basically, just to oversimplify a bit, someone did some math and worked out that under certain conditions, if you used a black plastic spatula in your skillet, it would create, you know, 38,000 Watsits in your food.

And the most number of Wotsits in your food that you should be able to ingest on a daily basis is 42,000 Wotsits. And so, you know, the idea being that you're already basically pushing up against your daily limit just from a single skillet's worth of black plastic Wotsits. And so everyone freaks out and they're like, you have to throw out your black plastic spatula because it is giving you a massive overdose of Wotsits. And it turns out that

the daily like what's it allowance it's not 42,000 it's 420,000 it's

six times 70,000, which is 420,000, not 42,000. And if you just do that math, you're like, well, in that case, even if all of this research is correct, I'm getting less than 10% of the perfectly normal amount of what's-its from my skillet. And so who cares? Yes. Amazing. Just a math error. The guy who caught it was like an expert in the field of black plastic what's-it limits. You do not need to be an expert in the field. You just need to be able to multiply six by 70,000. You just need to do the math.

Incredible stuff. And there's a piece in Bloomberg this week that inspired this segment that OXO, which is the maker of kitchen utensils, one in 12 kitchen utensils sold in the world is made by OXO. They've seen a decline in black plastic utensil sales because of this study and all the articles. The Atlantic had one that was like, throw out your black plastic spatula right away. Do it now. Okay.

Slate, of course, did not have a story like that. They had a very good piece on why it's perfectly fine and you can hold on to your black plastic spatula. But anyway, the zombie fact about black plastic spatula, which I love the term zombie fact, has led to this big decline. And now everyone's spending more money on wood and stainless steel utensils, which aren't as good. Did any of you throw out your black plastic spatulas? I looked at them suspiciously.

I was like, what's going on here? Was there some Kyle Chaker side-eye going on? There definitely was. So I wonder if all the utensils were white plastic, would people have just seen them as cleaner somehow? Yes. I think it's totally aesthetic. Unambiguously, yes. And partly just for semiotic reasons that white is seen as being cleaner than black. Although we should mention, since I think you wrote an article about this once,

the whole meme we have so many memes in this week's episode the whole meme of internet videos where people are wearing black plastic gloves as a sign of being hygienic yeah it's just the cooking videos where the the guy is like cutting meat with his big black gloves which i find kind of gross personally black plastic gloves they do weirdly in the world of like tiktok they can uh

hygiene and cleanliness. Yeah, but black plastic spatulas evidently don't. But the idea, the underlying idea behind the research is not black plastic is black, therefore it's bad. It's that black plastic is made by recycling old electronics and old electronics have all manner of weird, like fire retardant chemicals in them and whatnot, which winds up in the black

plastic spatula. And then if you use the spatula in the hot pan and some of those chemicals will leap from the spatula into the plant, you know, does this happen at the margin? Maybe, probably, perhaps. But, you know, we live in the modern world and we are constantly ingesting all manner of weird shit and we all seem to be fine.

Yeah, and the slate piece pointed out you would have to leave the black plastic spatula in the hot pan for like an hour. And then there would be some bad effect. And as the slate piece points out, that's not typical, I hope. We're all going to die full of regrets in microplastics anyway. So I don't have the bandwidth in my brain to think about this too much. This is the thing about the finite human lifespan.

What's happening? I'm sure that black plastics will kill us all eventually if we live to 1005. But given that none of us are going to live to longer than 100, like something else is certain to kill us before the microplastics do.

And everyone's fine with like little packages of plastic in their dishwasher. Like the cognitive dissonance of everything is just mind-blowing. Yeah, I know, right? Like we've moved from a world where people would very carefully and laboriously pour powder into a little tray in the dishwasher to a new world where you just throw a plastic pot in there. Yeah.

I mean, like, Tide Pod is for clothes, it's not for food. They're so expensive. Just squeeze the gel. Sorry, the Cascade Pod or the Finish Pod. We're a Finnish family, I have to say. I did fall into this rabbit hole recently with cutting boards. And there was a TikTok influencer, like Chef Guy, who I was really into. And he was using these black plastic rubber cutting boards from Japan.

And they looked really cool. And he justified his use of them by saying that they are actually healthier and they shed less plastic than, you know, your traditional white one, which shows all the marks and blah, blah, blah. And so I completely fell for this. I got the cutting board. It was like,

quite expensive. And I love the cutting board and it's like softer and it feels healthier or something. But I, I am sure it is putting just as much plastic into my brain as the white stuff. Like I'm under no illusion about the actual healthiness, but aesthetically it's very cool.

I think wood cutting boards are supposed to be good, right? The wood ones are the best. There's a lot of controversy about wooden chopping boards because obviously you don't put them in the dishwasher so you don't get that sort of incredibly good cleaning. And if you're doing something like chopping meat, especially chicken on a wooden chopping board, getting all of that raw chicken out of the wooden chopping board by just washing it with soap and hot water is surprisingly difficult.

And raw chicken is just the worst. Never touch raw chicken. Cutting boards really trigger people. Whatever you do, people, if you learn one thing from Slate Money this week, do not wash your chickens. Come on, people. We have learned this by now. Who washes chicken? People wash their chickens. I don't know why. They just do.

The wood cutting board thing too. It's like, okay, you're eating little bits of wood and our gallbladders or whatever don't digest wood as well anymore because we're not cavemen. Like which, are you going to choose your wood shavings or your plastic shavings? I don't know. Wood seems healthier. What makes your food taste better? The only safe route is to just pull spinach directly out of the ground and put it in your mouth with no intervention. Eat dirt. It works.

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Okay, folks, we need to come back to the one and only Shaina Roth for Egg Watch. Shaina, welcome. What is your preferred number of minutes to boil an egg? I think what I usually do is I think I do like five and then you kind of let them sit. I like a really if I'm going to hard boil an egg, I like it to be like fully hard boiled.

Yeah, but who wants a hard-boiled egg? You want a soft-boiled egg so it's nice and runny in the middle. Right, right. Yeah. I don't know. To me, that sounds very Jane Austen. Oh, the Onsen egg. Sous-vide it and all of that kind of stuff. Anyway, we are not here to talk about egg cooking techniques. We are here to talk about the breaking news in the egg market. See what I did there? Yeah.

What is it, Shana? So the latest is that the Donald Trump administration has some sort of shades of a plan. The agriculture secretary announced on Wednesday that there's a plan to invest a billion dollars in strategies to rein in soaring egg prices. It's a plan for a strategy. It's a plan for a strategy. We all know how well that works. They are hopeful that the market could stabilize in another three to six months.

which sounds to me a little bit too optimistic given that they don't necessarily have a really specific plan. There's like this five pronged strategy that includes like improving biosecurity on farms, providing financial assistance to farmers. Yeah, this sounds like

long term. Emily, what is the USDA saying about egg prices? USDA saying egg prices are going to go up 40% this year. Well, how much have they gone up already? Are eggs going to get more expensive than they are already? Or is this about it? Oh, no, they're going to get 40% more expensive in 2025 than they currently are, according to the USD. Oh, so this isn't like from Jan 1 2025. This is from like

late February 2025. Correct. This projection just came out this past week. Yeah. And I think it came out after the concept of a plan that the Trump administration released. And P.S., part of their plan involves importing eggs, which, as The New York Times pointed out on Friday, is going to be really tricky because of the tariffs they're also planning on putting on imports. So there was some speculation in this Times piece that eggs would become like...

A leverage item in tariff negotiations, which is hilarious to me. Maybe, and just work with me here, instead of tariffing the eggs when they come in from Mexico, you just break like a quarter of the eggs. And that has the same economic effect.

I'm feeling Trump's going to try to import them from Russia. So that's probably the solution. Like those eggs from when Russia had, you know. Like Fabergé eggs? Yes. Fabergé eggs. Thank you. There you go. Replace hen eggs with Fabergé eggs. I think this is the most Trumpy thing you could possibly Trump. Very pretty, not very tasty. And that was Egg Watch. Shana Roth, thank you for joining us for Egg Watch. Always a pleasure.

Okay, we should have a numbers round here. Emily, did you bring a number this week? I did. My number is 5.01, or $5.01. That is the average Tooth Fairy payout in 2024, and it is down...

from 2023. The kids are getting less money per tooth. In 2023, it was $5.84. This is from a survey of parents from a dental company that they've been tracking this for 27 years. The Tooth Fairy payout in 1998 was only $1.30, which is about $2.50 in today's dollars. So Tooth Fairy prices have gone up or the payouts have gone up, but right now they're going down, which feels like a bad sign somehow.

Is this a recession indicator? Could it be? Yes, it has that bite. I'm going to tell my nine-year-old that the tooth fairy is now operating in a deflationary environment. You should. Well, I have no idea about tooths. Like, how old are you when you stop losing your baby teeth? Tooth.

I think it depends on the kid. Around like 10, 11, 12 is when they stop. They're definitely old enough to be into Sephora at that point. Yes. I feel like your last tooth, you just take that money and go straight to Sephora, but you don't get very far with $5 at Sephora. You're already using the anti-aging cream on your face. Yeah. You're going to Sephora with your tooth fairy money to buy anti-aging cream. Yeah.

Can you get Sephora points instead? Like just go direct from the Tooth Fairy. The Tooth Fairy will stop giving cash and will start just giving Sephora credits. Or Roblox books or whatever those are. Well, I mean, okay, Kyle Chaker, master of the segue. I will just use that to segue to my number, which is $9.50.

And of course, as Emily will correct me, there's 9.50, which is a number of dollars, which is $9.50, which is the price right now as we are recording on Friday.

of A Good Snowman is Hard to Build, a downloadable game for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, which you can buy on itch.io. But if you go to itch.io and try and buy this for $9.50, you will not be paying $9.50 because the price changes every hour. And the price is the temperature in London in Celsius multiplied by 10.

So the temperature in London right now is 9.5 degrees Celsius. And so they've multiplied it by 10. And so the price is $9.50. When I checked this last night, it was nighttime in London and the temperature in London was

1.5 degrees Celsius, and so the price of the game was $1.50. And apparently, and obviously, if the temperature in Celsius drops to zero, which is 32 degrees Fahrenheit, then you get to download the game for free. If the temperature drops below zero, which it does on a not irregular basis in London, you still only get it for free. The developer will not pay you to download the game. Why?

Dynamic pricing games. Uber should do this too. I don't get it. I just think if you've got a game about a snowman, there's some conceptual link there. Okay. This is an art project. The idea is you have to build a snowman. And it's obviously harder to build a snowman when it's hot than when it's cold. Okay. But it's on the computer, so it doesn't matter, actually. It's just a gimmick to sell the game? Yeah.

I don't know. I just have questions, okay? You're just not very romantic, Emily. Who's not? Where is your whimsy? Elizabeth, what's your number? My number is 50,000, and that's square feet. And that is how large the Academy Awards red carpet is. And it turns out it's been made by a guy named Steve, who makes it in Georgia for years and years and years. Wait, is it a new carpet every year? Yes.

Steve, huh? But one year, Steve decided to change the color. The Academy agreed to change the color to a champagne. And there was a lot of backlash. So now it is back to a proprietary color called Academy Red. You need the hex code for that one.

Wait, the Oscars are this weekend, right? Tomorrow night? Sunday night? The Oscars are tomorrow. So have they got some kind of IP rights over the color? If someone else uses that color, do they get to see you? I think Steve owns the IP because it's his company and I think he developed the color.

Good for Steve. Well done, Steve. Also, Steve used to be a roadie for Motley Crue. That was his prior job. What a career. He's still alive. He lived to tell the tale. Oh,

All right, Kyle, what's your number? Okay, my number is 43.3%. And it is the number of people in Washington, DC, where I live, who work for the federal government. So almost 50% of the population here. I feel like that has to be a percentage of the workforce, not of the population.

Well, maybe, yeah, maybe I need to do more research here. But it's quite a lot of people here. And I think we're all just kind of staring down the barrel of a lot of them losing their jobs, and possibly the agencies. But this will be good for rents in DC, right? This could ultimately mean DC starts becoming affordable again? I think so. I mean, my aim is for them to turn all of the big agency buildings downtown into kind of brutalist apartments.

Kind of like the Barbican. Hell yeah. Can you imagine the HUD building as residential? That'd be so cool. Yeah, it's going to be the new Brooklyn, I think. All the hipsters are going to move to the mall. The one thing that would persuade me to move to Washington would be if they turned the FBI building into a residential, like move into the penthouse. There you go. So it's a rehabilitation plan for a fine swamp. I can't believe it.

believe that. I mean, I was looking at a jobless claims chart this week, you know, and it spikes up and just thinking about how like, usually the government is wanting to create jobs and is coming out and saying, we created these jobs and we're doing this to create more jobs and the jobs numbers are fine and good. And like, we're on it. And like,

this government is destroying jobs. And when you look at the job chart of people filing for unemployment, it's going up because the government is doing it. It's just so bizarre to me. Like these people are going to be filing for unemployment. Who do you think is paying for that? The people that used to pay them to do actual productive work, just like crazy. They really weaponized public sentiment on the right against government workers by just conflating it with big government altogether. You know, I see a lot of

People on the right just being completely unsympathetic to all these people who are losing their jobs, partly because they don't understand what they do. But also they just assume that they're all indicative of waste and spending and they're lazy. And also Washington, like most major cities, but probably even more than most major cities, is considered to be just a hotbed of liberal politics.

And so if all those people lose their jobs, so much the better. But like, okay, so most of the workers or a large share of the workers, as Kyle just said, in Washington work for the federal government. But most federal workers do not live in Washington, D.C. They live all around the country. Like I was looking at something from Atlanta. People in Atlanta are really worried. You know, CDC cuts. What happens to job markets?

there like it's all over the country it's not just dc even the national park service rangers like they are everywhere and they're just those stories struck me the most for some reason like these park rangers and caretakers getting thrown out of their jobs like did we talk about the guy who had the keys to the toilets no

Kyle, do you remember this one? Yeah, I mean, it was in one national park or other, and they fired the guy who had the keys to the toilets, and so there was just no more bathroom. If you found yourself stuck in the toilet, the one guy who could unlock you was fired. You know, don't the Republicans love nature and stuff? No, no. These are the rangers. Only if you're carrying a gun and shooting an animal. Only if they can drill in the middle of it. There's oil in the nature. They like it. Yeah.

All right. I think that's it for us this week. Many, many thanks to Kyle Jacob for coming on. It's been absolutely fantastic having you. Very fun. Thanks also to Shana Roth, the queen of the egg watch, to Jasmine Molly, to Merritt Jacob, and mostly to all of you guys who keep on emailing us on slate money at slate.com. You are brilliant. We love you. And we will be back next week with even more slate money.

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