Introducing Slate Money: The Week of Minor Apocalypses
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Hey there, it's Michela. Thanks for joining us during the holidays. While our team's taking a break, I want to share a podcast with you that I think you could be interested in. The show is called Slate Money, and it's a podcast from Slate. Every week, hosts and reporters Felix Salmon, Emily Peck, and Elizabeth Spires discuss important stories from the worlds of business and finance.

The episode that I have to share with you today is called The Week of Minor Apocalypses. It was originally published on December 7th and reports on a few things that have been in the news. One, the public conversation around the failures of the U.S. healthcare system, sparked by the shocking murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

And two, how South Korea and France followed Germany in having a governmental meltdown. And what's going on with all this political chaos? There's also a discussion on a piece that's in The Ringer about why headlights are just way too bright and what, if anything, is being done about it. So if you like what you hear, I encourage you to follow Sleep Money wherever you get your podcasts. Now, here's Felix. Hello!

And welcome to Slate 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 Slate, New York Times, places like that. Hello. We are going to talk about the craziness that is happening in democracies around the world. We've had various crazy in France. We've had various crazy in South Korea. And whether things are just...

going off the rails generally in the world. We are going to talk about headlights and what on earth is happening to them and whether they're blinding people and the roads are becoming less safe as a result. We have a Slate Plus segment, which is ostensibly about Bitcoin, but somehow segues into a discussion about glass technology.

And of course, we are going to start by talking about the pretty tragic news in Manhattan this week, where an executive was killed and we're going to talk a bit about health insurance companies. It's all coming up. Slate money. So as you have undoubtedly heard, the big news.

Business news of the week was the cold-blooded assassination of a healthcare executive on the street in midtown Manhattan, which, first of all, like, it's terrible. And he has kids and he was 50 years old. And it's just genuinely tragic. And second of all, there has been

This quite loud and not particularly subtle sort of reaction of happiness and glee on the socials, not just from the sort of pseudonymous trolls on Twitter, but from actual people using their real names. It turns out this may or may not be a surprise to you that people really hate health insurers.

And I guess Elizabeth Spires is here to sympathize with them? Well, here's the thing. I don't think that what people are expressing so much is clear happiness about the death of this specific person. I think what's happening is...

Everyone in America has a horror story about health insurance, maybe more than any other industry. It's something that affects every person individually or somebody that they know. And we just have nationally a sort of collectively bad experience with

with health insurance companies. And all of this is happening. It's the backdrop of a lot of specific things happening with UnitedHealthcare, which is the company in America most responsible for denying coverage for insurance claims. They deny around a third of insurance claims. That's the highest share for any health insurance company. Yes. Also, there's some weird stuff

going on with United anyway. They're under investigation for potential insider trading. They're being sued by a fireman's pension because of that. We still don't really know what the motive of the assassin was, but the reaction on the internet was mostly people who just, it immediately made people think of potential motives because everybody's just had these horrible experiences. Right. There's comments like prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers and things like that. Just...

I think for me, it was shocking to see. I don't know if shocking is the right word. It was shocking that a CEO was shot to death in Midtown Manhattan in the morning in broad daylight by a guy on a bike. And then it was sort of surprising and a little...

It was a little sickening, Elizabeth, to see people attached with their names. It was like university professors, academics being like, I don't condone murder, but da-da-da-da-da. And it was just like, no, no. No, don't say that. I understand. And I joined the crowd who has issues with health insurance companies and the health insurance industry in the United States, all of it. But

I think it was surprising and a little kind of gross to see the reaction on social media. I think most of the reaction, though, was not that. I think when anything bad happens, there are going to be trolls and shit posters. But most of what I saw was people telling their own personal horror stories. You know, there were people working in pediatric neurology who were saying, you know,

My kids that I treat can't get a drug that we know is perfectly effective for them because they're required to take a drug that we know isn't until they have so many seizures that it becomes life and death matter. Anybody who's had a kid in pediatric oncology, you're dealing with maybe the worst thing that could happen in your life and you're dealing with denials from an insurance company that could potentially bankrupt you. I mean, these are things that really just point to the fact that we have such a weird

you know, screwed up healthcare system because we have this sort of combination of public and private. And the private aspect of it really is geared toward profits and very often at the expense of patient care. And that's what I think people are enraged about. Okay. So this is where I need to come in and like defend the health insurers, because there's an interesting dichotomy going on with the

healthcare in the United States, which as we know, and we've talked about this many times, is by far the most expensive healthcare in the world. America spends way more money on healthcare than any other country for worse outcomes than any long list of countries that you might want to mention. It's an incredibly inefficient and incredibly expensive system. And the insurers are kind of the bad cops who are keeping it in control. When

We talk about something like, my kid with cancer needs this cancer drug, or I need this surgery, or whatever it is, whatever piece of healthcare that our doctor has prescribed to us. We kind of accept, almost without complaint, the absolutely insane reality

nominal cost of that. We're like, well, this is a cancer drug that costs $200,000 and my insurer won't pay it. And the problem is the cancer drug costs $200,000 and there is no incentive for anyone in the healthcare system to pull back on prescribing such things. The professionals in the healthcare system earn vastly more money than they do in any other country. You get, you know,

residents and doctors and surgeons who make, you know, start at like half a million and go up into the millions very quickly. There are people who are incredibly highly paid. The only break on any of this kind of runaway spending is the insurers who are like, look, if you want to be in network, we're going to cap the amount that you can charge us at some point. The dumbest subplot to this whole story this week was the thing where people got up in arms about

Anthem, Blue Cross, saying that they were going to cap the amount they were going to spend on anesthetics in certain surgeries. And everyone was like, this is terrible. I'm going to have to start paying for the anesthetist if my surgery runs over. And it's like, no, it's not that. It's just that the insurance company is trying to say, look, if you're doing the surgery, this is how much we're going to pay for the anesthesiologist. And they are trying to keep this thing under control. If there was no one keeping it under control...

then we would rapidly have health care costs like above 100% of GDP. It would be insane. I think two of your assumptions are wrong. One is that health insurance companies make health care in America more efficient. They don't. They add a huge level of administrative burden that's incredibly costly. They don't necessarily allocate payouts for claims in a way that leads to better health outcomes.

which in the longer term very often becomes more expensive. And also part of the reason why people are angry about it is that there's, in a lot of cases, there's not a human evaluating every case and making sure that this is appropriate for the patient. This is why there was so much outrage over the anesthesia problem because it

surgeries differ based on individual patients and all the conditions and complications that go with that. And there's no way to really fully estimate in the middle of a surgery how long it's going to take. Basically, they're saying it's precisely because what Elizabeth is saying is true, precisely because every patient is different and the amount of surgery they need and the amount of anesthetic they need is different.

It's silly to kind of just come out and say, well, obviously, if you need more anesthetic, that's going to be much more expensive. Why not just charge everybody the same amount for the same procedure? That's much more sensible. That's much more logical. And yeah, and it helps to... But then the anesthesiologists you're saying don't comply with that because they're still going to bill the health insurance company for more money than they've agreed to pay. And then patients will have to pay the difference.

But there was never, okay, and this was, by the way, the number one hugest misunderstanding. And this is why the whole news cycle was dumb as sand, right? The big misunderstanding was this idea that what the insurance company wanted was for the patient to pay the excess. That was never the point. That's how it works here. No, that's not how it works. When an insurance company

negotiates down and negotiates a price for a service. And they're like, we don't care how much you're officially billing. We will pay you this price for this service and there will be nothing left for the patient to pay. That happens every single day. One of the crazy things about health insurance in this country is that it makes perfect sense for people to pay real money for health insurance that has

A 100% copay and no deductible. This is the thing that people do and it makes sense that you pay an insurer money and then the insurance company pays nothing to the healthcare provider at all. You pay the full amount to the healthcare provider for every single doctor visit, every single procedure. And yet it still makes sense for you to have an insurer and to be insured because the amount you pay if you're insured is so much lower than the amount you pay if you're not insured.

That's because we don't have centralized health care in this country. There's no reason for privatized health insurance to exist. The only reason why it does is because we have a largely for-profit system. So again, to go back to the anesthesiologist example, what happens in practice is that those costs do get passed on to the patient. The providers don't eat them. They're not costs. They're bills. And they almost never get paid. And they

Like, okay, I'm just telling you that Anthem Blue Cross is out very explicitly saying, no, we were never intending, the idea here was never that the patient would end up paying the excess cost. The whole absurdity of this is that your insurance company can overrule your healthcare provider using an algorithm without knowing anything about your case. I just had an emergency appendectomy three weeks ago and Blue Cross Blue Shield rejected

paying for that claim. And it was probably a billing error, but if you look at their explanation, they suggested that acute appendicitis didn't warrant an appendectomy as if, you know, two things. First of all, what else would, you know, it's like you can't get a cosmetic appendectomy.

But secondly, even just as a matter of bureaucracy and process, the fact that we have a system that could deny that claim as if there is any emergency room in the United States where you could walk in and get an appendectomy just because you wanted one is crazy.

That's not a system that really works on behalf of patients. And it's particularly nasty for people who are sick and don't have the resources or the energy to navigate the system in order to make sure that it's not bankrupting them. I 100% agree that the system is absolutely terrible. And if you were designing it from scratch, you would never design it like this. And it is a recipe for anger and inefficiency and

unintentional cruelty and even sometimes intentional cruelty but very rarely mostly it's as you say it's just like algorithms it is not humans trying to be cruel but like yeah no one likes the insurance companies no one likes the hospital debt collectors no one likes the fact that people are going into bankruptcy because they've racked up medical debt the u.s healthcare system is

atrocious it is broken and it is my i guess my point is that it is systemic and coming around and just like blaming the insurers rather than trying to understand the vital role they play in the system is like it is true that the insurers are making a lot of money it is also true they are basically because of political reasons the only break we have on runaway health care costs

No. No. I've just talked about the insulin cap. That is the government break on health care costs. Public policy is the toughest break we have on costs. Public policy is the break. They set these rules. Agreed. The first best solution is public policy. Left unchecked, insurance companies would go bananas. There was a great, in our prep, investigation from Stat News about how United has been using AI to deny insurance.

elderly, sick elderly patients, long stays in nursing homes. They like, they start trying to get them out after like 24 hours. And usually when the families go to court to get the insurance companies to pay, like 80% of the time, the judge is like, oh yeah, the insurance company should pay. And then as soon as that ruling comes down, the insurance company again, refuses to pay for the nursing home stay. Like this is how insurance companies work. I feel like Felix, you're defending them a lot, but I mean,

come on we've all dealt with them they're these are not like the health care system you know out to keep our costs low the health care system is broken yes i agree 100 that the health care system is broken and just like you said no one's in setting out to be cruel the system itself is cruel and that's a big problem because there's no when it becomes so systemic and so broken

and there are no quote unquote villains, then it's confusing. So, yeah, I mean, like what one of the other points which I feel is important to make is that Americans have more access to more health care as a general rule than almost anyone else in the world. For instance, my if you talk to my compatriots in the United Kingdom, they're

Basically, no one under the age of 65 in the UK is getting the COVID vaccine anymore. It's just not something that's offered. Obviously, the National Health Service is hardly a shining beacon of light for anyone. I'm not saying we should do what happened to the NHS. But these kinds of things, you see them everywhere. Someone somewhere basically says, COVID vaccines, they only go to over 65s now, and then only the over 65s take it.

American healthcare at the sort of top end of the spectrum, American healthcare for the top 5% of Americans is pretty much the best healthcare in the world. It's extremely good.

And there is a lot of push in the healthcare system to get as much treatment to as many people as possible. And a lot of these drugs that people are complaining that they can't get in America, they couldn't get in any other national healthcare system either. But because they're available and because they're prescribed, they're like, well, obviously now my insurance has to pay for it. This insurance, by the way, it's not insurance like,

I mean, so health insurance is this weird thing that does two different things at once. On the one hand, it's a bit like fire insurance or earthquake insurance or car insurance, which is like we are protecting you against some incredibly expensive, unlikely thing that we all hope is never going to happen. On the other hand, it is also paying everyday medical costs that people have. Like almost no one with health insurance pays, makes no claim over the course of a year.

And so a lot of the basic day-to-day operation of health insurance is you go in for your annual and you have insurance and then your primary care provider bills your insurer and they pay it and that kind of thing. Right. And the fact is that if you subtract out that kind of predictable annual expense, right.

from your healthcare premiums, the amount you're spending in insurance premiums to insure yourself against something incredibly expensive and catastrophic is not actually that enormous. And the bills are that enormous. I would disagree with that. If you're a reasonably healthy adult, what we have to pay for insurance is bonkers. And plus, whenever you add in deductibles, which you're paying for anyway, with the exception of the appendectomy, if I'd paid for all of my healthcare this year out of pocket,

And I priced it to see what this would be. It's way less than what we're paying for in insurance. And we're all pretty much required to have insurance in this country. And it's tied to employment, which is problematic on 30 other different levels. So I just don't think that's true. I don't think that the math really works for a lot of people. And that's part of what enrages everybody is that, you know, we pay so much for health insurance in this country and it's

It's so difficult to use. It doesn't really guarantee you safety from medical bankruptcy. And it's very frustrating to people when they see that companies like United have made $16 billion in operating profit last year. And they're making choices that actually do harm people, especially the choices specifically around delaying and denying and using that process to prevent people from accessing healthcare. Just delays and denials have killed around

70,000 people in the U.S. annually. And that's very close to the number of people who overdose on fentanyl deaths. But which of these problems do you read more about in the news? And so I think some of this was just pent up rage because people know it's happening and it's just not being acknowledged.

Let's leave it there. Let's leave that one there. On a lighter note. I'll let Elizabeth have the last word on this one. And we should segue cleanly into a much lighter subject like military coups in South Korea. Actually, it's a very positive story.

So, Emily, bring us up to speed. What happened in Seoul this week? I'm doing that? All right. All right. Yes. I will get us up to speed on what happened in Seoul. No problem. Let me just look up these names real quick. Okay. So...

Earlier this week, we woke up to the news that South Korea's president had declared martial law. What? I don't understand South Korea's democracy. What's happening? Well, it turns out President Yoon had declared martial law, meaning like the military is taking control. They can lock up people who are protesting, et cetera. South Korea has sort of a bad history of martial law, although it's been pretty smooth and peaceful since the

the late 1980s. So everyone was like, "Oh no, a democracy has imploded. The world is in absolute chaos."

However, what instead happened was South Korea's parliament basically rallied and rushed to parliament. Some of them scaled the walls. There was one story in the Wall Street Journal of a woman who faced down a soldier with a rifle pointed at her. She pushed his rifle out of the way like you would see in a movie and then said, you should be ashamed of yourself.

and went in there and they unanimously voted to end martial law. And so six hours after he had declared it and prompted everyone to freak out and say like democracies are crumbling all over this world, they had this unanimous vote.

upholding their democracy. And now, as we're taping on Friday, it looks like President Yoon will likely get impeached, although it's not totally clear. The leader of his own party has spoken out against him. Well, the leader of his own party, like, you know, in echoes of the sort of Mike Pence situation on January 6th, President Yoon apparently put out an arrest warrant for the leader

with his own party, like when he declared martial law. And yeah, so my favorite part of this whole story is that this dominated the sort of intraday news cycle in the United States. In Korea, the declaration of martial law happened at 11 p.m. local time. It had all been lifted by about 6 a.m. local time. So anyone normal who'd just gone to bed at a normal time and woke up at a normal time just woke up to a bunch of headlines saying, actually, don't worry, nothing to see here. Yeah.

It was a micro-dictatorship that everybody slept through. It was a flash dictatorship. Crash of democracy, yeah. Some of us sleep through earthquakes. Others of us sleep through military dictatorships. But I mean, I thought it was really amazing. If you start to read the reporting, it was a real triumph of democracy and rule of law. And unlike what we have maybe, some would suggest, seen in the United States, at least in the wake of January 6th, where it was just really...

all the members of parliament coming together, voting unanimously, like, no, this isn't what we want. This isn't okay. We're going to impeach this guy. It just seems to me like, no, we don't want anyone declaring martial law in a democracy for no reason during peacetime. But hey, all's well that ends well. As in all countries, it really ultimately comes down to the military. When push came to shove, the military in Korea was not willing to use force

the state monopoly on force on elected MPs. And they were like, okay, if you want to go in there and have a vote, go in there and have a vote. And then the whole thing like became unstoppable. If the military had supported the president, it would have been very different. And this is why, um,

we should be very careful to not call this a military coup because the military was not actually doing this. And if they had done it, they would probably have been successful. And that is actually mildly terrifying. I mean, it's true in every country that if the military wants to take over the government, they can. But in most mature democracies, there's such a strong norm against that that it's basically unthinkable.

I do think that like things are falling apart. We should talk like a little bit more seriously, perhaps, depending on how you gauge these things. Like the French government has collapsed. There's no French prime minister anymore. There's a massive budget deficit there. No one knows how this is going to be resolved. The president is refusing to step down. The president has to come up with a new prime minister who is almost certainly going to meet the same fate as the old prime minister.

And it's not a constitutional crisis in France, but like it, France hasn't been in this level of like no government chaos, basically, you know, in living memory.

Germany doesn't have a government. The German government has collapsed. There's just a lot of generalized sort of dysfunction. And I think you're right that there is like silver lining here. Korea proved itself to be systemically strong enough to be able to withstand this attack.

People forget that France already was without a government for like 59 days or 51 days or something like that, like during the Olympics and managed to sort of muddle through. So not having a government is, it turns out, not the end of the world. I think Belgium didn't have a government for over a year at one point and no one noticed because it's Belgium. But yeah.

The broader idea that countries have the ability to run themselves along democratic lines with accountability to the public and all the rest of it, when you have countries like

declaring martial law or operating without a government, then that's not the case anymore. What do you mean? I mean, these are good examples of things that aren't going very smoothly at the moment, but I feel like at any given point, things aren't going very smoothly in a variety of

Of countries? Of mature Western democracies? Yeah. I mean, the UK recently went through its own problems with Liz Truss, who lasted as long as a head of lettuce, or I guess not as long as a head of lettuce or whatever. They had their problems. Brexit obviously has been, we've talked about it a lot on the podcast over the years, hasn't gone well. But I mean-

Britain's still standing. The UK is okay. France is probably going to be fine. Yeah, there's also a bit of an economic correlation to democracies leaning more right wing and authoritarian as they develop more austerity policies. And I think that's part of what's happening in France. It's definitely part of what happened in Germany.

Well, in France, it's interesting because it was 2018, I believe, when President Macron and the government tried to, was it, raise the retirement age, sparking those yellow vests. Remember the yellow vests? The yellow vests. Got to remember the gilets jaunes. So apparently ever since then, and that was such a political blunder, Macron and the French government have been spending a lot of money in

in COVID, especially just like in the US, they spend a lot of money, I guess, to keep people employed. The government took on paying for people on furlough or something. They've been spending up a storm. And now as they try to rein that in, because bond investors don't like these really big deficits, they find they can't do it. So I feel like

It's not just the austerity that pisses people off. It's like the, you gave us so much and now you're taking it back, which isn't, is, I guess you could say is austerity. Emily, what are you talking about? But it's also kind of like...

Screwed up everything, including the National Health Service. And at the same time, they moved very, very far to the right and to that, you know, I feel like putting the anti-immigrant far right sort of in opposition to the austerity camp is certainly not something you can do in the UK.

They're the same party. Right. In the U.S., it's sort of become more interesting because no one wants austerity anymore. No one wants budget cuts anymore. Our deficit is ballooning. Except for apparently, you know,

incoming treasury secretary who says he wants to reduce the budget deficit to 3% of GDP, which counts as austerity, by the way, these days. I'm old enough to remember the Maastricht Agreement, which said, well, every country should always have a budget deficit of no more than 3% of GDP. And now it's like, well, if you get to 3%, that's amazing. I think France is 6%, what I saw in the reading, which is

I guess, bad. Also, I think Americans have a fetishization of small government for its own sake without really understanding what government does. So there would be huge backlash here if you really cut major entitlements, especially Medicare and Social Security. But when people talk about wanting smaller government, they don't necessarily connect the two. So...

I think part of the appeal of Trumpism for a lot of conservatives is that he's promising to get federal agencies. And when you see people agreeing with Elon Musk that you probably could wipe out a third of the budget and it would be fine, that's where that's coming from. They don't recognize it as something that would result in the effects of an austerity policy because they don't necessarily recognize it as that to begin with. They think it's about cutting waste.

something's got to maybe give, I don't know, everyone always says that something has to give in the stock market. Can't go up forever. And then it's like, oh, there it goes going up again. But maybe something has to give with deficit getting bigger and bigger in the US at some point. And maybe it won't. But at some point, will the bond vigilantes appear, Felix? And we'll have to do something. Something will have to be cut. Some tax will have to be raised. I think we're still a ways away from the bond vigilantes appearing in the United States. They've definitely appeared in...

France

They made a brief appearance, as you mentioned, in the short-lived Liz Truss premiership in the UK, but then they kind of slunk back with their tails between their legs. They suddenly haven't appeared in Germany. Yeah, you know, one of the more outre ideas out there is that as interest rates rise and as we enter this era of more normalized interest rates, we're not in ZERP anymore. We don't have a zero interest rate policy anymore. One of the...

areas that the government spends money on, the US government in particular, is interest on the national debt, you know, and it could easily reach like 10% of the budget pretty soon. So that is an interesting area where certain like MMT types and they'll say that there is a lot of scope for saving. Maybe you get the Fed to keep interest rates to zero. Maybe you just print money instead of borrowing money. You

may or may not be inflationary depending on who you talk to, but ultimately, I think I do agree with them that inflation is a function of demand exceeding the capacity of the economy to supply that demand rather than a function of what the central bank does. As long as you aren't

making the economy run too hot there shouldn't be inflation so you're saying the solution to a ballooning deficit in the united states is to cut interest rates and you don't think it will cause inflation because no i'm saying i'm saying well i mean or even you don't even need to cut interest rates you can just print money instead of borrowing the money and then there's not a deficit anymore felix or your team meant the coin

Okay, so that so yeah, the America, America, by the way, and we have talked about this a million times on the show. America is uniquely dysfunctional. And it's kind of astonishing that it's managed to survive as long as it has given this unique dysfunction that Congress passes budgets, which by law force the government to spend money. And then it also passes debt ceiling that by law,

prevents the government from funding the spending that by law it has to spend. And basically, we run into this debt ceiling on a very predictable, regular cadence. And at some point, there will be a major constitutional crisis as a result. The debt ceiling is the single dumbest thing in America. It's even dumber than the Electoral College. It makes no sense. There's no reason to have it. Both of them should be abolished. But I don't know. Which one would you abolish first? I don't know. I just want to abolish them both. So to get back to the original topic,

back

Are we seeing increased amounts of chaos in the democratic world right now? Is that what you're saying? I just want to get that on the record. I think we are. I think that we had like that sort of post-Cold War peace dividend thing, like through the 90s and the 2000s, where everything was very calm. And Francis Fukuyama said we had the end of history. And there was lots of talk about secular stagnation, where nothing interesting is ever going to happen. And then, yeah, I feel like

All of that is behind us now. And I wrote a whole book saying that we're going to be in the new not normal and a whole bunch of weird, unexpected weird shit is going to happen. And I feel like I was right about that. Things are getting a lot weirder than we had got used to a couple decades ago. It has been a weird week. I will say that. We had a CEO gunned down. We had the six hours of martial law in South Korea. French government did collapse. Yeah.

Bizarrely, there was a five-minute tsunami warning on the West Coast. Yeah, the tsunami warning lasted even less time than martial law. You know, if we didn't have the 24-hour news cycle, though, I mean, a lot of this wouldn't even be on our radar. Yeah, we would have slept through a lot of it. The tsunami news was maybe the most ridiculous. Like, why was that? I mean, you have to warn people in California, of course, to get to higher ground.

I don't, I'm not disputing that, but like, did I have to get a news alert about it? I don't know. Probably not. It went away in like five minutes. I just felt like several apocalyptic things happened within 24 hours, but they were sort of minor. Yeah. This is the week of minor apocalypses. Let's move on to like an everyday apocalypse, which is people getting blinded by headlights. And when I say people, I mean, Emily Peck, because you're the only person out of the three of us who actually drives a car on the reg.

You guys, I have to drive at night. I don't want to, but I have to go pick up my kids from somewhere. And night is 4 p.m. these days. And night is 4 p.m., so it's very front of mind right now. And The Ringer has this big story about headlights getting brighter, and there's this whole subreddit group, and there are these men that are obsessed with this. And apparently it's true, according to the data provided earlier.

in the article, although I don't quite understand how you measure headlight brightness. But the TLDR is that we now use LED lights for headlights and they are brighter than the old headlights were. So now when you drive at night, if you're like me and I'm not in an SUV or a truck, I'm in a car that's like lower to the ground. So it's even worse for someone like me. These

extremely bright lights are blinding me. I cannot see. I cannot see when I'm driving. There's like three different things that are all combining to make things worse.

One is that no one makes cars anymore. Like Ford famously does not make cars anymore. That's correct. And generally the proportion of cars on the roads rather than like trucks and SUVs has been declining for ages and doesn't show any sign of slowing down. So if you are in a car, especially, but more broadly like anyone on the road is encountering cars coming towards them or vehicles coming towards them, which have much higher up headlines and the higher up headlights just don't

shine straight into your eyes and blind you. That's number one. Number two is that everyone is using LEDs and a large part of this Ringer article, which basically talks about how the...

auto manufacturers are making these LEDs as bright as possible. And there are official guidelines for how bright they can and should be, but they haven't been updated for the LED era. And there are lots of ways of getting around them. And it seems that all of the auto manufacturers are trying very hard to get around the guidelines rather than to comply with the spirit of the law.

This one I want to talk to you about because I don't really understand it. Like, what is the incentive for the auto manufacturers to do that? I think I can explain. Lower down in the piece, they talk about this rating. There's like a safety rating given by not the U.S. government, by another agency or another organization. If the LEDs are...

brighter because you can see the animal that is crossing the road in front of you earlier and brake and so on. That's the whole car culture in the United States. It's all centered around the safety of the person in the car driving. So the brighter headlights are good for the person in the giant SUV driving around my town at night. He can see everything and is actually safer, but he's making me in my little car less safe. And then the third thing that I just want to finish my list. The third thing that I...

read about. And again, I'm, I'm, I find it difficult to know. It's almost impossible to, to measure this one empirically, but there is anecdotally arise in the number of drivers who are just driving around with their brights on all the time. Yes. These are the most, these people and the people who leave shopping carts in parking spaces are

are the worst people in the world. They are the people. Anti-social behavior. No, I'm not going to make a joke about shooting them. But it's really anti-social behavior. These people with the brights on all the time, it is so rude. The Ringer reporter gives them the benefit of the doubt and says maybe they don't realize their brights are on because dashboards are complicated, to which I say, come on, they know. I've been out there at night and I get really frustrated and I get like really worked up because I'm kind of already a little like on alert driving. Like I don't want to hurt anyone.

And, you know, I'll flash my brights at the people with the brights on all the time, all angry. And they will turn them off. So they know. But are we sure they're always their brights? You know, since the lights in general are so much brighter even on a lower setting. Couldn't they just be normals, but they're so bright that you think they're brights? That's true. That's true. I guess we can give them the benefit of the doubt. But it does seem like people are driving around with their brights on, which is not legal, by the way.

How do they evaluate the safety of this, really? Because I'm thinking about, you know, my mother lives in a very rural area where there's just no streetlights. And so she doesn't like to drive at night anyway. But if you're driving there and you have your brights on, it's like, yeah, you would see an animal across the road. But if somebody is coming toward you, it seems like that would be less safe. And so how do you rate the safety just overall? It is interesting that, like, in general,

The brighter your headlights, the more you can see, the safer you are. There is this second order effect that is much, much harder to calculate, which is that if you're blinding a bunch of people who are coming towards you, does that make sense?

them more likely to get into a crash and is that dangerous for them and the fact is that no one really knows the answer to that everyone is annoyed by being blinded by lights and it is intuitively obvious to everyone that if you're blinded by a light you're going to be less safe than if you are not blinded by a light but quantifying that and quantifying the sort of decrease in safety is

as a result of people getting blinded by headlights, and then comparing that to the increase in safety of people being able to see better is, as far as I can make out, basically impossible. Well, that's too bad. You think, you know, we've invented so many things in America. We have AI now. Can't we do something about this? Can't we study it? So one of the interesting little subplots of this Ringer article is that the Europeans have a clever technology that

tries to at least address some of this at the margin which basically it's like what's it called adaptive headlight dimming or something i didn't understand that part so i'm excited for you to explain it actually oh it sounds like you know what your phone or your laptop does whenever it's sort of automatically adjusting to light okay and the u.s regulators have not approved it yet

Which is kind of wild because they haven't really approved anything in the headlight world for decades. But apparently this one needs active approval rather than everything else that is happening, which just passively they go along with. This goes back to the whole discussion about the Cybertruck, right? Where no one has signed off on the Cybertruck being safe, except for Tesla. Tesla's self-certified Cybertruck is safe. No one really believes it.

But you can't buy it in Europe or most other countries because Tesla won't put it in for safety testing. Because that's how the US works. We don't like clear cars the way we clear like drugs. We don't approve the cars first. We're like, let's see how many people die and then we'll figure it out. I feel like this is a problem that could get corrected by people being creative. There's the Ringer article that we're all talking about mentions a Reddit subreddit called rfuckyourheadlights.

And one of the guys who moderates it invented something that's like a mirror that pops up when other people's brights behind you are too light. To flash the light back in their face? Yeah, and it's probably not legal. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's not legal either. But yeah, Emily, what is worse? Having someone with their brights on coming towards you or having someone with their brights on right behind you?

Coming towards I think is worse. Bright sun behind me, like I don't like it, but I can deal with it and kind of illuminates the road sort of for me. So I don't mind it as much. It's the people coming towards me. It's like, I don't know what to do with my eyes. We all know that I only got my driver's license 10 years ago, maybe even less than 10 years. And I remember the instructor was like, just look away, look to the side because the bright headlights freak me out even then. You had driving lessons at night. That's really smart. I never had that.

Well, because I would do it after work. And as you guys mentioned, in the winter at 4pm, it is dark. I will say that Emily and I are exceptional, not only because we are both wonderful podcast hosts who work at Axios, but also because we are two of like the 1% of Americans who actually believe ourselves to be below average privates.

Yes, I admit it. My driver's license expired in 2012 and I never bothered to renew it. Just got an IED because I don't drive. And everyone in my family insists that this is good for public safety because I'm a terrible driver. So wait, that's all three of us are well aware that we're below average drivers. Is there any other podcast where that's the case? I feel like

I feel like I'm good going forward, but when I have to go in reverse, that's when it's challenging. I'm exactly the same. First thing messes me up every time. I'm parking. Otherwise, I'm good. If I could just keep going straight, make right turns. Basically, if you're doing something that like an AI could do, you're okay. Yes. All right, let's move on to a numbers round. I feel like I'm going to kick this one off.

with $19.99 is the amount of money that McDonald's charged for a half gallon jug of what they called a whole lot of McRib sauce. And, um,

It's sold out. There is this phenomenon in America called the McRib. The McRib? McRib. McRib. The McRib. You know all about it because we've been doing charts in Axios three times now. It's the only pork product at McDonald's. And it sits on the menu from time to time. And when it arrives on the menu, people get excited and

The last time it came on the menu in 2022, McDonald's called it the farewell tour because they were pulling like a Barbra Streisand. And now, of course, after the farewell tour, it's back again. And apparently it costs...

wide range of prices it's $4.99 in Atlanta $5.49 in Miami and $6.89 in San Francisco so like anyway um there was this theory which was initially promulgated by the great Willie Staley when he was he wrote this piece for the all which basically said that it was a hog price arbitrage and that McDonald's would bring out the McRib when wholesale pork prices were low and

But now, this time around, wholesale pork prices are really quite high, and they're still bringing it out. So, Emily, you have an alternative idea that it's something to do with Bitcoin?

What? I don't know. On Twitter, people say that when Bitcoin prices go up, the price of the McRib goes up. Oh, yeah. The McRib is a leading indicator of a Bitcoin bull market. Yes. Yes. The McRib comes back when the price of Bitcoin goes up. That is, I believe, the conspiracy. There you go. That angle. Or the other way around. Bitcoin goes up, then the McRib comes back. I don't... We will get into that in the Slate Plus segment. Elizabeth, what's your number?

My number is 63, and that's percent. And that's the amount of...

of growth that a bar in Boston called the Dubliner had in people ordering Guinness in the last year, because apparently there is a internet trend called splitting the G where people basically chug their first sip of Guinness and try to get the line between the foam and the brew, like right between the middle of the G on a Guinness pint glass. So two things are kind of driving this. One is people being dumb on TikTok and then now everybody has to do this.

But the other thing is that people are starting to understand that Guinness' famous reputation as kind of like a meal in a glass is not really true. It's a light beer. Yeah, it's like 4.2% ABV, and it's lower calorie than like almost any craft beer. Yeah, it has less calories than Coors Light. Really? People think it's heavy just because of the color. I don't like it because it's not fizzy enough. Is that immature reason not to like a beer? Perhaps.

Perhaps. That's my reason. Emily, what's your number? I really struggled coming up with a number this week. I don't know what was going on. People should be emailing me number ideas throughout the week. Yeah, email Emily numbers, people. Make it a me too. Don't force us to do work. Emily.peck at Axios.com. Drop the numbers in our lap, please. I would like that. I would really like that. So anyways, my number is...

11? That is my tally of billionaires who are picked to serve key roles in the Trump administration. 11 billionaires. Holy moly, that's up a lot from the last time. And the last time seemed like a lot. Then I tallied, Axios has sort of like a nice little graphic showing all the billionaires and how much their net worth is estimated to be. So I tallied them up.

And it comes out to a collective net worth of $21.571 billion of picks to serve in the administration. That's not counting Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. If you add them in, then it's a crazy number. Vivek is not a billionaire. Well, according to our publication that we work at, he's worth a billion dollars. Really? Vivek is worth a billion? How the hell did Vivek make a billion dollars? It's just billions are...

Billions are falling out of the sky. Warren Buffett himself said billion is the new million. I thought Vivek was like Andrew Yang, one of those like techie guys who didn't really have all that much money. I don't know. Maybe he is. Okay, I take it back. What about David Sachs?

Is David Sachs on the list? Yeah, he's on the list. But what is, do you have a number for him? Axios only says reported billionaire. He's the new crypto czar incoming. Yeah, and like Elon BFF. Just reported billionaire. So I didn't add him to the tally. My tally is probably an underestimate. And then Americans for Tax Fairness, they put out a little report on this and they pointed out that when Biden took office, his cabinet's collective net worth was $1.

$118 million. Million with an M. So what you're saying is $21 billion across how many nominees? You said 11 billionaires, right? Yeah. It's an average of about $2 billion per billionaire nominee, which I just wrote an article for Axios, which said that the average billionaire in the world

has a net worth of over $5 billion. So I guess, again, Elon notwithstanding, Donald Trump is going for the low-end billionaires. Yeah, these are kind of like the two-bit billionaires, like Doug Burgum. This is his working class policy. It's the working class billionaire. It's like Jared Isaacman, who's like no one's idea of a major billionaire. Had enough money to pay to go to space, but not enough money to develop a space company himself. Exactly. Exactly.

All right. I think that's it for us this week. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks so much to Jessamyn, Molly and Shana Roth and Merit Jacob and the whole Slate crew who put this thing together every week. Thanks to you guys for emailing us on slate money at slate.com. Or I guess if you want Emily and I to fight over numbers markets at Axios.com.

Just send them straight to me. No, just send them straight to Emily. And we are going to have a Slate Plus segment on Bitcoin, which has reached $100,000. And we will be back next week with even more Slate money.