Eggistential Crisis
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Welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Amon of Axios with Emily Peck of Axios. Hello, hello. Emily is a great headline writer. We will talk about her great headline later on in the show. I'm here with Elizabeth Spires of New York Times. Hello. We are going to talk about the whole...

tariff craziness, which happened and then unhappened this week. We are going to talk about eggs because we never get tired of talking about eggs. We are going to talk about the Texas lottery hack that the Maltese investor managed to get up to. We have a sleek plus segment on the Trump slump in the stock market. It's all coming up.

on Slate Money.

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Okay, so for those of you following along at home...

Trump announced that he was going to put massive 25% tariffs on everything coming into the country from Mexico and Canada. He did this in January, saying that the tariffs would be effective at the beginning of February. Then at the beginning of February, it turned out that he punted them down the road for a month and said they'd be effective at the beginning of March. So then he did them in the beginning of March. And then...

One day later, he said, Oh, actually, nevermind. Not really. So we are back to kind of where we started without really any tariffs on Canada and Mexico, but like kind of quietly while making all of this flip floppy noise about North America, he really has been ratcheting up the tariffs on China.

And also, as far as I can make out, there are retaliatory tariffs from Canada on the United States, and those still remain in place. So in terms of the US-Canada situation, all that Trump has seemingly managed to do is increase the tariffs that they are imposing on us. Emily, does any of this make any sense to you?

Well, no. I mean, it depends what you mean by make sense, right? I mean, what the president has done isn't rational and it's causing a lot of economic uncertainty. It's fraying our ties with our closest allies and the logic of the tariffs themselves really

as he explains it, doesn't really make sense. He sometimes says it's to stop the flow of fentanyl into the country. But if you look at flows of fentanyl from Canada, the numbers are tiny. The fentanyl thing is clearly a legal fiction. In order to be able to impose...

tariffs immediately without going through an incredibly long and convoluted process. You need to declare some kind of a state of emergency. And so he decided to pick on fentanyl as a state of emergency. I don't think even he believes that the purpose of the tariffs is to deal with fentanyl. I mean, some of his supporters believe that. I overheard a shocking conversation at the gym a few days ago in which someone said, I don't understand why the Democrats in my life don't support the tariffs. They're just temporary. And

until the drugs stopped coming into the country. And that was just, my jaw was on the floor. I feel like those people, though, are open to believing whatever Trump says. So it sort of doesn't, they're not really evaluating information. I just want to read a quote that I came across this morning in Politico from a Trump administration official who was not named Trump.

It says, it's the greatest show on earth. We'll put tariffs on tonight, but tomorrow we'll tell you we may negotiate and take them off. But stay tuned because you never know what tomorrow is going to bring. And that's such a Trump sentiment.

I wrote a piece for Axios, which a little bit of insight into how the journalistic sausage is made. The headline, Trump's rug pulled presidency, and the headline was entirely the work of Emily Peck. Thank you, Emily. Great headline. But as we do at Axios, we asked the White House for comment, and it was a whole thing, I can tell you. But in the end, I managed to get a comment out of the White House saying, you know, about all of this flip-flopping and back and forth and on again, off again.

The on-background quote attributable to a White House official is, it's the art of the deal. Yeah, and some of the things that the president has said recently really reflect this. When he was talking about Biden legislation, where companies get tax breaks and other incentives to build factories and manufacturing plants, Trump has said, well, that's ridiculous. You don't have to pay companies anything. You just...

threaten tariffs. And when you threaten tariffs, people snap to attention and they do what you want, which is, I guess, and I guess this is the reason for the tariffs. The other non-fentanyl reason is to, quote unquote, bring manufacturing back to the United States, something that's not going to happen and the global economy has moved on from, but nevertheless, it's

The plan is to do a deal. You don't offer any kind of incentives. You just bully and threaten and you get your way. You have people feeling so uncertain about tariffs from month to month. They finally, I think this is a theory, give up and just companies build plants in the US. I mean, if we're trying to feel our way to a rational explanation, that's the closest I can come. So this is the theory of the case, which I think is worth spending a little bit of time on just because it's kind of important.

is that after NAFTA was signed, there were basically no tariffs between US and Mexico. And a whole bunch of car makers realized that it was cheaper to make cars in Mexico than it is to make cars in the US. So they built auto plants in Mexico and then just imported the cars from Mexico to the US. And they made more money that way because their production costs were cheaper. And that was good for Mexico and good for Mexican workers. And if you suddenly, if you talk to

Sean Fain and the United Auto Workers, they'll be like, that was bad for America. It was bad for American workers and we should never have done NAFTA. NAFTA became like a dirty word. Trump rebranded it as USMCA and seemed to like it until he didn't. But the idea is that if you put tariffs on the cars that are coming in from Mexico, then the

advantage to making cars in Mexico evaporates and it becomes more attractive to make cars in the United States. And so you will reverse that trend and you will basically start building plants in the United States rather than Mexico. Now, two very important things here. One, like the move to building plants in Mexico did not happen overnight. It took many years and no one is looking out on a many year time horizon because number two,

There was this really fascinating research report that came out from S&P Mobility when the tariffs on Mexico and Canada were announced. And

It basically said, this is the probability that we give to various outcomes. There's a 70% probability that the 25% tariffs will last less than two weeks. There's a 20% probability that they'll last less than a month or two. And then there's a 10% probability that they'll be longer than a couple months. And

In that world where you consider all of these things to be, you know, the art of the deal and a negotiating ploy and a way for Trump to get this and get that, no one is going to move their plants back to the United States. This is, you know, that's like a decades-long strategic shift in response to something that no one thinks is going to last more than two weeks. And in fact, it lasted less than 24 hours. I'm struck by how when he did this in January, early February, how many smart people told me that now tariffs were off the table? Yeah.

Because I just sort of assume that Trump views tariffs as the one economic tool that he has, partly because he just doesn't have a very sophisticated understanding of economics. Yeah, obviously, he's going to continue to do tariff shenanigans for his entire presidency.

Well, that's what I thought. But all the political consultants I know were like, oh, no, well, this isn't an issue anymore. Name names, Elizabeth. Who said that? These people are wrong. I can't. But they said it in February, and he's still shenaniging now. Yeah, he's going to do this, you know, every four weeks. He is tariff man. He loves tariffs. He thinks the tariffs solve every problem. Anytime there is any issue, domestic or international, his first go-to tool is going to be tariffs. And

Some of them are going to be more permanent than others. Some of them will last, you know, six hours like these ones did. And some of them will last longer. And probably the ones on China are going to last longer. He announced tariffs on aluminum, which is a word I'm learning to say, and steel, which

which are probably going to last longer. So yeah, we are going to be in a higher tariff regime. And it's going to be a higher tariff regime than the first Trump regime. And there is going to be implications for inflation and all the rest of it, whether we're going to be in a full on guns blazing trade war regime with 25% tariffs on our closest allies, including Europe, because everyone expects Europe to be next in the crosshairs. That

is still to be determined. Can I just interject and ask you why you're not pronouncing aluminum?

that way anymore because I like it. Aluminium. All right. Thank you. Thank you for your permission for me to continue saying aluminium because that's just, it's so much more natural. It's fabulous. Yeah, please. Okay. And as I think we have mentioned on this podcast before, the standard sign of what a metal is on a periodic table is it ends in I-U-M. So like aluminium is the obvious scientific way of pronouncing it. What's important is it's your way. And I think you should be true to that. Your

You're an advertisement for the English. There you go. Yes. It's my last vestige of Britishness. Do we want to talk a little about what the tariffs are doing politically, which is sort of fascinating? Yeah, please. To start with, they've helped Justin Trudeau, who Trump does not like. He repeatedly refers to him as the governor of Canada. Yeah.

They've helped him politically, and his party, the Liberal Party. He's still out as of Sunday. He's still out, but support for Liberals in Canada has surged because of what's happening. Because Canada now has a new enemy, the United States, which is bizarre. And so I guess we'll find out more about that over the weekend. There are two men, I think, who made decisions which they probably regret at this point in the wake of Trump actions.

One of them is CZ, the founder of Binance, who turned himself in to the American authorities, you know, under the Biden administration and the expectations that he would avoid a jail sentence, did not avoid a jail sentence, went to prison for some time and now comes out of prison and sees all of the other cases against all of the other crypto people being dropped. And he's like, if I'd only waited for Trump to come in, the case against me would have been dropped as well. And I would not have had to go to prison.

I feel like Trudeau is kind of in that situation too. Like he steps down because it's clearly impossible for him to win reelection and the liberal party is in, you know, doing terribly in the polls. And he just, you know,

you know, his political life is over. And if only he held on for like a few more weeks, Trump would have come in and given him this massive boost. And now he's like, oh, now Mark Carney is going to win the election and get all the credit. I could have done that. Yeah, totally. Well, he's also making Doug Ford look good, which is astonishing. You mean Trump is? Trudeau isn't. Widely loathed Ontario premier. And Ford just cancelled

a $100 million Starlink contract in response to all the shenanigans. And they're pulling all of the American alcohol from red states off the state liquor stores. Just red states? Just red states, yeah. Wow, incredible. No bourbon for Canadians. But then on the flip side, down south, Claudia Scheinbaum...

the leader of Mexico, is somehow deftly setting the politics of Trudeau's political win aside. He and Trump are not vibing, and that probably is damaging for Canada in some way. On the South side, Claudia is doing amazing. And I think it's the first time, or maybe one of the only times I've heard Donald Trump speak positively about a woman losing

leader in public. On Thursday, he came out and said something nice about her. They had a very respectful conversation. He first dropped the tariffs on Mexico before Canada. And it just seemed like very chill vibes between the two of them. That was the case in February as well when he dropped the tariffs. He dropped them on Mexico first. And then he's like, oh, well, if I'm doing it for Mexico, I might as well do it for Canada. And that's why he did it all on this fentanyl stuff, border stuff.

He's like, Canada, can you like invent some border crisis that you can solve so that I can drop the tariffs on you as well? And Scheinbaum did apparently when they talked this week, she was like, you know, fentanyl seizures are down, Mr. President, like we're taking care of it. We're on top of this situation. She brought out that chart with like a line going down into the right. And he was super impressed. He was like, great, I'm doing it. It's working. My theory is that as a woman, she has more experience dealing with children. One of my business partners has a degree in clinical psychology and

And he always says this works with adults is that you offer them a substitute if you know you're going to tell them something they don't want to hear. And in this case, it's her saying, here's a narrative that you can take back home and it doesn't really matter if it's true. We've always said that in journalism too. It's like if you want a story killed or you offer like a substitute story or if you say this headline's bad, you say this is the headline you should use. Like you come with solutions, not punishments. That's the art of it.

the deal and negotiations, by the way. And it's not something we're seeing from our president. She's a better dealmaker than he is. It seems like it.

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All right, let's move on to Egg Watch. We are not giving this bit up, at least for this week. Shayna Roth, welcome back. Thank you. Always a pleasure. What is the headline? You know, I think the headline is probably some version of these eggs are still too damn expensive. And people are starting to question...

why we expect eggs to be so cheap and sort of like, I think we're all kind of starting to get a little existential about the place of eggs in our lives on some level. I know I have been thinking a lot about this and I'm now starting to see more headlines. There was a great piece in the Atlantic being like, eggs probably never should have been this cheap in the first place. They're so fragile and weird. That being said, they're not that fragile. They're really like

you cannot crack an egg with your armpit. I had like a bet going and I was convinced that I could do it. Sorry, we've gone way past the headline here. But my husband was like, yeah, he was keeping an egg under his armpit because it needed to get to room temperature when he was baking something. And I'm like, you're going to break it. He's like, you can't. The way the eggs are situated and the way your armpit works, he's like, no, it's the perfect way to carry it. And I'm like, no, of

Of course you can crack an egg. If you try to crush an egg in your hand, it's hard if you hold it horizontally. If you hold it longitudinally, it's impossible. You literally cannot. No one has the grip strength to be able to do this. And if you've got soft pitties like I do and you just tuck it under there, you cannot crack that egg. I tried it and I lost the bet. But they are these amazing feats of engineering because they are very strong in certain ways but very delicate in other ways. But also, why do we expect them to be like...

20 cents a pop. Is 50 cents an egg really that expensive? I agree that 50 cents does not feel expensive to me for an egg, but who am I? I live on planet Manhattan. But Felix, I think you're not alone. You're going to explain some economics to me about price elasticity and the willingness of the people to pay a lot of money for eggs. Well, so yeah, exactly. So the price elasticity of eggs is astonishingly

Like normally when the price of something goes up, the demand for it goes down. You're like, oh, it's got more expensive. I'll buy something else instead or I'll buy less of it or whatever.

And that's the reason why prices have been going up, right? Because the supply has been going down because of the bird flu. There's been fewer eggs. And so the price needs to rise in order to dissuade people who would have bought the previous quantity of eggs. Some percentage of them need to get sort of

priced out of the market in order for the amount of people buying eggs and the amount of people selling eggs to match in order for the markets to cross. But a surprisingly small reduction in the actual number of eggs on shelves, and I've seen numbers as small as 4% is the actual reduction in the number of eggs on shelves, can result in a very large increase in the price of eggs. Because

When the price of eggs goes up, the first thing that people do is just pay the new price.

It is, it needs to go up a lot for people to, I mean, people will notice, they will complain about it. They will tweet about it. They will have entire podcast segments about it, but they won't stop buying just as many eggs as they were always buying partly because in the grand scheme of things, they're still pretty cheap and they're still this insanely efficient delivery mechanism for all of these amazing proteins and vitamins and all the rest of it. And they are,

part of our breakfast ritual. They are a basically irreplaceable binding ingredient when you're baking. They just, there's almost no substitute for them. And as a result, the pricing power of big egg is quite astonishing. And I'm really getting the impression here, and I haven't done a huge amount of reporting on this, but it seems to me that the egg producers are

are not suffering from this bird flu situation because they are flat in one way and they are winning in another way, right? They are making many more dollars per egg or per carton than they used to because the prices are going up. So their revenues are up on that front. Now it's true that they are also selling fewer eggs, that their flocks every so often get

or whatever they do to the chickens to kill them all because they have bird flu. But here's the thing. When you lose all of your chickens, when all of your chickens are killed to prevent the spread of bird flu, you know what happens? The government reimburses you for the chickens. So they don't even lose money on that.

So do not shed any tears for the egg producers. They are doing just fine. Thank you very much. Arguably, a little bit of bird flu is good for them. It sort of optimizes egg pricing. It maximizes egg pricing. So are you saying, because some people are saying, you know, egg producers are gouging right now.

Are you saying that? Or are they just raising prices to keep because supply has gone down, they're raising prices because they have fewer eggs to sell? Exactly. They have to raise the price just to bring the demand down enough to make the demand low enough to match the lower supply. The price dynamics can be fully explained by the fact that

suppliers gone down and there was very low price elasticity. Because there are pieces out there, and I think I've gotten some emails from advocates and stuff who are like, there are only a few suppliers of eggs in the country. It's become a very concentrated market, and they're taking advantage. They're taking price right now that they don't need to. That's also true. Both things can be true.

I guess all I would say is like, yes, it's a concentrated market. Yes. The major egg suppliers are making a lot of money. There's a kind of windfall profit situation going on here. So it looks like that kind of smells kind of evil, but in fact, if they had not raised their prices,

then you would just have a situation where there would be no eggs on the shelves because it would be like toilet paper at the beginning of the pandemic. It would be first come, first served, and it would be hard to get eggs and everyone would be complaining about the nationwide egg shortage. There's also some evidence that eggs were underpriced to begin with because for every 1% drop in supply, people are willing to tolerate a 17% price increase. And that speaks to price inelasticity, but it also sort of tells you that maybe eggs...

Eggs were underpriced this whole time. So my question for all of you smart business people is, at what point does the elasticity break? At what point are people like, no, across the board, we will not pay, is it like $20 a dozen? There's a number, but it's like a percentage. It's 228% price increase to induce a 4% cutback in business.

What does that mean for people who don't do maths? That's just what has happened. The price of eggs has gone up by that. There's been a 4% decrease in consumption and the price of eggs has gone up by, that's just an empirical sort of,

Yeah, a statement of what has happened. We don't know going forward how much more production is going to fall. We know it will continue to fall because the bird flu isn't going anywhere. And so they're going to have to continue to cull a bunch more flocks. And so the supply is going to continue to decrease. We don't know if the supply decreases another 4%.

Does the price go up another 228%? No, that's like, it's an empirical question, which we're going to have to find out. I think Shaina's question is like, is there a sort of discontinuity in the elasticity, right? Is it like a straight line or is there a point at which eggs reach a certain price and then everyone's like, fuck this, I'm not buying eggs anymore. And I think the answer is there probably isn't, partly because there's so much regional variation in egg prices. I mean...

There probably is. There probably is. Like if eggs were a hundred dollars a carton, I'm sure people would stop buying them. Most people. No, no. I mean, absolutely. But you can get there in a straight line.

is all I'm saying. It's not like every single consumer behaves the same way, right? So for every $1 that the carton of eggs goes up, a certain number of people drop out and they're like, I'm not buying it. That's been happening already and that will continue to happen as it continues to get more and more expensive. But there's no like bright line point at which point like everyone drops out. Right. The Kardashians will always get their eggs even if they're $100. Because they've been paying that a ruon anyway. Yeah.

That's true. That is true. Gasoline is another thing where the price goes up and people still buy it. Is it more or less elastic than eggs? You can substitute away from eggs in a way that you can't gas. So it's probably more inelastic, I would think. I'm not sure. The elasticity of eggs is astonishingly low.

And the elasticity of gasoline is also low. People, you know, don't have a massive amount of, as Elizabeth says, like opportunity to save on gas usage. But they do when it is absolutely a fact that when gas prices rise, people use less gas. There are definitely, you know, to take an obvious example, there are

quite a few, in fact, a lot, millions of two-car households in America. And people will use the less gas-guzzling car rather than the more gas-guzzling car. They'll use their EV rather than the ICE car. You won't do road trips or maybe go less to the mall on the weekends. You'll still drive back and forth to work, but you maybe take fewer unnecessary trips, stuff like that.

It does happen. Yeah. So I'm very curious. I don't know if any economists are listening, which is more inelastic. I'm going to come out and say just from my gut, and we can check this and report back next week, that the elasticity of eggs is actually lower than the elasticity of gas. And gas is a famously priced inelastic commodity.

So say it in English without using the word elastic. If the price of eggs goes up by 20%, the amount of eggs that people buy is roughly the same. Whereas if the price of gas goes up by 20%, the amount of gas that people buy actually goes down by like a visible amount. So eggs are, wow. So, okay. So yeah, so this does come back to the question, like if I'm an egg producer, why would I ever lower egg prices again? People just buy the eggs. Yeah.

Is it because of that 4%? Yeah. I mean, so remember that the egg price is a market price, really. It's not that the egg producers are going like, you know, rubbing their hands and going, ooh, now we get to gouge people. The price is really like, I feel like this is a very efficient market that we have in eggs right now.

And ultimately, the price that you're being charged at the supermarket is being set by the supermarket. It's not being charged by the egg producer. And the supermarkets are saying to the producers, this is how much we are selling the eggs for. And there are actual markets and egg exchanges that we talked about last week.

So I think that's the misconception when people are talking about the egg producers price gouging. It's not that it's up to them how much to charge, right? They are just receiving in the open market, the market rate for eggs. And when the market rate for eggs goes up, they make more money. And when the market rate for eggs goes back down, as it will eventually, right?

they make less money. So it does sound like the market is working in this case. Yeah, that's my case. This is absolutely my case. It's that the market is doing exactly what it is supposed to do. But I think Annie Lowry, she's the one who wrote the good piece on eggs should never have gotten this cheap in the first place in the Atlantic. She still has a good point, which is like,

We industrialized egg production. It used to just be people bought eggs from their local farms and then it was industrialized and now eggs get shipped all over the country and they're a lot cheaper and they're not, I guess, people have come around to them. But the poor chickens. Oh, 100. Oh, we're never going to be nice to the chickens. I've made this point on Egg Watch in the past. Like, this is absolutely true that, you know, the price of,

free-range and organic eggs has gone up much less than the price of cheap eggs. And the reason is that those chickens are much better treated and much less likely to get the flu. And if you care about the welfare of chickens, you should never eat the cheap eggs at all because those chickens are just held in atrocious conditions. And that's the reason why eggs are so cheap. Can I quote to you from Annie Lowry's Friend of the Pod? She was on, it was many years ago. But anyway, can I quote...

Many birds on industrial farms show obvious signs of distress, injury, osteoporosis, liver disease, prolapse. I don't know what that is. As well as depression and, wait for it, social derangement. We are making the chickens deranged.

They're deranged, not free range. They're not free range, they're deranged. Deranged chickens running. They're not running around. They're just stuck in the little- They're cooped up in these tiny little cages. They can't move around, spread their wings. It's really sad. And do you know the male chicks, they have no role here. So Annie writes, they are gassed, threshed, or crushed after hatching. Like how sad is that? I mean, it's just-

Yeah, if you're a chicken sexer, your job is to just throw thousands of male chicks into like a threshold. Oh my God, that is so violent. Awful. It's really violent. All to get these cheap little eggs so people can have them for, just eat oatmeal. Well, I think this,

I think this is just, this is very much what happens when we are so far removed from how our food is made. We, you know, we've become very desensitized or at least put up blinders to like what goes into us getting the food from where it starts with the animal to our plates. And like, I'm not a vegan, but like hearing stuff like that makes me be like, maybe, or at the very least, like I should be a bit more conscious of what it means when I buy this specific food.

food item and what it means and what that animal had to go through to get to my plate. Unfortunately, a lot of people either because they

for various economic reasons, can't afford that luxury of, you know, getting the non-deranged chicken eggs. It's really frustrating, but it is. I think there's a big, overall, our culture has become so removed from the food-making process. I'm pretty sure Annie is a vegan, and so, like, this is not surprising coming from her, but I would agree, you know, if you're someone who is remotely engaged

swayed by the sort of ethical arguments for vegetarianism or for veganism, then the first and easiest thing you can do to have the biggest sort of marginal effect, you don't need to give up eating

all meat. You know, the first and easiest thing you can do is just like stop buying the terrible eggs and start buying the free range eggs and the organic eggs. If everyone just did that, just change the kind of eggs that they bought, that would have astonishingly positive impact.

implications for animal welfare in the country. Do you think then if there was a warning on eggs that said these eggs were laid by deranged chickens with osteoporosis, people would buy fewer eggs? Yeah, it should be like cigarettes, right? I think it would give some people pause, particularly if they can afford the more expensive, free-range, non-deranged chicken eggs. As those of us who've had chickens know, like...

like it is not cheap to keep chickens. It's true that they don't, you don't need to really feed them very much. They can just go out and forage whatever, unless there's, unless everything's just covered in snow, in which case you do need to feed them, but you can just feed them kitchen scraps and that's fine. But just,

the cost of building the chicken house and keeping them warm at night and making sure that the various predators don't get in and eat them all, that adds up. And it adds up to much more than the cost of buying

buying $4 cartons of eggs at your local supermarket. Got to make choices sometimes. Although Brooke Rollins, who's the Secretary of Agriculture, she has suggested that one of the solutions for high egg prices right now is to have chickens. Yeah, own chickens, man. I think there's somebody in Brooklyn who has a chicken rental service.

Or you can just rent a chicken. Yeah. That seems smart. Shaina, are you going to rent a chicken? I'm not going to rent a chicken, but like I mentioned last time, I have a friend with chickens and her and I need to have a talk. Report back next week on Egg Watch and thanks for coming on. Always a pleasure.

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This is my favorite segment of the week, I have to say, mainly because it flummoxes Emily. Emily, are you flummoxed by this? I'm flummoxed, okay? So a syndicate of investors in Malta bought up all the tickets in the Texas lottery. They spent $26 million and they won $58 million. Huge profit. And I guess my flummoxing is when I heard about this, when I read about it in Matt Levine's newsletter, and then when I went and read the Houston Chronicle article that followed...

I was like, this is wrong. No group of rich people should be able to game a state lottery and walk away with the winnings. That is not right. Doesn't seem fair. End of story in my brain. Then I come to the meeting with you all and Felix is like, it's fine.

Then I asked at the dinner table, the Peck household, I was like, what do you folks think? And they were like, it's fine. You can buy as many tickets for the lottery as you want. So they won. What's the problem? And I'm like, no, there is a problem. You can't. It's just not. And then I felt myself sort of fumbling around, like saying things like, it's just not right. It's not fair. But I'm having trouble kind of like getting to why. We know where Emily's intuitions lie. Yes. Elizabeth.

First of all, let's just do a quick scene setting. This has turned into a major political scandal in Texas. There are hearings in the Texan

legislature and people are resigning and everyone is outraged. And so the general consensus in Texas, which I always thought of as being quite a libertarian state, but evidently not the general consensus in Texas seems to be, this is a scandal and this is very bad and this should never have been allowed. And the people who allowed it to happen should lose their jobs and generally be pilloried in polite society.

Emily's intuitions are more or less aligned with this. Elizabeth, what are your intuitions? Well, I was in Texas all week and got back yesterday. My sense is that there's a certain constituency of people who are outraged because it sort of violates their sense of fair play. Yeah. But for the most part, the Texas lottery has very low participation. People only buy about a million tickets a week, which compared to most state lotteries is extremely low. So I think it's the sort of intuitive thing

To be clear, Powerball is what people play.

in Texas. Powerball and Mega Millions are the big multi-state lotteries, and they have pretty much crowded out most of the in-state lotteries. And so the Texans, because they want to win a billion dollars, not a million dollars, generally play the big multi-state lotteries rather than the smaller state lotteries. So both of you also do not share my intuition that this wasn't

Fair. I'm still waiting for Elizabeth's intuition on this one. Yeah, what's your intuition? My intuition is that you can only do this once or twice and then people kind of

understand what's going on. You know, the part of the reason why this group was able to do it was just that nobody else saw the opportunity. But now, and the Lottery Commission appears to have known about it. So if they don't ultimately decide that there was something wrong here, then any other investment group come in and do the same thing. And if anything, I hope that would encourage for fewer poor people to play the lottery.

So you still haven't answered the question. Is this fine or is this like a bad scandalous thing? I think it's a good thing, but partly because I have a sort of ideological opposition to lotteries. And I think if this is what kind of kills participation, then...

Why not? But I think to your point, at the margin, the most it can do is kill participation in the Texas lottery, which already had very low participation, and just move more people over to Powerball and Mega Millions, which have even lower chances of winning. So, you know, I doubt we'll see less lottery gambling as a result. We'll just see lottery gambling moving to a different lottery.

I still say it's not fair. People did buy tickets for this lottery and, you know, thinking I have a chance to win. And then some rich people swooped in and took away their chance to win. No, they didn't. Their chance to win, Emily, was exactly the same. I know. I knew you were going to say that. But like in their heads, you know what I mean? In their heads? Yeah, in their heads. So I'll tell you. Okay. So this is, if you need to articulate...

If you need to articulate a loser, then there is the only way that you can articulate a loser is by saying that if one of the small number of Texans who actually play the lottery had managed to miraculously by chance pick the exact right numbers to win the jackpot, which happens very rarely in the Texas lottery, which is why it rolls over so much, that person would

would have wound up sharing the jackpot with a bunch of investors from Malta and would have wound up getting only half of a jackpot rather than the full jackpot. And so the

loser here is the hypothetical winner who didn't actually play and there was no actual winner and there was no one to share the jackpot. But if there had been, that hypothetical person would have had slightly fewer millions to enjoy because they would have had to share it with the Maltese. And that is the only...

loser that you can articulate here? No, I'm going to try one more. Okay. What about the Texas state lottery? A clear loser because as you've both now said, no, you've both now said more, fewer people are now going to play the Texas lottery. No, I didn't say that. I,

Elizabeth said it. And I think, yes, the lottery is a loser here because it erodes any sort of confidence that people have that the whole thing isn't rigged, even though it's not technically rigged. Okay. So I am going to come out and say that like, number one, it's not rigged. Number two. I agree, but it creates the appearance of unfairness. It seems like a rigging. Okay. But the,

Lottery was the clear winner. Like the purpose of a lottery, and you can complain that it's a tax on poverty, and that is entirely true. But the purpose of a lottery is to raise funds for, you know, good causes within the state. And the more people that play the lottery, the more funds are raised. And if normally there's like 1 million tickets bought and the lottery gets half of that and the other half goes into prizes, then like in a normal week,

Texas gets half a million dollars to spend on good causes this week. There's 27 million tickets sold. And so suddenly that half million dollars turns into 13 and a half million dollars. And there's much more money in Texas to spend on good causes. So the lottery is a clear winner, the lottery and Texas, every single person in Texas who doesn't play the lottery, which is 99% of the people in Texas,

wins when the Maltese come in and just shower $26 million on their state. Perhaps in the short term, but in the long term,

I think this is bad publicity for the Texas state lottery, which really didn't need bad publicity because no one was doing it anyway. So in the long term, this isn't good for the people of Texas. I just feel like there are more pro-social ways to raise money for things that you need in Texas. Correct. So in fact, it's a win-win, right? It's a short-term win because Texas gets more money. And it's also a long-term win because...

there are better ways to raise money for the people of Texas. And so there's really like, this is fantastic. No, I think Slate money at slate.com. It's just icky for a bunch of investors in Malta to buy up all the tickets in the Texas state lottery so that they can win. It's not right. It's not fair. It's not how you're supposed to play the game of lottery. Is that right?

Is that how you say it? The game of lottery. It's just, it goes against. I thought you were going to say the game of life. It does go against. It goes against. It does go against the law. Let's also be clear about this. There were various laws saying that in order to be a lottery retailer, you needed to be some kind of a bodega or gas station or something that sold other things. And in order to be able to buy all of these tickets, they wound up just setting up a whole bunch of

lottery machines on folding tables which were not in stores and were not in bodegas and were not selling other things and so that you know they did wind up doing a bunch of things that bent or violated the law in order to do this so like i'm not saying that what they did was legal i'm just saying that you know i do not share emily's ick about it i think it's kind of clever to be honest oh

It's icky. I mean, it could be clever and icky at the same time. A lot of things are. Maybe that's the, maybe that is basically the lesson that we get from pretty much every single Matt Levine column. Clever and icky at the same time. Yeah, this was very much in his wheelhouse.

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Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. Okay, should we have a numbers round? I'll start off this week, why not, with 2,500, which is the amount that Benny's son was offered by a woman on 10 Mare Street in Manhattan for his Paul McCartney ticket.

Benny Sun is a reporter for Hellgate, which is one of my favorite New York City publications. Go subscribe to it. And he told the story of how he managed to buy a Paul McCartney ticket for $50 at Bowery Ballroom because he played this series of gigs at Bowery Ballroom. And it was a first come, first serve, one ticket per person. And whoever gets there first gets to hand over $50 and watch Paul McCartney perform in a very small and intimate venue, which I love.

And he gets there and the vet and there's a big, big long saga. And anyway, he hands over $50. He comes out, he has his ticket. And of course, immediately this being Manhattan, someone walks up to him and offers him $2,500 for it. And by the way, he says no. And he winds up going to see the gig, even though he could really use two and a half thousand dollars. And he, you know, that would like pay his rent. And I just love that story because it shows how, uh,

how weirdly complex these decisions are in real life. We're not like simple economic animals. If we've been standing out in the cold for hours, on one level, if someone said, would you stand out in the cold for hours for $2,500? You'd be like, yeah, totally. I would totally do that. But on the other hand...

Yeah, everything becomes very emotional. And I love the way that even people who really need the two and a half thousand dollars, if they've gone through the suffering of standing in line, won't flip their tickets. And I do think that helps to...

to ratify the decision of the Bowery Ballroom folks to make people stand in line and suffer in order to get their tickets because it kind of ends up with where you want to be, which is the true fans wind up seeing the show rather than just people who can

pull strings and pay lots of money. I bet he could have gotten more than $2,500 too. Like I would have said no just by be like, I bet I could get like a lot more. Like just face value of tickets these days is $1,000 sometimes, you know? Yeah, if he was playing at MSG, the tickets would be way higher. Elizabeth, what's your number? My number is 90,000 and that's dollars.

And that's how much a Flamin' Hot Cheeto shaped like a Charizard from Pokemon sold at auction. What? Last week, and the guy who sold it bought it for $350 off of eBay. What? What? First of all, I need to know the name of the auction house. Golden Auction. G-O-L-D-I-N. Pretty obviously a boutique. I hope it's related to Davidson Golden, the PR person. It's Claudia Golden's auction house, probably. Ha ha ha ha!

Wouldn't that be great if it was Claudia Golden's auction house? Oh, look at that. Oh, she's screen sharing with us. You can't see this because you're listening. A Pokemon shaped Cheeto, which sold for $90,000. Okay. It kind of looks like a lobster.

So I have a nine-year-old semi-pro Pokemon dealer in my house, and I'm currently taping in front of a seven-foot mural of Charizard. Who is Charizard? He's the dragon character from Pokemon that's orange. Okay, okay, great. He's the most popular character because that's what the highest-selling cards usually are, Charizards. Oh, wait, so Pikachu is not the most popular? Nope. I learn a new thing every day.

Emily, what's your number? Look, my number is one. I like that number. It's a good one. We have to have a one every so often. It's classic. Occasionally a zero, but yeah. Yeah, it's classic. One is a good number. It's one for one hour. That is the amount of time we have to set the clock back tonight, Saturday night. It's daylight saving. It's here again. We're losing an hour's sleep. We're losing an hour's sleep. Thank you. I hate it. I don't like it. No one wants it. Well, I guess some people want it.

Our president, Donald Trump, before taking office said he and the Republicans were going to get rid of it. They were going to make that happen. This week, he backtracked. Guys, shockingly, he changed his mind. And he said, no, we're not getting rid of it because it's hard to get excited about it. It's a 50-50 issue, which means I guess some people want to keep it. Some people don't want to keep it. So he's staying the hell away from it. And to sum up,

We just get less sleep and I don't like it. So I think there is a clear majority of Americans who don't want to flip flop in a Trumpy way from time zone to time zone twice a year. No one wants that. But.

There is absolutely no agreement within that majority of whether we should be on the summertime all year or in the wintertime all year. And I think, Emily, you and I disagree on this one. Like once we spring forward and we lose an hour, I just want to stay on that summertime all year round.

I agree with that. Yeah. I actually don't care anymore. Just either way. I just don't want to change anymore. Maybe we should all just be pressuring our local Trumpist to say, you didn't do it in March, but just hold off in September and make sure that we'll just stick to where we are and never change it again. Yes. Yes. Let's do that. If anyone's here, make this the last time we ever need to change our clock. SlateMoneyAtSlate.com. Tell us what you think about the time change.

Yes. Send us all your thoughts. SlateMoneyAtSlate.com. And other than that, thanks for listening. Thanks to Shane and Roth, not only for producing, but also for watching Eggs. Thanks to Jessamyn Molly for producing. Thanks to Merritt Jacob for doing amazing studio things in Brooklyn. And we will be back next week with more 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'm Leon Nafok, and I'm the host of Slow Burn Watergate. Before I started working on this show, everything I knew about Watergate came from the movie All the President's Men. Do you remember how it ends?

Woodward and Bernstein are sitting with their typewriters, clacking away. And then there's this rapid montage of newspaper stories. About campaign aides and White House officials getting convicted of crimes. About audio tapes coming out that prove Nixon's involvement in the cover-up. The last story we see is: Nixon resigns. It takes a little over a minute in the movie. In real life, it took about two years. Five men were arrested early Saturday while trying to install eavesdropping equipment. It's known as the Watergate incident. What was it like to experience those two years in real time?

What were people thinking and feeling as the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters went from a weird little caper to a constitutional crisis that brought down the president? The downfall of Richard Nixon was stranger, wilder, and more exciting than you can imagine. Over the course of eight episodes, this show is going to capture what it was like to live through the greatest political scandal of the 20th century. With today's headlines once again full of corruption, collusion, and dirty tricks, it's time for another look at the gate that started it all. Subscribe to Slow Burn now, wherever you get your podcasts.