MrBeast and The Chocolate Factory
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Hello, welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. I'm here with Elizabeth Spires of the New York Times and Humplemoose, something like that. Passion fruit.

All manner of places. We'll talk about that later. We are joined also, of course, by Emily Peck of Axios. Hello, hello. And we're going to talk about the stock market. It is down and we're going to talk about whether that matters. We're going to talk about Binance and whether it's going to ever become an American company. And if not, does that matter? We are going to talk about Mr. Beast and his chocolate bar. Elizabeth Spires is going to eat one

one of his chocolate bars. We have a Slate Plus segment on Banner White and the optimal number of days to work per year. It's all coming up on Slate Money. Slate Money is brought to you by Charles Schwab. Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching?

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Okay, so for markets nerds, I know there's one or two of you out there. One of the words that was being thrown around this week was correction. As in, if you look at the market, the broad stock market, the S&P 500, it briefly touched a level where it was 10% below its high point. And markets nerds and people keeping almanacs and that kind of thing

have a name for this. It's called a correction. If it then goes down as much again and goes down 20% from its high point, that is called a bear market. See, we define terms here on slate money. And people care about this because they like round numbers and that kind of thing. But people are particularly caring about this because it is happening in the midst of Trump chaos. And so

there is a natural tendency to...

basically assign some kind of causality there and say, the stock market is going down because Trump something, something, something. And so that's really what I wanted to just sort of look at today and ask Emily, basically, you've been looking at big global events of massive geopolitical and global importance over the decades. And

Tell me what you found in terms of whether and when they have any real effect on the stock market. Well, there are two kinds of big global or national events that affect the stock market.

One kind is sort of obvious, and I don't know if we need to talk about it all that much, but it's financial type events like the financial crisis or the Great Depression or Black Monday, you know, during the first George Bush presidency. Those things happen and the markets fall. And I found this really nice list of various events. So, I mean, the first thing we should just say is that Black Monday is a

Exactly the other way around. The stocks fell and then that created news rather than news happened and that caused stocks to fall. Yes, yes. That's very good. Very good point. Felix always makes a good point. But there are sort of the financial news events and then there's like political news events. So other events that historically have caused the market to fall would be like

Pearl Harbor, the Korean War, this list that I'm looking at right here, 9-11, the stock markets fell a little bit from that and then came back up. Even the World Trade Center bombing, we saw the markets kind of stumble a little bit. And of course, COVID made the markets fall. And I feel like sometimes these news events, these political events, are

they cause the markets to fall, and then they kind of reverse themselves pretty quickly. 9-11, I think, is a good example of that. And sometimes... And even COVID, if you zoom out a little bit longer. Yes. Well, if you zoom out for everything, the markets always go up. So it's like kind of a moot conversation. But some of these events are really significant and do restructure the way business and finance works for a long time. I would kind

of argue that COVID did, but not in the bad way. Well, I mean, I wrote a whole book about how it did. But I think the big counter example, and it's kind of interesting to me, the thing where we saw stocks, the market really fall dramatically and then not rebound was in 2000. We had a big crash in 2000 when the dotcom bubble burst. Stocks went down massively.

And then they stayed down basically for 10 years. There was no real rebound. There was a decade of stocks going sideways. And one of the interesting things about that is that's really one of your

exhibit A things, right? There was no news that caused the stocks to fall. It was just a market thing that happened. And then the market thing that happened, you know, they found a new level and then they stayed at that new level, lower level for some time. But you couldn't blame any particular sort of politician or event or policy for that happening. Sometimes it's like the accumulation of data. So with the dot-com bubble bursting, it was like

There was like a steady stream of stories about how ridiculous the dot-com economy had become. There were little scandals, Henry Blodgett, things like that. And it sort of builds up and then things start to fall. And I feel like you could draw that parallel to what's happening now with Trump where like

He was expected to do these tariffs and no one really paid attention. And then like the news just keeps coming about this stuff. He puts them on, he takes them off, he puts them on, he takes them off until finally like reality sinks in or something. I would say that the objective magnitude of the stories you're talking about in 2000, if you add them all up, comes nowhere near to this explains why trillions of dollars of wealth was evaporated from the stock market.

I think in terms of today's news, there are more people who are more inclined to believe that a wholesale restructuring of the geostrategic world order could affect the stock market. It seems, on its face, a little bit more plausible. Yeah, I was actually working in a startup in 2000. It was called Square.com. And my...

memory of what was happening then was just that a lot of companies had raised early stage venture capital in, you know, 97, 98, just as the internet was becoming huge. And a lot of them were hitting their series B rounds and not being able to raise money. So you had this sort of domino effect of companies imploding just because they had sort of outrun their valuation and they weren't having exits. And I think it caused a lot of fear in the markets that

maybe the whole sector was overvalued because that's really where a lot of the

market you know value was exactly it was a market valuation liquidity you know type thing it's very much what emily considers to be you know type a where like there's an event in the market that is i guess you could consider it on some level endogenous to the markets the market caused the run up and then the market caused the rundown yeah is there a straight up example of the type b

event that really kept the market down for a long time? I guess that's my question because looking at this list, I found online doesn't really help me. It just says this thing happened and the markets fell when it happened. Fall of France is the first on the list and the markets went down for about a month, 17%. And then six months later, they were back up. And so all

For almost everything that happened, the markets come back up six months later. There's like only a few instances where it didn't, like in the great financial crisis, Bear Stearns collapsed, stuff like that. It's a really good question. And I think it's hard to find a good example in US equities. But if you look at something like the value of the pound after the Brexit vote, you know, the Brexit vote happens, the pound has its like biggest one day fall since,

Black Thursday or whenever it was, you know, this massive plunge. And then it never comes back.

You know, that's like a new permanent normal because Britain is just fucked itself. Forever changed. Yeah. Oh, God. So is the question now, is the question now, are we, is the U.S. forever changed? We've not had an equity shock like you're talking about with Brexit before. Well, I mean, part of the question is, like, is there such a thing as an exogenous shock that can really hit the U.S. stock market on a,

to long-term basis. And...

I'm not sure that we've seen one, you know, since 1945. Does that mean that it's impossible? No. I think Trump is going to test that theory because we are so early into his term. And part of the reason why the market is reacting is markets just don't like chaos. And his sort of entire mode of leadership is, I'm going to keep you guessing, you know, maybe tomorrow I'll introduce a tariff and then two days later, take it away. And if he manages to keep doing this for four years,

I think there's probably going to be a lot of lasting damage. We haven't had an executive in office who has done this sort of thing, maybe ever.

So I think we're looking at something that's a little bit unprecedented. When you say lasting damage, I'm super interested in what you mean there. Do you mean damage to corporations' long-term ability to make profits over the next 20 to 30 years? Because that is ultimately what the stock market is trying to discount and value.

Yeah, I do mean that because it's a sort of constellation of Trump's policy choices. You know, if you destroy higher ed, which is a big source of where we get, you know, our knowledge economy, if you take away federal funding for medical research, which is happening everywhere.

These are all things that really do affect corporations' ability to make money. We're not a manufacturing economy, and that's the only sector that Trump seems to care about improving. And once you tear some of that infrastructure out, it's very difficult to rebuild that. There's a little bit of some of the stuff he's doing, you're not going to be able to just put the toothpaste back in the tube.

And I think that will have long-term effects if he keeps doing it. Yeah, what you were saying about scientific research and about education, I think those are really good points to raise. And they do answer the question Felix was raising, like medium to long-term success of science.

US companies, because those are really important things like the talent in the United States. They are super important. They're also incredibly difficult to price. If you're like a stock market trader, you could make the case to be sure that implicit and explicit government flows of money,

from taxpayers to Stanford have helped to drive the stock market over the past 40 years. Yeah, you can draw an indirect line from that to the so-called Magnificent Seven, right? All the funding the federal government spent on technology and science leads to the creation of these companies that the federal government doesn't really like. It's just odd. Yeah.

I guess my point is that that's like a 40-year bull market we're talking about. We're not talking about, you know, like no one priced that in 40 years ago because it was impossible to price in 40 years ago. We talk about this a lot. You know, the bond investors are more sophisticated than equities investors. We also have a lot of concentrated wealth in the GAFAs and the tech companies at the top of the equity heap.

But I think part of what we're dealing with, too, is just that the way people understand the economy is very vibes-based. And they look at the stock market as an economic indicator, even though it's not. And that has a sort of downstream effect on things like consumer spending. So...

I don't even know that all of it's going to happen long term. I think there are going to be some short term problems. And when you think about how voters tie their understanding of the economy to who's in office, it's, you know, people always sort of blame or credit the president with how the economy is doing.

even though that's a completely, mostly irrational thing to do. It's why we still have to listen to James Carville all the time, because he coined the phrase, it's the economy's stupid, and that's been considered political conventional wisdom ever since. So I think there probably are short-term and long-term effects. I'm personally more concerned about the long-term effects, the things like, you know, we have a measles pandemic because of stupidity,

in, you know, our health care. Yeah, no, I think that your point is absolutely well taken. Like, there is absolutely no doubt that Trumpism writ large is going to have massive effects on the United States and the world and already is. And you can see that in like German fiscal policy already and lots of things, right? I'm just trying to zero in right now on

the US stock market in particular, because this is the thing that is like moving around. And that's what stocks do as they go up and they go down. And I'm just trying to think through the degree to which this is a perfectly normal thing. You know,

you know, stocks go up and stocks go down. And it's entirely possible that the stocks would have gone down absent any action from Trump whatsoever. And also remember that the stocks are going down from an all time high that was notched during the second Trump administration during that early period of exuberance. You know, now we're back to a little bit below sort of pre-election levels, but not very much below pre-election levels.

And even the pre-election levels priced in a certain probability of a Trump win. So there's a lot of nuance here. I think two things are true, and you're absolutely right about this, Elizabeth. Number one, when people feel bad about Trump, one of the things they look to sort of ratify that vibe is, oh, and the stocks are down, so that's bad. And number two is that when stocks go down,

the people who write about that always look for some kind of causality. And the obvious causality in this case, were there to be some kind of cause has to be something Trumpy, right? Because that's dominating the news. And that's what is happening right now. So everyone's like, it's recession fears, it's tariffs, it's sluggishness.

slashing money going to higher education. It's whatever, you know, it's Doge. It's whatever, like name your Trumpy policy, like any of them could plausibly move stocks down. I just don't know whether there's any real evidence for that. I think it's all beginning to really annoy me because when Biden was president and everyone was like, the economy is terrible and they point into whatever economic indicator made sense to make that argument, it was annoying. And

to be fair, it's annoying now. I mean, if you like zoom out and you look at other economic indicators, they're okay for now. I mean, we just had like pretty good inflation report, the jobs report that came last week. And I know these are backwards looking indicators, right? So we don't know what's to come, but,

But so far, it's fine. It's really it's fine. And the people who are like freaking out because the stock market's going down on the left are people that in other contexts would be like, now, remember, the stock market is not the economy. Now, remember, you know, X percent of Americans aren't even invested in the stock market. And so now they're freaking out. America is in decline because Trump is president. And look at the stock market.

it just bothers, it just is, I find it just annoying. It's like, they're just hooking onto whatever argument they can to sort of make the case that the guy is bad. But I think it's just a bad look for everyone. As, as the left, personally, yeah.

I think part of it is that Trump got up and during the first term and every single day he said, look at where the stock market is. And that was the only metric that mattered. Yeah, but he's quite explicitly distanced himself from that rhetoric in the second term. Like he's come out, Scott Besant has come out and they're like, we don't actually care about the stock market. That's the point though. That's what irritates the left is like, okay, if that was going to be your metric, then

I mean, everything about Trump irritates the left, Elizabeth. We know that. The left doesn't give a fuck about the stock market. Exactly. What they do care about is the hypocrisy. But they're hypocrites too. I disagree with that.

The left doesn't care about the stock market, but right now the left cares about the stock market. They don't, though. Elizabeth is like, it doesn't care about the stock market. It just cares about whether Trump cares about the stock market. And the whole thing is a little bit silly. I'm team Emily on this one. They care about...

pointing out his hypocrisy. It's like, okay, let's take you at face value. You think the most important metric is the stock market. That's what you said all the way through the first term. Great. Let's look at the stock market. How's it doing? Seriously, no one cares about Trump hypocrisy. You can point to 8 million different examples of Trump hypocrisy. Like, yeah, that and $2.90 will get you on the subway.

As someone who works in politics, sometimes I disagree with you. And that's not also what we hear from voters. So you don't care about Trump. Yeah, you are coming at this explicitly from a sort of electoral voters politics, who's going to win the election kind of angle. I'm coming at this just from a kind of important things. Do we care about the stock market? And do we think the stock market is going down because of Trump?

And Elizabeth has just said explicitly she doesn't care about the stock market. Emily, I think you've said you don't care very much. No, I very much care about the stock market. Like I am older and my retirement is...

In view, not like close view, but like it's something I think about and that's where all my retirement money is. So definitely I care about the stock market, but I also recognize that it's not an economic indicator. The stock market is not the economy. And I recognize looking at these charts that it goes down and then it goes up and then it goes down and then it goes up and then up.

Also up. The big picture is the stock market is high on an absolute level. Yeah. Which is either good or bad, depending on how you think about it. Right. It's either good because, hey, we're rich because our 401ks have lots of money in them. Or it's bad because, you know, it has a long way to fall. Should it be so inclined?

But the general gist that I think we're more or less arriving at right now is don't be selling your stocks because you're worried about Trump. Trump is not a reason to be bearish for the stock market in particular, because the stock market has its own things that drive it, which are almost entirely not positive. That's probably true, but we're not giving stock advice on this show. Yeah.

You're not registered investment advisors. Yeah, I mean, who knows what's even happening as we tape this call. We saw the University of Michigan numbers were very bad. The thing, I'll just end with the conversation that I had with Ken Fisher once, who's a big money manager and is very, very expert in terms of selling money management services to rich people. And what he told me was that

When you have like meetings of clients and potential clients and you answer their questions, he was like 95% of the questions they ask are about whatever is in the headlines that morning.

And if you're a money manager who is an investor rather than a trader, if you're investing for anything longer than, you know, a couple of weeks, that's the dumbest possible reason to change your investments or make trades or do anything like you don't react to headlines. Like it's the first thing any investor learns is don't react to headlines because you will overreact.

Emily, I need to ask you a quick question. Do you have any financial habits? And in particular, do you have any financial good habits?

I'm going to be really honest with you. I don't. I am a chaos monkey when it comes to money. I mean, if I didn't have a family and I didn't work with my partner on budgeting and all that, I would just be waiting two times a month for that paycheck to come in and then just figuring it out. I know that this means I'm spending more money than I need to because I think financial routines actually lead you to spend more.

Less money, like if you have a plan for your food for the week, you're going to spend less money than if every day you're like, oh, what should I eat? I don't know. And then you wind up spending, you know, $40 on shrimp cocktail or something like that. Elizabeth, as a personal finance columnist, you surely have a healthy financial routine in your life somewhere. Well, I should say I'm not a personal finance columnist anymore. Oh, what happened to your personal finance column? I just didn't have time to rate it. So now somebody else is rating it.

My only routine is that I look at my expenses every month to see where I'm going over whatever I've budgeted in my head. But I also use an app to dig up all the subscriptions that I subscribe to and totally forgot about. I don't know if my routine is good or bad, but I have started getting into like food subscriptions. I have a coffee subscription. I have a subscription for fizzy water. I think it's maybe...

healthy specifically in coffee because these are very expensive times in the world of coffee if you get a five pound bag of coffee every so often that will save you money and that's a decent routine to have but yeah i think i'm mostly with emily on the chaos monkey approach the crypto exchange that refused to die is this amazing company called binance which was

found guilty of 8,000 different flavors of money laundering and other illegal activities. Its founder, this guy called CZ, turned himself into the authorities under the Biden administration, went to prison for four months. And now it's a whole brave new world. And no one seems to be worried about any kind of illegality that may or may not have happened at

or the $4 billion fine that the company paid. And the Emirates, the UAE have invested $2 billion in the company in stable coins. Of course, it's all in crypto. And there's a Wall Street Journal report saying that the Trump family is interested in investing in Binance US, which is this

very small and not very important exchange that Binance set up in the US because it needed to be compliant with US regulations, but no one really used it. And so all of the stuff that it got in trouble for was like Binance non-US, which is where all the sophisticated traders, even the American traders actually traded. Emily, what is your...

take on all this? Is this just another example of potential Trump corruption? Or is this like a sign that Binance is really going to dominate the

crypto world for the foreseeable future. Okay. So my big takeaway from when you just glibly say, is this another example of the Trump corruption? I'd like to just unpack that a little bit because the Wall Street Journal had this story and Binance denies it and the Trump administration isn't commenting on it. But that said, this story in the Wall Street Journal, my hot take is three words, which is, I wrote them down and bolded them. This is batshit.

The story is that the Trump family, which is managing all of Trump's business interests while he is president, which he obviously is not divested from in any meaningful way. And is also managing the Trump meme coin. Meme coin, all of it. And the Trump investment in world financial coin. Yes, world financial. Wow.

The story reports that they're negotiating to maybe take a stake in Binance, Binance US. And the reason Justin, I'm sorry, the reason CZ and Binance US might want this to occur is

Essentially, they are trying to buy a pardon from the Trump administration. They point to an example, which is a good example. This guy, Justin Sun, the guy who bought the banana that we talked about a while ago. Justin Sun was facing civil SEC charges. He invested $30 million in World Liberty Financial. That's the Trump crypto company. Last month, the SEC asked a court to pause his case.

So, according to the Wall Street Journal, CZ and his milieu saw that this happened with Justin Sun. They were like, oh, let's do that. We'll, you know, give some money to World Financial. We'll do some kind of deal and then we'll get our part in. Like, boom, bang, boom. Like, this is just being reported in the paper like...

That's like how it works now. And the person negotiating with Binance US, according to the Wall Street Journal, and again, this has all been denied, is Trump's top Middle East negotiator. He is the one like working this out. Like it's just...

Unbelievable. My new heuristic, and I realize that this is on brand for me, and of course I loathe Trump, but if there's a way to do something like this ethically and cleanly, Trump intentionally picks the crazy, wildly unethical way to do it. Because I think for him, it's like a display of power. Like you can do this and get away with it. I just had one more thing. I'm sorry. But I really, when I wrote This is Batchit, I was very serious in my use of the word batchit.

The last thing I will add is that Binance, the reason it got in trouble under Biden was it was accused of letting Hamas and other terrorist groups

use the platform to do finance for terrorism stuff. Like that is why. So now that allegedly, and they deny it, the Trump people are talking to this group and they're hoping to get like a pardon or whatever. At the same time, the Trump administration is like trying to deport some Columbia student who did some protesting that they're calling a Hamas terrorist. It's just,

I cannot believe it. Are you saying you're bothered by the hypocrisy? Let me drill down on this question of believing things, because I think this is something where Emily Peck, who has worked in many media organizations, including the Wall Street Journal, and who knows how the sausage is made, can understand.

be interesting and enlightening, which is when you have a long story like this one in the Wall Street Journal with lots of detail about who is talking to who and what are the entities that people are talking about investing in and how that might tie into a potential pardon and why it would be difficult for

finance to be active in the US while its major shareholder continues to be a convicted felon and all of these things, which are very detailed. And then on the other hand, you have CZ coming out on Twitter saying this is just false. And they talk to a whole bunch of people trying to find this

They had this preconceived story in their head and most of them said no, but one or two of them said, wait, what, who? And they managed to piece it together somehow, but it's totally not true. And I'm not talking to anyone about selling a stake in Binance US to anyone. How do you weigh those two things? How do you weigh the sort of veracity of the Wall Street Journal story versus the veracity of the CZ tweets?

Yeah, that's tough. When I read this story, there was felt like there was something missing evidence wise because there was no one quoted by name or on the record saying any of this. And I guess I'm coming to it knowing the Wall Street Journal and they do have really high, high standards for reporting. And they probably had it. They went through legal with the story. So I'm coming to it with a little bit of trust. But yeah, when I read it, I thought to myself, wow, this is really damning. And also, wow, are we sure?

And then I thought, well, it's the Wall Street Journal. Well, also, I think there's another possibility, which is that, you know, I think about the way people understand stories like the journal story, if it doesn't have people quoted. But almost every controversial story that's hard to get, you're mostly working with sources that are off the record or you're trying to corroborate information that you know, and nobody's going on the record.

Sorry, I don't take it for granted that everybody that the reporter talked to was, you know, somehow mentioned in the story. Absolutely not. There are lots of good reasons to why someone would talk off the record about something like this. But by the same token, and this has certainly happened to me, and I'm sure it's happened to both of you as well.

People are much happier to lie when they are off the record than when they are on the record. That's true, but then you have a reason. That's one of the few reasons why I think it's legitimately acceptable to burn a source. I think it happens very rarely, but I do think that's one of the few occasions where nobody...

gets super mad if a journalist does it. I would like to see another outlet report this same story, just to know. And I guess if you want to talk about the adjacent issue, which is the comeback of crypto, we can also address that because that was part of your question. You're like, is Binance coming back? One of the interesting things is that Binance kind of never went away. That after the prosecution of the company, after CZ going to prison, after the implosion of FTX,

there was a general vibe in the air that like Binance was going to zero and quite the opposite has happened. Binance has become the dominant crypto company on the planet. And it has done that in the face of a very, very,

concerted effort by the crypto world, much of which is based in the United States to try and make crypto like as American a thing as possible. And you have, you know, all the Anderson Horowitz guys and David Sachs and, you know, the new guys running the CFTC and even the SEC all coming out and trying to say like, we, we're going to make

crypto American again, basically. And the one major crypto company in the world, well, there are two really major crypto companies in the world that are not American, which are Binance and Tether. And those are the ones that are sort of very persona non grata in the United States. That's the reason why Binance US even exists is precisely because

finance can't operate in America. So they had to create this finance US entity in order to have something that could operate in America, but it never really took off. And it's super interesting to me that these super, super successful companies, Tether and Binance, don't have any operations in the United States. And yet they are

way more successful than all of the companies that do. Do we think that part of this is that the administration is trying really hard to sell crypto to the public as a safe asset? They're talking about strategic reserves of Bitcoin and whatever. And it might be hard to do that if two of the biggest players in the industry are not US companies. So you need to legitimate them a little bit too, especially if the last administration jailed one of the founders. Yeah, I think the chances of

Tether ever becoming legitimized in the United States are minimal. I think there is a big war going on between Tether and the U.S. rival to it, which is called USDC. And it is absolutely clear that the United States is team USDC, with the single exception, actually, interestingly, of Howard Lutnick.

the Commerce Secretary, who used to work at Cantor Fitzgerald. And Cantor Fitzgerald is the company that basically invests all of Tether's

billions in the treasury market. But except for him, everyone is very sort of pro-USDC and anti-tether because tether is incredibly opaque and no one knows what it's doing. And it's very dodgy. And there was, I mean, Seek Fox's book is all about tether. And so, yeah, I'm not sure that tether is ever going to become really Americanified. And I think if the Wall Street Journal article is right and what the Trumps are interested in is Binance U.S.,

The only reason you would invest in Binance US as an entity is precisely because you are convinced that big brother main Binance is never going to become much of a US entity. Also looking today, Fortune put out a story, six members of the Trump administration of the Trump cabinet have Bitcoin or crypto assets.

including of Robert Kennedy, Besson, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Scott Besson, and Sean Duffy. This is surprisingly normal. I can tell you that I am on my co-op board in Manhattan. And it's one of the dumb things that has to happen when people want to buy a co-op is they need to hand over a full list of all of their finances and wealth. And

Basically every single person who's trying to buy an apartment in my building has some kind of crypto holdings these days. It's very normal. You have crypto holdings. I have an ETF, which I bought for $1,000 because I lost a bet with Emily Peck. I haven't checked in on how that ETF is doing, but I'm pretty sure it's worth less than $1,000 now. Oh, it'll go up eventually. Everything goes up eventually. It's like the stock market. Emily Peck crypto bull.

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Let's move on to much more real things. And when I say real, I mean the most important celebrity on the planet, Mr. Beast, Jimmy Donaldson, Elizabeth. Is it true that his YouTube channel, which has absolutely mind-blowing global popularity, is in fact really just a lost leader for his chocolate bar?

No, but I can see why if you're looking at the finances, it absolutely looks that way. So Mr. Beast is Mr. Beast is. Is that Mr. What? Jimmy's. Jimmy's business model originally was that he had some followers on YouTube and he would get a sponsorship, you know, like maybe 10 grand.

And he would take $1,000 of that money and go give it to a homeless person on the street or say the first person who emails me gets $1,000. So this YouTube channel sort of grew because he was basically a one-person lottery. And that's still a big part of his business model, by the way. People give him giant sponsorships and his sort of giveaways become more extraordinary and sort of big extravagant experiences.

And that's why he ended up with the Netflix show. He has a huge following, mostly among Gen Alpha people. Like, I have a nine-year-old son, and he's squarely in the Mr. Beast demographic. Although he says, I polled him on this, that Mr. Beast is a little passe now. So the Gen Alphas are really fickle. So, I mean, I'm fascinated by this. The rise of Mr. Beast coincides with, as you say, the rise of...

his financial stunts going from like the thousands to the millions, basically. He has bigger and bigger budgets and can give away more and more money. I just feel that maybe I am completely out of touch, but I feel like even most adults, let alone most nine-year-olds, don't really have a feel for how much half a million dollars is or a million dollars is. What is it about

I'm giving away half a million dollars to this person, you know, compared to I'm giving away like $5,000 to this person that makes a nine-year-old more gripped by that. It's the staging. It's, you know, in the beginning, you would sort of walk out onto a regular street and give $1,000 to you.

homeless guy. Now it's like, I'm going to put you on a private plane and give you a million dollars and do all these life-changing things. And it has higher production values and it's being filmed in a beautiful locale. And it's like, we're going to go do something crazy. I was looking at, for this segment, I purchased an actual Mr. Beast Feastables bar. Explain how the chocolate bar ties into all of this. Yeah, we really should because that's why we're talking about it.

So basically, you know, for people who are influencers, and this is I'm a little overdosed on the creator economy right now because one of my consulting gigs is working with Passion Fruit, which is kind of a trade for the creator economy.

And the sort of holy grail, if you're an influencer, is either licensing your IP, which Mr. Beast has done. He has a show with Amazon. Or creating an actual product line. So it's basically high-end merch. The Mr. Beast Feastable bar that I'm holding, this is his chocolate bar that's made around $20 million so far. He's made $20 million chocolate bars or $20 million? What's the $20 million? $20 million. Okay.

of revenue from selling the chocolate bars. Yes. That feels like it's lower than Amazon, right? No, it's 20 million in profits off 250 million in sales, which I think is lame. Oh, okay.

But the back of the bar says, snack scan win. And then there's a QR code. So his whole vibe is like, I'm the internet's Willy Wonka. You may get the golden ticket and it'll change your life. And I'm literally selling chocolate bars. Okay. So Elizabeth, first of all, can you scan that and tell me if you've won anything? Because if you have, then I want to share in the winnings.

Okay, it goes to welcomefeastables.com. And it says peanut butter eggs have never been this creamy. Try now. So they have a rip off of a Cadbury egg. And then I get a pop up that says Mr. Beast wants you to join the crew. Share your email. There's no like individualized lottery ticket aspect to this.

That's odd. I saw a video with him where he was like, scan this code and you could win from if you buy my bar. Yeah, I think the idea is that once you put in your email, like you go into the Mr. Beast generalized lottery. So yeah, but this is like a standard sweepstakes where you don't actually need to buy the chocolate bar to do it.

No, in theory, I guess you could just scan the QR code. Or just go to Mr. Feastables.com. Everybody can just go to WelcomeFeastables.com. Okay, so the next most important thing that you have to do is eat this thing. I didn't try this before the segment. It's just a little square, everyone. It looks like a Nestle Crunch bar. Okay, she's eating it.

ASMR. Sounds crunchy. It tastes like a Nestle Crunch bar, like almost identical. Great. I mean, it could, and I spent a bunch of time recently with a guy who's deeply enmeshed in the food and drink supply chain world. It is entirely possible that it is made at exactly the same factory that makes Nestle Crunch bars. Oh, totally. It's probably like just a white-labeled thing they do.

So I should mention this feastable was purchased at the bodega next to my son's school. And this bodega gets swarmed by middle schoolers every single day after school. So they carry every single trendy candy box.

kids that age want. I feel like I learned about the new candy trends from this bodega. So they have the Mr. Beast bars all stacked up like right under the cash register. They're like one of the first things that you notice when you go in. And it's because my son's age demo is exactly the people who love Mr. Beast and they will buy something because it says Mr. Beast. They're also the demo that buy Prime, Low

Logan Paul's brand. That's basically like a vitamin water. It's an energy drink, no? It's got like vitamin B in it. They do have a caffeinated version. Sure.

But the one that all the kids buy is the light dose of vitamin B1. Jessamyn shared this incredible review of the Feastables bar. And it's the most earnest thing I've ever read. The guy's like, before I review this chocolate bar, let me tell you of my credentials. And he goes into this long story about how he learned how to make chocolate, bean to bar, and it took a long time. And he got all this great feedback. And that's why he's qualified to review the Feastables bar. And then...

the upshot of the whole review is just like, it's not a bean to bar experience, but it is okay. I mean, no shade on Nestle Crunch. Yeah, delicious. Can I tell you the dirt on Mr. Beast though? Yes, please. So, and this has been reported, you know, when they were filming the Beast games, which is basically like a sort of survivor kind of thing, you know, they ran sort of practice runs of this in Vegas and they

There were people, they told all the contestants they would be paid like 150 bucks a day and they would get a free meal for like being there for eight hours. A lot of people ended up sleeping in a stadium. Six people were hospitalized. There was just all this craziness and then nobody apparently got paid. So there's the sort of contradiction between Mr. Beast's brand, which is I'm this just benevolent guy who runs around giving people money.

But the show has been very problematic and they've had lots of issues. What have we learned from talking about Mr. Beast here today?

I feel like he's just like, it's nothing new here. It's lotteries, it's reality shows. I feel like what I've learned is that it's another, you know, if Kylie Jenner can create a makeup brand or Rihanna can create a makeup brand, it's all a way that these are all ways of monetizing fame. And the way that Mr. Beast monetizes fame, and I think he's raising money at a $5 billion valuation. Like he is really...

you know, monetizing up the wazoo these days, but it's by creating products like physical products that you sell to younger consumers. And no one has really been able to turn this into a lasting business that lasts forever because fame is a fleeting thing. And I don't think anyone really believes that Mr. Beast is going to be the most popular YouTuber in the world in 20 years time. But yeah,

maybe like, you know, what else are we going to invest in? So there you go. I mean, if you create a really good product branded to you, like a good product can outlast the fame of the person who invents it if it's actually a good product. But it seems like in this case, it's just an overpriced. Yeah, no, I think the only one that that springs to mind is

Paul Newman spaghetti sauce. All of Paul Newman stuff. That's a good product. Rihanna's lines do really well. Her Fenty beauty line and her lingerie line. And a lot of people who buy that don't know it's connected to her. I feel like they're both kind of going down and to the right. I feel like there was that big spike when they got launched and they're not doing so well these days. But that is a vibe I'm getting. I do not have the numbers. Time will tell. Time will tell.

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We don't have a lot of time for egg watch, but Emily, egg watch. What is happening to the price of eggs? I think we have big news this week. Brace yourselves. Are you sitting down? You should be sitting down for this. Sit down. Sit down. The wholesale price of eggs fell by $1.20 to $6.85 per dozen. Yes, eggs are getting cheaper. Brace yourselves. Woof, woof, woof.

Can we get like a cheering applause sound after Emily says that? Also, we got a complaint from a reader that we're too negative all the time. We never talk about good news. So I just want to emphasize this is good news. We're happy about it. This is good news. Eggs are getting cheaper. Be happy. There has been, what, two or three weeks without a major outbreak of avian flu. There's

More egg production, the supply is meeting the demand. We don't have the crazy upward price spiral. This is where presumably, Emily, you come in and say, well, this is a short-lived thing and the prices are going to go back up again.

Yes, it is probably a short-lived thing and prices probably will go back up again. They even actually haven't really come down yet because there's a lag between when the wholesale price falls and when the retail price falls. So maybe you haven't even experienced the price drop yet. But according to our email inbox, you should just buy the free range eggs, which prices haven't really changed very much this whole time we've been doing egg watch. Yeah.

I was flipping a fried egg yesterday and I accidentally missed the pan and it just splatted on the floor and I thought, what did I just do? Oh my God. And now you're bankrupt. How much was that worth? Now you have to sell your house. Exactly. Now you have to sell your Bitcoin to cover the price of that egg. And that's Egg Watch.

Enough egg watch, let's have a numbers round. Elizabeth, do you have a number? So my number is 25, and that's percent. Although the actual story said one in four, but it's awkward to say that in a numbers round. And that's the number of programming jobs that have vanished in the last two years. We have fewer programmers than in any period since 1980. And some Washington Post data nerds noticed this and started digging into the numbers. So what would you guess would be the reason behind that? AI?

Yes, indirectly. So part of it is that the way the government classifies these jobs, they consider a programmer different from a software developer. So the programmers basically do their grunt work, the software developers dictate, you

you know, what actually needs to be done with the coding. And a lot of it has been replaced by AI or it's just faster and easier. So you need fewer programmers. These are the people that created the AI in the first place. And they kind of like created themselves out of themselves. Absolutely. A little bit. Yeah. The work. Yeah. That's what we do. We disrupt ourselves. This is the way the technology works. We should applaud their selflessness. I refuse to disrupt myself. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not disrupting.

My number is 42, which is the length of the longest conveyor belt in the United States in miles. There is a 42 mile long conveyor belt. It's in the Permian Basin. It goes from Lee County, New Mexico to Kermit, Texas. And how much do I love the fact that it ends in Kermit, Texas?

And it is a conveyor belt that moves sand to fracking wells. And because there is this 42 mile long conveyor belt, which costs $400 million, that is all sand that no longer needs to get trucked on roads. So yay, frackers, you did a good thing. Wow, frackers are so environmentally responsible. You never hear that about them. How does a 42 mile conveyor belt work? Like if it breaks down at one point, does that just stop the whole thing?

Yeah. Apparently it's not even the longest in the world, though. The longest in the world is in the Western Sahara and is 61 miles long and moves phosphorus. Emily, what's your number? Okay, my number is $72,398.

That is how much Starbucks spent flying CEO Brian Nickel from his home in Southern California to corporate headquarters in Seattle just in September, from September 9th through the end of the month. It doesn't strike me as like a lot of money, I got to say. For a plane ticket, it's quite a lot of money. It's not just one flight. It was several. You know, he goes back and forth. To be fair, he, you know, insisted on flying private. Well.

I don't know if he insisted or the company insisted for security reasons and whatnot. Also notable, it was in a nice little roundup in the Wall Street Journal. Nickel, he is taking that $72,000 worth of travel and he's making big changes. He has fired 1,100 people.

So that's what that saves more than $72,000 right there. This is definitely the kind of thing that makes the leftist talk about guillotines. Yeah. And he cut 13 drinks from the menu, including white hot chocolate and Java chip frappuccinos. And also he is making the baristas right on the cups now. And if you go on to TikTok, the baristas are having a great time.

with writing on the cups. They're writing like poems. There's one TikTok I watched where the barista wrote like, they're keeping me captive here or something like that, you know, please help kind of a thing. So that is also very entertaining. We don't begrudge you the cost of the flights. We begrudge you the carbon emissions of the flights because that's how woke we are. Starbucks says it uses low emission fuel. I don't know if that's real. In its planes? That's what they said in the journal. It said, Starbucks says it uses low emission fuel and efficient fueling.

Isn't that like saying we use less potent cocaine? Like it's still not great, guys. All right. I think that's about where we're going to wrap it up this week. Thanks so much for listening to Slate Money. Thanks very much for being a Slate Plus member. If you are a Slate Plus member, then you get to listen to our amazing Slate Plus episode on Slate.

on Vanna White and what is the optimal number of days to work per year. Thanks for writing in on sleepmoneyatsleep.com. Thanks to Jessamyn Molly and Shaina Roth and Merritt Jacob for producing. And we will be back next week with more Sleep Money.

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