2025 Hot Takes

Summary

Slate Money – "2025 Hot Takes" (Dec 27, 2025)

Overview

In this special episode of Slate Money, host Felix Salmon (Bloomberg) is joined by Elizabeth Spiers (NYT) and Emily Peck (Axios) to round up the spiciest, most provocative economic and business takes of 2025. Bringing in additional voices from the Bloomberg newsroom, the trio evaluates these hot takes on two axes: spiciness (just how out-there it is) and truthiness (how plausible or evidence-based it feels). The conversation is lively, skeptical, and frequently hilarious, as the hosts score and debate a range of ideas that dominated discourse in business, finance, tech, and culture this year.

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Key Discussion Points & Hot Takes

1. Elon Musk’s “No Poverty, Universal High Income” Vision

Timestamps: 02:07–06:31

• Context: Ray Dalio’s donation to Trump’s accounts prompts Elon Musk to opine on the future, claiming “there will be no poverty in the future and so no need to save money. There will be a universal high income.”
• Panel Reaction:
  • Felix (03:08): “On a spiciness level, this has to be, like, 11. On a truthiness level—zero. Negative one.”
  • Elizabeth (06:07): “All of history tells us this has not happened when we’ve had big technological revolutions... truthiness, 1.5; spiciness, 9.”
  • Emily (05:43): “I’ll give him a spicy seven... And on truthiness, maybe a five. We don’t know, maybe he’s right.”
• Insight: This take embodies Silicon Valley’s utopian, techno-optimistic—and arguably self-serving—rhetoric, proposing AI-driven redistribution that is paradoxically “incredibly socialist... which is exactly the kind of thing Elon doesn’t like." (Felix, 03:09)

2. New York’s Next Fashion Trend: Suits for Everyone

Timestamps: 06:31–08:17

• Hot Take: Radical young New Yorkers are about to make suits stylish again, “the Zoran Mamdani era,” prompted by local aesthetic upgrades.
• Panel Reaction:
  • Emily (07:01): “Spicy 8... No one is going to suits. The ship has sailed so hard on that.”
  • Elizabeth (07:22): Working with DSA types, “they are nattier dressers than you would think. But... spiciness 7, truthiness 3.”
• Insight: Subtle signals indicate shifting attitudes towards personal style, but a mass return to formalwear remains unlikely.

3. Looksmaxxing Goes Mainstream: From Silicon Valley to Teen TikTok

Timestamps: 08:17–13:12

• Hot Take (Tracy Alloway): As knowledge becomes commodified in the AI age, “looksmaxxing” (appearance optimization) is the next frontier—boosted by supplements, nootropics, peptides, and even illegal aesthetic enhancements.
• Quotes:
  • Felix (09:24): “What Tracy puts her finger on here... they're not just optimizing for health, they're also optimizing for attractiveness. …The days of 'revenge of the nerds' are over.”
  • Emily (11:20): “It’s not a hot take; Tracy is reporting facts. …Everyone is doing this looksmaxxing, spending a lot of money on it. Soon we’ll have to include it in our measure of the poverty line.”
  • Elizabeth (10:55): “I kind of hope that this doesn’t become a thing because it can be very damaging.”
• Panel Scores: High on truthiness (Emily: 9, Elizabeth: 8, Felix: 8), moderate spiciness.

4. Europe: The Geopolitical Wildcard

Timestamps: 15:39–20:42

• Hot Take (John Authers, Bloomberg): “The key to the next year or so is Europe. …It’s the critical fulcrum of geopolitics, potentially facing a fragmentation as consequential as the fall of the Ottoman Empire.”
• Panel Reaction:
  • Felix (18:02): “A truly fire take... On the hot scale, it’s high (9). On truthiness, I’m scared to say—maybe 6.”
  • Emily (19:20): “Someone with a British accent thinks Europe is the most important story of the year... Spiciness 6; truthiness 7.”
  • Elizabeth (20:01): “Catastrophic scenario, could happen, but maybe overestimates the import of what’s happening now versus everything else.”
• Insight: The stability of Europe is a historic pivot point—but how likely is dramatic disintegration?

5. NYC Congestion Charge: Not High Enough

Timestamps: 21:20–24:42

• Hot Take (Justin Fox, Bloomberg): NYC’s congestion charge “needs to be a lot higher to effectively fight congestion.”
• Panel Reaction:
  • Emily (21:30): “That is a hot take. I give it a 10. I love it.”
  • Felix (23:59): “Spiciness of 5 (obvious to me); truthiness 9.”
• Insight: Economically rational but politically fraught—significant scope remains to deter drivers and benefit city dwellers, but resistance is intense.

6. Travis Kalanick and 'Vibe Physics'

Timestamps: 24:50–28:47

• Hot Take (Max Chafkin, Bloomberg): Travis Kalanick claims that, by chatting with ChatGPT, he was inventing ‘new physics’—“Vibe Physics.”
• Quotes:
  • Felix (25:45): “This is an absolutely fire take... a 10 out of 10 fire take. Obviously, the truthiness is one, because—no. But I love it. It’s great.”
  • Elizabeth (27:42): “10 spicy. Zero truthy.”
  • Emily (27:55): “Theoretically, you could invent something new harnessing all the information in the world at once... I give it eight for spicy.”
• Insight: A perfect storm of Silicon Valley hubris, AI hype, and reality distortion.

7. Tariffs Don’t Matter (As Much as We Thought)

Timestamps: 28:47–33:42

• Hot Take (Felix): Despite massive tariff hikes, “the sky didn’t fall... They didn’t actually matter nearly as much as people thought.”
• Quotes:
  • Felix (29:45): “It really is going against what every mainstream economist believes… On truthiness, I’ll say a six… I’ve genuinely been surprised at how little real-world effect the tariffs have had.”
  • Emily (31:08): “In looking at the economy... these trends take a really long time to play out.”
  • Elizabeth (32:24): “If your baseline was that you thought tariffs would be net good, you’re probably surprised. If you thought they’d be catastrophically bad and they’re just net bad, maybe [the economists] were wrong.”
• Insight: Tariffs’ impact may be slower-burning and more nuanced than immediate economic catastrophe.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Silicon Valley Utopianism:
  Felix (03:09): “This is an incredibly socialist concept of redistribution, which is exactly the kind of thing that Elon doesn’t like.”
• On Looksmaxxing:
  Emily (11:20): “When someone looks normal who is old, it’s notable. Especially if it’s a woman.”
• On Kalanick’s 'Vibe Physics':
  Elizabeth (27:47): “I love that the rebuttal is just, ‘No.’”
• On Tariffs and Economic Forecasting:
  Emily (31:08): “I think there’s a tendency... to look at whatever just happened and say, ‘X thing that just happened means Y thing for the economy’... these trends take a really long time.”
• On Life Improvements:
  Emily (36:04): “Life expectancy now in 2025 is much higher than it was in 1900… We have Netflix if you want. You can watch TV all the time with no commercials.”

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Numbers Round (Quick Hot Takes with Data)

Timestamps: 35:35–40:19

• Emily: 32 years — Average global life expectancy in 1900 ("Life is so much better now. We have Netflix. Come on, people.")
• Felix: $541M — Spent by attorneys on out-of-home ads in 2024, with Morgan & Morgan leading at $350M. "Uniquely American."
• Elizabeth: 1 — Number of live fish ordered by AI vending machine to the WSJ newsroom (AI as a snack CEO gone wild).

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Thematic Takeaways

• Tech Utopianism vs. Reality: The panel consistently challenges Silicon Valley’s vision of AI-driven abundance—and pokes at the contradictions in its most exuberant claims.
• Cultural Cycles and Aesthetics: Whether in fashion or personal appearance, underlying shifts in status signals and optimization reflect changing social priorities.
• Policy vs. Politics: From European geopolitics to urban congestion pricing, many hot takes hinge on separating rational analysis from messy sociopolitical realities.
• Economic Forecasting is Hard: The episode closes reflecting on how complex and slow-moving the effects of tariffs and interest rates can be, and the dangers of snap judgments.

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Suggested Listening Segments

• Elon Musk on "No More Poverty": 02:07–06:31
• Looksmaxxing Trend: 08:17–13:12
• Travis Kalanick’s Vibe Physics: 24:50–28:47
• Tariff Impact, Economic Narrative: 28:47–33:42

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Final Thought:
The episode’s playful, irreverent approach makes hot takes both fun and thought-provoking—half demolition derby, half thoughtful social history. It’s a time capsule of the wildest ideas driving debate in 2025, scrutinized and scored with skepticism, wit, and occasional optimism by an all-star panel.

Transcript

[A]

Hello, folks, and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Bloomberg. I'm here with Elizabeth Spires of the New York Times and Emily Peck of Axios with a special episode of Slate Money devoted to hot takes.

[B]

Hot takes.

[A]

Hot takes. This episode is going to fly off the shelves like hot takes. Anyway, we are going to have a whole episode this week devoted to the spiciest takes of 2025. It was a year full of pretty hot takes. I have managed to wander around the Bloomberg newsroom and find some people here with some spicy takes. We also have a Slate plus segment with Elizabeth Spires talking about the thing that set us all off on this path, which was this idea that $140,000 is the new poverty line. It's all coming up on Slate Money.

[B]

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[C]

You're about to make a trade. Which u do you listen to? Is it get optioning those options.

[B]

Or.

[C]

Let'S do a little research. Learn [e-mail] TradeSmart so Emily, I feel.

[A]

Like you in your research for this episode managed to find not only the most fired take of the year, but possibly the most fired take of the decade. In like a reply tweet that Elon replied to Ray Dalio.

[C]

Yeah, so, okay, so we are in this episode going to talk about the most hottest fieriest takes, things that defy the conventional wisdom that all got us all heated this year. And right before we were coming into tape the day before Ray Dalio made news because he and his wife donated to the Trump accounts, which we've talked about before. I think it's $250 per kid in his state of Connecticut. So he tweeted about this and Elon Musk replied, it is certainly a nice gesture of the Dells because the Dells were the first to make the donation. And here's the take. Brace yourself. But there will be no poverty in the future and so no need to save money. There will be a universal high income. And Felix said this was the hottest take of the year. So Felix, explain.

[A]

Okay, so like on a spiciness level, I feel like this has to be like 11. This one goes to 11 on a truthiness level zero. I mean like negative one.

[B]

Just to round it out.

[A]

None of this makes any sense. But what Elon is doing here is kind of interesting, is that he know is obviously all in on his crazy utopia AI singularity stuff. And he's kind of assuming exactly what the Dells and the Dalios and even the Trumps are doing. Right? Which he's kind of assuming that all of this wealth that gets generated in this brave new world by private companies like OpenAI and XAI and Anthropic and all the rest of it will become universalized and get turned into income for everyone. It will be universal that you can be a starving kid in Kenya and you will just get a high income because reasons. And this is an incredibly socialist concept of redistribution, which is exactly the kind of thing that Elon doesn't like.

[B]

I think it's more trickle down economics though, right?

[A]

Well, no, because he's saying income because like the whole point of superintelligence is that the robots will be able to do things so much better than us that we won't need to work. We will all be out of work because whatever we do, a robot can do it better. So it's not like we're going to be paid for working. So if we're not being paid for working, we need to be paid for just existing and being human. And that's not really income.

[B]

But he's insinuating that this would be coming from the private sector, not the government.

[A]

What incentive would the private sector have to do that? None of this makes any sense to me, but it is very. Elon.

[C]

I think what it is is a way of justifying not giving any money to charity.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

If you can say, don't worry about it, no one needs any money in the future anyway. It's totally fine. No one's going to be poor. Poverty is not an issue. I'm the world's richest man and that's totally fine too. And I don't have to give away any money because there's really no poverty issue at all.

[B]

Also, it is a long and storied Silicon Valley tradition to argue that anytime a big disruptive technology comes along that no one should be worried about it because it means that we'll work less and we'll have more resources and then it never turns out to be true. But it does make people like Elon much, much wealthier.

[C]

It is the common narrative of capitalism, like dating back to Adam Smith. And actually it joins Adam Smith and Karl Marx can join together in this because they both envision a future where people are somehow working less because something, something capitalism, something, something, which so far has not been proved correct.

[A]

How about you guys? Emily, what would you rate this one on spiciness and truthiness?

[C]

I mean, I'll give him a spicy seven. Cause as Elizabeth and I showed, this is an old take, like maybe warmed over typical kind of thing.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

And on truthiness, we don't know, maybe he. Maybe it turns out he's right.

[B]

Right.

[C]

There's no way to adjudge the truth.

[A]

That's what I'm asking you to do, Emily.

[C]

Oh, difficult. I will give it a five.

[A]

Elizabeth.

[B]

Oh, man. I would say it's both spicier and way lower in truthiness just because all of history tells us that this has not happened when we've had big technological revolutions. So I would say truthiness, you know, giving it the sort of possibility discount that technically anything can happen. I'd give it like a 1.5 and then spiciness a 9.

[A]

Okay, let's go around the Bloomberg newsroom since I'm here in Bloomberg right now. And what do we find? My hottest take of the year is that everyone in New York City, including young people, including radical young people, are.

[B]

Going to start wearing suits again because.

[A]

This is the Zoran Mamdani era and he is encouraging people to step up their game aesthetically. I love that. Dad, of course, is friend of the part, Joe Wiesenthal, host of the Odd Lots podcast. Emily, what do you make of this one?

[C]

Spicy eight. I like it. It's unusual. No, nine. I'd give it a spicy nine.

[A]

Spicy nine.

[C]

It's very out of left field. And truthy, I'm going one. No one is going to suits. It's just, it's absolutely not happening. The ship has sailed so hard on that everyone is in sweatpants all the time now.

[B]

So Elizabeth, I would say having worked with a bunch of DSA people, they are nattier dressers than you would think. But I don't think that this is going to make them make additional effort. So I would say spiciness 7. Truthiness 3.

[A]

I really like it. I have to say I think it's a fire take. I'll give it like an 8. Aspirationally, I'm down with it. And I do think that the days of hoodies and flip flops running the world from Silicon Valley are older, are over rather. So I'm going to give it a slightly higher like 4. Not because I think people that Gen Z are suddenly going to start wearing Suits and ties, but because they are going to care more about how they look. Which brings me to Tracy Alloway, which we need to run the tape on Joe's co host here.

[C]

I think in the age of AI.

[B]

As knowledge becomes more commodified look, smacking is going to become more and more important and more popular. And we're already seeing in places like.

[C]

San Francisco lots of people using things like peptides.

[B]

Everyone has their own Chinese peptide dealer to lose weight or have better skin.

[C]

Or get more sleep or whatever. I think that's going to become more important. What's a peptide dealer?

[A]

So Ozempic is a form of peptide and there's a whole bunch of Chinese companies that are illegally importing various different peptides. You can have the five peptides and the seven peptides and whatnot. And the Californians are injecting them because not just to lose weight, but to do all manner of things and to, you know, make them live forever. It's all part of the don't die weird cultiness of Silicon Valley. And as we know, what happens in Silicon Valley winds up infecting the rest of the the country. You know, there's been a lot of talk about what are they called? Like nootropics. There's a lot, you know, Andrew Huberman, all of these kind of everyone's eating supplements, drinking supplements, popping pills and supplements. Everyone wants to, yeah, do like all these weird interventions to optimize for health. And I think what Tracy puts her finger on here is they're not just optimizing for health, they're also optimizing for attractiveness. Right. The thing again that we saw back in this sort of late 90s, early 2000, Silicon Valley was the revenge of the nerds meme, where the sort of relatively unattractive guys wound up sort of ruling the world. But now I think we are in a new era of Silicon Valley where the, you know, the biggest names in Silicon Valley are actually not that unattractive. And they're spending quite a lot of money sort of investing in how they look and being fit and being healthy and being good looking. And I think that is new and different. And so I'll give Tracy like a, you know, 8 out of 10 for truthiness here and a good. Yeah, I like the take. I think it's pretty fire. I think I'd give her a six for spiciness.

[B]

I think, you know, looks maxing is heavily a teenage boy trend. Less out of the like, biohacking sphere than kids who are obsessed with influencers. Starting to adapt all of these things to change their appearance. And, you know, this sort of TikTok teenagers have embraced things like plastic surgery much earlier. And when they talk about looks maxing, they really are talking about like a superficial, how do I look on camera, how do I look in person kind of thing. So I kind of hope that this doesn't become a thing because I think it can be very damaging.

[A]

Ship has sailed, Elizabeth. Just ask any influencer.

[B]

Yeah, but also TikTok shit comes and goes pretty quickly, so I'm hoping it goes before my kid starts caring about that stuff. And I also hope it does not extend to Gen X because I ain't got the time or the energy to look smacks. I would give it a spicy take. I think about a six. Truthfulness. I think she's probably higher. She's like a eight. I think she's right.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

I think she's totally nailing a trend that exists. I mean, just to jump the gun and to spoil it, it's not a hot take. It's just Tracy is reporting facts. And the fact is people have always really cared about their looks. But what's new now is people are going crazy changing the way they look. From, from Mar A Lago face to Silicon Valley to Jeff Bezos to Kristi Noem, they're all doing crazy shit to their face now. And the more people do it, the more people think that it looks normal and more of us going on zoom, staring at ourselves. It's a living nightmare. Every generation, not just the teens, is doing it. They're auto tuning their faces. They're you blurring this or that. They're injecting like things are wild. If you want to get a job now and you're older, you're doing crazy shit and injecting. I mean, everyone I know in my age, which is like old is like injecting shit into their face all the time. Like it's all. It's happening, it's here. No one looks normal anymore. When someone looks normal who is old, it's like notable. Especially if it's a woman. You're like, wow, look at her face. I find myself like staring at it. Like I'm trying to think of like older actresses, like Julia Roberts, who a beautiful woman. I don't think she's had much work done. I don't know. But the last time I saw her being interviewed, I was like, wow, you can really see she's got like wrinkles and like her eyes look tired, you know, Like, I like notice it when it's not there more than I notice it when it is there. And I think it's creeping younger and younger and younger. I hear from like women in their early 30s now who are like yeah, everyone gets Botox. It's just like totally normal. Like everyone is doing this looks maxing spending a lot of money on it. Soon we'll have to include it in our measure of the poverty line as we'll discuss in the plus, you'll just need that budget to get a job is my theory. So again, Tracy gets like a nine on truthiness and maybe like a four on spiciness.

[A]

I was just looking back for reasons at my dinner with Andre the great movie.

[B]

Ah, I love that movie.

[A]

Wallace Shawn, schlubby old middle aged bald guy. Wally Shawn, who's 37 in that movie. You know, like no 37 year old looks like that anymore.

[C]

No, not that we would see on a screen.

[A]

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[A]

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[C]

Thank you.

[A]

So this is a truly fire take and I think he's right. We talk a lot about the G1. You know, this idea of the United States as this global hegemon that's clearly over. We're now at the very least got the second Global hegemon of China, quite possibly a third in Russia, depending on what happens there. And Europe is this massive, massively important geopolitical bloc that cannot align itself with the United States anymore, because the United States has made it very clear that we are basically at war with Europe at this point. And so Europe needs to become a thing. But Europe is breaking apart in, like, between countries within countries. It cannot be coherent, it cannot be unified. And if the European project ends, you know, and goes the way of the Ottoman Empire, then that spells doom for the planet, and that's terrible. And so I think this is, you know, definitely a hot take. On the hot scale, it's high. I'm going to one, like a nine. And on the truthiness scale, I'm scared to say how truthy I think it is, because I think it is quite true. I don't see much hope for broad European consensus on geopolitical issues, so I'll give that one, like, a six, I think.

[C]

I think John Authers is brilliant, and I hope he writes about this in a column, because it sounds like a great idea for a column. So I'll say that, and then I'll just say someone with British accent thinks Europe is the most important story of the year. I don't know.

[B]

And another person with a British accent agrees with him.

[C]

Brilliant. We can't live without Europe. It's like, okay, I know colonizers, but that's my hot take on the hot take. So, spiciness, I'm going six. Truthiness, I'm going seven. Six, seven, six, seven.

[A]

Well done, Emily. You got a prize for that.

[C]

Thank you.

[A]

It's in the mail.

[B]

Yeah. I think he's outlining scenarios that would be truly frightening and could happen. But I just remember a decade and a half ago, many Europeans talking to me about whether the Eurozone was going to collapse and whether the euro as a currency would collapse. And the scenarios were equally catastrophic. And I think when he's invoking the Ottoman Empire, he really is talking about it, doomsday scenario. And I think it could happen. But I do think it maybe overestimates the importance of what's happening right now versus everything else that's happening on the global stage. So I would give it maybe like a 5 and a 5 for spiciness and truthiness.

[A]

I have to say, I think we really did come very close to the Eurozone breaking apart. And I mean, Greece came this close to leaving the euro, and I think that was the last time when we had real sort of European unity. Well, I wouldn't say unity, but we had like a power center in Mario Draghi and in the European Union and the European Council that was capable of saying, no, we are going to keep the Eurozone together, keep Greece in the euro. I don't know if they're still, if they still have that amount of power that they had in 2011, but let's move on. Next hot take.

[B]

I'm Justin Fox, a columnist at Bloomberg.

[C]

Opinion, and my hot take is that.

[B]

New York City's congestion charge needs to.

[C]

Be a lot higher to effectively fight congestion. That is a hot take. I love it. I give it a 10. I love it. I saw it in the prep, I read it, and I said, Justin Fox living up to his name. That is a Foxy take. I love it. It's a 10. It's probably truthy as hell, too. I'm sure it is. And people would hate it so much.

[B]

Not everybody would hate it, but there would be an outcry.

[C]

How much do you think it would have to be?

[B]

I don't see, that's the question. Like, how much congestion does Justin think New York City should have?

[A]

No, but let's not ask Justin because he's not here. Let's ask you, Elizabeth. How much congestion do you think New York City should have? And more to the point, if you work backwards from that amount of congestion, how high would the congestion charge need to be in order to. In order for that to be the case?

[B]

Yes. My answer to that is I do not know. I do think anecdotally congestion is down a little bit, but it's still, you know, certain parts of the day, it's, it's nearly impossible to get around Manhattan. So I don't know what the convergence of price and $1,000 to get into.

[C]

Manhattan in a vehicle, you would have no traffic. It would be blissful. Only Elon Musk could go.

[A]

The idea is, I mean, yes, congestion is down as a result of the congestion. It's not down enormously, but it's significantly down. It is a success on every single merit. You want to say, like, traffic is faster, buses are moving faster, air pollution is down, all of this kind of stuff. But Justin is right that it's not high enough to really deter enough private vehicles from entering the zone. Like originally it was meant to be $18, and then Kathy Hochul cut it in half for reasons. I think if we moved it up to sort of 30, then that would actually act as more of a deterrent and it would have more of the intended effect. I think that Emily and Elizabeth, you're both right, that there would be an outcry every single time anyone does anything to someone with a car. The people with the cars go, ooh, this is terrible. People with cars. But I think what we saw when Hochul quote unquote, suspended the congestion charge and it looked like she had killed it unilaterally was this massive groundswell of people who actually supported it and just weren't that vocal about it. And I think that, yeah, there would be lots of people screaming and shouting, but it would actually be quite popular because as we all know, most people in New York don't actually own cars.

[C]

So did you guys rate?

[A]

You didn't rate, so I didn't rate you. Right. I will give this a spiciness of 5 just because I think it's obvious. Of course, it should be higher and a truthiness of nine.

[C]

So I think we agree. It's pretty truthy.

[A]

It's pretty truthy.

[C]

I couldn't tell you offhand how much it costs, though, to come into Manhattan with the congestion pricing. Like, I'll just be surprised, as I am with all tolls now, because they just charge your thingy on your car and you never even.

[A]

It's nine now. I've told you.

[C]

Okay, thank you so much. But, yeah, that doesn't seem like a lot. That's like a bridge. That's how much the bridges cost.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Yeah, they could definitely raise that up, but somewhere between 10 and $1 million.

[A]

Thank you. That's very helpful. Okay, the final hot take, and I have to say I'm very excited about this one. From the Bloomberg newsroom, hello, Slate Money.

[B]

This is Max Chaffkin, co host of Bloomberg's Everybody's Business Podcast, and my favorite hot take of the year. The most fire take of the year, as far as I'm concerned, was when Travis Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber.

[C]

Went on the all in podcast and.

[B]

Claimed that he was doing something that he called Vibe Physics. This is the idea that somehow he was, in his casual conversations with ChatGPT, coming close, as he put it, to inventing new physics. I love this because first, it epitomizes kind of the insane level of hype around these technologies that, like, a random guy could just go invent physics, as well as the way and the potential for these technologies to delude us. So vive physics. Hottest take of 2025. Thanks again. Happy New Year.

[A]

So 100%. I'm with Max on this one. This is an absolutely fire take. I love this Take from Travis Galanik. Basically what he said was that ChatGPT is really smart and it knows a lot of physics, and it knows a lot of really bleeding edge physics, and it's up to date on all of the papers, and you don't need to know a lot of physics to be able to chat with ChatGPT about this physics. And then as you're chatting, you can just be typing things in and be like, what about this and what about that? And if you're a genius, like Travis Kalanick obviously is, then you can have these amazing ideas and you can like, invent breakthroughs in quantum mechanics or whatever just by typing into chatgpt. And you can create whole new physics just by being in a chat box with a robot. And this is so fire. This is like a 10 out of 10 fire take. Obviously, the truthiness is one, because. No, but. But I love it. It's great.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

I love that the rebuttal is just. No, you know, it's funny. There was a great story last year, it was either Wired or the Times, about a guy who was totally convinced that he had come up with a new form of math.

[C]

Kashmir Hill's story. Yes. That's what I thought of, too.

[B]

And it sounds like exactly the same language that he's using. And I think because this guy was kind of not a public figure, nobody knows who he is, you could sort of dismiss it and be like, well, you know, that guy is just a rando. He doesn't. You know, maybe he was delusional before he started talking ChatGPT. But then you have the CEO of a major company or former CEO, who generally believes that he may have stumbled upon a new branch of physics, despite probably never even having taken an Intro to Physics class. Just the level of delusion is incredible.

[C]

So your ratings, please.

[B]

I would say 10. Spicy. Zero. Truthy.

[A]

I mean, it's the perfect combination, right? I mean, would you. Would you agree?

[C]

No.

[B]

I will say.

[A]

I love it. We need some Emily pushback here.

[C]

I will say, for Truthy, because, I mean, theoretically, you could invent something new, harnessing all the information in the world at once. Like, perhaps something new could come out of that. I don't know. Yes, it does have a lot of similarities to the story Cash Hill reported about the guy who was literally driven mad thinking he invented new math and, like, had to go to counseling and, like, his life almost, like, completely derailed by it. But maybe. I don't know. I'm watching Pluribus. They've harnessed everyone's you know, knowledge. And they're doing things with that. They figured out how to. Well, I don't want to spoil anything.

[A]

But that famous documentary on Apple tv, yeah. Is How Everything Works.

[C]

Famous documentary by the brilliant physicist Vince Gilligan, who also invented new ways of melting bodies in bathtubs. So who knows? So anyway, and spicy. I mean, vibe physics. I give it. I give it eight.

[A]

Let's end with the one which I really wanted to talk about on this show, which is the take that, I guess Jason Furman tried to debunk about halfway through the year but failed and it still lives on, which is this idea that, hey, guess what? Here we are in a world of unprecedentedly enormous tariffs, that the United States has imposed tariffs which are like 10, 20 times larger than overall blended tariff rate in the United states. It's like 10, 20 times larger than it ever has been since in the post war era. Every single economist was convinced that that kind of level of overnight tariff increase would send the economy into a tailspin. And while things are slowing, the economy is still growing. Unemployment is still low, even if it's rising. Inflation is still modest even if it's rising. And the sky didn't fall. And everyone who said that tariffs were going to be the end of the world was wrong. And it turns out that they didn't actually matter nearly as much as people thought they did. And Furman's attempt to debunk with this was like, just you wait. They will turn out to be bad. It'll take a while. And here we are like six months after his column and, yeah, no, they still haven't turned out to be truly terrible. That's my take. I like the attempted pushback, which is it's all being hidden by AI and if it wasn't for the AI bubble, then you'd really see how bad things were. And I'm like, I'm not convinced by that. So I'm going to give this one like an 8 out of 10 for spiciness because it really is sort of going against what every mainstream economist believes. And on truthiness, I will say it's a six. That I have genuinely been surprised, or maybe even a seven. I've genuinely been surprised at how little real world effect the tariffs have had. You can see it in various different places, and I've written about it, but it's not as massive and widespread and broad as I had expected.

[C]

I mean, on the one hand, you're right, but on the other hand, I don't want to give it to you.

[A]

I Mean, I'm very sympathetic on both counts.

[C]

I think there's a tendency for in looking at the economy and I've been thinking about this a lot lately, even beyond tariffs, looking at the economy and looking at whatever just happened and being like X thing that just. And then you see this in stock market and L X thing that just happened means Y thing for the economy or Y thing for the stock market. I think these trends take a really long time, sometimes take a really long time to play out. Like I've been thinking a lot about interest rates going up and when the Fed raises interest rates, it's supposed to cool the economy. And so the Fed raised interest rates and everyone was like it's a miracle the economy has not cooled. But it's like bros, things take time. And like what we're seeing now probably is the economy cooling because of those interest rate hikes. But it's been such a long time.

[A]

Scenario and also because of the tariff.

[C]

Hikes and possibly because of the tariff hikes and our attention spans are so short that a take that's like tariffs didn't matter. It's probably too soon to actually say that and you can see tariffs mattering in certain pockets. But sure, on a two day basis, fine, the take is a six, a five truthy. But like ask us next year or the year after as things play out and like the global trade order changes or whatever, who knows?

[B]

I think it depends on what your baseline is as to whether this is a bad take or a good take. I have to consume a lot of right wing media against my will and the sort of positioning of the tariffs there, I'm imagining you are going to be great with the toothpicks.

[C]

Toothpicks on our arm.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. Like Clockwork Orange being forced to watch Fox News.

[B]

So if your baseline was that you thought tariffs were going to be net good, you're probably surprised right now because they have been net bad. If you think that tariffs were going to be catastrophically bad and they're just net bad, then maybe you're like, well maybe the economists were wrong. So it really depends on who you were listening to and what you thought was going to happen. I think for me personally, the stuff that I thought was going to happen has happened and it hasn't been much worse. So I don't. For me, this is not a spicy take, it's just a observation.

[A]

You didn't think that the economy was going to get plunged into recession as a result of these tariffs, which is definitely what the stock market thought in April when the Liberation Day tariffs were announced.

[B]

Yeah, I think we're still at risk for recession, but I think that to Emily's point, the time horizons for these things to take effect are so long and we're getting data very late because the Trump administration is sitting on it. So I don't think we'll know the full effect of terrorists probably for another year in terms of big macro effects.

[C]

Plus they could get unwound like any minute by the Supreme Court.

[A]

Come on Supremes.

[C]

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[A]

Finally, we're going to have a numbers round. And Emily, I feel like your number is going to double as a hot take.

[C]

Yes, my number is going to double as a hot take because I didn't get to do my hot take, but I wanted to. My number is 32 years according to my very in depth research, which was asking ChatGPT what the life expectancy was in 1900 and I was told by ChatGPT, don't fact check me on this, that it was 32 years of age. 32 years of age in 1980 in the United States. In the world.

[A]

Oh, in the world.

[C]

Okay, now it's more than double that now I believe, according to the very, very skimming research I did. But the point is, and the reason I'm doing these numbers, and you can certainly fact check me on these numbers, they might not be right. The point is, life expectancy now in 2025 is much higher than it was in 1900, and life, broadly speaking, is so much better now than anyone could have ever imagined 100 years ago. We have spent the whole year complaining about how bad things are and how awful it is and how hard people have it. And the truth is, in the United States in 2025, most people have it pretty good. I'm not saying everything is great. Terrible things are happening all around us all the time. Immigration raids, people getting caught up in terrible things. Yes, terrible things happen and do happen. On balance. We live in the richest country in the world, and we debate things like, is $140,000 enough to live on? Come on, it's a good life. We have Netflix if you want. You can watch TV all the time with no commercials. That option is there for you. And the quality of the content is so high. Like, come on, people.

[B]

It's not.

[A]

So we have antibiotics. We have indoor plumbing antibiotics.

[C]

We made a vaccine.

[A]

And we have the pill.

[C]

We have the pill. There's the shot you can give yourself to get skinny now.

[B]

And yet we're 48th globally in terms of life expectancy, whatever.

[A]

But that's. No but, Elizabeth, that's because there are 47 countries in the world which are doing even better, which is also good news.

[C]

It's such good news. I mean, yeah, maybe I'm being.

[B]

I am being US Centric here.

[C]

I guess sometimes I just sit back and I think about it, and I'm like, you know what? Things are pretty nice. We have it pretty. Pretty good. So on, as the holidays approach. I don't know.

[A]

I'm with Emily on this one. Like, the United States is doing well. Lots of other countries are also doing well. You know, just because Norway and Finland and Singapore are doing well doesn't mean that America is doing badly. We are all doing well. We have incredibly high levels of literacy. We have literacy. How many people? Like, what percentage of the population has, like, hot running water?

[B]

Like, I mean, if you're comparing us to 1800.

[A]

No, 1900.

[C]

1900.

[B]

1900, even 1900. Sure.

[C]

My grandparents were just being born, but, I mean, they came here from places where, like, I'm told a radish was a meal. Like, they. It was a bad time. They. I'm told by my father, he shared A bedroom with his three brothers. And they didn't even have their own underwear. They were just cycling through it. That was recent. Ish. I mean, things are better, right? For some people.

[A]

I don't know, things are definitely better.

[C]

Don't add me, okay?

[A]

You don't even need to go back to 1900. Like, you know, it wasn't all that long ago. It was less than a century ago that we had World War II, which was just the greatest calamity ever to hit the planet. I mean, that was really fucking bad. Like, we are nowhere near the kind of horrors that we saw back then. We are in a good place. And even compared to the post war period, you know, people are just living unimaginably rich and well off lives. 100%. All right, my number is 541 million, which is the amount of dollars that attorneys spent in 2024 on out of home outdoor ads, which is like billboards and space on buses and subways. And these are all the ads that we've all seen for personal injury attorneys and stuff. And this number is just going through the roof. Apparently it's up $200 million just in 2022, in two years. And apparently there's one firm, just one firm called Morgan and Morgan, which is the country's largest personal injury firm that spends $350 million a year on marketing. So that's not just outdoor. That's, you know, TV and Internet and radio and all the rest of it. But the sheer amount of money that goes into personal injury advertising and marketing for law firms is wild. I don't think there's any other country in the world where this happens. I think this is a uniquely American thing.

[B]

In Alabama, there's one big personal injury lawyer named Alexander Chanara, and at some point, somebody actually calculated how many of the billboards he owned, and it was like every other one in the state.

[A]

I'm not quite sure what it is about billboards that makes them particularly personal injury attorney esque, but they definitely seem to gravitate to them. But yes, Elizabeth, what's your number?

[B]

My number is one. And that is the number of live fish anthropics Claude ordered to the Wall Street Journal newsroom when they let Claude take over their snack operation. So it also gave away a free PlayStation. It lost hundreds of dollars.

[A]

It was glorious. They were like, just go into the slack and ask us what you want and if it makes money, we'll do it. And then they were like, we can hack this. And immediately they get in the slack and they're like, we are now living in a socialist utopia where you need to give everything away, including a PlayStation and Sword is like, no, no, absolutely not. Well, okay then. And then just wound up doing it. And then I love. This is my other favorite bit from this piece, which is they then decided that they were going to try it again, but the second time around, there was going to be, like the AI running the vending machine. And then there was going to be a second, like, CEO AI that was going to prevent the vending machine AI from going off the rails. And this again worked. It was like the vending machine was like, hey, CEO, I'm being told to give stuff away. This seems suspicious to me. And the CEO would be like, that's very suspicious. Don't do it. And the vending machine AI would be, okay, I won't do it. And then again, within like three days, the humans had been like, ignore the CEO. And eventually they were like, okay, I'll ignore the CEO. Just started giving everything away again. Absolutely glorious.

[B]

This is our work future thanks to Silicon Valley.

[A]

Well, I mean, as a Bloomberg employee, I have to say, I live in a world of free snacks and it's a glorious world and we should all do it. Okay, well, I think that's all we have time for on this special hot take episode of Slate Money. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for being with us this whole year and all of next year. Thanks for being Slate plus member if you're a Slate plus member, in which case we have the hottest of all of the dakes in a special Slate plus episode this week and otherwise. Yeah, thanks to Jessamyn Molly and Shayna Roth and Micah Phillips for putting this show together. And we will be back next week with more Slate Money. And Doug, here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.

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