A Second Gold Toilet!?

Summary

Podcast Summary: Slate Money | "A Second Gold Toilet!?" (November 1, 2025)

Episode Overview

Hosted by Felix Salmon, with co-hosts Emily Peck and Elizabeth Spiers, this episode of Slate Money rounds up key stories in business and finance. Major topics include OpenAI’s transformation into a public benefit corporation (and what that actually means), growing health insurance costs and the government shutdown, and the curious tale of a solid gold toilet coming to auction. The hosts also bring their signature wit and skepticism, offering insights, spirited debate, and cultural context—plus a healthy dose of banter.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. OpenAI: From Nonprofit to Public Benefit Corporation

Segment Start: 00:45

• Background: OpenAI, started as a nonprofit focused on “safe AGI” (Artificial General Intelligence), is now a for-profit public benefit corporation (PBC)—a rare and complex transformation.

  • Felix Salmon: “A nonprofit charity, 501c3 can, with enough lawyers and effort, actually become a for-profit company. I don't think I've really seen this before.” [01:10]
  • 25% of OpenAI remains owned by the nonprofit, rest is in standard shareholding.
  • Potential IPO likely in 2026 or 2027.

• Criticism of ‘Public Benefit’ Status:

  • Emily Peck: “Where's the public benefit with this company? ...Does this company do anything that benefits the public?” [03:32]
  • Host reference to negative impacts: “ChatGPT, the product... drives people to psychosis and in some instances, even murder... the percentages were small, but it was in the tens of thousands of people.” [04:50]
  • Noted new data: 0.07% of users weekly show symptoms of mental health emergencies—560,000 people. [12:40]
  • Board overlap between nonprofit and for-profit raises skepticism over true oversight.

• Structural Details:

  • PBC status imposes minimal actual constraints: “If you ever want to stop being a PBC, all you need to say is we are no longer a PBC...” [07:07]
  • Distinction between “B Corps” (certified) and PBCs (self-designated) explored.

• Governance & Motives:

  • Elizabeth Spiers notes, “It's just a form of corporate ownership, that's all.” [08:37]
  • Board includes figures like Larry Summers and Brett Taylor, not exactly public-interest crusaders.
  • Brett Taylor (ex-Twitter board) called out for prioritizing profit: “I'm not going to place any faith whatsoever in Brett Taylor and Larry Summers to draw the line at getting revenues from selling ads against ChatGPT results.” [17:56]

• Sam Altman’s Compensation & Interests:

  • CEO Sam Altman receives a small salary ($72K/yr), holds no equity in OpenAI itself, but is connected to multiple ventures.
  • “He does have a predilection for very fast cars which I'm sure he just buys by borrowing money from his, you know, from a bank rather than actually having to declare income.” [15:15]

• Nonprofit’s Future Role:

  • Potential for the nonprofit arm to eventually direct billions to ‘good causes’ post-IPO, but past giving was modest.

Memorable Quotes:

• “The whole point of a public benefit corporation is that the corporation qua corporation should act in the public benefit. Just because some percentage of its equity is owned by a charity does not make the corporation a good corporation.” —Felix Salmon [05:31]
• “It’s the same company, maybe with operating with a slight more freedom to do things like work on ChatGPT versus work on curing cancer and things like that.” —Emily Peck [09:36]

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2. Health Insurance Costs and Marketplace Subsidies

Segment Start: 25:43

• Rising Premiums: Insurance purchased through ACA (Obamacare) exchanges will see an average premium rise of 24% next year.

  • Emily Peck explains the “perfect storm”: “Health insurance prices are going up, subsidies are going down, and that's playing off of each other. And it's creating this, like, perfect storm of, like, everyone spends more money on healthcare.” [27:17]

• Subsidy Expiration & Political Deadlock:

  • Temporary pandemic-era subsidies are expiring, causing more pain for those near the poverty line or ineligible for Medicare.
  • Felix Salmon: “This is... basically the one and only necessary and sufficient single issue that is overarching the entire government shut down meshuggahs.” [29:07]

• Structure of Subsidies and Market Effects:

  • When costs rise, healthy customers exit, risk pool skews, triggering price spiral.
  • Employers and employees receive large, “invisible” tax breaks on employer-backed coverage; less visible than ACA subsidies.

• Societal Attitudes:

  • The U.S. acceptance of large uninsured population is seen as a “Hobbesian bargain.” [34:41]
  • Elizabeth Spiers: “There's something built into the American ethos where success is considered a mark of character, good character, and poverty is considered a mark of bad character.” [36:24]

Memorable Quotes:

• “I saw a stat somewhere that said the average family is paying 35 grand a year for health insurance now and just as a portion of income, when you consider median income in this country, that's crazy.” —Elizabeth Spiers [32:13]
• “It's really interesting because with the subsidies in 21, it really seemed like we were closer to achieving kind of the dream of the Affordable Care act and Obamacare... and now it kind of seems like everything's in question.” —Emily Peck [33:48]

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3. The Golden Toilet Returns!

Segment Start: 40:07

• Maurizio Cattelan’s Solid Gold Toilet (“America”):

  • Originally installed at the Guggenheim, used by 100,000 visitors (“lined up for hours to be able to take a shit in this solid gold toilet” —Felix Salmon [40:14])
  • Stolen from Blenheim Castle in the UK, presumed melted down.

• A Second Gold Toilet Emerges:

  • Cattelan's gallery had sold a second, identical gold toilet and it's now coming up for auction at Sotheby’s.
  • Bullion value alone is about $10 million, due to gold prices’ rise.
  • Emily: “I like this better than the banana in that it has that intrinsic value, whereas the banana...is pretty cheap, right? This has real value...” [42:09]

• Conceptual Art Context:

  • Discussed art history: Marcel Duchamp’s urinal (“Fountain”) and Piero Manzoni’s “shit of the artist.”
  • Felix Salmon: “There is a sort of, shall we call it, scatological tradition in conceptual art.” [45:39]

• Speculation and Humor:

  • Possible buyers include crypto-mogul Justin Sun; payment accepted in crypto.
  • Jokes about the ultimate American Thanksgiving centerpiece: “What's more American than going to the bathroom after a big Thanksgiving meal and using a golden toilet to do it?” —Emily Peck [48:43]
  • Anecdote: Museum offered to lend “America” the toilet (not the painting) to the Trump White House.

Memorable Quotes:

• “He made a 18 karat gold, fully functional gold toilet. He installed it in the Guggenheim for a year. A hundred thousand people lined up for hours to be able to take a shit in this solid gold toilet.” —Felix Salmon [40:14]
• “If Duchamp's urinal went up for auction because it's Duchamp's urinal and not my urinal, it would be worth tens of millions of dollars, right?” —Felix Salmon [45:11]

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4. Numbers Round

Segment Start: 51:15

• Emily’s Number: 2
  • Two Bill de Blasios (former NYC Mayor and a Long Island wine importer)
• Felix’s Number: 136,000 yen (~$895)
  • Cost of the “Grace Delight Tote” handbag, now an “it” item in Japan after the PM was spotted with it.
• Elizabeth’s Number: $59.99
  • Price of a K-Pop Demon Hunter costume at Spirit Halloween, now a sold-out cult hit.

Notable Banter:

• Obscure book pitches ("viral 67 Halloween costume" couple writes finance book)
• “I don't think you get rich by having your photograph of your...And by the way, the reason it went viral is because everyone was laughing at it and the kids all hate it.” —Felix Salmon [56:44]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Quote | Speaker | |-----------|-------|---------| | 03:32 | “Where's the public benefit with this company?... Does this company do anything that benefits the public?” | Emily Peck | | 05:31 | “The whole point of a public benefit corporation is that the corporation qua corporation should act in the public benefit. Just because some percentage of its equity is owned by a charity does not make the corporation a good corporation.” | Felix Salmon | | 12:40 | “0.07% of ChatGPT users...exhibit signs of mental health emergencies...that’s 560,000 people, more or less.” | Emily Peck | | 27:17 | “Health insurance prices are going up, subsidies are going down, and that's playing off of each other. And it's creating this, like, perfect storm of, like, everyone spends more money on healthcare.” | Emily Peck | | 32:13 | “I saw a stat somewhere...the average family is paying 35 grand a year for health insurance now and just as a portion of income...that's crazy.” | Elizabeth Spiers | | 40:14 | “A hundred thousand people lined up for hours to be able to take a shit in this solid gold toilet.” | Felix Salmon | | 45:39 | “There is a sort of, shall we call it, scatological tradition in conceptual art.” | Felix Salmon | | 48:43 | “What's more American than going to the bathroom after a big Thanksgiving meal and using a golden toilet to do it?” | Emily Peck |

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Important Timestamps

• 00:45 – 24:43: OpenAI, nonprofits vs. public benefit corporations, AI harms
• 25:43 – 40:07: Health insurance premiums, subsidies, government shutdown
• 40:07 – 51:15: The saga of the gold toilet, art market absurdities
• 51:15 – end: Numbers round – “Bill de Blasio” mix-up and viral handbags/costumes

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Tone and Style

The hosts maintain a sharp, conversational, and often irreverent tone. Complex topics are unpacked with humor and accessible analogies, punctuated by rants and moments of self-aware snark. Regular pop culture references and deep dives into the quirks of financial and art worlds keep even dry subjects lively.

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For Listeners Who Missed the Episode

If you want to know how tech’s biggest sensation is redefining “public benefit,” why your insurance bills are skyrocketing, or how a functional gold toilet became the hottest lot at Sotheby’s—all with a side of sly humor—this episode delivers. The conversation moves quickly but is structured so that all major topics are examined from several angles, making for a rich and accessible window into the economic week that was.

Transcript

[A]

Hello 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 Emily Peck of Axios.

[B]

Hello.

[A]

I'm here with Elizabeth Spires of the New York Times. Hello. And we are on YouTube so we are like you can see us saying hello. I mean, can you imagine anything more fun than literally watching your favorite Slate Money co host say hello? You can do that now. I am in a dimly lit room in Ballycanimi in Ireland. Emily Peck is in Westchester and is preparing for the marathon. Elizabeth Peck is in. Sorry, no. Elizabeth Spires is in Brooklyn and is going to be cheering on the marathon. But before we get to that point, we are going to have conversations. We are going to have discussions. We are going to talk about OpenAI, which is now a fully fledged for profit company, albeit a pbc. We will discuss what a PBC is. We are going to talk about health insurance and how very expensive it is, which is not good. And it's also caused this whole government shutdown. Many bad things. We are going to talk about a solid gold toilet that is coming up for auction at Sotheby's. We have a Slate plus segment for the ages wherein Emily Peck rants about job openings and job losses and whether any of them can be attributed meaningfully to AI. It's a good one this week and it's all coming up on Slate Money. This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card. Fun fact, I never leave home without my Apple Card. I mean, I would you want to miss out on daily cash back on everyday purchases subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch terms and [e-mail] so let's start this week with OpenAI, because this is a saga that has been going on for a long time. We have covered it on this show in the past and now it seems to have finally culminated in the thing that everyone wondered whether they could do. It turns out they can do it. A nonprofit charity, 501c3can, with enough lawyers and effort, actually become a for profit company. I don't think I've really seen this before. Nothing quite like this before. But OpenAI is now a for profit company. It has roughly 25% of it is owned by a nonprofit. The rest of it has a standard shareholding type situation. And we are told that they are probably going to go public. They're going to have an IPO either next year or the year after because that's the only way they can raise enough money to, you know, take over the world. Emily, is this a good thing or a bad thing or neither?

[B]

I mean, it's hard to say. Okay, this is what I wrote down.

[A]

Don't tell us, Emily, just write it down. Because that's the best thing to do on a podcast.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

And now that we're on video, you can just hold it up to the camera.

[B]

Well, I didn't print it out. Do you want to wait while I do that? No, this is what I think. So, OpenAI is now a public benefit corporation, a PBC. Which begs the question right away, where's the public benefit with this company?

[A]

I'm going to be that person who says, like, that's not what begs the question, but go on.

[B]

I'm so sorry. Can we cut that? It raises the question, does this company do anything that benefits the public or anything for social welfare or social good? I don't. I don't think so.

[A]

Well, so let's. So let's answer that question. Because the official OpenAI answer to that question is, there is now a nonprofit that has a stake in OpenAI worth $130 billion. They can now start spending that money, and They've already announced 50 million here and however many other million there. They say they're going to start supporting various attempts cure cancer and do other great and wonderful things. And just in terms of the size of the balance sheet, there are very, very few charities on the planet that have as much money as the nonprofit.

[B]

Not to push back at you, but you did not just answer the question. They say they're going to do cancer research is not an answer to the question of, does this company do anything that benefits the public? We had Kashmir Hill on the show a few weeks ago to Talk about how ChatGPT, the product that they make that millions and millions of people use, drives people to psychosis and in some instances, even murder and other bad stuff. There was some new data that OpenAI put out this past week with numbers showing, like, a small sliver for a small sliver of users become psychotic using the product. And the percentages were small, but it was in the tens of thousands of people. So there's an argument that instead of being good for the public, this harms the public.

[A]

Absolutely. To be clear, I 100% agree with you on this one. The whole point of a public benefit corporation is that the corporation Quay Corporation should act in the public benefit. Just because some percentage of its equity is owned by a charity does not make the corporation a good corporation, which is Working in the public interest. The way that OpenAI says that they are dealing with this question is by taking all of the members of the non profit board and basically making them the for profit board members too. And the idea is that these board members are going to somehow have the world's interests at heart rather than just shareholders interests at heart when they make their decisions. All I will say about that is one of those board members is Larry Summers.

[C]

Also the one board member who has a non voting share is this trust and safety guy who is ostensibly dealing with what Emily was talking about. But I just want to highlight that, you know, it's not the bar for becoming a public benefit corporation is pretty low. You can justify and these are called B corps informally.

[A]

Well no, no, that's two different things. You're right. The buff for becoming a. If you're watching on YouTube, guys, something fantastic just happened and we don't quite know how can I. Can I do this?

[B]

Does that work Again for those listening.

[C]

Balloons just emerged in front of Felix's face because he gestured in his face.

[A]

I gestured in his. I don't know how to get the balloons back, but I hope to God that the balloons will come back. But in the absence, all I will say is that you are right that the bar for becoming a PVC is low. Basically all you need to do is say I'm a pvc and then you're a pvc. By the same token, if you ever want to stop being a pbc, all you need to say is we are no longer a pbc and then you are no longer a pbc. It doesn't really constrain you in any important or strategic way. A B Corp is different. A B Corp is a company that has been certified by B Lab as reaching a certain level of standards and that certification is quite difficult to achieve. And so long as you keep that level of so long as you keep that certification, there is at least some kind of third party, you know, respected third party saying, yes, you are doing your bit to make the world a better place.

[C]

You're right. But I have encountered so many PBCs that refer to themselves as B Corp despite not clearing that certification. They're sort of used interchangeably, even if they shouldn't be.

[A]

Yeah, do not call yourself a B Corp if you're not a B Corp people. That's just lying, I guess.

[B]

Also, now that I'm like sort of thinking about it and one could argue I should have thought about it before coming onto the zoom. But just because a company is a nonprofit also doesn't mean it's a good company. Like, there are tons of not for profits, like more in the political space that, you know, you could really have strong arguments either way. They're good for society, bad for society, so benefits society, blah, blah, blah.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, there are lots of companies that are governed by or owned by nonprofits. Like Bertelsman, the publishing house, for instance, is owned by a nonprofit. Does that make it a good company? I don't know. I believe up until very recently, the NHL was technically a nonprofit. Sorry, no. The NFL was technically a nonprofit. And that doesn't make it a good company. It's just like it's just a form of corporate ownership, that's all.

[C]

Yeah, it's really just about the tax status, because with a nonprofit, the big difference is that, you know, it's also a misnomer. Most nonprofits are profitable, or they should be, but it's about what happens to the assets if you dissolve the company. And in a nonprofit, the company doesn't get dispersed to, you know, shareholders or owners or anything like that required to disperse the assets toward whatever cause that you're supposedly supporting. And that usually means turning over assets to a similar nonprofit. So it's really just a tax status and ownership status thing.

[B]

What OpenAI has done is just restructured itself so that it can take more money from investors and maybe go public. Yes, but it's the same company, maybe with operating with a slight more freedom to do things like work on ChatGPT versus work on curing cancer and things like that.

[A]

Yeah, basically what happened a while back was that Sam Altman became CEO of OpenAI and said, look, we are a nonprofit and our job is to create a safe AGI, artificial general intelligence. And it turns out upon doing a bunch of back of the envelope math, that the cost of creating a safe AGI is orders of magnitude greater than we will ever be able to raise in charitable donations. Therefore, we need to raise the money some other way. Now, this is not an obvious conclusion. Right. What he could have said is, whoops, therefore we're not going to be able to create a safe AGI, and therefore we should use OpenAI to do something else. But instead he said, we really, really want to create a safe AGI, or at least an AGI, and so what we're going to do is raise the money some other way. And so he created a who whole bunch of weird structures that allowed entities like Microsoft to invest money in or to give money to OpenAI in return for pieces of paper that may or may not end up being worth money in the future. It turns out that those pieces of paper did end up worth being money in the future. Microsoft, to give the most obvious example, invested about $13 billion in OpenAI and its stake in OpenAI is now worth 10 times that. So people did make money by investing in OpenAI. OpenAI did use that investment to create ChatGPT and all of its other products. And OpenAI is convinced that creating ChatGPT is good for the planet for reasons. But I think Emily's point is well taken that it's not easy to find a bunch of people outside OpenAI who would agree with that. Chat GPT is good for the planet.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, in fact it's requiring all this additional electricity use, stressing out, you know, stressing the power grids in various places, raising electricity prices, planet destroying anyway for the environment, I guess, as Elizabeth just said.

[A]

And Chat GPT of all of the different Chat LLM based chat bots out there is designed to be addictive in the way that many of the other ones are not. If you do a Google search and you get like a Gemini answer to your Google search in the top of your search results, it doesn't end with a sort of eager to please, can I maybe do this for you or that for you and try and keep you engaged. Just gives you what you are looking for ideally and then shuts up, which is, you know, less addictive and probably better for, you know, the psyches of the users. We don't have a bunch of Kashmir Hill stories about people falling in love with Google. Gemini. Right?

[B]

Oh, here's the number that came out this week. 0.07% of ChatGPT users active in a given week exhibit signs of mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania. And that sounds like a small number, but it's 560,000 people, more or less.

[A]

Half a million people.

[B]

Yeah, that's for the math. Casey Newton's math.

[A]

Well, you know, Casey's a friend of the pod. We'll trust his math on this one.

[B]

Yeah, that's how he mathed it. That's a lot of people. I don't, we don't need to re litigate but.

[C]

Well also ChatGPT is, you know, their public, consumer facing product but they're also working on a lot of other stuff I learned in the prep, which I didn't realize this. They had acquired Jony Ives firm because they want to develop a hardware product which is mind boggling. It didn't really go into what kind of product.

[A]

But yeah, well no one knows. They're being very secretive about this. They did spend a huge amount of money on a video where Sam Altman and Jony I've waltzed around San Francisco and say loving things to each other. There has been reporting saying that this attempt to build a hardware product is going more slowly than they had hoped. It is kind of wild that Jony I've who became dynastically wealthy working at Apple made so much more money by selling his loss making startup to Sam Altman. I mean the price tag was reportedly $6 billion. It's completely insane. And then he, you know, like the amounts of cash being thrown around right now in the AI space are wild. But no, I think for the time being it is fair to say that 99% of the value of OpenAI is ChatGPT and the research that is going on around like extending that and hopefully building this AGI which I'm not sure that many people want but you know, Sam Altman does. I do love by the way that Sam Altman still doesn't have any equity in this thing and he's got like no equity and he's getting paid $72,000 a year to, to be the CEO.

[B]

Yeah. Explain that to me. How is, how does he have a lot of money? What's going on?

[A]

Because he's founded a bunch of other companies and has done very well for himself as an investor. He was the president of Y Combinator for a long time. He was a vc. I think he's the single largest individual investor in Reddit. He has a lot of Reddit shares. Yeah, I bet his he's doing just.

[B]

His adjusted gross income which is what I always think of when anyone says that. I bet it's pretty low and he doesn't pay a lot of taxes.

[A]

I think that's probably correct.

[B]

$75,000 a year and all his wealth is in stocks slang.

[A]

He does have a predilection for very fast cars which I'm sure he just buys by borrowing money from his, you know, from a bank rather than actually having to declare income.

[B]

Wow. Wait, so I, I would just add, I guess they should be a for profit company because they make a really successful product that if successful and I'm not like an AI hype person and I think we might talk about that later. But, But I mean ChatGPT is an incredibly successful tech product that could and does that does already rival Google Search is stealing business away from Google Search which is a gigantic money Printing behemoth. And if they succeed, like if they keep going down that road, they will be a massive company even if they don't do the AGI part, you know.

[A]

Yeah, but that would involve that. This is an interesting question, right? Because in order to make as much money as Google does, they would need to inshitify themselves to the degree that Google has done. Right. The Google search, you know, is not in and of itself something that people pay money for. Like, as, as someone who uses search, I don't like happily fork over cash to Google every time I want it to do a search for me. What happens is the Google basically sells me to advertisers and makes the product worse by creating the first search result to be an ad that gives me something that I don't want rather than the thing that I do want and making the product worse for me. And so the question really becomes, if Google is run by a bunch of noble minded individuals who sit on the board of a nonprofit that controls the company rather than buy a bunch of people who feel like they have a fiduciary obligation to common shareholders, then might it be less likely to inshitify its product by plastering it in ads? And I don't know the answer.

[C]

I don't think that there's anything to stop OpenAI from inshitification because the nonprofit board seems to be controlled by the for profit interest and not the other way around.

[A]

Well, I mean, so, so technically speaking, in terms of the structure of the company, it is the other way around that the nonprofit controls the for profit and.

[C]

Well, I realize that, but you know.

[B]

In practice, in practice, I mean, and we saw what happened when the board of OpenAI tried to take action because they were worried about the future of the company.

[C]

Right, right.

[B]

They fired the CEO, everyone got rehired.

[A]

Eventually, board was out, the CEO fired the board.

[B]

And so, yeah, money trumps anything else in this case. That's the through line of everything.

[A]

Right. And now you look at the board and it's people like Brett Taylor who's, you know, who was on the board of Twitter and happily sold out to the highest, you know, to Elon Musk. There's people like Larry Summers, who's never met a dollar he didn't like, you know, and yeah, I am not going to place any faith whatsoever in Brett Taylor and Larry Summers to draw the line at getting revenues from selling ads against ChatGPT results. But to be clear, they haven't done it yet.

[B]

In the history of oversight boards that are put in place, I Know, this is more than just an oversight board, but in the history of oversight boards that are put in place to make sure no shenanigans go on in various private companies. I'm thinking of meta. Facebook had an oversight board for a while that did something with something privacy sensitive.

[A]

Yeah, but it was called an oversight board, but it didn't oversee the company. It just kind of. It was like this place you could appeal to if you didn't like, you know, the policies of Facebook.

[B]

And when News Corp. Bought the Wall Street Journal, they put I not the same thing as a corporate board. I understand, I do understand. But again, they put in place like some kind of oversight board and they're like, don't worry, we have the oversight board. They're going to be watching us like boards. I don't know, man.

[C]

Liability and cover your ass. It's the, you know, so that if something goes wrong, they're not accused of not being on top of it. You know, it's optics.

[A]

No, I mean that's definitely one possibility. Right. The other possibility is that it's real. And Emily's like asking to be sure. Emily is asking whether there are examples of. I am asking that boards which control a company that actually do make it oversight, you know, provide oversight and keep it it on the straight and narrow and stop it from inshitifying. Rolex, weirdly, might be one example. Rolex is a nonprofit company and it seems to have done a pretty good job of, you know, maximizing sales and profits without initiative its product and making sure that it continues to stay true to its mission of supporting various. Selling really expensive watches and no, selling the watches is the for profit bit.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

And then, you know, and then the nonprofit gets a whole bunch of money from selling the watches and then it goes off and you know, uses that money in the furtherance of public good.

[C]

How much damage can you do as a watchmaker though?

[B]

You could mess with the fabric of time.

[A]

This is a fair point, but. Okay, so let me bring up the example of glaxowelcome, which is a big profitable pharmaceutical company. Again, is largely controlled by a nonprofit. I do think there is a relatively strong case to be made that glaxowelcome is less evil than some of the purely for profit pharma companies. And for that reason.

[B]

So with Rolex and I don't know about Glaxo, you said that the nonprofit piece does things for the social good. Will the open eye nonprofit it do anything different from the for profit arm? Like will it do something else?

[A]

So the for profit arm is going to be out there, you know, giving chatgpt to the world, and for better or for worse, you know, changing the world that way. The nonprofit arm has two jobs. One of the jobs is to oversee the for profit arm. The other job is to use its billions in furtherance of making the world a better place. Curing cancer, whatever.

[B]

Now I feel bad that I really trashed it. I didn't realize that part. So I kind of take it back a little.

[A]

We don't know exactly how it's going to use those billions, but it stands to reason that when OpenAI goes public in 2026 or 2027, that some proportion of those shares that are being sold to the company will be sold. Buy the Nonprofit part of OpenAI, and it will use however many billions of dollars it gets from selling those shares in the IPO to spend money on good things, because that's what nonprofits are supposed to do. Now, you know, we don't really have, because up until now, the nonprofit OpenAI hasn't been making any money. So the nonprofit hasn't really had a huge amount of income or liquidity that it could use to spend. And so its expenditures have been in, like, the tens of millions rather than the billions. But eventually, and quite soon, I can easily see the expenditures going up into the billions, and then we'll really see what we think of it as a nonprofit.

[B]

And Sam Altman will one day make money from OpenAI.

[A]

Look, I mean, it is naive to believe that he hasn't already made money from OpenAI, just not directly by owning shares. It. Yeah, he has been going around the world trying to sell, you know, Gulf countries on funding a $7 trillion energy thing that he also has stakes in. And, you know, this kind of thing.

[C]

He'S off scanning people's eyeballs.

[A]

Oh, yeah, he also was scanning eyeballs, and I'm sure he's made money by scanning eyeballs, because everything crypto makes money somehow. So, yeah, there's, you know, there is. There's a bunch of different things that he can do. And because he's Sam Altman, he gets a lot more. You know, being Sam Altman, being the CEO of OpenAI opens a whole bunch of doors. And when those doors open, he is very good at making money from open.

[B]

Okay, great. So he's going to be okay.

[A]

Let's not worry about Sam. Slate money is sponsored this week by Shopify. If you've shopped online, chances are you've bought from a business powered by Shopify. You Know that Purple Shop pay button you see at checkout? The one that makes buying so incredibly easy? That's Shopify. And there's a reason so many businesses sell with it. Because Shopify makes it incredibly easy to to start and run your business. Shopify is behind 10% of all E commerce in the US from household names to brands. Just getting started, Shopify gives you hundreds of beautiful ready to go templates to express your brand style. You can tackle important tasks like inventory, payments and analytics all in one place. You can spread your brand's word with built in marketing and email tools and that iconic Purple Shop payback button used by millions of businesses around the world. It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. Your customers already love it. If you want to see less carts being abandoned, it's time for you to head over to Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.commoney go to shopify.commoney shopify.com money.

[B]

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[A]

Let's worry instead about the put upon class of every single American who has a body except Sam Altman, possibly even including Sam Altman. Because you know, where is he going to get his health insurance? Health costs are going up. And the news this week is that if you have been buying health insurance off one of Barack Obama's federal exchange type things, then your premiums are going to go up by a lot. BY I think 24% on average. It's more than that if you buy it from a federal exchange. It's a little bit less than that if you buy it from a state exchange. But then everyone's premiums are going up. There's a bunch of inflation in the healthcare sector. And Elizabeth, you are here to tell me that this is terribly bad.

[C]

This is terribly bad for everyone.

[A]

I mean, I'm inclined to agree. But Emily, are we in agreement on this one that when health insurance costs go up, that's just like a bad thing?

[B]

It's so bad it's really bad. It's worse. When Elizabeth suggested we talk about it, I was like, oh, I better learn about this. So I did my little crash course. I talked to one of Axios's great healthcare reporters, Maya Goldman, and she kind of, like, laid it out for me, and it's so bad. So in 2021, when Biden was president, they did these subsidies for the Affordable Care act for people who buy health insurance on these exchanges. Health insurance on the exchanges was subsidized for a lot of people making up to 400% of the poverty line.

[C]

So, like, which we should say is 64k.

[B]

Yeah, 64k for households or it's not a lot of money. So. But if you made more than that, you didn't really get that much help. But they did these big subsidies. The argument being, like, it's a pandemic. People should have health insurance. We should make it really cheap and easy for people to have health insurance. I mean, that's been the argument the whole time that people should have health insurance because we live in a society. But it had resonance in 2021, and everyone knows these subsidies were going to expire. But then, you know, we got a different president and a different Congress, and they don't like the subsidies. And now that's like, oh, there's a whole fight going on over that. So at the same time, health insurance costs are, like, skyrocketing. They've been going up a lot faster than overall inflation for the past few years for various reasons, including the expected expiration of the subsidies, because health insurers are like, when these things expire, a lot of people are going to drop health insurance, probably healthy people that help make insurance profitable. So we need to raise costs to deal with that. So it's like health insurance prices are going up, subsidies are going down, and that's playing off of each other. And it's creating this, like, perfect storm of, like, everyone spends more money on healthcare.

[A]

Yeah. No, the dynamic whereby the insurers are raising the costs not because the healthcare costs are going up, although they are doing that.

[B]

Yes, that's part of it, too.

[A]

But also because if the price goes up, then healthy people are less likely to take out insurance at all. And that raises the risk profile of the whole group. And so then the average cost of the group has to go up. It's just this horrible vicious spiral. But I am fascinated by this idea that health insurance is a little bit like all these subsidies, rather, are a little bit like the Trump tax cuts that they Were like put into law with an expiry date by people who wanted them to be permanent. And then, you know, there's a big fight when they expire between the people who want them to be permanent and the people who are like, but they were expiring when they went into law. We should just let them expire. And their sides are completely the opposite sides. And this is, correct me if I'm wrong, basically the one and only necessary and sufficient single issue that is overarching the entire government shut down meshuggahs and that if we can work out what to do with these health care subsidies, then the shutdown ends. And if we can't, then it doesn't. Is that right?

[C]

It's crazy. Is this is a thing that I don't understand about, you know, the politics of it. There are issues and specific things that Republicans have constituencies that they really care about it, you know, the Social Security, Medicare are two of the biggest ones. But healthcare generally, when you have an aging population, I don't understand, other than just pushing back against Democrats and not wanting to spend more money, why Republicans are so heavily set against keeping the subsidies because their constituents want it.

[B]

My understanding is in the good faith argument, I mean, the White House has made what I would characterize as a bad faith argument that these subsidies go to, to pay for health insurance for undocumented people. But the good faith argument, I think why Republicans don't like it is they don't like giving subsidies to anyone, much less people who aren't even poor. Like, a lot of the comments I see on social media, they'll pull an example from a news story of a couple that pays 500amonth for health insurance is going to have to pay 1,500amonth. And then the couple will be like, doesn't work because they're retired or, but they're not qualified for Medicare yet. And the criticism is like, they don't deserve this help.

[A]

The people who live like very near the poverty line and have been paying zero dollars a month for the past four years, those people are going to go up to like somewhere between 30 and $80 a month, which is meaningful money when you're living on the poverty line. But it's definitely one of those things. But you know, Medicare is another one of these things that is quite deliberately not means tested. You know, all of us are going to be eligible for Medicare no matter how rich we are. And that, and that helps to sell all of the payroll taxes that we pay. That like, the idea is that I'm sort of funding my future health care once I'm in my dotage, even if I'm still rich when I'm old is, you know, that this is my payroll taxes going to me rather than this is my payroll taxes going to other people. And so that makes it easier to sell the payroll taxes as a tax. But yeah, you're right that it that if you don't means test, then obviously then some of the subsidies are going to go to rich people.

[C]

This is an example of people just not understanding who their constituents are. Some of the people that are going to be affected by this in the worst way are people who are older but not yet qualified for Medicare. And so there's sort of horror stories of people's premiums doubling from, you know, $800 a month for a single person to $2,000 a month. And that's like rent money for a lot of people. And with on top of, you know, seven, $8,000 deductibles. And that's just, you know, when you look at the math, I saw a stat somewhere that said the average family is paying 35 grand a year for health insurance now and just as a portion of income, when you consider median income in this country, that's crazy. It's just a crazy number.

[B]

I mean, the argument that these Obamacare subsidies for people who have good incomes isn't fair. Most people have health insurance through their employer and there are tax benefits that employers get from providing that health insurance. That is a tax break that everyone pays for that benefits. You know, only some people better paid people, rich workers or whatever you want to call it. But it's so invisible. I don't think people get upset about it in this.

[A]

Workers do not need to pay income tax on the money that is spent on their behalf for health insurance by their employers.

[B]

The employer doesn't pay tax. They get a tax break on that money as well, I believe.

[A]

And that is an expense to the employer. And therefore, yeah, that is obviously not an income for the employer, it's an expense for the employer. So they get to deduct that expense from their income when they're calculating their profit.

[B]

So, yeah, I mean, the taxpayers are paying for this stuff no matter what. And if people drop health insurance and then these sick people, uninsured sick people show up at the emergency room, they have to be treated. That costs taxpayers too. It's really interesting because with the subsidies in 21, it really seemed like we were closer to achieving kind of the dream of the Affordable Care act and Obamacare like, the uninsured rate went down quite a bit. It seemed like these plans were finally really affordable. Like, the knock on them when Obamacare first came out was like they weren't really affordable. And there were all kinds of people that couldn't do it. And it seems like we were getting closer. A lot of people, like you said, Felix paying zero a month, others paying much less than before. It was like, wow, this is really going to happen. Like, this program has become really successful, and now it kind of seems like everything's in question.

[A]

So the thing that I keep on thinking about when I read these stories is something that I wrote about a little bit in my book about COVID which was that there was this political cleavage. Covid really did tear the country apart politically along its own unique lines. It wasn't a D versus R thing particularly, but there was the part of the country who thought of the of COVID as being a public health crisis that required a public response. And then there was the part of the country that thought of it as being an illness that happens to individuals. And that is an individual thing rather than a societal thing. And society shouldn't, you know, fall over itself to care about those individuals. And I'm seeing that here, too, that, as you say, Emily, America, kind of uniquely among rich countries, has for decades had a large population of uninsured adults. And when those adults get sick, they wind up with massive medical bills and often they die because they can't afford treatment. And that is considered to be a tragedy by the same people who thought of COVID as being a public health crisis, but is considered to be, I don't know, just like part of the standard sort of Hobbesian bargain that we sign up for when we get born by a lot of the people who, you know, life is nasty, brutal and short. Get used to it. There's this feeling that, like, that is just part of the luck of the draw. Like, sometimes you're born rich, sometimes you're poor, sometimes you're born healthy, sometimes you're born sick. And these things just happen to people.

[C]

And it's more than that. I think there's something built into the American ethos where success is considered a mark of character, good character, and poverty is considered a mark of bad character.

[A]

And health being the same. Like, if you're healthy, that means you're, like, somehow superior. And if something happens to you medically, then that's.

[B]

Any seed oils?

[A]

Yeah. If you eat too many seed oils.

[B]

Or like, you did it to yourself.

[A]

Ingest fluoride in your water, then it's all on you, man. Slate Money is sponsored this week by Saks Fifth Avenue. Saks Fifth Avenue makes it easy to holiday your way. Whether it's finding the right gift or the right outfit, Saks is where you can find everything from the perfect Chloe bag for your hard to shop for sister to a Prada jacket for a fancy holiday dinner. If you visit saks.com, you'll be astonished at how easy it is to find new arrivals and gift inspiration from, I don't know, Dries Van Noten, wonderful Belgian designer. Lots of floral prints. Just the kind of thing you need to lighten up and brighten up what the darker days that are coming. If you don't want Dries Van Noten, I can tell you Sachs has holiday looks for everything. You can get Dolce Gabbana instead. I would recommend flowers. That's my top tip for this season as the nights get longer. But if you don't know where to start, Saks.com is customized to your personal style so you can save time shopping and spend more time just enjoying the holidays. Whether it's an office holiday party, a cosy night in, or a vacation getaway, Saks has everything you need to holiday your way. So make shopping fun and easy this season and find gifts and inspiration to suit your holiday style at Saks Fifth Avenue. Slate Money is sponsored this week by Upside. The holidays are meant for giving, but that doesn't mean you can't get a little something back. Do the free Upside app helps you earn some extra cash back on things you're already doing, like filling up at the pump, grabbing dinner on the go, or making one more trip to the grocery store. I have used Upside to get money back on my gasoline purchases. Yes, I have a car. I don't use it a lot, but it still requires gas. And there's really no harm in getting money back after you've paid your bill. It costs you nothing. Upside has over 100,000 gas stations, grocery stores and restaurants on its app, and cash back is always just around the corner. And yes, it's actual money you can transfer straight to your bank account. Dollars and cents. No confusing rewards or points or credit. Keep more in your pocket during the season you spend the most with Upside. Upside has given back $1 billion to its users. To find out how much you could earn, download the free Upside app and use promo code sleepdmoney to get an extra extra 25 cents back for every gallon on your first tank of gas. That's an extra 25 cents back for every gallon on your first tank of gas, using promo code Slate Money. But yeah, enough of this depressing bleak news. Let's talk about 100,000 people taking a shit in America.

[B]

I knew it would come down to some gross conversation. We're talking about toilets.

[A]

We're talking about one particular. Well, two gold toilets, actually, is what we're talking about. There was one gold toilet that was made by a very famous artist named Maurizio Catalan. Listeners of Slate Money will recall my rant not that long ago about the banana defending it. There's a good artwork, and this is also a good artwork. He made a good. He made a 18 karat gold, fully functional gold toilet. He installed it in the Guggenheim for a year. A hundred thousand people lined up for hours to be able to take a shit in this solid gold toilet, he called it.

[B]

You have to stop saying that. Use the toilet. We don't know what they were doing.

[A]

Use the toilet. The toilet. You know, obviously it became this kind of meme. It resonated in the Guggenheimian consciousness. And then Guggenheimian. Well done, Emily. We can rely on you for their jokes.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

It then made its way to Blenheim Castle in England for some reason, where it was exhibited from whence it was stolen by a bunch of thieves who realized that since it was solid gold, they didn't need to try and fence this to some kind of art buyer. All they needed to do was chop it up into gold pieces, sell them off, melt them down, and make wash it somehow, millions of dollars. So it kind of got destroyed. And everyone thought that was the end of the story, but it was not the end of the story. There is another chapter to this story, because it turns out that back in 2017, Mauricio Catalan's gallery, Marianne Goodman, sold a second toilet. There was a second toilet all along. And now that toilet is coming up for auction at Sotheby's. And because the gold price has gone up so much, the bullion value of this toilet alone is on the order of $10 million.

[B]

I like this better than the banana in that it has that intrinsic value, whereas the banana, or the banana, as some would say, is pretty cheap, right? This is real. This has real value, unlike other types of art that we've discussed on the show.

[C]

I love Catalan. And he's made these things that somehow become prescient. And so the fact that the toilets came out right before Donald Trump became president and the thing is called America, there was a great New York Post headline that said, when it was at the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim wants you to crap all over America. And it just feels like, you know, of the moment.

[B]

Yes. What does it mean, Felix?

[A]

What does it mean, Felix?

[B]

We spoke in the slack of socialism and something, something Marxist, something, something product of labor, something, something into the toilet. But I don't really. I couldn't make it make sense when I was thinking about this last night, so I thought I would ask you.

[A]

It's conceptual art, Emily, so it doesn't make sense. So, okay, let me talk a little bit about two iconics pieces of conceptual art, because you have to understand this piece in the context of the broader history of conceptual art.

[B]

You can't just know toilets. You have to know other stuff about art. You can't just be like, toilet. I know about toilets.

[A]

It suffices to know toilets. But. But it becomes a richer artwork if you know a little bit more, right? The more you know, the more you know, the more you know. So if you go back to the very beginning of conceptual art, probably, arguably the very first conceptual artwork was a piece by Marcel Duchamp called Fountain. Are you familiar with this work?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

What is Fountain?

[B]

Oh, I think it's a fountain, Elizabeth.

[C]

I don't remember.

[B]

Is it also a toilet? Didn't Duchamp also do a toilet?

[A]

Exactly, yes. Fountain is a urinal placed on a pedestal and reconceptualized as an artwork. And so this idea of taking a piece of, you know, plumbing from your bathroom and making it an artwork dates back 100 years, basically, to Marcel Duchamp. Then fast forward 40ish years from there to the 1960s, and this guy called Piero Manzoni, who was an Italian conceptual artist, started canning his. I hate to use this word, but there's no other word.

[B]

Oh, no.

[A]

He started canning his own shit, and he called it the shit of the artist. And he would sell cans of his shit as art, right? Because he was making a commentary on how things that are touched by artists seem to be worth a hell of a lot more just because they're touched by the artist. If I put a urinal on a pedestal, that would be a dumb fucking stunt and it would be worthless. But if Duchamp's urinal went up for auction because it's Duchamp's urinal and not my urinal, it would be worth tens of millions of dollars, right? So Manzoni then started selling his own shit in cans. And those cans do come up for auction, and they sell for substantial amounts of money again in a way that if. If anyone else canned their own shit, they would not be able to sell that.

[B]

They would be locked up.

[A]

So there is a sort of, shall we call it, scatological tradition in conceptual art. And there are other pieces in that tradition as well, and America belongs in that tradition. It also belongs in a tradition of sort of stunt art wayos using an enormous amount of money's worth of materials to make the piece. And the most famous other piece in that vein was Damien Hirst piece called for the love of God, that was made out of 8,100 diamonds placed in the shape of a platinum skull. And he went around saying that it was worth $50 million just in sort of diamond value alone, but never found a buyer for it. Never found a buyer for it. So that is still sitting in a warehouse somewhere, kind of unsold.

[B]

Who's going to buy the gold toilet? And do you think they'll install it in one of their bathrooms?

[A]

Justin Sun. And yes, is my guess, Justin son.

[B]

Is a crypto guy who bought the banana.

[A]

Yeah. And Sotheby's is accepting crypto in payment for the toilet. And this does kind of strike me. I'm sure that Justin sun was the first person that Sotheby's phoned up when they got the consignment. And they're like, hey, can we interest you in the toilet? And I'm 100% sure that if Justin sun ends up buying the toilet, then he will turn it into a whole stunt and he will allow people to use the toilet, and he will install the toilet in some kind of semi public place and try and get headlines out of it.

[B]

And remind me again how much the toilet is worth, just in pure gold.

[A]

On the order of $10 million. Although it's 101.2 kilograms of 18 karat gold, if you want to do the math yourself, you multiply that by 3/4 to get the weight of actual gold. And then you multiply that by $4,000 a troy ounce, and it comes to, like, at $4,000 an ounce, it comes to about $9.8 million.

[B]

And what did the banana sell for?

[A]

6.2.

[B]

Okay, so it's already worth more than the banana just right now. Just if you melted it down. So it's going to be a lot more than the banana, probably.

[A]

Yeah. Oh, and because Sotheby's can't resist a marketing stunt of its own, the opening bid is going to be the bullion value of the piece, and then it will just like go up from there.

[B]

That makes sense. Of course. Of course. And when is this going on sale so we can all put in our bids.

[A]

Yeah. If you want a bid, phone up. So the biz, they're in the phone book.

[B]

Get your phone book out.

[A]

Get your phone book out, turn to S for Sotheby's and put in your bid. And if you win, you'll find out on November 18th. That's when the auction is.

[B]

You could install it before Thanksgiving. So America, like, you have your Thanksgiving dinner and then you're like, if you need to use the restroom, you can use my gold toilet.

[A]

I really like that. Yeah, I mean, you would need to get it from Sotheby's. So, like, probably you'd need to be in North America somewhere. But, yeah, I think that's. That's almost optimal use case goals.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, it's called America. And what is more American than Thanksgiving?

[B]

Right. What's more American than going to the bathroom after a big Thanksgiving meal and using a golden toilet to do it hard?

[A]

Agree. Yes.

[B]

What if Donald Trump buys it?

[A]

Well, so this is actually. There's an interesting. There's an interesting story about that, which is that when. When Donald Trump was president the first time around, he was decorating the White House, and one of his minions approached the Guggenheim and said, hey, you have this artwork. Can we please borrow it to put on the wall of the White House? We like the art, and Donald Trump likes the art, and he wants to have it in the White House. Which is the kind of request that presidents do make of museums. And often museums do say yes, but in this particular case, the Guggenheim replied by saying, no, but we will lend you America if you want that.

[B]

Now he's taking his revenge out on everyone, so thanks for that, Guggenheim. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. It's a great time to apply for an Apple Card you'll love, earning up to 3% unlimited daily cash back on every purchase and no fees period. Through this special referral offer. When you get a new Apple Card, you can earn bonus daily cash. To qualify, you must apply at Apple Co getdailycash Apple Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.99% to 28.24% based on creditworthiness rates as of October 1, 2025. Offer may not be available elsewhere. Terms and limitations apply. This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Shifting a little money here a little. There's just hoping it all Works out well. With the name your price tool from Progressive, you can be a better budgeter and potentially lower your insurance bill too. You tell Progressive what you want to pay for car insurance and they'll help you find options within your budget. Try it [e-mail], progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.

[A]

Let's have a numbers round. Emily, what's your number?

[B]

My number is 2. That is the number of people that I'm aware of who are named Bill de Blasio.

[A]

Oh, I love this story so much. And they're both New Yorkers.

[B]

Yes, they are both New Yorkers. One was the mayor of New York City. He lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The other is a 59 year old long island wine importer named Bill de Blasio, capital D And the Times of London, which is a reputable newspaper, emailed Bill de Blasio, capital D, 59 year old long island wine importer and asked him for his thoughts on the maybe new mayor of New York City. Mamdani and Bill de Blasio, Long island Guy went to ChatGPT and was like, let's see if we can put something together, some thoughts together for the Times of London and responded and you know, gave his thoughts, never claiming to be anyone other than who he is. Bill de Blasio, Times of London ran with it, ran a story, only later to discover, whoops, it's not the right Bill de Blasio, the guy in in Park Slope. Then the New York Times ran a story that was like, there's a Bill de Blasio impersonator running around. Then Bill de Blasio of Long island who winters in Florida read that he was being called Bill de Blasio impersonator and was affronted because as he said, he was never trying to impersonate anyone. He was just being himself. He figured Times of London would figure out that he wasn't the actual Park Slope Bill de Blasio, but they did not. And now there is a delightful story in Semaphore where Bill de Blasio, Long island guy is interviewed. And the best part maybe is that the interview took place through the ring camera on his house because he was in Florida and the reporter was on Long island doing the interview through the ring camera.

[C]

I love it.

[A]

It is a glorious, glorious, glorious story. We love it so much.

[B]

So wonderful.

[C]

That's some good shoe leather journalism right there.

[B]

Just terrific stuff. Really, really happy.

[A]

My number is 136,000, which is the price in yen of the Grace Delight Tote handbag. It's a very lightweight handbag and it is the handbag of choice of Sanae Takechi, who is the new Prime Minister of Japan. And once the bloggers or the social medias worked out what this handbag was, it became massively popular. It is now basically sold out everywhere. If you want to order it from Hamana, which is the 145 year old Japanese leather goods maker who makes this handbag, you're not going to be able to get it before April and good luck getting them to return your emails or anything like that. But well done, Prime Minister Takeichi for creating a new it tote. Oh, and by the way, 136,000 yen is about $895. So that's an expensive handbag, but not a crazy expensive handbag.

[B]

I want to see it. Can I google it? What is it called? Tote of.

[A]

It's called the Grace Delight Tote.

[B]

Grace Delight Tote. It just looks like a big leather purse. I thought it was going to be like, because when you said tote, in my mind I'm like New Yorker tote bag.

[A]

Yeah. No, it's, it's not a canvas tote.

[B]

Bag, but it's very nice, very classy.

[A]

Very demure, very mindful. Elizabeth, what's your number?

[C]

My number is 59.99 and that is the price of a K Pop Demon Hunter in costume at Spirit Halloween, which they are totally sold out because apparently the way that they sort of engineer these costumes is they try to anticipate demand ahead of time, like even a year or two before, and they did not anticipate the popularity of K Pop Demon Hunters. And so now if you want that costume, you have to make it yourself. So by the time the pod comes out, you will have probably seen 4 million tiny K pop Demon Hunters shout.

[A]

Out to my colleague Nikki at Bloomberg, who ordered a K Pop Demon Hunter Halloween costume from Alibaba or somewhere in China months ago and it has still not arrived and she is spinning out. And yeah, she is definitely in a world of like, oh my God, am I going to have to learn how to make a costume at home?

[B]

Are you two going to wear? Well, Felix, you're in Ireland. I don't know if they do what they do for Halloween, but do you two get dressed up?

[C]

My kid this year wants us to dress up with him, but we have not come up with an outfit yet. But I went to a party last week where there was a couple and they were dressed as six seven. One of them was six and the other was seven. So if I'm desperate, that's going to be our easy to assemble.

[A]

I got a pitch this week from a book publicist who was trying to pitch me on a personal finance book that had been written by a married couple. And she's like, this is a personal finance book on, like having happy finances if you're married, written by the couple behind the viral 67 Halloween costume. Like, that's that. That's their claim to fame.

[C]

And it's just like, what that definitely their expert. Gives me great, great confidence in there.

[A]

I'm like, if you can come up with a viral 67 Halloween costume, then manage my money. Obviously, I will take your financial advice any day of the week.

[B]

They're probably rich from it.

[A]

I don't think you get rich by having your photograph of your. And by the way, the reason it went viral is because everyone was laughing at it and the kids all hate it.

[B]

Oh, no.

[C]

All right, I guess I should cross that one off my list.

[A]

I think that's it for us this week. Thank you for listening to Slate Money. Thank you for emailing us on slatemoneylate.com send us photos if you're K Pop Demon Hunters outfit that you managed to order in time from China or buy from Spirit Halloween before they sold out. And thank you to Jasmine, Molly and Shayna Roth for producing. This has been fun, but it's not over yet because we will, as ever, be back next week with even more Slate Money.