Disney Gets Ahead of the Darth Vader Porn

Summary

Slate Money: “Disney Gets Ahead of the Darth Vader Porn”

Date: December 13, 2025
Host: Felix Salmon with Elizabeth Spires and Emily Peck

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the intersection of tech and content ownership, focusing on Disney’s billion-dollar investment in OpenAI and innovative—but controversial—approaches to AI content restrictions. The hosts scrutinize how these developments reshape intellectual property (IP) protection, the future of video AI, equity in IPOs, and the evolution of pricing strategies—ranging from Instacart eggs to World Cup tickets and immigration “gold cards.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Disney’s Billion-Dollar OpenAI Deal: Policing Darth Vader and Sora

• Disney invests $1B in OpenAI, acquiring not just equity but imposing extensive licensing controls over how AI systems like Sora can use Disney IP ([02:34]–[04:40]).
• Emily Peck explains:
  “Disney is getting some measure of control...You cannot show a picture of you and Darth Vader doing anything naughty. You cannot mimic Darth Vader's voice...There's a very long appendix that sort of outlines what can't happen in these SORA videos.” ([03:17])
• Industry Blueprint:
  Disney’s deal signals a proactive shift: rather than suing AI firms for copyright infringement after the fact, IP holders are baking restrictions into licensing terms from the outset.
• Carrot & Stick Approach:
  Disney invests in OpenAI (carrot), but sends legal warnings to competitors like Google and Anthropic (stick) ([05:44]).

Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "You are not going to be allowed to make a video of them doing things in bed together."
  — Felix Salmon, joking on Disney+OpenAI ([00:29])
• "Disney is sort of like the king of US copyright. They literally changed the copyright law...to keep Mickey under lock and key for longer."
  — Emily Peck ([08:54])

Debate on Enforceability: The ‘Snoopy Problem’

• Elizabeth Spires: Skeptical about AI’s ability to police outputs.
  “How even OpenAI will be able to enforce these rules...users find a million ways to get around them.” ([06:27])
• Felix vs. Elizabeth:
  Can AI really detect and block sneaky, abstracted versions of Disney characters? ([10:47]–[12:40])
• Felix: “Technology is 100% capable of looking at a picture of Snoopy and saying, is this other picture Snoopy?” ([12:31])
• Elizabeth: “It famously is not. That's one of the weaknesses.” ([12:36])

2. IP, Fair Use, and Who’s Really Losing Out

• Authors and Creators: Despite settlements (e.g., Felix gets $5K from Microsoft for his book), most large deals benefit IP giants like Disney.
  “Who is getting hurt or whose creativity and IP is just getting completely ripped off...I think tbd and it's going to be hard to even understand it.” — Emily Peck ([10:03])
• Fair Use Questioned:
  “It's crazy to me that I didn't know it was understood that that was considered fair use. Isn't the New York Times suing them over this?” — Emily Peck ([15:52])

3. AI, Video, and User-Generated Content Gold Rush

• Disney’s win: If users make great AI-generated short films with Disney IP, Disney owns that work—potentially creating a massive free UGC pool ([14:07]–[15:18]).
• Emily Peck: “The future of mindless scrolling is not mindless scrolling through videoed TikToks, but… AI generated short form video.” ([14:35])

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4. IPO Mania: Will 2026 Inflate the Next Bubble?

• IPO Forecast: $3 trillion in new market cap possible in 2026; SpaceX, OpenAI, and more may go public ([20:41]–[22:30]).
• SpaceX IPO:
  “If it goes public, the valuations being mooted would probably be worth more than Tesla, which is kind of wild.” — Felix ([21:01])
• Dot-com echoes:
  1999–2000 was “the greatest time to go public in the history of the planet,” but investors—not companies—got “annihilated” ([23:04]–[23:44]).
• Tech companies staying private: Stripe, SpaceX, and others have used private liquidity rounds as alternatives to IPOs, but public listing is coming back into fashion ([24:00]–[24:44]).

On Elon Musk and SpaceX’s Motivation

• Emily Peck: “I can't see Musk and SpaceX wanting to disrupt that vibe... Unless Musk is like, I want to be a trillionaire, which would really be a motivating factor.” ([24:50])
• Elizabeth on Musk: “He does have to pay 30 million to each of his baby mamas. So if he wants like a billion more kids, he's got to find that money somewhere.” ([26:01])

Starlink as SpaceX’s Value Driver

• Felix Salmon: “Starlink is the massive majority of the value of SpaceX.” ([28:32])

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5. Dynamic Pricing Hits Home: From Instacart to FIFA

• Instacart’s Experiment: Prices for identical products vary between users—are they algorithmically personalized or just A/B tests? ([34:48]–[36:50])
• Concerns:
  • Using personal data for price discrimination is ethically fraught.
  • “Orbitz used to charge Mac users more because they had data that said…you probably had higher income.” — Elizabeth ([36:06])
• Regulation:
  NY now requires disclosure if you’re charged a personalized price, but none of the hosts have seen such disclaimers.
• Dynamic pricing analogy:
  “You can go to happy hour and get your beer for $2 off… With algorithmic pricing, with buying the eggs, you have no freaking idea.” — Emily Peck ([38:00])

World Cup Tickets & the Global Capitalism Divide

• FIFA’s resale marketplace: Average ticket prices soared to ~$5,000, up 5X from Qatar, causing international outrage ([41:18]–[43:11]).
• Emily Peck: “That's just sports right now…anything in person now...five times as much as it was five years ago.” ([42:02])
• Felix on world attitudes: “In the rest of the world, there is real anger about this...most football fans are not American.” ([43:15])
• Elizabeth Spires: “Only the obscenely rich should be able to see a soccer game.” ([44:17])

Trump’s “Gold Card” for Immigration

• $1 million ‘gold card’ green card system—pay to skip the immigration line. Platinum card allows (questionably legal) US entry with no tax on global income ([44:40]–[46:36]).
• “Is this discrimination in favor of rich people? Like, duh.” — Felix ([45:47])

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• [09:14] Felix Salmon: “Every time that Mickey was about to come out of copyright, they would, like, lobby Congress and Congress would extend it. It was wild.”
• [16:52] Felix Hammond: “I'm rich because that's all they're paying me for is...we are going to throw your book into this massive pool of data that we are ingesting.”
• [23:04] Felix Salmon: “Anyone who wasn't issuing equity into the dot com bubble was a moron.”
• [26:47] Elizabeth Spires: “Well, he does have to pay 30 million to each of his baby mamas.”
• [43:56] Emily Peck: “Everything costs, like, a few thousand dollars, anything you want to see. And, like, the rest of the world's like, girl, no, it doesn't have to be like that.”

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• Disney’s OpenAI Deal Explained: [02:34] – [06:11]
• Can Disney & OpenAI Really Prevent “Darth Vader Porn”?: [06:11] – [14:56]
• IP, Creators, and Fair Use Debate: [14:56] – [17:47]
• IPO Mania & the Next Tech Bubble: [20:41] – [29:56]
• Dynamic Pricing & Personalization Ethics: [34:48] – [40:42]
• World Cup Ticket Outrage: [41:18] – [44:40]
• Immigration “Gold Card” System: [44:40] – [48:51]
• Numbers Round (Fun, Quirky Stats): [51:06] – [58:28]

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Tone & Atmosphere

• Wry, skeptical, and often irreverent; the hosts joke freely (e.g., “Darth Vader porn”), but provide sharp, well-contextualized business analysis.
• Emily and Elizabeth often challenge Felix’s assertions, especially on fairness and accessibility, making for a lively, conversational feel.

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Final Thoughts

This episode is a must-listen for anyone curious about how AI, Big Tech, and powerful content owners are rewriting the rules of media, business, and personal rights. Whether discussing the practical limits of AI content policing, dissecting the possibilities of a historic IPO wave, or exposing the unseen hands behind consumer pricing, the hosts blend critical perspective with a wealth of industry knowledge.

Transcript

[Felix Hammond]

Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Hammond of Bloomberg. I'm here with Elizabeth Spires of the New York Times.

[Elizabeth Spires]

Hello.

[Felix Hammond]

I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios.

[Elizabeth Spires]

Hello.

[Felix Hammond]

We are going to talk about OpenAI and Disney, two massive companies that are.

[Felix Salmon]

Now like getting into bed with each other. But the thing is, you're not going to be allowed to make a video of them doing things in bed together.

[Felix Hammond]

We are going to talk about IPOs.

[Felix Salmon]

Of which there could be very many in 2026. I mean, given where the stock market is, that kind of makes sense.

[Felix Hammond]

We are going to talk about pricing.

[Felix Salmon]

And whether it is okay that people on Instacart get shown very different prices for the same object. And somehow this is going to wind up segueing into a discussion about not only World cup pricing, but also the trump card, the gold card, the gold green card.

[Felix Hammond]

We have a Slate plus segment about data centers in space. Also in a couple of weeks we're going to have a whole episode devoted to fire takes. So please send us your most fire.

[Felix Salmon]

Takes of 2025 on slatemoneylate.com do it in the form of a voice memo, if you will. That would be amazing. It's a fun one this week, so stay tuned. It's all coming up on Slate Money.

[Sponsor Voice]

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[Felix Hammond]

This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card. Fun fact, I never leave home without my Apple card. I mean, would you want to miss out on daily cash back on everyday purchases subject to credit approval?

[Felix Salmon]

Apple card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank.

[Felix Hammond]

USA Salt Lake City Branch terms and more at applecard.com so in OpenAI's eternal quest for cash to find that it.

[Felix Salmon]

Can then incinerate in data centers, it.

[Felix Hammond]

Has found $1 billion which it is receiving from Disney.

[Felix Salmon]

It is selling Disney a billion dollars of stock. Now to be fair, there's a lot of people out there who are willing to throw a billion dollars at Disney OpenAI for stock right now. So that isn't that interesting. Disney is a huge corporation that wants to be like hip with The AI cool kids. And so you kind of understand why they would want to invest a billion dollars in OpenAI. This is just like a really boring equity deal, except it comes with a whole bunch of very interesting licensing terms, which. Emily, explain.

[Emily Peck]

Okay, this is a big deal. It's a blueprint, I'd say, for all of Hollywood. Basically, Disney is buying itself some amount of control over how OpenAI, and specifically Sora, which is OpenAI's visual media creator. I don't know how, you know, you put words in and it makes a picture for you. So Disney is getting some measure of control over, say, like, you can show an image or video of you and Darth Vader, you know, sitting and eating breakfast together. You cannot show a picture of you and Darth Vader doing anything naughty. You cannot mimic Darth Vader's voice in that movie. Disney has limited Sora to, I believe, only 200 characters that people can use, that fans can use. It has said you can't use character voices. And apparently there's. In the contractor agreement that companies have, there's like a very long appendix that sort of outlines what can't happen in these SORA videos. So I guess Disney, if I'm. I'm putting myself in the mind of their legal department, maybe they're thinking instead of just suing ChatGPT over and over again for copyright infringement or whatever, we're going to come in at the ground floor and we're going to just lock down how our content can be used.

[Felix Hammond]

So I think what happened here is.

[Felix Salmon]

That the LLMs went out and sucked up every single piece of written content that had ever been published in the history of the world before anyone could really get their boots on to try and work out whether this was a good idea.

[Felix Hammond]

And in the wake of that, there.

[Felix Salmon]

Were a bunch of lawsuits. And, you know, I wound up getting paid $5,000. Rather, my publisher wound up receiving $5,000 from Microsoft for one of them because One of the LLMs had, like, sucked up my book.

[Felix Hammond]

But that was all, like, a way.

[Felix Salmon]

To make things good after the fact.

[Felix Hammond]

And now, as it becomes increasingly obvious.

[Felix Salmon]

That the next generation of AI is going to be video rather than text. What is happening now with this deal and with, I'm sure, a whole bunch of future deals, is that the owners of the video IP are trying to get out ahead of it and be in control from day one. And I think you're absolutely right. That makes a certain amount of sense.

[Felix Hammond]

And we should say that the flip.

[Felix Salmon]

Side of this coin is that Disney is doing a sort of carrot and stick approach. They're like, if you cooperate with us, we will invest a billion dollars in your company and we will shake hands on stage and we'll be very lovey dovey.

[Felix Hammond]

And if you don't, we will send.

[Felix Salmon]

You all, all manner of nasty grams. And they sent a big nasty gram to Google and they sent a big nasty gram to like Anthropic, I think, and they're claiming copyright infringement.

[Felix Hammond]

And so from the AI company's point.

[Felix Salmon]

Of view, the idea is they have a strong incentive to make nice with the IP companies and do deals rather than what they've been historically doing, which is ask permission after you've already ingested all of the material.

[Elizabeth Spires]

So I understand the business rationale for this, but I think it just strikes me as a little bit naive that Disney will really be able to control the outputs here. There was a great Wired story a couple weeks ago about the fact that you could get an AI to tell you how to make a nuclear bomb if you just phrase the prompt as a poem. And so I just, I don't know how even OpenAI will be able to enforce these rules around outputs when users find a million ways to get around them. So there's just. How is there not gonna be just a ton of Disney themed porn?

[Felix Hammond]

So, yeah, and that's. I think this is interesting.

[Felix Salmon]

I think there are two answers to that question. What we saw with Fortnite, which was that Disney licensed Darth Vader to go into Fortnite and then immediately a bunch of people tried to break it and a few of them did, and a bunch of videos started circulating of Darth Vader saying things that he was really not supposed to be saying.

[Felix Hammond]

Um, and. And the solution to that problem is.

[Felix Salmon]

Like, oh, we, they have worked it out and then like it becomes a kind of spy versus Spy, you know.

[Felix Hammond]

Like it becomes this kind of not.

[Felix Salmon]

Very long game of whack a mole.

[Felix Hammond]

Basically, in that, like people can do that for five minutes.

[Felix Salmon]

Disney and Fortnite work out what they were doing, they close that loophole and then they can't do it anymore.

[Felix Hammond]

I think we will see the same thing with Sora.

[Felix Salmon]

You know, people will get around it. Disney will see how they got around it. Disney and OpenAI will work out how they got around it. They'll close that loophole and then it will be harder.

[Felix Hammond]

And I think so far most, I.

[Felix Salmon]

Would say 99% of what we see in terms of this kind of infringing material is people searching the Internet. And circulating infringing material. Like, as an example of, look, I managed to get around the rules. And look, this person managed to get around the rules. People aren't actually genuinely trying to make Darth Vader porn and going out and enjoying the Darth Vader porn.

[Emily Peck]

Settled on Darth Vader.

[Elizabeth Spires]

Of all the Sarah, some of them are.

[Felix Hammond]

But like. But mostly it's like, it's this fun.

[Felix Salmon]

Game of like, can we get around the robots?

[Felix Hammond]

You know, and I feel like so.

[Felix Salmon]

Long as it stays in that lane of like, there's gonna be a certain number of people who try and get around the robots, and a certain number of those people will be successful. But it's not going to be like, no one. It's not like anyone's gonna be like, making money off it. It's not gonna be a business. I think that's a inevitable whether or.

[Felix Hammond]

Not Disney has a deal with OpenAI and be it like, it shouldn't prevent.

[Felix Salmon]

Disney from doing this kind of deal with OpenAI.

[Emily Peck]

I mean, it's important, I think, to recognize that Disney is sort of like the king of US copyright. They are the masters. They literally changed the copyright law and got it to be longer so that they could keep Mickey under lock and key for longer.

[Felix Hammond]

And they did this, like, multiple times. Every time that Mickey was about to.

[Felix Salmon]

Come out of copyright, they would, like, lobby Congress and Congress would extend it. It was wild.

[Emily Peck]

I mean, if you're like, pulling back and you're like, well, there's this new technology, sora, where people can make videos. It's not gonna be Disney or any of the other IP owners, the beloved IP owners of America, who have, like, teams of IP attorneys to make sure if anyone does mess with Darth Vader and do something inappropriate, they're gonna be on it. You know, they've been on it for years, since the birth of YouTube and even before with videotapes, like, I guess the real losers pulling back, and we've talked about this a little bit before, are the Felixes like $5,000. I mean, that's. What is that?

[Felix Hammond]

And once my publisher takes their cut.

[Felix Salmon]

Of 50% and then once my agent takes their cut at 15% of my 50%. Oh, my God. Yeah, it wasn't a massive check.

[Emily Peck]

Yeah. So I wonder, I don't know, bigger picture, like, who is getting hurt or whose creativity and IP is just getting completely ripped off by all this new technology. I mean, I think tbd and it's going to be hard to even understand it.

[Felix Hammond]

Perhaps the other thing, which is Just.

[Felix Salmon]

Very obvious, but we really should emphasize is that technology moves very fast, and anyone who wants to make Darth Vader porn is going to be doing it using Deep Seek or something. That is just not a big global AI company. And so if the big global AI companies put in even relatively mild guardrails on what people can do, all of the really bad infringing content is going to leave. That is not going to be on their platforms anyway.

[Elizabeth Spires]

There's another thing that AI people call the Snoopy problem, which is that you can train an AI on all these inputs. And so the AI kind of has an understanding of what constitutes Snoopy or Elsa from Frozen or whatever. And the users can use prompts to basically generate that character from. From an abstraction without ever naming it. So it strikes me as unenforceable across the board.

[Felix Hammond]

I don't think the Snoopy problem is that hard. You know, if Disney is licensing 200 characters to OpenAI, then it is actually.

[Felix Salmon]

Entirely feasible for OpenAI, before it produces any piece of video or picture, to just do a quick check against its list of 200 characters and be like, does this look like one of those 200 characters?

[Elizabeth Spires]

Then you're misunderstanding the Snoopy problem, which is that it can't do that because it's referencing a sort of set of abstractions. So when you think about, like, what Snoopy looks like, if I said I want you to draw, you know, a beagle that's white and has these dimensions or whatever, you can't check that against Disney's IP because it's a little bit too generic, but it will produce something that looks like snippy.

[Felix Hammond]

You don't check the prompt against Disney's ip. You check the output against Disney's ip.

[Elizabeth Spires]

But how would you do that? I mean, that's not how I think.

[Felix Hammond]

You can, but the robot, you just tell the robot, you know, follow the.

[Felix Salmon]

Prompt, do the thing, do all of the things that the user is telling you to do, but then before you.

[Felix Hammond]

Show it to them, before you deliver it, spend a fraction of a millisecond.

[Felix Salmon]

Checking that output against this list of 200 IP characters to make sure it's not the same.

[Elizabeth Spires]

But the problem is that the technology is not capable of doing that when you're dealing in abstractions. It can't.

[Felix Hammond]

Technology is 100% capable of looking at.

[Felix Salmon]

A picture of Snoopy and looking at another picture and saying, is this other picture Snoopy like that?

[Elizabeth Spires]

It famously is not. That's one of the weaknesses of.

[Felix Hammond]

You can do it again.

[Felix Salmon]

All of these things to within like 99% accuracy. I'm pretty sure this is not an insurmountable problem.

[Felix Hammond]

Except for that no one even needs to go to that length. No one needs to be like, hey OpenAI can you draw me a, you.

[Felix Salmon]

Know, white circle and a black dot and create Snoopy that way? When they can just go to Deepseek and say just draw me Snoopy and you know, like, why would you even bother?

[Elizabeth Spires]

Well, people have bothered the whole time. That's why Disney is having to do this. Anytime there's a new technology, users try to break it, but they also try to break it so that there's a playbook for doing these things when they actually, you know, want to. For non mischief making purposes.

[Emily Peck]

I'm also interested if I could change the subject. But please do, please write to us if you know how AI works. So I'm wondering just to be basic, is this a good deal or a bad deal for Disney? Cause when I first saw heard it I was like, they're paying OpenAI. Like OpenAI is getting access to all their stuff that seems good and they're not getting sued. And Disney in exchange is like paying to buy some OpenAI stock. I just feel like it's not that great for Disney.

[Felix Hammond]

So there's a couple of lame Disney.

[Felix Salmon]

Is getting out of this one is it's getting like coveted OpenAI stock. Great, fine, that's, you know, it's probably worth a little bit more than they're paying just because there's so much demand for it. But like, who knows, maybe the AI bubble will burst and it'll be worth less. Like, you know, no one knows how.

[Emily Peck]

Much open AI soldiers stock options.

[Felix Hammond]

The second thing they're getting is that.

[Felix Salmon]

They'Re basically crowdsourcing short form video around Disney ip.

[Felix Hammond]

And what's super interesting about that is.

[Felix Salmon]

That under the terms that they did with OpenAI, if I go into OpenAI and I spend 3,000 hours creating an amazing short movie using Disney characters, all of that IP is owned by Disney. It's not owned by me. I have no rights to that.

[Felix Hammond]

And everyone kind of believes, and this.

[Felix Salmon]

May or may not be true, but there's some non zero percentage probability that it's true that the future of mindless scrolling is not mindless scrolling through videoed TikToks, but it's mindless scrolling through AI generated short form video.

[Felix Hammond]

And specifically if Disney can come up.

[Felix Salmon]

With like a TikTok channel or something similar where people are scrolling through a whole bunch of videos that are created by a bunch of incredibly creative users, none of whom have any rights to their ip and they get it all for free. And they get this massive pool of UGC user generated content for free that they can then put on television and they can put on digital channels and they can do all the rest of it.

[Felix Hammond]

They then is that certain to make.

[Felix Salmon]

Them lots of money?

[Felix Hammond]

No, but it gives them like the potential. It is possible.

[Felix Salmon]

A lot of people are making that bet that that will be worth a lot of money.

[Elizabeth Spires]

I think of it as a do they have any other choice Kind of dilemma because all of the models are trained on their IP because that's fair use. And so from the, just from the company's perspective, it's like, well, if we're going to have outputs that basically violate our ip, shouldn't we be able to monetize them in some way?

[Felix Salmon]

Yeah. And to be clear, like it doesn't matter whether it's fair use or not. They are trained on that ip, I.

[Emily Peck]

Think, I mean it's fair use is unbelievable. Like these companies are profiting immensely from intellectual property that they didn't pay for at all. And it's crazy to me that I didn't know it was understood that that was considered fair use. Like isn't the New York Times suing them over this?

[Felix Salmon]

Yeah, this is not settled law that it's fair use at all.

[Emily Peck]

I think it's absolutely not.

[Felix Salmon]

Like there are a lot lawsuits about this and there have been a lot of settlements around this and yeah, like.

[Felix Hammond]

There are definitely that it is, it's.

[Elizabeth Spires]

Fair use is that it's fair use up to the point before you're producing the output.

[Emily Peck]

Right, right.

[Felix Salmon]

But we don't know. There was a lot of dispute about that. There were people on both sides of that debate.

[Emily Peck]

Yeah, that's fascinating. That is just such a, like tech moves fast and really in this case it's just wild.

[Felix Salmon]

If people genuinely thought that it was fair use up until that point, then I would not have received my $5,000 from Microsoft. And you're rich because that's all they're.

[Felix Hammond]

Paying me for is like we are going to throw your book into this.

[Felix Salmon]

Massive pool of data that we are ingesting.

[Elizabeth Spires]

And that's what allows them to use your book as output.

[Felix Salmon]

No, it does not. It explicitly does not allow them to use my book.

[Emily Peck]

What is it? It doesn't. So if I ask Chat Chat about your book, it won't tell me?

[Felix Hammond]

Yeah, that's like that is exactly the same thing.

[Felix Salmon]

Now that they know what is in my book. They are explicitly not allowed to quote at length or even minimally from my book. They can't plagiarize me.

[Felix Hammond]

All that they have the right to.

[Felix Salmon]

Do under this contract is ingest my book to help them be a smarter LLM.

[Elizabeth Spires]

So if I go to ChatGPT right now and ask ChatGPT what your book's about, it can't produce an answer.

[Emily Peck]

I'm asking.

[Felix Hammond]

It can tell you what my book.

[Felix Salmon]

Is about because lots of people have written that and it knows what my book is about.

[Felix Hammond]

But it cannot. If you're like, can you quot you.

[Felix Salmon]

Know, two paragraphs from page 300? No, it can't do that.

[Felix Hammond]

But yeah, I think it's, you know, this is indicative of where AI is.

[Felix Salmon]

Moving, which is that we are getting this convergence of the tech companies and the content companies. And this is going to be the first of many such deals.

[Emily Peck]

It says, I cannot provide verbatim paragraphs from page 200 of the Phoenix Economy or any other copyrighted book unless you supply the text yourself, which, if I could supply the text myself, why would I. Bro. What?

[Felix Hammond]

Bro. What?

[Emily Peck]

But he did offer to give me key quotes, which I assume that he just. Or she. Or they can just get from the Internet. Key quotes.

[Felix Hammond]

But also ChatGPT offers lots of things.

[Felix Salmon]

That it can't do.

[Emily Peck]

Yeah, yeah.

[Felix Salmon]

I mean, that's like my number one annoyance with Chat GPT.

[Felix Hammond]

It's like, if you like, I could do X. You're like, that sounds great.

[Felix Salmon]

Do X.

[Emily Peck]

And it's like, eh, that's me pitching stories every day. I'll write this.

[Felix Hammond]

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[Felix Hammond]

But we should stick a little bit with OpenAI.

[Felix Salmon]

Because I want to talk about IPOs and this idea. There was a Bloomberg article this week basically saying that if you add up all of the IPOs in 2026 it could come to $3 trillion, which would be completely insane of New Market Cap.

[Felix Hammond]

The massive granddaddy of all of them.

[Felix Salmon]

Being SpaceX, which is talking about possibly IPOing next year. Well, it isn't, but a lot of people are saying that. People are saying that someone is going to go public that SpaceX could go public in 2026, which would be interesting on like three different levels. Partly because Elon Musk controls SpaceX and he has famously hated the whole being a public company thing for a long time. So like what made him change his mind? Partly because SpaceX, if it goes public, the valuations being mooted would probably be worth more than Tesla, which is kind of wild.

[Felix Hammond]

But then there's a whole bunch of.

[Felix Salmon]

Other IPOs, including OpenAI, which could happen next year. We had an IPO this week from Wealthfront, which was super interesting to me because they sold themselves to UBS for 1.4 billion a few years ago and then UBS had a bunch of management shakeups and turned around and said actually can we have take back seats on this? And Wealthfront was like do we really want to enforce a deal where they are buying a company they don't want and will probably just shut us down? And so they were like okay fine, you get your $1.4 billion back, we'll just stay independent.

[Felix Hammond]

But everyone kind of thought that that.

[Felix Salmon]

Was a sign of UBS coming to its census and saying wellfont is not worth 1.4 billion. It's not worth anything near that. They were just buying the technology, they weren't buying the assets.

[Felix Hammond]

But now wealthfront is worth $3 billion.

[Felix Salmon]

And you're like, oh, well, okay.

[Felix Hammond]

So staying independent turned out to have.

[Felix Salmon]

Been a smart move after all.

[Emily Peck]

That was also true for another company this year, right?

[Felix Salmon]

Figma.

[Emily Peck]

Yeah, Figma. Adobe was going to buy it, but the Biden administration blocked it and then figma IPO'd and is now worth more than Adobe was planning on paying, I believe. Yeah, so.

[Felix Hammond]

So it's a good time to go public.

[Emily Peck]

Yes. But will next year be a good time to go public or will it be like a dot com floppity flip? I feel like is the question people are asking.

[Felix Hammond]

The thing that happened in the dot.

[Felix Salmon]

Com bubble, to be clear, if you look at 1999 and like a bunch of 98, beginning of 2000, that kind of era, is that it was the greatest time to go public in the history of the planet. It was an awesome time to go public. If you were raising money, you could sell like a tiny fraction of your company for a gazillion dollars and you got just like free money basically. And that was great. And anyone who wasn't issuing equity into the dot com bubble was a moron. Like it was the, the people buying might have lost money, in fact, almost certainly did lose money. But the people selling the companies going public, they made out like bandits. They did really well.

[Elizabeth Spires]

You know, SpaceX is a significant IPO, but with some of the other companies, it strikes me is there's a kind of business journalism convention where if a company is a certain size, it's always maybe going to go public next year. And it's just a recurring theme.

[Felix Hammond]

Well, I feel like for the past couple of years, maybe not. One of the themes over the past.

[Felix Salmon]

Couple of years is look at these massive private companies like Stripe. They seem to be perfectly happy being private. And isn't it interesting that they're not going public anytime soon?

[Felix Hammond]

And I think for me, this little.

[Felix Salmon]

Week'S worth of discourse is an interesting flipping of that script.

[Elizabeth Spires]

I think it's very hard for companies that are private and have taken a lot of venture money to stay private because people want exits. I remember when Uber, yeah, I think.

[Felix Hammond]

It used to be hard. And I feel like SpaceX and Stripe and various others have kind of proved that.

[Felix Salmon]

It's not like what they do is they have little private liquidity rounds where.

[Felix Hammond]

People who want to exit can exit and they've managed to solve that problem.

[Felix Salmon]

To a very large degree.

[Emily Peck]

Yeah. I can't see Musk and SpaceX wanting to disrupt that vibe or why they would want to. Unless Musk is like, I want to be a trillionaire, which would really be a motivating factor.

[Elizabeth Spires]

Yeah, especially in his case, personally. Like, I think that could easily be.

[Emily Peck]

A motivating factor just because it's cool, not because he, like, obviously no one needs to become a trillionaire. It's not like, oh, oh, God, I need to realize.

[Felix Hammond]

I think he has realized that having liquid wealth is kind of cool. Like, it allows him to do things.

[Felix Salmon]

Like buy Twitter if he wants to buy Twitter. And you can't do that if you own SpaceX, even if SpaceX is worth more than Tesla. Right. You can only do that if you own Tesla and own Tesla shares and can basically sell those Tesla shares to get the dollars that you need to buy Twitter.

[Felix Hammond]

And so if he wants to do.

[Felix Salmon]

Things that cost many, many billions of.

[Felix Hammond]

Dollars, you know, and specifically, he has.

[Felix Salmon]

Said over and over again, I just need a lot of money so that I can get to Mars, which is like, whatever.

[Felix Hammond]

But whatever it is that he wants to do, if it, if it's super.

[Felix Salmon]

Expensive, then it really does actually help to have public currency to do that, rather than just private stock.

[Elizabeth Spires]

Well, he does have to pay 30 million to each of his baby mamas. So if he wants like a billion more kids, he's got to find that money somewhere.

[Felix Hammond]

Maybe if SpaceX goes public, he can.

[Felix Salmon]

He can up that to 50 million.

[Emily Peck]

You know, I guess the parallel I said.com boom and we talked about that. But maybe the parallel in my head, since the talk is now that both anthropic and OpenAI would do IPOs next year, the parallel is more 20. Whenever the Facebook IPO was, I think that was 2012 or 2013. And, you know, maybe the parallel is when social media went public. And the parallel now is AI going public.

[Felix Hammond]

That is super interesting. And one of the super interesting things.

[Felix Salmon]

About not only the Facebook ipo, but also the Google ipo, which was many years there earlier, is that both of them were terrible IPOs.

[Emily Peck]

Yeah, they went really bad.

[Felix Hammond]

They were two of the worst IPOs to ever IPO.

[Felix Salmon]

People got really excited about the companies.

[Felix Hammond]

Like Google's going public and then Facebook's going public.

[Felix Salmon]

And, you know, it totally shit the bed. And it went like down rather than up. And everyone was like. And everyone's pointing fingers at everyone else. And I remember writing about it at the time, and it was like, it was Amazing how incompetent that IPO was.

[Emily Peck]

Of course, long term, you know, tried.

[Felix Salmon]

It out, it was fine. But in the short term, everyone was like, this is a complete disaster. Yeah.

[Felix Hammond]

And like, putting together a $40 billion.

[Felix Salmon]

IPO of a $1.5 trillion company is really fucking hard. And there's a lot of room for error, especially in a world where you can't, you know, walk down the street without someone screaming AI bubble at you.

[Emily Peck]

They compared it. One of the pieces we read in the Prep, they compared SpaceX to Saudi Aramco.

[Felix Salmon]

Yeah, that's the most valuable company up until now to ever go public.

[Emily Peck]

The oil company there, they said at the time of the IPO was pulling in. I'm reading. That's why I've looked to the side YouTube people. It had pulled in 360 billion in revenue the year it went public. And SpaceX is only bringing in 15 billion a year. So I wonder about that. Like, is do you have to pay a premium or does Saudi Aramco have to have a higher level of revenue? Because it's like oil, which is like a real thing.

[Felix Salmon]

Everyone, we're at like peak oil, right? So like the whole point about Aramco.

[Emily Peck]

There'S no potential there.

[Felix Salmon]

Expected future revenues are going down with SpaceX, expected future revenues are going up. So you're paying for future revenues, not current revenues.

[Emily Peck]

You're paying for the promise of sending all the billionaires to space and whoops, we can't get them back.

[Elizabeth Spires]

Starlink.

[Felix Salmon]

Yeah, what you're really paying for is Starlink. Starlink is the massive majority of the value of SpaceX.

[Emily Peck]

And that's Internet.

[Elizabeth Spires]

And it has a near monopoly on satellite Internet. What it does.

[Felix Salmon]

Satellite Internet. And then everyone is kind of expecting that it's going to eventually become like satellite cell phone service. And at that point it's just a.

[Emily Peck]

License to print money isn't also part of SpaceX. I think of it as like a government contractor.

[Felix Hammond]

Yeah, that's how it grew.

[Felix Salmon]

Right.

[Felix Hammond]

It's quite an old company.

[Felix Salmon]

It's been around quite a long time.

[Felix Hammond]

And the way that it got up.

[Felix Salmon]

To critical mass and the way that it became sort of cash flow positive in the first place was exactly that. It would get massive contracts from to send rockets into space. And it did that more effectively and more efficiently than NASA could do on its own. So, yeah, that was how it became like this big space company in the first place. And then it was like, well, now that we're good at sending things into space, let's send an entire network of communication satellites into space and create this thing called Starlink, where anyone anywhere on the planet can get Internet. And that was something that people had dreamed of before, but no one really had the money to do it. No private company had the sort of wherewithal to send that many rockets into space and create that kind of a network. But SpaceX did and it did. And now it's a trillion dollar company.

[Emily Peck]

I think it's really worth pointing out that this company that could be the biggest IPO of next year, that is worth more than a trillion dollars. The reason it was able to grow the way it was was because of government investment. And the leader of that company spent a good chunk of this year sort of destroying the government.

[Felix Hammond]

Well, I mean, do we think that.

[Felix Salmon]

One of the reasons, I mean, this is in the back of my head, right?

[Felix Hammond]

Do we think that one of the.

[Felix Salmon]

Reasons that Elon wants a whole bunch of liquid wealth is actually to do this thing that he has threatened to do, but doesn't seem to have got very far with, which is starting a whole new political party and like taking over the US Government?

[Emily Peck]

I feel like he said this week, actually on the Katie Miller's, Stephen Miller's wife has a podcast and he went on it and said that though he doesn't regret doing what he did this year for the US Government, that he wouldn't do it again or something, like it wasn't worth it because people lit Tesla's Tesla dealerships on fire or whatever. I don't pretend to know how he thinks or anything, but I would imagine his appetite for politics has been dampened.

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[Felix Hammond]

We are going.

[Felix Salmon]

To talk a little bit more about the business of space in the Plus, I definitely do want to talk about this question of whether the valuation of SpaceX is in part a function of this idea that the real growth, the real future growth, is putting data centers in space.

[Felix Hammond]

Which sounds kind of crazy.

[Felix Salmon]

And then you think about it and.

[Felix Hammond]

It'S like, is it really that crazy. But we should also, just before we.

[Felix Salmon]

Finish the main show, talk about the whole latest iteration of a conversation that we've been having for a while on this show, which is dynamic pricing and individualized pricing. And there's a big new report that just came out, basically saying that Instacart will sell the identical items from the identical store at the identical time of the same day to two different people at wildly different prices, to which the natural reaction is, whoa, that's terrible. So, Elizabeth, Emily, which one of you wants to tell me, Whoa, that's terrible.

[Elizabeth Spires]

Well, it's terrible for a specific reason. There's some suspicion that they're doing this based on people's private data. And when that happens, I think it's different from doing, say, price testing in the context of rolling out a new product, where what you're trying to triangulate on is the customer's price sensitivity, but the customer is kind of a uniform class. And it's a little bit different when you're sort of discriminating against specific customers based on their existing data that you have. So, for example, a good thing that came up in the prep was that Orbitz used to charge Mac users more because they had data that said that if you were using a Mac, you probably had higher income.

[Emily Peck]

Orbitz is a travel site, right?

[Felix Hammond]

Yeah, this was back in like the.

[Felix Salmon]

This is a million years ago.

[Elizabeth Spires]

Yeah. So imagine, you know now, given the wealth of data that companies have access to, being able to triangulate on you, Felix Salmon, know exactly where you live, what your income is, et cetera. And you go to Instacart and they're like, oh, no, no, that bottle of water is $20 for you. Because we know who you are and we have all this information.

[Emily Peck]

And so I think you got all that OpenAI money.

[Felix Hammond]

Yes, exactly.

[Elizabeth Spires]

And so I think there's a difference between using dynamic pricing to just do routine price testing to see where customers as a class, where the prices hold up or don't, and then utilizing people's data to target people individually.

[Felix Hammond]

So we should really jump in here.

[Felix Salmon]

Very quickly and emphasize the active word in what Elizabeth was saying is suspicion.

[Felix Hammond]

That there is no evidence of this.

[Felix Salmon]

There is.

[Felix Hammond]

People have been suspecting that this is.

[Felix Salmon]

Happening for some years now. There have been a lot of reporters chasing the story in various different forms. There have been a bunch of people talking about a bunch of companies that they suspect might be selling the data for these nefarious purposes. And what is interesting to me is that over the past however many years, whenever anyone looks for highly variable pricing, whether it's on Instacart or whether it's on Amazon, there was a piece about, like, how Amazon charges schools different amounts of money or whatever, they find it.

[Felix Hammond]

But whenever anyone tries to find a.

[Felix Salmon]

Company that is selling, we will allow you to use personalized information to discriminate against individuals or to charge individuals more or to charge individuals less, for that matter. They haven't yet found that.

[Felix Hammond]

So, yeah, there is. It is entirely intuitive.

[Felix Salmon]

That is what is going on, but we do not know that that is what is going on.

[Emily Peck]

So this was research conducted by Groundwork Collaborative. They're a progressive group with Consumer Reports. Everyone knows Consumer Reports and published in the New York Times that Ben Castleman wrote up. And basically, Instacart is ab testing prices, you know, selling eggs at different price points just to see which is the most bestest one. And of course, people think this is bad. I don't want to know that, like, at any given moment, I could eat the recharge 2.99 for my eggs or $3.50 for my eggs. Like, that just seems unfair on its face. It is unfair on its face. But then you, like, think a little bit more about how. And we've talked about this a lot on the podcast, but I think it's, like, endlessly interesting about how companies are. Have always done dynamic pricing, even before algorithms and the Internet. You can go to happy hour and get your beer for $2 off, or, you know, you buy a plane ticket on Christmas Day, it's cheaper than if you buy it on December to travel on December 23rd. I guess the difference with the algorithm is I know what's happening. If I choose to go to the bar after happy hour, if I choose to fly on the 23rd versus 25th, I have a good grounding in what is fair, what is not. Like how they're going to charge me for the privilege of traveling on the day I want or whatever. With algorithmic pricing, with buying the eggs, you have no freaking idea. There's no rhyme or reason to it. It's just always kind of happening. And even if you're the most astute consumer, you're not going to know.

[Elizabeth Spires]

Also, there's a question of, you know, how much this, you know, bleeds into price gouging ultimately.

[Emily Peck]

Yeah, that's the other. Like, the dark side of dynamic pricing is the gouging, Right? It's snowing. So we're going to charge you $50 for a $10 shovel or it's the pandemic. Everyone's on instacart, like who knows what shenanigan. There's no evidence, but that's the time to do the gouging then. And the shenanigans. I remember we were up at midnight trying to get our instacart delivery because we were afraid to go to the store or whatever. So yeah, and, and the way things are moving now with regulation, like I think one of the pieces we read said the FTC was sort of had started looking into some of this, into dynamic pricing sort of to, to try and lift the veil. But that's all sort of been put to the wayside. But that's what you would expect consumer protection laws to like this is where we would need them.

[Felix Hammond]

Well, New York, interesting.

[Felix Salmon]

All three of us live in New York State and New York State now has a rule basically saying that if the price is algorithmically personalized to you, then right next to the price when it happens, you need to see a little disclaimer saying this price is algorithmically personalized to you. I have not seen that disclaimer. I don't know if I am assuming neither of you two have. It'll be very interesting to see whether anyone ever sees this disclaimer in the wild.

[Elizabeth Spires]

So the exact wording of it is this price was set by an algorithm using your personal data. So they would have to establish that the company was using your personal data to you.

[Felix Hammond]

Well, it's not.

[Felix Salmon]

They, I mean the company themselves obviously knows whether they're using your personal data or not.

[Elizabeth Spires]

And then they can think about how these tech companies operate. Usually it's we'll fix it when we get in trouble.

[Emily Peck]

That's how it's operating now. I was thinking about that reading the groundwork research with Consumer Reports. I'm like, this is what we have now. We can't. Not that regulation was ever so amazing, but like this is, this is how it works now.

[Felix Hammond]

It is how it works now. And I think there's a super interesting.

[Felix Salmon]

Case study happening with World cup tickets right now, which is that the, now that we've had the World cup draw, everyone knows, you know, who, which are the games that everyone wants to go see. You know, people want to see England versus Croatia much more than they want to see Switzerland versus Qatar.

[Felix Hammond]

And so like you have that demand.

[Felix Salmon]

For the big games versus the little games and that is showing up in ticket prices and there is a FIFA operated secondary marketplace where you can buy and sell your tickets. And the average price for a World cup ticket now is somewhere in the region of $5,000. It's absolutely insanely expensive.

[Emily Peck]

I don't understand how that's new. Like, tickets for better games have always.

[Felix Hammond]

Correct. So this is not new. What's new is the.

[Felix Salmon]

Just the magnitude of the prices. That these prices are roughly five times more than they were in Qatar four years ago.

[Emily Peck]

But, like, that's sports right now. Like, I was looking at World Series ticks, a few tickets. I don't know why I had to say ticks, ticks, ticks. And I mean, just anything in person now is, I bet you could look at any prices for any concert five times as much as it was five years ago, whatever you just said.

[Felix Hammond]

Okay, so this is exactly.

[Felix Salmon]

This Emily Peck reaction is exactly the reaction of FIFA and the reaction of a fair number of Americans. Emily is not an outlier here in this reaction.

[Felix Hammond]

She's just like, well, this is supply and demand.

[Felix Salmon]

We live in the market economy. I'm a good neoliberal. Yada, yada yada. In the rest of the world. There is real anger about this in.

[Felix Hammond]

The UK FIFA is actually not allowed.

[Felix Salmon]

Is basically not allowed to sell tickets to the World cup in the UK because the UK has a law now saying that you're not allowed to resell tickets for more than face value.

[Emily Peck]

Well, that's wonderful. Good for them. That's. I mean. Yes.

[Felix Hammond]

And so the global football fandom is.

[Felix Salmon]

Up in arms about this because we.

[Felix Hammond]

You know, remember as well that 90.

[Felix Salmon]

Plus percent of the football fans on the planet are not American. Right.

[Felix Hammond]

So they don't have this intuition that.

[Felix Salmon]

Oh, yeah, of course it's gonna cost thousands of dollars to tickets.

[Emily Peck]

They're not like, beaten down by capitalism the way Americans are, essentially. I love that for them. Wow.

[Felix Hammond]

And so now there's this massive tension, Right.

[Felix Salmon]

Globally about the ticket prices.

[Felix Hammond]

And everyone around the planet, not so much in America, but like everywhere else.

[Felix Salmon]

Who are like, we want to travel.

[Felix Hammond]

To America to see the World cup.

[Felix Salmon]

Next year, they're saying, like, wait, what?

[Felix Hammond]

How much I love that.

[Emily Peck]

Yeah, that's like, there's all kinds of examples. But, like, you think something's normal that happens, like in your family, and then you tell someone else about it, and they're like, what? You know, that's how it is for America. Like, yeah, it's. Everything costs, like, a few thousand dollars, anything you want to see. And, like, the rest of the world's like, girl, no, it doesn't have to be like that.

[Elizabeth Spires]

Only the obscenely rich should be able to see a soccer game.

[Emily Peck]

Everyone else has to stay home and watch TV and get ads.

[Felix Hammond]

That's exactly where the market economy arrives at.

[Felix Salmon]

Right? There's a finite number of seats to these games. You sell them to the highest bidder because capitalism.

[Felix Hammond]

And then the result is that unless.

[Felix Salmon]

You can afford $5,000, you're not gonna go see the game.

[Felix Hammond]

And it just feels.

[Emily Peck]

And we didn't talk about it, but that's what President Trump is now doing with visas. He's charging a million dollars to get a visa. It's the same. It's like, it's kind of on the spectrum, I guess.

[Felix Hammond]

Yeah, it is. He's like, yeah, no, but no, you're absolutely right. This is the million dollar trump card.

[Felix Salmon]

Which is now a thing that exists.

[Felix Hammond]

Which is basically, you can apply for.

[Felix Salmon]

A green card and go through the normal green card process. And as someone who has been through the green card process, who has many friends who have been through the green card process, this is a very long and involved in torturous process to go through, even if you're doing it the easy way, which is via marriage to someone who can support you.

[Felix Hammond]

So the green card process is painful. And under Trump, it is clearly going.

[Felix Salmon]

To become more painful. They want to decrease the amount of legal immigration and people who are legally becoming permanent residents.

[Felix Hammond]

Or you just jump to the front.

[Felix Salmon]

Of the queue and become a permanent resident, get your green card super quickly if you write us a million dollar check.

[Felix Hammond]

And on some level, again, I'm kind.

[Felix Salmon]

Of with Emily on this one, which.

[Felix Hammond]

Is like, is this discrimination in favor of rich people?

[Felix Salmon]

Like, duh.

[Elizabeth Spires]

Obviously they're not.

[Felix Hammond]

If anyone is that rich and really.

[Felix Salmon]

Wants a green card that badly, then why not let them pay a million dollars for it? I suspect that demand for this gold.

[Felix Hammond]

Card, as they're calling it, is going to be minimal. There is a threatened platinum card, which.

[Felix Salmon]

Will cost $5 million. And that one is actually much more interesting, financially speaking to rich people, because the thing about the platinum card is that it uniquely allows you to not pay tax on your global income. You only need to pay tax on your US income. This is illegal and probably unconstitutional. And so that's why it doesn't exist, is because they haven't quite been able to work out how to offer this thing legally yet.

[Felix Hammond]

But if they ever do, then I.

[Felix Salmon]

Can see why it would make a bunch of sense for a bunch of rich people to spend $5 million on a platinum card. That makes more sense to me than why anyone would want to spend $1 million on the gold Card.

[Emily Peck]

Yeah, I mean I guess the million dollar visa is a way less to just restrict immigration to the rich. But some White House officials are saying like we want it to be a way we get more high skilled immigration. And I'm like, if you can afford.

[Elizabeth Spires]

A million dollar gold card, we will decide that you're high skilled.

[Felix Hammond]

Well, yeah, I mean which, which is.

[Felix Salmon]

Kind of like fine, whatever. It's a decent proxy.

[Felix Hammond]

You know, you, you, you have that much money that you will, you'll be.

[Felix Salmon]

Contributing to the economy, you'll be spending a lot of money, you'll be probably employing people directly or indirectly.

[Emily Peck]

But like are you getting Elizabeth and I's faces? We're making faces here on YouTube. You gotta see it.

[Felix Salmon]

Measuring skills is always a fraught thing. You know the.

[Emily Peck]

So just money as a proxy, clearly the rich are better.

[Felix Hammond]

No, but like you look at the.

[Elizabeth Spires]

Way Simplified by Donald Trump, Canada and.

[Felix Hammond]

New Zealand do it and we're not.

[Felix Salmon]

Going to wind up doing it the way that Canada and New Zealand do it.

[Felix Hammond]

But that, but where I was going with this is that people receive their.

[Felix Salmon]

Green cards generally up until five minutes ago when this gold card was announced, only after they have lived and worked in this country for many, many years. I lived in the US for well over a decade. I can't remember exactly how long it was before I received my green card. And that is entirely normal if you want to reduce legal immigration. The place you reduce that legal immigration is the people getting those work visas, the H visas, the I visas, the O visas, the L visas, the, you know, all of those, rather than like once they're already living and working here preventing them from becoming green card holders.

[Felix Hammond]

So tightening up the issuance of green.

[Felix Salmon]

Cards, most of which are family related anyway, is not the place to reduce legal immigration.

[Felix Hammond]

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[Felix Hammond]

We should have a numbers round.

[Felix Salmon]

Emily, do you have a number?

[Emily Peck]

Yeah. 18,000.

[Elizabeth Spires]

Okay.

[Emily Peck]

This is the number of older people who left their homes and went missing in Japan last year. Double the number from 2012. This is because people age 65 and up make up 30% of Japan's population, and that's second highest in the world. Apparently in the US it's 18%. So they have a lot of old people and they're getting dementia and an increasing numbers of them are leaving their houses and just going missing. And the Japanese economy is like, adjusting to being like a place of where very old people live. And maybe Felix probably knows this better because he was recently in Japan, but there's this great BBC article on this and they even described there's like a restaurant where the premise is that older people with dementia are waiting on the tables.

[Felix Hammond]

Oh, yeah, everyone's so nice to the.

[Felix Salmon]

Waiters and so patient, and they may or may not get your food.

[Emily Peck]

You may or may not get your food at the restaurant. So it was just making me think because, yeah, the U.S. right now just 18% old people. But those numbers are headed up and I guess by 2030 it'll be 20% and then 25% by 2060. So they're putting trackers on the old people now in Japan. So I guess ultimately we're going to need to put trackers on ourselves when we get older.

[Felix Salmon]

This is why I welcome my new personalized individualized database dystopia. Because eventually it's going to save me from myself.

[Emily Peck]

Yes, you need a chatbot that's just like you and you can be like, what happened? Tell me my name again. Or whatever it is, whatever you need to remember.

[Felix Hammond]

Elizabeth.

[Felix Salmon]

What's your number?

[Elizabeth Spires]

My number is 14.13. And that's $14.13. And that is the price that you pay right now for a USDA choice boneless steak per pound.

[Felix Salmon]

Well, depending on Instacart and its mood that morning fair.

[Elizabeth Spires]

But we have a cattle shortage, so steakhouses are having to charge a lot more for steak. You know, upwards of 60 bucks.

[Felix Hammond]

Wait, are you saying that $14 a.

[Felix Salmon]

Pound is expensive for steak? Because it seems dirt cheap to me.

[Elizabeth Spires]

That's USDA choice, which is the mid market steak. It's not prime, which is what you would get in a restaurant. And it is much higher than, you know, steak kind of peaked in August and it was $14, I think 30 something cents a pound. But it's just insanely expensive right now, and there's a cattle shortage.

[Felix Hammond]

Okay, I'm just going to come out.

[Felix Salmon]

And say that $14 is not insanely expensive, that beef is not expensive enough and the optimal price of beef is much higher than what it is right now. And we eat way too much beef.

[Elizabeth Spires]

My first ever Fortune column was about inflation and the price of beef. And one of the things that I wrote about was hedonic substitution, where basically one of the things that was not really taken into account when people think about inflation in food is that sometimes people will switch from more expensive cuts to lower grade beef or ground beef or whatever, and it's all kind of treated as the same product. But in steakhouses you're getting that prime cut. And so you're seeing entrees go up by like 60, $80 for filet mignon.

[Emily Peck]

Oh my God.

[Elizabeth Spires]

And the top tier steakhouses, this isn't having any effect because people, if you're going to one of those places like you expect, just pay a fuck ton of money for your steak. But at places like Longhorn and Outback and Texas Roadhouse, they are feeling it because people are just balking at the prices.

[Felix Salmon]

Yeah, I am, I am feeling absolutely no sympathy for them.

[Emily Peck]

I think you're Just so wrong.

[Felix Salmon]

The existence of McDonald's is just proof positive that there's too much beef in this country and it is underpriced.

[Elizabeth Spires]

That is all USDA select beef, which is the worst select beef. And it's kind of chopped up and mashed into a beef like thing.

[Emily Peck]

We're used to paying a certain amount of money to feed the fam and it's becoming really expensive. And prices were used feed them beef.

[Felix Hammond]

Which is like this Super Bowl.

[Elizabeth Spires]

Grocery prices are up. There was a really frustrating exchange that I saw with what's her name, the White House press secretary, who's 12, and Caitlin Collins, where Collins said, you keep saying the economy is great, but everybody is feeling prices go up. And the press secretary said, well, core CPI is at whatever it's at. And it's like, well, people don't pay attention to that because it excludes food and energy, which are the two things that people notice the most or they feel it the most. Because food, gas for most people.

[Felix Hammond]

And when people complain about gas prices.

[Felix Salmon]

I talk about how salient they are.

[Felix Hammond]

And when people complain about egg prices.

[Felix Salmon]

I talk about how salient they are.

[Felix Hammond]

Because we do this thing where we're like filling up our car with gas.

[Felix Salmon]

On a regular basis. We're buying eggs on a regular basis. I just don't think that beef rises to the level of gas and eggs as this absolute necessity that people have to buy a beer.

[Elizabeth Spires]

I think, well, you didn't grow up in redneck America where ground beef is like a staple, steak is like the.

[Emily Peck]

Most American of meals. You're just. I don't know.

[Felix Hammond]

You're wrong, I'm wrong.

[Emily Peck]

You're just wrong.

[Elizabeth Spires]

I'm wrong.

[Felix Hammond]

I'm wrong, people. But I'm not only wrong, I also.

[Felix Salmon]

Have a number which is also animal welfare related.

[Felix Hammond]

My number is 20.5 million, which is the number of animals that were farmed.

[Felix Salmon]

For their fur in 2024.

[Felix Hammond]

And the interesting thing about this number of 20 million is it is down from 140 million.

[Emily Peck]

Oh, wow.

[Felix Hammond]

In 2014, it is absolutely plunged over.

[Felix Salmon]

10 years, it is gone down by like 80%.

[Felix Hammond]

And it's kind of interesting to me that, you know, we all remember from.

[Felix Salmon]

Like the 80s, you know, the campaigns against fur and fashion and whatnot, but.

[Felix Hammond]

The really, really big decline in animals.

[Felix Salmon]

Being farmed for their fur. Like the, you know, no one's been wearing, like a leopard's coat for decades.

[Felix Hammond]

But if you're talking about like the.

[Felix Salmon]

Minks and the raccoon dogs and that kind of Stuff.

[Felix Hammond]

The massive decline has just been in.

[Felix Salmon]

The last 10 years, which I would not have expected.

[Emily Peck]

Is that because they make warmer coats now out of other materials?

[Felix Hammond]

No, I think the ability to make.

[Felix Salmon]

Warm coats out of not fur has been around for much longer than 10 years.

[Emily Peck]

So it's just a style thing. It's just not a style.

[Felix Hammond]

Yeah, it's just like, finally the consumers.

[Felix Salmon]

Are like, no, I don't actually want a mink coat, thank you very much.

[Elizabeth Spires]

Well, I think now it's kind of considered a little gauche, like, to wear real fur.

[Felix Hammond]

Like, wasn't it considered gauche like, 10, 20 years ago already as well?

[Emily Peck]

But now, like, the really rich people, and you guys probably know this better than me, they buy these, like, really expensive, like, Canada Goose or like these very expensive, like, activewear coats and things. And there's just other ways to spend a lot of money on coats besides fur. And I think.

[Felix Hammond]

I think maybe that's it.

[Felix Salmon]

That fur has no longer become as is no longer a signifier of luxury.

[Emily Peck]

It's, like, tacky now.

[Felix Salmon]

It's like the Canada Goose branding.

[Felix Hammond]

Although, yeah, I'm a little bit unclear where can, like, this thing where Canada.

[Felix Salmon]

Goose had, like a tiny little fur rim on a bunch of its hoods for a while, and there was a lot of controversy about whether that should be there. But, yeah, generally speaking, no one needs fur for warmth. You use it for signifiers of luxury. And if it doesn't signify luxury anymore, then there's no demand and it falls.

[Emily Peck]

And then the minks get to live another day and the minks get to live. Could we kill them for our steak? No.

[Felix Salmon]

Yeah, we could start eating them instead.

[Emily Peck]

It's a joke.

[Felix Hammond]

Anyway, I think that's all we have time for this week, unless you want to learn about data centers in space, in which case you're going to need to be a Slate plus subscriber. Do it.

[Felix Salmon]

It's good for the planet.

[Felix Hammond]

Thank you to Micah Phillips and Jasmine Molly and Shayna Roth for producing. Please send us on slatemoneylate.com, your hottest takes of 2025. We are going to have a special.

[Felix Salmon]

Episode all about hot takes.

[Felix Hammond]

Think back to the most fire takes.

[Felix Salmon]

That you came across in 2025. Send them in.

[Felix Hammond]

And ideally, just send them in as.

[Felix Salmon]

A attachment to your email as a voice memo, and then we can play it on the show.

[Emily Peck]

Felix, can you quickly explain what a hot take is? Is it something is. Is wrong or it goes against the conventional wisdom or so outrageous like what. What is a hot take.

[Felix Hammond]

Actually, a hot take is just like.

[Felix Salmon]

Well, Elizabeth, you're the queen of the memes. You do it. What makes a take particularly fire?

[Elizabeth Spires]

It's a little bit counterintuitive. Not knee jerk contrarian, but it's something that people probably would not. Wouldn't be immediately intuitive.

[Felix Salmon]

Yeah.

[Felix Hammond]

So something that, like, you hear and.

[Felix Salmon]

Then your first reaction is really, wow.

[Felix Hammond]

But that also has some.

[Felix Salmon]

It's like colorable, as the lawyers would say.

[Felix Hammond]

Like, you know, you can defend it.

[Emily Peck]

So the guy who said the pop should be $140,000 a year. That's exactly.

[Felix Hammond]

That's like a classic.

[Felix Salmon]

Classic.

[Emily Peck]

Classic. So it's not quite a slate pitch. Because slate pitch is a genre of hot take. Right. That's like counter.

[Felix Hammond]

They're close.

[Emily Peck]

Okay, okay. I just want to help.

[Felix Hammond]

If there was a particularly fire slate story that you think we should include.

[Felix Salmon]

Then please send that to us too. Yes. Thank you. And we'll be back next week with more of this here. Sleep money.

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