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Explosive You-Know-What
00:46:49
All eyes are on Taylor Farms and their contaminated lettuce, Trump tries a new tariff tactic, and Japan’s prime minister claims to barely sleep.
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- [00:05]
Felix Salmon
Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. My name is Felix Salmon. I work at Bloomberg. I am joined, as ever, by Emily Peck of Axios. Hello, hello. By Elizabeth Byers of the New York Times.
- [00:23]
Elizabeth Byers
Hello.
- [00:24]
Felix Salmon
And we are going to talk about cyclospora this week and the other term with which it is commonly associated. We are going to talk about the latest round of Trump tariffs, which are kind of batshit, but that's half the course. We are going to talk about Sanae Takechi's sleep habits. We have a Slate plus segment on Coke and Mulberry. It's a fun one this week, so stay tuned. It's all coming up on Slate money.
- [00:58]
Emily Peck
Slate Money is brought to you by Charles Schwab Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching? Listen to Washington Wise, an original podcast for investors from Charles Schwab to hear the stories making news in Washington right now. Host Mike Townsend, Charles Schwab's managing director for legislative and regulatory affairs, takes a nonpartisan look at the stories that matter most to investors, including policy initiatives for retirement, savings, taxes and trade, inflation concerns, the Federal Reserve, and how regulatory developments can affect companies, sectors and even the entire market. Mike and his guests offer their perspective on how policy changes could affect what you do with your portfolio. Download the latest episode and follow@schwab.com WashingtonWise or wherever you listen.
- [01:53]
Sponsor Voice 1
Slate Money is sponsored this week by YourNext Dollar, a podcast from Nerd Wallet Wealth Partners. YourNext Dollar is built specifically for high earners like you. It covers the financial complexity that comes with a higher income if you have equity compensation, RSUs, tax planning, housing decisions, figuring out when it's actually okay to enjoy your money. It turns out that the more you earn, the more complicated the questions get. And yet somehow there's even less content built for you. Until now, yournext dollar covers both sides of the equation, building wealth and spending on what actually matters to you. Because at a certain income level, the question isn't should I save more? It's what should I do with everything I have? Financial advisors from NerdWallet Wealth Partners join the show regularly to discuss the questions they hear from high earners like you, the nuanced, real world stuff generic financial content doesn't cover. If you want help getting more out of every dollar you earn, follow YourNext Dollar wherever you get your podcasts. Sponsored by YourNext Dollar, a podcast NerdWallet Wealth Partners and SEC registered investment advisor. This podcast is for informational purposes only and is not investment tax or legal advice.
- [03:13]
Felix Salmon
Okay, so I want to start this week by talking about branding. We have, like, spoiler alert. We have a segment three on branding, which is all about Coca Cola and Marlboro, but segment one, I think is also about branding.
- [03:30]
Emily Peck
Isn't that the plus. I'm so sorry to interrupt your flow, which was fabulous.
- [03:35]
Felix Salmon
Wait, segment three is not Coca Cola and Marlboro.
- [03:38]
Elizabeth Byers
Segment three was the Japanese pm.
- [03:40]
Felix Salmon
Yeah, well, God damn it. Okay, so guys, if you want to learn a lot about branding, you have to become Slate plus members, upon which you can learn all about the weird similarity of the Coca Cola font to the Marlborough font and whether that was deliberate or not. We are not going to talk about this in Spectrum 1, but we are going to talk about a different type of branding, which is taking a relatively recondite parasite named Cyclospora and rebranding it as explosive diarrhea, which is.
- [04:09]
Emily Peck
I thought we weren't going to say explosive. I thought. I don't know, I thought we were classier.
- [04:15]
Felix Salmon
I'm sad tell you that we have no class here on Slate Money. The fact that those two words captured the public imagination in the way that no public health emergency has been able to do, with the possible exception of, like, Ebola. Someone just used those two words and they went sort of mentally viral. Everyone started talking about it, and suddenly we have this food poisoning thing which is making headlines across the country. And I'm quite convinced that 80 plus percent of those headlines and news stories we would not be reading were it not for this rebranding of cyclospora as something, you know, so viscerally disgusting.
- [04:58]
Elizabeth Byers
Well, as a journalist, how many times in your career do you get to put the phrase explosive diarrhea into a story? I mean, once in a lifetime opportunity.
- [05:07]
Felix Salmon
I mean, I write about sovereign debt restructuring, so obviously all the time.
- [05:10]
Emily Peck
I mean, we all wish we could have put such an adjective into one of our stories and had it be well read. I've never managed it. It's redundant. I think you could just say severe. You could. There's so many other words that could have been chosen. It's so salacious. Every time you see a TV newscaster say it, they get a twinkle in their eye. They're like, excited to say it. Yeah.
- [05:34]
Elizabeth Byers
There's a great quote from a Times piece about this where there's a woman named Barbara Kowalchik who's the director of the Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security. At George Washington University. And her only quote in the piece is she said that she was avoiding high risk foods. And her quote is, quite honestly, I don't have time in my life for explosive diarrhea. You are one of us, Barbara.
- [05:57]
Emily Peck
It's fast if it's explosive. So you do have time, Barbara. Actually, I'm just saying it's quick.
- [06:04]
Felix Salmon
So what happened was that there's a food poisoning outbreak and it winds up getting associated with this phrase, which is just as you, as we have all agreed, catnip to journalists, which then creates a whole bunch of news coverage about the outbre break. And then because we are living on a 2026 timeline, obviously it's about 10 seconds before there's a Trump angle. And so like the, the cyclospora gets traced back to a farm in Mexico. The farm in Mexico is owned by a company in California. The company in California is kind of Trumpy and has been donating to the Trump administration and is kind of slow walking its response in contradistinction to Taco Bell. And one of the interesting things about all of these weird sort of foodborne public health things is that there's a standard playbook in America, which is the recall. And who was it? I can't remember, was it Hershey who, like did a big recall back in the 80s or something and set this playbook? Everyone was like, oh my God. Even though 99.9% of the product was uncontaminated, they recalled everything.
- [07:15]
Emily Peck
Oh, that's the Tylenol story. The famous Tylenol story. Yeah, because someone put cyanide, I think, in a Tylenol. Someone died and then Tylenol. I mean, it's this famous Harvard case study that's still told about it. There's like multiple podcasts about it. Legend in the marketing biz that Tylenol knew that if they didn't take recall icon. Yes, they knew if they didn't do something super fast and drastic and clear that their Tylenol would be forever tainted. Had they only known that decades later the president would like, say on Live, whatever. But famously, they recalled it all and regained the public's trust pretty quickly.
- [07:57]
Felix Salmon
And that has now become the sort of not just go to playbook for all brands up to and including Taco Bell, but the generally accepted just every single member of the public expects every single corporation to do this with every single case of anything, you know, even when it isn't cyanide. And some brands have been slightly less enthusiastic about doing it than others. I remember when, you know, like when Peloton recalled its treadmill, they were kind of like, well, if you really want to send it back, you can, but this is one of the first cases I can remember where it's so obvious that the brand was like, well, yeah, we'll do a recall. But they didn't really have their heart in it. And they put out this sort of incomprehensible press release that no one could understand. Partly because there's a couple of reasons. One is that the overwhelming majority of the lettuce was within wholesale channels. So, like, a public press release thing wouldn't make any difference because it's not like the public are picking up packed lettuce from the shelves, although they are Walmart.
- [09:01]
Elizabeth Byers
No, that's. That's.
- [09:03]
Felix Salmon
And so, like, one of them is like, were there, like, Walmart packages that were affected? But the other reason is that there's this massive time delay on cyclospora. It takes, like, weeks before you actually wind up with all of the explosive diarrhea and whatnot. So the fact was that everyone was reasonably sure that all of the lettuce that was in the, you know, on the shelves and in the Taco Bells at the time of the recall was fine.
- [09:28]
Elizabeth Byers
That's one theory. There are plenty of indications that Taylor Farms also kind of went out of their way to obfuscate what was happening 100%.
- [09:37]
Felix Salmon
Yes.
- [09:38]
Elizabeth Byers
You know, and we're already sort of dealing with cuts to the programs that actually do foodborne illness surveillance. But one of the things that came up a lot in these stories is that the sort of rapid testing that they did is usually not the way that you would track something definitively. That's that, you know, has that long incubation period.
- [09:55]
Felix Salmon
So, yeah, because it's actually more or less impossible to track definitively. As we discovered when the FDA did test a bunch of lettuce and said, oh, we found cyclospora, and then they had to, like, backpedal and say, oh, actually, no, it was a false positive.
- [10:08]
Elizabeth Byers
But they use, you know, epidemiology to figure out where these things are coming from. And they did not say that Taylor Farms wasn't responsible or that, you know, wasn't happening through all these Taco Bells in the Midwest. Taylor Farms kind of took one false positive for a specific product that they had and then kind of made up this whole story about how the FDA had apologized to them.
- [10:29]
Felix Salmon
And yeah, no, there was. Taylor Farms did a lot of dumb stuff that no marketing professor would ever recommend, including Putting out this tweet saying, the FDA has apologized to us when the FDA had not apologized to them. But I guess my point here is that, that it is interesting to me that Taylor Farms would have chosen to take this route of being sort of aggressively, like, anti Tylenol. I take the opposite road to Tylenol that that's even an option these days.
- [10:57]
Emily Peck
It reminded me of just as a journalist, you know, you hate to correct a story, and there's, like, good and bad ways to do it. Like, some corrections, you could be very persnickety about and not really, like, come clean and be like, this was wrong. This was why we are sorry. Like, that's, like, ideal correction. You can be like, well, I'm just making a clarification due to an editing. Due to an editing error. Like, there are ways. And then typically when something like that happens, you get screwed because you put it through and then someone else writes you, and it's like, it's still not right. You've got to do it again. You got to do it again. And that's what happened to Taylor Farms and to the fda, you know, as they're sort of, like, bumbling their response to it. The first response from the FDA didn't even. They named Taco Bell but not Taylor Farms. I mean, it's just been like, this
- [11:45]
Felix Salmon
rolling mess because Taylor Farms is so Trumpy. Everyone is conspiracy theorizing that the reason they didn't name Taylor Farms was because there's this, like, White House connection.
- [11:54]
Emily Peck
I mean, there is reporting from.
- [11:56]
Elizabeth Byers
They had to direct lines.
- [11:58]
Emily Peck
There's reporting from Bloomberg that the White House, fda, they all talked to Taylor Farms before the FDA put out its first.
- [12:04]
Felix Salmon
Oh, I'm not saying the conspiracy is false. It is entirely possible that the conspiracy is true. Like, this is Trump administration. There are a lot of conspiracies here.
- [12:12]
Emily Peck
Yeah. And the Trump administration, there is a trend where they're talking a lot, they're saying a lot, but they're not putting out any real information. You can see this across multiple lanes. Right. They don't want to do quarterly reports in the sec. They stopped putting out hunger statistics for the usda. Like, they don't want to name the company involved in the recall. Like, it all kind of fits together. This opacity that we're seeing, it's like, very of our time, and it just makes people panic. It causes more. More stories. And now no one's buying lettuce anymore. No one's getting their salad.
- [12:45]
Elizabeth Byers
I was sort of trying to decide if this is incredibly cynical on Taylor Farms part or just incredibly naive. Because on the naive side, everyone who lives in the current media environment knows that if you do stuff like this, it has a kind of, you know, Streisand effect. I didn't know who Taylor Farms was two weeks ago, and now I think anybody who's following the cyclospora story does. And the fact that they have to keep going back and, you know, making new announcements probably wouldn't have happened if they had on day one, just kind of done the recall, did everything that, you know, Tylenol did and then it'd just be done with.
- [13:18]
Felix Salmon
This is why, you know, I'm sure there's a marketing communications PR CMO type at Taylor Farms who's like, pulling her hair out going, no, but like the CEO, like, this is a family owned company, right? This is not a public company.
- [13:31]
Elizabeth Byers
That's a good point.
- [13:32]
Felix Salmon
This is a family owned company. It's owned by Mr. Taylor, who's kind of trumpy and friendly with the president. And like, his first reaction was basically the first reaction of every company pre Tylenol, which was, you know, we'll just do the minimum we need to keep every piece of lettuce on the shelves that we know is perfectly safe. You know, and he clearly hasn't been to whatever bit of business school tells you about the importance of marketing and comms. Probably hasn't been to business school as well. He's just inherited it from his dad.
- [14:03]
Emily Peck
They've had bad E. Coli lettuce outbreaks before, and. And I don't think any of them rose to the level of 2026.
- [14:10]
Felix Salmon
Exactly. So, like, if you've been through this before and kind of toughed it out, maybe they just used the E. Coli playbook from 2019 or whenever the last E. Coli thing was. And then they're like, well, you know, it worked then, you know, and then suddenly everyone started talking about explosive diarrhea and then, like, it got out of hand.
- [14:28]
Elizabeth Byers
We also just acknowledge that when they were talking about the origin of the explosive diarrhea, the administration and Taylor Farms both went out of their way to say that this was produced by the Taylor Farms de Mexico. They sort of like use the Spanish name of the subsidiary to make it seem like it was a Mexico problem, not a Taylor Farms problem.
- [14:54]
Felix Salmon
Well, I mean, I kind of like the idea of sort of like communicating that this is contained, that there's like one farm in Guadalajara that produces this iceberg lettuce. That was problematic. That does not mean that all Taylor Farms produce anywhere in the country that you see with the Taylor Farms branding is problematic. I totally do see the logic there.
- [15:12]
Emily Peck
Can we talk about some fun facts I learned?
- [15:15]
Felix Salmon
Yeah. Oh, please.
- [15:16]
Emily Peck
Okay, first of all, lettuce is the second most consumed vegetable in the United States after. Any guesses? Anyone? Anyone?
- [15:25]
Felix Salmon
Tomatoes?
- [15:25]
Emily Peck
No, Elizabeth. Most consumed vegetable. You know what it is? Potatoes. Potatoes.
- [15:31]
Felix Salmon
So lettuce, French fries. If you could fry lettuce, it would be number one. But you can't fry lettuce, therefore it's number two.
- [15:37]
Emily Peck
Exactly. You can grill romaine lettuce for a Caesar, which I think is the only way to eat lettuce right now. Yes, yes. Oh, and fruits and vegetables are responsible for about half of the foodborne illnesses in the U.S. second, fun fact. Third is lettuce. Bagged lettuce is prone to these kinds of outbreaks because, well, as we all learned about the crags in the lettuce. The crags. You can't get the parasites.
- [16:01]
Felix Salmon
It's hard to get the umskja out of the crags.
- [16:04]
Emily Peck
The crags also because we don't cook it except for the romaine.
- [16:07]
Felix Salmon
And because the bags in, like, there's crags in leeks. Cleaning leeks is terrible, but no one eats leeks, so it's just much less of a big deal.
- [16:14]
Sponsor Voice 2
Right.
- [16:14]
Emily Peck
And you don't buy a bag of leeks mixed with other things. So, like, if one lettuce is contaminated, then they chop it up and they put it in a bag with other lettuce, then you're spreading more disease all around.
- [16:25]
Felix Salmon
Bag lettuce is the vegetable equivalent of ground beef. Beef.
- [16:29]
Emily Peck
Yes. Yes. So I don't know. Now I'm very turned off. I know it's only like a few thousand cases nationwide and no one's died. Not to sound like, you know, right wing arguments or no one's died. Who cares? And. But no one did die. And I still don't want to eat bag lettuce. That's all.
- [16:46]
Elizabeth Byers
Isn't part of it too. Iceberg lettuce is kind of like the most popular lettuce, even though it's like mostly water. And that makes it more vulnerable if you put it in a bag.
- [16:54]
Felix Salmon
Again, like, just go back to the great American food, which is a burger and fries. Number one popular, most vegetable is the fries. And then what do you put on the burger? Is iceberg. No. No one's going around putting kale on their burgers.
- [17:08]
Emily Peck
Ugh. No, I like iceberg. I mean, I'm never eating lettuce. Again. Oh, and I did have one other point to make if no one else feels like speaking about lettuce anymore. But I, I was, like, reading about this for, let's see, like, hours. People always talk about we, we need less regulation and the US Bureaucracy is too much and we pay too high taxes. But, like, food safety is a really important kind of regulation. And I think everyone knows that, actually. And not having good regulation, having all these big layoffs at the fda, cutting back these rules, they delayed a food tracing rule that they've been trying to enact for like 15 years. Since the Obama administration. It's been delayed again until 2028 or something by this White House. This is core function.
- [17:55]
Felix Salmon
And they specifically took rfk, specifically took cyclospora off the list of things that he was tracking.
- [18:01]
Emily Peck
Yes, yes. These are core functions of government. It's not good to cut them.
- [18:05]
Felix Salmon
As an immigrant, as a foreigner, I will say that the first time I moved to the United States, I lived in California in 1984. One of the things that really impressed me was the, not just the quality, but just the whole, you know, professionalization of the food chain and how incredibly, like, organized and clean and healthy everything felt. And Americans do, I think, take that for granted. And I think one of the reasons why bag lettuce is so popular in America is because people just assume that it is safe. And so, yeah, I think it is definitely the case that as the government shrinks and starts taking less and less responsibility for these things, maybe people will start having a different attitude to things like bag lettuce.
- [18:48]
Elizabeth Byers
Yeah, I think part of it, too is just that when things are working in the government, people are not necessarily cognizant of them. It's not totally transparent to them. And food ways and food chains are not transparent to most people anyway. So if you have a whole group of companies like Taylor Farms who on the one hand, are lobbying for less regulation, throwing money at politicians, and then voters aren't really saying anything about it because they don't perceive it as a problem. That's how these, you know, food safety implementations end up not happening. That's why Congress decides not to enforce this law from 2011.
- [19:24]
Felix Salmon
It's not even that voters don't perceive it as a problem. I think voters do care. It's just like this is not going to be in the top five issues of any voter. You know, like, people care about this, but they care about other things a lot more. And so it just never really rises to the level of, although, like, you know, it is the case that the food safety law that was passed in the Obama administration passed with a massive bipartisan majority. Like, the legislators were fine with it, and then the industry pushed back and was like, oh, this is really tough. No. Suck their teeth and managed to. You know, it's all the lobbyists. It's not like voter apathy. It's lobbyists, really.
- [19:59]
Emily Peck
They divorce the reality from, like, they'll talk about regulations and bureaucracy and big government and taxes, and they won't talk about making sure lettuce is not going to give you explosive diarrhea. And it's all very like Michael Lewis, I think we all read, or some of us read, the Fifth Risk. Like, there are all these functions that the government has sort of been doing in the background, not really talking much about that. Like, makes it safe to go out to eat and buy bags of lettuce. And then when that all falls apart, people aren't quite connecting the dots. They're like, oh, Taco Bell causes diarrhea. And it's like, no, Taco Bell actually followed the Tylenol playbook here. And also, no one goes to Taco Bell for lettuce. It's fine. Like, things are falling apart. It just feels like that if no
- [20:43]
Elizabeth Byers
Democrat creates an ad that says, would you prefer explosive diarrhea or RFK Jr to stay? You know, and there's just a missed opportunity there.
- [20:52]
Emily Peck
Yes.
- [20:53]
Felix Salmon
In the annals of marketing, though, I think Taco Bell did this one pretty well. This is not going to be my number. It belongs in this segment. But the number that I'm not going to use as a number is 1, which is $1, which is the price of the Taco Bell Enchirito, which they're bringing people back into Taco Bells by offering the Enchirito for $1. The Enchirito is the most gloriously American thing in the world because it's a com. It's like a mix between an enchilada and the burrito.
- [21:21]
Elizabeth Byers
Ooh.
- [21:22]
Felix Salmon
And it has, like, beef. It's like a tortilla, which you roll up with beef and onions and covered in sauce. But most importantly, it doesn't have any lettuce.
- [21:30]
Elizabeth Byers
Does it have any spicy Doritos or Takis in it? I feel like that's the Taco Bell kind of.
- [21:36]
Sponsor Voice 1
They should.
- [21:36]
Felix Salmon
They should just sprinkle. Sprinkle spicy Doritos on top. Yeah. Ex. I like this idea that Tucker Brothers like. Not only are we going to do this massive recall, but also we're going to offer you $1 enchiritos. And who could resist such a thing?
- [21:49]
Emily Peck
I'm going to head there right now. I'll eat it live, send you a voice note.
- [22:04]
Felix Salmon
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- [24:48]
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- [25:29]
Felix Salmon
Emily, can you like wait until the end of the show and then go get your injury dough? Because I want to ask you about tariffs. You're the tariff queen.
- [25:37]
Emily Peck
I am not, but okay, ask me anything.
- [25:40]
Sponsor Voice 1
Okay.
- [25:41]
Felix Salmon
So to catch people up, you know. Previously on Tariff Watch. We all remember that the Supreme Court struck down the broad based tariffs that Trump had imposed on countries just for being a country. He's like, the trade deficit is large, therefore I'm putting a tariff on you. And the Supreme Court finally went, made its way to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court dragged his heels on this for a long time, but eventually struck it down and said, you know, you can't do that.
- [26:09]
Emily Peck
Can't do it.
- [26:10]
Felix Salmon
And Trump immediately said, that's fine. I respect the rule of law. I'll just take away. No, of course he didn't. What Trump did was he immediately got rid of those tariffs, but replaced them with almost identical tariffs under some like weird emergency thing that he would only last for 150 days because he still loves the tariffs. He's like, I can't do the tariff while calling it X. I'll do the tariff while calling it Y. Problem was these were emergency tariffs and they only lasted for 150 days. And 150 days is yesterday Friday. So what happens on yesterday Friday? He comes up with even more new tariffs and he can't do tariff X because that was found illegal. He can't do tariff Y because that expired under emergency tariffs. And now he's doing tariff Z, which is something. Something about forced labor supply chains or something. Yes.
- [26:59]
Emily Peck
The U.S. trade Representative, Jameson Greer, they're using Section 301 of the 1974 Trade act to raise tariffs on like 60 countries. They're accusing 80 countries. Is that right?
- [27:12]
Elizabeth Byers
Yeah.
- [27:13]
Felix Salmon
All of the countries, including like Canada
- [27:15]
Elizabeth Byers
and the U.K. well, 95% of our
- [27:18]
Emily Peck
imports, 12.5%, I guess, because they supposedly allegedly use forced labor in their supply chains. And it's basically. It's retaining the status quo. I mean, the Supreme Court knocked down the tariffs that he tried to do under the IPA law and said, you can't use the IPA law, but maybe you could use a different law. I don't know. And so they went around looking under, you know, the cabinet covers and under the bed in the Lincoln Bedroom or wherever the fuck, and they came up with this one.
- [27:49]
Felix Salmon
And I even dusted off Smoot Hawley, the notorious Smoot Hawley act of 1934 that caused the Great Depression. Wait, no. 1929. Whenever it was 1930. 30 that caused the Great Depression didn't
- [28:02]
Emily Peck
cause the Great Depression. The Great Depression was already underway when Smoot Hawley passed. But it may have exacerbated.
- [28:07]
Elizabeth Byers
Exacerbated the Great Depression.
- [28:09]
Felix Salmon
It exacerbated the Great Depression. And if you want to know more
- [28:11]
Emily Peck
about someone at the Hoover Library this week, because I was so tickled, don't
- [28:15]
Felix Salmon
be asking the Hooverites. They're the last people to us.
- [28:17]
Emily Peck
No, but I mean, he was historically accurate that the Great Depression was underway.
- [28:23]
Felix Salmon
You know, who you should ask is Ben Stein's professor in Paris prior to his day off.
- [28:28]
Sponsor Voice 2
Anyone?
- [28:30]
Felix Salmon
He was asking about Smoot Hawley tariffs in there.
- [28:33]
Emily Peck
Yeah, they brought back Smooth Hawley, a provision of Smoot Hawley that's going to definitely get challenged in the courts because.
- [28:39]
Felix Salmon
But as we discovered with the original Liberation Day terrorists, to challenge these things in the courts takes months, if not years. And if you win, he just invents some other random fucking thing that he found in the back of the cupboard somewhere. So, like everyone who is celebrating when the Supreme Court finally stood up for the rule of law and said, you can't do these illegal terrorists. Like, I feel at this point, we're just like, well, it's.
- [29:05]
Elizabeth Byers
It's there. You know, we have to keep playing whack a mole. Because Trump is so dead set on using tariffs. You know, it's like he has a hammer and everything's a nail. He can only think of tariffs as his primary, you know, foreign policy tool, but Republicans don't even like it. It's bad for business.
- [29:20]
Felix Salmon
No, it's true. But like, the. The question is, like, when you have this executive branch which is hell bent on imposing tariffs, you have a Supreme Court that is hell bent on empowering the executive branch as much as possible to do as much as it possibly can.
- [29:35]
Emily Peck
When it's President Trump, when it was President Biden, they were hell bent on empowering him to do nothing. Just worth pointing out, as you say,
- [29:43]
Felix Salmon
quite correctly, Emily, like the Supreme Court ruling, like, number one, took a long time and number two basically said, look, just find another excuse to do this.
- [29:51]
Emily Peck
Do it classier.
- [29:52]
Felix Salmon
Basically, we have reached the point at which the judicial branch is clearly not going to be able to work as an effective check on the executive branch. So, like, is it worth still trying?
- [30:03]
Emily Peck
Yes.
- [30:03]
Elizabeth Byers
Can we talk about the Canadian tariffs that he's proposing? Because I think that's an example of something so egregious and insane that there's no way that you could just sort of say, oh, well, you know, are these wildfire tariffs?
- [30:17]
Felix Salmon
Because he kept on moaning about the wildfires. He's like, I'm going to tariff them in punishment for having fires.
- [30:22]
Emily Peck
The administration says they're not, they're not the wildfire tariffs. But they did announce them like a day or two after he said he was going to do the wildfire tariffs.
- [30:32]
Elizabeth Byers
Well, he has a tariff and he's looking for a rationale. And the wildfire thing is just so, you know, unhinged that I think people are like, well, how would they stop the wildfires? It's not like they're having them voluntarily.
- [30:42]
Felix Salmon
It's the stated rationale for the tariffs is like almost non existent. Something about, you know, labor supply chains or something. And since the that wildfire reason is mildly bonkers, even by Trump administration standards, do we know why they're suddenly imposing massive tariffs?
- [30:59]
Elizabeth Byers
Yeah, that's the cheese thing.
- [31:00]
Felix Salmon
Oh, is it cheese?
- [31:01]
Emily Peck
He said it was basically retaliation for their tariffs that they did in retaliation to us. Like they stopped buying American alcohol.
- [31:08]
Felix Salmon
Well, that's not a tariff, that's just like a consumer boycott.
- [31:11]
Emily Peck
So we mad, we big mad about that.
- [31:13]
Elizabeth Byers
So he thinks that it's like unfair competition on some level. And this is why there's something about cheese where. Because Canadians prefer European ch to US Cheese that he's arguing that's like an unfair market or something.
- [31:27]
Felix Salmon
I mean, objectively, European cheese is better than American cheese.
- [31:33]
Sponsor Voice 2
What?
- [31:34]
Emily Peck
That's stereotyping. There are so many different kinds of American cheese. You can't possibly be serious.
- [31:39]
Felix Salmon
No, there's a handful of great cheeses I've had that are American. There's some amazing cheese in Vermont and this kind of thing. No, cheddar comes from cheddar in Somerset.
- [31:49]
Emily Peck
Yes, I know cheddar comes from cheddar. But in the US we make a good Cheddar.
- [31:53]
Felix Salmon
No, you don't. You make a bad cheddar. Have you ever had a real cheddar?
- [31:57]
Emily Peck
That's not the point, Felix. The point is, do you know about
- [32:00]
Elizabeth Byers
our Velveeta in our craft?
- [32:02]
Emily Peck
American cheese? My hot take is that American cheese is amazing stuff. I know it's not technically cheese, but no better cheese for a burger than American cheese or a grilled cheese sandwich.
- [32:13]
Sponsor Voice 1
Yeah.
- [32:13]
Felix Salmon
And. And this takes us back to the main theme of the podcast, which is that it all comes back to burgers and that a cheese is really just something you put between the top layer of your bun and your burger. It's not something in and of itself.
- [32:27]
Emily Peck
But anyway, I guess Trump is mad about cheese, so he. So he tear up the hockey sticks that are made in China.
- [32:33]
Elizabeth Byers
It is entertaining to see him stereotype Canada in the most hilarious ways. He's like, what can I tariff? Maple syrup and hockey sticks?
- [32:43]
Felix Salmon
And this one could be bad. We don't know. It's like the Smoot Hawley tariffs aren't coming into effect until August, and that gives him a million days to change his mind. But most of the big tariffs that he's announced on Canada, the 50% tariffs that he's announced over the course of the second Trump administration, have actually been much less of a big deal than they look on their face because they carve out usmca, which is the rebranded nafta, which is nearly all of the trade between the US And Canada. But this one doesn't. So if this goes through, which I kind of suspect it probably won't, Something, something Turco, then that could be, you know, a new historic low in relations with our friendly northern neighbors.
- [33:34]
Emily Peck
One last question for the group. Does the US now depend on tariffs? Tariffs for fiscal revenue? Before we hopped on the call, I was looking at a note from the bank, Standard Chartered, another note, and now it looks like about 1% of GDP is coming through fiscal tariff revenue. And I've seen now two arguments, one in this note from Standard Chartered and one in the pages of Elizabeth's New York Times, arguing that. That the US now needs. I'm doing air quotes. Needs tariff revenue, because we're in such a fiscal pickle. And I just don't believe that.
- [34:18]
Felix Salmon
So it is definitely the case that the one big beautiful act, when it was costed out by the cbo, assumed a bunch of tariff revenue. And there was a bunch of sort of wailing and gnashing of teeth when the Supreme Court decision came down, saying, like, well, this is going to Throw all of our finances out of whack because we've now assumed that we're going to get all of this tariff revenue that we're not. The tariff revenue is at this point non negligible. It's not income tax, but it's a meaningful part of the fiscal mix. And if you got rid of it, as we good neoliberal shills would surely love, you would have to find some other tax hike to replace it.
- [35:05]
Emily Peck
Hello. But. And Courtney Brown at Axios pointed this out in a meeting this morning. If the ostensible purpose of the tariffs is to make imports more expensive and drive more manufacturing to the home country where we make our own products that people would buy that wouldn't be tariffed, then that seems like a bad plan. Because if the plan is ultimately not for to get tariff revenue, it's more like to shift production to these other unterriffed goods. So it's not, it doesn't make sense to me as a revenue.
- [35:35]
Elizabeth Byers
It doesn't. Math at the macro level. It's like if you just look at the tariffs in isolation and you look at the percentage of GDP that they occupy now versus before Trump, it looks like a significant change. But you also have to look at where the administration has created new tax breaks and things that are, you know, have lower revenue generation.
- [35:56]
Felix Salmon
That was my point about the one big beautiful act. Right. There was a big tax cut, which they basically paid for with tariffs.
- [36:01]
Sponsor Voice 3
Yeah.
- [36:01]
Felix Salmon
And, and so if you, if you abolish the tariffs, you have to go back to that tax cut and you need to sort of rewind, reverse some of that tax cut. And yes, Emily, you're right on, on, you know, on the ostensible argument that what they want to do is for imports to plunge and all of the manufacturing to happen in America. If that happened, then tariff revenue would go down, but we know that's not going to happen. So that tariff revenue is here to stay unless we get rid of the
- [36:32]
Emily Peck
tariffs, which I think actually the tariffs are just here to stay. And even if Trump leaves office, which I'll say if, even if Trump leaves office, I think he's, he's kind of changed the way the global economy works. Other countries are doing tariffs now also, like we're in a new higher tariff era.
- [36:52]
Felix Salmon
We have seen this movie before, right, with Biden. Biden inherited a bunch of China tariffs that Janet Yellen said were really terrible, that Biden himself opposed. And then the first thing he did when he comes into office is abolished. No, actually he didn't. He kept them in place for the entire Biden administration. So, so these broad based I'm just going to impose 10% tariffs on the entire planet because I woke up one morning with a pain in my buttock. That kind of tariff, maybe some of those will get reduced. And I do think that there are ways of dealing with the fiscal effects of reducing those tariffs. But you are absolutely right that the effective 0% tariff rate on imports that we had pre Trump one and it's now up to sort of 7ish. You know, it will come down, but it will probably come down to like, I don't know, two or three, which is still a huge increase compared to the status quo. Handy. Slate money is sponsored this week by Leesa. L E E S A they make mattresses. They make awesome mattresses. I have one. The Leesa mattress is basically a reset button for your life. You wake up in the morning refreshed. You are ready to face the day. If, like me, you have a Fitbit on your wrist, it will tell you that you have an 89 sleep score and you should should go out and seize the day and go to the gym and do all of the things because you slept so well. As everyone always says, you spend a third of your life in bed. So invest in your mattress. Leesa has a lineup of beautifully crafted mattresses tailored to how you sleep. Each mattress is designed with specific sleep positions and feel preferences in mind. And from night one, you are going to feel the business look. You are going to feel the difference. You're going to see the premium materials. You're going to feel the serious comfort. You're going to feel the full body support. If you take a Lisa sleep quiz, you'll find your perfect match in two minutes or less. If you go to Lisa.com and use the promo code money, you don't just get 25% off, you also get an extra 50 off. So that's the promo code money will get you $50 off on top of the 25% off sale that's going on right now. So go to L-E-E-S-A.com promo code money for 25 off plus an extra 50 off. And when you use that code, you're supporting our show Lisa.com promo code money.
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- [40:52]
Felix Salmon
All right, I want to talk to the mums on this show, which thankfully is both of you. You have experience of sleeplessness. Is it good? Is it bad? How bad is it?
- [41:05]
Elizabeth Byers
It is terrible. They tell mothers, especially if you're breastfeeding, you have to feed your child every two hours and then you only sleep when the child sleeps. So basically you're just chronic sleep deprivation for at least two months. And I can't even deal with, you know, less than six hours of sleep normally without being completely discombobulated. But this is considered standard medical advice to for new moms.
- [41:30]
Emily Peck
Are you serious? Every two hours?
- [41:32]
Felix Salmon
Yeah. Get out of town. Yeah, I would highly recommend not doing that.
- [41:35]
Emily Peck
Don't.
- [41:36]
Felix Salmon
Don't do that.
- [41:37]
Emily Peck
That sounds real bad.
- [41:38]
Felix Salmon
Ignore the doctors. That's what Slate money says. This is medical advice.
- [41:41]
Elizabeth Byers
If I did it again, I would ignore the doctors instead of making myself insane.
- [41:45]
Felix Salmon
I need a lot of sleep. I need like eight, nine hours of sleep. I just more sleep, more better for me. And sleep is good for you and a lack of sleep is bad for you. And boasting about how little sleep you get is the most fucked up thing in the world. But who is doing it?
- [42:02]
Elizabeth Byers
Elizabeth, the Prime Minister of Japan and she is saying that she gets zero to three hours.
- [42:08]
Emily Peck
Am I going to say her name? Takaichi. Sanae Takaichi. She said she apparently Monday, last Monday was something called C Day in Japan is a holiday and Ms. I'm just reading the New York Times. Ms. Takaichi spent her holiday weekend doing work and she took took to Twitter to boast about it, about all the documents she was reading and editing, like very detailed oriented policy work. And she also mentioned that she had a chance to catch up on her ironing and that she. And this is from the translation. Okay, so if Someone speaks Japanese and I'm getting this wrong from the translation, please let me know. But she ironed her undergarments and her handkerchiefs. It's 2026. Just. P.S. but she did this and it was a good thing because she was running out of undergarments. Implication being like, if her undergarments aren't iron, she won't wear them. Which I, I find baffling anyway. She also says she typically gets from 0 to 3 hours of sleep a night. Obviously that's not enough sleep to get a night. This isn't her first time talking about this. She's talked about it before. Famously when she first took office.
- [43:20]
Felix Salmon
This.
- [43:21]
Emily Peck
She called her cabinet ministers to her house for a meeting at 3am why? Because the fax machine wasn't working. Again, it's 2026. What are we doing? Okay, Handkerchiefs, ironed underpants and fax machines.
- [43:36]
Elizabeth Byers
And there's, there's good work ethic and then there's just psychotic behavior. And I, I think she's on the line. For the record, I think she's lying. I don't think anybody could survive on zero to three hours of sleep.
- [43:49]
Felix Salmon
I, I don't think she gets zero to three. I do think she probably gets some people. There's a tiny, tiny minority of people. But some people don't need more than three or four hours of sleep a night. Margaret Thatcher was famously one of those people.
- [44:03]
Emily Peck
Bill Clinton.
- [44:04]
Felix Salmon
And I think a lot of them don't realize that everyone else needs a lot of, a lot more sleep than they do. And they kind of, they look at the rest of the world just go, you guys are all lazy.
- [44:13]
Emily Peck
Come on. They don't realize, like, she's reading detailed policy papers. She understands about bonds, probably. She doesn't know that people need more than zero to three hours of sleep. Of course she knows.
- [44:25]
Felix Salmon
No, no, she, she has been told this, but I'm saying she doesn't, she doesn't like, understand it on a, on a sort of gut intuitive level. I guess her head understands it, but her heart does not.
- [44:34]
Elizabeth Byers
I think it's performative because she ran,
- [44:36]
Felix Salmon
this is her election campaign, right? Was like work, work, work. All I'm going to do is work. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna have any family life. I'm not gonna have any private life. I'm not gonna go hiking, I'm not gonna go traveling. I'm just gonna work 24 hours a day. And that was what got her elected. And she's doubling down on it.
- [44:50]
Elizabeth Byers
She's Gonna work and have completely wrinkle free underwear. That was her promise.
- [44:54]
Felix Salmon
It might not be underwear, it might be blouses.
- [44:56]
Emily Peck
Yeah, maybe it's blouses. That was my only. Maybe to be fair, she's talking about like what she wears under her suit jacket or something, which I could understand. You don't want to be wrinkled. But people were saying this is like a gender performance because she's a woman, she's women prime minister in Japan, so she needs to show like, I'm still a girl, I still iron stuff. So it's sort of like this gender performance kind of walk in the line
- [45:20]
Felix Salmon
also, you know, because Japan is still a very sexist society, you know, she needs to do that thing of like, well, because I'm a woman, I need to work twice as hard and do that very visibly.
- [45:31]
Sponsor Voice 2
Right.
- [45:31]
Emily Peck
But Japan is changing and this caused quite a stir. According to the English American reporting I read about what happened in Japan. Like they have a word for working yourself to death, karoshi. And it's been something that they've been in sort of a panic worry over for, for like a decade. There's often these reports of like businessmen who, you know, work 24 hours, they never get up from their desk, but then they eventually die by suicide. And then there's like a law passed, you, you can't do more than, I don't know, what is it, like 40 hours of overtime a week or something. And I guess there is some cultural shift here where people are like, maybe working that much is bad, like there's a changed understanding or something.
- [46:14]
Felix Salmon
Friend of the pod, Le Boukite.
- [46:15]
Sponsor Voice 1
Yeah.
- [46:16]
Felix Salmon
And yes, there is a sovereign debt aspect to this because there's a sovereign debt aspect to everything.
- [46:20]
Emily Peck
Very important.
- [46:21]
Felix Salmon
Le Boukite has written at some length about sleep deprivation as a tactic in the sovereign debt negotiations, especially in the Paris club where you negotiate with a bunch of bilateral creditors. And he would talk about how like the French treasury would, would deliberately keep you up all night in order to just literally tire you out to agree to anything that they propose.
- [46:46]
Emily Peck
Also, I think you pay for it. On the other side, I've read in places that people who sleep less in their lifetimes, they die sooner. So like it catches you.
- [46:55]
Elizabeth Byers
A few months ago I read this book that's actually really good. It's called why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, who's a sleep scientist. And when I was reading the story about the Japanese pm, it reminded me of an antidote that he has about. There's a rare genetic disorder that only appears in Midlife, where you start having this chronic insomnia and eventually your ability to sleep goes down until it's zero. And whatever this disorder does, it doesn't respond to sleep medications. So basically, if you have it within like 12 to 18 months, you just die because you can't sleep. And so I, I was looking at the zero to three hours and thinking, how old is the Japanese pm?
- [47:31]
Emily Peck
Oh my gosh, the clock is tick.
- [47:44]
Felix Salmon
All right, numbers round. Emily, do you have a number?
- [47:46]
Emily Peck
I do. My number is 53%. That is maybe the US home ownership rate. It's a new calculation that I wrote about this week. The census reports the homeownership rate.
- [47:58]
Felix Salmon
65. Yeah.
- [47:59]
Emily Peck
Yes, the census reports 65%, but how they measure it is. And feel free to cut this if it's too nerdy. But how they.
- [48:06]
Felix Salmon
Oh, I love this. This is amazing.
- [48:07]
Elizabeth Byers
No such thing.
- [48:08]
Emily Peck
They look at all the houses, all the homes in the US and they say what share are occupied by their owner? And then that's the home ownership rate. But that leaves out a lot of people. It leaves out adults who are living in owner occupied homes, but don't themselves own the home. So like parents whose adult kids can't afford a house and still live at home don't get counted. Cousins, relatives who are living with people who own a house don't get counted. So the Federal Reserve bank of Minneapolis economists there went out, they looked at the population and they just simply counted up the share of the population of adults who own their own home. And it turns out to be a much lower number because it gets rid of all those other people, those, those adults who live in owner occupied housing but don't themselves own homes, but they're not renters.
- [48:55]
Sponsor Voice 1
Is it?
- [48:55]
Felix Salmon
You can't subtract that number from 100 and get the proportion of the population that that rents. We used to have a thing where there were like two categories. You either own or rent. And now there are three categories for like there's own and there's rent, and then there's other.
- [49:07]
Emily Peck
Yeah, basically, yes.
- [49:09]
Felix Salmon
Which I guess would include like federal prisoners and stuff like that.
- [49:12]
Emily Peck
They actually, they did include the prison population and the nursing home. They included people living in institutions. And you might say that's not fair to include them. I kind of think it is because the US Policy is very homeowner focus, as we've talked about so many times on this podcast. You know, tax policy very centered on the homeowner. And the argument in favor of that is always, well, most Americans are homeowners 65%. 65%? Well, no, most adults, it's about half. Barely half are homeowners, actually. So, like, maybe give that policy another look. See,
- [49:49]
Felix Salmon
my number is 30,000, which comes from a wonderful column by my Bloomberg colleague, Geroid Rady about Japanese weddings. And the way that Japanese weddings work is that they're quite expensive, and they're basically paid for with wedding presents in a roundabout way, that a standard wedding gift in Japan is a very beautiful envelope with three very, very beautiful 10,000 yen notes in it. So you basically give the happy couple 30,000 yen if you're one wedding guest. If you're coming as a couple, you give them 50,000 yen, you give them five wedding notes. It's an odd number of notes, because if it was an even number, that would imply that they should just take half each. But it's an odd number. So it's like you're given collectively. And so basically what happens is that the happy couple can kind of count on getting 50,000 yen per couple or 30,000 yen per person, which they can then use basically to defray the costs of the wedding. This has been more or less stuck in stone forever. And now Japan, for the first time ever, has got inflation. And so the cost of weddings is up like 50% from pre pandemic times, partly because of the whole tourism boom as well, like hotels and all that. Everything's becoming more expensive with. But the wedding gift is just three banknotes.
- [51:18]
Emily Peck
Oh, no.
- [51:19]
Felix Salmon
And so the amount that the people getting married receive has been going down in real terms quite dramatically compared to the cost of the wedding, which has been going up. And so now there's this disconnect, but no one knows what to do because it's cash. And, you know, and you can't give four notes because that would be rude.
- [51:39]
Emily Peck
You gotta give five.
- [51:40]
Felix Salmon
If you give five, that's like a 60% increase. And, you know, prices are up a lot. But, like, you know, the move from 30 to 50 is a big move. And it's not clear how and when people would make that massive jump.
- [51:51]
Emily Peck
Switch to dollars.
- [51:52]
Felix Salmon
So a 30,000 yen is about $180.
- [51:55]
Emily Peck
Yeah. So give $300. Does that work out? The yen is at a historic low to the dollar right now. It's a great time to go to go to Japan.
- [52:04]
Felix Salmon
Things in general are cheap in Japan. The one exception to that, as I say, is hotels, which are expensive because there's so much demand from people wanting to go to Japan because the end's so cheap. Cheap. Elizabeth, bring US home here. Give us a good number.
- [52:18]
Elizabeth Byers
My number is 9,000 and that's dollars. And that's how much you would pay for a Terran Tactical Innovations pit viper pistol, which are apparently very popular in LA right now because they were in the John Wick movies. So this is like, this is.
- [52:31]
Felix Salmon
This is an actual gun that you used to shoot people or vapors people.
- [52:36]
Elizabeth Byers
It's called a pit viper because, you know, these companies need them to sound menacing.
- [52:40]
Emily Peck
And $9,000 through a gun?
- [52:43]
Elizabeth Byers
Yes.
- [52:43]
Felix Salmon
Is that expensive or cheap? I have no idea how much.
- [52:45]
Sponsor Voice 1
It's a lot.
- [52:46]
Elizabeth Byers
It's expensive for a pistol. There's. So this was from a time story about this shishi gun club called the Range in la and now is they're making sort of like Equinox, but gun range sort of places where it's. It's sort of high end club. It's expensive.
- [52:59]
Felix Salmon
They have good like product in the showers. Do people take a shower after shooting guns? I have no idea.
- [53:05]
Elizabeth Byers
I don't know. They have fancy coffee bars and the membership is between $3,700 and $5,400 a. So that's, you know, a little bit
- [53:14]
Felix Salmon
cheaper than about the same as Equinox.
- [53:16]
Emily Peck
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [53:17]
Elizabeth Byers
They have events catered by Erawan because of course they do.
- [53:21]
Felix Salmon
And they sell $9,000 pistols. So you need to buy that somewhere else.
- [53:24]
Elizabeth Byers
You can use them to shoot at the range or you can bring your own gun.
- [53:28]
Felix Salmon
Oh, so they'll lend you a pistol if you don't have your own gun.
- [53:31]
Elizabeth Byers
They have like a collection of like 40 different kinds of guns, so you can try them out.
- [53:36]
Felix Salmon
But one of the guns they have is a pit viper.
- [53:38]
Elizabeth Byers
Yes, that's the trendy one.
- [53:40]
Emily Peck
And, and it's crazy, but John Wick came out years. Like, why now?
- [53:43]
Elizabeth Byers
Well, it's a whole franchise. You know, they did a movie last year that was called Ballerina that was kind of like in the. And I think just.
- [53:49]
Felix Salmon
Did she use a pit viper? No, I saw that movie. She used a flamethrower. I watched it on the plane.
- [53:56]
Emily Peck
The John Wick movies are actually really good. I've seen them all.
- [54:00]
Felix Salmon
Wow. All right, so for our final number, Emily, I'm going to give you two this week out of 1, 2, 3, 4, which of the John Wicks is the best? John Wick.
- [54:10]
Sponsor Voice 2
Oh, wow.
- [54:11]
Emily Peck
You know, I have them all jumbled in my head. I think it was the last one where he falls down this like really long flight of stairs. That may have been my favorite scene. I think it was for because he keeps falling, gets up. It's like a whole thing. And you're like, no normal human would make it down those stairs and let
- [54:29]
Felix Salmon
alone back up again.
- [54:30]
Emily Peck
Yeah. I mean, and I also like the first. I mean the first one kind of the best one because it was so cute. You know, the dog.
- [54:38]
Felix Salmon
The dog, yeah. The rest of the movies dogs appear, but they're not nearly as cute.
- [54:42]
Emily Peck
They can't compete with the first dog.
- [54:44]
Felix Salmon
Okay, we have to move on to a Slate plus segment about Coca Cola. So we are going to tie up this episode right now for all of you except you lovely Slate plus listeners. For the rest of you, thank you for listening. Thank you for emailing us us on slatemoneylate.com thank you to Jessamyn Molly for producing and we will be back next week with yet more Slate Money.
- [55:15]
Sponsor Voice 1
Slate Money is sponsored this week by your Next Dollar, a podcast from Nerd Wallet Wealth Partners. Your Next Dollar is built specifically for high earners like you. It covers the financial complexity that comes with a higher income. If you have equity compensation, RSUs, tax planning, housing decisions, figuring out when it's actually okay to enjoy your money. It turns out that the more you earn, the more complicated the questions get. And yet somehow there's even less content built for you. Until now. Your Next Dollar covers both sides of the equation equation building wealth and spending on what actually matters to you. Because at a certain income level, the question isn't should I save more? It's what should I do with everything I have? Financial advisors from NerdWallet Wealth Partners join the show regularly to discuss the questions they hear from high earners like you. The nuanced real world stuff generic financial content doesn't cover. If you want help getting more out of every dollar dollar you earn, follow YourNext Dollar wherever you get your podcasts sponsored by YourNext Dollar, a podcast NerdWallet Wealth Partners and SEC registered investment advisor. This podcast is for informational purposes only and is not investment, tax or legal advice.
- [56:37]
Sponsor Voice 3
Most AI tools can answer simple questions, but only rippling AI can help solve solve business problems. That's because rippling AI is built on your live global workforce data, giving it the full context it needs to make smarter recommendations and take action across departments. Say you want to know which top performers are at risk of leaving. Just ask rippling AI and get an instant report with supporting data such as comp ratios, recent performance reviews, 10 year trends and more. Then it can turn those insights into into real action. It might recommend a 10% spot bonus to retain a top performer based on the data. All you have to do is review the recommendation, tap, confirm, and the bonus is added to the next payroll run. Rippling AI understands your workforce systems and workflows, helping you make faster, more informed decisions across your business. Don't settle for AI. That's all talk. Head to Rippling AI Slate and get AI that turns insight into action. That's R, I, P, P, L, I, N G AI slash Slate. Sign up for exclusive access today.