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- [00:11]
A
Hello.
- [00:13]
B
Welcome to the Having Children is Hard episode of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. I'm here with Stacy Marie Ishmael.
- [00:26]
A
Hello.
- [00:26]
B
I'm here with Emily Peck.
- [00:28]
C
Hi.
- [00:29]
B
And we are going to be talking about the jobs report this week, which was a massive disappointment. And we're going to zoom back and talk a lot about what that means in terms of having children and things like that. We're going to talk about the Facebook oversight board and their decision to approve Facebook's decision to kick Donald Trump off the platform. And of course, we are going to talk about the richest couple to ever get divorced in the history of the planet, Bill and Melinda Gates.
- [01:04]
C
Wait, are you sure about that?
- [01:05]
B
I think so.
- [01:06]
A
Doesn't Jeff Bezos have more money than Bill Gates?
- [01:07]
C
Yeah, he does. He's richer.
- [01:09]
B
Oh. Maybe the second richest couple to ever.
- [01:12]
C
Get the more benefit, I think.
- [01:15]
B
Yeah. We also have a Slate plus segment on Peloton and their new recall of the Tread plus treadmill, which they said they wouldn't recall, and now they're recalling all of that. Coming up on Slate Money. I'm just going to come out and say that the jobs report we had on Friday morning was the biggest miss in the history of the jobs report. We have never seen economists get it so wrong. Everyone was saying probably a million, conceivably 2 million. The economy is firing on all cylinders. Jobs are being created left and right, and in the end, we got an absolutely dismal number. We barely kept up with population growth. The prior month's number was revised down enormously. And suddenly everything that we thought we were happy about in terms of jobs in America turns out to be something we are now sad about. Is that a good summary, Emily?
- [02:15]
C
It is a solid summary. I think some complexity gets lost in the mix. I think one bright spot, I mean, it was a huge mess at historic levels. They expected a million jobs to be added. Instead, it was about a quarter million. I think the one bright spot was leisure and hospitality, which apparently added tons of jobs. And workers in that sector are working more hours and wages in that specific sector are going up. So that's like a little. A little bright sprinkle.
- [02:41]
B
And that was the sector which was occasioning the most hand wringing in the press up until now. Everyone's like, yeah, no one can find any workers. There's a massive worker shortage. Well, apparently there's not because that number of workers went up BY what, like 350,000 more? Something like that.
- [02:58]
C
One other thing I was thinking of was we spoke, I guess, last week about supply chains. Well, workers are part of their own little supply chain. Right. They're a component of the economy that's all mixed up and different now in the post Covid landscape. And perhaps it's going to take a bit longer for workers to get settled back into jobs because things have shifted a little bit. I think that could be one part of the story, too.
- [03:25]
A
Emily, do you have an example of the kinds of workers that are taking a little bit longer to get settled back?
- [03:30]
C
Well, my favorite example, Stacey Marie, would be the ladies, the women, particularly mothers of young children. I was emailing with an economist at the census this morning for something else, and I asked her, like, what do you think of the jobless numbers? What's going on? Could women mothers be part of the story? And she said, absolutely. Single women without young children are increasing in employment, going back to work, but mothers with young children are still stagnating, and it doesn't take an Einstein type to figure out why. I mean, schools, yes, are reopening, but there's still a lot in hybrid mode. They're still subject to shutdowns because of quarantines. It's not stable. The mothers I've been speaking to, a lot of them are staying home still because you can't rely on childcare yet to get back to work. And I think, though, that's not the whole story here because the numbers are big. As Felix was saying in our email thread. I think it's part of the story is mothers and people with childcare issues and instability who can't work.
- [04:32]
B
I mean, there's a silver lining here, right. We saw the labor force go up a lot much faster than the number of jobs created, which means that people are going back to work. And from what you're saying, Emily, we can assume that once schools go back to normal, the labor force is going to have another step change upwards, and then there's going to be a lot more people coming back into the labor force. So in that case, we can see good things happening in the future, even if they didn't happen in April.
- [05:03]
C
Yeah. Although I would worry a little bit about for those women coming back in, what jobs are they going to get and take? Because we know the longer you're out of the labor force, the harder it is to get back in. At the same level, you really lose a bunch of steps there. So could be that schools get back to normal and everyone just like Thanos snaps his finger Whatever, I don't know. And it's all good. But I worry.
- [05:30]
B
Super League.
- [05:32]
A
One of the things, without relying on the cliche of is it? Too soon to tell. But I'll be really interested to see whether there is in fact a secular downshift in labor force participation among women as a result of this, because we have gone through several months of various stories from the New York Times and other places talking about the opting out of women from the workforce, the inability to do the zoom and the conference call and the laundry and the zoom school. And to your point, Emily, not only what kinds of jobs will they go back to, but what other types of choices will they be making? And I think one of the big choices is are they going to keep having kids?
- [06:12]
B
And the answer is no. Right? According to all the most recent data that we've had in terms of the fertility rate went down. Didn't go down quite as much as people thought it might, but it did go down by a historic amount, unsurprisingly, given the pandemic. And. But the one thing we know about fertility rates, Emily, correct me if I'm wrong here, is that they only go down and they never go up. Right.
- [06:36]
C
Okay, so what we're talking about is the news this week that birth rates sunk even lower in 2020, the sixth straight year of decline, down 4% from 2019. Birth rates have been declining since the Great Recession. Do birth rates only go down and never go up, Felix? I don't know. Do they? I don't know the answer.
- [06:56]
B
I mean, as a stylized fact, I think we can say what we know is that as countries get richer and as people become more comfortable, they have fewer children. Obviously it happens very quickly in poor countries where the minute you stop having to worry about child mortality, people have a lot fewer children. The minute people start sending their kids to school more, rather than getting them to work, people have fewer children. But this is a long term trend that we've seen in basically every country in the world for centuries, is that women have been having fewer children and people wondered for a while whether it might slow down around replacement rate and that us being animals, we tend to want to replace ourselves. But no, in rich countries, we've been well below replacement rate for a long time. China worried about having too many people implemented the one child policy. They've been obviously below replacement rate for a long time. But then when they lifted the one child policy, like the birth rate didn't really go up. People just get used to having fewer children and it's very hard for me to see any of these numbers turning around and going up anytime soon. Which is another reason why rich countries are going to need a lot of immigration in future decades.
- [08:11]
C
Yeah. And it's interesting to me also, like, a lot of people want to. Progressives, especially people like me, want to explain this in the US by saying, well, our social safety net is the worst. We don't encourage women to have children. We have no paid leave. We have no childcare for young children. Of course women aren't having children. And if we only did these things, then everything would be fine. But I will admit here on Slate Money that even if we had those things, probably the birth rate doesn't go up all that much because if you look at other countries like us that have the good policies, it's not all that different.
- [08:49]
B
In fact, it's worse a lot of the time if you look at France, Italy, places like just really low birth rates.
- [08:55]
A
This is so fascinating to me because we are not in a immigrant friendly rhetoric period. We're not even in a social safety net rhetoric friendly period. I mean, I'm on any of the groups that I'm on where there are like more than five professional women, there are multiple conversations about if you are having kids, how are you doing it? What is your childcare situation? There's a lot of discussion in the US about the backlash to. The backlash to the backlash to paid childcare and family leave. What are we going to do?
- [09:27]
C
Okay, this is what I've been thinking all week and Felix sent around an article that gets at this too. But it's like, having children is really hard. And not having children has become increasingly easier. Like, birth control is real good now. Women want to be independent and free. And having children still in 2020, especially in 2020 with the pandemic, really impedes that freedom. So it's natural that this is happening. It makes perfect sense. It's really hard. As women gain equality, they're gonna be less likely to have children. Like, I don't know, as someone who believes in gender equality, I don't know what you do about that exactly.
- [10:07]
B
Well, the question is, is it really something to worry about? Like, demographically speaking, as a Gen Xer, I'm gonna be like, well, I want lots of labor force to be supporting me when I'm retired. Selfishly, I would love to see the population go up and everyone have lots of babies because then their taxes will support me in my comfortable retirement. But from a big picture point of view, certainly in terms of carbon emissions and basically, stuff like that. I think having stagnant or even possibly negative population growth is not the end of the world. It's okay. Japan has had it for decades and seems to be doing.
- [10:43]
A
Thank you for a Malthusian.
- [10:44]
B
Felix I'm not a Malthusian at all. I'm not saying that, like, the population is too big. I'm just saying that if you look at Japan, which has had a stable to negative total population for decades, it's okay. Per capita GDP does fine. You can support a lot of old people and still have a wealthy and prosperous economy. I think there are worse things in the world than having a population decline.
- [11:11]
A
Emily One thing that I will note is in as much as it's become easier for folks to. The social stigma of not having children is less than it has been historically, certainly. But I think there's also a reverse challenge, which is very much tied up in the rhetoric around immigration, which is the idea of all these brown people come to the US and they're all having kids. And then you get into kind of the white nationalist rhetoric around, you see, like, they're taking over our culture just numerically as well as everything else. And so I do think that this is one of those areas where it is very hard to just particularly because of the way that the partisan politics are shaping out to separate the underlying economic realities from the political rhetoric and policy, from the kind of, you know, capital D discourse around all of these topics, because they're all intertwined.
- [12:00]
C
Yeah, I was thinking about that, too. I was thinking about, at HuffPost, if I wrote about the declining birth rate, it always got a lot of traffic, and a lot of it was from that strand of, like, white nationalist people being like, oh, my God, you know, freaking out. Which, like, made me think about the Handmaid's Tale.
- [12:20]
A
Oh, my God.
- [12:20]
C
Because. And all the freaking out, which, like, made me think about the Handmaid's Tale.
- [12:26]
A
Oh, my God.
- [12:27]
C
Because. And all these, like, these, like, dystopian children of men. Yeah. Where it's like, the women aren't having babies, so everybody freaks out. And in the Handmaid's Tale, you know, they, like, force the women out of society to just have the babies all the time. And I do feel like these stories and the news about declining birth rates is, like, kind of a threat to the equality that I was just talking about that leads to the declining birth rates. There is this strand of conservatism and nationalism, whatever, racism, that kind of would lead down a very dark path. Whenever you talk about declining birth rates.
- [13:03]
B
And to be clear, I would love the population to increase. I think population increases at the margin are better than decreasing populations. I would love to see it increase. I do think the only way it's going to increase is, is through immigration and or what Stacy was saying in terms of demography. If by some miracle Americans do wind up having more babies rather than fewer, then the Americans who are having more babies are going to be black and brown Americans. And so we are going to have a much less white country. And that's great. And I'm all in favor of that. So either way it's good. But you're right that it's going to discomfort a large part of people, a.
- [13:41]
A
Lot of people, no matter which direction you go. Yeah. And to Emily's earlier point, one of the reasons it'll be from folks who are black and brown is because educational outcomes and opportunities and labor market opportunities also lag for these groups. And so there's this kind of catch up challenge of if there were in fact equal access to education, equal access to college education, equal access to the kinds of jobs where you start to make decisions about do you want zero kids or one, we'd be having an even more different and more difficult conversation potentially.
- [14:12]
C
One thing I would say also, Felix, is that though I think I agree with you that declining birth rates probably isn't so bad, it's good for the environment or whatever. But it does seem like kind of a bummer. The Daily did a whole segment on the declining birth rate earlier this week and they talked about how when there are fewer younger people in your town or your city, it's a bummer. The school closes, there's less kids around, there's more old people. It's just kind of like depressing. It doesn't feel like a vibrant economy.
- [14:42]
B
The worst cities are the ones that used to have large populations and now have small populations that if you look at places like Baltimore or Detroit that like literally lost half their population, it's just societies are not set up for that. Infrastructure is not set up for that. The tax base doesn't support the infrastructure anymore. Things start declining, it becomes bad. And so yeah, the first best solution here is absolutely to continue to grow and to welcome in the world and to open our borders. Yay, let's do it.
- [15:15]
A
Unless we go full robot, which is of course the futurist proposal. Do you really need people supporting you if you just have robot caretakers?
- [15:24]
B
The other thing we have to mention, I think in terms of the environmental impact is that while having More Americans will make global warming worse because Americans by their nature just have higher carbon emissions. The flip side of that is that as global warming gets worse, the, the worst hit parts of the planet are going to be like low lying poor places like Bangladesh. Those people are going to need to go somewhere and it behooves the richer world to accept those climate refugees. Stacey, what do you think about rich people getting divorced?
- [15:56]
A
I try not to think about rich people getting divorced, honestly, but it's one of those things that's so hard to avoid. I mean, I was genuinely astonished by both the rollout and the reaction to the rollout of the Bill and Melinda Gates news because it was such a good example of the meme speed of the Internet where it was, okay, you've got these exceptionally well crafted, obviously like 19 PR shops involved in kind of the communication strategy of this thing very much designed to reassure every single beneficiary of the Gates foundation, designed to reassure people whose jobs depend on knowing what billionaires are doing with their money. And then you had this sort of strand of commentary which to be clear, I don't disagree with, which is like no two people getting divorced should have potentially seismic effects on global markets. And then there was the why, you know, the endless speculation about the inners of people's relationships. Was it, I think the Daily Beast had a story either yesterday or today talking about the fact that Melinda Gates wasn't a fan of the fact that Bill and Jeffrey Epstein had interacted for several years past the point at which all of allegations about Epstein were known to the public. There's been internal disagreements within the camps, according to folks who have asked about this, about their approach to vaccination and ip. So not to argue against wealth accumulation necessarily, but I definitely have thought that it's such another example. In the same way with Mackenzie and Jeff Bezos when they got divorced, the question was, well, what's she going to do? And the answer was she's immediately going to give away all her money. But I'm, I'm only interested in this in a forward looking perspective, right? What is Melinda Gates going to do in a post Bill world? And is that going to be a function of things that she felt that she couldn't do while married?
- [17:50]
B
A lot to unpack there. But let's start with this question of vaccine ip, because it's my favorite subject. There was an interview with Melinda Gates by the Washington Post where they asked her what happened with Oxford. Like this. It's a well known story. That's a big mystery that has been circulating and we've talked about on this show in the past. Why did the Gates foundation encourage Oxford University to license its vaccine to AstraZeneca under pretty tough IP laws, rather than open sourcing it and allowing anyone to make it a la, you know, the polio vaccine? And there were arguments on both sides, but mostly the arguments came from where you would expect them to come from. So Oxfam would be coming out and saying, we think this should be open source and everyone should be able to make them. And the pharmaceutical lobby would say, no, it's very important that we retain IEP protection. And the Gates foundation was the one place which seemed to have an opposite view to what you'd expect. The Gates foundation wanted the IP protection rather than open sourcing the vaccine. And now the news this week is that the US Government is saying, no, no, we're going to try and open source as much as we can. We're going to do this thing called drips waivers, which allows not the AstraZeneca vaccine, but the Pfizer vaccine and a couple of others to be made in other countries without worrying about infringing ip. So this is a weird part of the sort of debate, like, why do you have the Gates foundation where it is? And Stacey, you said that there was disagreement within the Gates foundation or between Bill and Melinda.
- [19:29]
A
I have no insight into anything happening between Bill and Melinda, but certainly within people who've worked and who currently work at the Gates Foundation. I think there was a lot of discussion about exactly that point, like, why not do the waiver? And is this kind of aligned with what we're trying to do as a foundation?
- [19:46]
C
I mean, I don't know the motivations behind the Gates foundation, why they're more business friendly. You could obviously speculate that Bill Gates is more inclined to protect big companies IP just because of who he is. And I mean, I just was thinking a lot about IP for the first time in 20 years, as Felix likes to point out. I used to work at an IP magazine, but I was just starting to think about Big Pharma and their arguments around why it's so important to have these drug patents, et cetera. And the more you dig into their argument, the more bogus it really looks. Big pharmaceutical companies use patents to gain monopolies, which is what patents are for. But then they really abuse the patents and gain monopolies for far longer than the patents would have them. I think it's 15 or 20 years from time of invention. But pharmaceutical companies have figured out all kinds of neat little tricks to extend the life of drugs. So, like, the drug is invented, it gets patented, it gets on the market, and then the company continues to get all these, like, little extra patents thrown onto it to extend its life. And the bottom line result is drug prices are higher and taxpayers pay more money for drugs they really need. Like insulin is the example everyone points to. So I think it's really cool that in this case they're relaxing the IP around these vaccines because obviously we're in a public health emergency. And though it's possible that this won't matter because people are talking about there's not enough ingredients to make this stuff anyway, there's not enough manufacturing capacity. So it's possible loosening the IP won't matter that much, but maybe it'll matter. It'll give a week or two or a month of increased time for generics or other drug companies to make this stuff. So that's good. Maybe it'll get people talking about how big pharma abuses the IP system and abuses patents in a lot of cases. So that's good, too. And look, if it led to the Gates divorce, like, that's fine.
- [21:44]
B
The possible downside here, and just to be clear, I completely agree with you, the pharmaceutical companies abusing the patent system. I agree with the Biden administration's move to come up with these TRIPS waivers. I disagree with the Gates Foundation's approach to Oxford University. And so, like, I'm on, I'm on your side here. But the argument that Melinda Gates was making, just to be clear, there is an argument on the other side from the humanitarian perspective is basically, look, Oxford University has no ability to manufacture billions of doses of a vaccine. If they just simply put the recipe out there on the Internet for anyone to find, they still have no ability to manufacture the vaccine. You still need to find someone who will manufacture it. And AstraZeneca was pretty clear that it wasn't going to be them unless they had IP protections. So there's a risk if they just put it out there that no one would be manufacturing it because the AstraZeneca or people like them would only make the investments needed to manufacture the vaccine if they had those IP protections. I kind of don't buy that argument. I think that if you don't know what's going to happen to the price, you certainly have lower pricing power. But ultimately, when it comes to something like a coronavirus vaccine, there's no shortage of governments around the world who will just pay to manufacture this stuff. You don't need the profit motive to make it happen. You can just get the government to pay for it. And given that, I think, yeah, just make it open source.
- [23:16]
A
Well, the Gates foundation, yesterday, the CEO put out a statement saying that they support a narrow waiver. And I think the narrowness, because it's not spelled out in the statement, the narrowness kind of is suggested in two parts, that it should happen within the WTO framework. And then there is, of course, of that language which is also consistent with the Biden administration of during the pandemic. And I'm going to be very interested to see when everyone decides what is the magic day that the pandemic is over. And to your point, Felix, about the argument about manufacturing, that is one of the things that they emphasize in the statement, which is they say in quote, we're committed to supporting the continued expansion of vaccine manufacturing capacity in countries, both from the perspective of being able to take advantage of this set of coronavirus vaccines, but and a quote, again, to prepare for future outbreaks. So they seem to be very aligned with that market philosophy of you want to make sure that you have the infrastructure to take advantage of any of the IP that might be out there.
- [24:12]
B
The other wrinkle about this is that while I would argue that it's necessary to open up the ip, it's not sufficient that manufacturing the MRNA vaccines in particular is incredibly difficult. And it is generally accepted in the pharmaceutical world that if and when new manufacturing facilities get stood up in places like South Africa or Indonesia or Argentina, they're going to need a lot of know how from Pfizer and Moderna and companies like that that know how to make the vaccine. And when I talk to the pharmaceutical lobby, they didn't quite come out and say, well, why would we do that? But that is an obvious question. Like, the people who work in these companies, they're trained doctors, they have humanitarian impulses. It would be kind of awful for them not to give all of the help they can to people who are trying to save lives. But on the other hand, it's clear that they're going to need to give a lot of that help. And it's also clear that they don't really have any economic incentive to do that, whether or not the IP system is opened up.
- [25:28]
C
Yeah, I think that's where the public sector or places like the Gates foundation could step in and like essentially bribe the pharmaceutical companies into action. And I mean, I think it's pretty clear that that's, that's what's needed to get These big pharma companies to do anything. They, these are for profit companies. They do stuff that makes lots of money. In the case of these vaccines, they were given lots of money by the US Government. That's, that's, that's what's going on. Yeah, you just need to pay the money and then the big pharma, they'll do the stuff.
- [25:58]
B
The amounts of money involved are so small compared to the benefits that if you pay a few billion dollars to bribe pharma companies to share their know how and whatnot. Like, like given the trillions of dollars of economic benefit you get, it's just, it's such a no brainer. So just to close the loop on this one, Stacey, what do you think is going to happen to the Gates Foundation? Because Bill and Melinda Gates, back when they signed the Giving Pledge, whenever it was 15 years ago, said that they committed basically all of their money to the Gates foundation, but they haven't given it yet. They still have $150 billion or so between them that they haven't given to the Gates Foundation. Do you think they will? I kind of suspect that maybe they won't.
- [26:44]
A
Why do you suspect that they won't?
- [26:46]
B
So the reason I suspect that they won't is because it was their joint lovely married foundation baby thing. Baby. That they then sort of adopted Warren Buffett as the sort of only child. And then it was. It's just the three of them. Right. They're the only three trustees of the foundation, the Bill Gates, Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett is 90. He's not going to be around much longer. And so the idea of having a foundation that is run by two trustees who are divorced and that's going to be the place where you're going to give $150 billion seems improbable to me.
- [27:18]
A
I think that's one of the reasons that I've been keeping an eye on how folks who are in and around philanthropy have been reacting to this, whether it's this foundation or others. I mean, that's not a trivial amount of money. If they stick to the pledge, even if they stick to it in a way that's like, we're not necessarily gonna do this through this fund. What are we looking at? Are we looking at a different donor advisory fund? Are we looking at the MacKenzie, Scott Bezos route of I'm actually just going to give money to HBCUs and other causes and things that are less predictable? I am trying to be optimistic because that was my resolution for 2021 that at the very least that plus the Bezos money, as it were, will lead to a set of discussions about actually what is useful. Is it useful to go through foundations that then do other things? Is it useful to go directly to institutions that can immediately absorb into its operating budget and operational capacity what that is? Is Bill gonna like go into vc?
- [28:18]
B
He already is. I mean, that's why he has so much money. His stake in Microsoft is tiny. He's. He's been investing in all manner of stuff through his family office called Cascade. That's where his wealth is. And I think you're absolutely right that the optimistic take here, and I do have an optimistic take here, is, look, the Gates foundation is enormous. It has $50 billion. It's going to be around for as long as we're alive. It's going to be doing Gates foundation things for as long as we're alive. And it's not going to be poor anytime soon. It's already the biggest philanthropy in the world. It doesn't need to be any bigger. So if this other $150 billion winds up getting spent in non Gates foundation ways, that's fine and probably good. And I don't think it's going to just get given to their children. I do think they're going to give it away one way or another.
- [29:07]
A
Do we have anything not grim today?
- [29:10]
B
So in not grim news, Stacey, we have the news that Donald Trump is still banned from Facebook. That's good news, right?
- [29:17]
A
Donald Trump is still banned from Facebook. Well, if you're into democracy, there are certainly arguments to be made to that end. Yeah, this is the week in which if people hadn't heard of the Facebook oversight board, they definitely at least heard of it. I think one of the elements that continues to be underreported is that this is a board paid by Facebook. This is not an independent, external, hands off universe of people. It's 20 folks who were really hand selected and in most cases hand selected by Nick Clegg, who convened at great length, sent Facebook a series of questions. I believe they said there were 46 questions and Facebook declined to answer several of them and ruled as it were, that they would not overturn the ban on Donald Trump, but not because they agreed with Facebook, but because they want Facebook to go back and do a little bit more work and come up with an actual concrete policy that isn't just capricious, as it were, as to why and under what circumstances these kinds of bans are appropriate and to then assess whether, if that policy exists Would that policy say that Trump should be banned from the platform on an ongoing basis?
- [30:25]
B
Well, I mean, they did find a policy that they said justified the ban and they made it pretty clear that Facebook's given reasons for banning Trump were adequate and sufficient reasons for banning Trump. The ban they basically agreed with. What they disagreed with was the indefinite nature of the ban. They said, if you're going to ban him for a set amount of time, you can always re ban him once that set amount of time is up. But don't do it indefinitely, do it for a fixed amount of time or just do it permanently. My guess is if they just banned him permanently and said, you're kicked off the platform, the Facebook oversight board would have said, yep, okay, what you were doing was very dangerous. And that's condign punishment.
- [31:04]
A
It's the vagueness of the duration.
- [31:07]
B
And this is basically the oversight board saying, we are not going to make policy for you, Facebook. Can you please grow up and make your policies and make them explicit? And fine, I guess. But it also just goes to show how completely useless this oversight board is.
- [31:22]
A
I mean, both sides, as it were, have said that their recommendations are non binding.
- [31:27]
B
I thought they were binding. I thought oversight board was binding.
- [31:30]
A
There's recommendations and there's rulings and the recommendations are non binding and the rulings are binding. So even within what they can issue, there is wiggle room.
- [31:43]
C
I mean, and even the word like binding, not binding. Facebook can do what it wants. Mark Zuckerberg has subordinated himself, I guess, to their decisions. Or really what he's done is punted his role, which is decision maker and boss of company, to this board. And nothing will happen to him if he doesn't agree with whatever quote unquote binding decision they make. It's mostly theater here. I saw someone on Twitter say we should appeal Facebook's ruling to the Supreme Court. And it's, yeah, no, that's not how it works. This is all kind of, it's good, I guess, that Facebook has sort of independent people looking at the decisions it makes. It's better than not having that, I suppose, but it's pretty much. I think it's kind of a farce.
- [32:28]
A
I think one of the things that I'm really frustrated by with so much of this conversation is this board came out of Facebook, like many other tech companies, trying to triple down on this argument that they don't want to be editorial decision makers. Right. That they don't want to be perceived as censorious in some way or another. And that it's kind of. It's uncomfortable to them. It's also politically very challenging because the. Again, like the rhetoric is, oh, you are making editorial decisions that disproportionately infringe on the speech of Republicans. None of the research shows that to be true. And so this kind of outsourcing allows the perception of an arm's length of. Well, we didn't actually decide, someone else did. And so the board kind of going back to them puts them back in the same position as before. It's like, no, you still need to come up with a policy. Come up with a policy that's clear, cogent, applicable and then demonstrate why or why not. You're going to stick to that thing.
- [33:29]
C
Yeah, they can't abdicate responsibility. I mean, I know legally they can abdicate responsibility for the content and the speech on their platform. They can't. They really can't. I mean, I was just thinking about if you had a newspaper that ran like Facebook and it would just be like, people just publish whatever they want in your pages. And then you're like, oh, did that started an insurrection and people died, Whoops, let's ask some academics to figure out what to do about it.
- [33:57]
A
Aren't those just op ed pages?
- [34:00]
B
I mean, it reminds me a little bit of something I said in my newsletter this week, which is, you know how Peloton wants to be a media company, but whoops, people are dying, Their treadmill turns out to be fatal to small children. And they're like, oh, shit. I guess we ought to take responsibility for that, even though we really didn't want to.
- [34:16]
C
Yes, these companies need. There they are media companies. And media companies for the longest time have taken some kind of responsibility, set some limits, had some standards, like, you have to do that. You can't abdicate that to someone else.
- [34:30]
A
Well, here's the question though, like, why have media companies done that? Like, is it an honour amongst thieves? Where we sort of as an industry have said there are certain lines that you don't cross unless you are Newsmax and oann. And then whatever lines is it that there is a degree of accountability. I mean, every time I recall during the great whatever latest Piers Morgan blew up in the UK and what trickled across the pond was this idea of like, oh, my God, the UK has regulators that involve infringe on the speech of people. And that was seen as so culturally dissonant, we're gonna ignore for a second. That is not actually what the press agencies in the UK do. But there does seem to be this idea that any value assigned to speech of any kind, positive or negative, is a bridge too far. And as somebody who is still more recent to the US than I am to other countries, I find that really fascinating that there is a morality to speech.
- [35:29]
B
Totally agreed. And the big thing in the news this week was Tucker Carlson going full anti vax on Fox News.
- [35:37]
A
Yes.
- [35:37]
B
And I'm pretty sure that literally would not be allowed in the uk. The UK regulators would actually step in and say, no, you can't do that. You are killing people by doing this. Don't do that. And somehow there's a lot of hand wringing, but that's it. So long as Lachlan Murdoch's okay with it, he'll keep on doing it. And there's no sign that Lachlan Murdoch isn't okay with it. And it's terrifying that he can do that and do think that because no one is going to step in and stop him. There does need to be a lot more internal accountability in being grown up about these things.
- [36:10]
A
And no one's stopping the tech companies. Yeah, right. And so it's okay you have an oversight board, but there's no accountability for genocide. There's no accountability for suicides that are live streamed on your platform. What is the redress that we have?
- [36:28]
B
There is accountability in the form of the FTC imposing a fine on CBS for inadvertently revealing Janet Jackson's nipple. Yeah, we have accountability for that, but nothing else.
- [36:37]
A
Nothing else. And again, a question of what kind of morality is too far.
- [36:42]
B
I think it's time for a numbers round. Stacy, do you have a number?
- [36:45]
A
No, I completely forgot. Give me two seconds. I'm gonna like, pull in, Emily, and be like, is there a good Jamie Dimon?
- [36:56]
B
I will start then. I will start with $429,496.7295.
- [37:10]
C
I know what this number is. I know it is.
- [37:14]
B
Okay, what is it, Emily?
- [37:16]
C
It's Berkshire Hathaway's stock price. Is that right?
- [37:18]
A
That's going to break stock exchanges.
- [37:21]
B
Yes, we are breaking the stock exchange. Berkshire Hathaway's stock price has broken the nasdaq. It is literally too high. Okay, so stock prices are encoded on computers. Computers encoded them by putting them to four decimal places in the form of a 32 bit number, which is 2 to the 32. 2 to the 32 is basically 429-496-7295. As why it ends in the 5, I don't quite understand because it's 2 to the 32 but anyway, that's the number. And if a stock price gets higher than that, then you basically don't have enough bits to encode it. And the Berkshire Hathaway stock price got within 5% of that number and NASDAQ freaked out and basically took the A shares off its stock ticker. They say they're going to have a fix within the next couple of weeks, but I love this so much. He has been so weird about refusing to split his shares that he has now broken the stock exchange.
- [38:18]
C
So he's still not going to split the shares so far, no.
- [38:20]
B
He's still not going to split the shares? No.
- [38:21]
C
Goodness.
- [38:22]
A
Speaking of the FCC, my number is 18 million. So the New York State Attorney General announced yesterday that according to an investigation that had been happening for a few years, broadband companies lined up something like 18 million fake testimonials around net neutrality and that there was one college student in particular who was responsible for 7 million of them.
- [38:46]
C
Oh, my God.
- [38:47]
B
And, and this was like, and this was like Verizon college student.
- [38:52]
A
I have a lot of questions about the motivations of college students on my good day, but I'm like, this person spent a lot of time arguing against net neutrality and it boggles the mind that astroturfing campaigns on this scale continue to persist and persist in ways that have long standing consequences on legislation. And again, it's what's the recourse? Right? Like, we're several years past the point at which this was in the conversation. We're several years past the point at which folks like, cared about net neutrality and Internet speeds. And yet here we are. So shout out to New York for revealing what was really going on at the time that some of us were talking about this.
- [39:35]
C
The whole public testimony thing kind of confuses me a little bit. Like with the, with Facebook, they kept saying there were 9,000 public comments about whether or not Donald Trump should be on Facebook. And, and the oversight board read them all. And I was kind of like, what? They read the comments, so what does it matter? We all know. I just don't really get. I mean, I guess it gives you a sense of public sentiment or not in the case of net neutrality, but I just wonder about it a little bit.
- [40:03]
A
I suppose it's kind of a throwback to the idea that direct democracy is a way to rule. Right? Like, everybody gets a perspective. I mean, we even saw that people are faking side effects for vaccines and submitting them to vaccine side effect databases. Every story is a story about moderation.
- [40:21]
B
Emily, what's Your number.
- [40:23]
C
My number is not zero.
- [40:26]
B
Okay, Whoa.
- [40:28]
C
That is.
- [40:30]
B
This is like a metaphysical number. What kind of a number is that?
- [40:35]
C
That number comes from an article about rocket debris from a Chinese rocket that is going to fall to earth over the weekend and no one quite knows where it will land. So Times headline or the Times tweet about it and in their story they said, scientists said there is a not zero chance of this stuff falling on you or me. It's a 10 story, 23 ton piece of Chinese rocket called the Long March 5B. And it went up in the air I guess last week. And unlike what the US does with rockets, which is there's a whole yada science way to safely land it so it doesn't hurt anyone. The Chinese, according to the story that I read, are just like, it'll be fine. And the stuff just lands where it lands. So this weekend, heads up, we don't know where it's landing. One of the predictions that they said on Thursday was somewhere in northeast Africa and it's probably going to be okay, so don't worry.
- [41:40]
B
But maybe, well, 70% of the world is water, right? If it lands in the water, it should be fine. There you go.
- [41:45]
C
Not zero.
- [41:46]
A
I didn't realize that I was going to have to add like, like space debris to my list of random anxieties that keeps me up at night.
- [41:53]
C
So you should sleep well. You'll be fine, I promise.
- [41:56]
A
But not zero promise.
- [41:57]
C
Not zero promise. Okay. I wanted to credit my number to Mr. Peck, my husband, who suggested I do it. And it's a good idea.
- [42:05]
A
Shout out to Mr. Peck.
- [42:06]
B
Shout out to Mr. Peck. I think that's it for us this week. Thanks for hanging out with us. Thanks very much to everyone who's been rating in with your fabulous emails. Sleepmoneyleep.com we love them. Thanks to Jessamine Molly for producing Seaplane Armada and we will be back next week with even more sleepd money.