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- [00:10]
A
Hello and welcome to the Media Media edition of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of what was a very busy week. I am Felix Salmon of Axios. I'm joined by Emily Peck of HuffPost.
- [00:27]
B
Hello.
- [00:28]
A
I'm joined by Anna Shymansky of Breakingviews.
- [00:31]
C
Hello.
- [00:32]
A
And because we love him so much, we have the best person coming back to join us, Ed Lee from the New York Times.
- [00:38]
B
The media media media reporter.
- [00:43]
A
Ed covers all things media at the Times and is here to talk to us about Spotify in the plus segment, also about the New York Times itself. He's getting very navel gazy in this.
- [00:55]
B
Particular issue, as media reporters are wont to do.
- [00:57]
A
We're gonna talk about Instagram, we're gonna talk about YouTube lot this week, but also, of course, Tesla content.
- [01:08]
D
Because what's going on with Tesla?
- [01:10]
A
If you want to know whether to buy Tesla stock, you can do two things. You can either just Google, should I buy Tesla stock? Or you can listen to Slate Money. We will answer that question for you coming up on Slate Money. So this is the segment where we talk about Google searches. I have my Google app, and we have all tried this with various degrees of logged in and Anonymous and WhatsApp browsing. For me, when I type should I buy into Google? The first autofill is should I buy Tesla stock? And then it's followed by should I buy Apple stock? And should I buy Bitcoin?
- [01:44]
B
So I get. All I have to type is should. And I get should I buy Tesla stock?
- [01:49]
A
Wow.
- [01:49]
B
But then after I get that, I get Should I Stay or should I go? Lyrics.
- [01:54]
D
I typed should and I got should I buy Tesla stock? And should college athletes be paid?
- [01:59]
A
Which yes and no respectively, do buy Tesla stock, and no, they shouldn't be paid.
- [02:06]
C
So I also got should I buy Tesla stock? And then I got should I get bangs? And should I text him? The answer to all of those is no.
- [02:15]
B
Yeah, absolutely not. That's easy. That's good. I think there's.
- [02:19]
A
I don't know what you've got against Google.
- [02:20]
D
Tell people whether or not to get bangs.
- [02:22]
C
I know.
- [02:22]
D
I don't understand what kind of advice Google doesn't. I guess they know you well enough. They could just. Google knows you so well, it could just say, not for you, honey.
- [02:31]
A
So the answer to should I buy Tesla stock? Is obviously yes, because it's what, crazy. Like, it's how to make lots of money, right?
- [02:39]
D
Nope.
- [02:40]
C
Buy high, sell low.
- [02:41]
D
You're contradicting yourself. I mean, everyone reads your newsletter and knows that you said, what goes up really quickly must come down really quickly.
- [02:48]
A
I didn't say it must come down really quickly.
- [02:49]
D
Probably will.
- [02:50]
A
But I did say that if a stock can behave like that, if it can melt up and basically double in value in no time in the way that Tesla did, it is equally capable of melting down and halving in value.
- [03:04]
B
24 hours after it went up.
- [03:07]
A
Right. I mean, so we had.
- [03:08]
C
Wait.
- [03:08]
A
We had pause and let's have a little brief history of Tesla stock.
- [03:13]
B
Brilliant.
- [03:14]
A
Which, like, Tesla was worth $31 billion back in June, which is probably a reasonable amount of money for Tesla, if not a lot of money for Tesla. It's a car company, and that's how much car companies are worth. And then suddenly, in 2020, this stock has gone on an absolute tear. And it went up and up and up. And then after going up, it went up and up and up. And then suddenly this week, it stopped going up and it started screaming up. And it would go up like $10 billion a day, $17 billion a day, $20 billion a day. It hit a peak of, like, almost a thousand dollars a year. And then, because it's just at that point, a gambling vehicle rather than an actual company, I think it's been a.
- [03:57]
B
Gambling vehicle for a long time, actually. So the other history around Tesla stock, beyond it just being this sort of new company and worth more than GM and Ford, all these established carmakers that produce, like, millions of cars a year versus Tesla producing hundreds of thousands of year. There were a lot of short speculators against Tesla in addition to bulls. Short speculators are basically people who bet that the stock will go down. Right. And I think that had an effect this week when it surged.
- [04:22]
A
Okay, so. So, like, I have done a bunch of work on this.
- [04:26]
B
Okay. I want to. Let's get into this. This will be fun.
- [04:28]
A
I think that Anna and I are in agreement on this one. So I looked at the Tesla chart, because that's how much of a nerd I am. And I immediately said, this looks exactly the same as the chart of Volkswagen shares in 2008, because that's how much of a nerd I am. And those of us who remember Volkswagen in 2008 remember that it was the mother of all short squeezes. And it was. It briefly became the most valuable company on the planet. And this was all to do with a bunch of financial engineering by Porsche, which bought up a bunch of, like, options, which gave it control of the overwhelming majority of Volkswagen shares. So what you had was you had 12% of the shares of Volkswagen were short. Right. That short sellers had borrowed 12% of the ordinary shares of Volkswagen and then had to buy them back. And they expected and hoped that they would be able to bite them back at a lower price than they paid for them. Between them, Porsche and the state of Saxony In Germany owned 94% of Volkswagen shares. And they weren't selling.
- [05:41]
B
Wait, the state of Saxony? I didn't know that the state of Saxony could own. Okay, well, there you go.
- [05:45]
A
So there you go. So the states of Saxony owned 20% of Volkswagen and they weren't about to sell. So these short sellers, you had basically 12% of Volkswagen was short, and only 6% of Volkswagen was available to buy. So all of the short sellers, when the press release went out saying, we control this much of Volkswagen, they desperately tried to buy the stock in order to be able to cover their shorts. But of course, only half of them could get to the exits in time. And there was this insane short squeeze, and this is still to this day, 12 years later, being litigated in various courts. And like Dan Loeb and a whole bunch of people lost a fortune. And it was great. It was a great.
- [06:22]
B
But that was a squeeze, though.
- [06:23]
A
That was a squeeze.
- [06:24]
C
That's a short squeeze, though.
- [06:25]
A
That is a classic short squeeze. Yeah.
- [06:26]
C
Often, anytime there's any type of short covering, people like, it's a short squeeze. No, it's like, yeah, it has an effect, but it doesn't have that dramatic effect. There's not a supply demand issue with it.
- [06:34]
A
In this case, in the case of Tesla.
- [06:37]
D
Sorry, Because I. When you said Saxony, I just drifted off. So with that, it was basically like they needed to buy the stock, but the other people weren't selling the stock. So it just kept.
- [06:48]
A
There was no stock to buy.
- [06:49]
C
More expensive and more expensive and then in general, bail out of the ship.
- [06:52]
A
In general, the way that a short squeeze works, you don't need that kind of artificial thing. But in general, the way that a short squeeze works is you borrow the stock and then sell it. The person who lent you the stock wants some kind of collateral because you're entering into a loan agreement. And then if the value of the stock goes up, the person who lent you the stock enters what gives you what's known as a margin call. And they're like, you have to put up a bunch of money if you want to keep on being short this stock. And then the more the stock goes up, the more money you need to keep on putting up, the more you're Losing, basically, right. Until eventually you end up capitulating and end up buying the stock at a crazy high level. And all of that buying pressure from the shorts keeps on pushing the price up. And so there's this like dynamic where the more shorts there are, the more buying pressure there is on the stock. Because the more shorts there are, the more people who need to buy the stock. That was not happening with Tesla. The Tesla short interest rate now is, is lower than it has been in years. The amount of activity in the stock means that shorts can cover super easily without affecting the price because the amount of volume in Tesla is enormous. So buying pressure from shorts doesn't affect the price because literally we had one day this week where there was $60 billion of volume in one day in Tesla. And so no amount of short covering is going to really even be a drop in that bucket. So the idea that the reason it was going up was because shorts were covering and buying the stock and that was sending the stock up just doesn't pass the smell test.
- [08:30]
B
Meaning even if that were the case, it wouldn't account for that much of a rise that we saw.
- [08:35]
A
It could account for maybe like the price going up by a buck or two. It doesn't account for the price going up by $300.
- [08:44]
D
So what was it? It was just individual traders on Robinhood.
- [08:46]
A
Okay, so this is what it was. Do you want to know what it was? Yeah, I will tell you what it was. Everyone wants to know. The answer is the stock went up and there wasn't a reason.
- [09:02]
D
Come on.
- [09:02]
B
There are no, you know, that is the best answer. But it doesn't explain the phenomenon, of course.
- [09:08]
A
I mean it has how much of zero explanation?
- [09:10]
C
Well, I mean, why has.
- [09:11]
B
Yeah, I want to hear.
- [09:12]
C
Yeah, I'm just like looking at the movement of bitcoin over time. Like there is not a tremendous you off. You can get into these speculative bubbles and where there just simply is no good reason. And you can try to come up with a reason and you can come up with all these theories, but they're all going to be somewhat false. The reality is that in theory the stock price is supposed to represent something about the value of a company. And when you have something moving this dramatically, there is nothing possible that happened that could have changed the market value of this company, the intrinsic value of that company that dramatically.
- [09:44]
A
But even, even technical factors like, you know, I remember getting to a big discussion with Luke. How are Bloomb about this? He had this whole theory about people buying calls and delta hedging.
- [09:56]
C
No that's whenever anybody starts telling you delta hedging say absolutely no, it's not.
- [10:01]
A
But the point is that we as human beings are absolutely desperate for narratives and causation and we see something happen in the markets and we're like, there must be a reason, there must be a narrative. There must be a causal relationship here somewhere. And sometimes there just isn't.
- [10:21]
B
But isn't the. I agree with that. But in this particular case, the velocity of trades, the velocity of the movement was such that you kind of feel like there had to have been something. I mean, isn't as simple as, I don't know, was it robot arbitrage? No, no, no. How do you know that though? How can you say that's a no? Where does that coming from?
- [10:39]
A
Because, okay, this is what I'm saying. I'm saying this Doc Rice is random stochastic gambling vehicle thing, which is just behaving like a demented roller coaster and there's no sort of causality there. And you're saying, wait, this is so crazy, there must be a reason. And what I want you to do is to examine that statement and to say like, what reason do you have to believe that whenever there's crazy price activity, there's always a reason for it?
- [11:10]
B
Because the market is not as diverse as we think it is. Is. In other words, there are only so many. Like a lot of retail investors, regular mom and pops. There aren't that many of them. It's mostly big funds. And whether it's, it's hedge funds and, or you know, calpers, like retirement funds, there's just, there's like maybe 100 big players that move the market in so many ways every single day. And it's not like hundreds of thousands of individual people.
- [11:35]
A
Okay, can I depend an interesting little wrinkle here?
- [11:39]
B
Sure, please.
- [11:40]
A
What is the biggest, largest, most solid pot of long term stock market investing capital in the world, but certainly in America, the answer is S&P 500 index funds. They just sit there, they buy the entire index. They don't do anything. Sometimes they'll repo it out, sometimes they won't.
- [12:03]
B
Passive index is what you're saying?
- [12:04]
A
Very, very.
- [12:05]
C
No, no, no.
- [12:06]
A
Not just passive in terms of buying the passive market, which is what they do, but passively buying the S&P 500. And Adam is going to tell you what is the single biggest company that is not in the S&P 500.
- [12:20]
B
Tesla.
- [12:20]
A
Tesla. Tesla has always been a weird outlier. Tesla is not in the S&P 500 because it hasn't ever had four consecutive quarters of profit. And so that means it's not eligible for the S&P 500. And so that makes the holders of Tesla much more diverse than the holders of virtually any other stock.
- [12:43]
B
Oh, there we go. I like that explanation. So it's more diverse. And there was no reason.
- [12:49]
D
Wait, but maybe at first there was no reason when it first started going up, but then, as our Google search results show us, people went nuts and probably dropped down. And that's part of the reason, because people are like, tesla's so cool. Elon Musk is like, Iron Man. Oh, my God. Like, there is some. Some bit of that driving it up.
- [13:09]
C
Any bubble has that type of element.
- [13:12]
A
There's a kind of FOMO thing going on. But there's also what happens, and this is this bizarre phenomenon that you get in sort of late capitalism, is that people think that the stock is a good investment precisely because it's going up. And they see the stock going up and they're like, oh, yeah, this is the market ratifying the thesis that everyone's going to be buying electric vehicles, that Tesla has an insurmountable lead in the EV market, that it has this gigafactory in Shanghai, which means it's going to have an insurmountable lead in China, which is going to be the biggest car market in the world. There's this new news coming out from Panasonic saying that the batteries it's making are now a profit center. And all of these different data points coming together and then some random entity called Ark Research putting a price, price target of $7,000 a share by 2025, and all of this kind of stuff. And people like, yeah, this is going to. This is going to be the new big thing. And so Tesla at that point just becomes this dream. It's almost like the financial equivalent of a lottery ticket.
- [14:21]
B
Yes.
- [14:21]
A
And you go in there and you're like, I'm going to buy the dream.
- [14:25]
B
I just, I don't know. I don't believe that there are that many.
- [14:29]
D
That's all the articles. The Times wrote that story, the Journal wrote that story.
- [14:33]
A
But then combine that with, let's say that you own Tesla stock, right? Let's say that you're not buying Tesla stock, but you're just someone who happens to own it. And it goes from $200 to $300 to $400. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. And then some of these retail investors typing, should I buy Tesla stock into Google? Come along to you and like, can I Buy your Tesla stock and you're like, fuck no. This is fucking awesome. I'm loving this rocket ship. Even if it falls another 50%, I'm still up like a gazillion dollars. Why would I want to sell? So what happens is it becomes harder and harder to find buyers because polders are like, why on earth would I want to sell?
- [15:17]
B
And there are no robots in this, there are no hedges and there are no HFT guys programming against.
- [15:23]
A
But also there's huge volumes.
- [15:25]
C
Exactly.
- [15:25]
B
I'm contradicting myself because the volume is way too high.
- [15:29]
C
But yeah, of course those are going to be involved. But I think you also have to be a little careful because there's a tendency when anything weird happens in the market now for everyone to be like, it's the robots. But the thing is like the people who are making these, these are not like simplistic things that are just like, oh, this tells me to keep buying, so I will keep buying. Like they're very complicated. So it's actually somewhat unlikely that you're going to get that type of movement just from high frequency traders.
- [15:52]
B
I don't know. I think hypercontraders are responsible for lots of weird moves. Day to day moves, not that type of move.
- [15:58]
A
So it's true. You can see high frequency trading moves like these little mini flash crashes which happen in almost every major stock and pretty much every single day. And they last.
- [16:09]
C
Not over. Yeah, not over the time period.
- [16:11]
A
Yeah, they last for maybe a couple of seconds, not for days.
- [16:14]
B
But you know, they're robots responding to other robots too.
- [16:17]
A
That's what causes so much of this cascade, those kind of cascades. You can see them last. You can see them every day and you can. And they last for seconds. They don't last.
- [16:25]
C
Right. And quant traders are. It's not as simplistic as I think. It's sometimes portrayed as though like, oh well, you know, one thing happens and then it's just cascading effect. Like. No, like these are, these are very sophisticated.
- [16:36]
B
I have no algorithms are sophisticated. I think the outcomes aren't always sophisticated. That's the difference. I think they're, they're overly complicated at the outset, but the outcomes, what it ends up executing doesn't always look like what you thought it was going to look like. Which explains, which explains the complexity, but at the same time it doesn't suggests that the outcome is equally complex as what you're intending.
- [16:56]
A
In any case, my, my big takeaway from all of this is that everyone is being, including us, is Being distracted by Tesla stock as this like, weird animal which behaves in very odd and peculiar ways that no one can really understand. And it is a distraction to us, it is a distraction to Tesla. It is not actually helpful for Tesla as a company. And this only serves to ratify Elon Musk's desire in 2018 funding security. Take the fucking company public. Private. Rather take the fucking company private at $420 a share, which was a perfectly good price. And then if he'd done that, it looks possibly maybe as though that might in hindsight have been a reasonable.
- [17:43]
B
It would have been a bargain.
- [17:43]
A
Yeah, well, you don't know what would.
- [17:45]
C
Have been a bargain, but.
- [17:46]
A
And then he wouldn't have had all of this bullshit wouldn't be happening. And he could just concentrate on making curves.
- [17:52]
D
Yeah, but now he's set to get some like, insane payday if the stock price holds. Right.
- [17:57]
B
So if it maintains 100 billion valuation over six, at least six months and you can't fall below a certain amount.
- [18:03]
A
He gets, he gets like half a billion dollars. Yeah, but, but compared to how much he just like this guy's net worth is up $20 billion this year alone. So it's like, it's a lot of money, but it's less. But you know who else made a huge fortune this week, Jeff? Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison owns 3 million Tesla shares. So that, you know.
- [18:24]
D
And the Saudis, how are they doing?
- [18:26]
C
No, they got out right before. Yeah.
- [18:29]
A
Oh, really?
- [18:31]
B
That was a bad trade on their part.
- [18:33]
D
Oh, see, good things do happen.
- [18:34]
B
So clearly they didn't know anything.
- [18:36]
A
But in any case, Emily, as the closest thing we have in this room to Google, I'm going to ask you, should I buy Tesla stock? I mean, it's come down now, right, from, from the highs.
- [18:46]
D
No.
- [18:47]
A
Maybe it could bounce back up.
- [18:48]
D
No, don't do it. Unless you don't care about losing money. I think, don't we always say don't, don't gamble on individual stocks.
- [18:54]
A
It is, it is the new Bitcoin, like I think it is probably.
- [18:59]
C
I mean, it has somewhat more kind of a reality to its valuation than bitcoin. There's something there they in fact do actually produce.
- [19:05]
D
There is something really seductive about the argument that, like, it has the lead and I think that like, once the world finally stops relying on gas and switches over, it's going to have the lead and it's just going to like.
- [19:17]
C
That is very value in this company. Like, I think, I don't think there's this much value in this company at this stage. But you know, look, we've seen this with a lot of growth companies that have done very, very well over the past 10 years that, you know, when you're buying a company like this, you are not buying it obviously based on earnings, you're buying it based on growth, you're buying it based on expected earnings. You're like. And you can't exactly put a great on the future. We are just like, it seems like it's at this moment where as you said, either itself will become very large or at some point it'll get acquired.
- [19:49]
A
So one of the mechanisms here, which I think the Tesla bulls love to glom onto and suddenly Elon Musk has been banging this drum a lot is this idea that it's the first car company with like Internet scale network effects, that he has a gazillion hours of data already from cars that have been driving around and no other auto manufacturer has anywhere near that much data. And because he has that much data, his cars become better and become closer to self driving more quickly because it's a very data heavy kind of problem to solve. And so people wind up buying the Tesla cars because Tesla has better data. And the more people who buy Tesla cars, the better Tesla's data becomes and it becomes this insurmountable lead and no one can compete. And you know, I think that's probably false and I think that within a few years there will be other EV manufacturers competing with Tesla. But it's certainly true right now that in terms of network effects, not only in data, but also in terms of charging stations, Tesla has this huge lead and it does make a lot of rational sense for someone buying an EV to buy a Tesla just because of those network effects.
- [21:04]
C
Yeah, and I've also heard people say that when you're figuring out how you're valuing this thing that you're not, you're looking at it not just like a normal car company, but you're almost looking at it like something like an Apple where you have hardware in theory, you have software and you have services. Like you, you have a, it's a combined things, you're going to, it's going to trade at a higher multiple.
- [21:21]
A
Right. I'm talking about buying cars rather than the stock here. I'm saying that people buy.
- [21:26]
C
Why would you want to talk about the actual cars?
- [21:28]
A
Well, I mean, Elon Musk has been making this case for a while that the car is an investment. Like at some point the data will become so rich that you're going to be able to rent your car out as a self driving vehicle.
- [21:42]
C
Yeah. And that actually is very important. That is actually a big part of this idea behind this valuation is this kind of like robo taxi idea and these ideas that, that yes, exactly. You can actually make money when you're sitting at work because your, your car is self driving. Car is going to be driving.
- [21:57]
B
I think self driving is, is snake oil. That, that's not real. That's not going to happen. Not for decades and decades.
- [22:03]
A
It might happen in like highly artificial parts of, you know, the bit of Toronto that Google is building or something like that.
- [22:11]
B
Or if there's like a special lane out of the airport that takes you a mile outside, like, sure, fine, you can. But that's basically mass transit, right? That's just a rail system without rails. So.
- [22:24]
A
Okay, so you are the media media correspondent.
- [22:28]
B
Well, I'm now going to rebrand myself as the media media reporter at the New York Times. Or is it the media media media reporter because there's social media and there's, is there other media? I think social media is.
- [22:40]
A
But I feel like we've now, we can now split media into media media and social media very well. So the media media story is getting interesting. The New York Times, your very employer, just came out with some pretty amazing subscription numbers.
- [22:55]
B
Oh yeah, I was surprised myself, actually. I mean, I've been tracking the company for a while, but I think we are now at 5.2 million subscribers altogether. That includes print. But if you're looking at just the digital, it's 4.3 and change, which again I'm surprised by. And there was definitely the Trump bump in 2016 that if you look at a chart, there's this nice swoop up and then it levels a little bit, but then it continues to go up. So you could argue that that is still Trump is, he's still in office. But even after things like the Mueller report, when that was a big disappointment for the left, like subscriptions still kept going up. You know, there was this sense that, oh, as soon as this sort of whole thing starts to fizzle one way or the other, no one will be interested.
- [23:38]
A
But and in a show of like, interesting show of confidence here, the New York Times for the first time I think ever, has decided to increase the price of the digital, of the digital only digital subscription. Like, it's a bit like Netflix just did that, what last year for the first time, the first big digital price hike. Now the New York Times is doing it. They're moving it up from 15 to $17 a month.
- [23:59]
B
Right. Which, so these, all these prices are interesting, right? Netflix is about 15, 16 or 13 for a basic subscription or the standard subscription. New York times is about 15 is going up to 17. They're all similarly priced, right? Spotify.
- [24:13]
A
How much is Spotify?
- [24:14]
B
Spotify is, what is it, 10?
- [24:16]
A
I think it's 10. Yeah. Spotify is 10. Hulu's a bit less. Hulu is like six. But you have to have ads.
- [24:21]
B
Six with ads or 12 without, you.
- [24:24]
D
Know, plus is six.
- [24:26]
A
Disney six.
- [24:27]
C
Granted, I would say there's some differences between like Disney and the New York Times. Yes.
- [24:31]
B
But I think the price point forces consumers to immediately compare them in a lot of ways.
- [24:37]
A
Right, exactly. And it's fascinating to me that of all of those, the New York Times was basically at the top of the list. It was the most expensive and now it's becoming even more expensive.
- [24:47]
C
Well, but compared to like the Wall Street Journal in the Financial Times, it was less expensive.
- [24:51]
B
It was less expensive. But I guess that's the other sort of value proposition, right, which is FT and the Wall Street Journal, which I think are great papers, but it's professional. Professional or it's a niche or it's a more specified market as opposed to potentially everyone. Now they would disagree with that, right? I'm sure the Journal especially would disagree with that. No, we are meant for all educated readers everywhere. You're interested in living in the world and we live in a capitalist society. You want to read the Journal. I think that's a fair pitch. But if you look at the array of content, I think part of what helps at times frankly is all the non political coverage as well as the political coverage.
- [25:24]
D
I mean, I think, yeah, the, the big story that's really interesting is that the time the New York Times, a newspaper has managed to, I think we can say confidently now, transform itself from old media newspaper into a subscriber based.
- [25:39]
B
Media to a digital media new media company.
- [25:43]
D
Going from advertiser driven because the advertiser advertising revenue keeps falling, falling, falling to subscription based revenue.
- [25:50]
A
And this is different products.
- [25:51]
D
Now. It's not just you could, you could subscribe to the New York Times online. You can also subscribe to New York Times Cooking, the cooking app and the crossword app.
- [26:01]
B
They're both doing well and they're separate apps too. Interestingly enough, like, and I was told just anecdotally like the cooking app, a lot of the subscribers are not New York Times readers. Right. Them are in the Midwest and people.
- [26:12]
C
In the Midwest do read The New York Times.
- [26:16]
B
But relative to what they've.
- [26:18]
A
It's not a subset of the cooking. And crossword subscribers are not entirely a subset.
- [26:23]
B
So that was an interesting thing.
- [26:24]
A
And the other thing which was fascinating to me was that digital ad revenue went down.
- [26:29]
B
So that is still a head scratcher. I'm surprised by that. Right. Because it's a growing qualified audience. Right. And you are not doing as well in the advertising against that as you did the previous year. So you have more readers this year than last year, but you're selling fewer ads. That I think is surprising. I don't know. I wonder if what, what's going on there. I haven't really gotten a good explanation for why that's happening though, more broadly across digital media, display advertising has started to flatten anyway.
- [26:53]
C
Yeah.
- [26:53]
A
And I think, I think more broadly, the big trend in digital advertising, which we've talked about many times on this show with and without Ed Ly, is that it is all just getting sucked into the gaping maw of Google and Facebook, the duopoly, and no one else can get a foot in.
- [27:10]
B
Which is why subscriber revenue is that much more important. Whether the New York Times or Netflix or almost anything else at this point, if you're not Google or Facebook. The other thing about the New York Times, we're talking about media old versus new, print versus digital. They did surpass a pretty important milestone that they had set for themselves. 800 million digital revenue, which they just passed the end of, the end of last year, a year ahead of their intended target.
- [27:33]
A
Despite the fact that digital ad revenue went down, they were making so much money in digital subscription revenue that they hit.
- [27:39]
D
And so they made a lot of money from. They make a lot of money from the daily podcast. That's the one area where there's sponsorship against that.
- [27:46]
B
Right.
- [27:46]
D
Which is robust. And they. Making money from, from Hulu. From. It's, it's Hulu.
- [27:52]
C
Right.
- [27:52]
A
So I think that's tiny.
- [27:53]
B
Yeah.
- [27:54]
D
A one time little revenue.
- [27:55]
B
That's a relatively. Yeah, that's a TV show, the weekly show that, that airs both on FX and on Hulu and they're both supplying the Times with money to fund it. So that certainly helps the top line. But it's, it's, it's very small. There's also Wirecutter, which is the review site and there's affiliate revenue against that, which certainly helps. I mean, it was a very photogenic 800 million that it hit. 800.8 million was the precise number. The more important context around that though, is the, you know, the conceit around having a big enough digital business so that you don't need to rely on print. So were print to just disappear tomorrow, which it won't, but let's say it just happened all of a sudden. You still have an $800 million business, right, that's growing. So I think that was the, the sort of the mental hurdle to get past that. Can we survive as a, as an online only business? Yes, most likely it can.
- [28:40]
D
And I think that's really interesting because I was reading a piece this morning in, I think it was BusinessWeek about Warren Buffett getting out of the business and the PC.
- [28:48]
A
Yeah, I never quite understood why he was in it.
- [28:50]
D
I mean, according to the. He loved newspapers. He used to deliver them. I don't.
- [28:54]
A
Whatever.
- [28:54]
D
And he's supposed to be so brilliant, right? And there are all these, like, investors getting into the newspaper business and sort of like managing its decline. And these guys are just, they're not, they're not smart about. They could have the Times reinvented.
- [29:08]
A
It's fine.
- [29:09]
C
The Times is a special.
- [29:12]
A
We are all gonna jump on you there. There is only one New York Times. The, the Warren Buffett's newspapers are all local newspapers. No local newspaper can do what the New York Times said. You can't get a local newspaper with 5 million digital subscribers, obviously, especially not charging when you're charging $17 a month, which is in order to be able to find 5 million people paying $17 a month. And as we've said, like, that is not a mass market price. That is a premium price you need to be targeting. And you know, one person who used to sell New York Times subscriptions, like, explain this to me. Basically the top 50% of college graduates, that's who you're going after. And most Americans aren't college graduates.
- [29:56]
D
I'm not saying everyone should have done what the Times did to reinvent themselves. I'm saying the Times had people running it that cared about the Times and they did different stuff. Not everything they did was successful to reinvent themselves. Meanwhile, in the rest of America, newspapers, they just didn't have the people behind it to reinvent them.
- [30:19]
C
Right.
- [30:19]
B
Not even a way.
- [30:22]
A
And the reason. And the reason why that's.
- [30:24]
D
Maybe that could have happened.
- [30:25]
A
No, but the reason why that's not true, and there's a very good reason why that's not true is that if you look at across America, there are thousands of newspapers across America, the vast majority of which are local newspapers. Only one newspaper has been able to do what the New York Times has done. And that's the New York Times. And the New York Times is completely sui generis. And you would think if what you were saying was true, that like, oh, you just need to try a few different things and maybe one of them will work. If that was true, then you would think that statistically speaking, at least maybe eight or nine of these little local places would have been able to have some success.
- [31:02]
C
And you can't point to anything as.
- [31:05]
D
Smart as everyone said. He could have taken his wealth and his alleged strategical brilliance and he had a bunch of newspapers he could have figured out.
- [31:16]
B
He doesn't do that. Warren Buffett is not someone who creates value in companies. His investment thesis is, I'm going to find value where other investors have not seen it and then own that versus I'm going, he's not a.
- [31:28]
A
He's a passive.
- [31:29]
B
He's not a PE guy. He doesn't like, sort of turn things. Yeah.
- [31:32]
C
And to be fair, too, his whole thing is often like, I'm going to find something that's an excellent brand that has a moat around it. Whereas that is decidedly not the case with a lot of these newspapers. And also, I think it's important to, like, the success of the New York Times is also going to eat into all of those. It used to be that you had your local newspaper and that's what you written. Now you can get the New York Times.
- [31:50]
B
And I think. I think that's. The Internet has sort of broken that barrier down where, I mean, sad to say, like, so for every subscriber, new subscriber, the New York Times gets is potentially one fewer that the LA Times or the Chicago Tribune get. Right. So we then. The New York Times has sets itself up really, as a national paper in a very real way, in a very immediate way. And so it's great for the Times, but overall it kind of shrinks the news pie, unfortunately. And I think that's the bigger conundrum beyond just. I think you're right, Felix. I think the New York Times is the only one that's really doing it, that can have this brand. But you have these others trying to vie. And I think it's.
- [32:26]
A
No, I think there's a clear second tier, which is the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.
- [32:32]
B
I think the Post would probably argue with you and say, hey, actually, no, we are first tier. And there are people who are deciding between the Post and the Times. I think maybe the Journal is one of those where, like, you know what? I Get the Journal plus something else. Right. Whereas I think Post is trying to be a first tier. Your first read. Same as the LA Times. I think the Chicago Tribune. Like they're in a completely different situation with.
- [32:55]
A
All of these properties have national ambitions.
- [32:58]
B
Yes. That is, you have to not have. And that's the thing. Maybe you can't be a local paper anymore. Maybe that whole concept doesn't exist. Is not.
- [33:05]
C
Not as a profit model. I mean, I think the only way you could have local papers is if it was something that was like publicly funded as a public service. Yeah.
- [33:11]
A
Yeah.
- [33:11]
B
Which. That is something that, you know, like Lorene Jobs, who she's thinking about that working on and trying to figure out ways that you can create a model around everyone is.
- [33:21]
A
Everyone is trying to make local news work. Like apparently Patch still exists and is.
- [33:25]
B
Maybe that's crazy to me.
- [33:26]
A
That is maybe like making money somewhere. There's an interesting model going on in Berkeleyside. They just opened a new publication covering Oakland and there are interesting local news things and they're often based on some kind of nonprofit model. But the idea that you could have a public company with. What's the market cap of the New York times now?
- [33:46]
B
Like 5 billion plus?
- [33:47]
A
Well over that now.
- [33:48]
B
I think maybe it's getting closer to six.
- [33:50]
A
But like, I feel like a few.
- [33:52]
D
Years ago it wasn't a. Like we're all looking at the Times now.
- [33:54]
A
Oh yeah. No one's saying this was inevitable. No one is saying that this was inevitable.
- [33:58]
D
I just think that the. The inventiveness and the creativity they put into reinventing their business is not something seen at other. In other places in other news outlets like the Washington Post. Maybe you could make that argument now. But more it's just like they figured out the Internet a little bit, I think. And it's funny, but they haven't approached reinventing news media the way the Times has, which I think is interesting. And I don't think that other people.
- [34:27]
A
So what do you think that that's. What do you think that the really inventive thing was that the Times did in terms of reinventing news media?
- [34:35]
D
I think the way they. I think the daily was inventive. They weren't the first to do a daily news podcast, but they kind of. I mean everyone listens to that. To that show because they did it really well and no one else had sort of done it before. Everyone has copied them since. I think the cooking app is really smart. I think people had tried to do just subscriptions before and it hadn't worked. I think they approached everything with a level of excellence that I. I haven't seen in other places.
- [35:02]
C
And I think they are almost more becoming like a. Like a lifestyle brand. Like, it's not just news. Like, the Washington Post is still fundamentally news. And I think the Times has, like, a lot of what they do is not really, let's be honest, like hard news. I mean, it's, it's stuff that's fun and it's, it's. It's stuff that you used to more get in magazines, like, and they are using video and audio in really interesting ways. But it is just such a different animal. To compare it to almost any other newspaper doesn't make a lot of sense.
- [35:32]
B
I think I agree with what everyone's saying here. I think its success is a hard thing to explain, frankly, beyond sort of the excellence argument. I mean, the Journal was charging people online from the first day being on the Internet. So it's not like the Times is just sort of following the footsteps of what other companies had been doing. It's just the specific blend of things that it had, maybe, and at the specific time that it did it, that it allowed it to succeed. But again, it's hard to explain. I don't know.
- [35:59]
A
Yeah, we should be happy that the New York Times is succeeding, but I think it's a stretch to then say, well, if you didn't manage to succeed like the New York Times did, they've done something wrong.
- [36:08]
D
No, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying they tried really hard. And I don't know.
- [36:12]
A
I think a bunch of people have tried hard and then.
- [36:15]
D
And it makes me sad to see these hedge funds coming in and buying up these newspapers and just managing their decline and not. And not even trying.
- [36:22]
B
Yeah, and those are just. You know what I mean?
- [36:23]
D
They're just sucking value out of newspapers.
- [36:25]
B
Well, those papers still generate a lot of cash flow, so I think that's what they're in it for, unfortunately. By the way, 6.2 billion. That is the market. The current market cap of the New York Times trading about him is 37. He's making nice money. But people should know. I mean, it is a publicly traded company and you can buy the shares and make money off of that, but is firmly controlled by the Ox Salzberger family. There's a second class of shares that aren't openly traded that the family owns and those shares.
- [36:56]
A
This is standard for media companies, right?
- [36:57]
B
It's fairly standard for media companies. And it's to protect the journalism. It's not just about profit, but anyway, the family controls 2/3 of the board. So Carlos Slim could buy up every single openly traded share and still only control a third of the board.
- [37:11]
A
Right. We don't need to worry about Carlos Slim controlling the New York Times or.
- [37:14]
B
Anyone for that matter outside of the family for now.
- [37:16]
A
But I look forward to the day that the New York Times stock becomes. Becomes like the new gambling vehicle, like the new Tesla. But let's talk about the social media, the other side of the media coin, which is where the real money.
- [37:31]
B
The real money media. Maybe that's what we should call that, real money media.
- [37:34]
A
What is the New York Times annual revenue on? Or let's just say annual ad revenue. Where are we at now?
- [37:41]
B
Well I think the digital is something around 260 and then another print about another 260 or 300 something.
- [37:48]
A
So less, less than half a billion dollars or half a billion ish dollars, yeah, for ad revenue. Now compare that to ad revenue at.
- [37:58]
B
YouTube which is 15.1 billion.
- [38:02]
A
Compare that to ad revenue at Instagram.
- [38:05]
B
Which is 20 billion.
- [38:08]
A
And these are subsidiaries of Google, the.
- [38:12]
B
Real money business, right. Facebook Blue and Google Search. You know, these are the actual, the Dadd. YouTube and Instagram are just sort of these one time errant hobbies that turned into massive, massive, massive things. I think. However, YouTube is not a real business. I suspected for years that it loses money and I think even seeing its current financials, I still think it loses money.
- [38:37]
A
Well that's the thing. They didn't reveal whether it was profitable.
- [38:40]
C
Because this is the difference between obviously YouTube and Instagram. That YouTube, most of its revenue is going to the content producers, which is not the case with Instagram, is it? Most a lot.
- [38:49]
B
I think it is most. So $0.55 out of every dollar goes to the actual creators. Right. So the whole conceit of YouTube, right. The original thesis around YouTube is you don't need television anymore, you don't need to pay for programming. People create their own entertainment and guess what they do. 500 hours of videos uploaded to YouTube every minute. That's insane. So there's a whole wealth of expression out there that just sort of lives on this, on this repository called YouTube. And so you know, you play it, you let you download it, there's advertising against it. Most of that then goes to the people creating the videos. YouTube doesn't create anything, right? Or most, most of what's on there is not created by YouTube. So $0.55 out of every dollar goes to the actual creators. They take 45 cents. So they, their real revenue is more like 7 billion, let's say. Right. So I looked at it thinking like, all right, 7 billion. How much does it cost to run? The fact that they didn't reveal that I think is very telling. Unfortunately, we don't really have a good comparison. The best comparison I think is Netflix. They're a similar sized business in terms of send a lot of video out of the Internet. Video on the Internet is actually very expensive. We tend to think of it being sort of, oh, it's just easy. It's relatively free and data is cheap. But for as large an operation as it is, the bandwidth that it sucks up, the staffing, everything, cloud computing, servers, et cetera. So the closest comparison being Netflix. If you take out all the content costs, what they spend on content, it's something like 7 or 8 billion that Netflix spends every year just to maintain its business. Right. So if there's in any way a mirror of the cost at YouTube, I think YouTube loses money every year, but.
- [40:23]
A
It is this time suck for people with Google accounts. And it just keeps people inside the Google ecosystem. I mean, put it this way, Google Paid what, like $400 million for YouTube? Something like that.
- [40:35]
B
It was like one. A billion dollars, I think.
- [40:38]
A
Oh, a billion dollars.
- [40:38]
B
Yeah, something like that.
- [40:39]
A
I mean, that has to be up there with Instagram as one of the great acquisitions.
- [40:44]
B
Oh, absolutely. It's a fundamental part of the Internet.
- [40:49]
D
We should just say the reason we're talking about YouTube's financials is because for the first time ever, Google actually said what they were. Because now that the boys are gone.
- [40:58]
A
Right?
- [40:58]
B
Yeah.
- [40:59]
D
Okay.
- [41:01]
A
And also just because we have similar new information from Instagram, no one knew how much money Instagram was making.
- [41:08]
B
Well, the timing of that was curious, right, because Google releases YouTube financials, Total.
- [41:14]
D
Flex by Facebook, and then all of.
- [41:16]
B
A sudden it's like, huh, if you're Instagram, you're like, ah, but my business is bigger. I want this known out there one form or another. I think it was Bloomberg News that reported and I think they have great reporters and I think they did a pretty good job. But I do think the timing is very interesting.
- [41:28]
A
It's telling, but. So Instagram does not share its $20 billion with its content creators.
- [41:33]
B
They keep most of it. There's still some portion of Instagram that is similar to YouTube, where they have creators and they pass along a bulk of the ad revenue against those creators to, to those people. But for the most part, Instagram, the advertising in that works very much Like Facebook Blue, where it's just, it's the in between spaces where these ads come up.
- [41:51]
D
Instagram ads are addictive, am I right? I cannot stop clicking. I will click on the Instagram ads.
- [41:56]
C
My, it is very well targeted.
- [41:59]
A
It is the only ad that, it's the only ad unit online that anyone ever clicks on.
- [42:03]
D
100% true.
- [42:05]
A
Shopify is a multi billion dollar business. Basically on the back of Instagram ads alone. As far as I can make out, it is probably the most well designed and compelling ad unit that the entire ad industry or media industry has designed in decades. And what's fascinating to me is that when Facebook bought Instagram, everyone was like, do you think they're ever gonna be able to sell ads against this? And it turns out that it's so much more powerful than YouTube ads. So much more powerful than like standard online banner ads. So much more powerful than anything you see in your Facebook feed. It is just insane how especially luxury brands who don't advertise anywhere else online are flocking to Instagram because it's the.
- [42:58]
B
Beautiful platform, it's the thing that comes closest to what magazines once right in that way. And I think a lot of luxury advertisers were lamenting just how the Internet was for them. And all of a sudden Instagram comes along and it's sort of the beautiful life platform basically. And so it was tailor made for luxury brands and you know, fancy car commercials, that kind of a thing. So yeah, I think in that way it was sort of lightning in a bottle.
- [43:20]
D
Is it going to eclipse Facebook? Because a quarter of Facebook's revenue right now? I believe so. I mean, one day could we see a flip given how powerful.
- [43:28]
C
I mean it's interesting. I mean, I think they're also starting to do a much better job about figuring out E commerce, which I think is obviously something Facebook general wants to do on many platforms. But I think it makes far more sense on Instagram and they do seem to have a little bit of a head start. I know that is something that YouTube is also looking at, but I think YouTube has a much longer way to go. So I think if you were going to value, if you were going to value YouTube versus Instagram, I think no question, Instagram has a much more like.
- [43:53]
A
If I, if I, if I was a, you know, high end clothing company, say, and Instagram came to me and said we want to do something with E commerce with you, I would take that meeting in a second. If YouTube came to me and said I want to do something with E commerce with you, I would be like, who? Go away. No.
- [44:11]
B
Right. I don't want to be next to beheading videos. White nationalists. There is a reason. So this whole YouTube question, which like I said for years I suspected it had been losing money and I would, anytime I come across a Google source I'd bug them. Hey, do you think YouTube like what I think it loses money and they sort of like turn their heads and not kind of say anything and eventually like, like, you know, enough people sort of hinted at that, yeah, it may not be profitable, but there's a good reason why it exists. I'm like, what's the reason? They're like the data. Right. We talked about data earlier in terms of Tesla having this network. So much of YouTube viewing feeds into the algorithms and the, and the data processing against advertising, against search and their display ad network. And so it's, it gives them this extra edge that they otherwise wouldn't have.
- [44:56]
A
So the, so the kind of videos I watch on YouTube help to determine the ads that I get served on.
- [45:03]
B
Search and back the other way too. Right. So it is part of a larger ecosystem that it's hard to divorce in a lot of ways if you really want to value. So they dominate.
- [45:12]
A
This explains Maps. I mean Maps is the most astonishing product. And as far as I can make out, revenue from Maps is basically zero. I mean it might be tiny, tiny, tiny, but it's a really important part of the Google in ecosystem because of the data that they know about me, because of what I give them from using Google Maps that then feeds into all manner of other revenue streams they can get somewhere else.
- [45:37]
B
Yeah.
- [45:37]
C
And also thinking about kind of data moving forward, I mean this is slightly anecdotal but I mean I think from like the 0 to 4 set, YouTube has a lock on them like and in a way that also does. I have seen personally sell products like.
- [45:50]
B
Anything that's astounding to me. Right. But you're right. You're absolutely right. And it's just at every stage of your life there is something on there for you that it's hard to. My daughter's 15 and she does, you know, she's got homework on occasion and there's something, there's a YouTube video that explains something in, in some form or another. Everything from the math equations, quadratics to you know, what happened to Charlemagne and what like, it's just, it just, there's enough on there that there's huge utility.
- [46:14]
C
No, I mean like my 3 year old nephew, all of the Christmas Presents he wanted. He saw YouTube videos of kids playing with those Christmas presents or those.
- [46:21]
A
Whereas all of the Christmas presents that my wife wants, she gets from Instagram. Okay, let's have a numbers round. Okay. What's your number, Emily?
- [46:30]
D
My number is 15. 15%, because that is the broker fee I spent on my first apartment in New York City, which I went back. I think it was about like $1200 back then because my first apartment was pretty cheap all in. But it was really hard to come up with that $1200 back then.
- [46:49]
A
That's rent.
- [46:50]
B
A lot of money.
- [46:51]
A
On top of the first month's rent, on top of last month's rent, on top of the security deposit.
- [46:56]
D
That was really tough.
- [46:56]
A
Where are you meant to find all of that?
- [46:58]
B
How does anyone move to New York?
- [46:59]
D
I don't know how I did it, actually, looking back, but the good news is no more brokers fees in New York City. This sort of snuck it on all of us.
- [47:08]
B
That is amazing that they snuck it into the bill and that basically this trade group just like, were caught unawares, right? It's amazing to me.
- [47:16]
A
And then, and then they came out with all of these like, like squeals of pain, saying, but this is gonna really hurt the rental brokers industry. And everyone's like, yeah, that's the point.
- [47:27]
B
No one is crying for that.
- [47:28]
D
No one is crying. And some people start to say, oh, but rent might go up. And it's like, first of all, rent always goes up in New York City. And second of all, just the difference between trying to gather up that broker fee versus just a little bit extra every month.
- [47:41]
A
But also, but also the broker, what they're saying is that the broker's fee is going to be reflected in the rent. And that is, is possibly true. But what they're not saying is that the broker fee is going to come down substantially because when the landlords weren't paying it, they didn't care. Now that they're paying it, they're going to be price sensitive.
- [47:59]
B
Ha ha.
- [48:02]
A
What's your number?
- [48:03]
C
My number is £4 and 50 pence. So this is maybe what the cost of the sandwich is that got the city trader fired.
- [48:14]
A
It was a sandwich.
- [48:15]
C
I've heard it was a sandwich. Now it may not, as I've said.
- [48:19]
B
What?
- [48:19]
C
This could be wrong. So there was this Citigroup trader in London who apparently stole possibly a sandwich from a canteen, like, just like the cafeteria once, one sandwich, and got fired.
- [48:31]
B
What?
- [48:31]
C
Or no, I shouldn't say. I think he's Suspended. I'm not sure if he's actually fired.
- [48:34]
A
I think he got fired.
- [48:35]
C
Fully fired.
- [48:35]
A
Yeah. Because they fired him before the bonuses were payable.
- [48:38]
C
That's right.
- [48:39]
D
So from the company, he was making.
- [48:42]
A
Literally millions or at least a million.
- [48:44]
C
Why did he steal a sandwich? No one knows. No one knows.
- [48:48]
D
He's in a rush.
- [48:49]
B
No, I think. I mean, I think there. Isn't it just the thrill, Right? Like, ultimately, these guys, they just. They're in it for the thrill.
- [48:55]
D
It's like when Kendall stole from.
- [48:59]
A
It's just like Kendall's doing. From the news.
- [49:00]
C
Winona Ryder.
- [49:02]
B
I remember one time in Sun Valley. Like, you know, it's. This is the big sort of mogul retreat, and it was in the coffee shop, and I'm. You know, billionaires are going through there, Right? And I saw one of the billionaires just come in, take a paper, and walk out and not pay for it.
- [49:18]
A
Name names. Edley.
- [49:19]
B
Yeah, I'll have to think about that.
- [49:22]
A
What's the number?
- [49:23]
B
So I've got a tricky number. It's a little bit of a cheat. One million. That's my number.
- [49:28]
A
Okay.
- [49:28]
B
That is the number of subscribers that the New York Times netted last year.
- [49:34]
A
That's the Delta.
- [49:35]
B
That is the Delta.
- [49:36]
A
Okay.
- [49:36]
B
One million is also the number of subscribers that Disney generated in two weeks in January. Right. One million is also the number of subscrib Netflix netted over 10 days.
- [49:48]
D
Oh, my God.
- [49:49]
A
Wow.
- [49:50]
B
So that's a way to think about what we've been talking about earlier.
- [49:53]
A
My number is 80 billion, because I love big numbers. I love this number so much. 80 billion is the number of sea urchins that are ravaging the Norwegian kelp forests. There's a bunch of kelp in Norway. And. And thanks to global warming and various other things, it's not just Norway. It's also in California. It's also in Australia. Basically, around the world, everywhere you find kelp, there's this horrible invasion of sea urchins. And there are 80 billion sea urchins in Norway. And it's super harmful for the life in the oceans because these kelp forests support enormous numbers of fish and other things, and the urchins just come along and eat them all and destroy them, which means that there is a huge opportunity here, new food supply for us all to go completely batshit bonkers. Eating uni.
- [50:53]
B
Yes. I was about to say, like, when you said sea urchin.
- [50:55]
A
Hmm. And I'm like. And so people are setting up uni firms in, like, Norway and all over the world to try and take these sea urchins and turn them into something delicious and profitable and good rather than just evil. And then once you start farming the urchins, that allows the kelp forests to grow back. So uni is the best thing you can eat and we should all be eating more of it.
- [51:15]
B
Let's have them with breakfast. I love it with scrambled eggs.
- [51:18]
A
I mean, it does taste good with scrambled eggs. Yeah, yeah.
- [51:20]
D
Can you eat that?
- [51:22]
B
I'm seeing a lot of blank stares on the other side.
- [51:24]
A
So sea urchins are a bit like oysters in that they don't. That's true.
- [51:27]
C
You could probably make an argument they.
- [51:28]
A
Don'T have a nervous system. So if you are the kind of vegetarian who doesn't eat things with an. I mean, they're living things, but then carrots are living things. Right? It's all living. So the question is, where do you draw the line? Draw the line?
- [51:39]
C
Yeah, yeah. Okay, Maybe. Maybe I'd eat some uni.
- [51:41]
D
Oh, fun.
- [51:42]
C
We should have an ooh, just for the kelp. I'll do it for the kelp.
- [51:46]
B
To save the kelp.
- [51:47]
A
Yes, save the kelp. Okay. Wow. On which note, I think we are gonna wrap up Slate Money this week. Thank you, Ed Lee, for coming in. It was amazing to have you.
- [51:58]
B
Always a pleasure being here.
- [51:59]
A
Thank you, Jasmine and Molly for producing. Thank you all for listening. Do stay tuned for the Sleep plus about Spotify and keep the emails coming, please. Sleepmoney at slate. Com. We will talk to you next week on Sleep Money.