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- [00:10]
A
Hello. Welcome to the Quick Bites edition of Slate Money, a guide to the business and finance news of the week. This is your quick bite of information from me, Felix Salmon of Axios, from Emily Peck of HuffPost, from hello. From Anna Shymansky of Breakingviews.
- [00:33]
B
Hello.
- [00:33]
A
We are going to be talking about Robinhood Day trading, stock market frothiness and just how bad it is or isn't. We are going to be talking about Quibi, the streaming service that you almost certainly are not paying for. We are going to be talking about children's nutrition and what what has happened to that over the course of this pandemic. And in the Slate plus, we're going to be talking about PPP shaming and whether we should be upset about people who received money from the PPP who maybe didn't deserve it or who you might think didn't deserve it. That's this week. And next week we are going to be running a live show. If you want to be part of the taping of the live show, just tune in to Slate Money Live on Wednesday evening at 7pm Eastern. The link for that is in the show notes. All of that coming up on Slate Money. We're going to start with Robinhood, which is the place where you go to trade stocks when you think they're going up. Basically. It seems to have become that. Anyway, there's a lot of stocks going up right now, Tesla being the one you've almost certainly heard of. It's now trading, I believe the technical term is $8 billion a share, something like that. It is bigger than every other car company in the world combined. The stock only ever goes up. This proves the Bastille Sports guy's thesis that stocks only ever go up, especially if they're Tesla and there's a whole bunch of others, because Tesla is an electric car company. There's been this halo effect on other electric car companies, even ones which have no products, like Nikola, which was just an obvious Tesla knockoff, which is now worth $20 billion despite the fact that it has no product and basically no revenue. And no revenue. There's a spac. There's literally a company which doesn't even own anything. One of these special purpose acquisition, blank check companies which like doubled in price just on a rumor that it was going to buy Fisker, which is a bankrupt electric car company, basically. It's unbelievable. There's so much frothiness. One of the things that I mentioned in my newsletter this week was lemonade, which I can say this on the podcast, is a crappy home insurance startup came out of the gates to this IPO and is now worth billions of dollars for no obvious reason, except for something, something Millennial ipo, something. And there's all of these blank check companies, which don't own anything and have no revenues, and they're all, you know, raising billions of dollars. And the place where all of the cool kids are buying all of these stocks and shares is Robinhood, because Robinhood was the first company which allowed you to buy stocks and shares for free. So, Anna, what is your opinion on all of this?
- [03:35]
B
Well, pretty much bad. Just in a word, bad. I mean, I think this is an example of where sometimes friction is good. You know, in the same way that we probably don't want to underprice things like cigarettes because we don't want people to smoke so much. When you underprice stock trading, especially for retail investors who have no idea what they're doing, the consequences are not going to be good. Robinhood was created with this idea of they're going to democratize finance, that so many young people aren't invested, and thus they're missing out on all of the gains in financial assets. And there's some truth to that. The problem, of course, is that we do have a way to democratize finance. They're called index funds. They're cheap. You don't have to constantly trade and lose money. They make perfect sense. What Robinhood is, is simply a way for young people to lose money.
- [04:26]
A
And what they have done is they have built an incredibly addictive app with a bunch of gamification aspects to it where, like, confetti fills the screen every time you buy or sell anything, and they make it so that you really want to be trading a lot on the platform for reasons that we will go into. And that gamification is just really bad. And when I say really bad, I mean really, really bad, as in it looks like it actually caused one kid to commit suicide. Like, that bad.
- [04:58]
B
Yeah, I mean, I mean, I'm always cautious about, you know, saying any suicide is connected to, you know, any specific event. But.
- [05:04]
A
But there was clearly a major, major user interface fuck up with Robinhood that basically this kid started trading options on Robinhood, which, like, you know, financial advice from Felix and Anna, never trade options anyway. This kid was trading options on Robinhood, and Robinhood is actually quite good about not allowing you to trade options in a way that will let you lose more money than you have in your account. But because of the way they displayed the results of one leg of a trade without displaying the results of another leg of a trade. He thought that he was down $730,000 or something like that. And it looks like that was a major contributor to his suicide. And Robinhood obviously need to fix that now. But it is related to this kind of high speed, fast twitch gamification and basically stock trading being the new hot video game that the gorgeous are playing.
- [06:01]
C
Yeah, I was going to say, the reason we're talking about Robinhood now, and it's been getting a lot of coverage now is since the pandemic started, it's seen an uptick in business. And specifically, there's that guy, the barstool sports guy, what's his name? Dave Conway, who's like made. Made this his thing. Right. He used to be betting heavily in sports and now he like live streams his stock picks. He's like a millennial Kramer, basically bringing a lot of attention to stocks for that go up and stocks that go down also, and saying like crazy things about Warren Buffett and basically has made Robin Hood into like a thing.
- [06:44]
A
My favorite partner story, there's this wonderful video online where he literally pulls letters out of a Scrabble bag and says, oh, here's one letter, here's another. That's the stock ticket. I'm going to put $200,000 into that stock ticket. It's just pure trolling all of the investment professionals out there. And because the stock market has been doing so well for the past three months, you know, basically anything you do makes money, so long as you're basically long rather than short. And so he was making money, and so he's like, look, this makes money and everyone else wants to do it too.
- [07:15]
C
Yeah. It seems like a very bad trend. It reminds me of back when day trading was big during the dot com boom, right. And people were like, it's so easy, no problem.
- [07:24]
A
And that was when it was like $12 a trade. Now it's $0 a trade.
- [07:28]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [07:30]
B
I mean, I think there are a few things that are scary about this, but one is that if you studied economic history, when you start to see this kind of behavior, something is very, very wrong. I think that the Fed has acted very well in a lot of ways. However, there is so much liquidity in the system right now that equities are just so massively overvalued, and it's creating a lot of really bad behavior. And I think that if history is any guide, this is going to end very, very badly.
- [07:58]
A
The one thing we should talk about is this thing called Payment for order flow. One of the complaints that people have about Robinhood is that the reason that they can offer free trades is, is that they get paid by Citadel and Virtue and other big high frequency traders who take the other side of, of the customers trade and they say get money from HFTs rather than charging money directly to their customers for doing trades. This I am 100% convinced is not a problem. Every single brokerage basically does this. Robinhood does it a bit more, as in they basically sell their trades to the highest bidder. But the one thing you need to know about this, the only thing you need to know about this is if you do use Robinhood to buy and sell stock, then you will be getting what's known as NBBO National Best bid offer. You will get the official price on the ticker at the New York Stock Exchange. You will not get a worse price than that. Some other retail brokerages do give you what's known as price improvement and they will give you a tiny bit better than NBNO. But we're talking about talking like a fraction of a cent here per share. It's really nothing. So that is not a big problem as far as I'm concerned or as far as basically anyone who knows what they're talking about is concerned. But it does explain why Robinhood has this strong incentive to maximize the amount of trading that happens on their platform because that's where they get their revenue.
- [09:27]
B
Right. And in that sense, just like we've probably had this criticism of many social media outlets is that we. When your business model is based on user activity and that user activity is actively hurting the users, you might not be paying in commissions, but you're paying in other ways. Because we, I mean like this is just something that's very well known. The more you trade, the worse your returns tend to be. This is often even the case with professional traders.
- [09:55]
A
It is the case with professionals.
- [09:56]
B
It is in fact. Yeah.
- [09:57]
A
And Robinhood is the place where people do their gambling. There's definitely like one of the things that people do is they point to Robinhood compared to say Charles Schwab and they say Charles Schwab people don't trade this much even though they have zero dollar trades. Robinhood people trade much more. But I think one of the reasons for that is because Charles Schwab is where you kind of put your safe borrowing retirement funds. And then if you are bored during the pandemic and want to start gambling with a couple thousand bucks, you, you take that couple thousand bucks out of Charles Schwab put it into this little sandbox called Robinhood, where you feel like this is gambling money, which you can afford to lose, and then you gamble with it, and then you either make money or you lose money. And I do think that a lot of people are making a kind of category error here that they are treating the investors in Robinhood as though they are investors in Vanguard target funds or something, and they're not. The investors in Robinhood are, you know, a lot of, like, young kids who are playing a game. And certainly when I was their age, I didn't have any money in the stock market. And if these kids end up at the end of the day with no money in the stock market, like that's where all kids normally wind up is with no money in the stock market. You know, they're playing a game. It's a gambling game. In gambling games, most people normally lose. And it. I think it. While it's definitely true that people are going to be losing money on this, I don't think that the money they're losing is like important retirement net worth so much as the stuff they are playing with on this game app that they have on their phone.
- [11:30]
C
Is what they're doing having a distorting effect on the market, though? I think we talked about a few weeks ago, bankrupt companies, stocks going up, Hertz went bankrupt, but the stock went way, way, way, way up because of this kind of activity. And you were just saying that companies with no revenues or products, their stock is really high. Is it really?
- [11:51]
A
Yeah, it's a bit like Bitcoin. There's no, like, you know, if there's no value there, it's a pure gambling vehicle. And the Robinhood folks love pure gambling vehicles.
- [12:00]
C
So it doesn't harm anyone to have those companies.
- [12:03]
B
Yeah, I mean, I don't know. It's hard to say. I mean, Felix, I mostly agree with you. I guess if it's very clear that this is simply people who are playing around with money they have to lose, that's one thing. I'm just not entirely sure if that's actually the case. I don't know. It's possible. I know that there are this kind of anecdote about people using their stimulus checks and they didn't really need them, so they just go on Robinhood. And I guess, fine, if you were just going to use it to buy something you didn't need and now you're going to gamble it, whatever, that's fine. But I guess my concern is that it does kind of create this belief that this is investing, this is how you like build wealth. Because people talk about it as they are investing and that's not what this is.
- [12:50]
A
And I think that, and you're right, that is the other category era that's happening is that the kids who are playing this gambling game think that the gambling game that they're doing is investing. And certainly I know a bunch of people who are like, I'm going to start investing in the stock market and I'm going to do something very sensible like just buy a bunch of S&P 500 index funds and sit on them. But because they're a certain age, in a certain demographic, the place they choose to do that buying and holding of index funds is Robinhood. And in principle there's no problem with that. But in practice, it's kind of a suboptimal place to do that because of the way that the app is designed to encourage you to trade.
- [13:38]
C
Thinking about it a little bit, if people are actually spending their stimulus money on like garbage gambling of stock, that's not what the stimulus money was supposed to do. It was supposed to go to the real economy and like, you know, stimulate it. Like buy goods, services, etc. Like fireworks. This seems like not good for the economy at all. Yes, by fireworks, but this seems like really bad. It doesn't. It's like it's basically garbage. Sending money to high frequency traders and this company, Robinhood. Right. I guess that's theoretically good for the economy a little bit, but doesn't seem as good.
- [14:15]
A
No, you're absolutely right.
- [14:16]
B
You're right.
- [14:17]
A
Stimulus checks are being spent in the stock market. That was not the aim. Which is why the next round of stimulus really should be targeted in other ways. Like, for instance, really concentrate on things like restaurants and state and local governments and people who are going to spend the money in places where it needs to be spent in the economy rather than putting it into Tesla.
- [14:41]
B
Yeah, maybe spending more money, but giving it to the people who actually need it and not those who will gamble.
- [14:49]
A
So the one thing that we know for sure is that people are bored in a pandemic and they need fun things to do on their phones and they're doing fun things on their phones and they're playing games and they're trading stocks and. And so it turns out that this was perfect timing for Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman who launched this fun app for people to play on their phones, which was full of bite sized chunks of video content made by the hottest video creators in the world. And it launched with great fanfare and they raised $1.75 billion. And this is why me and you and everyone we know are glued to our phones. We consuming bite sized chunks of video content on Quibi, which is their app. Is that not the case, Emily?
- [15:36]
C
That is not the case, Felix. Quibi.
- [15:39]
A
Damn, I got it wrong again.
- [15:41]
C
Sorry, man. Quibi, which stands for quick bites, but is not pronounced Qui by. It's Quibi and it's not pronounced.
- [15:52]
A
It's not pronounced omakase either, which was the original name they wanted to call it. Right?
- [15:57]
C
So I guess it was Katzenberg and Whitman. And there was fanfare. They made themselves out to be like the next second coming of Netflix. They pitched this as, as it was going to compete with the big boys. But the reason we're talking about it, one of the reasons is there was a great piece in New York magazine, sort of like giving you the inside story of what a disaster this startup has been. And it does seem like it's been a disaster. People got free trials and they're ending right now. And the estimates are of those who actually signed up are really, really minuscule.
- [16:31]
A
72,000 was the one I saw. Yeah, no one is. No one is paying for Quibi. How many people downloaded it? I think was like 5 million or something. How many of those 5 million actually bothered to open it and watch something? I don't know. But how many of those 5 million converted into paying customers? Looks like it's been just painfully, embarrassingly low. And there's a lot of schadenfreude going around in, you know, various communities enjoying the spectacle of Jeffrey Katzenberg falling flat.
- [17:03]
C
On his face because it just, it seems like they don't understand the Internet or honestly, the 21st century. Like, at one point in this Vulture story, Gal Gadot has a meeting with Jeffrey Katzenberg and he says to her something like, we want to make you the new Jane Fonda and have you do workout videos. Which, I mean, my God, that's like a 1970s cultural touch point. And apparently like her face fell and it was just a disaster. But I mean, they didn't even. If there's one thing we all know, and I'm not the most, I'm not even a millennial, I'm not that savvy. But like, I know that if you want people to talk about your shows in 2020, like, you make it easy to screenshot them so you can share them on social media. And Quibi didn't even make any of its bite sized content chunks of content screenshottable, which.
- [17:53]
A
Or shareable in any way.
- [17:55]
C
So dumb.
- [17:56]
A
In fact, when they launched, they wouldn't even let you watch their incredibly expensive video content on a television. They wouldn't let you, like, stream it through your tv. They seemed determined to make this as hard to find and as hard to share as possible. And in fact, the only thing that went viral from Quibi, like, in the entire history of Quibi was, as far as I can make out, was, like, someone using one phone to video a second phone which was showing. Is it Rachel Brosnahan, like, Mrs. Maisel.
- [18:24]
C
With a golden arm.
- [18:25]
A
With a golden arm saying, bury me with my golden arm. And it was just this, like, incredibly camp. Everyone just started laughing at how bad it was. So, yeah, it doesn't seem to have worked. But one of the reasons why this is a fun story to me and not just pure Schadenfreude, is that this was a company which did a $1 billion Series A. This company, pre revenue, became a unicorn. And not just became a unicorn, it became what I call a minotaur. It became a company that raised over a billion dollars in cash in a single round with no product, just based on the strength of. Here we have a couple of, like, boomers who are really in with what the kids are gonna want. It was amazing.
- [19:15]
C
Katzenberg has a huge reputation, right? I mean, he was at Disney when they had their, like, first run of huge hits in the 90s, and then he went to DreamWorks and, like, did amazing things there with Shrek. So, like, he had that reputation, right, that he could do something amazing. And I think people bought it.
- [19:33]
B
And I think that that probably hurt him to a certain extent because he was very successful at a different time when he was in media, but in a sense, like a different kind of video media. And it appears that he just assumed that because he had this brilliant idea, it must work because previously these other ideas worked. And because we just have way too much liquidity in the system and he can raise a ton of money from it, that is just going to kind of justify his belief. And then they're going to throw so much money at these, like, to create new content for a service that no one at that point was subscribed to. I mean, no part of it made sense.
- [20:09]
A
No part of it made sense. Except, like, one of the other amazing things is they managed to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, if not actually close to a billion dollars, I think, in actual revenue from advertisers. They sold ads against this content, you know, and the advertisers were bought in on the idea that people would be watching it. Haha.
- [20:31]
B
You can step back and I remember when I first heard about this, and I'll be perfectly honest, I thought it was dumb from the beginning, but I do remember that, you know, people are, there's, you know, want to watch, obviously, good content. People spend a lot of time watching content on their phones. People do watch a lot of kind of, you know, shorter bits of video. That's all true.
- [20:52]
A
It's called TikTok.
- [20:53]
B
Yes, that's exactly the thing. It's like they don't seem to understand that, especially when you're dealing with smaller bites. You don't need that to be like Mad Men. In fact, you almost don't want it to be. The whole point of usually when you're watching short videos is that you just want some stupid funny thing.
- [21:08]
A
And as someone who has spent more hours than they care to admit, like just falling into TikTok holes and watching stupid funny things, that is exactly what you want on your phone. You're absolutely right. I do not want to be watching the Wire in like three minute chunks.
- [21:24]
C
Yeah, you just want your quick bites to be funny and kind of raw. And, you know, you don't want credits on your quick bites. You don't want golden arms, really on your quick bites.
- [21:33]
A
I mean, the golden arm is pretty funny.
- [21:35]
B
The golden arm is pretty funny.
- [21:37]
C
I mean, what does it tell us about the streaming wars? I mean, while Quibi was flailing and failing, Disney seems to be so far a pretty big success. Like, they just had Hamilton come out.
- [21:49]
A
They had a big coup with Hamilton. Everyone was talking about Hamilton.
- [21:52]
C
Yeah, and the Mandalorian was a big hit too. So they seem to be like everyone, maybe me, was saying that there wasn't any more room for streaming services, but it seems like actually there was room, but they did a very bad job.
- [22:07]
A
I think there's room for two. I think there's room for Disney and there's room for Netflix. The jury is still very much out on hbo, Max and on Hulu, which is also Disney, but it's like a different bit of Disney, I guess. But the Disney and the Netflix are clearly the winners. And it remains to be seen whether people are really willing to pay for three.
- [22:31]
B
Well, I mean, I think you could end up having a number of streaming services because certain ones will appeal to certain people. So everyone might not have all three of them, but people will have different groups of two of them or even if there are five of them.
- [22:45]
A
But the one thing we're pretty sure about is that one of them is not going to be Quibi.
- [22:49]
B
Yes, none of them will be Quibby.
- [22:52]
C
Wait, did you read the part in the New York Magazine story where they ask the author asks Meg Whitman, like, what's a TV show you like? And she's like, well, I don't really like TV that much. And she says, well, I like this TV show on the History Network called Grant. It's about President Grant.
- [23:15]
A
Priceless. Emily Felix, I want to talk a little bit about, go back to this pandemic thing because that's still going on, you know, raging stock markets and streaming wars notwithstanding, what has been the effect of the pandemic on this is going to be a big enough to want, I'm afraid, kids nutrition.
- [23:39]
C
It's had a very outsized effect on kids nutrition. I wrote a story yesterday about census data that shows that almost 14 million children are living in households that are food insecure and they have gone hungry a few times. Some of the time the snapshot was taken in June, so it's 13.9 million children. And for context, that's almost three times as many children going hungry as during the Great Recession. Like, these numbers are absolutely unprecedented since they've been keeping track of the numbers, which was starting in 2001. So, like, I couldn't tell you if it was worse than the Great Depression or anything like that, but there's something really extraordinary and horrifying going on right now. We have a huge economic crisis going on, and I don't feel like I'm seeing people pay enough attention to it. And when I saw these numbers this week, I was just really shocked and saddened by them.
- [24:39]
B
What jumped out at me about this was that it kind of revealed this somewhat larger issue, which is that part of the reason you have so many kids that are experiencing hunger is because so many kids get fed at school. And I think this just underscores how dependent so many kids are on getting, you know, again, on getting their nutrition from school. And so that's doesn't really surprise me why you would see much bigger numbers now as opposed to the Great Recession, because obviously kids still went to school during the Great Recession then.
- [25:06]
C
That's only just part of it. Part of it is right, kids are missing out on the free breakfast and the free lunch they normally would get at school, although some schools are providing, you can go pick it up. But it's also the unique pressures of this pandemic. So even people who still have money and jobs, their Money isn't going as far as it used to to buy groceries. The, the cost of groceries has gone up like quite a bit. Like maybe you and I haven't noticed that much, but like the staples, eggs, you know, milk, butter, meat, it's all gone up a lot. 10% in some categories. So there's that aspect of it too. So it's really, it's not even just the school piece. It's sort of like everything at once. And it's really hitting families hard. I mean, we've all seen the lines, right? The lines for people at food banks. And so we like, you know, it's a problem. But like these numbers are really striking too because even famil are food insecure. Usually parents will go without eating so that their kids can eat. So these numbers don't usually get that high. But the fact that it is this high is really bad.
- [26:08]
A
And the bigger picture here is that food insecurity for children is basically the same thing as educational and cognitive harm. If you look at a lot of the talk about quote unquote, bad schools and bad school districts and that kind of thing, a lot of time, if you kind of scratch the surface a little bit, really what you're talking about is areas where a bunch of kids are going hungry and are not eating well enough. And where you have kids who are hungry and not eating well enough, they will do badly at school whether or not even if they're attending school, they will do badly if they're not attending school. Then their educational achievement and attainment is just going to get destroyed. And I think this is going to be a hugely lasting consequence of this pandemic is that it is going to turn out to have really put a lot of kids like destroyed years of their education. It's not just that they aren't getting new education, it's that they're losing some of their existing years of education and it's going to be terrible for an entire generation.
- [27:17]
C
Yeah. And I mean the long term effects of going hungry when you're a child, it's your financial achievement as your social development, everything. It's, it's. To repeat myself, it's very bad, long term, really terrible consequences for these children, for their lives, basically, and kind of preventable in my opinion. Like we have good. It's not like we had to create something whole cloth to address the issue. We have, you know, we have snap, we have food stamps. Right. And the stimulus passed in March did expand SNAP a little bit and that's going to expire soon. We could have done more, I think, and the Trump administration slow walked a lot of the expansion and put limits on it. That left out, like, 5 million children. I think it's. It's really shameful. And it shows just, like, how poorly we've handled this whole thing. There's lots of ways to show how poorly we've handled this whole thing, but children going hungry, to me is, like, maybe the worst, right?
- [28:14]
A
Especially since, as you say, it's such a preventable problem. Like, this is something we know how to solve, and we can solve it for relatively small amounts of fiscal stimulus. And what's more, as we were talking about Robinhood, this is the kind of money that would not wind up going into buying Tesla shares. This would go into feeding kids who need to be fed.
- [28:36]
B
And also, it's not just that this wouldn't cost a lot. It would have a negative cost in the sense, I mean, it would make the economy long term, much more productive. That's something they show over and over again, that when you invest in, whether you're talking about health or education of children, that has a demonstrative impact on GDP far more than a lot of the ways the government tends to spend. So, number one, we should certainly be spending in this way. There's absolutely no excuse not to. And if anything, I think food stamps are great, but I think shifting to a system where we are simply giving people more money and allowing them to spend it on whatever they want, as opposed to food stamps, which is like, well, you can buy this, but you can't buy this. You can go to this store, but you can't go to this store, doesn't make a lot of sense, especially in a pandemic where everything's more complicated.
- [29:16]
A
Right? I mean, the problem with that, and I am totally down with the whole sort of unconditional cash transfers and that kind of thing, the problem is identifying these 13.9 million kids. You know, you can do sort of statistical techniques, as we just saw in June, to work out roughly how many of them there are. But there's a big difference between knowing how many of them there are and knowing who they are. And so by all means, if we can work out exactly who they are, then just give those families more money. That's a great thing to do.
- [29:49]
C
Some would say just give everyone more money, like Claudia Sam at Equitable Growth, just send out the money. Just keep giving the money out, and people will spend it. Unfortunately, some will spend it at Robinhood. But like, as we saw with stimulus checks, like people who really needed that money. Spent it pretty quickly, and they spent it on groceries, utility, and rents.
- [30:11]
A
Let's have a numbers round. I'm going to start. My number is 400,000, which is the number of people per day that crossed the Brooklyn Bridge when it was first opened. When it was first opened, it only had trains, bicycles, and pedestrians. That was it. Now, as anyone who's crossed the Brooklyn Bridge knows, it's mostly cars. And the number of people who cross it every day is less than half that what it used to be. So there was a pair of articles in the New York Times this week, one by Michael Kimmelman and one by Farhad Manju, both talking about how New York City in particular and cities in general can and should be transformed by basically decarring them. And I feel like this was the week for banned cars. And I just. I'm always there for any kind of ban cars rhetoric. And this was a good band cars week.
- [31:09]
B
Yeah. Well, two things, though. I would say outside of pedestrians and people riding bikes, there was also an elephant that first crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. Jumbo the elephant. When they first opened Brooklyn Bridge, they had cross it so that people would realize that it wasn't going to collapse. Fun fact. And I'll also say I am one of those people that crosses the Brooklyn Bridge frequently because I live close to it and I run on it almost every day.
- [31:28]
A
How many selfie sticks have you been dodging? Is the number of tourists way down?
- [31:32]
B
The number of tourists is way down. You know, the issue is not selfie sticks so much as people taking their effing engagement photos. I can't tell you how angry I get having to dodge the idiots that are getting married.
- [31:46]
A
Last time I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, there was this extremely pregnant person doing a photo shoot on the Brooklyn Bridge wearing nothing but a very flimsy negligee. And I don't know, apparently it's a thing to do. Like naked pregnancy pics on the Brooklyn Bridge now.
- [32:03]
B
Yeah.
- [32:04]
A
Anyway, Anna, what's your number?
- [32:06]
B
My number is 20 million. So 20 million is how much money Tuscaloosa, Alabama brings in. Every weekend there is a Alabama football game. And I'm just pointing this out because it's going to be very interesting to see if college sports happen at all this year. My guess is most of them won't. And if they do, they almost certainly will not have fans you've already had. I think the Ivy League has been canceling almost all of its sports. And while I know for people who aren't as interested in Sports. It may seem like this doesn't matter whatsoever, but these are big businesses. Not only kind of for the universities themselves, but for the surrounding communities, which these just bring in a tremendous amount of money.
- [32:49]
A
So the 20 million excludes the money they get from the television rights. That's just local spending.
- [32:55]
B
Yeah, exactly. This is just from the community itself. Yeah.
- [32:58]
C
Wow.
- [32:59]
A
Emily. Number.
- [33:00]
C
My number is 3.2%. That is the percent of research subjects in neurological studies who are left handed. Because apparently there is a prejudice against left handed people in brain studies. That I thought was a charming thing to write. About 10% of the population is left handed, apparently. But when doing brain studies, scientists think that they have to keep it consistent because righties and lefties use their brains differently. So they don't want to have left handed people kind of like polluting the data.
- [33:37]
A
It's hard to control for that.
- [33:38]
C
Yeah, but it's a really good piece in Vice. It's all about it. But, but what this means is like they don't know that much about righties and lefties or as much as they could about what sides of the brain are used for what. And there's sort of this like black hole in the research that could be filled if they were less biased against lefties. I'm personally a righty. If you're wondering why I've chosen this as my number. I don't know, I just thought it would be kind of like a cheerful subject.
- [34:06]
A
Is this not like a great opportunity for some, like fundamental research grants at the federal level if we need more fiscal stimulus, like just create like a few hundred million dollars for neurological research into lefties?
- [34:18]
C
Yeah, I think so. Oh, and the one other interesting thing was there are still a lot of people who are born left handed but are forced to become right handed.
- [34:26]
A
Does that still happen?
- [34:27]
C
According to this piece and Vice? It does still happen. And those people have different, their brains work differently than the true lefties or the true righties rather, if that makes sense. And there's no screening for that. They just ask you like, are you righty, lefty? They don't ask like, were you forced to be a righty? Because some people might not even know. Are you guys both righties? I feel like you are.
- [34:47]
B
I am.
- [34:47]
A
I am right handed. But now I, you know, I feel for my more sinister brethren. On which note, I think we will wrap it up for this week. We are going to talk about PPP shaming in Slate plus. But other than that, thanks for listening. Thanks for emailing us. It's slatemoneylate.com Many thanks to Jessamyn Molly for producing. And this Wednesday we have a live show. Slate Money Live is going to be recorded over Zoom or some equally fabulous app. And we're going to have Margaret Sullivan on the great media reporter. We're going to talk about news, deserts and all manner of other stuff. So if you want to join in, ask questions, do that on Wednesday at 7:00pm if you're not around at Wednesday, 7:00pm that's fine because you get to listen to that next week on Sleep Money.