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Foreign. Welcome to the End of the World as We Know it edition of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of what turns out to have been a pretty packed week of business and finance news. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios and of South London, which was the last holdout in the British election that actually voted Labour. Virtually everywhere else in the UK managed to vote Tory, it seemed, except for Scotland, which went in a landslide for the Scottish Nationalists. We're going to talk about that, of course. We are going to talk about the end of the wto, which is a story I covered in my newsletter this week, Axios Edge, but which I feel hasn't got enough attention because it's a pretty big deal. We're going to talk about other trade related stuff. We're going to talk about Paul Volcker, Rest in Peace. What else we can talk about.
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Emily we are going to talk about when a suitcase company is more than a suitcase company.
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Emily. Emily Peck of Huffington Post is going to delve into the gender dynamics of away suitcases, which apparently is a thing who knew that a suitcase could have gender dynamics? But. But it does. And Anna Chymansky of Breaking Views is here and you are going to basically be the trade nerd.
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C
I guess I'm the one who's like let's talk about all the boring things.
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All of that coming up on Slate Money.
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B
So everything's falling apart, Felix Huh?
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Everything is falling apart. I had this thing in my newsletter I was like about the Treaty of Westphalia, which I kind of like liked as a frame, which is basically 1648 when nation states really became a and the thing about nation states was they were all sovereign nations and no one and they answered to no one. And they would make treaties with each other, but they wouldn't install some kind of judicial system that they could take each other to court because that would violate their sovereignty. And basically ever since then, for the past 400, 350 years, it was that way until something crazy happened in 1995, which is that the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade GATT transmogrified into something called the wto, the World Trade Organization. And the main difference between the two is WTO had this court and the court was like countries could take each other to court. They didn't need to agree to be taken to court, they could just be taken to court. And the US just took Europe to court and said you were giving illegal subsidies to Airbus. And the court found in America's favor and came down with a $7.5 billion judgment. And this was a real thing, and Europe had to pay that. And this idea that there was a court where countries could take each other to court like, that just didn't exist before 1995, and now it doesn't exist anymore.
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B
And that is because of. Of course, because of Donald Trump.
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A
And that is because of Donald Trump, who. Well, I mean, it is because of.
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C
Donald Trump, the WTO has been coming increasingly irrelevant. And China also really kind of massively broke it, and then Donald Trump kind of actually broke it.
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A
So, yeah, it's true that the Chinese relationship to the WTO has been quite fraught because in 1995, China was not the dominant player in international trade like they are now. And it was, and quote, unquote, developing countries had, like, a different status within the WTO than the main, like, industrialized nations. And then since then, it's been basically impossible to update the WTO rules to account for things like the Internet and China, which are kind of like major.
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C
Two fairly important things, which are pretty.
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A
Important things that WTO clearly needs to be updated, and it hasn't been updated. And Anna's absolutely right that it's become more and more outdated, you know, as the years have gone on. But up until Trump's election, at least it had this court that was the one thing that existed and that worked. And it had seven judges on it, and they would make rulings, and then those judges would cycle off. Their terms would come to an end. And the Trump administration just said, well, we're not going to allow any more judges to be appointed. And so it went down from seven to three. And then this week, two of those three cycled off. And once again, the Trump administration said, we're not going to allow anyone to be reappointed in their place, which left one. And one judge can't make a binding ruling. And so therefore, there are no binding rulings anymore. And the one thing that the WTO was still kind of doing effectively, which was issuing binding rulings, it now can't do. And it's now, basically, I use this, one of my favorite words, otos. It means it just. It's useless. It does nothing.
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B
But the irony here, I guess, is, and I think it was. You had it in your newsletter or maybe the Times had in their piece. But the United States has won a majority of cases at the wto. Like, yeah, it's hard to have a body that hurts your sovereignty. But as far as the US Goes, where was the hurt? They were winning a majority of the cases, like, you Just pointed out this.
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A
Airbus victory, although that's backwards looking rather than forwards looking. So, you know, the Obama administration was unlikely to do stuff that violated WTO rules because they were like friendly globalists. And the Trump administration, on the other hand, and quote, you know, Mr. Donald Tariffman, Trump, he loves imposing crazy illegal tariffs on anyone for any reason. And that is much more likely to be found in violation of WTO rule. So going forwards, he has much more freedom to do that because someone can appeal, or rather he can appeal any ruling against him to the appellate body, as it's known. And since the appellate body can't deliver a binding ruling, he can just keep on doing it.
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B
So this is just the one, just one sign from the week that the world order created post World War II, that sort of kept the peace globally is come crashing down and just crumbling all around us. And it's not just Trump's fault, it's also your people's fault.
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A
It's my people's fault. It's 100% my people's fault.
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C
Yeah, I was just saying, like Trump is, if anything, you could say, probably a symptom of the fact that all this stuff was already collapsing.
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B
A return to the Westphalia way.
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A
Well, exactly. I mean, the other big international institution that basically superseded the old Treaty of Westphalia system of nation states was of course, the European Union. Right. Where a bunch of countries really did give up sovereignty to something above them. The EU was above them. And that, you know, it has a court that rules over just the EU nation states. And the Brits hated that. And they were like, we refuse to be subservient to Brussels. We are a proud nation and we will never allow this to happen. So we're gonna leave. And as Slate Money listeners will know, that wasn't exactly a smooth process. But it is now going to happen on January 31. In the wake of the election this week where Boris Johnson won a landslide, he gets to push through Brexit. It will happen on January 31. Britain will leave the. And that is, you know, it's not in Britain's economic interest to do that, but it's clearly, as you say, it's a sort of atavistic reversion to this kind of, you know, everyone against everyone else. Hobbesian nightmare situation. Yay.
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C
Cool.
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B
That sounds great.
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C
Yeah. And I guess if you're thinking of, you know, why this is happening, because as you said, it's not as though the UK was ever super excited about being in the eu, you know, they always kind of had one foot in one foot out. And in a similar way, the Republican Party has always had issues with international bodies, you know, with the correct WTA being one of them. So I guess the question then is, but, you know, what is it? What has been happening now? Why is now the moment when all this stuff is actually falling apart?
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B
I think it's because the argument for globalism lost the thread with people, with the humans, because globalism, while it's good for peace and world order and cooperation, you know, normals on the ground where workers really have been, especially since the financial crisis, just losing ground. Right. And they need something. I don't know, I'm just bullshitting here.
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C
They need someone to blame.
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A
As a proud European, I'm not sure about that. When I travel in Europe, I meet a lot of proud Europeans. If you look at the marches that have been happening in London with people waving EU flags, people genuinely feel European. One of the problems is that a lot of Europeans in the uk, like non British citizens in the uk, weren't allowed to vote in the elections. And so that, like, you know, caused problems. And the other thing I have to say is that a majority of the UK is pro remain. Like every single opinion poll shows this. Even this latest election, The Tories got 43.6% of the vote. They didn't even get a majority of the vote in England, which is the heartland, where they got almost all of their seats. There are a lot of, like, boring electoral first past the post reasons why that still resulted in a landslide. But it's not really the case that there's this broad popular mandate to take Britain out of the eu. Most people in Britain want Britain to.
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B
Stay in the eu, but, I mean, they lost.
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C
Right. And I. That's, that's a very good point. And there is general discontent. I mean, of course, in the case of the uk, you know, it's also Corbyn and I think he, you know, obviously is.
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B
They had a bad candidate.
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Yeah.
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C
And that's a big part of it too. But, but I do think this fits into things that we've been talking about for, you know, months. All of these, you know, protests, this pushback against this kind of global order, which, you know, has been gaining steam. And I, and Emily, I think there's some truth in what you're saying, that some of this is because of kind of the fallout of the financial crisis that essentially none of these developed nations have really, really fully recovered from, and people at the ground have not felt like they're benefiting from all of this.
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B
I think that the benefits of globalism haven't been felt by everybody and the benefits that are sort of bigger picture that we're now seeing go away like a return to the Hobbesian world. I don't think people understood that, you know what I mean? I don't think there was an appreciation for that. So that when it goes away, anyone's really mourning the loss. People feel like they have been losing ground since the financial crisis. They see the people at the top haven't lost ground and are doing better. And like on the left, the solutions on the table haven't been very good.
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A
I think also one of the main benefits of globalism is labor mobility. Certainly in the eu, like the people who really benefited from the EU were the French and Spanish and Romanian and Polish people who like found it really hard to find well paid work in their home countries and moved to London or other places in England and got much better paid work. And they were clear winners from the internationalist agenda. But one of the things we really found over, you know, the history of the EU is there was much less labor mobility than people thought there would be. That people like didn't really take advantage of it in quite the way that you thought they would. If you look at youth unemployment in Spain, for instance, it's way higher than you'd think, given that any of those people can just leave Spain and find work somewhere else. And, and then the flip side of that was the people in, you know, the native born English people, not in London but in most of the rest of England, didn't like the immigration and they thought that, you know, they had this kind of nativist reaction against them. And so it didn't work on either side. And without that kind of like successful labor mobility, I think a lot of the benefits of globalization kind of, you know, evaporate a little bit.
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C
Yeah, I mean, I think that pretty much everyone has benefited from globalization, but the problem is they've benefited in ways that aren't as easy to see as the ways that they might also be harmed. And you know, and I think when a lot of these programs were put in place there, there was this idea that humans would behave in a fairly rational way that somewhat unsurprisingly, they haven't, as you say, and that's the case in a lot of southern European countries where you have very high youth unemployment rates and people don't move. Same thing in the US you have areas of the country where there's unemployment is significantly higher. And the question is, okay, well then why don't people move to where?
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To North Dakota.
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C
Right, exactly. And when you look. Well, there are variable reasons why people don't do that, and it's because we're not perfect economic actors.
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B
And I think also maybe the biggest benefit of global trade is, like, is to people as consumers. I've said this before. Things are really cheap. There's not just cheap.
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Like, I'm sitting here in front of my iPhone. Everyone with a smartphone is benefiting from globalization. Smartphones couldn't exist without globalization. But you don't think of it as like, oh, this is a great neoliberal win. You just think of it as your phone.
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B
Right. And like, just because stuff is cheaper and you get to have an iPhone, there are all kinds of downsides that make those benefits less exciting. Like you don't get paid as much money anymore. You, you know, struggle to live in a home. You know what I mean? There are so many other economic struggles besides the lack of struggle. You might feel as a consumer, like, yeah, a cheap struggle is cheap, but.
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Struggles are always more salient.
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B
Struggles are more salient.
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And so, you know, if. And so, yeah, you, you notice the struggles much more than you notice the things that are easy. There are so many things that are very easy that used to be hard, which you can do on your phone now. But you don't sort of think of those as offsetting struggles. And everyone has struggles. Yeah.
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C
And there are some industries and jobs that wouldn't exist, but we don't think of those.
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A
Yeah, let's see. Volker.
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B
Yeah, Speaking of struggles, Paul Volkler. What a great transition. Right.
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So Paul Volcker, really. And there was a interesting backlash against him among the sort of lefty Internet this week. I was under the general impression that he was this secular saint and that no one could possibly object to anything he had ever done. And he was the last uncontroversially, you know, great Fed chair who everyone could agree did the right thing. And that lasted for about 35 minutes. And then suddenly all of the sort of revisionist takes started coming out. He was undoubtedly. Well, I mean, there was doubt over everything I was going to say. He was undoubtedly like a dedicated public servant. Oh, he was. And I saw like Matt Stoller on Twitter saying, but look at all the money he made as chairman of Wolfenson & Co. In Revolving Door, blah, blah, blah. So it's interesting, the fact that there's even a debate over Paul Volcker, I think, shows that there's no one who isn't problematic.
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C
Anymore. Right. And look To a certain extent, no human being is unprobled, obviously. Like, you know, you can really, really respect Paul Volcker and not necessarily agree with every single thing he ever did. But I do think this take now that like, oh, well, actually, you know, he really didn't need to kill inflation and it would have just gone away anyway. And oh, well, you know, the, the deep recessions we had in the 80s were, you know, they were so much worse than, than what we would have had then. You know, he caused this. This is his.
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Fault. Well, he did cause a deep recession. Let.
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Go. Can we back up and just.
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Say, back up and say, Emily, who was, who is Paul Volcker and what is he most famous.
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B
For? Paul Volcker was chair of the Federal Reserve during the Carter administration and then a little bit into Reagan and he is famous from that time because he slayed the beast of.
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Inflation. Yes, inflation had gone up to like.
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15%. It was really.
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High. He raised interest rates up to like 19%. He caused a really nasty recession. A lot of people lost their jobs. Unemployment went through the roof 10.8% and he kept interest rates high despite the fact that there was high unemployment until inflation came down. And then everyone was like, woo, we've beaten inflation and now we can bring interest rates down and now people can have jobs. But we needed to put up with that high unemployment for as long as we did in order to bring rates down. And I guess now there's a sort of revisionist attempt to say, well, maybe we didn't need to keep interest rates as high as we did for as long as we did. Because there is certainly, it certainly seems, and I think this is a fair criticism, that in terms of the dual mandate that the Fed is charged with ensuring full employment, he didn't seem to care a huge amount about ensuring full.
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Employment.
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C
Right. Well, but it depends on what you mean. Does it mean ensuring full employment at that moment or trying to ensure full employment long term? Which I think if you look at what he did, and if you look long term, where unemployment rates went in the 20 years after, it is very hard to make an argument that what he did didn't long term help that.
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Trend. But, and stop me if I sound insane, but maybe inflation isn't that big of a deal to the people with jobs who are getting raises year over year and like their money, they.
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Won'T go jobs because no one's going.
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B
To. And inflation is something that like, more like rich people care about because they're the ones with all the money that you Know, in accounts, you know, that's actually losing money. Whereas, like, working people don't really have to worry as much about inflation because they have. What is it, like, 40% of people don't even have $400 in the bank or.
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Something? I think. I think.
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So. Like, his overweighted concern for inflation was an overweighted concern for wealthier people, and his underweighted concern for unemployment was an underweighted concern for working.
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People. So a lot of it had to do with unions as well. But, yeah, if you look at this broadly in the question of, like, weighing out labor versus capital, then obviously labor is more interested in employment, and obviously capital is more interested in inflation. Those are the dual mandates. And one mandate is like, look after labor, and the other mandate is look after capital. And he was clearly looking after capital. And labor, to your point, was actually doing fine. Okay. It was getting. It was getting significant pay rises in line with inflation. And there was a good case to be made that those pay rises were fueling inflation, making inflation even higher. And it became this kind of spiral where pay rises caused inflation and inflation caused pay rises. And it went on and on. And you can see how that's not a great spiral to be in the middle of. And you can see how someone like Paul Volcker might want to come in and end it, but you can also see how so long as you keep on getting those pay raises, ultimately that spiral works out worse for capital than it does for.
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C
Labor. I think that that is inaccurate because I think that you can't separate capital and labor and say that what happens to one doesn't affect what.
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Happens. They're obviously back and.
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Forth. No, but the point is, part of the reason that inflation is such a big deal when you're talking really high levels of inflation is because it. It stops the economy from moving. It stops people from investing, it stops people from hiring. It makes people fire people, doesn't allow the economy to move. So the idea that somehow you could just, oh, inflation's fine, and you'll just keep paying people paying more and more, and it won't have any effect. Like that has just never, ever been the.
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A
Case. But the fact is that when Volcker started bringing inflation down, unemployment went up. So you're right that unemployment was bad, you know, when he took over, but it got much worse. He made it much worse. And you can and you have made the case that over the long term, this turned out to be good for labor and good for employment. And I will. You know, that is a 100% legitimate take. And that is totally the received opinion in, like, the economic world. But it's. It didn't feel like that at the.
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C
Time. That goes back to what we were just saying in the last segment, though, is that, yes, of course, like, when you have to go through a painful time, and usually the people who suffer the most pain are the most vulnerable. And that's true. And no one thinks that that's easy. And people feel that a lot more than they think about the benefit. But I think this kind of revisionist history to say that what. And I'm not saying you're saying this, but some of the kind of lefty talk on Twitter of, well, what he did, it would have been better if he hadn't done it. To me, I just disagree with that.
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B
Thoroughly. I think one thing that's sort of interesting about Paul Volcker, and it kind of relates to what we were just talking about with trade, is that he was a technocrat. He saw numbers in this instance, right? He wanted to slay the beast of inflation. He didn't care in the moment that that kind of tough work would lead more people to lose jobs. And everyone kind of fell in line with his technocratic viewpoint, which is like, yeah, people matter, but this matters kind of more. And I think for a long time, everyone kind of bought into that a little bit, but now people are not buying into that anymore. And that's why you see the revisionist takes. That's why the global world order is falling apart. Because people are like technocrats.
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A
No. Or as Michael Gove famously put it, I think we've had enough of experts.
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B
Right? I feel like Paul Volcker was. He is a lionized expert, right? I mean, and I guess we should talk more about his, like, more recent kind of legacy in the Volcker.
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A
Rule. And he had the. He had the. He. He introduced the Volcker rule over the objections of the Treasury Department and, you know, the Larry Summers types in the Obama administration. He did great work for the UN in terms of, like, investigating the shenanigans with oil for food in Iraq. He just wrote a forward for his autobiography, which the FT published, which. Where he started talking lot more about the importance of what we were just talking about internationalism in the age of global warming and how he was extremely depressed. But the idea that at the point at which, in global history, we need international cooperation more than ever, given this existential risk, is exactly the point at which it seems to be falling apart. So he was much more than just the Fed chair who raised interest rates Absolutely.
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C
No. And I think the thing with him, I think we need more technocrats like him in the sense that he wasn't a dogmatic technocrat. He was like, let's find solutions to things. And he also was a devoted public servant in a way that I think he, you know, he didn't demonize government, he didn't demonize business. He tried to find solutions to have a functioning economy. He wasn't opposed to finance, however, he thought that there were tremendous excesses of finance. And I think we in fact need more figures like.
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A
Him. Yeah, and I will just say that, like, in terms of, like, Paul Volcker as a human being. My favorite Paul Volcker factoid is that there are many economists who believe that you can only be an economist if you have a PhD in economics. And he did go to the LSE in a PhD program, but he never actually got his PhD because he wound up like, chasing a girl instead. And I just, I was like, yeah, get your priorities.
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B
Right. Oh, but then also we talked about what he did on inflation, and maybe some people didn't like it, but he said, he told the New York Times that the greatest strategic regret of his life was to take my wife to Maine on our honeymoon on a fly fishing trip. And his second wife, he didn't make the same mistake and they went to the Virgin.
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C
Islands. His memoir is pretty good, but there's a bit too much fly.
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A
Fishing. Well, that's why, I mean, Paul Volcker is the reason why the big annual Central Banking Conference happens in Jackson Hole every year. They wanted to make sure that Paul Volcker would turn up. And the only way they could make sure that Paul Volcker would turn up was by making it in Jackson Hole so he could go fly fishing. True fact. Emily, tell me about.
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B
Suitcases. So a suitcase isn't just a suitcase anymore because of.
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A
Instagram. Felix, this is my favorite thing about suitcases. It used to be that suitcase manufacturers made suitcases. Now suitcase manufacturers make Instagram.
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B
Posts. Yeah, they make lifestyle travel products. So we're talking about the suitcase company away. AWAY is known for its suitcases and Instagram posts. And I guess the distinguishing feature of the AWAY suitcase is a battery that a removable.
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A
Battery. There was, there was an earlier company that made a suitcase which had a battery that would recharge your phone. But then the airline said, you can't check that suitcase because the battery is going to explode. And so then AWAY came into the market very quickly and said, aha, but our battery you can remove and put in your hand. Baggage and still check your bag. And then they did a lot of Instagram posts and everyone else and their mother came out with basically identical suitcases that also recharge your phone. Yeah, but AWAY had the Instagram.
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B
Post. So, anyway, so last week, the Verge published this piece about away, specifically its founder and CEO, former CEO, now Steph Curry. And it was one of these pieces that said, away has a toxic workplace culture. And you kind of look at that headline, you're like, whatever, it's just millennials complaining about something. Who cares? Then you read the piece, and the piece is just so damning. So Steph Curry just, you know, she is on Slack talking to her workers at three in the morning and yelling at them. They're not getting to take any time off at all. There's bosses telling their co workers who are making like 40,000 a year and doing like, customer service work to take a picture of yourself in your pajamas while you're still doing work in bed. Then the lead anecdote is. So one of the more disturbing or interesting parts about the workplace culture is Corey's insistence that everyone be public on Slack. And they discourage any emailing between employees, and they discourage even direct messages between employees. Everything has to be done in public on Slack, which leads to the CEO of the company jumping into Slack conversations and just like ripping people apart. And it also leads to people getting fired because they started a Slack channel called Hot Topics. LGBT workers and workers of color were in the Slack channel, like, blowing off steam, which, hello, everyone does on Slack, if you have Slack in your workplace. So apparently all these people of color and LGBT employees get fired for comments they made in the Slack channel because they were deemed racist by, you know, Steph Curry and a panel of white people. A panel of white people. I mean, it's just, it was an outrageous story and it flew around pretty quickly. Blah, blah, blah. Only a few days later, AWAY announced that this woman, Steph Curry, is, you know, stepping down. She's out. She's going to be replaced by the former COO of Lululemon. And it was a pretty speed. The timeline from damning article to ouster was incredibly.
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A
Fast. Although they had been hiring for CEO since like March. And yes, like, you can't hire a new CEO from Lululemon that quickly. CEO hires. And I think what's what, in hindsight, clearly what happened was that she or the board decided that she had to go a few months.
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C
Ago.
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A
Sure. They put in place a sort of very quiet seat EO search, which eventually they managed to find this guy from Lululemon. And they were looking forward to, like, a relatively elegant, you know, transition of power. And then the Verge article just drops it just before they were about to announce him. And they're like, shit. And they're like, we can't announce him yet because we haven't got the whole thing finalized. So they had to wait a week before all of the tease were dotted and eyes were crossed. And probably he got like an extra couple million dollars because they. He knew that they really needed him at that point. But y. It was. I believe the technical term is a.
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B
Clusterfuck. Yeah, I mean, it's such a good. It's a really good story. I think it just reveals so many myths about tech companies and startup culture, starting with the myth of the, like, girl boss, which I feel like we've discussed before with the. The company thinks, remember, it's founder and CEO. And so this is another one where, you know, people like to be like, girl power. Oh, a woman was leading this company. But she turns out to be, as evidenced by this Verge story, just like an absolute.
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C
Monster. And I think the hypocrisy here just made it all the more infuriating. It's like you're reading some of these slack messages they have, and they're all couched in this language of like, we're empowering you to work all these hours you don't want to.
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B
Work. Yeah, we're empowering you. You should. We're teaching you something really important here. And all these, like, young entry level workers. What was interesting to me was how they were so excited to work at this luggage company because of it. They had really bought into the marketing. Like, it's just interesting and comes at a time when, like, I think Facebook and another tech company have just dropped off the best places to work list or something. And it's just like that weird thing where people go to work for companies just based on marketing and.
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A
Vibes. One of the. There's a big difference between a way where people really bought into the marketing and work and kind of drank the Kool Aid. Versus my other favorite example is supreme, which is, you know, supremely cool. And people line up around the block to buy hoodies and skate decks and anything else that they might drop because they really covet them. And if you walk into supreme for a job interview and say, like, oh my God, you guys are so cool. You do the coolest things in the world, they'll just. They will never hire you because they. The actual, like, management of Supreme Dream is Way more cynical. They're like, no, we just take any old random T shirt and slap a logo on it and sell it for 8,000% markup. And they understand the importance of, like, maintaining the marketing facade while at the same time optimizing. Whereas at a way, they started hiring true believers. And I'm not sure that hiring true believers is always the right thing to.
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B
Do. No, because you can't operate a company, you can't operate from within in that idealized version of your company. You have to be much more cynical.
- [30:57]
C
Right. Also, if you're a true believer in a way, then, like, what's wrong with you? Like, they sell.
- [31:01]
B
Luggage. It's true. Also, I thought one thing to point out was, yes, Steph Curry was a quote unquote girl boss, but. And we talk a lot about, like, getting more women to run companies and more women should be startup founders, but more poor people should somehow become startup founders. Like they point out in the Verge piece that Steph Curry grew up in a 55,000 square foot mansion in Ohio that is so big her mom was quoted on some real estate site saying, like, it's a great place to live if you don't want to go outside, but you still care about, like getting walks. It has, you know, three dining rooms in it. There just needs to be more class diversity. I think with some of these companies, that's true, if.
- [31:47]
C
Possible. I mean, yeah, there are some reasons why, unfortunately.
- [31:52]
B
That'S. I mean, we used to live in a country, we used to live in a country where like someone could be poor and become rich by starting a company. But it feels like, but it does feel like the startup CEOs that we're familiar with now, like none of them came from working class backgrounds or there's much less, what feels like bootstrapping.
- [32:11]
A
Going on about those guys, a bit more about the gender dynamics and whether you worry that, you know, female founders of fast growing VC backed startups are somehow going to wind up sort of tarred with this Steph Curry brush in a way that male founders of VC backed startups aren't tarred with, say the Adam Newman brush, that there's something, there's a bit of a double standard.
- [32:41]
B
Maybe. There's absolutely a double standard and part of it is the sample size is small. So you have one Steph Curry and there's just not that many other women founders out there to say, no, no, no, she's just one among many. You know, Adam Newman is just one among many, many, many men. It's hard to Stereotype men based on Adam Newman, though I would try. So, yeah, I think there's probably gonna be maybe a little bit of unfair bounce back. And I. And I know you said the guy from Lululemon was kind of like, waiting in the wings, but I still feel like it happened faster for this woman than the typical male founder. And I wouldn't expect this woman to have the kind of comeback that say, like a Mike Cagney from SoFi has had. You know, where he's ousted from.
- [33:25]
A
Figure. He has a new company called Figure. And I have no idea what Figure does, but they keep on emailing me.
- [33:31]
B
Right. He has a new company. Travis has a new company. Like, I just feel like Travis's.
- [33:35]
A
Company is already worth $5.
- [33:36]
C
Billion.
- [33:37]
A
Yeah. How did that.
- [33:37]
C
Happen? And I think that that's a good point, because I feel like the reality is when you're. If you're starting a company, like, the hours are insane, you're probably gonna be an incredibly difficult person to work with. Like, that is tends to be a reality of starting a company. But if a guy does that and then people are at a certain point are like, you're a jerk. You're out. They still have these other opportunities, whereas for a lot of the female funders. And I don't know if this is actually true, I don't know if there's what the data is to show, but it doesn't seem like you're given as many second chances. If you're a female founder, I.
- [34:01]
B
Don'T think you even get as many first chances because I think the standards for women are so much higher in terms of how not nice they are allowed to be, that, like, you're gonna get burned a lot faster. Like, who knows what the hell kind of emails Jeff Bezos was sending to people back in the day and imagine they were much better. But is the richest, you know, one of the richest men in the world now? He wasn't judged like.
- [34:25]
A
That. What I want to know is what were the board discussions about why Corey needed to be replaced, like, earlier this year, what was it that she did that caused them to decide that they needed to replace her? I'm assuming that it wasn't her idea that she should step down and be replaced. And if a male founder had done those exact same things back in, like, March of 2019, as far as the board was concerned, would they have reacted in such a drastic.
- [34:55]
B
Way? Yeah, I mean, I think those are really good questions and not definite that a male CEO would have been treated.
- [35:03]
C
Exactly. How is the actual company doing.
- [35:05]
B
They have like a $1.8 billion valuation or.
- [35:08]
C
Something. Well, I'm just curious because, I mean I. Is part of the reason she was being pushed out because of what was happening with the company versus her actual management.
- [35:15]
A
Style. I do think that suitcases became commoditized, became, I mean, well, I mean, Tumi has a market cap just sold for like, what was it, many billions of dollars. There is a long history going back to, you know, Louis Vuitton and even before that of suitcases being able to differentiate themselves even though like ultimately it's a box. And then the great innovation was put the box on wheels. And there's literally, that's basically the extent of the innovation in the suitcase world. But there was this period when people got into the idea of direct to consumer suitcases. That's the thing. Direct to consumer suitcases with hard shelves which recharge your phone became a thing and Away was early to that game. And now there are 8 million of them. And people have a choice in which of those hard shell recharge suitcases they buy. And there's, there's really nothing to choose between.
- [36:12]
B
Them. With the way online retailing works now, a brand like Away or Everlane or what are the shoes Allbirds like simple. You know, everyone knows the marketing has been so big that everyone associates, you know, suitcase, oh, should I buy in Away? Oh, you know, jeans, Should I buy Everlane? Like there's something kind of genius and first mover kind of good about a brand like Away versus like there really aren't any other suitcase brands that we're talking about besides Sumi. And that's really important today online because online shopping, I'm not gonna say it's hard, but it's like kind of hard. And it's nice if you can just know like you can go to one specific site and get one specific.
- [36:51]
A
Product. The CEO of Allbirds is very annoyed right now at Amazon because Amazon has a knockoff product. And he's like, how dare you compete with my sneakers? And in my opinion is like, it's probably good for him. They're ratifying the category. And the bigger that the category grows, the better Allbirds will perform. But it doesn't stop him being annoyed. Let's have a numbers round. Why not? Emily, what's your.
- [37:21]
B
Number? My number is also Emea Culpa. My number is.
- [37:25]
A
160.
- [37:27]
B
Okay? That is the number of revenue generating minority league baseball teams in the United States. And on last week's episode, I said that each major League team has only.
- [37:39]
C
One. You mean minor, minor league or minority.
- [37:42]
B
League? Minor league. Oh my God. Next week I'll be back with another apology right here on slate money. No. 160 Minor League Baseball teams. And I will stop talking about baseball now that I have corrected my error. Thank.
- [37:56]
A
You. My number is 43.6% which is the share of the popular vote that the Conservative Party got in the UK and yet managed to get an overwhelming majority in Parliament. Like this is the biggest majority since Thatcher, certainly the biggest Tory majority since Thatcher. And the idea that you can get such a huge majority, one which will allow Boris Johnson to push through anything he likes with basically two in five votes is kind of interesting to me. And the UK having a referendum on this and then they were like, do you want to keep this system or do you want to move to a system of more proportional representation? And the referendum overwhelmingly voted in favor of keeping the system. So it's what the Brits.
- [38:47]
C
Want. So my number, as I'm saying it, there's a possibility. I've done this number before, but if I have, you know, whatever you're going to get again. So My number is 30 billion. That is the number of non performing loans that Greece is expecting to remove from its banks books with their new Hercules asset securitization.
- [39:06]
A
Program. Wait, the number of loans or the value of.
- [39:08]
C
Loans? Sorry, the value of.
- [39:09]
A
Loans. I was like, that's a lot.
- [39:10]
C
Of. That's a lot of.
- [39:11]
A
Loans. Yeah, that's like a thousand loans per.
- [39:13]
C
Person. Yeah, the value of the loan. So Greece has had this massive problem with non performing loans and you cannot grow an economy if your banks have all of these on their books. So they're pushing through this program which is based on an Italian program and it was finally passed and so hopefully it will.
- [39:34]
B
Work. Good for.
- [39:36]
A
Grace. On which note, I think that's it for Slate money this week. Unless you're going to be hanging out for the Slate Plus, I think we're going to talk about hydrocarbons. There was, if you didn't know, amidst all of the other news of the week, the largest IPO in the history of the planet. A company raised 25 and a half billion dollars. No company in the history of the world has ever raised more money in an ipo. And somehow the world just yawned and we're going to talk about. Wait, what was all that about? So that's coming up in Slate Plus. Otherwise it just fools me to thank Jessamine Molly for producing this show, to ask you to keep the emails coming on slatemoneylate.com and we will talk to you next week on Sleep.