← Slate Money
Slate Money
Trump is Stuck in the 80s
00:51:39
Trump says Venezuela strike was about oil, Grok has become a tool for disturbing deepfakes, and Trump is freezing $10 billion in childcare in 5 blue states.
Loading summary
Transcript217 lines
- [00:05]
A
Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Hammond of Bloomberg. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios.
- [00:19]
B
Hello, Felix.
- [00:20]
A
With Elizabeth Spires of the New York Times.
- [00:23]
C
Hello.
- [00:24]
A
And very excitingly, we are giddy with anticipation with the one and only Lizzie o' Neill o' Leary of Slate.
- [00:33]
D
Hello.
- [00:34]
A
Hi, Lizzie. Welcome. You also podcast on Slate.
- [00:38]
E
I also podcast on Slate. I host a podcast called what Next tbd.
- [00:42]
A
So we have brought you on basically because you are the best person and we love you very much and you are great. But also because you have been doing a big deep dive into X Rock, Elon and various ickiness thereabouts. So we are going to talk about that. We are also going to talk about. Well, we are also going to allow Emily to go off on her own deep dive that she has done into. What's it called? It's not called welfare anymore. It's called temporary assistance for needy Families.
- [01:15]
B
It sounds the most boring possible.
- [01:18]
A
It is actually going to be a good rant.
- [01:20]
E
This like, underpins the economy in so many ways, Felix.
- [01:23]
A
When Emily gets a good rant going, you want to stay around for that. But of course we are going to lead with Venezuela because that's the big news of the week. We have a Slate plus segment about leaks and plays and Joyce and fun and why you all need to buy a ticket to see Ulysses at the Public Theater. And, well, mainly because Lizzie's here. It's just going to be an awesome, awesome episode. So stay tuned. It's all coming up on Slate. Money.
- [02:00]
D
Par le tu francais hablas espanol par le italiano. If you've used Babbel, you would. Babbel's conversation based technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55% off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com acast speaking spelled b a b b e l.com acast rules and restrictions may apply.
- [02:40]
F
Shipping, billing, admin, payroll, marketing. You're managing all the things, so why waste time sending important documents the old fashioned way? Mail and ship when you want, how you want with stamps.com print postage on demand 24, 7 and schedule pickups from your office or home. Save up to 90% with automated rate shopping. That's why over 1 million small businesses trust stamps.com. go to stamps.com and use code podcast to try stamps.com risk free for 60 days.
- [03:12]
A
So let's start this week with Venezuela, which we didn't talk about last week because it hadn't happened yet. But we all woke up over the weekend and there were lots of headlines of bombs and deaths and kidnappings and whatnot. And now a week later, things are a little bit coming into focus. Elizabeth, you've actually written about this, so bring us up to speed very quickly on Is Venezuela part of America now?
- [03:42]
C
I think Donald Trump would like it to be. Over the weekend, they abducted Nicolas Maduro, the head of state in Venezuela. And initially the sort of explanation for this was that we were charging him on charges of drug running, even though Trump's fentanyl obsession doesn't really apply here because there, there have been cocain main issues with Venezuela, but no fentanyl. And then he sort of blurted out in a press conference that it was really about the oil. He said, we're taking back the oil. And so now it's about the oil. And everybody kind of acknowledges that.
- [04:13]
A
When he says he's taking back the oil, that kind of implies that the oil used to be American and then the Venezuelans took it, and now it's going to be American again. Was there ever a point at which this oil was American?
- [04:24]
C
As with many things, Trump says he distorts things, possibly from a place of misunderstanding as much as from malice. But in 2007, Venezuela nationalized several oil fields that were being run by American companies. Now, since then, this has sort of been straightened out in international courts. And Venezuela has billions of dollars in debt that it owes to these American companies that it's in the process of or has been in the process of paying down. So when Trump says we're going to take the oil back, that's kind of what he's referring to. But he's, he's sort of lighting the whole thing that, you know, this has already been worked out.
- [05:01]
A
I was under the impression that Venezuela was very much in default on all of that debt and has not been paying it down.
- [05:06]
B
It has not been paying it down. It's in default. Because of this, the sanctions imposed by the Trump administration, Venezuela can't negotiate its debt or do anything to get out of its default status.
- [05:17]
C
Yes, that's true, but it's also the case that we're partly responsible for the fact that it can't get out of default status. So whenever he suggests that this is just, you know, remedies the whole problem. I think that's disingenuous. But at any rate, he's now sort of claiming that we're going to take this oil back and this is going to solve everything. But the reality is he didn't consult any of the American oil companies before he did this. And in order for American companies to benefit from the oil that is in the ground in Venezuela, they have to repair a lot of broken infrastructure that would cost them a lot of money. And there's no evidence that they actually want to do that.
- [05:58]
A
Well, I mean, again, this is still very early days and certainly Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, says that he's been talking to the CEO of Chevron, whose name I forget quite frequently, and apparently Trump has been talking to him too. Chevron being by far the biggest player in Venezuela and the one.
- [06:15]
C
They're the only, only American.
- [06:17]
A
The only American player, the biggest player is Peddr Vesa, which is the Venezuelan oil company. Chevron is a significant number two. And in the era of sanctions, when Pedvesa is not allowed to sell any oil, Chevron is the only company that is really allowed to pump oil and sell oil. Chevron is also owed money. As part of. In the way that we are talking about and part of the financial aspect of all of this is very much that there was this idea that sanctions will be lifted, oil money will start flowing again, and some quantum of that money at some point will make its way to the American companies who are owed a lot of money to recoup them for the expropriations and yada, yada, yada. But that's all a long way off. And it seems, I have to say, it seems like a kind of second order effect of this whole invasion, kidnapping, putting on trial and all the rest of it. The first order effect, as far as I can tell, is just sort of muscle flexing. You know, people are talking about the Monroe Doctrine, but really, I feel like this is really just bringing back the right of conquest. You know, he doesn't want to really take over Venezuela, but he wants to show that he could if he wanted to. And he talks about the way that us is in charge of Venezuela and he's talking about taking over Greenland and. And basically, I mean, I was kind of surprised about this. The right of conquest only really ended in 1933. It isn't that long ago that the United States claimed a sort of right of conquest over various dominions. And Roosevelt, in the depths of the Great Depression kind of said, well, actually there is this thing called sovereignty and we won't mess with that. And Trump is now sort of rolling that back in a way that is really quite profound, I think.
- [08:11]
C
I wrote a column for the Nation about this and my theory was, because it drives me crazy when all the pundits get up and say Trump is pursuing a strategy that is pursuant to everything we know about political theory. And in this case, they keep saying he cares about spheres of influence. And my contention is that he doesn't even know what that means. He cares about acquisition. And this comes from his mentality as a commercial real estate guy. So he just views foreign countries as properties and assets to be acquired. And he doesn't see why you can't just go out and buy Greenland.
- [08:43]
A
And specifically, as we have discovered, very much with trade, war. And in many other cases, he lives very much in the world of goods rather than services. So Even though in 70% of the US economy is services based, what he really cares about is goods trade and the balance of trade and goods. And specifically when it comes to goods, again, he's not really interested in the super sort of high end stuff. He's interested in as far down the value chain as you can get. He really cares about commodities and oil. Yes. And also critical minerals, of which Greenland has quite a lot. And I think one of the reasons, like, again, while, you know, you can do the sort of Alison Janney speech from the first season of the Diplomat about why Greenland is so strategically important, I think when it comes to Trump, it's again, like those minerals and natural resources that he's eyeing, and he's like, I want that to be American. And while under sort of international law and even American law, the massive oil reserves underneath Venezuelan waters are clearly Venezuelan and not American. I think that's a sort of nicety as far as Trump is concerned.
- [09:51]
B
It really does seem like he, he is taking us back to a very different time when commodities were everything and countries fought each other over the oil or the gold or the minerals, whatever the silver.
- [10:06]
A
Remember, Argentina is called Argentina. The name of Argentina is named after the silver that is there.
- [10:12]
B
Right. And the question I have, is this a good idea? I mean, it's 2026 now. The US economy is massive and free trade has enabled us for a long time to build out a services economy that makes an awful lot of money and isn't dependent on, you know, commodities prices. We have a big tech industry that, yes, needs commodities to operate and increasingly more and more energy to operate but that's not where, like our big money comes from. That's not where our power comes from. Our power doesn't come from like the oil. We have the largest oil reserves, I believe the United States does in the world. But our power doesn't derive from our oil. It derives from our. It used to derive from our stability, our services sector, our financial sector, and trust. People trusted the United States as an actor on the world stage. And what he's doing now is destabilizing that trust in favor of showing this kind of like old fashioned show of power that I just don't know if we can go back to that world anymore.
- [11:19]
A
Yeah. And let me add as well, a strong dollar, an independent judiciary, and, you know, the idea that everyone can do business in America and trust that they will be treated independent.
- [11:31]
C
Fed.
- [11:32]
E
Right.
- [11:33]
B
He's dismantling those things. And I think more than commodities, those have been really important to America's power over the past, what, like 50, since, since World War II, since the New Deal, maybe even, you could argue you.
- [11:48]
E
All have this very, like high minded, commodity centered economic focus. I've just, over the holiday break, became obsessed with the idea that he just wanted to rerun the Panama invasion and that he's such an 80s guy that like the template for whatever he was going to do in Venezuela was the invasion of Panama. The timing is pretty close. I was texting Mary Harris. Do you think this will happen on Christmas Day? If the weather had been favorable for Trump, it probably would have happened on Christmas Day. I just feel like he can't get out of like the 1989 cycle or.
- [12:26]
B
Even the late 70s with the oil thing.
- [12:28]
C
That was the exact thesis of my column.
- [12:30]
E
I love you.
- [12:31]
C
He also, when you think about Trump's understanding of history, because his brain really is frozen during that era. That's also the period where we arrested Manuel Noriega and indicted him in the US on charges of drug running. And he had been a sort of useful tool for the US until he wasn't.
- [12:47]
E
Exactly.
- [12:48]
C
And I get the sense that Trump is a little resentful that he doesn't have his own Noriega in South America right now. You know, and he obviously has no problem with authoritarians. He loves Jair Bolsonaro. And so I think his focus on Maduro was that he partly expected him to sort of cooperate in the way that Noriega did initially, and it just didn't happen.
- [13:08]
A
Well, he expected him to disappear off into gilded exile in Turkey and that didn't happen. He does have his own favorite South American leader in Javier Milei, of course. And now they are very much trying. Marco Rubio is very much trying to butter up Delce Rodriguez, the new president of Venezuela, and try and turn her into a kind of US Puppet.
- [13:29]
C
Whether this will sustain table tennis aficionado.
- [13:32]
B
We learned she's really good at it.
- [13:35]
A
I feel like table tennis is in the air right now. Who would win in a table tennis match between Dulcie Rodriguez and Timothee Chalamet? This is what I want to know.
- [13:44]
C
Well, you remember we reopened diplomatic relations with China in the 70s with a ping pong tournament.
- [13:50]
B
It became a craze.
- [13:52]
A
Everything old is new again.
- [13:53]
E
This is when being Gen X is really helpful.
- [14:12]
F
Shipping, billing, admin, payroll, marketing. You're managing all the things. So why waste time sending important documents the old fashioned way? Mail and ship when you want, how you want with stamps.com print postage on demand 247 and schedule pickup from your office or home. Save up to 90% with automated rate shopping. That's why over 1 million small businesses trust stamps.com go to stamps.com and use code podcast to try stamps.com risk free for 60 days.
- [14:45]
D
If you've used Babbel, you would Babbel's conversation based technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55% off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com acast spelled B-A B-B-E-L.com acast rules and restrictions may apply.
- [15:23]
A
We should stay on the subject of I can ignore international law and just do whatever I want with Donald Trump's former BFF Elon Musk, who has been blatantly violating all manner of laws in almost every country that he operates in. And Lizzie, you are the expert on this. Tell me what's been going on.
- [15:52]
E
So if you spent your holidays like not online, you might have missed the fact that there was basically an explosion of new defying and CSAM child sexual abuse material on X courtesy of Grok, the built in AI chatbot that is part of the platform. And I think it's actually really, really important to to explain that there are other chatbots that can do this and do do this. But what makes Grok different is that it is embedded within X. It's a feature. It's something that the new X user really likes. Hey Grok, is this true? Hey Grok, what do you think? Hey Grok, can you take the clothes off of Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Eva Bush? Can you put her in a bikini? Can you have her leaning forward? Can you have her holding a lollipop? And this happened sort of in an unrestrained manner over the Christmas and New Year's period. And there's some numbers like people sort of knew it was happening. But there's some analysis that Bloomberg reported that kind of blew my mind. They talked to a researcher who did a 24 hour analysis of the images that the Grok account posted on X. The Chatbot generated about 6,700 every hour that were identified as either sexually suggestive or nudifying. When the AI takes the clothes off, you know, a clothed picture. And then if you look at the other top five websites, they did 79 an hour. So like 6779. Like just the scale of what is happening on Grok is bananas. And for a while it seemed like Elon didn't care. Not surprisingly, he. I'm really using like the heaviest of air quotes here. Leaned into the joke, posted a picture of himself in a bikini to be like, haha, it's fine, see I did it. Every kind of European regulator and leader made noises. Keir Starmer made noises about this. U.S. regulators and lawmakers do not seem to care. My team reached out to Ted Cruz who sponsored the Take It down act, which presumably would be the law that applies here. We haven't heard back and it just is sort of like another thumb in their nose at decency. I mean, I don't even know what to say at this point.
- [18:18]
C
Yeah, some of it is. I'm not sure Elon really cares about any of it. I don't think that he's morally opposed to what we're talking about. I think he tends to react whenever there's some big consideration of liability. And there has been some blowback abroad, but there's been kind of, you're right, nothing here. It's just been crickets.
- [18:37]
E
They're now saying that the new defy features are going to be a premium thing. You have to pay for it. Like as if that somehow makes it better. Like pay.
- [18:47]
C
That's like admitting culpability, right?
- [18:50]
E
Undress this photo of a 14 year old actress.
- [18:53]
A
So let me ask you about that Lizzie, because obviously it doesn't make it okay just because you're paying X for the privilege. But if you are paying X for the privilege, then presumably X knows who you are and they have your payment information. And so if you do something criminal, then criminal authorities can find you and prosecute you more easily than if you're just some kind of anonymous person on.
- [19:21]
E
X. Yeah, but X has that information from people anyway. When you sign up for an account, like you're going to be found. If you are paying for the premium feature, yes, X knows who you are. But X also knows who you are when you're signing in to your own account. Even if it's a pseudonymous account, you have an IP address, you have various details that you have entered into the platform. They can find this stuff. I mean, one of the, like hallmarks of reporting on this and reporters who have covered this for a while have learned not to do this. People used to say to X when it actually responded to reporter inquiries, instead of writing back mainstream media lies or sending you a poop emoji, they would say, hey, the following accounts, bloop, blah, blip. Have posted what appears to be child sexual abuse material. Do these violate your terms of service? Don't you need to take them down? Aren't they legal? And then the company would just take them down and be like, yeah, we did that. And reporters learned not to give them the examples in advance to say, I have seen these things. So that the companies. And it was not just X that would do this. Meta would do this too. Wouldn't like preemptively take the thing down and be like, yes, we were on it. Thank you for bringing it down.
- [20:36]
B
We want the companies to take these things down.
- [20:38]
E
Yes, we do. Providing a service. They were doing it in this window of time where the reporter would tip them off. Then they would take it down and be like, aha, we did it.
- [20:47]
C
Or we don't have this problem. We don't have it.
- [20:48]
E
Yeah, right. We handled it.
- [20:50]
B
What actually is illegal? Children. You can't undress children on the Internet. That's definitely criminal and illegal. And even Elon Musk says, you know, we don't want to do that. Beyond that, like this argument of like, we're all just having fun here I am Elon Musk in a bikini. We this is just fun stuff. Like how illegal is that? The quote unquote fun harassment.
- [21:12]
E
This is where the Take It down act kind of comes into play. So the law was passed in May. It criminalized non consensual sharing of intimate images and digital forgeries. So deepfakes. But it sort of has this mix of penalties. There's some fines, there's some jail time, but you have to say, take that down. They have 48 hours to comply, but the platforms have until May to fully comply with the law. So we're in this period of time where it's not entirely clear to me that the platforms have to do this yet. Until May.
- [21:47]
B
You have to take it down. The law is clear. It's the title. Do you have to not offer a feature that lets you make the thing? Is that illegal to just have the feature? Because if it's not, then that just seems like a crazy, like cat and mouse. Shouldn't you have to ban the nudify capability?
- [22:05]
E
The publication of the thing is the violation.
- [22:07]
B
Stupid.
- [22:08]
E
I know. So now this is why you're starting to see calls for just ban X, just ban the platform. What else is it for? Like, it is so overwhelmingly for this at this point. Like, yes, like, I still have a shell account that is on there. I go on there. Governments still put stuff out on there. People do still talk on there. But like, when you look at the overwhelming mush of stuff, it's like crypto bros and weight loss and nudifying.
- [22:41]
A
So let me ask you about X, because a few months ago, I think it was last year sometime, X ceased to exist as an independent company. It got merged into xai, which is Elon's AI company. And the primary product of XAI is not X, it's Grok.
- [23:03]
E
It's Grok.
- [23:04]
A
And X has basically now become Grok Playground, a place where XAI can ingest huge amounts of people typing intelligent things and dumb things and just all the things that people type and learn about language and all the different languages that people use on the platform and can roll out Grok and allow people to play with Grok. Two of the most, if not the two most valuable AI startups in the world are OpenAI and Xai, because they are the two that are most used by normal people.
- [23:39]
E
That word normal is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
- [23:43]
A
But like, ChatGPT has 300 million users, whatever it is, and Grok has also got hundreds of millions of users because it's managed to infiltrate itself via what used to be known as Twitter.
- [23:55]
E
And it just raised $20 billion this.
- [23:57]
A
Week, just raised $20 billion this week from people who clearly think this is a feature rather than a buzz. So in this world of kind of AI land grabs where you ask forgiveness rather than permission, because the most important thing is to just get out there in the hands of as many users as you can, does this strategy actually make perfect sense from the point of view of what Elon is doing.
- [24:22]
B
I mean, he's got you there.
- [24:25]
E
He does kind of got me there. Well, I guess the question is, like, what's the strategy? Right. If it's just to make money.
- [24:29]
C
Yeah.
- [24:30]
E
And OpenAI is, you know, has been talking about rolling out its erotic mode. Porn makes money. Porn has always made money. And this gets into, like, this really murky area where you have, like, First Amendment questions, but then also questions about, like, the age. Like, because people are taking photos of adults when they were younger and nudifying them. And so, like, adult. Adult content has a lot of First Amendment protections. It should. But, like, adult content that's made out of children. No. And I think the companies don't want to answer these questions because it's profitable.
- [25:15]
A
Well, it's losing a lot of money. It's not actually profitable, but it's.
- [25:18]
B
Now they're making it a premium feature. Who knows?
- [25:20]
E
I'm saying porn is profitable historically. Porn makes money.
- [25:24]
B
And porn does lead to tech innovation. We know that. So, like, if porn is what GROK is for, that leads to more innovation and integrating AI into social media. It kind of makes a lot of sense.
- [25:36]
C
Right.
- [25:37]
E
But if it's revenge porn and kiddie porn, not so much.
- [25:40]
B
I think they've a little bit succeeded with Grok because the times I go on X, people really engage with Grok as they've really anthropomorphized Grok. And, you know, they're always asking, grok, is this true? Like, no one uses the term X very much to describe that site. Everyone still says Twitter reporters. Yeah, but the term GROK is a thing. Like, he made it a thing, and that's no small thing. So it is interesting to think about it.
- [26:03]
C
It's not.
- [26:03]
E
But it also drives me insane when people anthropomorphize Grok. Like, there were all these news stories that were like, grok apologizes. Grok didn't apologize. Grok is not a representative of the company.
- [26:13]
B
Yeah, we're down a rabbit hol.
- [26:15]
E
I mean, Grok is a word prediction machine.
- [26:17]
C
Yeah.
- [26:17]
A
And also an image generator.
- [26:19]
E
Yes, and an image generator.
- [26:21]
A
So just so I'm clear about this, was this like some upgraded version of Grok that got rolled out around Christmas time that suddenly allowed all of this to happen, or was this something it could do all along, and then everyone just realized and they jumped on it?
- [26:35]
E
I actually can't answer that in a perfect way. I think it's the latter, though, because There have always been people like doing this in the darker corners of the Internet. There's like telegram channels that dedicated to jailbreaking every AI model, finding the prompt that will make it disregard its instructions. And so I think Grok has always had this capability, but I'm a little over my skis in saying that.
- [26:59]
C
I feel like, you know, companies that make these kinds of technologies, they know these problems are going to emerge because they do. Anytime you have technologies that can do this. Like, I remember when 3D animation was just starting to become sophisticated, there were a lot of discussions about, well, what if people make csam, but you know, they're animated characters. When VR was nascent, there was a lot of discussion about that too. It's like, what if somebody sexually assaults a character or somebody else's avatar in cyberspace? What does that mean? So it's not like they couldn't anticipate that this was going to happen. So the sort of like reactionary response from them, like, oh well, oops, just seems completely disingenuous.
- [27:41]
A
I don't think they are saying Elon in particular is leaning into it and he's like, haha, this is great. Yeah. And he has said many, many times that trust and safety teams are a woke thing that ought to be abolished.
- [27:53]
E
Right. They basically don't exist.
- [27:55]
A
I don't think he's even like crying crocodile tears over this. I think he's absolutely loving every minute of it.
- [28:03]
E
It reminds me in some ways, go with me on this. Of the allegations of extremely egregious racism at the Tesla Fremont plant. So the Tesla Fremont plant was sued by the state of California. When you read into or talk to some of the workers who were involved and you read the legal documents and I've done that, talked to some of these people, the stuff that was being said was so astonishingly awful that it was really sickening. And Elon's response was very similar. He had this blog update that was like, hey, you shouldn't do things that hurt people's feelings. But also people need to grow up and like, get on with it. And that attitude of his, like, seems to carry through to all of this, like, yeah, maybe don't make child porn, but also, whatever, here we are on the Internet. And like that kind of crystallizes his philosophy. And the thing about Elon Musk, which we have been saying since Doge, since before that, and Tesla investors need to think about this too, is I don't see anything on earth that can stop Elon Musk. He's just so rich that there are no consequences.
- [29:21]
C
Well, he's also, I think he's just a nihilist. If he has any values anywhere in there, I don't know what they are, you know, because he's certainly never drawn lines anywhere without somebody putting a gun to his head.
- [29:32]
A
His value is colonizing Mars, Elizabeth. It's the only thing he cares about.
- [29:35]
B
But this is the Max Reed column, right? Max Reed wrote this week, like, everyone seems to be afraid of Elon Musk. In the US Especially, as Lizzie already discussed, regulators are doing Jack nothing. And in Europe there's some threats. Maybe like whispers of threats is my sense from reading the coverage, but nothing really is happening. But Max Reed makes the point, like, maybe don't be so afraid of Elon Musk. Like, we saw the backlash to what he did with Doge. He was out at the federal government. I mean, the consequences are long lasting and ongoing, believe me. But like, people don't like this stuff. Like, the US and these European countries are still democracies. People's opinions still matter. And like, people don't like nudifying pictures of young kids. Maybe they like nudifying pictures of women in power. That's like a whole other topic. That's not what this podcast is about. But regulators shouldn't be so afraid was his point. And I think it's a good point.
- [30:31]
C
He had that great line. He said, when you think about it this way, or do you understand why Congress isn't doing anything about it? He said, the single largest Republican donor refuses to shut down CSAM machine. And that's why when Lizzie's people call Ted Cruz, he's like, I don't know.
- [30:46]
B
He did do a tweet or an ex Ted Cruz saying that this was bad. Just putting that out there, not going.
- [30:51]
C
To do anything about it, but it's bad.
- [30:53]
E
I do think there's one person who can defeat Elon Musk.
- [30:55]
A
By the way, who's the one person who is the Musk?
- [30:58]
E
This is going to sound super deranged. I just want to be clear.
- [31:00]
A
Say it.
- [31:01]
E
I think the one person who could and probably should have sued when this happened to her and has the power to do this is Taylor Swift. She is rich, she is powerful. She had people making.
- [31:14]
A
She's not powerful.
- [31:17]
C
Culturally, she's very powerful.
- [31:19]
E
Do what now?
- [31:20]
A
She has the power to like sell vintage Cartier watches. But, like, it was amazing how many people were urging her for years to come out and have a political opinion and tell people how to vote. And then. And she did that and it had no effect at all.
- [31:34]
C
It did though. You're wrong about that. It increased voter registration in areas where she did concerts.
- [31:40]
E
I think she has. Why would she be afraid of Elon Musk?
- [31:44]
A
I don't think she. No. The reason. Well, because if I.
- [31:48]
E
If right, they. Let's say they nudify me. What am I? I'm like some random middle aged mom. But you need someone who has the standing to say, this is ugly, this is silly. You're acting like a 12 year old with unlimited funds. Knock it off.
- [32:03]
A
Yeah, she could try. I hope you're right. I don't think she'll do it. And I'm honestly skeptical that she would succeed. I think there would be a Streisand effect of like people just nudifying her.
- [32:15]
C
Probably.
- [32:16]
E
And that's why she hasn't.
- [32:17]
B
Don't underestimate how much people hate women, especially when they start like asserting themselves. Like the cultural support can turn pretty quickly.
- [32:25]
E
Maybe it needs to be a menopausal woman who just doesn't care anymore.
- [32:28]
B
It has to be a bro. I think has to be a guy.
- [32:30]
E
Like, there's literally nothing you could do to me anymore. I'm just like, fine, whatever.
- [32:53]
D
If you've used Babbel, you would. Babbel's conversation based technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55% off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com acast spelled B-A B B E L.com acast rules and restrictions may apply.
- [33:29]
F
Shipping, billing, admin, payroll, marketing. You're managing all the things, so why waste time sending important documents the old fashioned way? Mail and ship when you want, how you want with stamps.com print postage on demand 247 and schedule pickups from your office or home. Home save up to 90% with automated rate shopping. That's why over 1 million small businesses trust stamps.com go to stamps.com and use code podcast to try stamps.com risk free for 60 days.
- [34:02]
A
I want to stay on the subject of the Doge aspect of Elon and the way in which the US government is continuing to. Because remember January, like this time last year, like it was such a long time ago, but there was this point in time like pre Liberation Day where the big Trump story was like his attempt to reduce the size of government and for the government to spend less money.
- [34:26]
E
Well, okay, hold on a second, Felix. That is not actually what they were doing. That is what the headline was, but that's not what they were doing. What they were doing was firing federal workers and creating an interoperable database where you can stop the silos between the way government information is shared and also.
- [34:47]
A
Killing USAID and various other things. But the segue here. Lizzie, before you derail my segue, Go ahead, Sorry. The segue here is to the federal government deciding that it is going to freeze $10 billion of. Well, Emily, you explain.
- [35:05]
B
So at the end of the year, the beginning of the year, There was a YouTube video where a guy named Nick went to a childcare center, a child care centers in Minnesota with another guy who is only identified by his first name. And they discovered some of these places were empty or wouldn't let them in because why would you let some random dudes into your daycare where there are little, little babies and toddlers, Come see our children. The video went very viral and landed at the same time in Minnesota. There have been fraud scandals with public money discovered by the last administration and prosecuted, but kind of bad. So the swirl of these two things happening led the White House to say, we're going to freeze child care funds, the federal money that is used to pay for child care centers and for what's now called tanf, but which is basically welfare, not only in Minnesota, but in five states, coincidentally, they all are run by Democrats. California, Illinois, Colorado, New York, Minnesota. And so they, they sent letters to these states and they said, we're freezing your flow of cash until you give us all this data. And they've asked for a tremendous amount of data. It's not clear the states are confused how they even respond to that. And it's not even clear that they are able to get the data together. Like, it's just like a bureaucratic administrative burden pileup like you've never seen before. And so the night before we were taping Thursday night, the five states, as you could predict, their attorneys general got together again, it's like their 50th time getting together, basically, and sued the White House and said, this is really unfair. You're targeting us. You don't have any evidence of fraud. And I've been reporting on it all weekend, asking them, what is the evidence of systemic fraud. And the White House has not given me any evidence. They sent me some links to stories about arrests and prosecutions like One offs in New York, in Minnesota, in California, they haven't sent me any articles or news of arrest or prosecution. In Colorado, for example, And I asked Colorado, they're like, we don't know. There's nothing going on here. This is cr. You know, Anyway, it's just the latest news.
- [37:14]
A
I mean, not to mention, I feel like I should just jump in with a little bit of common sense here, which is, even if there is fraud, freezing all of the money for childcare is super crazy remedy. It doesn't.
- [37:26]
B
Yeah, right. Someone told me it's like killing a fly with a bazooka, basically. And the laws establishing these, these three programs, it's child care block grants, it's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and these smaller block grants that fund things like foster care. All of these laws have very clear rules and provisions and processes in place for fighting fraud that pretty much do work. And those laws don't have a provision for freeze all the funds. That's one of the things the lawsuit says. You can't just freeze all the funds. It's not how it works. But. But doing this crying fraud and then cutting off help for the most disadvantaged, and to be clear, the most disadvantaged people, they're cutting off welfare money, the poorest people in the country, is a very successful strategy. It's not one the White House is coming up with. De Nova. Like, this is like, you can listen to Slate's amazing podcast about the welfare queen era and go back to Ronald Reagan crying fraud and then taking away people's social services money is, like, guaranteed to work. It's really hard to fight back against it, I think.
- [38:31]
A
So, Emily, let me try and ask you the first big question I have here, which is, is this money that reimburses the states for the money that they spend on childcare, has there been any actual effect on the childcare services yet? Or is this just like pushing the burden that used to be borne by the feds onto the states?
- [38:53]
B
So the states get this money from the federal government and then they, like, draw it down, and then they hand it out to the childcare providers, or sometimes they give it to parents in the form of vouchers. The money is still flowing. Like, this new freeze hasn't had an effect yet because it's so early, but it's like a matter of time. And then whether or not the states can step in really depends on the state. Like, some states are, like, really well placed to keep things going. Like New York State just this past week announced more funding for childcare. They're going to do care for 2 year olds now in the city, which is like awesome. So they can afford it. But then there's other states like Indiana, Colorado, Indiana's doesn't count, but Colorado, who probably won't be able to make up the difference. And we already know about this because there was all this extra funding that went to these childcare grants during the pandemic, like records amount of money. States took it and ran with it. I mean it was temporary, but they opened new childcare centers, they raised pay, they gave bonuses, they did all this stuff. The money is gone. And now we're seeing what happens when the money's gone. It's to bring up Indiana, like worst childcare situation in the country, long waiting list, providers going out of business, all of this. So you can expect if this freeze goes on, you'll see even more of that because this is like a big washout of the tide 10 billion. And it's important economically. Like it's not just about the. I find that when reporting on this stuff, people don't care very much about poor people. But with these childcare centers, a lot of them, they depend on the federal money and the state money and they take private paying people as well as subsidized people. So if they lose their funding, the private paying people who aren't the poorest and most disadvantaged, they still lose too because these centers close down and like none of the kids can go. It's like a rolling kind of thing.
- [40:40]
E
And none of the parents can work.
- [40:42]
B
And none of the parents can work. So that's why we say we care about it in the business pages. So it seems bad.
- [40:48]
A
Thank you, Emily.
- [40:49]
B
You're welcome.
- [40:50]
A
It is bad.
- [40:51]
B
Thank you for letting me talk about that. I wrote like 10 stories, but I feel like they're all over the place. And you know, do you think this.
- [40:57]
A
Is a kind of resurgence of the we're gonna take a chainsaw to government thing that we saw at the beginning of the Trump administration? Or is this just part of the general scattershot? We're just going to crack down on anything that seem left dish.
- [41:14]
B
I think it's a continuation of what Lizzie started out with us talking about because remember, like the thing with Doge was we're going to crack down on, quote, waste, fraud and abuse. Waste, fraud and abuse. And they have really succeeded in getting everyone to say waste, fraud and abuse. Even when I speak to people on the left and progressives and advocates, they're like, of course we don't want any waste Fraud and abuse. It's just become like a mantra. And so I think it is more about cracking down on police fraud and abuse and less about cracking down on leftists. But I could be wrong. I mean, I wonder what Elizabeth would say.
- [41:46]
C
No, I think they're trying to thread two needles here. One is that they want these programs to be smaller anyway, but they're also using them in the culture war. They keep suggesting that assistance programs are heavily benefiting undocumented migrants and particularly and minorities in particular. They're just rerunning the Welfare Queen playbook from the 80s.
- [42:05]
B
Yeah, it does seem like that. And they. They announced, or Scott Besson announced on Thursday, they're creating a new position, like an AG that will just work on fraud stuff. And they're, like, putting more restrictions on sending money out of the country, remittances. It's a lot.
- [42:21]
C
What's crazy. And I, you know, I feel like this is a little undercovered in media. You know, I was a public policy major, and one of the things that kept getting hammered into us by people who actually work on policy is that fraud in the government sector is so much lower than it is in the private sector because there are all these guardrails and they're heavily litigated and so on. But if you were just looking at the news and you had no idea, you would think government was just the worst purveyor of fraudulent activity, because we hear about it disproportionately because Republicans have successfully made it a part of the public discourse. And even Democrats often take it for granted that there is copious fraud in every government program.
- [43:01]
A
I blame the movie Dave. I think it all goes back to the movie Dave.
- [43:05]
B
Who was the movie Dave?
- [43:07]
C
I don't know.
- [43:08]
E
Oh, Kevin Klein's like the accountant. And he goes through and is like, oh, well, I would never do books this way. And then he like, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. And then the federal budget.
- [43:18]
C
When did that movie come out? Was that like a.
- [43:20]
E
It's a green era thing? It's like a welfare reform triangulatory Democrat.
- [43:28]
A
It was the point at which the household metaphor, like, we should treat the fiscal situation of the country just as you would treat your household budget when that went super mainstream. And we've never really recovered.
- [43:39]
E
93. 93. I'm sorry to get so exercised about the Doge thing. I just like. But when you actually step back and look at what they did, there's this whole, we're gonna save a trillion dollars. They didn't save any Money. Federal spending didn't go down at all. It went up well.
- [43:53]
A
That's because they're spending it all on the ice.
- [43:55]
B
So Jonathan Cohn wrote a really good. My former colleague at HuffPost who's now at the Bulwark.
- [43:59]
F
Excellent.
- [43:59]
B
He wrote a great piece sort of breaking down the Minnesota fraud scandal. And he makes this really good piece which is. And there is fraud in some of these programs sometimes. And one of the reason is because the programs are structured so poorly. It's not government run. Right. The government gives money to the states. The states give money to these private actors. So there's, like, room to screw it up.
- [44:20]
E
Because Republicans shaped the policy to look like that.
- [44:23]
B
Because Republicans shaped the policy to look like that, it makes it more susceptible to fraud. That's one point I want to make. And the other point I want to make, because who knows when I'll be allowed to talk about this subject again.
- [44:33]
A
It's not like you're the host of the show or anything, but we all.
- [44:36]
B
Have to breach a consensus.
- [44:38]
A
Well, this is like the Swiss government. We only do it if we all want to do it.
- [44:41]
C
Yeah.
- [44:41]
B
We all have to turn our keys or whatever.
- [44:43]
A
Yeah.
- [44:44]
B
So I started looking into tanf, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, because the Most of the $10 billion is from TANF, which is welfare, because Bill Clinton made it it. He ended welfare as we know it, and he made it into tanf. And what I realized and learned, which maybe all of you already know, but welfare, Temporary Assistance for Women with Children that think was created alongside Social Security a bajillion years ago, but it was more of a targeted program, targeted to poor people. And they, over the years, Poor women, disproportionately poor black women, People started to hate it. The program. Right. Not the people receiving it, but everyone else. And. And they were able to craft this narrative of a welfare queens and ultimately to get rid of the program. But it's so interesting because it came up alongside Social Security, which everybody loves. It's universal, and you can't do anything to touch Social Security. People will freak out. Even Donald Trump has pledged over and over, I'm not gonna mess with it. I'm not gonna mess with it. People love it. And that is all I wanted to say, except for the one other thing, is that one of the knocks on welfare was like, we're paying these freeloading women to just sit home and. And get fat and live off the public dime. They don't even work. But Social Security women who have never worked when they're Older, they get paid by the federal government because if they were married, you know, they get, they get Social Security. And like no one ever complains about those freeloading women.
- [46:06]
C
It's about the perception of who the recipients are. And overwhelmingly people do perceive the recipients of assistance as being minority women who are single. And so when you do this in polling and you ask people do you support without kind of framing it as a specific policy, the answer for a lot of people, and these are people who risingly skew Republican about whether they support a policy is who they think the intended recipient is. And so because Reagan era people branded the average recipient of assistance as a single black woman, the underlying racism there is the difference in support. It's that people do understand that like old white men get Social Security and.
- [46:49]
B
Then they should never worked a day in their lives, they get it too, and it's fine. But anyway, and now I guess though it's not about welfare queens, it's about like undocumented immigrants. They're the ones that are now the scapegoats.
- [47:01]
E
That's the demonization. I'm like, I'm sure you all have listened to it because you're all brilliant, but my former colleague Chrissy Clark made this amazing podcast that continues, but it's called the Uncertain Hour. And it is like the history of welfare and all the ways welfare touches the American system that we don't think about because that Reagan narrative is the one that takes over.
- [47:27]
B
Fascinating. I'm gonna listen to that podcast. Very exciting.
- [47:30]
E
So good.
- [47:30]
B
Once I'm done listening to Lizzie Oleary's podcast.
- [47:33]
E
Podcast.
- [47:46]
A
We should have a numbers round. Elizabeth, do you have a number?
- [47:48]
C
I do, and it's 50,000 and that's dollars. And that's what you can pay to a new dating SL matchmaking company called Keeper that's powered by AI. You can pay them $50,000 for a marriage bounty, where they will, you'll pay an intro fee for each match and then if the matches lead to a long term relationship, you pay them the full $50,000. But this company is being run by three guys in Silicon Valley who are basing the company on things like predictive analytics, AI and what someone termed meta rational marriage practices. So it also won't surprise you those some of the things that they measure for you go through a whole process where they ask you a million questions and like your SAT scores, your feelings about entrepreneurs, your ideal ethnicity, and they will scan your photos to estimate your body fat percentage and the strength of your jawline. So buried this is from a Times article. And about 2/3 of the way down when you're already sort of creeped out, one of the founders has an account on X where in his bio it says I love eugenics. And so the reporter sort of asked the other co founders about this and the co founder, whose name is Hunter Ash, said something like, well, I'm not actually advocating for sterilization of minority people. Literally. I was sort of shocked that this wasn't the whole story. So a typical thing. And he's their marketing director. So one of their pieces of marketing information was something like if the woman is half a standard deviation more agreeable than the man, that's the optimal point for relationship durability. So if you're an aspiring eugenicist looking for a heavily algorithmically driven mate, I guess this is the company for you.
- [49:34]
A
Absolutely amazing. Wow. I'm just going to move straight here with 24, which is the estimated number of months it is going to take to move move the Apple card from Goldman Sachs to Chase. Chase is now officially. Everyone sort of understood that this was going to happen, but it is now officially going to happen. If you have an Apple card right now you are borrowing money from Goldman Sachs every time you use it in 24 months, more or less, that will then be Chase. Goldman Sachs has lost about $7 billion on its ill fated attempt to get into consumer finance. They are selling about $20 billion of balances to Chase at a discount of $1 billion. So Chase is basically paying $19 billion for these $20 billion of balances. So that's another billion dollars that Goldman is losing here. The Apple card itself is a perfectly good product. And one has to kind of wonder at some point is one of the reasons it's so good is because it's been like subsidized to the tune of like many billions of dollars by Goldman Sachs. And will it continue to be good if Chase runs it on a for profit basis? But in any case, it will basically continue. It will continue to be a MasterCard. We don't need to worry about it becoming an American Express.
- [50:54]
B
And what about our ads?
- [50:56]
A
What about our ads?
- [50:57]
B
Well, I mean, change what we say in the fine print part of the ad.
- [51:00]
A
Exactly. The ads will continue, but just with a different financial.
- [51:04]
B
Or will they?
- [51:05]
A
Anyway, Emily, what's your number?
- [51:07]
B
My number is 2.9 billion. That's dollars 30. That's sushi sales at retail stores, including grocery stores for the year ending November 2025. That's up 7% from the year before. And Sushi is very popular. And the reason I'm using this number is just an excuse to tell you about this Wall Street Journal ahead, which was about parents going broke, spending all their money on sushi for their kids who love it more than chicken nuggets or french fries or tater tots. They just want to eat $200 sushi dinners. And the parents apparently have no control over this. And they interviewed a kid named Elliot. He is 8 years old and he lives in Calgary. And his quote is, quote, I love sushi. I don't like it.
- [51:52]
C
My main year old loves. He likes sushi, but only salmon and tuna. But he still eats enough chicken nuggets that I bought him a hat for Christmas that says chicken nuggets and a goth font, and now it's his favorite hat.
- [52:05]
B
That does sound like a cool hat.
- [52:06]
E
I would love to have my child eat sushi. I would love to have my child eat something that isn't beige.
- [52:10]
B
Be careful what you wish for.
- [52:11]
A
Be careful what you wish for.
- [52:12]
B
You gotta pay your mortgage.
- [52:14]
A
Can you afford it?
- [52:15]
E
Lizzie, you can have some sushi from the place around the corner. Fine.
- [52:17]
C
Whatever your kid's gonna be like. I only do tasting menus, Mom.
- [52:21]
B
Oh, my God.
- [52:21]
A
Exactly. I need to do the thing which I have done occasionally on this show but haven't done in many years, which is tell everyone to dig up the now ancient Nick Tosh's piece on sushi from Vanity Fair from years and years and years ago, which to this day is the best thing ever written about sushi. And he basically asks the question, how did sushi become this massive cultural phenomenon in America and in, like, Midwestern America and in places that are incredibly conservative and any normal, especially in, like, the 1950s and 60s when the memory of the war against Japan was very fresh and in a world where no one ever ate raw fish and raw fish sounds kind of disgusting, how is this possible that it took off so successfully? And the answer, you will not be surprised to hear, is sugar.
- [53:10]
B
Sugar in the rice. They say it in the Journal story, too.
- [53:12]
A
It's the sugar. It's just a very sweet thing, and that's why kids love it so much.
- [53:17]
B
Yes, that's what it said in the piece. There's a quote even from a sushi chef who says, I just learned the more sugar you put in there, the more the kids are gonna eat it. So I felt betrayed because I never realized that sugar was even playing a role in the sushi.
- [53:31]
C
Sneaky kids.
- [53:32]
A
All right, Lizzie, what is your number?
- [53:34]
E
My number's seven. And this is 100% lifting a joke from a friend of mine who after seven days of 2026 was like, thank you for my free trial. I would like to unsubscribe from 2026. I've had a week. Yeah, we're good now. Take it back.
- [53:56]
A
But do they want, do they want 2025 back?
- [53:59]
E
I don't know. Maybe you could just pick a year at random and rerun it.
- [54:03]
A
1999. That was a good year.
- [54:05]
B
Yes.
- [54:06]
E
Not for me.
- [54:07]
B
Good movie year.
- [54:08]
E
I love 98. 98 was good. 99. I was just out of college and clueless and yeah, I'd take like maybe 2003. That was fun.
- [54:16]
A
Lots of blogs happening in 2003.
- [54:18]
C
Yeah. Yeah.
- [54:19]
A
Well, okay. On that note, I'm going to open it up to the listeners, send us an email on slatemoneylate.com and tell us if you could teleport out of 2026 and into any year of your choice. Which year would that be? That email we read by all of us, not including Lizzie because she's only a guest here, but the other three of us will see.
- [54:43]
E
I have access to your Slack channel. I might just get in there and read it.
- [54:46]
A
We will share some of them in the Slack so that Lizzie can read it. It will be read by Jessamyn, Molly and Shayna Roth, who are our producers. I should also thank Merritt, Jacob in Brooklyn for getting Lizzie on the air and Micah Phillips making us all look beautiful on YouTube and mostly you guys listening. We love you. If you are Slate plus listeners, you will get to hear all about Greek things and otherwise. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week with more Slate money.
- [55:22]
D
Par le tu francais hablas espanol par l'. Italiano. If you've used Babbel, you would Babbel's conversation based technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 languages experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55% off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com acast spelled B A B-B-E-L.com acast rules and restrictions may apply.
- [56:02]
F
Shipping, billing, admin, payroll, marketing. You're managing all the things, so why waste time sending important documents the old fashioned way? Mail and ship when you want, how you want with stamps, dot com, print, postage, on demand 247 and schedule pickups from your office or home. Save up to 90% with automated rate shopping. That's why over 1 million small businesses trust stamps.com go to stamps.com and use code podcast to try stamps.com risk free for 60 days.