What Even Is Money?

Summary

Slate Money – “What Even Is Money?”

Podcast: Slate Money
Host: Felix Salmon (Bloomberg)
Co-hosts: Elizabeth Spiers (New York Times), Emily Peck (Axios)
Date: October 11, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, the Slate Money team explores the provocative question: what even is money? They dig into three strange stories from the worlds of finance, art, and betting: the runaway rise of gold, the hyper-growth of prediction (betting) market Polymarket, and the eye-watering prices paid for Bob Ross paintings. The hosts challenge conventional wisdom about value, investment, speculation, and what drives people to spend—or risk—their money. The episode’s through-line is the blurring between “rational” markets and vibes or memes, making us question the very nature of money and investment in modern times.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Gold Rush: Why Is Gold So Expensive?

[02:41–21:35]

• Gold’s Persistent Allure

  • Gold recently surged above $4,000 an ounce, outperforming the S&P 500 over the last 25 years.
  • Felix admits past skepticism about gold bugs, but data shows "If you put X dollars of money into gold ... you would have more money now than if you put it into the S&P 500, substantially more money." (Felix, 03:36)
  • Gold is described as a “barbarous relic” with little intrinsic value yet remains a prized asset.

• Drivers: Central Banks & Retail Access

  • Central banks, especially China’s, have moved reserves into gold (as a non-dollar asset), affecting the global price.
  • Retail investors are now piling in, encouraged by ETFs making gold easy to access.
  • "It is now way, way easier to buy gold as an investment ... The rise of ETFs ... has made it a lot easier for retail investors to buy gold." (Felix, 12:50)
  • Costco gold bar sales are a tiny part of the story (“ignore that”) compared to ETF-driven demand.

• Changing Narratives & De-Dollarization

  • The media’s narrative has shifted: under Biden, China’s gold buying was linked to its own economic woes; under Trump, it's framed as a threat to the dollar’s reserve status.
  • Felix dismisses the idea of gold (or anything else) replacing the dollar as the reserve currency: “Gold is never going to replace the dollar. Bitcoin is never going to replace the dollar ... The dollar is the global reserve currency.” (Felix, 09:58)

• Retail FOMO and The Fallacy of Models

  • Ray Dalio’s quote about a 15% gold portfolio is explained (and dismissed): “It’s a very bad sort of ... at the point at which your models are saying, allocate 15% to gold, that’s probably the time to sell, rather than buy.” (Felix, 16:15)
  • The hosts note the cycle where good backward-looking returns justify ever-increasing allocation—right at the possible market top.

• Is Gold a Meme Asset?

  • “Gold in many ways is the ultimate meme…it is the meme to end all memes.” (Felix, 18:02)
  • The lasting appeal of gold, and even the recent spike in silver, is said to be driven more by psychology and vibes than fundamentals.

• Can Markets Defy Explanation?

  • “Sometimes there just is no reason. Even if you had omniscient, you know, insight ...there still is no causal reason why. Sometimes things just go vibes.” (Felix, 19:51)
  • Emily sums it up: “Narrative follows price. Something happens in the market and then we all race to make a story about it.” (Emily, 21:11)

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2. Polymarket: Betting Meets ‘Investing’

[22:52–35:35]

• From $1B to $10B—In Two Months

  • Polymarket’s valuation has exploded following new investment from Intercontinental Exchange, owner of NYSE.
  • “Suddenly this thing has gone from being worth $1 billion to being worth $10 billion in the space of two months.” (Felix, 24:50)

• Legalization and Political Connections

  • Polymarket, once illegal, is now legal in the U.S. following the acquisition of a licensed exchange.
  • Connections: The CEO of ICE (which invested) is married to Trump official Kelly Loeffler; Donald Trump Jr. is an investor.

• What is Polymarket?

  • Prediction markets where people bet real money on the outcomes of events, from politics to sports.
  • Originally focused on political/societal events, but the bulk of betting is now sports. “The minute you start doing sports, it turns out people are much more interested in betting on sports than ... elections.” (Felix, 26:22)

• Why Is Sports Betting Moving Here?

  • Peer-to-peer structure means skilled bettors aren’t pushed out as with traditional “the house” bookies.
  • Tax treatment on winnings is more favorable on Polymarket than at sportsbooks.
  • “For tax reasons, it just makes all the sense in the world for sports betting to move from sportsbooks to prediction markets.” (Felix, 28:19)

• What’s the Bet? Is This Gambling or Investing?

  • ICE (and others) are betting Polymarket and its ilk will “eat the entire sports betting industry.”
  • Hosts discuss whether the data is really saleable (“I don’t think it’s worth that much, honestly.” – Felix, 30:13)

• The Blurred Line: Gambling vs. Investing

  • Emily wonders if prediction markets are modern-day “bucket shops," recalling history with illegal market-betting venues.
  • Felix: “I don’t think there’s that much of a difference between bets and investments, to be honest, right now.”
  • “All the guardrails ... in the wake of ... 1929 and the Great Depression are now being dismantled. ... Now everyone’s like, just go ahead, do speculative gambling. Buy crypto, bet on the New York Yankees, do whatever you want. It’s all investment, it’s all yolo, it’s all memes. Just knock yourself out.” (Felix, 33:14)

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3. Bob Ross Paintings: Investment, Consumption, or Charity?

[39:21–51:06]

• Why Are Bob Ross Paintings Selling for $100k+?

  • Recent auctions saw Bob Ross’s paintings reach six figures ($114,000 and $95,000), even though they're not considered "investment grade" art.
  • Felix, on the notion of investment: “What she [Julia Halperin] said was $500,000 ... below that, it's not investment grade.” (Felix, 43:03)
  • Buyers are likely motivated by nostalgia, consumption, or the charitable aspect (supporting public TV), not expectation of return.

• Is It Value, Scarcity, or Fun?

  • Elizabeth: “I don't think anybody who buys a Bob Ross painting is thinking of it as investment grade art. It strikes me as something more akin to buying an antique that has collector value because of nostalgia reasons.” (44:39)
  • Emily: “It's fun ... It's fun to buy collectibles ... just like a fun, happy little painting to buy, to get people chatting.” (45:16)

• Is a Charitable Auction Price the “Market Value”?

  • Flooding the market: One station preparing to auction off 30 Bob Ross paintings—supply may outstrip demand.
  • If an auction fetches a huge sum, does that set a real market price, or is it mainly a charitable donation?
  • “It becomes impossible to sort of disentangle these two things.” (Felix, 50:38)

• Peak Absurdity—Money as Meme

  • Conversation ends with Bob Ross paintings, NFTs (“the NFT for ‘Comedian’ ... the banana taped to the wall”), and concludes with existential confusion: “What even is money, you guys?” (Emily, 51:01)
  • Felix’s parting summary: “We have done the opposite of being an informative podcast. We have actually just made everyone dumb and no one knows thing at the end of this podcast. I apologize to you all. We will do better next week.” (Felix, 51:06)

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Memorable Quotes

• On Gold as Meme:
  “Gold in many ways is the ultimate meme… it is the meme to end all memes. It is a meme that has been around for 4,000 years.”
  —Felix Salmon [18:02]

• On Narrative vs. Price:
  “Narrative follows price. Something happens in the market and then we all race to make a story about it.”
  —Emily Peck [21:11]

• On Investing vs. Betting:
  “There is no intrinsic value to gold. There is no future cash flows to gold … If gold is an investment… then, yeah, I find it really difficult to draw any kind of hard and fast line between betting and investment.”
  —Felix Salmon [35:35]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Gold’s meteoric rise, central banks & ETFs: [02:41–15:01]
• Retail investing, Ray Dalio & risk models: [10:41–17:06]
• The meme theory of gold, silver, and vibes: [18:02–21:35]
• Why Polymarket boomed, legality & business model: [22:52–29:59]
• Sports betting shifting to prediction markets: [26:05–29:59]
• Is betting investing? Market history, regulation: [31:19–35:35]
• Bob Ross paintings as a weird “asset class”: [39:21–51:06]

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Tone and Takeaways

The tone is witty, skeptical, and often irreverent. The hosts repeatedly interrogate markets where prices are unhinged from any valuation fundamentals: gold as a memetic relic, betting as "investment," and Bob Ross paintings as objects of nostalgia and charity masquerading as art assets. They land (with bemusement) on the idea that much of what is called “investment” is little more than speculation—or even charity wrapped up as asset appreciation. In the world of money today, memes, vibes, and stories may be as powerful as math or fundamentals.

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In summary:
This episode masterfully ties together the irrationality behind vaulting gold, speculative markets, and pop-culture collectibles, ultimately asking: when does something become money, or investment? Or is it all vibes? As Felix closes, maybe we know less about money now than when we started.

Transcript

[Elizabeth Spiers]

Foreign.

[Felix Salmon]

Hello. Welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Bloomberg. I'm here with Elizabeth Spires of the New York Times.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

Hello.

[Felix Salmon]

I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

Hello.

[Felix Salmon]

Hello. And we have a really interesting show that will make you question everything you thought you knew about money. I think this is the general gist of this show. We're going to start talking about gold, which is a barbarous relic that is somehow worth $4,000 an ounce. We're then going to talk about polymarket, which is apparently worth $10 billion, even though it's just betting. We are then going to talk about Bob Ross paintings, which are spectacularly ugly. So sorry, Emily. And are selling for $100,000 a piece. We have a slate plus segment where Emily is going to finally explain six seven in a monologue the likes of which the world has never seen. Somewhere along the line, and only if you're a Slate plus subscriber, you will listen to my own dulcet tones and I will sing Spandau Ballet. It's one of those shows and it's worth sticking around for. So all of that is coming up on Slate Money.

[Emily Peck]

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[Felix Salmon]

Gold is not just a Spandau Ballet song, but it is a good Spandau Ballet song.

[Emily Peck]

Never heard it.

[Felix Salmon]

Emily, you don't know the song? Elizabeth?

[Emily Peck]

I'm Only a one song by Spandau Ballet.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

I don't think I know the song. Sing us a few bars, Felix.

[Emily Peck]

Yeah, could you sing it, Felix?

[Felix Salmon]

You know what I Will for Slate plus. If you are a Slate plus subscriber, you get Felix singing Gold by Spandau Ballet. How about that?

[Elizabeth Spiers]

A few bars of gold.

[Felix Salmon]

Oh.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

Ooh.

[Felix Salmon]

It is not just a Spandel Ballet song. It is also an investment. And I have to say that in 30 years of financial journalism, I have pretty consistently been rude about gold bugs and anyone who told me that gold is a remotely sensible long term investment, and maybe I was wrong. I mean, in the very, very long term, over like centuries or something, there's a limit to how much it can rise. But gold is. Well, it's not quite. It's around $4,000 an ounce right now. It did break above $4,000 an ounce earlier this week, and that's why we're talking about it. But it has been on such an amazing run, not just this year when it's up like more than 50%, but over the past 25 years, that if you put X dollars of money into gold, like at the beginning of the millennium, you would have more money now than if you put it into the S&P 500, substantially more money. And the S&P 500 is a real asset that is cash flowing and giving you claim on future cash flows that are worth a lot more now than they were 25 years ago. And gold is, to coin a phrase, a barbarous relic. It does nothing. It just looks shiny, basically. It has a couple of minor uses in electronics or something, but really it's just a shiny object. This just fascinates me. How can the ultimate shiny object that does nothing except for shine outperform over decades, this incredible bull market that we've seen in the United States, because we're.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

A deeply irrational species. Also because central banks are now buying gold as a hedge against inflation, where they would normally buy things like US Treasuries.

[Felix Salmon]

Well, let's do two different things here. There is a group of retail investors who buy gold as a hedge against inflation. And certainly back in the 70s, this was a thing that you would buy gold as a hedge against inflation when people were really worried about inflation and inflation was running very hot in much of the world. That is not the reason why central banks are buying it. Central banks are buying it as part of their foreign exchange reserves. Obviously it's not foreign exchange, it's a shiny metal, but it serves the same purpose. It's something that you can convert back and forth into your own currency, you know, and have like a store of value outside your own currency. But it is absolutely true that central banks in General and the Chinese central bank in particular have been buying a lot of gold and that has been driving up the price.

[Emily Peck]

That's where I come in here. Because when gold first crossed, I think 2000 into 3000, we wrote about it at Axios and it was all about China wasn't doing well, its economy wasn't doing well, and it was buying more gold, pushing up the price of gold. Then reading about Gold Crossing 4000 this past week, went in and read the coverage. As an aside, people would say China's buying gold, but the stories, I mean, Krugman had a substack.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

Of course.

[Emily Peck]

All the usual people who write about this stuff had their columns and the conventional wisdom was gold prices are increasing because there's de dollarization going on. People don't like the dollar anymore. Some pieces were like, there's a Chinese strategy and conspiracy to move away from the dollar and into gold. And this is what's happening now. And I, I'm just not convinced by any of it.

[Felix Salmon]

Emily, are you saying that the rhetoric is different now? So my question is, what is the difference? Because both of these stories are basically saying China is moving its foreign exchange reserves out of dollar denominated treasuries into gold, and that is causing the price of gold to go up. So what is the difference between the previous discourse and the current discourse?

[Emily Peck]

So in the previous discourse during the Biden administration, it was really like, China's doing poorly, so it's doing this thing, it's buying gold.

[Felix Salmon]

Why would China doing poorly make it want to buy gold?

[Emily Peck]

I'm not sure. Honestly. I went back and read the coverage and I can't explain it fully. It was just like, China's economy is doing poorly, so they're buying gold. But no one was like, this is Biden's fault. And no one really was saying, I don't think that the global economy is moving away from dollars all that much. But now in the current moment, where a lot of people talk about Trump derangement syndrome, which I don't adhere to people saying that exactly, but there is a tendency to read everything that happens in markets as a reaction to Donald Trump. And that is the difference this time.

[Felix Salmon]

Around, I think that is exactly right that, you know, under Biden, this was China doing some grand geostrategic something something and buying gold for whatever reasons. Like, I think Poland was buying gold as well. Like every so often a central bank here or a central bank there decides that they want more gold. I mean, it works the other way too. I remember when the UK central bank sold a bunch of gold. I think the IMF maybe sold a bunch of gold at one point. So whatever, sometimes they buy, sometimes they sell. At the moment, we seem to be in a period where central banks are buying, but China is just so big that Chinese central bank buying really does move the price of gold in a way that most central banks can't because it is a very big and liquid market. It's like $27 trillion, I think, you know, it's much, much bigger than all the crypto in the world combined. So you really need, you know, massive amounts of buying to move the price and to quadruple the price or to, you know, 10x the price from where it was a couple decades ago. That's kind of wild. And yeah, part of this is just to try and reduce reliance on the dollar. But I think the difference is that in one of these cases what you're doing is you're saying like, we are living in a dollarized world and that makes us feel unsafe and not really in control of our own destinies as China. And so therefore we want to find other assets that are not dollars that we can invest in. And that's like the Biden discourse. And then under Trump, it's like, no, we actually want to move the world away from the dollar. We think that the dollar is losing its status as the global reserve currency. And so there's something wrong with the dollar. And therefore we all need to pile into gold, which is a slightly different sort of angle to it. And while I totally can buy into the first, even now under Trump, I don't really buy into the second. Gold is never going to replace the dollar. Bitcoin is never going to replace the dollar. The Euro is never going to replace the dollar. God knows the Remnant B is never going to replace the dollar. The dollar is the global reserve currency. It will be for the foreseeable future. It might not be as secure in that status as it was 10 years ago, but there's nothing else that's even close. And I don't think that that slight diminution in reserve currency status really explains what we're seeing in the gold price.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

So what's driving the retail market then? Because there was a quote in the prep from Ray Dalio of all people saying that it would be reasonable to have 15% of your portfolio in gold right now, which strikes me as insane. Insane.

[Felix Salmon]

So Ray Dalio, first and foremost is not retail. Ray Dalio is the ultimate non retail investor. He is out there doing all manner of complicated mathematics at some hedge fund that Rob Copeland has written about at length. No one really understands what he's doing or why he's doing it. What he was saying in that quote was not, and I really, really want to underline this, was not. If you are Joe Q. Public, you should have 15% of your assets in gold. Absolutely not. What he was saying is that if you look at gold's risk adjusted return and you start trying to put together some kind of a CAPM sharp ratio optimized asset allocation model, then the weight of gold in that model, if you kind of optimize it according to whatever algorithm Ray Dalio has up his sleeve this week, comes out way, way higher than you would normally imagine and could be as high as 15%. I don't think any institutional investor has a 15% asset allocation to gold. That's not something people do. But what he's saying is that the reason people don't do it is not because they're slavishly following a CAPM model. It's because they're taking a look at what gets spit out of these models. And they're like, well, that's insane. I'm not going to do that. There's a common sense reason why people are not allocating 15% to gold much more than the sort of weird mathematical reason.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

I think generally that's true. But I also think the retail market does pay attention to what institutional investors are doing with their own money and they chase a lot of the same trends. And so Dalio, something like that publicly, and it's not just him. I think there's a lot of retail buying happening right now and it's not just by the conspiracy theory driven gold bucks that you would have derided a few years ago.

[Felix Salmon]

So again, let's unpack this a little bit. I think that's right. I think the number one biggest change over the past 25 years, that really genuinely does explain a decent chunk of the run up. Not all of it by any means, but a good chunk of it is the fact that it is now way, way easier to buy gold as an investment than it ever was in the past. It used to be, you know, when I was a, when I was a lad and you wanted to invest in gold, you would go out and you would buy like Krugerrands or something. You would buy physical coins and then you would put them in a safe and the coins are heavy and expensive and you need to look after the safe and remember the combination and probably pay for it if it's in the safety deposit box in the bank and all of this stuff. And it feels kind of prepper, like in its own way. You know, there is something a little bit paranoid about like I'm buying these Krugerrands because they are a store of value when everything else goes to shit. Now with a couple of taps on your computer, you can enter your Charles Schwab account and buy ETFs. And there are a million gold ETFs, including one, I think it's XAU, that has $175 billion under management or something huge like that. They're very liquid and it basically you can just buy a stock on the stock market and it's gold and you are directly exposed to the gold price that way and it becomes just another financial instrument. And that rise of ETFs, which has really happened over the past 10, 15 years, has made it a lot easier for retail investors to buy gold. And that has helped provide a tailwind to the gold market. And that is much, much more important. And I cannot emphasize this enough, this is dwarfs by like three orders of magnitude. All of the dumb lifestyle pieces that we read about, like people going to Costco and buying gold bars at Costco, like, ignore that.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

I need you to know that I just googled because I thought truly there's a trump gold coin somewhere that's taking advantage of this. And you can buy a 1 ounce 24 karat gold coin called the Deplorables of their time is what the coin is titled for $14,000, $999. If you really just want to lose.

[Felix Salmon]

Money, if you don't want to spend $4,000 an ounce for gold, you can spend $14,000 an ounce for gold. That sounds like a great trade.

[Emily Peck]

So Felix, you said when Elizabeth mentioned Ray Dalio saying you put 15% into of your whatever investments into gold, you said that's crazy. But also you said I was wrong. Gold prices have increased more than the S&P 500 over the past two decades. So if I 20 years ago had taken this Ray Dalio advice, non advice.

[Felix Salmon]

Well, he didn't advise that. He's not advising now and he certainly didn't advise that 20 years ago.

[Emily Peck]

If I had gone with this rule of thumb that you explained isn't a rule of thumb and also is crazy. If I had done that, I would have more in my 401k right now than I currently do. So seems good to me now it seems too late now. It seems like, well, that's the whole.

[Felix Salmon]

Point, right the reason why there's this crazy 15% number that gets spit out of Raid Dalio's algorithms is only because gold has done so well over the past 20 years. And so because the returns are so high over time, the algorithms slowly wind up allocating more and more to gold because it has a stronger and stronger historical record. That historical record didn't exist 20 years ago. Twenty years ago, gold had been going sideways for decades or even down since the 70s and 80s. And so there's no model in the world that would have recommended a 15% allocation 20 years ago. You only get that recommendation at the top of the bull market, not at the bottom of it. So, like, it's very. It's a very bad sort of. At the point at which your models are saying, allocate 15% to gold, that's probably the time to sell rather than buy. Yeah.

[Emily Peck]

Although, I mean, gold just hit 3,000 in March and now it's 4,000. That's crazy. We could have talked about this in March and you would have said the same thing. And then, you know.

[Felix Salmon]

Yeah.

[Emily Peck]

Missed out on a lot.

[Felix Salmon]

Yeah. I mean, like, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. I mean, that's also interesting. Right. Because the thing that this isn't is a short squeeze. It's not like gold went to 3,000. A bunch of people said that's massively overvalued according to my fundamental valuations analysis. So I'm going to short gold. And then they've all needed to cover their shorts as they've been getting margin calls as it's been going up. Like, that is not what happened. Are there people in Chicago who short gold on futures? Absolutely. Can it be done? Yes. Is it an important part of the price mechanism which drives prices upwards over years or months? No.

[Emily Peck]

So gold isn't memeing out.

[Felix Salmon]

You see, this one I struggle with. I mean, gold in many ways is the ultimate meme. You know, it is the meme to end all memes. It is a meme that has been around for 4,000 years in that sense, as you know, as Elizabeth says, it's almost embedded in our genetic code. You know, we just. As humans, there's something about, ooh, shiny object and gold in particular that is amazingly sort of meme. Ish. Unlike silver. And I have to say, like, the other thing that is going on right now is silver just hit $50 an ounce, which is also crazy because, you know, again, not that long ago it was five. And that one you can't explain away with. Chinese central bank buying. The Chinese central bank isn't buying silver.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

I covered a company a million years ago that did a precious metals refinery and they would balance in quotes their portfolio based on how the metals were performing against each other. So I imagine that that's just a sort of category. Yeah, yeah.

[Felix Salmon]

I mean, that's part of it. There's a lot of people who do that, like relative value trade. They're like, if the ratio of gold to silver gets too high, then you buy silver, and if it gets too low, then you buy. But again, there's no fundamental analysis you can do here. Right? There's no kind of. Well, let's go back to first principles. And one ounce of gold should be worth a hundred times more than one ounce of silver. There's no there there. There's nothing underlying it. And the thing you can say with absolute certainty is that neither of them are equal to the present value of their future cash flows in the way that you could say about a stock or a bond or even a piece of real estate.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

How much of this overall is just a de dollarization trade and how much of it might be driven by other factors?

[Felix Salmon]

I think a little bit of what's happened over the past couple of months might plausibly be attributable to the dollar. Something, something. But one of the main things that I fall back on when talking about financial markets, and I have said this a million times, I'm sure I've said this on the show a million times, is that whenever something startling happens in a market, when you have a line that goes sharply up and to the right, there's this deeply human impulse, especially if you're a journalist, to ask why? And you look for causal factors that caused this line to go up and to the right. And there are two things that are often true. In fact, two things that are usually true. One is we don't know why. It's really hard to have some kind of knowledge of why. But then the second thing is even more profound than that, is that sometimes there just is no reason. Even if you had omniscient, you know, insight into all of the things in the world, if you were like a super powerful AI or something, there still is no causal reason why sometimes things just go vibes.

[Emily Peck]

What's the adage? Narrative follows price. Something happens in the market and then we all race to make a story about it. And it's not just the markets, it's really anything.

[Felix Salmon]

Nassim Taleb wrote a whole book called Fooled by Randomness, which is a really good book which is basically all about this, right? You know, we see something big happen to the price of gold and we spend an entire podcast segment, you know, trying to talk about why this might be.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

Maybe there is no reason, but it's.

[Emily Peck]

Probably because China's buying a lot of gold.

[Felix Salmon]

Foreign.

[Emily Peck]

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[Felix Salmon]

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[Elizabeth Spiers]

And what isn't this partly just a sort of bet that the market is becoming more amenable to companies like polymarket because of the political situation? The guy who runs the Intercontinental Exchange is the husband of Kelly Lefler, who's a Trump administration official. Donald Trump Jr. Is an investor in Polymarket. This just seems like a, let's take this opportunity now that Polymarket is probably going to be, well, it is legal now. It wasn't for a while and they bought an exchange that allows them to do business in the U.S. i think.

[Felix Salmon]

They did that in August. I think that was part of the billion dollar investment. Right. When it was worth $1 billion, it was worth $1 billion because it had become legal. And yes, you're right, Polymarket was illegal for a long time. It was doing a whole bunch of gambly things which were definitely illegal and a whole bunch of crypto y things which were definitely illegal. And you would talk to former SEC chair Gary Gensler and he'd be like, yeah, this is completely illegal and we need to. And technically speaking, that massive growth that we saw in Polymarket over the past few years all happened with non US Betters because Americans weren't allowed to use it. You know, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. But now it's legal. Yeah.

[Emily Peck]

So polymarket, I didn't even realize, and we've talked about it a few times and we should say, if we haven't already clearly said it's where you can go and bet on the outcomes of things, whether it's political races or political news or sports, which is becoming a bigger and bigger piece of it.

[Felix Salmon]

By far the biggest piece of it. Like it was built as a prediction market for non sports events. And then it started to doing sports just like its rival Kalshi is also doing sports. And the minute you start doing sports, it turns out that people are much more interested in betting on sports than they are and interested in betting on, you know, who's going to win the next election. And so now it is basically become the bet with Polymarket it is less like prediction markets are a really smart way of forcing people to put their own Money on the line and getting a valuable prediction about probabilities of future events and they start becoming, this is where you bet on sports. Right.

[Emily Peck]

So, but what I didn't know is that it was founded during the pandemic by an NYU dropout named Shane who just made an app and now he is a billionaire at the age of 27. Like the youngest self made billionaire in the Bloomberg index, which I'm just saying I didn't know that the feds raided his, you know, New York City townhouse a few years ago back in the Gensler days before like the Trump administration had a stake in, in betting markets. So I just wanted to put that information out there because it's interesting and I hope my children found apps that make a billion dollars someday.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

Yeah, I think some of this too is just consumers being educated a little bit about the fact that you can bet on these things. With the growth of sports betting, people are looking for other things to kind of bet on.

[Felix Salmon]

Well, so again, I think this is exactly the other way around, to be honest. It's not that people are used to sports betting and now they're learning that they can bet on the outcome of the election. It's the other way around. It's that when Polymarket was just event contracts, everyone was like, that's the nerdiest, most boring thing in the world. And then once it started accepting sports betting, it became an incredibly obvious place to do all of your sports betting. Because all of the alternative places to do sports betting are worse. They're worse for two really big enormous reasons. Number one, you are betting against a sportsbook who is very worried that you have information that you don't. So if you're any good at betting, then the sportsbook will basically prevent you from betting. And there's a whole chunk of Nate Silver's latest book about this, which is basically like the minute you get any good at betting, the problem then becomes you can't find anyone to take your bets. Polymarket solves this problem by making it a peer to peer market rather than you against the sportsbook. And then the cherry on top is basically it's a tax thing that if you make money betting on sports in Vegas with a sportsbook, then you have to pay taxes on all of your winnings, but you can't offset your losses or you can't offset all of your losses. Whereas if you trade sports events on polymarket, then you only need to pay taxes on the amount that you actually earn or make rather than on the winnings without taking into account the losses. So for tax reasons, it just makes all the sense in the world for sports betting to move from sportsbooks to prediction markets. And so with those two things, I think the bet here that Intercontinental Exchange and people are making is the Kalshi and Polymark and probably a couple of others will effectively eat the entire sports betting industry. What this does to Fanguel and people like that, I don't know. And if that's the case, is that worth $10 billion? I don't know.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

Maybe the other thing, and I don't really buy this, but the Intercontinental Exchange rationale for investing in Polymarket is that they want to access to and the ability to sell the data as proprietary data. I don't know how much that's worth.

[Felix Salmon]

But, you know, if you are betting on Polymarket, if you're a remotely serious better on Polymarket, you're on the site, you're looking at charts of where everything has been trading over time. You're like, you're saying, oh, like, that's gone down to a place where I want to buy. This has gone up to a place where I want to sell. You need that data. Everyone who is on polymarket is like, they don't bet if they don't have the data at their fingertips. The idea that Intercontinental Exchange is going to be like, you need to buy a Bloomberg subscription before you can like, find out the price history of the probability of Kamala Harris becoming president. Yeah, like, I don't think it's worth that much, honestly. And most of it is just of historical value now. It's not that valuable. It's like, it's of interest to historians, but the people who are actually betting and who are putting real money on the line, they need that data right now. And if they don't have it, they just won't bet. And so you kind of have to give it away. I'm not sure this is a massive income stream for them, but maybe this.

[Emily Peck]

Whole thing got me thinking. Well, plus, you guys talked to Andrew Ross Sorkin about his new book 1929, for the Money Talks offshoot pod that.

[Felix Salmon]

We do, which is coming out on Tuesday.

[Emily Peck]

And reading it, I learned something that I didn't know, which was at the turn, turn of the 20th century. So in the 1900s through the great Depression, there used to be a thing called bucket shops where people would go and they would bet on whether stocks would go up or down. This wasn't investing in the stock market. It was just betting, like the US Deals going up, US deals going down and there was like a house involved in the house, like Felix was saying about sports betting, the house always kind of won. And they were pretty corrupt and people, you know, just lost a lot of money and they eventually got outlawed. And then I was thinking, hang on, are we going back to that? And there's another piece I was reading just before we started taping on Friday from Bloomberg about the difference between gambling and investing or betting and trading. And there is a difference. Like one of the points the author made was that bets are not supposed to affect outcomes. But when you're trading in the stock market, like you look at, or you used to look at stocks, and whether or not people were investing or how much they're investing would tell us something about the worth of the underlying thingamabob. But bets are a little different. And there's cross pollination and all of that.

[Felix Salmon]

The whole point of prediction markets is that you can read into the market and we can learn something from where the price is. That's why people think that prediction markets is valuable is because you get price discovery. And you can see this is the most objective number there is about what is the probability, probability that Hamilton's gonna win the election.

[Emily Peck]

Is it objective or is it just like vibes, like we're looking at prediction markets about politics or something? It's like bettors are trying to figure out what other people think about a thing. There is that stock.

[Felix Salmon]

That's Keynes, right? That's what Keynes said about the stock market is that it's a beauty contest where you're trying to judge not how beautiful the contestants are, but how beautiful the other people think the contestants are. I don't think there's that much of a difference between, between bets and investments, to be honest, right now. And we did talk about this with Andrew a bit like, we are definitely in a world where all of the guardrails that were put in place in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression are now being dismantled. And that kind of paternalist thing about the SEC saying, oh, you know, you can only invest in things that are safe and we aren't going to let you just do speculative gambling. Like now everyone's like, just go ahead, do speculative gambling. Buy crypto, bet on the New York Yankees, do whatever you want. It's all investment, it's all yolo, it's all memes. Just knock yourself out.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

I think these things are cyclical, though. I think there is a kind of regulatory backlash when speculation hits a frenzy and people start losing their shirts.

[Felix Salmon]

That happened once in 1933. I don't think it has happened again.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

I think it has. There have been regulatory tightening around certain types of assets. I think this is more akin to sentiment analysis right now, because there's not really. There aren't enough people on Poly Market to give you the same signal that you would get from a much larger market like the stock market, for example.

[Felix Salmon]

Yes, you're right. The stock market gives you a better price signal than polymarket. But polymarket is not small. Polymarket has real volumes. And you don't need massive volumes to get price signals. You only need relatively modest volumes to get valuable price signals. And I think polymarket is big enough now that there is value to the numbers that have spit out of it.

[Emily Peck]

But you don't think there's a difference between betting and investing?

[Felix Salmon]

I'm saying that where we're at right now in terms of the regulatory treatment of the two, that basically isn't.

[Emily Peck]

But that's not what I'm asking. I'm asking, is there a difference between betting that the price of Tesla goes up and investing your money in Tesla stock? Like, is there a difference between gambling and investing?

[Felix Salmon]

And what I would say is. Please refer back to the previous segment about gold, because either buying gold is a bet or it's an investment. There is no intrinsic value to gold. There is no future cash flows to gold. There's nothing that it does that has value. It's pure meme. And if gold is an investment, and frankly, in one way or another, it has been an investment for thousands of years, then, yeah, I find it really difficult to draw any kind of hard and fast line between betting and investment.

[Emily Peck]

But, okay, betting on gold, if there was a company and the company produced gold bars and you invested in the company based on its future revenue.

[Felix Salmon]

Yeah.

[Emily Peck]

What's happening? That's.

[Felix Salmon]

No, that, that's. That's.

[Emily Peck]

Even though it's working in a material. That is nonsense. Ish.

[Felix Salmon]

Well, there are. There's a whole bunch of publicly listed gold miners. Right. And you can buy stocks in gold miners. And that was always one of the big interesting questions. What's better value? Buying stock in gold miners or buying gold? And turns out buying gold is a better investment than buying stock in gold miners.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

What about meme stocks? Because there you're definitely betting, but are you ever really investing?

[Felix Salmon]

Exactly. So when a stock can be a bet and when a bet on gold can be an investment, then the distinction between the two is, I think, impossible. Slate Money is sponsored this week. By 1Password do you know how many SaaS applications are being used at your company right now? I'm just going to come out and say that you don't. If you can't keep count, you're not alone. Trellica by 1Password helps you discover and secure access to all of your SaaS apps, even unmanaged shadow IT1 password. You almost certainly know it. If you don't, you should. It's an amazing app. It keeps all of your passwords safe in one place. It's incredibly secure. It is trusted by millions of users and over 150,000 businesses. Trellica is a product by 1Password that inventories every app in use at your company. It pre populates profiles to assess risk. It lets you manage access, optimize spend, enforce security best practices across every app your employees use. It helps you securely onboard and off board employees. It makes sure you meet compliance goals. It's a complete solution for SaaS access governance. So take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application, Even unmanaged shadow ID. Learn more at 1Password.com money that's 1Password.com money all lowercase.

[Emily Peck]

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[Felix Salmon]

I love the way that we're moving in this conversation today because I want to end with another like fine line, which is the one that you see in charity auctions, which is the distinction between purchasing something for money because you value it to a certain degree, which is what you see. You know, at most like you if there's a Sotheby's auction of paintings, then people will say like, you know, this isn't as much as I'm willing to pay for this painting. And that gives you an idea of the value of the painting versus charity auctions where you're basically giving money to charity and that's the reason why you're writing the check. And then there's this object that kind of ratifies the donation. And then the person who writes the biggest check gets the object, gets the painting, gets the prize. And the value of the painting is not necessarily equal to the amount of money that was donated to charity in return for the person getting the painting. So again, where there's this fine line between betting and investing, I think that's an interesting fine line between, like, can you back out the value of a painting from the amount that it sold for at a charity auction?

[Emily Peck]

You buried the lead. I'm sorry? You buried the happy little lead, which is.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

You're missing the fun part. Yeah.

[Emily Peck]

We're talking about this because Bob Ross, who for years hosted a show on PBS called the Joy of Painting, and, you know, we're Gen X, so we all probably watched it where he. For, like, 25 minutes, he got up in front of a canvas and he painted a landscape using his famous. I guess I didn't know it was famous. Wet on wet technique apparent. I don't understand why this is a.

[Felix Salmon]

Big deal, but it's like, spoiler alert. It's not. But yeah, go on. Okay.

[Emily Peck]

And then he painted these delightful little paintings. Spoiler alert thinks they're ugly.

[Felix Salmon]

They're not delightful in the same way. They are the ugliest things in the world.

[Emily Peck]

If I could paint something like that in 26 minutes, I would be brilliant.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

But see, this is the backstory to this, is that oil painting. You know, the reason why this is a proprietary technique is that normally it takes forever to do an oil painting because you have to do it in layers and it has to dry, and it takes forever to dry. And his whole shtick was, I will show you how to do a full landscape in, like, 25 minutes. And it's all just a matter of putting happy little clouds here and happy little trees here and so on. So it is democratizing oil painting.

[Felix Salmon]

The idea that in like, 1500 years of oil painting, people hadn't realized that you can use different colors of paint at the same time. You don't need to wait for a layer to dry. I mean, come on, people.

[Emily Peck]

Anyways, his work is owned, you know, by his estate, and they had had some success auctioning off his paintings.

[Felix Salmon]

Okay, so I quick fact check on this, and this is confusing. I don't think these works are being sold by his estate. I did think that for a minute, and now I think they're not. I think they're being sold by a public television station which owns 30 of them.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

But what precipitated this is where I think where Emily's going is that Bonham's, the auction house had two of his paintings and they expected them to for between 30,000 and $50,000. And they sold for 114,890 5,750 respectively. And that surprised the woman who runs the Bob Ross estate. And so she thought, well, now's a good time to sell a bunch of these paintings and help out public radio.

[Emily Peck]

Because they already had value on the auction market to Felix.

[Felix Salmon]

All right, so so many things to.

[Emily Peck]

We got there, which I tried to get out an intro and he tried and together we haven't quite got there.

[Felix Salmon]

Yet, Emily, because you still haven't got to the best bit, which is all of this was precipitated by a lovely email from Marshall. And he said, hi, Slate money. I read that Bob Ross paintings are going to be auctioned off to raise money for public TV stations. I recently listened to the episode about Basquiat and I was curious about the market for Bob Ross paintings specifically, is there one? And if so, what does it look like? What kind of investor would buy a Bob Ross painting at an auction as an investment? Such a good question, right? Such a good question. So there's so much to unpack here. Let's just start with Marshall's question. The really easy answer is no. If you go back a couple years, I did a show with Julia Halperin about paintings as an investment grade paintings, that kind of thing. And I asked her, how much money do you need to spend on a painting before it becomes investment grade? If you spend $1,000 on the painting, it's a consumption good and you're spending $1,000 to put something up on your wall. If you spend $5 million on a painting, you kind of expect that that painting is going to hold some kind of value and might go up in value. And you can think of it as an investment. Where is the dividing line? And what she said was, and this is, if anything, it's gone up since then, but what she said was $500,000. So Bob Ross paintings, if they're selling for 95, $114,000, that is expensive, but it is not investment grade. And I would highly, highly expect that whoever it was who spent that much money on those paintings did not think of it as an investment and did think of it as a consumption good.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

Maybe that's a category error because I don't think anybody who buys a Bob Ross painting is thinking of it as investment grade art. It strikes me as something more akin to buying an Antique that has collector value because of nostalgia reason.

[Felix Salmon]

Yeah, right. I mean, there is investment grade antiques as well. And the bar for investment grade antiques is lower than the bar for investment grade paintings. But no, it's not an investment grade antique. It's not an investment grade anything. It is not going like, as I say, no one is spending $100,000 on the Bob Ross painting because they think it's going to go up in value. Because, I mean, just.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

I love your disgust at the utterly, you know, cringy.

[Emily Peck]

I fully get it. I feel like when I was reading about this last night, I was like, I get it. I would buy one of these. It's fun. Like, Bob Ross did this on pbs. He had his big hair, his voice was chill. This is fun. If you have it on your wall, you can be like Bob Ross, you know, and if your house guest is over 40, they will know what that means. And if they're not, they won't. But it's, you know, it's fun to, to buy collectibles. All kinds of different stuff. Like you're saying, not an investment really, but like, just like a fun, happy little painting to buy, to get people chatting.

[Felix Salmon]

Yeah. If you have $100,000, like, you know, at the bottom of your loose change drawer, then why not? It's a fun little thing.

[Emily Peck]

And in this case the auction, the money goes to pbs, which is nice.

[Felix Salmon]

So, okay, so now what's happening is that the Bob Ross market, that was always a very thin market because there weren't a lot of them in, like, private hands is now kind of being flooded. This is very interesting. If you look at the history of Bob Ross paintings at auction, there is a history of it. There have been 13 paintings. I looked this up on Artnet. There have been 13 paintings by Bob Ross that have sold at auction since 2009. And, you know, they've generally gone for five figure sums. As Elizabeth says. We recently had one that went for very, very low six figures, 13 over the past, you know, 16, 17 years. Now this public TV station is like, we can sell off our Bob Ross paintings for charity. And people who are buying it will know that they're not just buying a Bob Ross painting, but they're also supporting public TV. Great, awesome. But they're selling 30 of them. That is a lot of Bob Ross paintings to drop onto the market. The person who spent $114,000 on that Bob Ross painting is kicking themselves right now because they're like, they spent that money because they thought that Bob Ross paintings were Very rare and very rarely hit the market. Now we're having 30 of them hit the market at once. Three of them are being auctioned on November 11th at a Bonham's auction in California. And people are going to be like, yeah, let's bet on Bob Ross, and yay, it's going to a good cause, so I can spend a bit more. But on the other hand, they're also thinking to themselves, if I don't get one of these three, there's going to be another 27 chances to be buy a Bob Ross painting coming up very soon.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

Well, but there is a finite number of Bob Ross paintings. So is there a large scenario he.

[Felix Salmon]

Was painting these things? There are 400 episodes. He was painting these things in 15 minutes. I think there's a lot of Bob Ross painting somewhere.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

But is there a possible scenario where it becomes more of a scarcity to have a Bob Ross painting than, say, be the five millionth person to own a Damien Hirst dot print and then the value relatively is higher or it becomes an investment grade?

[Emily Peck]

I think Felix is making a gold mistake with Bob Ross paintings. I think he's got that name recognition and it's fun and that this isn't a flood. It's just like meeting the demand. And I think I would bet, but I don't want to bet a real bet, because I'm cheap, that the prices that these paintings will garner at these auctions will be similarly high.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

Should we go open a polymarket bet around this?

[Felix Salmon]

Exactly. We should have a polymarket bet on how much the Bob Ross. I mean, there is one in particular which I need to talk about. One of these three paintings is this, like, seascape of a wave crashing against rocks, which I honestly think is the single ugliest painting I have ever seen in my entire life. It is so unbelievably bad.

[Emily Peck]

Are you talking about Cliffside?

[Felix Salmon]

Cliffside, yeah.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

When I was 10, I would have thought this. This painting was gorgeous.

[Emily Peck]

Again, if I painted it Cliffside, I would be like, look what I made, because I can't even draw a house. So it depends how you're looking at it.

[Felix Salmon]

But yeah. So I think this is interesting, right? When we're sort of handicapping how much Cliffside is going to sell for when it goes on the auction block in November in Los Angeles. We are looking at three different things. One is, is this painting any good? I think the obvious answer to that is no, but maybe Emily would disagree. The second one is like, does it have cultural cachet and value? By dint of being painted by this guy with big hair who was on the telly. Clearly it does. And there are people who are willing to pay for that. And then the third thing, which is super hard to handicap, is the people who are bidding on this painting, are they going to be willing to spend a lot more just because they know that their money will be going to a good cause and will be supporting public television?

[Elizabeth Spiers]

Yeah, I think probably.

[Emily Peck]

Definitely. Yeah. I wouldn't pay $50 for a tote bag, but if it's a $50 tote bag plus it goes to PBF's or whatever, then okay, sure.

[Felix Salmon]

So then that raises an interesting question, right? That. That this is going to be a public auction at Bonhams. The result will find its way into the artnet database, just like all of the other paintings in that auction. And let's say it goes for, like, a million dollars because someone wants to give a million dollars to public tv. Like, at that point, the auction record for Bob Ross is a million dollars. And everyone's like, oh, wow, Bob Ross paintings are going for a million dollars. But then really not, because that's mainly a charitable donation, it's not really the painting. It becomes impossible to sort of disentangle these two things.

[Emily Peck]

I get that.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

See, a year ago, we would have asked, what if somebody turned it into an NFT and put it on the blockchain? Would it be worth more?

[Felix Salmon]

I mean, it's not even a year ago, like, the NFT for comedian the banana taped to the wall. You know that banana? Everyone was shocked that it sold for $6 million. The market cap of the NFT is still more than $6 million, even today. Yeah, NFT is weird.

[Emily Peck]

What even is money, you guys?

[Felix Salmon]

I feel like we all started this podcast with this vague, intuitive concept of what money was, and by the time we reach the end here, none of us has a clue. We have done the opposite of being an informative podcast. We have actually just made everyone dumb and no one knows thing at the end of this podcast. I apologize to you all. We will do better next week. Slate money is sponsored this week by Lisa, which makes mattresses. And you know this. How you sleep is just as important as how long you sleep. Sleep, you can get eight hours a night. But eight hours on a lumpy, terrible mattress is just not as good as eight hours of perfect, deep sleep because your mattress is cradling you in an optimal manner. Leesa mattresses are made with premium materials, and they're designed with specific sleep positions and feel preferences in mind. They adjust to your body to deliver serious comfort and support no matter how you sleep. I have a Leesa mattress myself and I am sleeping better. It is super comfortable. And what happens with a lot of mattresses is you wind up getting too much pressure in one part of your body and not enough pressure in another part of your body. See, what you wind up is tossing and turning throughout the night to even out the pressure points. That is suboptimal. If you have a beautiful Leesa mattress, I can tell you from experience that does not happen. You can just fall asleep and enjoy as many hours as you can possibly get of wonderful sleep. You'll feel the difference from night one, but honestly, you can feel the difference even more from like night 10 or night 20. There's this technology that kind of improves over time. Plus Lisa backs it up with free shipping, easy returns, and that 100 night sleep trial. So you get to keep it for 100 nights and find out if it doesn't work, you can send it back. Lisa isn't just about sleep. It's about impact. They donate thousands of mattresses each year to those in need and they partner with organizations like Clean Hub to help remove harmful plastic waste from the oceans. So go to Lisa.com for 20% off mattresses plus get an extra $50 off with promo code money exclusive for Sleep money listeners. That's L E-E-S-A.com promo code money for 20% off mattresses plus an extra $50 off. Be sure to enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you. Lisa.com promo code money slate money is sponsored this week by AG1. Do you think you have a healthy diet? I hope you do. I think I do. But it can be hard for anybody to get the key nutrients they need. You can take a ton of different vitamins and supplements, but that just takes up a ton of cabinet space. And it's also just a lot of of remembering to take things. AG1 is a single thing that you can drink and solves all of those problems. It's this lovely little green powder. You put it in a tube, basically screw on the cap, you shake it up with some water. Just water. That's all you need. And it's this delicious drink that you can drink and it solves all of your problems. If you do it once a day, that's all you need to do. It's actually surprisingly difficult to get get all of the key nutrients you need from diet alone. And it definitely isn't efficient. AG1 Next Gen is a daily health drink that has been clinically shown to support gut health and fill in common nutrient gaps. It has five probiotic strains, it has over 75 vitamins and minerals and it's a simple habit that you can get into for less than $3 per day if you buy a subscription Description you'll get more than $7 worth of daily nutritional support. And it comes in all manner of flavors. Tropical berry, citrus. So head to drinkag1.com slatemoney to get a free welcome kit including a bottle of vitamin D and three AG1 travel packs when you first subscribe. That's drinkag1.com slatemoney but we will finish with the numbers round because we do stick to tradition on this show. We don't just throw it together, you know. Emily, what's your number?

[Emily Peck]

My number is 115 million. That's dollars. Those are the legal fees incurred by Charlie Javice. Her legal fees and another executive were convicted of defrauding JP Morgan because they had the student loan company. And they said they had so many users but it turns out they had very few users. But what's interesting about the legal fees, it's a big high number. But what's interesting about it is that guess who is paying the legal fees? Is it Charlie Javiz?

[Felix Salmon]

No.

[Emily Peck]

Guess who?

[Felix Salmon]

It's JP Morgan.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

It's JP Morgan who she defrauded.

[Emily Peck]

Who she defrauded is on the hook for her legal fees because of the contract they signed when JP Morgan bought her fraudulent company. And so that is funny and I don't know why but apparently these are very high legal fees. Even in this world I think it.

[Felix Salmon]

Is not easy to rack up $115 million in legal fees. We have to wait.

[Emily Peck]

They put it in perspective in the article I read a high priced lawyer billing $2,000 an hour would have to bill eight hours every day including weekends and holidays for 20 years to reach 115 million according to the nice article that I read about this.

[Felix Salmon]

A couple of quick things to note and first of all, curse you Emily because that was going to be my number.

[Emily Peck]

I got to go first.

[Felix Salmon]

Second of all, Charlie Chaviz having lost this case is now technically on the hook for this. Like she now owes $115 million to J.P. morgan because she lost. No one expects J.P. morgan to be able to recover this because she doesn't have any money. But J.P. morgan had to pay the fees. Charlie Javies is now not only going to prison for seven years but is also in debt to the tune of $150 million. The third thing that I do need to just shout out to Alex Spiro here, it's that man again. You know, he's everyone's lawyer, including Elon Musk. He is the guy who's getting the $115 million, and he is the guy who is billing out at $2,100 now. And not just for him, but for his associates as well. And you're like, Alex Spiro, man like that is a good business to be in.

[Emily Peck]

What firm is he at? Is he a Quinn Emanuel?

[Felix Salmon]

No, I think he has his own shirt.

[Emily Peck]

Oh, good. Good for him. Good job. And he represented Elizabeth Holmes too, right? They were saying Elizabeth Holmes legal fees were less than Charlie Javis's, which I was sort of surprised by because her case seemed more complicated.

[Felix Salmon]

According to Wikipedia, he has represented multiple celebrity clients, including Elon Musk, Jay Z, Mr. Beast, Eric Adams, and Alec Baldwin. Kind of amazing.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

That is a murderer's row of celebrities.

[Emily Peck]

Eric Adams a celebrity?

[Elizabeth Spiers]

Oh, I think he is. I think there's. There's nobody who doesn't. He's too much of a personality.

[Felix Salmon]

Was Eric Adams New York's first celebrity mayor discussed?

[Elizabeth Spiers]

Oh, no.

[Emily Peck]

New York always has a celebrity. Not always, but often has a celebrity.

[Felix Salmon]

Was Rudy Giuliani a celebrity mayor?

[Emily Peck]

Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

[Felix Salmon]

All right.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

He was America's mayor. Felix, do you not remember that for five minutes?

[Felix Salmon]

I don't remember that. Hang on. In that case, I'm going to have to come up with. What's the word? A non $150 million number. So therefore, Elizabeth, while I'm doing that, what is your number?

[Elizabeth Spiers]

My number is 1 million, and that's dollars. And that's the amount of money a company called Friend AI paid for a Subway ad takeover. That's about their product, which is $129.

[Felix Salmon]

I see these ads every day.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

The pendant is supposed to be an AI companion for you. And because these things are all over New York City, which is probably the city in America least likely to be receptive to this sort of thing because it's kind of cringey, and New Yorkers don't like cringe. So the idea of being receptive to an ad for an imaginary friend, for an adult that's powered by environmental destruction is not great. So all of them have been vandalized. And now there's a whole website dedicated to the creative vandalism of these ads. But the entrepreneur is, of course, a 22 year old who lives in Silicon Valley, and he was super excited about this ad launch. And so I have a quote from him. It says, in preparation for the campaign's Aug. 25 launch in New York, Mr. Shiffman headed to Burning man without an Internet connection. The overlap was intentional. I wanted to do the coolest thing I could possibly do and the biggest thing I could possibly do at the same time, he said, in the spirit of life, maxing. And I just think this is just the wrong. He picked the wrong city. It doesn't work.

[Felix Salmon]

What do you mean?

[Emily Peck]

He's getting free publicity right now on this pod. Like, this is great, I guess, in.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

The sense of, yeah, AU Press is good press.

[Felix Salmon]

People are definitely talking about it and vandalizing it. But one of the interesting parts of the discourse is that no one is actually receiving these things. The company has covered New York City in ads, but there is no product. I think 300 people have managed to receive one. And if you sign up for one, you'll get one. Maybe eventually, perhaps. But, like, everyone's complaining that, like, I tried to buy a friend and where's my friend?

[Elizabeth Spiers]

As of this rating, they've. They've sold 3,100 pendants.

[Emily Peck]

That's pretty good.

[Felix Salmon]

That's less than one pendant per subway ad. I'll tell you that. These things are everywhere. My number is 1,400, which is the number of dollars. 1,400 is the amount in dollars that Mikhail paid for two tickets to see Waiting for Godot on Broadway, and Mikhail did not like it. Mikhail then went on the Internet and wrote a review, and it's the best review ever of Waiting for Godot. I'm a longtime admirer of Broadway productions and even hold a season pass for Shay's Performing Arts Theater. Right, Mikhail? So I came in with genuine enthusiasm and high expectations. Unfortunately, this show was unlike anything I have ever experienced and not in a good way. What I encountered was not the artistry, music, or emotional storytelling I usually associate with Broadway, but instead, what felt like an endless cycle of nonsensical conversation between characters who seem trapped in their own madness. I stayed through the first half, hoping the second would offer clarity, but by intermission, it was clear this was a waste of both time and money. Keanu Reeves is an actor I respect greatly, but I cannot fathom why he would agree to participate in such a disjointed, inaccessible production.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

Samuel Beckett would love this, by the way.

[Felix Salmon]

He really would. It's quite glorious, and it's almost enough to make me want to see the show. But I am not going to spend $1,400 to see Bill and Ted do Godot. I'm sorry. I think that's it for us this week. Thank you so much for sticking with us through this show. Thank you for subscribing to Slate Plus. If you do, we will have a Slate plus on Emily. What are we talking about?

[Emily Peck]

Slate Plus 6, 7, 6, 7. Two numbers. Felix wouldn't let me do it for my number because it's two numbers.

[Felix Salmon]

It's two numbers. That's not six. Seven is not a number. It is two numbers. We're going to talk about six, seven. We have, as discussed on Tuesday, a show with Andrew Rossorkin. He's going to talk about 1929 and all of the echoes with the present day. And other than that, it just falls to me to say thank you for listening. Thank you to Shayna Roth and Justin Molly for producing. And we will be back next week with more Sleet money. Sleep Money is sponsored this week by Saks. Saks Fifth Avenue makes it easy to shop for your personal style this season. Fall is here and there are so many new fall arrivals that you're going to want to wear again and again. There's a great new relaxed Prada blazer. There are Gucci loafers you can take from work to the weekend. It is incredibly Easy to visit Saks.com and find new arrivals from your favorite designers. I kind of love the shirts from Commes des Garcons. I can't always afford them, but it is definitely always there on my Inspo board. And once in a blue moon, I might even buy one. Saks makes shopping feel customized to you. They have in store stylists. They have Saks.com showing you only what you like to shop. They will even let you know when arrivals from your favorite designers are in or when something you love is back in stock. So find inspiration for your personal style every day at Saks Fifth Avenue.