Allbirds Aren’t Real

0:04Hello, and 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 Spiers of the New York Times. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios. Hello, hello. We are going to talk about all birds. We have to talk about all birds. It's the funniest story of the week. So, because it's funny, we'll do it. We're going to talk about stonks, because the stonks are stonking. We are going to talk about Ticketmaster, because everyone hates Ticketmaster. We have a Slate Plus segment about SantaCon, because everybody hates SantaCon. And so, like, we just have a bunch of unanimous opinions on this show, which isn't going to stop us from disagreeing with each other.

0:48Somehow, we will work it out. It is all coming up on Slate Money.

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2:38So sometimes something happens which is so funny that the jokes just write themselves and everyone has so much fun telling the jokes that no one wants to actually say, well, actually, you know, there's something real going on as well. And I feel like this is one of those situations and we should just get the jokes over and done with, right? So Elizabeth, why don't you tell us the joke?

3:07Elizabeth Spiers: The joke and the reality is that Allbirds is now an AI company. Allbirds being, of course, Emily, what is Allbirds? Well, up until recently, they made sneakers that were wool and good for the world somehow and sold to tech people who wore them. And they were made of wool. And that was what Allbirds was, founded by a soccer guy and one of the many direct-to-consumer companies that got really big in the 2010s, like the razors and the socks and the underwear and everyone was thinking. Don't forget the eyeglasses. The eyeglasses. Eyeglasses are huge. It was at one point worth$4 billion for gray sneakers.

3:55I think more than Nike. Maybe. I don't remember. Don't quote me. It wasn't more than Nike, but it was a crazy amount of money. It was the Nans. And this was very much a tech bro phenomenon. And everyone in Palo Alto would be walking around wearing Allbirds sneakers. and they're very well suited to the Palo Alto climate. They would have their Allbirds sneakers on, their Away suitcase trailing behind them, right? They would wear their Warby Parker sunglasses. Nowadays, of course, they'll all be just dripped out in quince. The caravan moves on. But yeah, this became the sort of stereotypical piece of Silicon Valley clothing more than anything else was the Allbirds sneaker.

4:34Every venture capitalist worth its salt will be wearing Allbirds sneakers on stage. they had a whole bunch of hype. Now I think the sneaker hype has moved on and people are much more interested in like on. I'll just add these guys don't wear shoes anymore. There was an article in the Times a few days ago where this guy he's like a manager in the new world. He has four jobs doing management because he can use an AI agent blah blah blah to do it so well. And the Times photographed him at his desk literally with his socks on no shoes. So we're in a world now where tech people are so busy using their ai agents they don't even have time for freaking shoes because our robot butlers have yet to arrive soon soon emily we will have we will all have robot butlers who can lace our shoes for us but until that day arrives so obviously all birds was not

5:25Elizabeth Spiers: doing well anymore but yeah they were profitable they were they had a 77 million dollar net loss Oh, details, details, Elizabeth. This is Silicon Valley. $77 million doesn't even buy you an AI engineer these days. Yeah, if you're not losing a billion dollars, what are you doing? Exactly. $77 million net loss is not nearly high enough. If they'd been losing$7.7 billion, then people would have taken them seriously. But yes, the problem with Allbirds, it turns out, is that they had difficulty scaling outside the San Francisco Bay Area. They didn't sell enough shoes to make money, you know, the presence of physical retail outlets and all the rest of it notwithstanding.

6:07And so eventually they realized they couldn't make it as a standalone company listed on the stock exchange with a negligible market capitalization because the stock market, you know, was basically pricing in the present value of future cash flows and all of those future cash flows were negative. Whoops. So what they did was actually reasonably sensible, which they said there's still a brand here that people like. There are still shoes here that people like. We are still making those shoes. Let's sell the brand and the shoes and basically the entire company to what are they called? American Exchange Group, which is a company which runs brands and makes things.

6:47And so now let's just be very clear about it. all birds is a shoe company that makes shoes that you can buy on the internet and that is owned by a company called american exchange group that is what all birds is what happens after that sale closes is the the company that sold all birds and that no longer owns all birds is is sitting there as an empty husk on the stock exchange. It is a stock market listing with$22 million of cash in it because that's basically how much was left from the purchase price and after they'd paid off their debts and all of that kind of stuff. And so in this day and age, if you are sitting on a stock market listing with$22 million of cash in it, what you do is you're like, let's go to the casino and put it all on red and see how much fun we can have with this$22 million of cash.

7:45I reckon in this age of dumb AI hype, we can increase our$22 million somehow. The shareholders are expecting$22 million, which is a penny a piece or something like that. So they don't actually care if they're not going to get the$22 million. They want to have fun and go off to the races and try and moon this stock. And so let's do something really stupid. it. Let's call ourselves an AI company. Let's put out a press release saying that we're going to buy a bunch of GPUs with a$50 million credit line, which will get you like five and a half GPUs, and rename ourselves New Birds and sign what's known as a death spiral convertible deal with some hedge fund somewhere, and just become a pure meme stock.

8:32Because, you know, lol, nothing matters basically.

8:36Elizabeth Spiers: I may be the only person who thinks that this institutional investor, whoever they are, might be a genius because they're only putting$5 million into this convertible upfront. And the only thing they have to bet on is that Allbirds has enough brand recognition and nostalgia that it draws enough, say, earned media to make people think of it as an AI company, however, temporarily. And the stock was already in the toilet. You don't have to move it very much for whoever put in that$5 million to benefit. But to be clear, I think you are absolutely right about what this unnamed hedge fund is doing. I think you're absolutely wrong when you say that you are the only person who thinks they're a genius.

9:16Like Matt Levine here at Bloomberg wrote a whole column about how they're a genius and how the way this deal is structured is pretty much guaranteed to make them a lot of money. It's this thing called a death, buy, or convert, which basically means that whatever the share price is, they can buy shares below that price and sell it above that price. And if you side a deal with a company saying, I want to be able to buy$50 million of your shares at below what they're trading at and then sell them at market price, well, guess what? That is like a license to make money. I don't think there are that many people, to be honest, who think that this deal is stupid from the hedge fund point of view.

9:55Elizabeth Spiers: Well, you know, it's funny because it reminds me a lot of what happened after the first dot-com boom imploded, because there were a lot of companies that were sitting on public exchanges, largely NASDAQ companies, that had kind of tanked, and they were essentially empty shells. And they might have a little bit of cash, some assets. And what would happen is you'd have a kind of distressed private company that had no way of getting an exit via normal routes. They weren't able to IPO. They weren't attractive takeover targets. And they would do what was called a reverse merger into one of these NASDAQ shells.

10:28Elizabeth Spiers: I worked on one of these that involved Jose Canseco, the former... Oh my God, the greatest man on Twitter. ...comodipo CEO, and two random companies that had nothing to do with each other. But this was pretty common. It was a way for distressed companies to kind of give... If you were the private company, you're giving potentially your investors an exit, and the public company is already in the toilet, but that NASDAQ shell is worth something. You're exactly right. Stock market listings are something. You don't need to set up a special purpose acquisition company like a lot of people did in 2021 in order to sort of merge into some dumb speculative venture.

11:06You can just find there's a whole bunch of these things lying around, including Allbirds, you know, that you can just find lying around soon about to die shells with nothing in them on the stock market. And you can have fun with them. And people did it back in the 2000s. People are doing it now. Now, the thing that annoys me about the discourse, and it doesn't annoy me a lot because allow people to have some fun, right? Like this is a terrible time that we're living in. There's a lot of fucking bullshit going on in the world. So if people want to start making jokes about all birds pivoting to AI, then yeah, whatever, fine, make the joke.

11:43But there is a sort of serious point which people are deliberately ignoring here, which is that there is a difference, as we have mentioned many times on this show, between a company and a stock. And every time someone says the phrase Allbirds has pivoted to AI, what they are doing is they're saying, if I say the word Allbirds, what I mean is the stock. I do not mean the company. If you walk down the street in a pair of Allbirds, that is a thing. made by a company. The name brand on your sneaker, the sneaker itself, the people manufacturing the sneaker, the owners of the company who is manufacturing the sneaker, and all of that is a real thing in the world.

12:26It is a corporate entity with employees and cash flows. And, you know, they're making objects that if you, you know, pass your head with them, it hurts. all of these things are real. And those things are the thing that in my heart, I think people should be referring to when they say the word Allbirds rather than some dumb stock. Okay, Felix, but like, I think you're down a semantic rabbit hole that is pretty crazy. Like, get over it. Like, of course, you're going to say Allbirds pivoted to AI. You could say the company behind Allbirds or the company that used to own Allbirds or something like that.

13:03Yeah, the company formerly known as Allbirds. They want to change their name to Newbirds, by the way. You have all these little aggravations and complaints about so many different things. I feel like you got to let this one go. Yeah, it's true. I mean, it aggravates me a little. And as I say, people are allowed to have their fun.

13:21Elizabeth Spiers: Yeah, yeah. Also, I can't believe they passed on AIbirds as the alt name for the... That was just like the universal headline in every single publication. Did anyone make a joke about birds aren't real? Yeah, people have made that joke too. My favorite part of this deal, though, is that in the filings, they had to ask the shareholders to not consider them a public benefit company because originally part of their mission was to do things that would help with environmental conservation. And now they're just openly like, fuck the environment. I'm going to be very interested to see whether they actually buy any GPUs.

14:01Because so long as they don't actually buy any GPUs, they're not actually hurting the environment very much. It's just a pure stock market shell game.

14:07Elizabeth Spiers: Wouldn't they have a fiduciary duty to shareholders now to go buy the GPUs now that they've put out filings saying that's what they were going to do? No, the fiduciary duty to shareholders is just to maximize the share price. And they seem to be doing that just fine. I wrote about this a little bit and I made Elizabeth's point about the 1990s. And there were some fun things that I got to look back on. there's a paper from 2001 titled arose.com by any other name that found when companies because companies back then would do the same thing they would put a dot com or a dot net or an e hyphen on their name and then like their stock would go up is what the paper found there was a measurable impact on the stock price at least for a time i worked for one of those companies i worked for a company called idea which changed its name to ideaglobal.com because if you have a dot com on the end of your name you know and i was i was on that team that would try and put content onto ideaglobal.com we had a separate website called intermoney.com oh my god those were the days one of the companies i was looking at for an example was called meckler media change it change its name to internet.com i mean that's a good that's a good name change right there i mean that's got that's got to be good for like at least 100 million dollars internet.com i don't Is there an AI.ai right now?

15:25I'm sure there is.

15:27Elizabeth Spiers: They're still around. I think they went back to Meckler Media. They owned two companies that I used to work for. And during the dot-com boom, the guy who owned them, Alan Meckler, would go through. There was a building that used to be the Drexel Burnham Lambert Building, hilariously, that was called the Plugged In Building. It was at 55 Broad, and they had a big literal electrical plug in case you didn't get it. and it was just all dot coms and meckler used to just go through the halls knock on doors and offer people cash for their companies what and that was how a lot of their initial acquisitions happened oh my god and there was also some company that was like an oil and gas company founded by original og george bush that like got sold and sold and then somehow wound up an internet company also like just like wild stories we're living through it again the numbers today are so much bigger than the numbers back in the dot-com era when you know a hundred million dollars was a lot of money but the dumb stories are just not as dumb like the late 90s and the 2000s were funnier i think yeah i guess because the internet people were fun and goofy and like they just wanted to have a good time with their companies in a lot of ways.

16:43I mean, not all of them, as I'm sure Elizabeth remembers, but like, it was kind of fun. It was like websites, sock puppets. And now the founders now are like, we're going to ruin the world, but it's inevitable. Yeah, the thing about the 2000s is that everyone was aware of how dumb it was at the time, right? And so, you know, you would have Jim Ledbetter going to London for, what was it, Red Herring and losing shit tons of money and going, this is fucking stupid. Or Michael Wolfe wrote that book called Burn Rate. Once this crash started, there was fuckedcompany.com, which was like everyone's favorite website.

17:17And like people kind of laughed at it because they knew it wasn't that serious. And again, the sums of money weren't actually all that enormous. I mean, they were for like the market cap of Cisco or, you know, that kind of thing, but not for these dumb little dot coms. As silly as it was and dumb, it was a real tech transformation that played out for the next quarter century in very real ways than we're still living through now. So, yeah, I mean, it's super interesting, right, which is that there was this really important tech innovation, the Internet, which people got very excited about and that consistently failed to make any money for anyone until Steve Jobs comes along with the iPhone and puts the Internet in everyone's pocket and creates apps.

18:04And then everything starts becoming profitable. Up until that point, like, no one really made money. Really? You think it was that long? I don't know about that.

18:12Elizabeth Spiers: Interesting theory. I feel like there was a lot of enterprise money made, maybe not as much consumer good. There were a few cable companies that made money selling bandwidth, that kind of stuff. Amazon was making money when the iPhone launched, no? Well, the reason why Amazon crashed by 98 % in 2000 was because a report that was put out by fixed income analysts, not stock analysts, right? And this fixed income, like the stock analysts are always just going, how high can this go? And the fixed income analysts are going, well, you realize they have debt and they need to be able to service that debt.

18:48And there's a pretty good chance they're not going to be able to service that debt and they're going to have to file for bankruptcy. And that's what like caused the plunge in Amazon shares. But then I'm saying it was up by the time the iPhone came out. I mean, it was like, yeah, it plunged in 2000. iPhone comes out in what, 2004? 2007. Yeah, I feel like that was the lost decade, right? Like stocks kind of went nowhere in the 2000s.

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23:28This is actually the perfect segue to like the next segment, which is S &P 500 7000. First thing I'm very happy about is that our dumb discourse around round numbers in the stock market has finally moved from the Dow to the S &P 5000. And I'm like, oh, yes, finally, we have a proper index that we're looking at rather than a really stupid average. Yes, we have hit a new all-time high on the stonks. and every time we hit a new all-time high as i think barry ritholtz mentioned on this show you know people start sort of sucking their teeth and going oh is this bad is this a bubble should i be selling and most of the time no you shouldn't because this is what happens when stocks go up you know if you just think of the stock market as a thing that generally goes up over time then it will often be hitting all-time highs it just feels really weird that stocks are hitting an all-time high at a point of such incredible geopolitical uncertainty?

24:28I think it makes perfect sense. Okay. Pleased to explain. Well, ever since the ceasefire announcement over a week or so ago, the stocks have been going, they were going up a little bit before that, but then they really took off after Trump announced the ceasefire agreement because investors and all their algorithms and everything, they were like, okay, this is probably going to end. And the stock market, like Felix has taught us all, is the, what is it, future expectations, blah, blah, blah. Like, it's about the future. So they were like, the future is looking pretty damn good. So the stocks went up.

25:04And as I'm sitting here and we're recording Friday, they just announced that the Strait of Hormuz, which we've talked about on the show, Iran said, it's open. Stocks are going now even higher. And Trump put out a tweet calling it the Strait of Iran, which I thought was amazing. Well, Scott Besson, it sounded like the other day he called it the straight of vermouth.

25:29Which is perfect, if you know what he looks like. Anyways, so I think it makes perfect sense. And if you had been looking at the oil futures market as well, we were seeing a lot of what's called backwardation. Backwardation, baby. Which means the curve goes down. The farther out in the future, prices are going down. Oil in the future is a lot cheaper than oil in the present. There was a lot of hand-wringing, a lot of stories about, oh my gosh, oil in the future is so cheap, but oil in the present is so expensive. This means the oil market is like broken. Now it's kind of looking like the oil market knew what it was talking about.

26:01You know what backwardation is close cousins to? What? That thing we haven't talked about in forever, the inverted yield curve. Oh my God, I still don't understand that. Remember the thing that predicted the COVID recession? Yes, I remember. It knew that the pandemic was coming. Long-term debt is, damn it, what is it? Say it now you have to finish. It's where long-term yields are lower than short-term yields. Long-term yields are lower than short-term yields. Why do I have to make up these words? You know how many weeks I've been working on my backwardation contango takes? Because I write the markets newsletter, but have to learn about these new things every five minutes because reasons.

26:40But contango is such a good word. Contango is the best word. It sounds like a new kind of orange that they sell at Wegmans that cost like$7 a pound or something, right? But it just means that it's the opposite of backwardation. It just means that oil in the present is cheaper than oil in the future. Contango. It always reminds me of my other favorite financial word, which is champity. I'm like, contango and champity coming up. They're like horses in a horse race. Champity does sound like a horse name. Anyway, so I think the stock market, it made sense to me that it started to rip before the ceasefire and even as all this other bad stuff.

27:18And the last thing I'll say is that the stock market is not the economy. So when people are like, how could the stock market be doing well when we feel bad or whatever? It's because it's not real life. It's something else. But also because the part of the reason that you feel bad is because the pendulum has swung so far towards capital and away from labor, right? So your labor income is bad, but capital is having a jolly good, fun time of it. And the sign of capital being happy is a high stock market.

27:47Elizabeth Spiers: Yes. Everything is explainable. I'm not sure that that's the same as things being totally rational. And I think some of this just has to do with the structure of who's putting money into the stock market now and how. I think it makes sense that, for instance, algo-driven macro funds would move very responsibly to whatever Trump says. It makes sense that when 80 % of the companies in the index have higher corporate earnings, that there may be an assumption that consumer spending is somehow reflected by that. But where I do see some, you know, maybe gaps. If you look at the companies that are not doing well, like General Mills and Dollar General, those are companies that are heavily influenced by people at the lower end of the income scale.

28:29Elizabeth Spiers: Especially around things like food. And that's where people are still really feeling the pressure and where consumer spending is not going up. So I don't take it for granted that the stock market's just going to keep going up. I feel like Trump could say something tomorrow that sends it back into a spiral. Oh, yeah. If he says, I'm bombing Iran tomorrow, it'll go down. And if for whatever reason, corporate earnings at the AI companies plateau or start going down, I think that too could pull everything else down with it. So one of the things I did when I was looking at, oh my God, stock so high, was I pulled up a chart of the PE ratio, the forward PE ratio of the S &P 500 over the past 30 years.

29:07That's the price to earnings ratio. And that's like a very quick and dirty, easy way of sniffing the stock market and saying, does it look like it's frothy or does it look kind of normal? And it's 21, 22, somewhere around that right now, which is high. but there's been many periods where it was higher. Could it come down from here? Hell yes. Does it look cheap? No. Does it look massively overpriced and bubblicious and frothy? No, precisely because, as Elizabeth was saying, corporate earnings are doing really well. And there are two things, very broadly speaking, that drive stocks higher. One is higher earnings, and the other one is higher P.E.

29:53ratios. You can disaggregate the stock market into those two factors. And most of the rise in the stock market over the past few years has really been driven by the former rather than the latter. Higher earnings. It's a fundamentals-based rise is what I'm saying. I have some fun facts. I like fun facts. All-time highs are pretty common. We had, I think, three reached this week, probably. We're speaking Friday, so I don't know what's going to happen, but things are going up. There have been 204 all-time highs in the 2020s as of March 31st. So now it's 207 or something. That's like a lot in the 2020s.

30:30It's only 2026. Yeah, we're barely halfway through the decade. At this rate, we'll have like 400 by the end of the decade. And that would be a record. The current record right now, I'm looking at this chart that I made today. The 1990s, which we just talked about in the previous segment, had 310 all-time highs, followed by a sad 2000s where there were only 13. And that was all in the year 2000s, I think. Can I just run this by you guys? Because I just think about this stuff sometimes on my own and probably come up with crazy theories. But I don't think this is so crazy. In the 2010s, we have auto 401k enrollments.

31:09And auto 401k increases every year for a lot of people. So people are always buying stocks. even if it's a bad stock market there's a there's this like base a floor of demand now that there didn't used to ever be so like you can't people were always saving up money and putting it in the stock market maybe not through 401k not like the auto enrollment in the 401k and all of that like that's that's new like all that money there is new right and it is definitely true that american individuals with defined contribution pension plans, however they save, invest way more than they should on any sort of rational basis into the US stock market.

31:54You know, they tend to be incredibly strongly overweight equities rather than fixed income. And they're massively overweight US equities in particular, compared to everywhere else on the planet, even though American companies make up, you know, one third of world market cap. When people talk about the market, you know, the universe, the broad index, they're talking about the S &P 500. And, you know, to be fair, a lot of companies in the S &P 500 are global companies and they get income from all over the planet. But it's really not a diversified index in the grand scheme of things. But it's actually literally not.

32:31The S &P has said it's not considered diverse enough because it's so heavy. the top companies are so heavily weighted. And also you have that concentration. I also want to nerd out just for one second about like my other super nerdy theory for why stocks are doing so well, which is a bad thing in the grand scheme of things, which is this thing called financial repression. A lot of talk has been chatted about the Mar-a-Lago Accords and the way that Trump wants to kind of restructure the national debt and how big and how unsustainable the US national debt is and so on and so forth, right? And Trump loves defaulting on stuff and Bessent and Hassett and people like that seem to be perfectly happy encouraging him to think the unthinkable.

33:20And there are various tried and tested ways, some, you know, more legal than others, where you can artificially keep interest rates low, even when your borrowing requirements are enormous and in a natural market, those interest rates would go up. Those various different ways you can do that are referred to as financial repression. In an inflationary environment, normally what happens is that interest rates go up. But where you have financial repression, that's like an artificial way of keeping interest rates low despite the amount of inflation. And And what happens in that situation is that all of the costs of goods and services and that kind of stuff goes up in nominal terms, which means that companies make more in nominal terms.

34:09Nominal profits for corporations goes up. And share prices are denominated in nominal dollars. Meanwhile, all of those future profits that are being made in inflated nominal dollars are being discounted by repressed artificially low interest rates. So normally what happens with inflation, or one of the standard things that happens with inflation, is that it gets kind of plugged into the discount rate which you use to discount future cash flows in companies. But if you have financial repression, then it doesn't. And so what you're kind of doing when you're buying the stock market right now is you're buying future earnings that you expect to be much higher just because of inflation.

34:51And that can explain some part of why the stock market is so high. That's my own sort of pet theory. Can you say it again, but in a sentence? I think that in the sort of Trumpian, Besantian world, inflation can be good for stocks. Inflation makes stock prices higher than as long as interest rates are artificially pressed. blue. Inflation just means higher profits in the future in nominal dollars. Right. And so, but that's what we're buying in the stock market is nominal dollars. What does it mean for my retirement savings? Well, right now it means they're at an all-time high. Congratulations. Thank you so much.

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36:32Holds up incredibly well. He's one of life's great raconteurs. You'll almost certainly find something you love across the seasons. He has a very broad range of guests and you'll find a few that you recognize and probably some that you don't and you would want to hear from anyway. So to listen to Drive with Jim Farley, just search for Drive with Jim Farley in your podcast app. That's Drive with Jim Farley.

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37:40With Spectrum Business, you get more than just internet. You get support with 100 % U.S.-based customer service. Real people who understand small business, ready 24-7 to help you stay up and running. Join millions of business owners like you across America who trust Spectrum Business for reliability, speed, and support. Visit spectrum.com slash business today to get started. Restrictions apply. Service is not available in all areas. All right, let's move on to, I'm just going to come out and say the most hated company in America. If it's not the most hated company in America, it's definitely in the top five.

38:23And it was the subject of a jury trial this week. And we are, of course, talking about Ticketmaster, or as I suppose we ought to call it, since it is a merged company, Live Nation Ticketmaster. And the government sued it for being a monopoly, came to a settlement with Live Nation's Ticketmaster. But then all of the various states that were a party to the lawsuit were like, this settlement is bullshit. So they kept going with the lawsuit with a new lawyer, even after the federal government withdrew. And the jury went off and deliberated. And as any jury of 12 normal Americans would, with great predictability and with great rejoicing felt throughout the land, came back with a verdict saying, yeah, you motherfuckers are a fucking monopoly.

39:09Fuck you, because everyone hates ticketmaster. And now it goes to the judge to try and come up with some kind of remedy, which we have no idea what kind of remedy he might come up with. Do you have a theory, Emily, of how this might play out? No, I don't know. He could break them up. But do you hate Ticketmaster? Obviously. Obviously. I'm not a huge concert goer anymore, but I mean, ever since I was a little girl growing up in Long Island trying to see Billy Joel or whatever, I had a tough time with Ticketmaster. And it's only gotten worse. It's onerous to deal with. Prices are very high. That is the end of my personal story with Live Nation Ticketmaster.

39:47But everything I've read about their behavior is just, it doesn't look good. they basically when they merged it was like the ticketing company joined with the concert company and so the concert company was like well if you want to perform in our venue you have to use our ticket service you have to pay us lots and lots of fees it just it looks like pretty ugly stuff and one of the possible remedies here is that they get broken up and the merger gets unwound and Live Nation and Ticketmaster then become two separate companies again. I will just say that everyone hated Ticketmaster even before it merged with Live Nation.

40:25And, you know, a breakup of Live Nation and Ticketmaster would leave Ticketmaster as probably 90 % as evil as it has been all along. So I'm not sure that would even be that effective.

40:36Elizabeth Spiers: I think of this merger as kind of like a merger between two mob families where they were both already behaving a little bit coercively and then with combined power, they're even worse. And one of the things that I sort of love about, you know, reading about the trial and the testimony is you have all these people coming out and saying, you know, Live Nation threatened us. You know, there was one guy in Irvine who was a city manager who said they, an executive literally called him and said he was going to go after his job and destroy him and stuff like that. And they threatened Barclays Center and said, you know, they wouldn't have access to programming if they went with SeatGeek as a potential ticket vendor.

41:09Elizabeth Spiers: And then you have the Live Nation lawyers coming back and saying, oh, no, that wasn't a threat. They were just saying what was going to happen. That's not a threat. We're just giving you bad news. It's hard to hear. It's not a threat. That's a promise. I love the Slack messages where they're like, ha ha, we're calling these VIP ticket packages. It's just like we're allowing people to park their car on the grass slightly closer to the stadium and that's VIP parking and we're going to charge them like$60 extra for VIP parking. And the Slack quote was, we're robbing them blind, baby. Like a literal quote from the Slack.

41:46And the defense was, and this is kind of interesting to me, the defense was we're just competing aggressively.

41:55Elizabeth Spiers: Not illegally, and they use that phrase. Yeah, like aggressive competition is legal. And there are two things going on if you sort of unpack this idea of aggressive competition. One is in order for there to be aggressive competition, you need to be aggressively competing with someone. And everyone else is so much smaller that you're like, well, who are you competing with so aggressively? And doesn't this seem like kind of an unfair fight, given how much of a 9 ,000-pound gorilla you are compared to everyone else? And the second thing is that once, which is related, which is once you become that big, it behooves you to get out of that aggressive competition mindset.

42:32This is the thing that Microsoft ran into with its own antitrust trial 20-some years ago, is that Bill Gates was this hard-charging CEO who's like, we are this tiny little software company, and we need to have sharp elbows in order to try and make it in this really tough technology world. And then eventually he did. And he had this monopoly with Windows and Office. And he kept on, he didn't, you know, his elbows were just as sharp as ever. And the fact is that once you have a monopoly, it's a really bad look to keep on doing that sharp elbow shit. You have to, like, transition to benevolent overlord mode.

43:14You have to be a gracious boss, a gracious mob boss somehow. Yeah, I feel like a company like Apple has done this really well. You know, the Apple, you know, was scrappy and everything when it was small. And now it's this massive global behemoth. And it doesn't come out saying, oh, we're competing aggressively. It doesn't like stomp on people. It does really, you know, kind of unconscionable things like taking 30 percent of the cut of everything that you buy through, you know, on an app on your phone. But it does it in a kind of like quietly benign way that doesn't cause people to come out with pitchforks.

43:49If Apple was up in an antitrust trial, you wouldn't just know that any jury will convict in the way you do with Ticketmaster. Yeah. Well, as I've long said, Apple makes good products that I like. Ticketmaster does not. It sort of like stands in the way of the product you want.

44:06Elizabeth Spiers: You don't feel like you're getting price gouged by Apple. You can get, you know, they could probably raise their prices twice and you would still be like, oh, this is a great product. And, you know, or it's like Ticketmaster. Or it's like fee upon fee. And you're like, I have no idea what I'm even paying for anymore. And they don't make the product. They're just a rent seeker. But I think there have been a couple of developments. And these antitrust trials take years and years and years to come to trial and get a verdict and all the rest of it. And I have to say that here in 2026, we are already in a better place than we were 10 years ago when the worst of this behavior was happening.

44:44Number one, certainly in New York, but across much of the rest of the country as well, there are rules about all-in pricing, that you don't have all of those long lists of added extra fees that you have to pay. The price that you see is the price you pay. And number two, the venues can't have exclusivity monopoly agreements. That's like something that Ticketmaster has already agreed to. i for instance um you know looking around trying to buy some tickets to a gig on my birthday on tuesday and i can buy those on ticketmaster like it's sold out so it has to be like secondary market and ticketmaster has its own secondary market sales platform where i can buy the tickets or i can go to stub hub and buy the tickets there or i can go to seek geek and buy the tickets there and you can buy tickets on one platform and sell them on another platform and there is there's no sort of locked in secretary market platforms anymore or that kind of thing.

45:38And I feel like that is a real improvement. And like the world is still not great. I'm not happy that we are living in a world where Live Nation Ticketmaster is a monopoly and it still is a monopoly, but it is, we are in a better world than we were. And I think most of the egregious behavior that was documented in the court case is no longer happening. And it would actually be harder to win that case with 2026 behavior than it is with the behavior.

46:04Elizabeth Spiers: I think you might be right from the consumer ticket buying perspective, but I don't think that that's necessarily true in terms of the venues and Live Nation and, you know, the way that they're treating artists. I also wonder if even the positive changes that you're talking about are in danger of getting rolled back in the Trump administration's attitude toward deregulation and general hostility to antitrust. I mean, partly as evidenced by the fact that they settled the federal case so quickly and on terms that most of the attorneys general didn't agree with. What was intriguing here is that this was a case that the Biden administration, which was very antitrust, very hyped up on antitrust, that they brought.

46:40And when the Trump administration came in, there was some lip service paid to MAGA antitrust. They put in this woman, Gail Slater, to run the antitrust division in the DOJ. And she pursued this case. And then things happened. And they settled this case. Slater was pushed out. everyone who was working on it, I believe, has left. The DOJ tried to say that this was, you know, a good settlement, blah, blah, blah. No one really believes them. The Trump administration hasn't pushed back on any mergers in any real way the whole past year and a half or whatever. But apparently now there's talk that United is going to want to get permission to merge with American, which is wild.

47:20Right, because they already, this is how you get your deal through now. You just like run it by the oval. There's reporting that they just said to Trump, like, what do you think of this airline merger? Anyway, still, the suit was a success because the states stuck with it. So now they're sort of, I think it's just hope, hopium, that the states will sort of carry the antitrust mantle into the future. Now that the White House is pro-merger, the states will somehow be anti-merger. And that'll be effective. This is a federal antitrust case. And it was ultimately won not by the federal government, but it was brought by the federal government.

47:57And it is definitely hard to see a world in which the states sort of spin up some weird, you know, collective FTC or something that will bring antitrust cases from a bunch of states rather than from the federal government. It's just not something states do. Like they get involved with antitrust cases, I think, and they can pursue cases and things and go after companies. We saw what's a big tobacco, for example, But you need the federal government's help and resources and power.

48:28Elizabeth Spiers: Well, I think this is a case where it sort of behooves the states to go after them because, you know, as Felix pointed out, there's no love for Ticketmaster and Live Nation. And that could maybe be the case with the airlines or hypothetically a telecom company, any type of company where, you know, the electorate is already pretty bad at them. I feel like outside of health insurance companies, there are really very few companies that are as hated as Ticketmaster. it. Yeah, that's probably true. There was some data in the New York Times reporting on how positive an experience people had with the Ticketmaster site and it was like 9 % positive or something.

49:02Did you catch that in the story? I think it went from like 18 % positive to 1%. Yeah, so crazy. Yeah. It was low and then there was a Taylor Swift fiasco and then it just went to zero.

49:13Elizabeth Spiers: Right, you can't cross that. You can't fuck with Taylor.

49:28Anywho, we should have a numbers round. Elizabeth, do you have a number?

49:32Elizabeth Spiers: My number is 64, and that's percent. And that's the number of men interested in dating women older than themselves exclusively. That's how much it increased over the last year, according to Field. And this comes from a Times story from opinion about younger men wanting to date older women and that being a kind of shift in the data. Yeah, but is this like up 64 % from like 2 % to 3 %? Especially on field, it would be a lot higher than that. I think, but the logic is that the biggest factor, according to the people who are sort of speculating and hashing this out, is just that older women tend to be more financially independent and that sometimes these younger guys are looking for somebody where they're not expected to play a sort of, you know, traditional gender role where they're the primary breadwinner or they're responsible for paying for more things.

50:20You want to get rich the Kevin Wash way or, you know, the John McCain way just by marrying an heiress.

50:25Elizabeth Spiers: I think there's more to it. But I, you know, this was cited as a primary explanation. Is this like the reverse of trad wife? It's like actually untrad wife? There was a little bit of talk of sugar mummying, but it was mostly more like people wanting equal partnerships. That's nice. I see the world is getting better. Thank you for your optimistic number, Elizabeth. Just typical Elizabeth optimism. Oh, yeah. What I'm known for. Emily, do you have an optimistic number? I do. Ooh, nice. My number is 1 ,800. 1 ,800. That is the number of participants in a survey or a series of surveys conducted by a doctoral student at the University of Michigan.

51:04What she found is that people consistently underestimate how interesting and enjoyable conversations about boring topics can be. So they tested. Participants were basically asked to predict how much they would enjoy talking about different things that were considered boring, like World War I and II, books, the stock market, cats, vegan diets. Backwardation? Probably backwardation.

51:28Elizabeth Spiers: Books, cats, and vegan. Is this a gender-coded? I don't know. What do vegan cats think about contango? These lady topics that people like. But anyway, even when people thought that the topic was boring, when they finally had the conversation, they said it was actually quite enjoyable and they enjoyed it. And this made me happy because there's nothing I enjoy more than talking about something totally inane and boring, as listeners of the podcast might know, because it's fun. It is fun. This is why I like talking about the effects of financial repression on PE ratios. Yes, it's all good times. So that made me happy.

52:08Ask me about the inverted yield curve. I'll talk forever. I am taking this as permission to just nerd the fuck out as much as I want on site money. Yeah. Participants were asked to suggest a topic they found boring. Responses included math, Pokemon, and onions. Onions are so interesting. There are so many different kinds of onions, and they're so underrated. And they have their own special commodity rule.

52:35Elizabeth Spiers: Yes. For crazy reasons. You're not allowed to trade onion futures. They're that important. My number is 15, which is the number of shots of tequila that Diana Sanders was served on a carnival cruise. And after drinking 15 shots of tequila over many hours, like between 2 p.m. and 11 p.m. or something like that. But after consuming 15 shots of tequila across four different bars on this carnival cruise ship, she fell over, basically. Oh, my God. Overboard? No, not overboard, but just like she kind of woke up in her cavern and wasn't entirely sure how she got there. But she had bought this package, right, which allowed her like 15 drinks in a 24-hour period.

53:23This was like the party package. But she got separated from her friends, and she got like drunk and belligerent, and she was shouting at people and, you know, doing all the things that people do after 15 shots of tequila. Anyway, she sued Carnival for serving her 15 shots of tequila. and saying, like, dude, I was shouting at you and I was clearly drunk. You shouldn't be serving me more tequila when I'm in that state. And it went to a jury trial and Carnival was found guilty and she was awarded$300 ,000 in damages from Carnival cruises. Come on. That's not going to get upheld.

53:59Elizabeth Spiers: I feel like there must be some information in there that we don't know. There really isn't. The damages don't seem to have been enormous, but like basically the jury reckoned, I don't know how they came up with this number, but they reckoned there was$500 ,000 of damages somehow in total. And that she was responsible for 40 % of it because she was the one ordering the tequila. And that Carnival was responsible for 60 % of it and therefore Carnival owes her$300 ,000. Does this logic make a lot of sense to me? No, but it's a kind of, but just remember folks, If you fall over and hurt yourself after drinking too much, you too might be able to sue the bartender who kept on serving you tequila.

54:41You make your own choices. No? Maybe it's not really you after the 11th shot. Right. In any case, I think that is all we have time for this week. Many thanks to Jessamyn Molly for producing. Many thanks to all of you guys for emailing us on slatemoneyatslate.com. and we will be back next week with tons more sleep money.

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