Christmas Adjacent Inciting Incident

0:06Craig Trudell: Hello 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 Emily Peck of Axios.

0:18Felix Salmon: Hello, hello.

0:18Craig Trudell: I'm here with Elizabeth Spiers of the New York Times. Hello. And especially wonderfully, I have Craig Trudell beaming in from the Bloomberg offices in London. Craig, welcome. Hi, thank you for having me. Craig, introduce yourself. Who are you? I am the global automotive editor for Bloomberg. What that means is that you are covering the big picture in cars. And so that is what I want to talk about this week with you. There was big news from Ford, but it turns out, for those of us who noticed the rest of the planet, that there's big news from the European Union. There's lots of stuff going on in China.

0:58Craig Trudell: So we are going to talk about what is happening with EVs. What is the big picture? Is this the death knell of the American automotive industry? We are also going to, of course, talk about the fact that Trump Media and Technology Group is now a nuclear fusion company for reasons. Emily is going to wax lyrical about the wonders of Hallmark Christmas movies. We have a Slate Plus segment where we reveal the one gift we wish that someone would give us. It's a happy holiday episode of Slate Money. It's coming right up.

1:39Craig Trudell: so obviously Craig we're going to start with you because there has been enormous news this week on the EV front not just in Europe which seems to have started backpedaling on its desire to make sure everyone only drives EVs. But also in the United States, where Ford took a$19 billion charge, and a bunch of that was real money, like actual cash that they've just sort of gone up in smoke. And correct me if I'm wrong here, but the general message that I got from Ford was, we were doing EVs because that's what Joe Biden told us to. And now Donald Trump has told us to not do EVs. So we're not doing EVs.

2:22Craig Trudell: And if only the US government could be consistent, that would be great. But otherwise, we're just going to go back and forth according to who's in the White House. This doesn't seem smart.

2:30Emily Peck: I think that's generally right. I think it's maybe even slightly more complicated than that, right? And that like, even when Trump was in office the first time, you had Tesla sort of as this, you know, rising power within the industry. And everybody in Detroit was freaking out about, you know, the Model 3, eventually the Model Y. And all the while, Trump was undermining fuel economy and emission standards. And so they had to kind of navigate that. Then you have Biden come in. He says he wants half of vehicles sold to be EVs or hybrids by the end of the decade. Everybody sort of rushes to meet that vision and also make subsidy grabs and DOE loans and so on and so forth.

3:15Emily Peck: And then absolutely the rug gets pulled out from under Ford and the rest of the industry when Trump comes back. And he goes even further this time. He eliminates penalties for fuel economy standards. Those made a lot of headlines recently, but they don't matter because there's nothing sort of enforcing those new weaker rules. And emission standards may be going away as well if we have the EPA just decide that, you know what, it's not appropriate for us to be governing tailpipe emissions either.

3:40Felix Salmon: But Jim Farley and his statements and like just reading through all the -

3:44Emily Peck: Jim Farley is the Ford CEO.

3:45Craig Trudell: The Ford CEO.

3:46Felix Salmon: And just reading through a lot of the commentary, there was a lot of yes, but it's not just the fact that the Trump administration pulled away from EVs. It's that customers weren't as into them as everyone had hoped, truly. And that doesn't seem like a fib, right?

4:05Emily Peck: I think there's absolutely validity to that. I grew up in a rural area of Michigan. And when I go back home and talk with friends and family members about, hey, would you consider buying a fully electric vehicle? They either look at me funny or just laugh in my face. And I think a lot of America still, you know, forget about buying electric vehicles. They're still buying really thirsty F-series pickups, right? Those are still Ford's bread and butter. I think there was, you know, some progress being made in sort of changing that mindset. And I think we have to give Tesla credit in that regard. And yet it's really been a case where Tesla is the only one who's been successful in the U.S.

4:46Emily Peck: in sort of getting Americans into EVs.

4:48Craig Trudell: A friend of mine has a Ford Lightning pickup truck. This is their electric version of the F-150. He has like a pool company in North Carolina. And he not only loves his truck, but he's like all of the like burly construction guys who come around like are obsessed with it and say that they want one and then completely love it. And they're like, oh my God, that's so cool. I do think that there is more of a love for EVs or like an excitement about EVs in principle than necessarily has shown up in the market. I think, you know, the people who say that they love it, I think they do love it. They're just not necessarily going out and buying it.

5:26Craig Trudell: But by the same token, you say that the Tesla is the only game in town anymore, which is kind of true when it comes to the pure EVs. But their sales have been slowing for the past two years, partly because, you know, the libs don't want to give money to Elon Musk. And I need to ask you as a Bloomberg reporter, like, how is it possible for a company with not only zero, but negative growth to be worth like over a trillion dollars? You know, like, I don't understand how the stock market isn't hasn't punished Tesla yet for the fact that like, the only way you can get to that kind of evaluation It's by extrapolating massive future growth.

6:10Craig Trudell: And the growth just isn't here.

6:11Emily Peck: Yeah, the growth has not only dissipated, it has disappeared. You have a situation where I feel like, you know, to borrow a phrase from one of my colleagues, Dana Hull, who covers Tesla for us out of San Francisco, Elon Musk is bored with making cars. And I think part of that boredom is a legitimate sort of, you know, issue of kind of been there, done that. I also think it's a sort of acknowledgement of the idea of, you know what, actually, the car business is really freaking difficult. And if I can sort of, you know, wave these bright, shiny objects of humanoid robots and robo taxis that may or may not actually exist, sort of over here, I can distract everybody from the fact that my sales are, you know, not only, you know, slowing, they're actually declining.

6:55Emily Peck: And, you know, I've torched my brand.

6:57Elizabeth Spiers: I have a theory also, I grew up in a rural area where every household has a big ass truck. And do you think that specifically maybe like people are nervous about trucks as fully EV?

7:11Emily Peck: Yeah, absolutely. I think in retrospect, they were the wrong, you know, sort of body style to try to fully electrify, you know, right off the bat. It made sense in that, you know, on one hand, yes, Americans like to buy big ass trucks. On the other hand, they want to be able to tow. They want to be able to haul. And, you know, a battery depletes very quickly when you're towing or hauling things. and in order to be able to power a vehicle that's so big and so heavy you need a bigger heavier battery and it's just you know sort of a matter of physics that you know there was sort of skepticism from the engineers who know better that this was ever going to work out and i think

7:49Craig Trudell: in retrospect that skepticism was warranted so ford's bright idea is correct me if i'm wrong here to basically replace the lightning which is their electric truck with what's known as an ere basically an electric truck that has a little gas tank in it that you can fill up with petrol and then that doesn't move the wheels it doesn't actually do it but you can it will work as a kind of generator to recharge the battery if you need it to and so obviously there are going to be tailpipe emissions from that but it's going to be a much smaller engine than you would find in a normal track. Is this like the future or is this just another dead end?

8:30Emily Peck: I love this aspect of the story because it's sort of, we have to go back to, remember when General Motors went bankrupt and like the one reason that America wanted to save GM or one of the big reasons the Obama administration was like, you know what, this company is worth saving. It was the Chevrolet Volt. Do you remember the plug-in hybrid? That was an extended range electric vehicle, an EREV. And so we're basically going to Voltify pickups and SUVs. I do think that actually sort of solves this issue of Americans liking bigger vehicles and extending the range of these vehicles by having an onboard gas engine.

9:08Emily Peck: And, you know, in retrospect, that was part of what sort of was the Volt's undoing, right, was that it was kind of, you know, as a concept, it looked really sexy. And then once it made it into production, it kind of looked like a funky sort of toastery compliance car. And it sold like a funky toastery compliance car. Who doesn't want to drive around in a funky toastery?

9:29Felix Salmon: Craig, so the U.S. seems to be kind of moving backwards on EVs. The EU also seems to be moving backwards. They've punted. They had a goal of 2030. I think all electric vehicles.

9:41Emily Peck: 2035.

9:42Felix Salmon: 2035. They punted on that. And then all the pundits are like, but China is moving ahead. China is leading the way now. Did China just basically win the EV race if there was an EV race?

9:54Emily Peck: Haven't they been winning it for years?

9:56Felix Salmon: Is it official now?

9:57Emily Peck: Is it official now? I think it is both true that China is absolutely lapping the rest of the world with electric vehicles. I also think that we may be getting carried away and sort of, you know, saying woe is Europe and China is sort of running circles around. Because if we actually look at what the rules are in China, they have not set a timeline for going fully electric. And their leading manufacturers, BYD being the biggest and baddest of them, they make a plug-in hybrid for every battery electric vehicle that they make. So I think there's a little bit of a tendency to sort of lean into this notion that China is just so world-beating because the volumes are so large.

10:37Emily Peck: And yet Europe has made much more progress than the U.S. has. And I do think that even with these rules softening a bit, we're going from wanting 100 percent emissions reduction by 2035 to 90 percent. And yes, there's some fudging of that 90 % number where they're going to give credit to locally made vehicles. So there will be some, you know, sort of compliance credits that make that 90 % number kind of fudged. But the direction of travel is going to remain that manufacturers here in Europe really have to go electric quickly. And that's why you're seeing some whinging on the part of, you know, the Germans after this announcement.

11:17Craig Trudell: So I guess the first question is, yeah, it's true that in China, there is a broad mix of drivetrains. But in Europe, if we fast forward to 2035, where there's a 90 % reduction in emissions, that means, to use a technical term, a fuckton of the cars being sold are going to be electric, they're going to be pure electric. And just looking at where we are today, and who the big EV manufacturers are, and who is selling the EVs and who is not selling the EVs, Is it reasonable to assume that most of those EVs being sold in Europe are actually going to wind up being Chinese?

11:52Emily Peck: I think they have had no trouble continuing to grow at this really incredible rate, even in spite of tariffs being put in place just last year. I do think that there is – one of the stories that I'm going to be watching in 2026 is like which manufacturers start to hit a ceiling on sort of their volumes for Europe in the sense that I do think that while BYD, for example, has made much more of a name for themselves as a manufacturer, they do not have a Corolla or just a sort of – they don't have the brand cachet or the recognition. If you ask the average German or French person on the street to name a single BYD car, I think, you know, 99 out of 100 would say, yeah, sorry, I can't do it.

12:41Emily Peck: And it's really, you know, going to take them some time to do some brand building, get more established and go beyond just fleet cars.

12:49Craig Trudell: Don't people just go out and buy a BYD car? Does it matter whether they know what the name of the model is?

12:55Emily Peck: It's honestly a good question because I think the price is so good and so substantially competitive. And you get sort of more for that money as well. And I think the Chinese companies also have been reluctant to be too aggressive on price because of concerns about what Brussels will do if and when they do get out over their skis in that regard. So that will be the sort of counter to my point of, you know what, maybe there's only so much growing they can do.

13:23Craig Trudell: And Ford weirdly announced an EV in Europe as a joint venture with, was it Renault?

13:30Emily Peck: Renault, yes. That's a really interesting one because, you know, we've been watching the way things have been trending with Ford, particularly on the passenger vehicle front. The amount of market share loss there has been so substantial that we've started to wonder, you know, is Ford Europe long for this world? I do think they make a lot of commercial vehicles and vans that that business is still strong for them and is more profitable anyway. But it was absolutely fascinating because they already have a partnership with Volkswagen, where you basically have Ford-badged Volkswagen electric vehicles made in Germany.

14:04Emily Peck: And so we're going to see more of that just with the French now.

14:07Craig Trudell: So the big question, I think, from an American perspective is this one, which is the Europeans are still going to be forcing their manufacturers to really move to EVs. The Chinese, as we know, are going to be a major force in EVs come what may. So we're going to have two major markets and manufacturing powerhouses building a huge number of EVs in a world which I think everyone agrees eventually is going to become electric. It just makes all the sense in the world. So given that the US manufacturers are just basically not in the game anymore, Tesla notwithstanding, is this the end of American car companies as a global force?

14:52Craig Trudell: Like they're just going to be sitting here in their domestic market, insulated from Chinese competition because the Chinese don't import into the United States. And they sell their, you know, ICE cars in the US until they don't. And then eventually everyone just buys electric cars from somewhere else. And like the long term future of the U.S. auto industry just seems to be zero.

15:13Emily Peck: I think there's a real concern, especially just from the perspective of what the industry needs in order to make electric vehicles work is scale. And they have really struggled with reaching the sorts of volumes where you do get to a point where your batteries can be cheaper and you can bring price down and offer consumers actually affordable electric vehicles.

15:35Craig Trudell: And that scale needs to be global, right? Like just even the United States isn't big enough.

15:39Emily Peck: Yeah, I think, you know, the way in which China is absolutely dominating here is the fact that you have companies like CATL just making so many more batteries than there is demand for that the price is just, you know, so much lower than the rest of the world. And so you are going to see a ton of electric vehicles, particularly here in Europe, that are, you know, built with Chinese made battery cells. And that's the sort of only path to affordability for the moment. And if the U.S. continues down this road of every four years zigging and zagging in this drastic way, you're going to eventually reach a point where, you know what, we're just too far behind and EVs are just not going to work here the way they work in the rest of the world.

16:37Craig Trudell: let's talk about how the trumps uh what's the word there are a couple of like woke things in the energy industry one of them is is evs and trump is anti-evs because it's woke another one One of them is nuclear power and especially clean nuclear power because environmentalists love that shit. And somehow for all of for all the clean nuclear power is woke coded. It is now also Trump coded because the Trump media and technology group, the parent company of Truth Social, announced this week that it was going to merge with a nuclear fusion company. and now it is a nuclear fusion company, which makes all the sense in the world, right, Emily?

17:24Felix Salmon: It actually does make sense. So at first, it doesn't make sense. You're like, Truth Social, that company makes$4 million a year, maybe, and has$400 million a year in losses. And pays its chief executive$47 million a year. Devin Nunez, of course. And you're like, what? It doesn't make any sense that it's doing anything. Then you read about the nuclear fusion company, TAE, This company is legit. It's been around since 1988. It's funded by like a who's who of corporate America plus Charles Schwab. We know him from our ads. He was an original investor.

18:00Craig Trudell: Isn't his son like in charge of it?

18:02Felix Salmon: No, I don't know. Also, they have on their board the former energy secretary under Obama, who's like a nuclear physicist. This is a legitimate company betting on nuclear fusion, which, to be clear, has not been commercialized and is like still quite nascent and doesn't really produce anything. What they need is money and what a company with Trump's name on it now, because he is the president, what they are able to do, not build a social media empire, but they are able to amass money, cash monies. People want to give the company money for reasons.

18:41Craig Trudell: They can take all of the Bitcoin that they've been buying and convert it into a fusion reactor.

18:47Felix Salmon: They can fuge and make energy of... Anyway, there's some joke that I could say.

18:53Craig Trudell: They can pay their fusion researchers in Bitcoin. This all makes perfect sense.

18:57Felix Salmon: It does make sense, though. It does make sense because I think the journal story had a quote that was just like, you know, this is a company in search of a business, basically. They have money. People want Trump's branding because he is the president and he has a lot of power and he's not afraid to use it. And so why not give it to this company that is building a technology that doesn't make any money, that just needs lots of money? So it kind of makes sense.

19:23Craig Trudell: I kind of like it because it's a little bit AI coded in that the reason everyone wants power is because AI. But really, it's just, you know, people have been dreaming about nuclear fusion for decades. and by the way in terms of evs like the carbon emissions from evs if you sort of trace them back to where the electricity comes from are non-negligible right now if that electricity comes from nuclear fusion then brilliant you know it's basically free energy for all it's awesome we love it it's great total utopia also like physically impossible as far as we can make out but this company as you say is convinced that it has some technology that will work and they'll be able to build a utility scale power plant by 2031 or something.

20:08Craig Trudell: Count me skeptical, but like if they can get a few extra billion dollars from Trumpy types to try and make that happen. Okay, great.

20:17Elizabeth Spiers: Yeah. I love the fact that, you know, the rationale for doing this is fairly straightforward. You know, it's just access to money. But Matt Levine had a great column about this that included a slide from the deck that they presented where they have to come up with the kind of rationalization for doing it that is not as obvious as the one we're talking about. And so the slide just looks completely unhinged. They're talking about how to sort of merge the social media capabilities with the Fusion Company. And they're just throwing out like everything. It looks like a really bad brainstorming session with, you know, red yarn connecting all these disparate things.

20:50Elizabeth Spiers: It's worth reading Matt's column just to see that slide.

20:53Felix Salmon: He also says that the Trump media's revenue is about as much as a top substack newsletter.

21:00Craig Trudell: So yeah, so Craig, we now seem for better or for worse to have reached the point, and this honestly took longer than I thought it would, given the whole SPAC boom of 2021, where you've reached the point at which there is now a publicly traded nuclear fusion company with a multi-billion dollar market cap. This seems like a milestone.

21:20Emily Peck: Yeah, I think my great irony is someone who spends way too much time following every you know, musing of Elon Musk online, I'm getting a huge kick out of the fact that he's shitting all over nuclear fusion. And even as he's sort of, you know, made this grand makeup with Trump, you know, you have the Trump world sort of, you know, true social combining with the nuclear fusion company. So he now has both, you know, X going after a Trump-tied company, and he's also got all of his solar things that he is going off on. And so, yeah, I guess in short, I would say, this makes about as much sense to me as like the AI data centers in space idea that Musk and his ilk are pushing of late.

22:07Craig Trudell: Musk's point, and Musk very rarely makes much sense, but he does, I'm going to give him a little bit of credit for this one. He's like, guys, guys, We have the biggest fucking nuclear fusion reactor. It has been going for billions of years. It's called the sun. It produces infinite amounts of money, basically. All we need to do is put some solar panels out there and capture that energy. And that is fusion. And it's clean.

22:34Felix Salmon: That makes sense.

22:34Craig Trudell: And like, why would we want to recreate a sun on planet Earth when we actually have one right here that we can capture the energy from?

22:41Elizabeth Spiers: He's not wrong. He's got a point.

22:44Felix Salmon: That definitely makes sense.

22:44Elizabeth Spiers: He's also the guy that says we should all go live on Mars, even though we have a planet right here that's perfectly serviceable.

22:50Craig Trudell: Yeah, I mean, internally consistent is not something that anyone's ever accused Musk of being. But I really do go back and forth on this one. On the one hand, I don't see solar really meeting all of our energy needs. We're going to need a lot more than that. And if fusion works, it's almost like magic. It is, in Arthur C. Clarke's words, indistinguishable from magic. No one's been able to make it work. The technology to make it work does not exist. I think that, you know, even Trump's money-raising abilities are not going to be enough to, like, A, raise enough money to make it work, or B, even, you know, I don't think money alone can do this.

23:30Craig Trudell: But I'm happy there are humans out there trying to make it work, because even if there's a small probability, that sounds great to me.

23:36Felix Salmon: Before we go down the road of speculating about nuclear fusion, which Craig probably knows a lot about it, but I don't think we know that much about it. Can we also raise this question, which I've been thinking about this morning, which is like, theoretically, Trump is going to be president only for another three years. What happens to all this money and like all this juice that his name has once he leaves office? What happens to nuclear fusion's prospects now that it's tied in? They've tied themselves to this guy.

24:06Craig Trudell: Well, obviously, they just need to raise all of the money between now and the end of his presidency, right? And then at that point, they've reached takeoff velocity or they haven't. I think that's the bet.

24:18Felix Salmon: Okay. So it's just like, get us the cash now while the Trump is hot. And then once it's not, it doesn't matter.

24:24Craig Trudell: Yeah. The classic thing about raising money in the stock market is you do it when you can. And when you can raise lots of money and you don't do it when you can't.

24:31Felix Salmon: Okay. And like presumably the executives and brilliant minds behind Trump media, there's no synergies where they're like going to integrate themselves with the nuclear physicist on the board who used to work in the Obama administration.

24:44Craig Trudell: I think the nuclear physicist on the board, there's this hilarious like co-CEO situation where basically the nuclear physicists are going to keep on running the nuclear physics and Devin Nunez is going to keep on running Truth Social. and they're just going to have this kind of, maybe like once a year they can meet for coffee or something and shake each other's hands and then go back to what they were doing before.

25:07Elizabeth Spiers: Isn't there something just a little disconcerting though about a nuclear company tied to what's basically a meme stock?

25:14Felix Salmon: Yes.

25:15Craig Trudell: Well, I mean, remember it's fusion, right? It's not like radioactive nuclear. Just fusion.

25:21Felix Salmon: Just the power of the sun and trying to assess it, whatever.

25:24Craig Trudell: Although apparently there are like interesting like radioactive things that are byproducts that you, but yeah, I, we're all so far away from that at the moment that I think, I think we can, that's, that's the least of our worries.

25:38Elizabeth Spiers: I'm glad Devin Nunez is anywhere near that sort of thing. That's a.

25:42Felix Salmon: All I remember about him is something to do with a cow.

25:46Elizabeth Spiers: He got very angry that there was a guy parodying him on Twitter. I think the account was called Devin Nunez cow. Okay. Something like that. I see. He sued that guy.

25:57Felix Salmon: The cow is not involved with nuclear fusion.

25:59Craig Trudell: What? Who knows? As far as we know. This is 2026. Anything is possible.

26:16Craig Trudell: Talking about the end of the year, the holiday season, Emily.

26:21Felix Salmon: Yes.

26:22Craig Trudell: Tell us what is going on in Connecticut.

26:27Craig Trudell: Emily is so happy. This is the happiest I've ever seen her.

26:31Elizabeth Spiers: She looks very blissed out right now. This is her favorite.

26:34Felix Salmon: Okay. Connecticut, which is a state, is apparently the location for at least 22 holiday films made by Hallmark, which is the leader in the original holiday movie space, which everyone at this point should know. And now Connecticut is promoting tours of the locations behind these 22 films that were filmed in Connecticut. So you can go and you can be super cozy. You can get like a hot cocoa and you can wear gloves and your hat and your scarf, but not around your neck. A scarf in a Hallmark movie is worn on the coat. It has no purpose other than decoration because it's warm when they film those things.

27:13Felix Salmon: Anyways, but you can go and you can wrap the scarf however you want. Drink your cocoa and walk to these different locations. And this is just the latest news in this booming industry, which is original holiday films, which now happen every year. And I think more and more people are saying they watch them, including me, Emily Peck. I'm converted. It started with Hot Frosty, which we discussed previously on the show from Netflix, which is more now that I'm in the Hallmark space. Hot Frosty was like very much more like risque kind of like edgy holiday original film because of the showing of the naked man.

27:48Felix Salmon: The chest and the six pack, which typically not shown in the Hallmark holiday movies, which are all rated G, usually only have one to two kisses. And that's it. And usually one of the two kisses is an almost kiss because there's like, you know, you wait till the end for the full kiss. So there's a whole economy behind Hallmark movies. A lot of it is happening in Connecticut. it.

28:08Craig Trudell: I love this almost as much as Emily does.

28:11Felix Salmon: I love it unironically. Don't be ironic.

28:13Craig Trudell: I'm not being ironic. I have to admit, I have never seen a Hallmark Christmas movie, but I love the idea of Hallmark Christmas movies. And I especially love the idea that there's all of these like mom and pop tour operators with tour coaches driving around small Connecticut towns. I will also say that over the past couple of years of using ChatGPT, I have never received a better answer from ChatGPT as the answer I received when I typed in, what are the essential formulaic elements of a Hallmark Christmas movie? And I mean, totally nailed it. As someone who's never seen one, but Emily, you can confirm.

28:49Felix Salmon: Okay.

28:50Craig Trudell: There are 10.

28:52Felix Salmon: Okay.

28:52Craig Trudell: So I'll run down the list very quickly. One, a familiar, non-threatening protagonist who is a successful but emotionally incomplete woman, often big city career focused who is temporarily displaced into a small town in Connecticut for Christmas reasons. The character flaw is not moral failure but misalignment.

29:13Emily Peck: Yes.

29:13Craig Trudell: She has chosen ambition over what really matters. Number two, a picturesque small town as moral geography. The town functions as a values incubator and is a contrast to the alienation of the city. Three, a love interest who embodies local virtue, typically male, hands-on profession like carpenter or tree farm owner, fireman, emotionally available but modestly guarded. He is already complete. He does not have his own thing to overcome.

29:44Felix Salmon: Four, a Christmas-adjacent inciting incident, like being stranded due to weather or inheriting an inn or something like that. Or like the gingerbread bake-off and you have to get it organized.

29:55Craig Trudell: Gingerbread Bake Off, which gives a reason for proximity without overt desire.

30:00Felix Salmon: And cooperation. The couple has to cooperate and do a task together.

30:04Craig Trudell: Right. Five, a threat to tradition that is never real. So there's some kind of corporate development or sale of a beloved local business, but the threat is entirely reversible. No one loses their livelihood.

30:16Felix Salmon: Yes, they almost closed down the Catnip Cafe, for example, in one of my favorites of this year. The Cat Cafe was in danger of being closed down by a Scrooge-like evil character who turns out to be basically fine and nice in the end. Nothing bad happens. Spoiler alert.

30:31Craig Trudell: The stakes. The stakes. The stakes are so low. The stakes are so low.

30:35Felix Salmon: And it's wonderful.

30:36Craig Trudell: This is my favorite one. Number six, montage-based intimacy, which always includes, and they've got four bullet points here, tree decorating, baking cookies, ice skating, or charity planning.

30:48Felix Salmon: There's also walking around with hot cocoa and looking at the sights.

30:52Craig Trudell: So that's the important montage.

30:55Felix Salmon: I guess my quivils would be, I know the trope is big city girl winds up in hometown for some kind of, something has happened and they have to be there and then they learn the lesson of the hometown is amazing or whatever. But sometimes it's a man. Like I watched one, at least one this year where it's a guy who's back in his hometown. Yeah, it's more diverse.

31:17Elizabeth Spiers: All of this is a conservative wish casting. And that's why white evangelicals love Hallmark movies. My mom is like a connoisseur. But the storylines are all about explaining to the big city career woman how wrong she was. And she discovers that her hometown was great all along. And this is a fantasy that every conservative parent I know has about their adult children who move to big cities. But I also find it funny that these things are always filmed in Connecticut. Because if the trope is that the jaded city person goes back to rural hometown or whatever, jaded city people move to Connecticut all the time.

31:51Elizabeth Spiers: And they just could commute back in.

31:54Felix Salmon: They're often in upstate New York, however. I watched at least two to three, including one about the Buffalo Bills. Shoot, what was it called? The Buffalo Bills Christmas Story. It was a sequel to last year's Chiefs Christmas Story. It's like a football-themed one where the two families bond over their love of the Buffalo Bills and the main love interest. His job is not veterinarian or pediatrician. No, he manages the new construction of the Bills stadium. So very relatable.

32:23Emily Peck: Are there any folding tables harmed in the filming of that Buffalo Bills?

32:27Felix Salmon: I don't think so. That's a good question.

32:29Craig Trudell: I feel like folding tables appear in this is a common trope. But like, just to fast forward to the end, 10, closure without consequences. By the end, romance is secured, community is preserved, and future ambiguity is gently erased.

32:45Felix Salmon: Yeah, I think that's right. It's never like we're getting married. It's just like we have kissed and we have plans for next week. I think it's more progressive than Elizabeth might be saying, which I understand that it's a fantasy sometimes to move to the hometown. But we did see in COVID, many people did move to their hometowns or out of the big cities in pursuit of this very dream that we see in the Hallmark films.

33:08Craig Trudell: A lot of New Yorkers, they moved up to Putnam County or Kingston.

33:12Elizabeth Spiers: Falling in love with the high school guy.

33:14Felix Salmon: Yeah. They fall in love with their best friend from high school who is extremely good looking. And they haven't noticed until they were 32 years old, came back to their hometown. and coincidentally he's still single but totally emotionally mature just like Felix said from his chat GPT list yes it's amazing and people say that Hollywood is dead and and movies are over but there is this booming market in Hallmark films that I feel like we must note right in these dark

33:43Craig Trudell: times in these dark times we can come together around virtual or even real Coco and we can also

33:50Felix Salmon: Also, I will say that the films are short. They are usually two hours or less. And I think Hollywood could take a lesson. You know, Chris Nolan needs to sit down and watch a few of these things and take some pointers away. I really think that.

34:03Craig Trudell: You know what short movie I just watched and absolutely loved? And since we're on movies right now, I'm just going to break the rules of Slate Money. These things have to be vaguely money related. No, they do not.

34:13Felix Salmon: Everyone has money in the Hallmark movies. Yeah.

34:16Craig Trudell: If you want a great family film to watch this Christmas, if you are the last person in the world who has not seen this movie yet, go see or sit down and watch K-pop Demon Hunters. Love that movie.

34:28Felix Salmon: You watched it?

34:29Craig Trudell: I watched it.

34:30Felix Salmon: Say more. What is it about? It's right there in the title.

34:37Craig Trudell: A couple of people I really trust recommended it to me and I watched it. And I hate to say it, but Elizabeth is 100 % correct. it does exactly what it says on the tin it's about a k-pop girl band who fight demons but the twist is because it's not just that the twist is that the demons they're fighting are a k-pop

34:59Felix Salmon: boy band oh oh yeah and the music's good you like the music is good the and it's again it's 95

35:07Craig Trudell: minutes long it's perfect length and it's fun and it's touching and it's great that's amazing

35:13Felix Salmon: I think the careers of the people in the Hallmark movies are wonderful too, because in life, I feel like we're always talking to and meeting people with the weirdest job titles and you don't understand what they are. Like marketing, consultant, TikTok guru, AI, HR, MCCP. Like if you're ever on LinkedIn, the titles make no sense. But in the Hallmark movies, everyone has clear jobs. It's like very much like busy town or whatever. Everyone has like a job you fully can comprehend and is like good.

35:43Craig Trudell: You know what you never find in a Hallmark movie? Someone falling in love with a blogger.

35:48Felix Salmon: No, but I did watch one that was about a big city newspaper columnist who gets run out of town, but is so beloved that her fan base writes to the newspaper. Then they're so angry that they have to hire her back. Newspaper columnist. That definitely happened. What?

36:06Elizabeth Spiers: Another time.

36:07Felix Salmon: It was very realistic. I was like, did the algorithm, did it just find me? Like, did it know that this is exactly what I want to, you know, watch a movie about?

36:16Craig Trudell: I will personally do the letterizing campaign to make sure that the newspaper has you back.

36:33Craig Trudell: Guys, we should have a numbers round. Elizabeth, you have a number?

36:37Elizabeth Spiers: I do. It's 435 and that's a dollars. and that's how much a tomahawk steak costs at Lichen in the West Village. Wait, how many dollars? 435. Oh my God. That's an expensive steak. Holy cow. And we've already talked about beef prices going up, but this has nothing to do with it. This is from a Times piece about restaurants in Manhattan specifically coming up with these insanely expensive dishes that they sort of gratuitously put caviar on them and whatever.

37:06Craig Trudell: So you can get a much cheaper steak there if you don't want to spend$435.

37:10Elizabeth Spiers: I don't know if you can there. They also have a$260 Turbo filet.

37:16Felix Salmon: What's the$400 steak like? Does it have like a pile of caviar on it or something?

37:20Elizabeth Spiers: Is it Wagyu? Probably.

37:21Felix Salmon: Tell us more about it.

37:22Elizabeth Spiers: But the point is, this is in a Times piece about these incredibly expensive dishes at Manhattan restaurants being more and more over the top because the people who are willing to pay for the$435 steak. Part of the fun for them is that they're paying$435 for a steak. And so one of the chefs at one of these restaurants with exorbitantly priced food said, you know, anytime we put something on the menu that is insanely expensive, it immediately sells out. It doesn't matter what it is.

37:50Felix Salmon: What?

37:50Craig Trudell: I love it. These people deserve to be separated from their money.

37:53Felix Salmon: But it's just a steak? Why is it so expensive?

37:58Craig Trudell: Because it has a big price tag on it, Emily. It's the same reason why people spend$5 ,000 on a bottle of vodka at a nightclub. It's just, you know, the flex.

38:08Felix Salmon: And there's nothing, it's not like it has a bunch of stuff on it or it's like really big.

38:12Craig Trudell: I'm sure it has a bunch of stuff on it, but I'm sure that stuff is like 1 % of the price.

38:16Felix Salmon: Holy cow.

38:17Craig Trudell: But I also have a Manhattan number. So I feel like this is a good segue. way my manhattan number is 159 which is the number of starbucks in manhattan which is down from 192 last year it is shrunk by 33 starbucks and for the first time in living memory what this means is that starbucks is not the biggest chain in manhattan duncan donuts has 169 outlets in Manhattan. So Dunkin Donuts is now not only the top chain in Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens, which it always has been, but also in Manhattan. Well done, Dunkin. Also, as we all know, Dunkin Donuts has better coffee than Starbucks. So this is good and true.

39:03Craig Trudell: Emily, believe me, you're a coffee drinker again now. You should embrace the Dunkin.

39:08Felix Salmon: I don't like Dunkin coffee that much. Sorry.

39:09Craig Trudell: What's your number?

39:11Felix Salmon: My number is 11.2. That's a percent. 11.2 % is the share of songs from the 1990s on Q104.3's 2025 list of the greatest classic rock songs of all time. 1 ,403 songs.

39:27Craig Trudell: Is that an oxymoron? Is it impossible to be classic rock and also from the 90s?

39:31Felix Salmon: I mean, it's a great question. So in 2005, the share was only 6.3%. So it's almost doubled in the 20 years. And I got this number from Chris De La Riva's Substack, where he analyzed all 1 ,043 classic rock songs on Q104.3's list, because they do it every year. and it was sort of fun to think about. It's basically like time passes and history changes with time and what people consider classic rock evolves. So when I was growing up, there were no songs from the 2000s because of how that was in the future. But now classic rock songs encompass music from the 2000s and from the 1990s. It's a whole new world.

40:13Felix Salmon: But -

40:14Craig Trudell: When I was growing up, there were no songs from the 2000s because that was in the future. I feel like that is the greatest thing that anyone has ever said.

40:22Elizabeth Spiers: That's the best analysis we've had the whole episode.

40:24Felix Salmon: Thank you. When my column goes dark, please write in.

40:29Emily Peck: Ray, what is your number? We're already all over this during the car segment talking about Tesla. My number is$1 ,629 ,252 ,000 ,000 all around there. That is Tesla's all-time high market cap. It is insane to me that... And that's like now? That was as of Tuesday. So they dropped a bit Wednesday, went back up Thursday.

40:59Craig Trudell: Explain, like of all the times for Tesla to reach an all-time high, like why now?

41:04Emily Peck: I mean, his humanoid robot, the last I saw it in public was handing out gummies in Times Square. It does nothing of use. I think for the most part, the sort of optimism of late has been a combination of, OMG, we're going to pay Musk a trillion, isn't that great? And the second thing is robo-taxis. And the optimism about this notion that they're going to have fully driverless cars in spite of the fact that...

41:31Craig Trudell: Now, Waymo is raising cash at a much lower valuation, right? And it actually has robo-taxis. Yeah.

41:38Emily Peck: And just this week, I think the big catalyst was there was this video on X of a Model Y going around Austin without anyone in it. But we know that he's faked videos like this before. And we know that his quote unquote robotaxis in Texas keep crashing despite the fact that they have somebody, you know, in the car to try and prevent against crashes. So I don't see that scaling substantially in 2026, but we shall see.

42:04Craig Trudell: If anyone believes in efficient markets, let them look at this$1.6 trillion valuation for Tesla and explain that one. If you do, if you can, send a note in to SlateMoneyAtSlate.com. And yeah, thank you for listening this week. This has been a fun one. Thank you to Jessamyn Molly and Shana Roth and Micah Phillips for producing. A special thanks to Craig Crudell for coming in and being with us from London, England. And we will be back next week with more Sleep Money.