Disney Gets Ahead of the Darth Vader Porn

0:06Emily Peck: 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 Elizabeth Spiers of The New York Times. Hello. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios.

0:22Felix Salmon: Hello.

0:22Emily Peck: We are going to talk about OpenAI and Disney, two massive companies that are now getting into bed with each other. But the thing is, you're not going to be allowed to make a video of them doing things in bed together. We are going to talk about IPOs, of which there could be very many in 2026. I mean, given where the stock market is, that kind of makes sense. We are going to talk about pricing and whether it is okay that people on Instacart get shown very different prices for the same object. And somehow this is going to wind up segueing into a discussion about not only World Cup pricing, but also the Trump card, the gold card, the gold green card.

1:04Emily Peck: We have a Slate Plus segment about data centers in space. Also, in a couple of weeks, we're going to have a whole episode devoted to fire takes. So please send us your most fire takes of 2025 on slatemoneyatslate.com. Do it in the form of a voice memo, if you will. That would be amazing. It's a fun one this week, so stay tuned. It's all coming up on Slate Money.

1:36Emily Peck: So in OpenAI's eternal quest for cash to find that it can then incinerate in data centers. It has found$1 billion, which it is receiving from Disney. It is selling Disney$1 billion of stock. Now, to be fair, there's a lot of people out there who are willing to throw$1 billion at OpenAI for stock right now. So that isn't that interesting. Disney is a huge corporation that wants to be, like, hip with the AI cool kids. And so you kind of understand why they would want to invest a billion dollars in open AI. This is just like a really boring equity deal, except it comes with a whole bunch of very interesting licensing terms, which Emily, explain.

2:28Felix Salmon: Okay, this is a big deal. It's a blueprint, I'd say, for all of Hollywood. Basically, Disney is buying itself some amount of control over how OpenAI and specifically Sora, which is OpenAI's visual media creator. I don't know how, you know, you put words in and it makes a picture for you. So Disney is getting some measure of control over, say, like you can show an image or video of you and Darth Vader, you know, sitting and eating breakfast together. You cannot show a picture of you and Darth Vader doing anything naughty. You cannot mimic Darth Vader's voice in that movie. Disney has limited Sora to, I believe, only 200 characters that people can use, that fans can use.

3:18Felix Salmon: It has said you can't use character voices. And apparently there's, in the contract or agreement that companies have, there's like a very long appendix that sort of outlines what can't happen in these Sora videos. So I guess Disney, if I'm putting myself in the mind of their legal department, maybe they're thinking instead of just suing ChatGPT over and over again for copyright infringement or whatever, we're going to come in at the ground floor and we're going to just lock down how our content can be used.

3:50Emily Peck: So I think what happened here is that the The LLMs went out and sucked up every single piece of written content that had ever been published in the history of the world before anyone could really get their boots on to try and work out whether this was a good idea. and in the wake of that there were a bunch of lawsuits and you know i wound up getting paid five thousand or rather my publisher wound up receiving five thousand dollars from microsoft for one of them because one of the llms had like sucked up my book but that was all like a way to make things good after the fact and now as it becomes increasingly obvious the next generation of AI is going to be video rather than text.

4:38Emily Peck: What is happening now with this deal and with, I'm sure, a whole bunch of future deals is that the owners of the video IP are trying to get out ahead of it and be in control from day one. And I think you're absolutely right. That makes a certain amount of sense. And we should say that the flip side of this coin is that Disney is doing a sort of carrot and stick approach. They're like, if you cooperate with us, we will invest a billion dollars in your company and we will shake hands on stage and we will be very lovey-dovey. And if you don't, we will send you all manner of nasty grams. And they sent a big nasty gram to Google and they sent a big nasty gram to like Anthropic, I think.

5:18Emily Peck: And they're claiming copyright infringement. And so from the AI company's point of view, the idea is they have a strong incentive to make nice with the IP companies and do deals rather than what they've been historically doing, which is ask permission after you've already ingested all of the material.

5:37Elizabeth Spiers: So I understand the business rationale for this, but I think it just strikes me as a little bit naive that Disney will really be able to control the outputs here. There was a great wide story a couple of weeks ago about the fact that you could get an AI to tell you how to make a nuclear bomb if you just phrased the prompt as a poem. And so I just, I don't know how even OpenAI will be able to enforce these rules around outputs when users find a million ways to get around them. So there's just, how is there not going to be just a ton of Disney-themed porn?

6:12Emily Peck: So, yeah, and that's, I think this is interesting. I think there are two answers to that question. What we saw with Fortnite, which was that Disney licensed Darth Vader to go into Fortnite, and then immediately a bunch of people tried to break it. and a few of them did and a bunch of videos started circulating of Darth Vader saying things that he was really not supposed to be saying. And the solution to that problem was like, oh, they have worked it out. And then like, it becomes a kind of spy versus spy, you know, like it becomes this kind of not very long game of whack-a-mole basically in that like people can do that for five minutes.

6:48Emily Peck: Disney and Fortnite work out what they were doing. They close that loophole and then they can't do it anymore. I think we will see the same thing with Sora, you know people will get around it disney will see how they got around it or disney and open ai will work out how they got around it they'll close that loophole and then it will be harder and i think that so far most i would say 99 of what we see in terms of this kind of infringing material is people searching the internet and circulating infringing material like as an example of look i managed to get around the rules and look this person managed to get around the rules.

7:23Emily Peck: People aren't actually genuinely trying to make Darth Vader porn and like going out and enjoying their Darth Vader porn. I think we've settled on Darth Vader

7:30Felix Salmon: of all the characters. Some of them are.

7:34Emily Peck: But like, but mostly it's like, it's this fun game of like, can we get around the robots? You know, and I feel like so long as it stays in that lane of like, there's going to be a certain number of people who try and get around the robots and a certain number of those people will be successful but it's not going to be like, no, it's not like anyone's going to be like making money off it. There's not going to be a business. I think that's, A, inevitable whether or not Disney has a deal with open AI. And, B, it shouldn't prevent Disney from doing this kind of deal with open AI.

8:04Felix Salmon: I mean, it's important, I think, to recognize that Disney is sort of like the king of U.S. copyright. They are the masters. They literally changed the copyright law and got it to be longer so that they could keep Mickey under lock and key for longer.

8:20Emily Peck: And they did this like multiple times. Every time that Mickey was about to come out of copyright, they would like lobby Congress and Congress would extend it. It was wild.

8:29Felix Salmon: I mean, if you're like pulling back and you're like, well, there's this new technology, Sora, where people can make videos. It's not going to be Disney or any of the other IP owners, the beloved IP owners of America who have like teams of IP attorneys to make sure if anyone does mess with Darth Vader and do something inappropriate, they're going to be on it. You know, they've been on it for years since the birth of YouTube and even before with videotapes. Like, I guess the real losers pulling back, and we've talked about this a little bit before, are the Felix's. Like,$5 ,000, I mean, that's, what is that?

9:04Emily Peck: And once my publisher takes their cut of 50%, and then once my agent takes their cut of 15 % of my 50%, like, yeah, it wasn't a massive check.

9:14Felix Salmon: Yeah, so I wonder, I don't know, bigger picture, like who is getting hurt or whose creativity and IP is just getting completely ripped off by all this new technology. I mean, I think TBD and it's going to be hard to even understand it, perhaps.

9:28Emily Peck: The other thing, which is just very obvious, but we really should emphasize, is that technology moves very first. And anyone who wants to make Darth Vader porn is going to be doing it using DeepSeek or something that is just not a big global AI company. And so if the big global AI companies put in even relatively mild guardrails on what people can do, all of the really bad infringing content is going to leave that, is not going to be on their platforms anyway.

9:58Elizabeth Spiers: There's another thing that AI people call the Snoopy problem, which is that you can train an AI on all these inputs, and so the AI kind of has an understanding of what constitutes Snoopy or Elsa from Frozen or whatever. and the users can use prompts to basically generate that character from an abstraction without ever naming it. So it strikes me as unenforceable across the board.

10:21Emily Peck: I don't think the Snoopy problem is that hard. You know, if Disney is licensing 200 characters to open AI, then it is actually entirely feasible for open AI, like before it produces any piece of video or picture, to just do a quick check against its list of 200 characters and be like, does this look like one of those 200 characters?

10:46Elizabeth Spiers: I didn't hear misunderstanding the Snoopy problem, which is that it can't do that because it's referencing a sort of set of abstractions. So when you think about what Snoopy looks like, if I said, I want you to draw a beagle that's white and has these dimensions or whatever, you can't check that against Disney's IP because it's a little bit too generic, but it will produce something that looks like Snoopy.

11:09Emily Peck: You don't check the prompt against Disney's IP. You check the output against Disney's IP.

11:15Elizabeth Spiers: But how would you do that? I mean, that's not how...

11:17Emily Peck: I think you can. But the robot, you just tell the robot, you know, follow the prompt, do the thing, do all of the things that the user is telling you to do. But then before you show it to them, before you deliver it, spend a fraction of a millisecond checking that output against this list of 200 IP characters to make sure it's not the same.

11:33Elizabeth Spiers: But the problem is that the technology is not capable of doing that when you're dealing in abstractions. It can't.

11:39Emily Peck: Technology is 100 % capable of looking at a picture of Snoopy and looking at another picture and saying, is this other picture Snoopy? It famously is not.

11:48Elizabeth Spiers: It's one of the weaknesses of.

11:50Emily Peck: You can do it again, all of these things to within like 99 % accuracy. I'm pretty sure this is not an insurmountable problem. Except for that, no one even needs to go to that length. No one needs to be like, hey, open AI. can you draw me a white circle and a black dot and create Snoopy that way when they can just go to DeepSea and say, just draw me Snoopy. Why would you even bother?

12:15Elizabeth Spiers: Well, people have bothered the whole time. That's why Disney is having to do this. Anytime there's a new technology, users try to break it, but they also try to break it so that there's a playbook for doing these things when they actually want to for non-mischief-making purposes.

12:30Felix Salmon: I'm also interested, if I could change the subject.

12:32Elizabeth Spiers: Please do.

12:33Felix Salmon: Please write to us if you know how AI works. So I'm wondering, just to be basic, is this a good deal or a bad deal for Disney? Because when I first heard it, I was like, they're paying open AI. Like, open AI is getting access to, like, all their stuff. That seems good. And they're not getting sued. And Disney, in exchange, is, like, paying to buy some open AI stock. I just feel like it's not that great for Disney, really. It's kind of lame.

12:59Emily Peck: There's a couple of things that Disney is getting out of this. One is it's getting like coveted open AI stock. Great, fine. That's, you know, it's probably worth a little bit more than they're paying just because there's so much to run for it. But like, who knows, maybe the AI bubble will burst and it'll be worth less. Like, you know, no one knows how much open AI stock is worth.

13:14Felix Salmon: It's like stock options.

13:15Emily Peck: The second thing they're getting is that they're basically crowdsourcing short form video around Disney IP. And what's super interesting about that is that under the terms that they did with OpenAI, if I go into OpenAI and I spend 3 ,000 hours creating an amazing short movie using Disney characters, all of that IP is owned by Disney. It's not owned by me. I have no rights to that. and everyone kind of believes and this may or may not be true but there's some non-zero percentage probability that it's true that the future of mindless scrolling is not mindless scrolling through videoed tiktoks but it's mindless scrolling through ai generated short-form video and specifically if disney can come up with like a tiktok channel or something similar where people are scrolling through a whole bunch of videos that are created by a bunch of incredibly creative users none of whom have any rights to their ip and they get it all for free and they get this massive pool of ugc user generated content for free that they can then put on television and they can put on digital channels and they can do all the rest of it then is that certain to make them lots of money no but it gives them like the potential it is possible a lot of people are making that bet that that will be worth a lot of money.

14:39Elizabeth Spiers: I think of it as a do they have any other choice kind of dilemma because all of the models are trained on their IP because that's fair use. And so from the just from the company's perspective, it's like, well, if we're going to have outputs that basically violate our IP, shouldn't we be able to monetize them in some way?

14:58Emily Peck: And to be clear, like it doesn't matter whether it's fair use or not. They are trained on that IP.

15:02Felix Salmon: I think, I mean, it's fair use is unbelievable. like these companies are profiting immensely from intellectual property that they didn't pay for at all and it's crazy to me that i didn't know it was understood that that was considered fair use like isn't the new york times suing them over this this this is not settled law that it's fair

15:24Emily Peck: use i think it's absolutely not like there are a lot of lawsuits about this and there have been a lot of settlements around this and yeah like there are definitely people who say that it is

15:34Elizabeth Spiers: It's fair use, isn't it? It's fair use up to the point before you're producing the output. Right. Right. We don't know. There was a lot of dispute about that.

15:43Emily Peck: There were people on both sides of that debate.

15:46Felix Salmon: Yeah, that's fascinating. That is just such a, like tech moves fast and really, in this case, it's just wild.

15:53Emily Peck: If people genuinely thought that it was fair use up until that point, then I would not have received my$5 ,000 from Microsoft.

16:01Felix Salmon: And you're rich now.

16:02Emily Peck: That's all they're paying me for is like we are going to throw your book into this massive pool of data that we are ingesting.

16:10Elizabeth Spiers: But that's what allows them to use your book as output.

16:13Emily Peck: No, it does not. It explicitly does not allow them to use my book as output.

16:16Felix Salmon: What is it? It doesn't? No. So if I ask Chachititi about your book, it won't tell me? Yeah.

16:23Emily Peck: That is exactly the same thing. Now that they know what is in my book, they are explicitly not allowed to quote at length or even minimally from my book. They can't plagiarize me. All that they have the right to do under this contract is ingest my book to help them be smart at LLM.

16:41Elizabeth Spiers: So if I go to ChatGPT right now and ask ChatGPT what your book's about, it can't produce an answer? I'm asking.

16:47Emily Peck: It can tell you what my book is about because lots of people have written that and it knows what my book is about. But it cannot – if you're like, can you quote, you know, two paragraphs from page 300? No, it can't do that. But yeah, I think this is indicative of where AI is moving, which is that we are getting this convergence of the tech companies and the content companies. And this is going to be the first of many such deals.

17:13Felix Salmon: It says, I cannot provide verbatim paragraphs from page 200 of the Phoenix Economy or any other copyrighted book unless you supply the text yourself. Which, if I could supply the text myself, why would I? Bro, what? bro what that he did offer to give me key quotes which I assume that he just or she or they can just get from the internet key quotes

17:35Emily Peck: but also chat GPT offers lots of things that it can't do yeah I mean that's like my number one annoyance with chat GPT it's like if you like I could do X and you're like that sounds great do X and it's like eh

17:46Felix Salmon: that's me pitching stories every day I'll write this

18:03Emily Peck: But we should stick a little bit with open AI because I want to talk about IPOs and this idea. There was a Bloomberg article this week basically saying that if you add up all of the IPOs in 2026, it could come to$3 trillion, which would be like completely insane of like new market cap. The massive granddaddy of all of them being SpaceX. which is talking about possibly IPO-ing next year. Well, it isn't, but a lot of people are saying that people are saying that someone is going to go public, that SpaceX could go public in 2026, which would be interesting on like three different levels, partly because Elon Musk controls SpaceX and he has famously hated the whole being a public company thing for a long time.

18:49Emily Peck: So like what made him change his mind? Partly because SpaceX, if it goes public at the valuations being mooted, would probably be worth more than Tesla, which is kind of wild. But then there's a whole bunch of other IPOs, including OpenAI, which could happen next year. We had an IPO this week from Wealthfront, which was super interesting to me because they sold themselves to UBS for$1.4 billion a few years ago. And then UBS had a bunch of management shakeups and turned around and said, actually can we have take backsies on this and Wealthfront was like do we really want to enforce a deal where they are buying a company they don't want and will probably just shut us down and so they were like okay fine you get your 1.4 billion dollars back we'll just stay independent but everyone kind of thought that that was a sign of UBS coming to a census and saying Wealthfront is not worth 1.4 billion it's not worth anything near that they were just buying the technology they They weren't buying the assets.

19:54Emily Peck: But now, Wealthfront is worth$3 billion. And you're like, oh, well, OK. So staying independent turned out to have been a smart move after all.

20:03Felix Salmon: That was also true for another company this year, right?

20:06Emily Peck: Figma.

20:07Felix Salmon: Yeah, Figma. Adobe was going to buy it. The Biden administration blocked it. And then Figma IPO'd and is now worth more than Adobe was planning on paying, I believe. Yeah, yeah. So that's good. We like this. So it's a good time to go public. Yes, but will next year be a good time to go public? Or will it be like a dot-com floppity flip, I feel like, is the question people are asking.

20:28Emily Peck: The thing that happened in the dot-com bubble, to be clear, if you look at 1999 and a bunch of 1998, beginning of 2000, that kind of era, is that it was the greatest time to go public in the history of the planet. It was an awesome time to go public. Like if you were raising money, you could sell like a tiny fraction of your company for a gazillion dollars. And you got just like free money, basically. And that was great. And anyone who wasn't issuing equity into the dot-com bubble was a moron. Like it was the people buying might have lost money. In fact, almost certainly did lose money. But the people selling, the companies going public, they made out like bandits.

21:07Emily Peck: They did really well. You know, SpaceX is a significant IPO, but with some of the other companies, it strikes me as there's a kind of business journalism convention where if a company is a certain size, it's always maybe going to go public next year.

21:21Elizabeth Spiers: And that's just a recurring theme.

21:24Emily Peck: Well, I feel like for the past couple of years, maybe not. Like one of the themes over the past couple of years is look at these massive private companies like Stripe. They seem to be perfectly happy being private. And isn't it interesting that they're not going public anytime soon? And I think for me, this little week's worth of discourse is an interesting flipping of that script.

21:48Elizabeth Spiers: I think it's very hard for companies that are private and have taken a lot of venture money to stay private because people want exits. I remember when Uber.

21:56Emily Peck: Yeah, I think it used to be hard. And I feel like SpaceX and Stripe and various others have kind of proved that it's not. What they do is they have little private liquidity rounds where people who want to exit can exit. And they've managed to solve that problem to a very large degree.

22:14Felix Salmon: Yeah, I can't see Musk and SpaceX wanting to disrupt that vibe or why they would want to unless Musk is like, I want to be a trillionaire, which could really be a motivating factor.

22:26Elizabeth Spiers: Yeah, especially in his case personally. Like I think that could easily be a motivating factor. Not because it's cool.

22:32Felix Salmon: Not because he, like, obviously no one needs to become a trillionaire. It's not like, oh, God, I need this.

22:39Emily Peck: But no, I think he has realized that having liquid wealth is kind of cool. Like, it allows him to do things like buy Twitter if he wants to buy Twitter. And you can't do that if you own SpaceX, even if SpaceX is worth more than Tesla, right? You can only do that if you own Tesla and own Tesla shares and can basically sell those Tesla shares to get the dollars that you need to buy Twitter. And so if he wants to do things that cost many, many billions of dollars, you know, and specifically he has said over and over again, I just need a lot of money so that I can get to Mars, which is like whatever.

23:15Emily Peck: But whatever it is that he wants to do, if it's super expensive, then it really does actually help to have public currency to do that rather than just private stock.

23:24Elizabeth Spiers: Well, he does have to pay$30 million to each of his baby mamas. So if he wants like a billion more kids, he's got to find that money somewhere.

23:32Emily Peck: Maybe if SpaceX goes public, he can up that to$50 million.

23:36Felix Salmon: I guess the parallel, I said.com boom, and we talked about that. But maybe the parallel in my head, since the talk is now that both Anthropic and OpenAI would do IPOs next year. The parallel is more whenever the Facebook IPO was. I think that was 2012 or 2013. And, you know, maybe the parallel is when social media went public. And the parallel now is AI going public.

24:01Emily Peck: That is super interesting. And one of the super interesting things about not only the Facebook IPO, but also the Google IPO, which was many years earlier, is that both of them were terrible IPOs.

24:11Felix Salmon: Yeah, they went really badly.

24:12Emily Peck: They were two of the worst IPOs to ever IPO. People got really excited about the companies. Like, Google's going public. And then Facebook's going public. And, you know, it totally shit the bed. And it went, like, down rather than up. and everyone was like, and everyone was pointing fingers at everyone else. And I remember writing about it at the time and it was like, it was amazing how incompetent that IPO was.

24:30Felix Salmon: Of course, long term, you know, just ride it out. It was fine. But in the short term,

24:35Emily Peck: everyone was like, this is a complete disaster. Yeah. And like putting together a$40 billion IPO of a$1.5 trillion company is really fucking hard. And there's a lot of room for error, especially in a world where you can't, you know, walk down the street without someone screaming AI bubble at you.

24:57Felix Salmon: They compared it, one of the pieces we read in the prep, they compared SpaceX to Saudi Aramco.

25:03Emily Peck: Yeah, that's the most valuable company up until now to ever go public.

25:07Felix Salmon: The oil company there, they said, at the time of the IPO was pulling in, I'm reading, that's why I've looked to the side, YouTube people. It had pulled in$360 billion in revenue the year it went public. and SpaceX is only bringing in 15 billion a year. So I wonder about that. Like, do you have to pay a premium? Or does Saudi Aramco have to have a higher level of revenue because it's like oil, which is like a real thing, plus it's Saudi?

25:35Emily Peck: Everyone was convinced we're at like peak oil, right? So like the whole point about Aramco is the expected future revenues are going down. With SpaceX, expected future revenues are going up. So you're paying for future revenues, not current revenues.

25:48Felix Salmon: You're paying for, like, the promise of sending all the billionaires to space. And whoops, we can't get them back. Also, you're paying for the Starlink.

25:56Emily Peck: Yeah, what you're really paying for is Starlink. Like, Starlink is the massive majority of the value of SpaceX.

26:02Felix Salmon: And that's internet. Yeah. And it has a near monopoly on what it does.

26:08Emily Peck: Satellite internet. And then everyone is kind of expecting that it's going to eventually become, like, satellite cell phone service. And at that point, it's just a license to print money.

26:19Felix Salmon: Isn't also part of SpaceX, I think of it as like a government contractor.

26:23Emily Peck: Yeah, that's how it grew, right? It's early, it's quite an old company. It's been around quite a long time. And the way that it got up to critical mass and the way that it became sort of cash flow positive in the first place was exactly that. It would get massive contracts from NASA to send rockets into space. And it did that more effectively and more efficiently than NASA could do on its own. So, yeah, that was how it became, like, this big space company in the first place. And then it was like, well, now that we're good at sending things into space, let's send an entire network of communication satellites into space and create this thing called Starlink where anyone anywhere on the planet can get internet.

27:03Emily Peck: And that was, you know, something that people had dreamed of before, but no one really had the money to do it. known private company had the sort of wherewithal to, you know, send that many rockets into space and create that kind of a network. But SpaceX did, and it did. And now it's a trillion dollar company.

27:20Felix Salmon: I think it's really worth pointing out that this company that could be the biggest IPO of next year that is worth more than a trillion dollars, the reason it was able to grow the way it was, was because of government investment. And the leader of that company spent a good chunk of this year sort of destroying the government.

27:38Emily Peck: Well, I mean, do we think that one of the reasons, I mean, this is in the back of my head, right? Do we think that one of the reasons that Elon wants a whole bunch of liquid wealth is actually to do this thing that he has threatened to do, but doesn't seem to have got very far with, which is starting a whole new political party and like taking over the US government?

27:56Felix Salmon: I feel like he said this week, actually, on the Katie Miller's, Stephen Miller's wife has a podcast, and he went on it and said that, though he doesn't regret doing what he did this year for the U.S. government, that he wouldn't do it again or something. Like it wasn't worth it because people lit Tesla dealerships on fire or whatever. I don't pretend to know how he thinks or anything, but I would imagine his appetite for politics has been dampened.

28:36Emily Peck: We are going to talk a little bit more about the business of space in the plus. I definitely do want to talk about this question of whether the valuation of SpaceX is in part a function of this idea that the real growth, the real future growth is putting data centers in space, which sounds kind of crazy. And then you think about it and it's like, is it really that crazy? But we should also just before we finish the main show talk about the whole latest iteration of a conversation that we've been having for a while on the show, which is dynamic pricing and individualized pricing. and there's a big new report that just came out basically saying that Instacart will sell the identical items from the identical store at the identical time of that same day to two different people at wildly different prices, to which the natural reaction is, whoa, that's terrible.

29:30Emily Peck: So, Elizabeth, Emily, which one of you wants to tell me, whoa, that's terrible?

29:34Elizabeth Spiers: Well, it's terrible for a specific reason. There's some suspicion that they're doing this based on people's private data. And when that happens, I think it's different from doing, say, price testing in the context of rolling out a new product, where what you're trying to triangulate on is the customer's price sensitivity, but the customer is kind of a uniform class. And it's a little bit different when you're sort of discriminating against specific customers based on their existing data that you have. So, for example, a good thing that came up in the prep was that Orbitz used to charge Mac users more because they had data that said that if you were using a Mac, you probably had higher income.

30:19Elizabeth Spiers: Orbitz is a travel site, right? Yeah.

30:21Emily Peck: This was back in the 90s. This was a million years ago.

30:24Elizabeth Spiers: Yeah, so imagine now, given the wealth of data that companies have access to, being able to triangulate on you, Felix Salmon, know exactly where you live, what your income is, etc. and you go to Instacart and they're like, that bottle of water is$20 for you because we know who you are and we have all this information. You got all that open AI money. Yes. I think there's a difference between using dynamic pricing to just do routine price testing to see where customers as a class, where the prices hold up or don't, and then utilizing people's data to target people individually.

31:03Emily Peck: So we should really jump in here very quickly and emphasize the active word in what Elizabeth was saying is suspicion that there is no evidence of this. There is people have been suspecting that this is happening for some years now. There have been a lot of reporters chasing the story in various different forms. There have been a bunch of people talking about a bunch of companies that they suspect might be selling the data for these nefarious purposes. And what is interesting to me is that over the past however many years, whenever anyone looks for highly variable pricing, whether it's on Instacart or whether it's on Amazon, there was a piece about how Amazon charges schools different amounts of money or whatever, they find it.

31:51Emily Peck: But whenever anyone tries to find a company that is selling, we will allow you to use personalized information to discriminate against individuals or to charge individuals more or to charge individuals less, for that matter. They haven't yet found that. So, yeah, it is entirely intuitive that is what is going on. But we do not know that that is what is going on.

32:13Felix Salmon: So this was research conducted by Groundwork Collaborative. They're a progressive group with Consumer Reports. Everyone knows Consumer Reports. and published in the New York Times that Ben Castleman wrote up. And basically, Instacart is A-B testing prices, selling eggs at different price points just to see which is the most bestest one. And of course, people think this is bad. I don't want to know that at any given moment, I could eat the recharge$2.99 for my eggs or$3.50 for my eggs. That just seems unfair on its face. It is unfair on its face. But then you think a little bit more about how, and we've talked about this a lot on the podcast, but I think it's like endlessly interesting about how companies have always done dynamic pricing, even before algorithms and the internet, you can go to happy hour and get your beer for$2 off, or, you know, you buy a plane ticket on Christmas day.

33:05Felix Salmon: It's cheaper than if you buy it on December to travel on December 23rd. I guess the difference with the algorithm is I know what's happening. If I choose to go to the bar after happy hour, if I choose to fly on the 23rd versus the 25th, I have a good grounding in what is fair, what is not, like how they're going to charge me for the privilege of traveling on the day I want or whatever. With algorithmic pricing, with buying the eggs, you have no freaking idea. There's no rhyme or reason to it. It's just always kind of happening. And even if you're the most astute consumer, you're not going to know.

33:37Elizabeth Spiers: Well, also there's a question of, you know, how much this, you know, bleeds into price gouging ultimately.

33:43Felix Salmon: Yeah. That's the other, like the dark side of dynamic pricing is the gouging, right? It's snowing. So we're going to charge you$50 for a$10 shovel or it's the pandemic. Everyone's on Instacart. Like who knows what shenanigan, there's no evidence, but that's the time to do the gouging then. And the shenanigans, I remember we were up at midnight trying to get our Instacart delivery because we were afraid to go to the store or whatever. So yeah, and the way things are moving now with regulation, like, I think one of the pieces we read said the FTC was sort of had started looking into some of this into dynamic pricing sort of to try and lift the veil.

34:20Felix Salmon: But that's all sort of been put to the wayside. But that's what you would expect consumer protection laws to like, this is where we would need them.

34:29Emily Peck: Well, New York, interesting, all three of us live in New York State. And New York State now has a rule basically saying that if the price is algorithmically personalized to you, then right next to the price, when it happens, you need to see a little disclaimer saying this price is algorithmically personalized to you. I have not seen that disclaimer. I don't know if I am assuming neither of you two have. It'll be very interesting to see whether anyone ever sees this disclaimer in the wild.

34:55Elizabeth Spiers: So the exact wording of it is this price was set by an algorithm using your personal data. So they would have to establish that the company was using your personal data to you.

35:04Emily Peck: Well, it's not they. I mean, the company themselves obviously knows whether they're using your personal data or not.

35:10Elizabeth Spiers: Yeah, but think about how these tech companies operate. Usually it's, we'll fix it when we get in trouble.

35:15Felix Salmon: That's how it's operating now. I was thinking about that reading the groundwork research with Consumer Reports. I'm like, this is what we have now. We can't, not that regulation was ever so amazing, but like, this is how it works now.

35:27Emily Peck: It is how it works now. And I think there's a super interesting case study happening with World Cup tickets right now, which is that now that we've had the World Cup draw, everyone knows which are the games that everyone wants to go see. People want to see England versus Croatia much more than they want to see Switzerland versus Qatar. And so, like, you have that demand for the big games versus the little games. And that is showing up in ticket prices. And there is a FIFA-operated secondary marketplace where you can buy and sell your tickets. And the average price for a World Cup ticket now is somewhere in the region of$5 ,000.

36:13Emily Peck: It's absolutely insanely expensive.

36:15Felix Salmon: I don't understand how that's new. Like, tickets for better games have always cost more.

36:20Emily Peck: Correct. So this is not new. What's new is just the magnitude of the prices. These prices are roughly five times more than they were in Qatar four years ago.

36:31Felix Salmon: But, like, that's sports right now. Like, I was looking at World Series ticks a few tickets. I don't know. I had to say ticks. Ticks. Ticks. And, I mean, just anything in person now is, I bet you could look at any prices for any concert five times as much as it was five years ago, whatever you just said.

36:46Emily Peck: Okay, so this is exactly, this Emily Peck reaction is exactly the reaction of FIFA and the reaction of a fair number of Americans. Emily is not an outlier here. Just a basic B. She's just like, well, this is supply and demand. We live in the market economy. I'm a good neoliberal, yada, yada, yada. In the rest of the world, there is real anger about this. In the UK, FIFA is basically not allowed to sell tickets to the World Cup in the UK because the UK has a law now saying that you're not allowed to resell tickets for more than face value.

37:25Felix Salmon: Well, that's wonderful. Good for them. I mean, yes.

37:28Emily Peck: And so the global football fandom is up in arms about this because we, you know, remember as well that 90 plus percent of the football fans on the planet are not American, right? So they don't have this intuition that, oh, yeah, of course it's going to cost thousands of dollars.

37:45Felix Salmon: They're not like beaten down by capitalism the way Americans are, essentially. I love that for them. Wow.

37:53Emily Peck: And so now there's this massive tension, right, globally about the ticket prices and everyone around the planet, not so much in America, but like everywhere else who are like, we want to travel to America to see the World Cup next year. They're saying like, wait, what? How much? I love that. Yeah.

38:10Felix Salmon: That's like, there's all kinds of examples, but like you think something's normal that happens like in your family and then you tell someone else about it and they're like, what? You know, that's how it is for America. Like, yeah, everything costs like a few thousand dollars, anything you want to see. And like the rest of the world's like, girl, no, it doesn't have to be like that.

38:30Elizabeth Spiers: Only the obscenely rich should be able to see a soccer game.

38:34Felix Salmon: Everyone else has to stay home and watch TV and get ads.

38:38Emily Peck: That's exactly where like the market economy arrives at, right? There's a finite number of seats to these games. You sell them to the highest bidder because capitalism. and then the result is that unless you can afford$5 ,000, you're not going to go see the game. And it just feels...

38:54Felix Salmon: And we didn't talk about it, but that's what President Trump is now doing with visas. He's charging a million dollars to get a visa. It's like kind of on the spectrum.

39:04Emily Peck: Yeah, he's like, yeah, no, you're absolutely right. This is the million dollar Trump card, which is now a thing that exists, which is basically you can apply for a green card and go through the normal green card process. And as someone who has been through the green card process and has many friends who have been through the green card process, this is a very long and involved and torturous process to go through, even if you're doing it the easy way, which is via marriage to someone who can support you. So the green card process is painful. And under Trump, it is clearly going to become more painful.

39:38Emily Peck: They want to decrease the amount of legal immigration and people who are legally becoming permanent residents. or you just jump to the front of the queue and become a permanent resident, get your green card super quickly if you write us a million dollar check. And like on some level, like again, I'm kind of with Emily on this one, which is like, is this discrimination and favor of rich people? Like, duh, obviously. If anyone is that rich and really wants a green card that badly, then like why not let them pay a million dollars for it? I suspect that demand for this gold card, as they're calling it, is going to be minimal.

40:18Emily Peck: There is a threatened platinum card, which will cost$5 million. And that one is actually much more interesting, financially speaking, to rich people. Because the thing about the platinum card is that it uniquely allows you to not pay tax on your global income. You only need to pay tax on your U.S. income. This is illegal and probably unconstitutional. And so that's why it doesn't exist is because they haven't quite been able to work out how to offer this thing legally yet. But if they ever do, then I can see why it would make a bunch of sense for a bunch of rich people to spend$5 million on a platinum card.

40:58Emily Peck: That makes more sense to me than why anyone would want to spend$1 million on a gold card.

41:03Felix Salmon: Yeah, I mean, I guess the million dollar visa is a way to just restrict immigration to the rich. But some White House officials are saying like, we want it to be a way we get more high skilled immigration.

41:20Elizabeth Spiers: And I'm like, if you can afford a million dollar gold card, we will decide that you're high skilled.

41:28Emily Peck: Which is kind of like fine, whatever. It's a decent proxy. You know, you have that much money that you'll be contributing to the economy. You'll be spending a lot of money. You'll be probably employing people directly or indirectly. But like...

41:41Felix Salmon: Are you getting Elizabeth and I's faces? We're making faces here on YouTube. You got to see it.

41:46Emily Peck: Measuring skills is always a fraught thing. You know, the US is unlikely to ever... So just use money as a proxy.

41:53Felix Salmon: Clearly the rich are better and more skilled.

41:56Emily Peck: As exemplified by Donald Trump. Canada and New Zealand do it, and we're not going to wind up doing it the way that Canada and New Zealand do it. But where I was going with this is that people receive their green cards generally up until, you know, five minutes ago when this gold card was announced, only after they have lived and worked in this country for many, many years. I lived in the U.S. for, you know, well over a decade. I can't remember exactly how long it was before I received my green card, and that is entirely normal. If you want to reduce legal immigration, the place you reduce that legal immigration is the people getting those work visas, the H visas, the I visas, the O visas, the L visas, all of those, rather than like once they're already living and working here, preventing them from becoming green card holders.

42:45Emily Peck: So tightening up the issuance of green cards, most of which are family related anyway, is not the place to reduce legal immigration.

43:04Emily Peck: We should have numbers round. Emily, do you have a number?

43:07Felix Salmon: Yeah. 18 ,000. Okay, this is the number of older people who left their homes and went missing in Japan last year. Double the number from 2012. This is because people age 65 and up make up 30 % of Japan's population. And that's second highest in the world, apparently. In the U.S. it's 18%. So they have a lot of old people and they're getting dementia. And increasing numbers of them are leaving their houses and just going missing. And the Japanese economy is like adjusting to being like a place of where very old people live. Maybe Felix probably knows this better because he was recently in Japan.

43:44Felix Salmon: But there's this great BBC article on this. And they even described there's like a restaurant where the premise is that older people with dementia are waiting on the tables.

43:55Emily Peck: Oh, yeah. Yeah, everyone's so nice to the way it's just so patient. And they may or may not get your food.

44:00Felix Salmon: You may or may not get your food at the restaurant. So it was just making me think because, yeah, the U.S. right now, just 18 % old people. But those numbers are headed up. And I guess by 2030, it'll be 20 % and then 25 % by 2060. So they're putting trackers on the old people now in Japan. So I guess ultimately, we're going to need to put trackers on ourselves when we get older.

44:24Emily Peck: This is why I welcome my new personalized, individualized database dystopia, because eventually it's going to save me from myself.

44:33Felix Salmon: Yes, you need a chatbot that's just like you. And you can be like, what happened? Tell me my name again or whatever it is, whatever you need to remember.

44:41Emily Peck: Elizabeth, what's your number?

44:42Elizabeth Spiers: My number is 14.13 and that's$14.13. And that is the price that you pay right now for a USDA choice boneless steak per pound.

44:52Emily Peck: Well, depending on Instacart and its mood that morning.

44:56Elizabeth Spiers: Fair. But we have a cattle shortage. So steakhouses are having to charge a lot more for steak, upwards of$60.

45:04Emily Peck: Wait, are you saying that$14 a pound is expensive for steak? Because it seems dirt cheap to me.

45:10Elizabeth Spiers: That's USDA Choice, which is the mid-market steak. It's not Prime, which is what you would get in a restaurant. And it is much higher than... You know, steak kind of peaked in August, and it was$14 and I think 30-something cents a pound. But it's just insanely expensive right now, and there's a cattle shortage.

45:28Emily Peck: Okay, I'm just going to come out and say that$14 is not insanely expensive, that beef is not expensive enough, and that the optimal price of beef is much higher than what it is right now. We eat way too much of it.

45:39Elizabeth Spiers: My first ever fortune column was about inflation and the price of beef. And one of the things that I wrote about was hedonic substitution. where basically one of the things that was not really taken into account when people think about inflation in food is that sometimes people will switch from more expensive cuts to lower-grade beef or ground beef or whatever, and it's all kind of treated as the same product. But in steakhouses, you're getting that prime cut, and so you're seeing entrees go up by like$60,$80 for filet bignon.

46:11Felix Salmon: Oh my God.

46:12Elizabeth Spiers: And at the top tier steakhouses, this isn't having any effect because people, if you're going to one of those places, like you expect just pay a fuck ton of money for your steak. But at places like Longhorn and Outback and Texas Roadhouse, they are feeling it because people are just balking at the prices.

46:29Emily Peck: Yeah, I am feeling absolutely no sympathy for them.

46:32Felix Salmon: I think you're just so wrong.

46:34Emily Peck: The existence of McDonald's is just proof positive that there's too much beef in this country and it is underpriced.

46:40Elizabeth Spiers: That is all USDA select beef, which is the worst kind of beef.

46:45Felix Salmon: Yeah, that's select beef. And it's kind of chopped up and mashed into a beef-like thing. I mean, we're used to paying a certain amount of money to feed the fam, and it's becoming really expensive.

46:56Emily Peck: If you feed them beef, which is like this super luxury product. No, grocery prices are up.

47:01Elizabeth Spiers: There was a really frustrating exchange that I saw with, what's her name, the White House press secretary, who's 12, and Caitlin Collins, where Collins said, you know, you keep saying the economy's great, but everybody's feeling prices go up. and the press secretary said, well, you know, core CPI is at whatever it's at. And it's like, well, people don't pay attention to that because it excludes food and energy, which are the two things that people notice the most or they feel it the most because food, gas are, for most people... Yeah, and when people complain about gas prices,

47:33Emily Peck: I talk about how salient they are. And when people complain about egg prices, I talk about how salient they are because we do this thing where we're like filling up our car with gas on a regular basis. We're buying eggs on a regular basis. I just don't think that beef rises to the level of like gas and eggs. It's this like absolute necessity that people have to buy.

47:51Elizabeth Spiers: Well, you didn't grow up in bread deck America where ground beef is like a staple.

47:56Felix Salmon: Steak is like the most American of meals. You're just, I don't know. You're wrong.

48:01Emily Peck: I'm wrong.

48:02Felix Salmon: You're just wrong. I'm wrong.

48:03Emily Peck: I'm wrong, people. But I'm not only wrong. I also have a number, which is also animal welfare related. My number is 20.5 million, which is the number of animals that were farmed for their fur in 2024. And the interesting thing about this number of 20 million is it is down from 140 million in 2014. It is absolutely plunged. Over 10 years, it has gone down by like 80%. And it's kind of interesting to me that, you know, we all remember from like the 80s, you know, the campaigns against fur and fashion and whatnot. But the really, really big decline in animals being farmed for their fur, like the, you know, no one's been wearing like a leopard's coat for decades.

48:55Emily Peck: But if you're talking about like the minks and the raccoon dogs and that kind of stuff, the massive decline has just been in the last 10 years, which I would not have expected.

49:04Felix Salmon: Is that because they make warmer coats now out of other materials?

49:08Emily Peck: No, I think the ability to make warm coats out of not fur has been around for much longer than 10 years.

49:14Felix Salmon: So it's just a style thing? It's just not a style.

49:16Emily Peck: Yeah, it's just like finally the consumers are like, no, I don't actually want a mink coat. Thank you very much.

49:22Elizabeth Spiers: Well, I think now it's kind of considered a little gauche, like to wear real fur.

49:26Emily Peck: Yeah, but wasn't it considered gauche like 10, 20 years ago already as well?

49:31Felix Salmon: But now like the really rich people, and you guys probably know this better than me, they buy these like really expensive like Canada Goose or like these very expensive like active wear-y coats and things. And there's just other ways to spend a lot of money on coats besides fur.

49:46Emily Peck: I think maybe that's it, that fur has no longer become, is no longer a signifier of luxury.

49:53Felix Salmon: It's like tacky.

49:54Emily Peck: Now it's like the Canada Goose branding. Although, yeah, I'm a little bit unclear where Canada Goose had a tiny little fur rim on a bunch of its hoods for a while. And there was a lot of controversy about whether that should be there. But yeah, generally speaking, no one needs fur for warmth. You use it for signifiers of luxury. And if it doesn't signify luxury anymore, then there's no demand and it falls.

50:16Felix Salmon: And then the minks get to live another day.

50:19Emily Peck: And the minks get to live.

50:20Felix Salmon: Could we kill them for our steak? No, just kidding. Yeah, we can start eating them instead. It's a joke.

50:25Emily Peck: Anyway, I think that's all we have time for this week, unless you want to learn about data centers in space, in which case you're going to need to be a Slate Plus subscriber. Do it. It's good for the planet. Thank you to Micah Phillips and Jessamyn Molly and Shana Roth for producing. Please send us on SlateMoney at Slate.com your hottest takes of 2025. we are going to have a special episode all about hot takes think back to the most fire takes that you came across in 2025 send them in and ideally just send them in as an attachment to your email as a voice memo and then we can play it on the show

51:03Felix Salmon: Felix, can you quickly explain what a hot take is? Is it something is wrong or it goes against the conventional wisdom or is so outrageous? What is a hot take actually?

51:14Emily Peck: A hot take is just like well, Elizabeth, you're the queen of the memes. You do it. What makes a take particularly fire?

51:23Elizabeth Spiers: It's a little bit counterintuitive, not knee-jerk contrarian, but it's something that people probably would not, wouldn't be immediately intuitive.

51:31Emily Peck: Yeah, so something that like you hear and then your first reaction is, really? Wow. But that also has some, it's like colorable, as the lawyers would say. Like, you know, it's, you can defend it.

51:43Felix Salmon: It's so the guy who said the poverty line should be$140 ,000 a year. That's a hot tape. Exactly.

51:47Emily Peck: That's like a classic. Classic.

51:49Felix Salmon: So it's not quite a slate pitch. Because slate pitch is a genre of hot tape, right? That's like counter...

51:56Emily Peck: They're close. Okay, I just want to help. If there was a particularly fire slate story that you think we should include, then please send that to us too. Yes. Yes, thank you. And we'll be back next week with more of this here. Slate money.

52:16Thank you.