Least Cool Ferrari Ever

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2:59Hello! Welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Bloomberg with Elizabeth Spires of The New York Times. Hello. With Emily Peck of Axios.

3:15Felix Salmon: Hello, hello. And we are going to talk about fast cars because they go zoom zoom, only sometimes they're electric and they have fake engine noise that gets pumped into the cabin to make you feel like you're going more zoom, even though they're electric and they're basically quiet. We're going to talk about one of those that costs 550 ,000 euros. We are going to talk about GDP and whether it's useful metric and whether anything will ever replace it. And we're going to talk about air conditioning and why Europeans are so mistrustful of it. We have a Slate Plus segment on the funny media machinations behind all of the stories you might have heard about people getting sexually harassed at J.P.

3:58Morgan. It's all coming up on Slate Money.

4:11okay so obviously the most important business and finance news of the week is the fact that ferrari has a new car am i correct about the the massive importance of this car oh this is the only thing i've been

4:28Elizabeth Spiers: thinking about for at least 72 hours i've been thinking about this all week basically as far as i can make out john elcan who now basically owns ferrari put in this tech guy as the ceo of ferrari and he was like we should do an ev and everyone said yeah yeah whatever and then to make it buzzy and cool they decided to hire johnny ive to design it even though he has never designed a car in his life and he with great fanfare it is kind of impossible to overstate the fanfare with which ferrari launched this car unveiled basically something that looks either like an apple mouse or a nissan leaf depending on who you believe it just has zero sexiness zero ferrari dna nissan is making great play of this on on the socials and everyone i think everyone hates it Is that right?

5:24Everyone hates it?

5:25Elizabeth Spiers: I think that's true. I would defend part of it, though, maybe from knee-jerk contrarianism. But I think the interior is cool. Very kind of like retro, futuristic. But I understand why everybody's mad about it, because it looks like a sedan. I mean, it is a sedan. Four doors and five seats, which makes you wonder who they think the market is for it. Is it like the same people who buy really boring-looking Bentleys? Is it... Say the price. Who's going to buy it? Say the price.

5:52Felix Salmon: Say the price. Emily, what is the price? 550 ,000 euros or$640 ,000, which is an insane amount. That's why it's crazy. Because, okay, it looks like a Leaf. Fine. A Nissan Leaf. Or it looks like an Apple mouse on its back. And that was my favorite of the memes with the car on its back with the charger in it, like how you have to charge your wireless mouse. But$600 ,000 for that? Obviously, that's terrible.

6:16Elizabeth Spiers: Yeah, it is supercar pricing. Yeah. It's like demi-supercar pricing. I feel like supercars start at like a million these days so it's like half a supercar um the idea is that electric vehicles have been very very fast for a long time and a lot of people were comparing this car to a xiaomi car from china which has basically exactly the same acceleration and you know performance figures and costs 57 000 dollars and they were like why would i pay 640 000 for an amount of acceleration i can get for a tenth of that the ferrari accelerates zero to 60 in under 2.5 seconds can you do that with a with a xiaomi yes you can that's surprising you can do that in quite a lot of electric cars you've you've been able to do that on like the model s plaid for you know many years now electric motors are very very good fast acceleration from zero to 60 is kind of what they're best at and you can put a very fast acceleration motor into pretty much any ev and so to a first approximation all evs accelerate really quickly unless they're incredibly heavy which this one isn't so the fact that supercars have been able to get sold whether they're by ferrari or koenigsegg or bugatti or porsche or whoever over the past five or six years at prices of one two three four five million plus is proof that what you are paying for is not acceleration because you've been able to get that acceleration on a tesla for all those years or lucid or you know any of those cars right so then the idea here with this ferrari is that it has all of the handling and performance and all of the other things that you want in a ferrari and that people pay a million dollars for in a ferrari beyond just the acceleration and maybe it does but the other thing that people want in a ferrari or something that looks like a ferrari and that makes people look at it go oh that's a sexy car i want that car and there is just nothing nothing sexy about this car it seems like it's been designed by exactly the same algorithm that designed you know all of the teslas and the nissans and everyone else which is basically an aerodynamics optimization algorithm making it very smooth so that you can maximize mileage.

8:46But like that is not that is not what Ferrari stands for.

8:50Felix Salmon: It looks like a picking the kids up from school car. Yeah, seating five is not how I think of a Ferrari. I think of a Ferrari as a very profoundly uncomfortable car that's very low to the ground that is has zero appeal to me. Like, I don't like being super low to the ground. Then you have to like, climb your way out of a car. And it's super like tight in there. I just No room for luggage, no room for kids.

9:13Elizabeth Spiers: The non-EV Ferraris, the powertrain is structured so that you can't have more seating in it. Like there's just no room. Yeah, and the Ferraris with engines, and Ferrari has been putting batteries into cars for some time now. They've had like hybrids, but this is the first one with no engine at all. And all the ones with engines have these engines basically right in the middle of the car where your passenger would normally be. And so because the engine is there, you can't have a passenger there. Now they have all of these batteries and they don't have to have an engine there. And so you can put passengers in the back where the engine would normally be.

9:47And in fact, you can put three passengers in the back because you don't have that. I believe it's called a transaxle, which is the long tube which connects the steering wheel to the back wheels, basically. And because that's not there, you can fit a third passenger in the middle. And so, hey, look, we have lots of space. We may as well use all of this space. Good for us. but please, just find a way of making it cool in Ferrari.

10:09Elizabeth Spiers: I have two theories about this. One is that nobody wanted to tell Johnny Ive no because surely they do focus groups or they got feedback from people who are potential customers before they rolled it out. And then my other theory is that maybe the idea is that because it's so distinctive looking and now everyone knows how much it costs, that the kind of people who are going to buy it are the people who bought Cybertrucks.

10:31Felix Salmon: That's what I was thinking. Everyone did the same thing with the Cybertrucks. It's so ugly. I see them everywhere now. I know you see them everywhere because they stand out. But there aren't that many of them, objectively. The Cybertruck is not a high-selling vehicle. But these aren't meant to be high-selling vehicles. Ferrari's whole thing is we don't sell a lot of vehicles. But what I would say is that it is not that distinctive looking. It looks like every other EV out there. And you could easily mistake it for a Nissan Leaf. It could drive past you. And you could be driving down the road past a bunch of these things.

11:02And you'd have no idea. It just looks like a lump.

11:05Felix Salmon: The former CEO, he was in some video saying he hated it and blah, blah, blah. Oh, he said, if I say what I think, I'd cause harm to Ferrari. Like, he said what he thought. There is actually a reason for this. And there is a reason it will sell. And there is a reason Ferrari makes it. And there is a reason why it really doesn't matter what it looks like or what anyone thinks. The reason why it is being made is because Ferrari is a European carmaker. It is an independent European carmaker. and under European regulations. And under European regulations, Ferrari needs to make a certain amount of sustainable, you know, zero emissions or low emissions cars or all the rest of it.

11:43Like they can't just make ICE cars. That's actually illegal in Europe now. So they needed an EV to remain in regulatory compliance. So they put out an EV. The second reason is that Ferrari is a little bit like Rolex or AP or, you know, the swanky watch brands, which is that they make many fewer cars than there is demand for. So everyone is clamoring to buy their cars and everyone's like trying to jump ahead on the wait list and all the rest of it. And so the way they allocate the really in-demand cars is they basically look at you and they're like, did you buy our boring shitty cars and have you given us a bunch of revenue by buying like a bunch of Ferrari Luches that no one wants.

12:30And if you do, then you're more likely to get that coveted allocation for the supercar that everyone wants. So they have a built-in base of buyers who just want to suck up to Ferrari so that they get the allocation they want. And they get a whole bunch of regulatory kudos, basically, even as the likes of Porsche and Mercedes are like pulling back on their pure EVs. So they get to be kind of, you know, environmentally responsible and sell a bunch of cars that no one wants at the same time. And everyone kind of wins.

12:58Elizabeth Spiers: You're saying this is like Hermes and the Birkin bag where they make you buy a bunch of crappy Hermes stuff before they'll let you buy Birkin? Basically, the Ferrari Luce is the equivalent of the crappy Hermes stuff that no one wants. For$600 ,000. Which is cheap by Ferrari standards. Maybe the billionaires will buy the Luce for their kids when they turn 16. Exactly. This is the toy you get for your daughter when she turns 16 and she needs something to go to the supermarket in.

13:27Felix Salmon: What are we doing? How is this our lead story? Is there any bigger picture to this story that we need to address? Or should we just move on? It is what it is. People got excited about an ugly car again. It's not, I was like, maybe this is about EVs. China's taking over the whole market. Maybe this is the decline of our regular, like my colleague at Axios, Joanne. And Mueller had a story about how American automakers are cooked. She used the word cooked. She is not Gen Z, but still used it because the whole world is going EV. I think half of the EV sales in the world are now Chinese cars. And the U.S.

14:06Felix Salmon: is off that train or off that highway or whatever. And the automakers in the U.S. are flailing about. Trump has, you know, tariffed their business to hell. Now he's going to get rid of NAFTA or USMCA, whatever it is. It's just a mess. and maybe something, something, this relates back to Ferrari. But look, we can cut this. It doesn't relate back to Ferrari. No, I think, Emily, you are absolutely right. That is the big picture here, is that one of the reasons people are so disappointed is because Ferrari was kind of the last hope of the European and the American car makers to be able to do something that the Chinese could not.

14:42What is clear is that Ford and GM and Volkswagen and you know the big companies even the big japanese companies don't really have the ability to compete with chinese evs on a kind of we can make a better car for cheaper right you know the chinese cars are just for any given price they're going to be better than anything that the europeans or the americans can do and the americans and the europeans have basically given up i mean like no one can point to a european on an american ev that anyone's got excited about for years right In America, even Tesla seems to have more or less given up making cars.

15:20The only other American EV maker which seems to have its head remotely above water is Rivian, and they're making a tiny number of cars.

15:29Felix Salmon: Their cars look good. And they just released the R2s, which are medium size. But no one is getting super excited about the R2, which is just a smaller version of the R1. Ferrari had the opportunity here to be able to say kind of like, this is the way you compete with China on EVs, is you make something just ultra high-end that something, something. And it just fluffed it. And so now, if you want an ultra high-end EV even, you wind up going to Xiaomi rather than to Ferrari.

15:58Elizabeth Spiers: So Ferrari kind of said, all right, we tried that sort of design. We're going to go back to the drawing board. They made something that actually looks like a supercar. Would that change anything? I hope so.

16:10Felix Salmon: Cars are the new microwaves. Like in the 80s, the microwaves were expensive and like cool isn't the right word, but they were like coveted items perhaps. And now you can get a microwave for like 20 bucks and it's no big deal. As all appliances go, ultimately that's where we're headed with cars. I don't know. It's just the thing I thought of just now. That's my hot take.

16:29Elizabeth Spiers: I wish they would get more microwavey so we could get a new one at a decent price point. Yeah, I mean like - That's what they're waiting for.

16:36Felix Salmon: Like go to Walmart and get like their doorbuster car. All it would take would be a single relaxation of the effective U.S. ban on Chinese EV imports. Let's relax. Let's relax things here. If the U.S. was like, hey, China, come sell us your EVs because they will allow us to get around much more cheaply and much more efficiently than anything we can drive around in right now. Let's improve our economy by having much more efficient transportation. Free up so much money for people. It could happen tomorrow. I had Chad Bowne and Sumaya Keynes on Money Talks we just recorded. And Chad is very worried, as are a lot of people, that the Chinese will spy on us through the EVs.

17:15Elizabeth Spiers: I feel like that's what people say about any kind of Chinese technology. Right. Yeah. Fine. The Chinese can know where I'm driving.

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20:32Felix Salmon: Hannah, I just Venmo'd you for dinner Obsessed, I'm literally spending it right now on the lip gloss that's been sitting in my cart What do you mean spending it right now? You instantly spend your balance with the Venmo debit card Stop, say more More exactly The more you do with Venmo, the more you get like earning up to 5 % cash back with Venmo Stash Get the Venmo debit card or check out online venmo stash bundle terms and exclusion supply max 100 per month see terms at venmo.me slash stash terms venmo checkout not available at all merchants the venmo mastercard is issued by the bancorp bank na let's take that excellent segue and talk about if we were going to measure the way in which a massive influx of chinese evs could benefit or not the u.s economy what metric would we look at well and i think the the main one that the go-to thing that we all have been trained like pavlovian dogs to point at anytime anyone says anything like that is to look at gdp and they're like would it cause economic growth if we brought in all of these chinese evs and people would be like well it wouldn't help gdp because you know the cars are made in china so it would help chinese gdp but not us gdp but on the other hand because we would be spending less money on american cars like that would reduce the u.s car makers contribution to gdp but as you said emily it would free up a whole bunch of cash that we could put to more productive uses than just buying a car and maybe gdp would grow rather than shrink there'll be all these arguments and people would say like would it be a net positive for gdp or not but ultimately gdp does seem like a weird metric and what we want to know is does it make americans in aggregate like better off in a sort of life way and so the un now has a dashboard which they have managed to come up with with 31 different metrics and they're like look at all of these 31 different metrics about a country which includes inequality and human rights and sustainability and all the rest of it and then if you somehow aggregate these then you can get a much better feeling for how well a country is doing than you can just by looking at gdp and so then the likes of joe stiglitz come along and go yes yes this is what i've been talking about so all along i want to maximize gross national happiness and you know congratulations on creating an alternative to GDP, except for the problem is that this dashboard is not an alternative to GDP.

23:18Like it's just, it's too unwieldy. It's too many numbers. It's just like, I think if the best you can do to come up with an alternative to GDP is come up with a dashboard of 31 numbers, then that just proves that GDP is here to stay.

23:36Elizabeth Spiers: I feel like this is a function of policymakers tend to operate like this, where they have to sort of coalesce a million different metrics into one. But if you've ever been on the sort of business side of any operation where you have to use analytics or create KPIs for people, you learn very quickly that if you have too many metrics, people don't know what to do because it's just overwhelming. So I don't think the problem here is that there shouldn't be an alternative way of looking at prosperity besides GDP, maybe some GDP plus measure. And I read Stiglitz's book, People, Power and Profits, when it came out, and I thought it was really good.

24:10Elizabeth Spiers: He makes a lot of good points about the idea that, first of all, GDP is correlated with prosperity, but it's not synonymous. And so the question his book was trying to answer is, what do we consider prosperity? And I don't think you need 31 different data points to get to something that's better than GDP. You can maybe add two or three. So I think, yeah, we can all agree. And I don't think you'll find anyone who would disagree that GDP is imperfect in measuring whatever it is you're trying to measure. The question is whether there's anything better. And Joe was basically saying in that book that, yeah, there probably is something better that we should try and put together.

24:53And now that the UN has come up with this dumb 31-unit dashboard thing, I kind of get the feeling that Joe has kind of given up on that because he's come out and said, oh, yeah, there is no one thing that we can create. And this kludge of coming up with a dashboard of 31 different metrics is frankly the best that we're going to be able to do. If he's kind of given up, then I think there is no hope for replacing GDP with anything else.

25:22Elizabeth Spiers: I think it's probably an exaggeration to say he's given up, but he did say that he thinks 31 data points is way too many. But he also said that one is too few, that you can't bring it down to one.

25:32Felix Salmon: Well, there was some country in one of the pieces we read in the prep where they wanted a different measure because they wanted to borrow more money and GDP wasn't capturing the value of their natural resources or something like that. Like, why? There are other metrics, obviously, that people use to compare different countries' well-being and prosperity to each other. Like, we're covering them all the time in business journalism, various, like, you know, Norway or Finland or whatever. They're the happiest per capita income. Like, there's tons of things you can do. So I guess my question is, like, why is GDP, is it just the most popular one?

26:09Felix Salmon: Is there just so much decision making that goes behind the GDP numbers? I think it's easy to overstate the importance of GDP on things like borrowing costs. Like if a country is like, I want you to take into account the value of my natural resources rather than just my GDP, the financial markets will be like, well, yeah, we already do. You know, it's not like a country's bond yields are entirely a function of its GDP or its GDP growth. They're not.

26:34Elizabeth Spiers: Right. It's just a function of the winner's rate history because the U.S. insisted on using GDP as a metric for prosperity at the Bretton Woods Conference after World War II. And that's what made it the sort of dominant metric that we look at.

26:47Felix Salmon: I guess what I'm saying is I don't think of it as a dominant metric myself. As a business journalist, I'm like, this is the one I never write about because I'd rather look at unemployment. I'd rather look at inflation. I'd rather look at median income. I'd rather look at income growth. Like there are so many other fun things to look at. Emily has put her finger on something important here, which is that it's really not that dominant. that when the inflation number comes out, when the next CPI number comes out, everyone is going to be glomming onto it, much more than when the next GDP number comes out.

27:20And the GDP number is going to have this thing called the GDP deflator, which is like the broadest measure of inflation. And in a weird way, that right now is more important than GDP. Unemployment, and especially like youth unemployment and all of this kind of thing, what's happened to unemployment among recent college grads that have been going up you know these are the numbers that people are caring about right now we had not that long ago two consecutive quarters of negative gdp growth for sort of technical reasons there was not a recession we kind of knew that it wasn't a recession even though like if we were in europe it would have been because the europeans just say if you have two negative gdp prints then you're in a recession But like we had that, no one blinked, we kept on growing, everything was fine.

28:10And so I feel like, Emily, you're exactly right here, that GDP just, we're trying to solve a problem of GDP dominance in a world where GDP actually isn't all that dominant after all.

28:21Elizabeth Spiers: Exactly, yes. So here's where I'd push back a little bit. I don't think it's that dominant for people in the private sector.

28:27Felix Salmon: Normal.

28:27Elizabeth Spiers: I do think that it is a big part of the discussion in global political economics. And I think in terms of the political discourse, even domestically, it's something that is part of the discourse. It's the metric that Republicans often point to when we have contradictory economic indicators that maybe voters wouldn't like. They can still point to GDP and say, look, GDP is growing. The economy is fine. So I don't think business reporters would pay attention to it. I don't think anyone with a Bloomberg terminal would pay very much attention to it. People with Bloomberg do pay attention to it. I don't think voters pay attention to it.

29:01I think if the best that a Republican or a Democrat, for that matter, if it's a Democrat in office, can do is point to a GDP number and say, this is positive, so you're doing well. Like, at that point, you've lost the argument anyway, no matter which party you're part of.

29:14Felix Salmon: That's what Felix was saying, because I was like, I don't want to talk about this. And he was like, no, it's good because right now the whole thing with the K-shaped economy or whatever rising inequality is that you can point to all these indicators that show the economy is great. But of course, for many people, it doesn't feel very great. So GDP is maybe the biggest one that sort of exemplifies that. And that kind of goes back to the original problem that I guess Stiglitz was kind of – well, part of it was that he was trying to solve for, which is like this doesn't really capture the vibes. We've reached the point now at which, you know, if I come up to you and say, who are you going to believe, like GDP or your own lying eyes?

29:53Everyone's going to be like, I believe my own lying eye. We all, we all like no one is convinced by the GDP argument anymore. Like politically, it carries no water anymore. And so the program of trying to replace it has become much less important just because, yeah, like back when Joe wrote that book, I think especially not even the US government, but especially the IMF and to a certain degree, the World Bank cared about maximizing GDP growth. But they've all moved on to a whole bunch of different indicators at this point. So like if they don't care, I don't know who does.

30:30Felix Salmon: Also, read the room. Now is not the time for these wonks to be like messing around with dashboards of 31 metrics grouped into four buckets. Like there's a trade war going on and an actual war going on. And like, it's not the time to tinker with the metrics yet, I don't think. Yeah, but Emily, this is the UN. What else are they going to do?

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33:47We need to talk about the heatwave that has just broken in Europe. It was May, people. And even in May, people were dying in Europe because it was so hot. And, you know, it was 95 degrees across vast swathes of Europe, including England. I happen to be recording from Europe right now. And I was in literally the only tiny corner of Europe on the west coast of Ireland that wasn't suffering from a heat wave. But even we had an amazingly unseasonably sunny and warm day but this problem of heat in europe is a real problem which is causing an enormous number of deaths and we'll link in the show notes to a wonderful little blog post that kind of proves that whether you're looking in aggregate or per capita or whatever the number of people who die in europe because it is too hot and they don't have ac is broadly equal to the number of people who die of gun deaths in america and the number of people who die of heat in america is tiny just like the number of people who die of gun deaths in europe is tiny they are almost weirdly perfectly symmetrical with each other and i find that fascinating and it's really interesting to see the discourse the sort of pro ac versus anti-ac discourse in europe and the incredible reluctance that politicians and even homeowners have to installing AC.

35:12People will be like, well, okay, we should have some AC, but only in major civic institutions or something like that. The idea that a normal person would just want an AC in their bedroom so they can sleep comfortably at night still seems to be a step too far for most of Europe. 20 % of French people have AC. 20%.

35:31Elizabeth Spiers: There was something in the prep, and I'd be curious to know if this is your impression that said a lot of English people view it as from a place of stoicism or ideas about American excess. Yes, both of these are true. The disparity between the U.S. and England as being that, which I find remarkable because, you know, if you look at where the U.S. is just a much bigger band of potential weather. Like for, I grew up in, you know, central Alabama where 95 degrees is like a random day in mid-barch. Yeah, no, but for that reason, you need AC in order to live in Alabama. I think what happens then, though, is that Europeans come to America and it's 95 degrees or 100 degrees or 110 degrees, whatever it is outside.

36:11And then they walk into the shopping mall and it's like 65 and it's freezing. And they're like, this is crazy. Why is everything so air conditioned? And they find it obnoxious to make something so artificially cold on such a warm day. And they're like, we would never do this where we come from. and so they don't they just don't put in any ac at all i have a relation in germany in an area where it gets extremely hot in the summer and he has a heat pump on his house but the heat pump has the cooling thing disabled it's a heat only heat pump it's a heat pump that doesn't cool that doesn't provide any ac and so every summer they just swelter and this is so normal and if you ask any sort of mainstream european politician like what should we do about this they'll start going on and on about like have better insulated buildings and improve cross ventilation and make sure that you have good solar shading on your windows and yada and then ac can only be a last resort there's this thing called regulation o in the uk which basically means that no new houses get built with ac because you have to tick off so many other things you've tried first before you're allowed to install ac is a way of dealing with heat.

37:25And the heat is just, it doesn't care. You know, the sun doesn't care. The sun is going to beat down and people are going to die. And people, I don't think, really appreciate how lethal these heat waves are.

37:36Elizabeth Spiers: That's why I think it's amazing that stoicism comes into this at all. Because if you can fight a heat stroke with just mental fortitude.

37:43Felix Salmon: But I mean, air conditioning isn't great, right? It's part of the reason it is so hot. Isn't it environmentally pretty bad? And isn't the 65 degree mall kind of obnoxious? And like when you walk down the street in Manhattan, you get blasted by AC when doors open in the summer. It's always like, what are we doing?

37:58Elizabeth Spiers: Yeah, but there's a difference between no air conditioning and too much air conditioning. There is this feeling in Europe, which is technically true, that if the problem is that your city is too hot, then installing lots of air conditioning units only makes it hotter. because what the AC units do is they blow hot air out, you know. And so basically, wherever you are in America is hotter than it would be if there wasn't any AC. And so you're making the problem worse. And they're like, we don't want to make the problem worse. We want to make the problem better. The way to make the problem better is to address global climate change.

38:31And, you know, you're like, yeah, okay, good luck with that. The real immediate problem is that thousands of people who die every single day that there's a heat wave. And what are you going to do about that? And it is just fascinating to me that cooling things just seems to be a bridge too far for millions and millions of Europeans on a sort of just intuitive level. The thing that I keep on coming back to is this idea that like heating things is not right. Every house in Europe has some kind of heating mechanism.

38:59Felix Salmon: But they're drafty, right? And well, I mean, like some are, some aren't. Castles, I don't know. but you know the amount of energy that you need to bring a building up from say you know if it's 40 degrees outside to bring it up to 70 degrees inside right you're increasing the the air temperature by 30 degrees conversely if it's 90 degrees outside and you want to bring it down to 70 degrees inside then you need to bring it down by 20 degrees it's cheaper to bring it down by 20 degrees and it is to bring it up by 30 degrees and yet the europeans are perfectly fine with the heating part and they're like no the cooling part we can't do and that's this that that's the sort of asymmetry that i struggle with does this come back to why europeans don't like ice in their drinks what's with that ice in the drink is great everyone how do you not like ice in the drink is it all of a piece you can tell me do you not like ice in the drinks i i have no problem i mean but I'm American now.

40:00I've lived more than half my life in Manhattan. Don't ask me. I'm a rootless cosmopolitan, Emily.

40:05Felix Salmon: Right, of course. But I'm sure Elizabeth likes ice in her drinks, right?

40:09Elizabeth Spiers: Mostly, but it doesn't bother me if there is no ice. Like, I don't ask for it if somebody brings me a glass of water. No, the phenomenon of ice water is a very American phenomenon, to be clear.

40:20Felix Salmon: So the Europeans don't like ice water? Come on, put the AC on, have a cool glass of ice water. What are we doing? It's summer. Maybe. Thank you. Jessamyn, our producer, is with us. Me.

40:32Elizabeth Spiers: That said, I would totally buy one of those ice machines that just makes the crunchy ice, pellet ice.

40:38Felix Salmon: Yeah, you could buy one for your countertop now. Europeans need to get ice machines for their countertops. Don't buy Ferraris. Put in AC. Live your best life. All right. So let me ask you this, Emily, because you're an expert on rich people. The thing that fascinates me the most is the seemingly insatiable demand by Americans to holiday in some of the hottest parts of the planet in the summer. The number of Americans who are flocking to Rome or Athens or Positano or Amalfi or, you know, all of these very hot places in the summer where it gets incredibly hot outside. And it's just going up and up and up.

41:17It is dwarfing pre-pandemic levels. There are rooms in Amalfi this summer that are going for$6 ,000 a night and you're like why you know it is so uncomfortably hot you know either you just stay inside your air-conditioned hotel room of course if you're paying six thousand dollars you get air conditioning inside your hotel room but the minute you leave the minute you go down to the beach or whatever you know it's horribly hot and like there seems to be something about the hot american summer that is attractive to europeans because look at the number of americans who travel to Paris every summer in August.

41:50Paris in August is one of the most miserable places in the world, and yet, like, it is swarming with Americans.

41:56Felix Salmon: And you want me to explain that? Yeah. I'll let Elizabeth explain. I don't know if I can.

42:00Elizabeth Spiers: Isn't it just that, you know, Americans get almost no vacation, and if they have kids, like, this summer is the only time the kids are able to travel? I think that's it.

42:07Felix Salmon: Yeah, but why would you go to Paris? Is it cheaper then, because it's so hot?

42:11Elizabeth Spiers: These are not people who go to Paris regularly. They don't realize it's sweltering and gross. People come to New York in August, too. Yeah, don't do that either.

42:19Felix Salmon: I kind of have come full circle on New York in August because it's like only the diehards are out there on those streets. And everyone acts a little weird when it's like maniacally hot. So it's kind of fun. All the rich New Yorkers are in the Hamptons. They're all gone. Yeah, all the rich people are gone. Or maybe they're in Paris. I don't know. But it's just like the real ones. They're out there on the streets. Are they being stoic? Super stoic. But they're going inside and blasting the AC in their faces with their guns. No, I don't.

43:02All right. It's time for us to move on and have a numbers round. Elizabeth, do you have a number?

43:06Elizabeth Spiers: I do. My number is$200. and for$200 you can get a pair of on-running shoes that are Cloud Surfer Max's, but they're on X Erewhon. They've done a collab, and I'm fascinated with these kind of collabs that sort of make sense, but then they don't. Wait, wait, on X Erewhon? Did you say like the former president of Turkey? No, Erewhon. The store in LA. Where you get the$50 stock. On X Erewhon would be amazing.

43:37is there an Eta one Eta one? I mean,

43:40Elizabeth Spiers: that would really make my point. I'm thinking about the, you know, the just kind of rando collabs that, I mean, another one is since you mentioned Audubar PJ earlier, people have been rioting at swatch stores because they did a collab with swatch for a kind of pocket watch called a Royal pop watch. And it's like 400 bucks.

43:59Felix Salmon: Who did the collaboration with swatch? Swatch slash swatch XAP. And it's not even a wristwatch. It's like a pocket watch. What's AP? Audemars Piguet. Yeah. And you can dangle it from your Hermes handbag like a LeBouBou. Wait, say the name of AP again. What is it? Audemars Piguet. And that's like the new hot watch? No, they're the old hot watch, right? They're this old Swiss watch company.

44:22Elizabeth Spiers: They're like the$100 ,000 watches. Exactly. And now that you can buy like a cheapo quartz one for$400, and everyone's going crazy.

44:30Felix Salmon: I see. Great. I have a collab too for my number, actually. Okay, what's your collab number? My collab number is five, as in five pounds of weights that come with the Starbucks limited edition weighted vest sold by a company called KBB. That's the collab. It's a weighted vest sold by Starbucks. Starbucks X KBB weighted vest with five pounds of weight in it. Correct. Five pounds of weights. I think you could put more if you want. And then in the back, there's a pocket in the back where you can put your Starbucks protein drink. And that's something that exists in the world. It costs$22. And then there's like a long straw that comes out and you can sip on your drink.

45:08Felix Salmon: No, I didn't see a straw. But most vests, I have a running vest, you know, with the straws. But it didn't have a straw. You can just reach back and get the, it kind of seems like a bad idea, actually, when I think about it. Won't it spill if you're running? Or are you not meant to be running with it? You walk with a weighted vest. Actually, I saw someone today with a weighted vest walking. Women, middle-aged women especially, really into walking with weighted vests on right now. It's very popular. There's a Wall Street Journal story about it.

45:32Elizabeth Spiers: Like resistance training kind of? It gets strong. Bones. You know who lost like a ton of weight walking with a weighted vest? It was friend of the pod, Manu Sadia. Shout out to Manu.

45:45Felix Salmon: There you go. Maybe he would want this vest. You can't. It's sold out, as these things tend to do. But there is like sweepstakes you can enter to win one if you walk a certain amount every day or something. And you don't have to have the Starbucks drink in the back. That's entirely up to you. Talking about sweepstakes, I just need to rant about this for a minute. Zoran Mamdani did this deal with FIFA to allow 1 ,000 New Yorkers to go to each of the World Cup games in New York, except for the final, for 50 bucks. And he was like, yay. And he was like, there's going to be a lottery and we'll pick 1 ,000 winners for each game and you get the tickets.

46:25Fine. But then he was like, we are going to artificially limit the number of people in each lottery to 50 ,000. So now you have to enter a lottery to enter the lottery. And then if you're one of the top 50 ,000 people trying to enter the lottery, then you get to enter the lottery, which you might then win the ticket. It's like, why? If it's a lottery anyway, just allow everyone to enter. What?

46:47Elizabeth Spiers: I feel like there has to be like a bureaucratic reason for that. That is the most New York thing I've ever heard. You know, sweepstakes law is really weird. Like, I've had to deal with this before. You know, media companies will give away, like, a trip or something. And there's all this legalese around what constitutes the sweepstakes and what the parameters have to be. So I feel like this is some red tapey thing. I was going to enter for the Starbucks weighted vest because it looks really weird and interesting.

47:12Felix Salmon: But you have to have a Strava account, which I don't have, to enter. Which, is that legal? I don't know. Elizabeth, can you tell me? I don't know. I'm not sure. We'll get back to you. Let us know. Write us, write to us, slatemoneyatslate.com. All right. My number is 3 million, which is the number of dollars that John Carreyrou has been paid for his new book about this guy, which we talked about, who he reckons is Satoshi Nakamoto. And we talked about this on the pod and we were like, okay, he's come up with a name and it might be true and it might not be true. and he's one of 18 people who's come up.

47:54And anyway, that name has been published and he's splashed it all across the New York Times. So who is going to buy this book? And how on earth does any publisher think they're going to make back a$3 million advance? I do not understand publishing. All the publishers are like, you know, crying poverty and claiming that their business is really bad. And then they're paying John Carreyrou$3 million for this book that no one is going to buy.

48:17Elizabeth Spiers: Well, okay. So here's my theory about sales like that. First of all, the publisher probably gets a cut of any options on the book for a movie, which is the sort of thing that would maybe get made into a movie. This is such an uncinematic story, though. Also, if you read the prior Carrie U book, you might not have seen the Times reporting. You'd pick it up because you liked the last one. And Bitcoin enthusiasts who just want to know everything about every possible theory are going to write. Yeah, you see, if I had any belief whatsoever that Bitcoin people read books, then I would buy that. But there's no evidence of this whatsoever.

48:54Bitcoin books, there have been a million published and none of them have done well.

48:57Felix Salmon: I feel like we should celebrate when a journalist has a$3 million deal. Okay, all right. Almost no matter what. Fair point, Emily. Well done, John. This is a matter of karma. We should all have a$3 million. Like, where is my$3 million? Emily, you should have a$3 million contract. Yes, we should all have it. And well done to John for signing a$3 million contract. And he's a great journalist. And he is a good journalist. I mean, the Elizabeth Holmes thing, he should be able to dine out on that for the rest of his career. I believe that is exactly what he is doing. Well, good for him. I mean, he put in the work and he did a service for us all.

49:32Felix Salmon: So many memes and entertaining things have launched because of that. I mean, just wonderful. Just wonderful. Great job. We can bask in John Carreyrou's success. Give him a counter ice machine. Thanks for listening. Thanks to Jessamine Molly for producing. And thanks for being a Slate Plus member. If you're a Slate Plus member, then we have an extra Slate Plus segment coming up on basically the media lore behind the viral story about the J.P. Morgan sexual harassment lawsuit. Come on, say it. Get people excited. J.P. Morgan sex slave scandal. J.P. Morgan sex slave scandal. That's what Jessamine wrote in the notes.

50:14Felix Salmon: So I'm just repeating what she wrote. with a little asterisk saying there is no J.P. Morgan sex slave. None at all. Nothing happened. But it's still a sex slave scandal, right? We will talk about why we can call it a sex slave scandal, even though it isn't one, in the plus. So listen to that, if you remember. And otherwise, we'll be back next week with more Slate Money.

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