The Burger CEOs Are Beefing

0:10Chris Kempczinski: Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Bloomberg. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios.

0:21Felix Salmon: Hello, hello.

0:21Chris Kempczinski: I'm here with Elizabeth Spiers of The New York Times. Hello. And we have a busy news week this week. There is a war going on and we are going to talk about it. We're going to talk about the effects on the oil markets, on the dollar, on the status of Dubai as a financial center. We are going to talk about the way that all war is AI now and there's a big fight going on. Not a war, but a fight going on between the Department of War and Anthropic, the main provider of its AI systems. We are going to mostly, however, talk about the really important news of the week that involves 1 ,750 grams of sodium.

1:00Chris Kempczinski: It is terrifying, but it's also fun. So stay tuned. It's all coming up on Sleep Money.

1:15Emily Peck: This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card. My favorite travel hack? Easy. It's using Apple Card. It's great knowing that every time I dine out, buy souvenirs, or pay my hotel bill using my Apple Card, I'm actually earning up to 3 % daily cash back. So if you're like me and love to travel, then apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app today. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, terms and more at AppleCard.com.

1:47Felix Salmon: Slate Money is brought to you by Charles Schwab. Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching? Listen to Washington Wise, an original podcast for investors from Charles Schwab, to hear the stories making news in Washington right now. Host Mike Townsend, Charles Schwab's Managing Director for Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, takes a nonpartisan look at the stories that matter most to investors, including policy initiatives for retirement savings, taxes, and trade, inflation concerns, the Federal Reserve, and how regulatory developments can affect companies, sectors, and even the entire market.

2:29Felix Salmon: Mike and his guests offer their perspective on how policy changes could affect what you do with your portfolio. Download the latest episode and follow at schwab.com slash WashingtonWise or wherever you listen.

2:42Chris Kempczinski: i feel like this is the week if there's ever a week when we need to talk about the straight of hormones and its importance to global oil markets which is a conversation we could have had at literally any point in my career or even like my parents careers this has been a known issue in global oil markets for what 75 years something like that the straight of hormones if you look at not just oil, but now LNG, gas as well from Qatar, all of this shit comes through this tiny little gap connecting the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world. And if the oil can't get through that tiny little gap, then, well, Emily, what happens?

3:23Felix Salmon: The price of oil goes up, up, up, up, up, which has been happening since Trump started this war just a week ago. The price of oil has spiked.

3:31Chris Kempczinski: And is that just purely a sort of supply and demand thing that the demand for oil is more or less unchanged, but the supply has gone down because there isn't oil coming through the straight-to-form moves. And one of the reasons I should say why it's not coming through the straight-to-form moves, it's not just the oil tankers are too scared to do it because they'll get blown up by Iranian missiles. It's also that Saudi Arabia has closed its two big pipelines, which refill those oil tankers. So there's no point in even going into the Gulf because if you do, there's no oil there right now to be refilled.

4:04Felix Salmon: Yeah, I think that's a really good question. And I think the spike is pricing in the supply shock a little bit before the supply shock happens, because this is moving so fast. We haven't seen the full brunt of the price spike yet, because it's still days and people have supplies, but things are going to get backed up if you follow.

4:22Chris Kempczinski: Yeah, I think the thing that people have demand for is like nice refined oil, not crude oil. and the straight reform moves is more a place where you see crude oil. So eventually the crude oil will stop making its way to the refineries. The refineries will have less output and, you know, eventually we'll reach the point at which I need to fill up my F-150 and I don't know how to do that. But we're not at that point yet. And in fact, correct me if I'm wrong, but like here in North America, we'll probably never reach that point because America is a net oil exporter for refined oil, the oil we refine if it isn't produced domestically comes mostly from places like Venezuela and places in our hemisphere from Canada.

5:05Chris Kempczinski: So we're not directly in that sort of supply chain.

5:09Elizabeth Spiers: I have two questions, though. First of all, does Trump really understand that because he's perpetually mentally stuck in the 80s? And when he went into Venezuela to swipe Maduro, he said, we're going to get all the oil there. So it's unclear whether he fully has internalized that we are energy independent now, and it's not 1988. But I think he does understand that, yeah.

5:29Felix Salmon: Well, we're not, I mean, we are energy independent, and we probably won't have an oil shock like we had, I wrote about this week, back in like the late 1970s. We're fine, but oil trade's on a global market, and with the shock that we're seeing now with Hormuz, which I guess 20 % of the world's oil or something travels through, prices are going to go up, and they will even affect prices here in the U.S. You saw gas prices already increase a little bit this week. And we don't have to go back.

5:56Chris Kempczinski: Oil is fungible. Yeah. Yeah.

5:58Felix Salmon: And we don't have to go back far to understand what this means, because we remember 2022 when there was the last time there was an oil shock when Russia invaded Ukraine.

6:06Chris Kempczinski: That was more of a gas shock. But yeah, it was a gas shock.

6:10Felix Salmon: And energy prices went up and we saw gas prices in the US go up. We weren't like affected the way Europe was. And you mentioned LNG, liquefied natural gas, Felix. And like, that's where we really shine. I think. And we're really in the US protected against what's happening now in the Middle East. We had a really good chart this week, I thought, in Axios from my colleague Amy Harder, which showed LNG prices in Europe and Asia have gone up, up, up and like are on the high part of the chart. And the low part of the chart is LNG prices in the US because we have our own supply. We're not.

6:43Chris Kempczinski: So in that sense, I think, Elizabeth, the answer to your question is, yeah, like in a weird way, I think Trump probably does understand, or if he doesn't understand, it doesn't matter because it's good for him, that the externalities inherent in starting a war with Iran fall largely in what we finance folks called the EMEA area, Europe, Middle East, Africa, and not in the Americas. And so he's like, well, yeah, if Danish natural gas prices spike, which they have done, that's just like an ancillary benefit because he doesn't like the Danes because they want Greenland.

7:18Felix Salmon: But again, like Americans, and my gosh, did we talk about it so many times in 22, but Americans, they see those gas prices on those big billboards on the roads. And like, we don't tolerate that stuff. Like even if things move$1,$2 a gallon, people be pretty pissed coming into the midterms.

7:35Chris Kempczinski: Yeah, yeah. I do. One of the things I really hate about American English is the way that the word gas has two very separate meanings. And like in this particular conversation, it's actually important to be able to distinguish between natural gas and gasoline.

7:51Felix Salmon: Yes.

7:51Chris Kempczinski: But I'm never going to be able to like, just call it petrol, okay?

7:54Felix Salmon: Petrol. Yes. When petrol prices soar in the U.S. and Americans get angry, that's going to be bad for the politics. Even though Trump doing this now, the timing was pretty good. If you read all the commentary, oil supply was pretty great coming in. Prices were pretty low coming into this. The U.S. is much more energy independent than it was at any other time. We've had beef with Iran. This was a good time to start the war. I don't know if I really mean that. But do you know what I mean? From an oil market perspective or an energy market perspective.

8:28Chris Kempczinski: And petrol prices in the U.S. are within the range of normal still.

8:35Felix Salmon: They were pretty low coming in. They were pretty low.

8:37Chris Kempczinski: And so now they're back up to levels that we have all become relatively accustomed to over the past few years.

8:43Felix Salmon: Yeah. Yeah.

8:44Elizabeth Spiers: Well, besides the petrol prices, Trump also wants a weaker dollar. And this is having the opposite effect.

8:51Chris Kempczinski: I think, again, to Emily's point, the dollar was already very weak when he started this war. And it has strengthened a bit since the war started for reasons that Emily can explain. But again, not so much as to worry anyone. It's still weak by recent history standards. Emily, can you explain why a war strengthens the dollar?

9:10Felix Salmon: I don't know.

9:11Chris Kempczinski: I mean, you did it in your newsletter.

9:14Felix Salmon: So, OK. Yeah, I can, actually. So, okay, so coming into this war for the past like year and a half, international stock markets have been doing really well, which we've already discussed on Slate Money. And U.S. investors really like investing in stocks. And for the past year and a half, they've been taking their dollars and investing them in international stock markets. The South Korean stock market, the KOSPI, is up overall.

9:38Chris Kempczinski: Oh, my God, that's up again. It's crazy. 100%. Crazy times in Korea.

9:44Felix Salmon: Crazy times in Korea. over 100%. Everyone shares these charts showing international stock markets just doing lots better than the US. But when a shock happens in the economy, US investors, typically the pattern is they're like, oh, no risk. And they sell out of the international stock markets. And they sell out into dollars. So there's all of a sudden, there's like more demand for dollars. And when demand goes up, the price goes up. So the dollar strengthens is how I explained it in my story.

10:13Chris Kempczinski: Yeah, this whole question of how everyone is comfortable with their own home risk is something that I was talking about this week with the Bloomberg Pursuits team in the context of travel as well. So there's been a lot of talk about enormous numbers of people, quote unquote, stranded or quote unquote, trying to get out of Gulf states and particularly UAE. And there's like, you know, half a million Americans are stuck in the UAE or something and need to get out. They don't need to get out. They were happily living there before and they're still living there now. It's not obvious how many of them want to get out.

10:51Chris Kempczinski: But there's this sort of assumption among a bunch of US-based observers that, of course, they would want to get out and that somewhere like Dubai is a very dangerous place to be right now and therefore you need to get out. I think, statistically speaking, Dubai is a large city. I think three people have died in Dubai this week, which is a lot of people. But by the standards of people dying in major cities, American cities are still more dangerous than that.

11:19Felix Salmon: Yeah, but as soon as you're getting text messages from the government that's like, don't move, bombs coming. And then it's like, OK, you can move again, bombs gone. As soon as I'm getting those messages as an American, I'm like, bye.

11:32Elizabeth Spiers: Well, also there's a kind of like, how do you escape that sort of brosk when a lot of the people being injured are being injured by like falling debris, not directly getting hit by a bomb or anything. But if you've been walking around Dubai for a year, you're not worried about that at all. It does create, I think, especially for the more recent expats, the sort of influx of people who've gone there over the last two or three years, kind of panicky stake. Because first of all, the more recent influx of expats are not that accustomed to being expats anywhere. And so I think they're more skittish.

12:02Elizabeth Spiers: And those are the people you keep seeing in interviews who are like, I just moved here. I thought it was safe.

12:07Chris Kempczinski: Yeah, and it was safe and it was great. And one of the interesting open questions right now is the question to which UAE and Qatar in particular have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in making their cities, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, incredibly safe, incredibly attractive places to live. and that worked until it didn't. And the open question is like, you know, there have been attacks on these cities before. Is this going to be like a little blip which lasts for a couple of weeks and then people go back to where it was? Or is this going to fundamentally change the risk calculus of the professional classes who run these cities and those people are just not going to want to live there anymore?

12:52Chris Kempczinski: And I think I tend toward the latter. That Dubai is still going to be a financial center. the attraction of Dubai as a place to live and make lots of money and not pay any taxes and all the rest of it is going to remain. And once this whole thing is over, which is probably going to be a matter of weeks, we will go back to something very closely approximating the status quo ante. One of the reasons I say this is because I've seen what's happened in Hong Kong, which also had a major shock in terms of the freedoms that people have in that city. and a lot of people like protested in the streets and talked about leaving and actually left.

13:29Chris Kempczinski: But the status of the city is like a safe and vibrant and rich financial center has not really changed. I suspect we're going to be okay, but this is definitely worrying for these Gulf states. And you can see now the way in which their investment in air defenses is paying off, right? They're shooting down 99 % of the missiles being aimed at them. And that is, that's working out for them. That's good for them.

13:53Elizabeth Spiers: I think that's good. But you also, if you were a resident of Dubai, you would be like, this is a problem that we haven't had recently. There was a family office guy who's based in Dubai who had a quote, like something like geography is the original risk model. And on that basis, if you've suddenly adjusted your perception of risk of being in Dubai, I think that does have longer term consequences.

14:14Chris Kempczinski: So the question I would have for you, Elizabeth, is if you are a family office guy, and you have re-rated your mental risk model of where to live, where do you now think is safer than Dubai?

14:27Elizabeth Spiers: I mean, New Zealand?

14:28Chris Kempczinski: It doesn't have the financial infrastructure. It needs to be a financial hub.

14:32Elizabeth Spiers: London?

14:33Chris Kempczinski: Definitely not London.

14:34Elizabeth Spiers: I mean, if your risk adjustment is just about where might I get hit by a missile, there are plenty of places. But it's not, is it? That's my point.

14:42Felix Salmon: I'm not sure who I agree with of the U2, but I am thinking about September 11, 2001.

14:47Chris Kempczinski: Exactly.

14:48Felix Salmon: Actually, I'm thinking about February 2002 because that's when I moved to downtown Manhattan because rents were crazy cheap because no one wanted to live there. And I got a great deal on a studio. And by the next year, like my rent went up and up and up and up and up.

15:03Chris Kempczinski: I was renting and I was like, this would be a great time to buy a place in Tribeca.

15:07Felix Salmon: For sure.

15:08Chris Kempczinski: And so I started looking and the prices didn't come down at all. Like rents came down, but prices did not come down because everyone kind of understood this on some level.

15:15Elizabeth Spiers: Yeah. Do we think New York and Dubai are really comparable, though?

15:19Chris Kempczinski: So the point is, though, that financial centers get attacked, right? New York got attacked on 9-11. London got attacked on 7-7. Paris has all manner of shit happening all the time. Like Hong Kong, we've talked about. Dubai is going through something right now. There is nowhere that is free of any kind of safety risk. Somewhere like London, the safety risk is low level and constant, or even New York, for that matter, in the way that, you know, Dubai, where people leave their homes and their cars unlocked, and there's no theft, and there's no muggings, and there's no homicides, is much, much safer on a whole bunch of, like, non-bomb-related risk metrics.

15:56Elizabeth Spiers: I'm not saying it's rational, but I do think that people do perceive risk around things like bombs differently than they do protests in Paris. Oh, for sure.

16:04Chris Kempczinski: And that was exactly my point, right, which is going back to Emily's point about Americans suddenly saying, oh, foreign markets are riskier than American markets. The risk you're comfortable with is the risk you've grown up with. I think part of the reason that I think the way I do about this is because I grew up in London in the 80s where bomb risk was constant, right? And we had the IRA letting off bombs on a semi-regular basis. And so you got used to bomb risk. And so for me, bomb risk is much less scary because it's something I've lived with for many years than for someone who's just arrived in Dubai and who's never lived with bomb risk.

16:39Chris Kempczinski: I think we're all really agreeing on this, that these kinds of risk calculations are weirdly idiosyncratic and actually national. And so one of the reasons why the dollar is strengthening is precisely because Americans have these idiosyncratic risk calculations and go, ooh, at a time like this, I think what I want to do really is be back in the quote-unquote safety of the US stock market, even if it's much more highly valued than foreign markets.

17:03Felix Salmon: Yeah, hold on tight to your dollars for safety. I guess.

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21:03Chris Kempczinski: We should also talk about the thing that we promised that we would talk about last week, which is AI and its role in the attacks and the Department of War, which is running the attacks. and where Claude, which is the main product of Anthropic, is deeply integrated into the Department of War and has been central to planning all of these missiles that have been raining down on Iran. Right as that is happening, suddenly there's this dumb argument between Pete Hegseth and Dario Amadei. And Emily, explain what happened. Where are we?

21:41Felix Salmon: Dario Amadei, who is the CEO of Anthropic, which makes Claude, which is embedded in the war apparatus of the United States and was apparently pivotal in the Venezuela operation and now in the Iran war. The Department of War is mad at Anthropic for reasons of that it is woke because it doesn't want AI to be used to autonomously kill people and it doesn't want AI to be used to spy on Americans.

22:10Chris Kempczinski: Which, by the way, the Department of War also says that it doesn't want those things either and would never do those things. It just doesn't want to be told not to do those things.

22:18Felix Salmon: So anyways, they had like a fight. Trump did what he does, which is take to wherever social media to say he doesn't want them involved in the US government anymore. And then Department of War said, we're going to designate you, what is it? A hostile frenemy or whatever, and a supply chain risk. Thank you. Supply chain risk.

22:38Chris Kempczinski: Hostile frenemy would be a much better designation.

22:41Felix Salmon: Official frenemy of the United States. And then they've been going back and forth about this. And then Emody, he apparently he writes things in the internal Slack or wherever they write things at Anthropic.

22:54Chris Kempczinski: And he's like, I didn't kiss up enough to the dictator. Not a good look.

22:58Felix Salmon: Not a good look.

22:59Chris Kempczinski: Don't put that in a Slack that gets leaked.

23:02Felix Salmon: And then so the last now as we're taping on Friday, he is saying, sorry, I said that. You said it was a memo in the media, but it was more just like my free flowing thoughts. And I want to be like, you need some training as a CEO. you can't do that. Everybody knows. Anyways, that's where we are. They have designated anthropics some kind of risk, but it's not fully clear to me. Maybe one of you can explain.

23:25Chris Kempczinski: Yeah, it's not the full on, like there was a bit of fear, but when we were recording last week, there was a bit of fear that this designation would basically force any company that deals with the US government from not using Claude at all for anything. And that definitely didn't happen. There was a bunch of sort of opportunistic positioning, especially by open AI, but also by ex-AI to sort of Sam Altman and Elon Musk saying, well, you don't need Claude. You can just use us instead. And Pete Hedges going, yeah, we'll use you instead. But it's, you know, as we all know, much harder than that when you're deeply integrated into a system as huge and complex as the Pentagon.

24:06Chris Kempczinski: So now Antropic is back in talks and there'll probably be a bit of ritual groveling. And my expectation is that this six-month divestment of the Department of War of Claude is not going to happen. And they're going to keep on using Claude because this is what they know how to do. And trying to replace it at this point would just be not worth it.

24:23Elizabeth Spiers: I agree with you that they're not going to divest. But I don't think that this is a nothing burger as much as I think you two do. Because I do think there are big cultural differences between OpenAI and Anthropic. And big differences between leadership there. Altman and Amadei are two very different leaders, you know, and I'm not going to go so far as to say that Anthropic is woke because it's not, although Trump called them an out of control, radical leftist AI company.

24:52Chris Kempczinski: So a little bit of history here. Anthropic is a bunch of people who left OpenAI because, to oversimplify massively, they reckoned that OpenAI wasn't woke enough. They were worried about the safety implications of various decisions that Sam Altman had made. So I think it is fair to paint Anthropic as being on the woke side of Chetiquiti. Relatively. Relative they are, yeah.

25:16Elizabeth Spiers: They have a history of being a lot more transparent about the problems with their model. A lot of the sort of horror stories that you've heard about AI models in the last year were things that Anthropic put out their own public research. And OpenAI has far or less transparency about what's happening there. And I do think that's an Altman thing. So Altman turned around and immediately swooped in and said, we'll take those contracts if Anthropic doesn't want them. And then Amadei accused Altman of just gaslighting everybody and suggesting that they were being reasonable and Anthropic wasn't. And at one point, Amadei said something like, I feel like the gaslighting is working on Twitter morons, but I worry if it's working on OpenAI employees.

25:56Elizabeth Spiers: I don't believe that there are identical situations. I do believe that the wording in the contracts does make a difference. And I think the difference is Altman doesn't really care if eventually the government kind of breaks the law that they're saying that they're going to stick to you. And I think Amadei doesn't trust them to do that, doesn't trust Texas or any of the Department of War people to not use the models for those specific purposes.

26:19Chris Kempczinski: You agreed with me that the Pentagon is not going to divest itself of Claude.

26:25Elizabeth Spiers: But I think for pragmatic reasons. I don't think that they can unwind Claude. Claude was the only model. Exactly.

26:31Chris Kempczinski: We're in agreement on that. This is purely pragmatic, right? The ideology is a bunch of noise happening on social media, but there's no one more pragmatic than a general. Pete Hexler is not a general, right? But he is running a department of generals. He is running a department that really understands that all of war is logistics. and all of war is just the really boring shit of getting food into the bellies of the soldiers at the front, which now just means getting all of the information from this massive organization, centralizing it, doing computery things on it, getting it out to where it needs to go.

27:02Chris Kempczinski: The kind of things that AI is very good at and the kind of things where your procedures and programs and software for doing that become deeply embedded in the organization and ripping out one and replacing it with another is extraordinarily difficult. And for purely practical, non-ideological reasons, I think we both agree that is not going to happen. And so at that point, like for all that you're right that there is a difference between open AI and Anthropic, in practice, I don't think it makes a difference. In practice, Anthropic stays where it is.

27:37Felix Salmon: I think what's interesting aside from that is that the whole dust-up appears to have drawn AI around partisan lines. So now we have like blue Anthropic and red OpenAI and super red.

27:51Chris Kempczinski: Super red XAI. OpenAI is trying to present itself as centrist, I guess. Sure.

27:56Felix Salmon: And then we've also seen like Anthropic saw, you know, more people starting to use it. And they're just on like, from a business perspective, they're on sort of a tear, I'd say, these past couple of months.

28:06Chris Kempczinski: They just raised another$100 billion or whatever it was.

28:09Felix Salmon: Yeah, they announced that their revenue run rate is much higher than it was a month ago, whatever that means. And they've kept releasing these software plugins every week or so that gets amazing press because every time they do it, it tanks the stocks of whatever sector they're involved in. They're just having a good time, I think. They're having a moment. They're having their moment.

28:30Chris Kempczinski: And I'm not sure that having a big fight with Pete Hegseth is bad for them.

28:34Elizabeth Spiers: Exactly. Well, it also sort of raises the question of why Hegseth would choose this moment to sort of pick a fight with them when, you know, you can't really mind all of that technology in a finger snap. And then right as we're going to war with Iran.

28:47Felix Salmon: It does seem like a bad timing.

28:49Elizabeth Spiers: What would he do if they actually did cut off the model? It would they've a little bit got each other sort of backed in the corner.

28:55Felix Salmon: So, yes, that's such a great point. It's like this is not the time for that. And yet, as we see so often, it doesn't seem to matter.

29:02Elizabeth Spiers: Are you saying Hegseth isn't completely rational all the time?

29:05Felix Salmon: I don't know. I wouldn't pretend to know his mind. No, I think he's pretty transparent.

29:11Chris Kempczinski: I mean, I think actually with Hegseth, what you see is what you get. He's just this rah-rah, like, I want to be lethality maxing or whatever the fuck they, these words.

29:20Felix Salmon: They do seem excited about the war. Yeah.

29:22Chris Kempczinski: And you're like, okay. He presents as a MAGA chud, and I think he's basically a MAGA chud.

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33:10Emily Peck: Investing involves risk.

33:16Chris Kempczinski: We should talk about importance. Like none of this war and AI and the future of the planet and we're going to run out of oil and the Strait of Hormuz and the war in Iran. No, there is one important business and finance piece of news this week. And God damn it, if we're not going to cover it, Elizabeth, what happened?

33:37Elizabeth Spiers: We're going to talk about the Great Burger War of 2026. McDonald's CEO, he calls himself Chris Kay. I think his last name is Kemp Jack or something like that. made a video of himself eating McDonald's new burger, the Big Arch. And he kept referring to it as the product. And then he took a tiny, dainty little bite of it. And this was widely ridiculed all over the internet because it seemed like he didn't even like the burger. And it was just like he'd never seen a burger before. And all of the competitors jumped in and this went incredibly viral. So you had a video of the Burger King CEO taking a giant bite out of a Whopper and very performatively enjoying it and all the other brands jumping in.

34:16Elizabeth Spiers: So now the question is, is the Big Arch actually good or does the CEO's reaction to it embody exactly what it is, which is just another McDonald's product?

34:26Chris Kempczinski: And Emily is here to answer that question because, Emily, in the interests of journalism, you ate some portion of a Big Arch. All of it?

34:35Felix Salmon: Jessamyn, do we have the tape? I'm risking my life here because it's raining kind of hard. I don't like to drive in the rain because I'm a bad driver. Oh, I see the Arches. I'm waiting. I'm behind an Acura. No, we're moving. Can I order the new Arch burger? Oh, wow. It was$12.99 before tax, but with tax,$14.08. Mia, you are definitely paying for this. I'll eat the fries while I drive. I'm back. Got my fries. Wow, I really did eat half of them. They went down pretty easy. Big Arch. honestly looks pretty good. Oh my gosh, it's like heavy. I'm taking a bite, but not like the McDonald's guy, more like the Burger King guy.

35:21Felix Salmon: Oh my god. Wow, pretty good. It's really salty. It looks like real meat. It's like a little pink inside, which is sort of surprising. The onion taste is very strong. It basically just tastes like a McDonald's burger, but it's way bigger. I'm understanding why it's a thousand calories. It's not a delicious burger, but it's very tasty and I don't know, I might eat all of it. That's it, signing off. I'm hopping back on here because I have a postscript, which is I'm basically almost done with this gigantic burger. I'm jacked up on Diet Coke, filled with sodium. I don't know what this means for my productivity for the rest of the day, but all right, that's all.

36:00Chris Kempczinski: That was not, I just need to come in here and say that was not all because we then got Slack messages from Emily saying, I'm on my 20th glass of water. There are, according to the internet, there's 1 ,760 milligrams of sodium in it.

36:16Felix Salmon: I was so thirsty all day after that. Oh, my God. Did you eat the whole thing? I left a little bite over, if you know, like 90s ladies know. You just leave a little bite over to be like, I didn't need to finish it, but I ate the whole thing. Let's be honest. I couldn't stop once I started. It was so salty and heavy. Like the weight of it in my hand, I cannot believe they sell these things to just like on a mass scale. It's wild stuff. But yeah, I ate the whole thing.

36:42Chris Kempczinski: So it wasn't the burger. It was the burger and the Diet Coke that was$12.99.

36:47Felix Salmon: It was a full big arch meal that was$12.99. So it was a medium fries, the big arch burger, which is two patties, half a pound of meat with some weird orange sauce. I don't know what it's called. I didn't look it up. Some weird orange sauce, two different kinds of onion product on there.

37:04Chris Kempczinski: it's products it's not real onion it's all product but the one piece of product that is not in there this is dear to my heart is yes tomato because we are old enough to remember the arch deluxe the disastrous predecessor to the big arch the arch deluxe was basically a big arch but with tomato and mcgernald's can't fuck with tomato it just doesn't work so they dropped the arch deluxe They bring back the Big Arch, which is the same concept of like a big grown-up burger, but sans tomato. Did you miss the tomato?

37:37Felix Salmon: Yeah, I really could have used a tomato, as you would say. It really could have used it because it was so salty.

37:43Chris Kempczinski: I'm telling you, I'm going to get this entire country onto tomato and petrol.

37:48Felix Salmon: I took a bite of one.

37:49Elizabeth Spiers: Oh, yeah, Elizabeth, you took a bite of one.

37:51Chris Kempczinski: So not only did Elizabeth take a bite of one, but Elizabeth's son took a bite of one.

37:57Elizabeth Spiers: Yeah, my 10-year-old son Ford has tried the burger last night and gave me a review. Play the tape. I'm going to try a large burger. We're going to see if it's good or bad. Three, two, one. That is a much bigger bite than the McDonald's CEO took, even though your mouth is smaller. It's pretty good. Like one to ten. Ten, but I think all burgers are ten. That's fair. What would you do to improve this burger? I say remove the sauce because the sauce is really messy. No sauce doesn't mean no flavor. We still got all these other ingredients. I'm not bad at investing into burgers, but I have an ideal burger.

38:44Chris Kempczinski: All burgers are 10. I think this is a good way of rating burgers. Just rate all your burgers on a scale of 1 to 10 and give them all a 10. And I have to say, although you are very polite to your son, the sheer size of this burger is so enormous.

39:01Felix Salmon: It was as big as his face.

39:03Chris Kempczinski: That his bite was not actually bigger than the McDonald's CEO bite.

39:07Felix Salmon: The burger was half the size of his head.

39:11Elizabeth Spiers: I agree that there was too much sauce to you. It made the burger very messy.

39:15Felix Salmon: Messy?

39:16Elizabeth Spiers: And I couldn't tell what the sauce was. It's like every fast food chain has a special sauce and they call it special sauce and are intentionally vague about whatever was in it.

39:24Felix Salmon: It's just salt and mayonnaise.

39:27Chris Kempczinski: But the bigger question is like, could this McDonald's viral video have been more successful if they tried? Like we have Elizabeth's kid eating the burger. We have Emily Peck eating the burger. We have everyone talking about this fucking burger. The earned media on this burger is off the chart. But the number of people who know that this burger exists is enormous. And if the McDonald's CEO had just done a boring like...

39:52Elizabeth Spiers: Emily's still drinking water. Emily's still drinking water. So thirsty, you guys.

39:54Chris Kempczinski: If Chris Kay had done a normal like delicious, it would have disappeared into the sea of slop and never been seen again. And this in a weird way just shows how to do social media right in 2026. It's by fucking it up.

40:08Felix Salmon: Yeah. When you do it wrong, you're actually doing it right.

40:11Chris Kempczinski: Yeah.

40:12Felix Salmon: Somehow. But also, I just want to note, and I made this point in the Slack and ended our meeting, and I think it's the only point I have around this whole thing is like Chris, the CEO of McDonald's, did his video. And then the CEO of Burger King and Wendy's were like, we're going to do a video too. Ha ha ha. We'll take bigger bites. But if you just look at the screenshots of these videos and these guys eating the burgers, they look all the same. They look like they never eat fast food. They're very slim. They're wearing very nice sweaters, sharp glasses. They look like they just came in from the Lynx.

40:45Felix Salmon: And the only place they're having burgers is at the country club. They're all identically looking white guys.

40:50Chris Kempczinski: The thing it reminds me of is when all of the cigarette company CEOs would always be asked, do you smoke cigarettes? And they would always answer the same way, which is, I like a nice cigar now and then.

41:06Chris Kempczinski: which is their way of saying no of course i don't fucking smoke but yeah it's bad for you burgers are bad for you do not eat like there's how many calories are in

41:14Elizabeth Spiers: this fucking thing it's insane over a thousand over a thousand not get high in your own supply is that how there's i would argue that the mcdonald's ceo was like a little dorkier than the other ceos and people picked up on that like somebody referred to him as a linkedin guy in a TikTok world whose aura screams kale salad. You say that like it's a bad thing.

41:35Felix Salmon: They're going to live a really long time with all their money, all their safe dollars that they're holding onto right now.

41:41Chris Kempczinski: Which they've just moved back to the United States from their risk appetite in the Middle East.

41:48Felix Salmon: Just talking about the burger right now, I kind of want another one. Help. That's how they get you, Emily. The fries were so good.

41:57Chris Kempczinski: Would you make do with just like a standard quarter pounder or do you want another big arch?

42:02Felix Salmon: Well, I would never get another big arch, being honest. A thousand calories and drinking six gallons of water in a day. It's not in the cards, but I might get the fries again, you guys. I don't know. Maybe a burger from a local place.

42:14Elizabeth Spiers: Everybody likes the fries, though. Everyone quietly likes the fries.

42:17Chris Kempczinski: We mean quietly. Everyone noisily likes the fries. McDonald's fries are famous as the greatest fries in Christendom. I will eat McDonald's fries happily.

42:27Elizabeth Spiers: I feel like there are raw food influencers, though, who quietly sneak to McDonald's and just get the fries.

42:32Chris Kempczinski: Yeah, wasn't that what the brevarian got outed, is like quietly eating McDonald's when she wasn't pretending to live on nothing but air?

42:55We should have a numbers round because, goddammit, we need to bring this show to a close.

43:01Chris Kempczinski: Elizabeth, what's your number?

43:03Elizabeth Spiers: Well, this is kind of related, but my number is$90 and$90, and that's the weekly spend at a restaurant now for Americans, down$25 from last year or last summer. Oh, wow, deflation. Yeah, so this is mostly affecting the food slop chains, the sort of sweet grain, or the bowl of slop balls chains.

43:22Chris Kempczinski: You're saying like, this is a massive decrease, if true. Like, this is average weekly restaurant spend across all Americans? Yeah.

43:30Elizabeth Spiers: And I think some of it, in the article that I read, some of it was a function of a lot of that money being spent by particularly middle-income people or upper-income people at places like Sweetgreen and Cava. And even Chipotle is considered that middle market because 60 % of Chipotle customers make 100K or more a year. So they raised their prices last year by quite a bit. And so people are just shifting away from that or making food at home or whatever. And they don't really have any down market offerings. Chipotle tried a$3.50 taco and it had mixed results. So that's why Sweetgreen and Kava are suffering a little bit right now because people are spending less money.

44:09Chris Kempczinski: My number is also about household incomes in a way. It's$320 ,141. the average annual household income of the average person who goes to see a broadway play 320 000 that's much higher than i thought it would be it's also by the way significantly higher than 267 000 which is the average household income of someone who goes to see a broadway musical

44:38Felix Salmon: huh so it's a very high bracket i don't think that is surprising actually felix this is interesting

44:44Chris Kempczinski: to me because obviously Broadway is in New York. New York is a high income kind of place, but these are high salaries even by New York standards. And you watch the Tony Awards and these are like national celebrities. And there's this idea that Broadway is very all American. And by the numbers, it seems to be much more elite than I'd imagined.

45:07Felix Salmon: To be able to afford to go and see a show if you don't live in New York is, or even if you do, is really expensive.

45:15Elizabeth Spiers: Ticket prices are insanely high.

45:17Felix Salmon: We've talked about the$1 ,000 ticket prices and all of this for the hottest shows, right?

45:21Chris Kempczinski: Right, but yeah, the average ticket price is, it's like 150 bucks, which is still a meaningful chunk of change. And it's part of the reason, I think, why the household income is so high is just because it's harder for people on lower incomes to afford it. But yeah, you can totally afford it if you're scratching by on 150 grand a year. But there's also just a class thing. I think that the social class of theatergoers is actually higher than I might have expected. And there is, this being America, a strong correlation between social class and income.

45:52Elizabeth Spiers: I think that's probably true. But aren't the highest grossing Broadway productions the ones that, you know, like all the tourists go to, like big Lion King-y sort of shows?

46:01Felix Salmon: But you have to have a lot of money to be a tourist.

46:03Chris Kempczinski: Yeah. And those are the ones where the household income is a mere$267 ,000. Anyway, Emily, what's your number?

46:10Felix Salmon: I was thinking like I would have to change it to do the jobs number, which is really bad. Go look at the news if you're listening. We lost a lot of jobs in February. But my number is six. That is the approximate number of vests owned by Demare Johnson, age 23.

46:27Chris Kempczinski: Oh, my God. Interview Magazine for the win.

46:30Felix Salmon: He is one of the, quote, finest boys in finance, profiled this week by Interview Magazine. and DeMar and his, the other boys in the piece are getting a lot of pushback, mostly from the New York Post, which I think is being annoying. If you read the interview, it's like, honestly, it's kind of sweet. These quote unquote boys, they are men, of course. They're in their early 20s. And they say things like, when asked, what is your idea of hell? DeMar says, not making my family proud. Like, why are we giving these kids, you know, the business.

47:07Elizabeth Spiers: The whole feature was just inexplicable because it was like the finest men in finance. And then there were like five kids.

47:12Felix Salmon: Really young. There's a picture of two of them with cake slices toasting each other.

47:17Elizabeth Spiers: Maybe because they're not old enough to drink.

47:19Felix Salmon: And then later, the New York Post has written like, I don't know, three, four articles at this point about it. And they're like, Goldman might fire two of the boys in finance. And then there's like a quote from Goldman's PR person being like, we did not authorize the profile. And they're Like they might be fired or punished. And it's just like, everyone calm down. This was fun. We can calm down. No? Although I have to say, would you or would you not fire someone?

47:44Chris Kempczinski: This is a genuine question and a genuine answer. Question, where do you take dates? Answer, art galleries where the wine is free and then towel downtown afterwards. That is the wrong answer. I don't know what the right answer is, but I know that is the wrong answer.

48:04Felix Salmon: But again, so what?

48:06Elizabeth Spiers: That guy's never going on a date to an art gallery again.

48:10Felix Salmon: These pictures are going to haunt these people for a long time, but it's all in good fun. And I hope they don't get fired.

48:16Chris Kempczinski: It was in good fun. And you're right. They did come across pretty cute.

48:20Felix Salmon: I was just like, oh.

48:21Elizabeth Spiers: The guy with the vest was adorable.

48:24Felix Salmon: The vest. Each guy had to answer about the vests. How many bests do you have? One said, just one, unfortunately.

48:33Chris Kempczinski: You know that in like 10 years when these guys are getting married, this is going to be the centerpiece of the best man speech.

48:39Felix Salmon: I hope so. And like a slideshow where they'll be in the slideshow.

48:43Chris Kempczinski: Good stuff. Yeah. Claim to fame. That is it for us this week. Thanks very much for listening to Slate Money. Thanks to Jessamyn Molly for producing. and a special thanks to Shana Roth for telling Emily to expense her big arch.

48:59Felix Salmon: And thanks to Mia for paying for it.

49:01Chris Kempczinski: And thanks to Mia for paying for the big arch. Thanks to all of you guys for writing in on sleepmoneyatsleep.com and we'll be back next week with more Sleep Money.

49:26Elizabeth Spiers: From GEICO Subconscious News, I'm Tammy Racing Thoughts, broadcasting from your brain. Tonight's top worry. If something happens to your apartment and you need to, like, stay in a hotel and pay for it, that would be crazy, right? Art Palpitations has more. That would be crazy, Tammy, but you got surprisingly affordable renter's insurance through GEICO, so it could be covered, giving you peace of mind.

49:47Felix Salmon: Aw, I love a story that ends well.

49:50Elizabeth Spiers: Next up, love stories. Are they all they're cracked up to be? It feels good to worry less. It feels good to GEICO.