The Hyundai ICE Raid

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1:10Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Bloomberg. Yes, you heard that right. I have this new job. If you missed it last week, I am here with Elizabeth Spires of the New York Times. Hello. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios. Hello, hello. And we are all in New York City, which has 3.775 million homes. You will understand that number if you continue listening. We are going to talk this week about the ice raids on Hyundai in Georgia. We're going to talk about the astonishing up-and-to-the-right nature of Oracle stock this week and why that happened.

1:53We are going to talk about JP Morgan's new headquarters. We have a Slate Plus segment on Zuckerberg vs. Zuckerberg. It's a fun one this week, and it's all coming up on Slate Money.

2:10So here we are in this slightly unexpected world where the stock market and corporate America seems to have made its peace with Donald Trump, tariffs, and all other manners of weirdness notwithstanding. And we had a really, really interesting example of the tensions there this week when a bunch of ICE agents marched into a multi-billion dollar Hyundai plant, arrested most of the senior folks who were in there trying to build this multi-billion dollar Hyundai plant, which was a major crown jewel of Georgia's economic development, and marched them off in like handcuffs and shackles for some kind of immigration violations.

3:01And this then became, you know, a summit level mini crisis between Korea and the United States where the Secretary of State got very involved, the president, both countries got involved. Eventually, the workers were flown back on a chartered jet. And the whole thing was on the face of it, very terrifying, for any of the many countries and companies who have promised to invest billions of dollars in the United States because they don't want their employees to wind up getting handcuffed and shackled. That's not a fun experience for anyone. And yet, despite all that, everyone was bending over backwards to say, oh, no, this isn't, you know, we'll send more workers, different workers.

3:48This doesn't derail anything. No foreign companies in Korea or anywhere else have been like, okay, this is ridiculous. We can't build in America anymore. No one has used this as a sort of, it doesn't seem to have had any sort of broader repercussions beyond, well, that was a fuck up. It's only been a week. I mean, I don't know if that's the conclusion to draw yet. Yeah, and there was a report that officials in South Korea were saying, you know, we don't really have much incentive to keep funneling money into the US if this kind of thing is going to happen. No, absolutely. I mean, that was the whole thing that the discussions were about, right?

4:25The Koreans were furious, as you would expect. And so they were shouting at Marco Rubio and anyone else who was available to be shouted at. Not, of course, that Marco Rubio has any real control over ICE, which is one of the problems. The Republicans who want investment in the country and the Republicans who want an immigration crackdown are not necessarily the same Republicans. Right. I mean, I think the incident really does highlight that sort of tension. And it's not just a tension between different factions of Republicans. It's a tension in the White House where we have this president who is, you know, forcing company or forcing countries to invest in the United States.

5:04And then at the same time, this sort of ham-handed ICE raid in Georgia that is going to, it hasn't had repercussions yet. It's only been a week, but just like you're saying, Felix, is certainly going to deter or make other countries think twice before setting up factories in the United States to get back to the ham-fisted. The New York Times today had reporting that said ICE went into this factory in Georgia looking for undocumented immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries, and they just stumbled upon all these Korean workers. Oh, my God, it really was a cock-up. Yeah, that's what it sounded like in this story out Friday.

5:42Also, they had four specific people they were looking for, all of whom were Hispanic, and they sent 400 agents and just rounded up approximately the same amount of people. 475 people were detained. One of the interesting things is that it wasn't just ICE. The same tension you have at the federal level exists even at the state level because the Georgia State Police cooperated with ICE on the raid, even though the Georgia State Police reports up to the Georgia governor, who is like, this is the thing he's most proud of his entire career as governor is building this factory and getting all of this investment into the state.

6:23The backstory there was like he had flown to South Korea and really like pushed for Hyundai to open this plant. The surrounding area has seen like economic revitalization. You know, there's some line in one of those stories we read in the prep, like going from dollar stores and Walmarts, you know, in the area to bibimbap and, you know, Korean barbecue and, you know, just more revitalized kind of economy, something Brian Kemp is really proud of. But the politics are all screwy because Kemp isn't, you know, a big Trump guy, obviously. And I don't think he's even said very much about this. Yeah, he's been very, very quiet about the whole thing.

7:01One thing I will say, and this goes back to a series of Democratic administrations, but especially the Biden administration, is that Korea, unlike many other countries, like if Hyundai was an Australian company, none of this would have happened. because Australia has a deal where it's very easy for Australian companies to get, you know, temporary work visas for highly skilled employees to come in and build factories. And a lot of countries do, but Korea, for reasons that no one entirely understands, does not. And so, you know, they wind up getting these like B1 visas, which are, you know, historically for the past however many decades, if you came in on a B-1 visa and you sort of supervised a bunch of building of a factory, that was kind of understood that was what a B-1 visa is for.

7:55But technically, there is definitely a very simple reading of the law around B-1 visas, which says you're not allowed to do that. And ICE is just being very maximalist in the way it interprets the visa laws and is saying like, well, okay, now you're an illegal immigrant and we have to deport you. One of the interesting things about this case though was that the ice basically dropped all of the charges against everyone no one was deported they flew back on a jet that was chartered by the korean government and they are all free to come back to their jobs if they want i don't know how many of them are going to want to and this is i think the thing that i'm kind of chewing on the most about this whole story is less like this high level conceptual countries and companies investing in the united states thing and more like the very low level individual if you are a korean manager and you are expert in building battery plants and your boss goes up to you and says we want you to build a battery plant in atlanta georgia like you have a pretty decent life and job opportunities in Korea and you really don't want to run the risk of, you know, all manner of run-ins with Trump goons.

9:07And so like just finding the workers for these foreign companies, I think it's going to be a lot harder. Yeah. Although I think a lot of them were, you know, just sort of told that they had to do it. They were sort of assigned. And in a lot of those cases, you know, people can't just quit their jobs. But, you know, what's astounding about this is, you know, it's just another example of how Trump's, you know, immigration line is not something that he really has thought through in any meaningful capacity. Once he realized that this Hyundai plant was going to be unstaffed for people who would actually be able to train the workers, he said, well, why don't we let them stay long enough to do their jobs and train the workers?

9:44And it's like, well, what did you think they were there for in the first place? Yeah. I was curious, maybe you two know more about this, but when Hyundai says there are no American workers who can do these jobs, is that true? and be related if we want to broaden it more. Just thinking of the tension in the White House between the two goals, right? Having foreign companies produce things in America and having American workers do the work. Is it good for an economy even when it's not American workers doing the work? If it's in America, like what I was saying before, there's still economic revitalization.

10:18You know, when immigrants come in or even temporarily come in to do the work, that's still a bonus. I mean, it's still like they're spending most of their salaries in America. Like all of that, like economically speaking, the ownership is kind of neither here nor there, right? It is absolutely right that if you are managing a battery plant in Georgia and you're Korean, then that ipso facto means that an American does not have that job. But this is a job that wouldn't otherwise exist were it not for Korean investment. It's not like, you know, they're creating a bunch of jobs and then they're filling them with Koreans.

10:54It's like, you know, companies are still national. The vast majority of companies you can very much assign to a country. And this is the basis of Trump's entire economic policy is that the countries can make promises about investment, even though the investment is made by companies and not countries. And in most companies, you will find that most of the senior management ranks are kind of the same nationality that they kind of have grown up, as it were, within that company. They understand how it works. They literally speak the language. You know, if you're building a plant for Hyundai in Georgia, then you're going to be doing two things.

11:34You're going to be like managing down in terms of getting the plant up and running in Georgia, but you're also going to be managing up and trying to coordinate with a whole bunch of different arms of the company in Korea to try and make everything happen that needs to happen. And you need to understand how the company works. And frankly, you need to speak Korean. I think there aren't that many Americans who can do that. Well, another thing is that these workers specifically were there to install very sophisticated equipment that's used to build these electric batteries. And because it's Hyundai specific, it's their proprietary technology, you couldn't just find workers in the U.S.

12:09that could do it. They haven't been trained. So, okay. So, yeah. So, it's correct to say that Hyundai wasn't able to find people in the U.S. to do this work. They needed to have South Koreans come and help open this plant for various reasons. To be very clear about this, you know, the alternative to having Hyundai build a battery plant is to find domestic companies who want to invest billions of dollars and build a battery plant, right? And the stated goal of the Trump administration is to get inward investment and for a bunch of foreign companies to invest in the United States. They do want to replace foreign workers on these shores with domestic workers on these shores, but they do not want to replace foreign companies on these shores with domestic companies.

12:58They are actively trying to encourage the foreign companies to continue to invest. And if you have a bunch of foreign companies to continue to invest, that is going to mean a bunch of foreign workers working for those companies. It just is. And that is a tension that is going to exist for as long as the Trumpists remain in government. When it comes to things like battery manufacturing and encouraging domestic production, the White House is not doing that because it's sort of pulled back on all those kinds of investments made by the previous administration's bazaar. Batteries are like woke coded, aren't they?

13:38Because they're electric rather than fossil fuels. And so therefore we don't like them anymore. And we don't like the IRA, the legislation that, you know, put all this money into building things like battery plants and, you know, solar plants and anything so woke as energy that's not polluting. Not wanting to plant it today.

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17:24Talking of energy, I feel like we have a good segue here into the Oracle news of the week, which is that they came out with their earnings this week and the earnings were slightly below expectations in terms of profits. But everyone completely ignored that because they said hey we have a whole bunch of contracts like hundreds of billions of dollars of contracts that we have signed for future revenue for data centers in the future and everyone got very excited about this and the stock went up 35 in one day and larry ellison became the richest man in the world and there was a whole like news cycle around it but yeah this is definitely just a tiny part of this massive energy economy that is growing up around AI.

18:15You know, when he's saying we're signing contracts to build data centers, what he means is we've signed a$300 billion contract with OpenAI. And the amount of power that just the OpenAI contract alone is going to require is like two Hoover dams worth. Yes, that was in one of those stories that the contract between Oracle and open AI,$300 billion, one of the largest cloud contracts ever signed, 4.5 gigawatts of power capacity. I'll be full disclosure, I don't know really what that means. But a gigawatt is a lot of watts. You can have entire power plants that produce less than a gigawatt. And this is four and a half gigawatts.

18:58Two Hoover dams are the amount consumed by 4 million homes, which that is quite a lot of power. That's like all of New York City. How many homes are there in New York City? More than 4 million, right? Less than 4 million, I would say. I don't know. New York City has a population of like 9 million. So what, two and a half people per home, something like that? I don't know. But yeah, so these are absolutely enormous numbers. Oracle spiked to become worth almost a trillion dollars. And it's kind of interesting to me conceptually, because really what Oracle is being paid for for here is buying a bunch of h100 chips from an outside vendor nvidia putting them in a box plugging the box into the electric grid and then buying a bunch of electricity from an outside electricity vendor and turning the box on and that can be worth like if you look at the increase in market cap overnight that can be worth 250 billion dollars right there like somehow what you would think would be a pretty sort of commoditized service at this point, which is putting chips in the box and turning the box on, turns out to be an incredibly either difficult and or either difficult and or valuable service to provide.

20:12It doesn't seem to be like, there doesn't seem to be competition sort of competing away profit margins on this. I think at enormous scale, it is kind of difficult to do. It's not like buying a couple of servers off of Amazon, AWS, or, you know, some smaller service because it's just when you're running a data center that's that big or you have that many servers live, it's just more complicated to keep it all up and have all the redundancies that you need. But I do sort of take your point that it's not particularly complicated base level technology. And what they're doing is just kind of outsourcing everything to other companies.

20:48There's a company called Crusoe that builds data centers. Yeah, it's just plug and play, right? You get an NJ or some utility and like, can you build me a power plant? You go to NVIDIA and say, can you sell me some chips? You go to Crusoe and say, can you, yeah. And then you just put it together. It is obviously more complicated than that. The question that I have is like, where is the moat? You know, if you look at trillion dollar companies, they all seem to have some kind of monopoly. And I just don't see the competitive moat that Oracle has here compared to like any number of other people who can do this.

21:19I think it's just, you know, the deals that they're doing, the sort of backlog of orders are for basically three companies and open ai is the big one and open ai already you know they had 10 billion dollars of revenue last year so they just signed a 300 billion dollar deal with oracle and oracle is taking on a lot of debt to to get this done too so you can sort of see if for whatever reason open ai vaporizes all this kind of falls apart yeah i was looking at the debt side of things moody's and s &p kind of put oracle on watch for a possible credit downgrade because they are going to have to borrow money to build these data centers.

21:57But it doesn't seem like everyone seems very bullish about this kind of, I mean, it's real estate, right? Real estate is always built with debt. No one ever builds real estate with equity. Also, can we just talk about briefly Larry Ellison being so rich and his son who just bought Paramount is now trying to reportedly buy Warner Brothers Discovery. Like, is this AI money reverberating now into the Hollywood media landscape? I think David Ellison had more than enough money to buy Paramount and Warner Brothers even before the Oracle AI convergence. Oracle was late to the AI game. It hasn't really been considered an AI play up until this week.

22:40But yes, I think, broadly speaking, in a world where Larry Ellison's net worth can go up by$100 billion in one day... yeah, they're spending$16 billion on Paramount or whatever is a rounding error, you know? I saw some reporting that maybe TikTok is going to happen or could happen or is remodeled to happen. I will always take the over on that one. Like TikTok is banned. There was a law that was passed by Congress and was signed into law by the president. And so therefore there is no TikTok. But yeah, like that can is going to get kicked down the road forever. You know it. I do not see a world in which Donald Trump suddenly goes, oh, fuck it.

23:21OK, let's ban it. And I do not see a world in which the Chinese government just like gives up everything that they're being asked to give up. I don't know. I feel like this is just going to sit in its current limbo state indefinitely. You know what? It's going to be like Fannie and Freddie. They've been in limbo since like 2009. TikTok will be in limbo for at least that long. Well, then maybe to get back and to change the subject one more time, we have a really smart editor at Axios, Scott Rosenberg. And he talked about like when these tech bubbles or tech booms start, the infrastructure companies make a lot of money and then it builds out to the consumer facing companies, like as happened with the internet a little bit.

23:59But now with AI, it seems like there's something different happening where like Oracle is an infrastructure company making a lot of money off AI and it's making the money from open AI, which is the, what am I trying to say? I'm trying to say that it seems very incestuous, the AI bubble. I think what you're trying to say is that the tail is wagging the dog here. Yes, it seems like the companies are just sort of like the money is just going back and forth and not coming to the consumers. Unlike the tech boom of the 90s, the current tech boom is being driven by private company losses to a very large degree and to a certain other degree, like by public companies, like burying losses on their balance sheet.

24:41You can see this most obviously with the open AI burn rate. The open AI is just burning through astonishing numbers of billions of dollars. And Sam Altman is just like, give me another$10 billion so I can light it on fire and give it all to Oracle, you know, and people seem to be very happy to do that. But also, you know, how many billions of dollars has Google lost on like DeepMind over the years that it's just buried somewhere in its balance sheet? and you can't even see because that's not a reported figure. There's a huge amount of investment. This is what used to be called back in the day.

25:16You'd see it on the financial statements as R &D. But it's a very weird kind of R &D because it's just buying electricity to a large degree. And you're like, that's not what I always used to think of as R &D expenditure. I used to think of R &D expenditure as like hiring a bunch of boffins wearing white coats and giving them a whiteboard and some dry erase markers. Whereas, you know, just buying like a nuclear power plant and plugging it into a box with chips in it is a, it feels a little bit more, you know, hard science-y, you know? It's like those CERN particle accelerators and whatnot, you know?

25:52It's like you just, you need to spend a huge amount of money on building something expensive in order for this shit to work. But meanwhile, our electricity bills are just going up. Yeah, because the demand for electricity is going up. And as we discussed last week, you know, the supply of electricity is being stymied by the fact that Donald Trump hates windmills. The latest CPI has electricity up 6.2 % year over year versus just 2.9 % inflation overall. Which, of course, the Fed tends to ignore because that's considered food and energy. And food and energy is considered volatile. But yeah, the energy part in particular seems like it's only going up.

26:29and you can't really expect that. This isn't volatility as in what goes up must go down. It's more volatility as in what goes up. It's like just go up even further. I feel like I resent maybe having to pay a higher electricity bill so Larry Ellison can have another$30 billion so that his son can buy Paramount, so something, something. So that Barry Wise can take over CBS News? Yeah, that doesn't seem right. And so that all of her kids can be brain-rotted by AI slop. Yes, something feels off in that. What of the public good? It's a good question. No, it's a really good question. And it's super interesting as you see all of these AI companies being founded, you know, Ilya Sutskyeva's new one and Anthropic and all the rest of them.

27:15And they're all sort of trying to one-up each other in terms of claiming that they're the white hat good guys. And it's just not obvious how much, if any, public good any of them are actually creating. We should probably just mention, since we're on the subject of AI and money, that the open AI transformation into a for-profit looks like it is still on. And they seem to have agreed that they will buy off the nonprofit by basically giving it a$100 billion stake in OpenAI. But what exactly the nonprofit is going to be able to do with owning a bunch of shares in OpenAI that are technically worth$100 billion remains to be seen.

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29:05Hi, this is Paige from Giggly Squad, and today's episode is brought to you by McDonald's. Honestly, Caesar sauce and a Diet Coke at McDonald's might be the perfect girl dinner. And McCrispy strips dipped in Caesar sauce? No notes. Right now at participating McDonald's, the$2.99 Caesar snack wrap is making me rethink my entire go-to order. Caesar sauce is at participating McDonald's for a limited time. So go try it before it's gone. Prices and participation may vary. All right, I've forgotten what segment three is. What segment three? We're talking about JP Morgan building this like monument of work palace thing right near Grand Central.

29:46So I would work there for sure. I hate this building. I'm just going to come out and say I think this is the worst new building in New York, if not the world. It is just hulking and ugly. And I hate how it meets the ground and I hate how it meets the sky and I hate how it lights up at night and I hate how it screws up the skyline. It's so gaudy the way it lights up. It looks like a naff Vegas hotel. But everyone says that about new buildings and then... Well, I don't. Honestly, tell me one skyscraper in New York that I haven't liked in the past 30 years. Like, I am a pro skyscraper person. Okay.

30:24I believe you. It seems a little fitting, though, that it looks like a casino. It's a perfect housing for an investment bank. So we're talking about J.P. Morgan's new building at 270 Park Avenue, 60 stories, 2.5 million square feet. It's going to have a food court curated by a fancy chef that I don't remember the name of anymore. It's Danny Meyer. Danny Meyer. Not just a food court. It's going to have 19 restaurants. 19 restaurants. And if you're sitting at your desk in the building, you get to just tap a few keys and they will deliver lunch to your desk. Sounds great. And there's like some fancy gym, which controversially, apparently JP Morgan is going to charge a membership fee for.

31:05But I'm sure it'll be subsidized by the company. So it won't be so bad. I'm sure it'll be subsidized. But also, like, duh, this building is going to house 14 ,000 people. There is no gym on the planet that is big enough to accommodate 14 ,000 people. They're not all going to go. And if you're an investment bank, the only real sensible way of rationing access to the gym is by charging for it. They're not doing it for the money. They're doing it so that the gym is a pleasant place to be and not overrun by 14 ,000 people. And it's going to have class. I mean, it just sounds great. It sounds like a great place to work.

31:37I'm someone who's been working from home for the past five years. So the idea of going into a super swanked out office building seems great. And I mean, if Jamie Dimon has been, you know, all about the office now since 2021, he was among the first CEOs to be like, this is bullshit. Everyone back in. Back in. What are you doing? He recently was like hot mic'd on some call where he was like, this Friday thing is ridiculous. I call people. No one's there. Like we need to be working on Fridays, you know, because most other companies have come to this place where every day is in the office except Friday has become sort of everyone stays home kind of a thing.

32:15Anyway, I can tell you that as a someone who now has an office and colleagues in the office and I go into the office pretty much every day. Number one, I'm loving it. number two there's this sort of official four day a week mandate but there's a large number of people who come in on fridays might not come in on mondays or might just take a different day off because fridays are a little bit quieter it's a little bit less hectic and you can get a little bit more sort of work done but it's still you still get all of the amenities you know the bloomberg snack situation is legendary i love it yeah so i think it's great if he wants to be all about people coming to work and now he's making work like a really nice place to be and it's an investment like yeah i will totally take it as read that as a place to work once you're in the building it's a great place to work the ceiling heights are much higher than the old 270 park part of my beef as long-time listeners to this show might remember is that in order to build this building they demolished the old 270 park with the old union carbide building which was an absolutely gorgeous piece of architecture.

33:25The tallest building in the world ever designed by a woman. I really loved that building. And it went through a massive eco refit in 2011, which made it lead platinum and was basically a completely rebuilt building. It was kind of new at that point in 2011. It seems crazy that they would then demolish it. It was the largest and tallest building in the world ever to be demolished on purpose. They just took down all of this steel, all of this embedded carbon and replaced it with, this is like one crazy stat. The New 270 Park is shorter than the Empire State Building, has fewer square feet than the Empire State Building, but has 60 % more structural steel.

34:08It has 95 ,000 tons of steel in that building, which is wild. What is that? So why should I be? So what? Why it matters. Think of every ton of steel as having a massive carbon footprint. And you're like, this is just, and they're making a bunch of green claims for this building, right? They're saying this is the first all electric building. This is the first zero emissions building, you know, which is all kind of meaningless. It's like, well, we're buying green electrons to power our building, whereas the building next door has dirty electrons. Like how can you, like an electron, let an electron come on people.

34:40So they're greenwashing what has been kind of like an environmental. Catastrophe. Yes. Got it. Got it. Okay. Yeah, that seems like a fair point to make. And also JP Morgan is now like the biggest bank. Yeah, it used to be like there are, you know, four big banks in America. You know, it's like JP Morgan and Citibank and Wells Fargo and Bank of America. Now it's like there is one big bank in America and everyone else is competing for second place. And it's not just in America, it's in the world. JP Morgan reportedly is looking at spending another$3 billion-ish to build a massive new headquarters in London, which would immediately become, by some margin, the largest building in London.

35:21There is an old rendering from Richard Rodgers, which if it winds up looking anything like that will look much nicer than 270 Park. But yeah, I don't have a problem with big building. I just have a problem with this big building. But I mean, there is that thing when the new big building comes to town, like a lot of critics are like, it's so ugly, I hate it. And then after like 10 years or 15 years, it becomes a crucial part of the skyline and very beloved. I just don't. I mean, you know, I've lived in New York for almost 30 years now. And I'm thinking about all of the big buildings that have gone up over that period of time.

35:57Like just down the street from 270 Park is one Vanderbilt, you know, the Bank of America headquarters. And when that went up, people were like, that's strange. But then there wasn't a vehement hatred towards it. right next to 270 park is 383 madison which was the old best duns headquarters when that went up people were like oh that's quite nice actually has a nice little crown on top you know it's a pretty building the new 425 park has just opened up the road from 270 park which is where citadel is everyone loves that is just like everyone's like wow this is a really fucking gorgeous building so i don't i don't really buy this thesis that new buildings are always hated i think you know Yeah, until 9-11, the World Trade Center buildings had a lot of critics that persistently hated it.

36:44That was the one I was thinking of. And that, again, belies Emily's, you know, they got built in, what, the mid-70s, early 70s? So, you know, even 40 years later, sentiments hadn't changed. People started liking them a little bit more in sort of retrospect once they were gone. But like the replacement, One World Trade, the new, the David Childs one, it's kind of, eh. You know, it's not anyone's favorite building. But again, like I don't see anyone saying I hate it. All right. Well, what about this? What about this other thing that I want to say, which is that when a company builds a splashy new headquarters, as Jamie Dimon himself has said, that's time to short the stock.

37:24That is a sign of hubris. And everything's about to come crashing down. Lehman Brothers built a new building in 2002. By 2008, they were kaputs. Enron had a big fancy. Bear Stearns, famously. Bear Stearns, Time Warner, AOL, whatever that building situation was. They were out soon after. It just seems like you're really tempting fate. I mean, you're using a relatively generous definition of soon here, but if it includes like 15 years. Whatever. I'm saying that it's tempting fate to build a big splashy headquarters and spend a lot of money often. But maybe I'm just totally wrong again, twice in a row in this conversation, but I don't think so.

38:08I definitely see a certain amount of hubris going on at J.P. Morgan, especially with 383 Madison, which, you know, when it was built as Bear Stearns' headquarters, they said exactly that. They were like, this is a very hubristic headquarters for Bear Stearns. Why are they building such a great monument to themselves right next to Grand Central Station? JP Morgan has now taken 383 Madison now that it can move back into 270 Park. And it's like, we're going to completely revamp the whole thing, tear off all of the exterior cladding, replace it with glass, change the sidewalk situation. It's not good enough for them.

38:46This incredibly grand and special Bear Stearns headquarters that everyone was kind of jealous of when it was built is now considered like class B. And so it needs a major upgrade from JP Morgan. That's kind of wild. Class A is the only, like the commercial real estate sector, office buildings specifically, obviously haven't been doing very well since 2020, with the exception of Class A buildings, which have been doing well. So in that sense, it kind of makes sense. Yeah, I mean, to be clear, 383 Madison is a Class A building. It's just like, it's not A plus. You got to be A plus. You got to be A plus.

39:19Like one Vanderbilt is A plus. Right. That's the space where the commercial real estate sector is doing well. So maybe it's not hubris. Maybe it's just smart. It's an interesting question, right? So JP Morgan spends$3 billion or whatever it is building this new headquarters. They own it. They're paying rent to themselves. Like it kind of lives as an asset on their balance sheet. They don't ever really want to move out. It's an interesting question. Like if it is true that these things are in demand and increasingly valuable, you know, if it goes up in value and no one ever hears it because they never sell it, like maybe at some point they'll do some clever financial engineering you know if it doubles in value and becomes worth six billion dollars then maybe they'll do a sale and lease back thing with the saudi arabian sovereign wealth fund or something and so they could realize that gain but it's all very theoretical really let's do office building sustain like what is state of the art now in 15 years will be weird and old-fashioned and yeah i mean i think i think 383 madison is a really good example of that you know it it's what 20 years old and already it's considered to be out of date and it was state of the art i mean actually a really an even better example of that is one brian park the bank of america building which was super brand new and swanky not that long ago maybe 10 15 years ago it got built and it was very eco-friendly at the time and it was full of lead gold or lead platinum signs all over the rest of it and now is considered to be so out of date and behind the times that it's going to get fined under local law 97 something like that over two million dollars a year because its emissions are so high what because it has like an internal it heats itself by like basically burning fossil fuels in the basement which is how buildings always used to do it up until 270 per a guy down there shoveling coal into a furnace not quite but yeah almost but that would be an amazing job right i work for bank of america shuffling coal into the furnace so that the traders can keep cool in the summer because we have like coal-powered air conditioning.

41:27That's like the AI economy, basically. At the bottom of it all is just a bunch of guys shoveling coal into a furnace. A few hamsters on wheels making the servers go. Yeah. Yeah, I'm long hamsters. I'm telling you, man. I'm going to tap into hamster power.

41:55We should have a numbers round. Emily, what's your number? Oh, this is kind of nerdy. I like nerdy. Nerdy is good. I'm going to go for it. So my number is 9.9%. That is the official poverty rate for adults age 65 and older, senior citizens. And it's slightly higher from last year, according to new census data that came out this week. And the supplemental poverty rate, which I don't need to define, do I? But whatever, it also went up was the only poverty rate to go up among all the demographics. And you're saying, what? Why are the seniors so poor? Emily, what's going on with the seniors? Are they okay?

42:31You guys, they're fine. They're totally fine. It turns out that the way the census calculates the poverty rate, particularly for seniors, leads to a misleading and higher rate of poverty than you would think. And I know this because I read this great sub stack from a guy named Andrew Biggs, who works at the American Enterprise Institute, who explains that the poverty rate doesn't take into account irregular income. So it'll take into account paychecks. It'll take into account Social Security. It'll take into account your pension, but it won't take into account your 401k or your IRA income at all.

43:08Oh, wow. So if the seniors are all increasingly relying on their 401ks and they pull out every quarter, whatever they need to live on for the next quarter, none of that is counted as income, even though it is taxable. Yes. And apparently the census knows that this is a problem and puts out, there's been tracking this other kind of data, more complete set called like news or something, but it's still preliminary and behind the scenes. So they don't publish it the way they do these other numbers. Well, I'm sure that given the Trump administration's commitment to high quality national statistics, we will have that very soon.

43:43Oh yeah. I'm sure it's right around the corner. But if you look at that, then the poverty rate for old people in our country is really, really low. The poverty rate for children is like three or four times as high, which I feel like is a conversation for another time. Like, what are we doing? We need age-based redistribution. Yeah. Take, take from the old and give to the young. Give the babies 401ks to spend right away. Elizabeth, what's your number? My number is 3 ,600 and that's a dollars. And that's what you would pay for a leather workout bag from Aloe Yoga, which is not really a luxury brand.

44:17They sell, you know,$70 leggings. And so they're, they're sort of trying to break into the luxury handbag market because everyone knows that if you need a workout bag, you want it to be leather or suede, which is not at all problematic when you put all your stinky clothes in it. But my favorite detail about this bag is that it comes with an embedded crystal for intention setting. I like that. Yeah. Various people, as I lower myself gently into the water of the Bloomberg offices, and I notice all of the random Bloomberg screens that people have, a bunch of people have a little circle in the top left-hand corner of their Bloomberg screens, which is just like going in, going out, going in, going out.

45:00And all you need to do is if you're feeling a little bit stressed or something, you just look at the circle and you breathe in, you breathe out. And then it helps you calm down. And it's just a nice little calming thing. And that's even better than an intentional crystal in a workout bag. What? But aloe bags, they're having a moment right now. Do not ask me how I know this, but there's this, the basic aloe bag is tie-dyed, right? And it is ubiquitous. And everyone's walking around with like tie-dyed aloe bags. No one can quite work out why. I think it's because of Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner are fans.

45:35Well, there you go. That'll explain it. Oh, I see it. Aloe intention crystals, individually selected. The energy of the crystals carries the resonance of your intentions throughout the day. Protects you, balances your daily life, and grounds you where your true power lies. Wow. That's very powerful. Incredible stuff. I mean, let's all go out and start crystallizing. How do you know your intentions if you don't have a crystal? How do you even intend to buy a crystal without a crystal that would set your intention to buy the crystal? It's crystals all the way down, Emily. My number is 63, which is a percentage.

46:13And while Emily is talking about the olds, I'm going to talk about the youngs. I'm going to talk about 18 to 26-year-olds, specifically Japanese 18 to 26-year-olds. 63 % of them have not had a drink in the past six months. Not even a beer. 63%. Wow. I was reading recently in America, many people are drinking less, but not to that extent. Many people are drinking less, but it's not like a majority of people are drinking nothing. No. That's great. They'll be healthier. Yeah. Well done, Japanese people. This is bad for the Japanese beer companies, but good for the Japanese general metabolism. And considering the demographics in Japan, they need those young people really badly.

46:54They can't afford pet drinking problems. Stay healthy, youngs in Japan. But why is it like that there? I mean, is there something going on that explains this? We're just going to have to send you to Japan to find out. I would like to find out. If we have any listeners in Japan and you want to like, you know, send us an email, slatemoneyatslate.com saying, I would totally pay for a ticket to a Slate Money live show in Tokyo. We'll fly out. I thought you were going to ask them to explain why 60, what is it, 63 % of young people aren't drinking, but no. Is there a reason? Let us know. Slatemoneyatslate.com.

47:31Otherwise, thanks very much for listening. Thank you to Shana Roth and Jessamyn Molly and Merit Jacob for doing all the wonderful behind-the-scenes work that makes this whole show possible. And all month, if you join Slate Plus in Apple Podcasts, you can get an Apple-exclusive two-week-long free trial. Just press Try Free at the top of the Slate Money show page in the app. If you are a subscriber, thank you very much for subscribing. and we have a Slate Plus segment coming up for you on... Zuckerberg vs. Zuckerberg. It's not a divorce. It's something else. Zuckerberg vs. Zuckerberg. The defining lawsuit of our age.

48:10So that's for you special people. Otherwise, we will see you next week with more Slate Money.

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