The Legacy of “Tim Apple”

0:07Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of a week that was dominated actually in many ways by a man named RFK Jr. who we're going to talk about in a couple of different contexts on this show. Do not be put off. It's a fun show. So I am Felix Zaman of Bloomberg. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios.

0:31Felix Salmon: Hello, hello. With Elizabeth Spires of the New York Times. Hello. And we are going to talk about Tim Cook. That's the main segment. We need to talk about the legacy of Tim Cook and what he meant for America and for gay CEOs and for China and for various different things. He has announced that he is stepping down as CEO, although he is still going to be sticking around. We are going to talk about peptides. This is the first time that RFK Jr. pops up in this show because he wants to make it easier for compounding pharmacies, make and sell these things that the tech pros and various other people are very much into, even though there's no real pinnacle data supporting the claims that are being made for them.

1:11Emily, who's going to join us on that one?

1:14Felix Salmon: Our special guest, Felix, is Adriel Bettelheim. He's the senior health care editor at Axios. He is great. He is going to be joining us from a basement in the capital somewhere. We are also going to talk about The Onion and Global Tetrahedron buying Infowars.com. We have a numbers segment, which RFK Jr. has another surprise appearance in. It's a great show this week, so stay tuned to Slate Honey.

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3:41Terms and more at apple.co slash applecardbenefits. All right, guys, let's talk about the beginning of the end of the Tim Cook era. This is one of the most iconic CEOs in the world, which is not really what we all expected when he took over from Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was this incredible charismatic leader who changed the planet and then this like great guy who was very into ops took over and had very little charisma or name recognition and then he proceeds to run the company and invent basically nothing but like somewhere along the line he became a sort of hero of business and now he has done the thing that great CEOs love to do and I have complained about many times on this show in the past which is keep all of the power with none of the responsibility and give himself this glorious job of executive chairman which is a contradiction in terms and he's handed over the reins but we should just take a minute here to just sort of look back on the Tim Cook reign at Apple because the two numbers that really jumped out at me when I looked at this was the profits at Apple have gone up about eightfold since he joined, which is amazing.

5:10The stock price has gone up about tenfold, which means that the, you know, the multiple has grown, that the stock market expects more growth from Apple now that it's a$4 trillion company than it did back when it was a$350 billion company. Even though it kind of seems sometimes that there are no new worlds to conquer and that Apple has basically managed to do about as well as it could possibly do, but there's not a lot of obvious growth strategies or new products or anything down the pike, we are still expecting a more glorious future. Like if you look at the stock market valuation and multiples now than we were when he took over.

5:53And that just boggles my mind. You know, I think of Tim Cook as a kind of foil to an Elon Musk style CEO where a lot of the shareholder perception of the value of the CEO is very vibes based. With Tim Cook, he does this sort of boring operational stuff that you do to make a business grow. You know, he moved a lot of the operations to China, which has been enormously instrumental for them. He opened over 200 retail stores all over the world. And, you know, he sort of would find these areas for improvement that are not very sexy, but they're things that, you know, do help the bottom line and help with growth and marketing.

6:30And he also just didn't need to be the sort of in the middle of the spotlight kind of CEO the way that Jobs was because he was so charismatic and he just sort of instantly drew that kind of attention. He seemed to be very comfortable being in the background. And I think it shielded him from a lot of distractions and a lot of scrutiny.

6:50Felix Salmon: Also, he was good at managing President Trump. Yes. In fact, earlier this week, Trump truthed about Tim Apple. And it's really kind of a remarkable truth. It's a remarkable truth. It's a remarkable truth. He says, he talks about the first time Tim Cook, who he calls Tim Apple, called him and he said, And in the truth, he says, when I got the call, I said, wow, it's Tim Apple. It's Tim Apple calling. How big is that? I was very impressed with myself. Calling to, in Trump's word, kiss my ass. I was very impressed with myself to have the head of Apple calling to kiss my ass. And I think it's just a very.

7:32Sometimes the amount of like self-knowledge that Trump displays is kind of impressive. Yeah. I wouldn't call that self-knowledge. I would say unwittingly projecting his inferiority complex.

7:45Felix Salmon: It seems like he is literally truthing on truth social. Like this is the truth. This is the truth. He was impressed that the CEO of Apple called him. Here he is, the leader of the free world. He's, oh my God, a CEO is calling me. Wow, I must be important. But I think a little bit goes back to what Elizabeth was saying, which is like, yeah, Tim Cook wasn't a flashy CEO like looking to market himself. I mean, Steve Jobs, I guess he was, yes, he was charismatic, but part of it was like he was a marketing guy and like he needed to drum up a lot of attention and excitement about Apple in a way that Tim Cook really didn't need to.

8:20Felix Salmon: Like he was running a very big profitable company and we're all walking around with Apple products in our pockets. I was just listening to the Les Culturistas podcast with Bo and Yang and Matt Rogers, and they had Lena Dunham on. And they started off their conversation talking about an Apple event that they had all attended together, mentioning Tim Cook by name and talking about some picture of Lena Dunham and Tim Cook together. Like he achieved celebrity, I think simply because, you know, he's running a company that everyone is really interested in and has like a personal relationship with. And that counts for Donald Trump's excitement and Lena Dunham's excitement as well.

9:00People really love the products, which when you contrast that would say the number of people who complain about having to use Microsoft Teams or products from other tech companies. Apple has this sort of funny niche where people like the products because they're good tech products, but they also occupy a kind of cultural space because of the design. People consider them kind of prestige products. They're fashionable, visible. They have a distinct branding design that's been copied by so many other companies. It's like cultural capture in addition to just people thinking that the products are technologically better.

9:36Felix Salmon: And yet, like all the stories about Cook's departure were like, they haven't done anything with AI. They're falling behind on AI. What are they doing about AI? And like the new guy. Yes, I want them to fall behind on AI. That's my own bias. I'm like, Apple is known for coming in late, swooping in late on a technology and then cornering it like with the iPod, for example. Like there were lots of MP3 players before the iPod came out. I remember sitting through some like exhausting Microsoft presentation for its Zune, I want to say it was called. And it was just like so awful and complicated. And then, yeah, and then Apple swooped in with the iPod or Apple swooped in with the iPhone when we're all using trying to move to smartphones or even the AirPods.

10:21Felix Salmon: You could make an argument that they swooped in late and cornered that market, too. That's partly because they understand that their competitive advantage is being really good at hardware. With the exception of iOS, they haven't really tried to conquer the software market. So it kind of makes sense that they wouldn't prioritize AI, at least not early. i i think the new ceo is going to be under pressure to do that but he's also he is a hardware guy he was running you know yeah i think they know where their bread is buttered yeah the thing that he like the reason why tim cook got the job is because like he was good at the ops and he was able to create this incredible supply chain mostly from china which would supply the world with billions of iPhones, which is a really, really gnarly difficult task, especially given where China was 20 years ago when Tim Cook started doing this.

11:13The new guy has possessed his hardware, and his main claim to fame is he created in-house chips that do amazing things. Apple no longer has to rely on Motorola chips or Intel chips or anyone else's chips. It makes its own chips. And that's another massive, quite boring thing. But it's so important to the economics of Apple and to the vertical integration of Apple. And in that sense, I think this swap changeover is kind of similar to the Jobs to Cook changeover. The one thing we should talk about briefly, though is patrick mcgee who wrote apple in china had a offend in new york times basically saying like the single most important thing that tim cook did was not really anything about apple's share price or its phones or you know his ability to phone up donald trump he basically created the chinese middle classes and he turned china into the global superpower that it is today and mcgee frames this as being bad for america and this is like a bad thing and this is like a you know staying on cook's copy book as it were but i think this is a great thing the fact that he was able to create so much wealth and knowledge and sophistication in china i like you know he's improved so many lives hundreds of millions of people's lives even when none of them have an iPhone or have an Apple product.

12:53And I think that's kind of awesome. You know, I haven't read the book Apple in China, so I hope I'm not oversimplifying his argument. But it does seem to be contingent upon the idea that the alternative would have been to do all this stuff in the US, which we've already demonstrated that we cannot do in a way that's actually profitable. So I don't know what the alternative would have been other than, you know, offshoring somewhere that's not China? Well, I think that what he's saying is that the way that Tim Cook managed to solve the supply chain problem in a company that has historically, as I say, been very vertically integrated was to basically make the decision that a huge amount of the manufacturing they were actually going to outsource to Foxconn and various other companies.

13:40And what that did was it gave a bunch of very sophisticated manufacturing know-how to those companies. And basically, I think, and to China in particular, which could then use that manufacturing know-how in a bunch of other contexts and did and was very successful in doing so. And so I think the alternative would have been to be much more selfish about the know-how and the intellectual property and keeping things more in-house and trying to stop it from leaking out. But yeah, as Emily says, I don't think Apple has been that amazingly innovative that it could keep that. Every time Steve Jobs would come out and say, I've just invented Wi-Fi and this is amazing.

14:26Or we have patents on the noise cancelling in our AirPods and no one else can do that. Then everyone else comes out and does it five minutes later. I don't think you can firewall knowledge in that way. And I think it was always inevitable that China was going to get this knowledge and was going to bridge it.

14:44Felix Salmon: Yeah, but some of the arguments he made in the New York Times piece that we read, I thought was really interesting. I mean, some of it is a lot like any other sort of China hawk arguing that we don't want this country to become more powerful because they're the United States top rival. And just anything that makes them stronger is like de facto bad. That seemed to be part of the argument. And then the other part that I thought was more interesting or more nuanced or whatever was like in the U.S., Tim Cook, I wouldn't call him a social activist CEO, but he was, you know, he was outspoken. He was, I think, the first CEO to come out as gay of a Fortune 500 company.

15:20Felix Salmon: I think I'm right about that. And, you know, he's outspoken on various civil rights issues in the U.S. But when it comes to China, hands off. If China wants certain things out of the App Store, it takes it out of the App Store. If Chinese government wants data, it gives it data. It does the same in the United States. Yeah. I think the real question here is the degree to which Apple needs to behave as a national champion of the United States as opposed to like a global company. Yes. And in my mind, Apple is a global company. And if it winds up benefiting hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens rather than American citizens, like that is what global companies do.

16:00And I'm not going to get upset about that.

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19:31And who doesn't love making room for something new too. Download the Depop app and list your first item today. Okay, so I want to move on to peptides. Emily, what is the news on peptides and who is the single person who can tell us what the hell is going on?

19:53Felix Salmon: Well, the news right now is that RFK Jr., who is in charge of the country's health for reasons, is willing to lead this push to loosen regulations on peptides, which are, I learned this, short chains of amino acids that are too short to be proteins. Huh? Huh? That people really, really super, super like right now. Emily has a PhD in biology now. It's amazing. Yes, I read a New Yorker article. But because I'm pushing up against the limits of my science, knowledge, and PhD, we have the wonderful Adriel Bettelheim here from Axios. to really explain to us what peptides are, what the hell is happening, and I'll just leave it to you.

20:37Felix Salmon: So, Adriel, welcome. You are in a basement of the Capitol somewhere. You are reporting live from... Are you hiding from RFK Jr.? He's not here. I'm in a utility room, and there's a lovely collection of paints, a lot of beiges, some off-whites. So it's quite a scene. It's the full range of colors seen in Trump's cabinet. it so yeah i like emily i'm an instant phd in biology who knows roughly five minutes worth of reading on this i did learn that insulin is a peptide all of the glp ones that we've been taking as mpick and wagabee and those lot they're all peptides but then there's a whole bunch of other peptides that have not gone through clinical trials and a bunch of like bros in Silicon Valley and the various other people are taking, mostly imported from China.

21:31And there are two problems here, as I understand it. One is that no one has a clue what is in these vials that get imported from China. And the other one is that no one has a clue whether these peptides are even safe, even if they are perfectly pure. And the administration seems to be trying to solve the first without solving the second. Well, I mean, I think it's part of their bigger push for alternative treatments. And what they say they're doing is trying to unshackle these increasingly popular injections that, as you say, seems to be very popular with the tech bros, but with all the social media influencers and all the direct-to-consumer channels, it's spreading.

22:15And what they seem to say is that we're going to now convene an expert panel in July to talk about giving these things some sort of a market status. This is after the Biden administration put them off limits to pharmacies in 2023. So part of this is the reversal of a Biden restriction. And part of this, the administration says, is trying to do some controlled access to what's now a Wild West black market, whatever the word you want to choose. So tell us a little bit about the status quo pre-23. I mean, obviously, Andrew Huberman was not plugging these things on this podcast back then, so that the amount of demand for them was much lower.

22:55But were they being made sort of in good labs in America that people could trust? You know, there are a lot of naturally occurring peptides. There's been a lot of study in them going back decades. And some of them have been shown to work in animals to do things like to control inflammation, to heal tissue. But as you know, there's a big difference between animal studies and healing injuries in laboratory mice and in people. And we just really don't know if these things work. And as you said, I mean, the most well-known peptides is the GLP-1 drugs. That's the P in GLP-1s, but those have been vetted in clinical trials and approved by the FDA.

23:40These other ones, hundreds of them, have not been tested, have not been evaluated. People don't know if they work in people, in humans. And like you say, when they're coming from so many different channels, you don't know if there's contaminants like lead. It's sort of your classic importation problem. What's creating this demand for them right now? Other than Andrew Huberman. Well, this is kind of a wellness craze, partly stoked by the post-pandemic medical freedom kind of ethic where everyone sort of wants to create their own adventure. Everyone wants to be beautiful. Everyone wants to live forever.

24:20And many of these amino acids are being pitched for those uses, even though there's no use case for them. And there are now, as I understand it, like peptide raves in San Francisco. People are taking multiple injections of different ones, four or five at a time. And, you know, part of the concern from physicians that we talk to is that, you know, you kind of pancake one on top of another. You don't know what type of effects that has. You don't know how they interact if you're taking like a prescription drug. So it's a real going down a dark tunnel of unknowns. And it's just, it seems to be stoked partly by social media influence, partly by the cool factor.

25:00And now if the FDA is giving it, you know, some sort of a semi-legal or legal veneer, then it really takes off. The idea, just to be clear, is they will be legal but not approved, right? They will be like, you can buy these things a bit like you can buy any supplements at your local vitamin shop, but they're not going to be approved for prescription by doctors to treat certain things. I think the first step is that they're going to let compounding pharmacies make them, synthesize them in large numbers. That was the prohibition that Biden put on about two dozen of them in 2023. So there's a long rulemaking process, as you know, with all of these things.

25:43And nobody really knows how they'll be regulated. They may find like this middle ground where they regulate them like supplements, which is sort of like you don't have to be subjected to rigorous trials, but you also can only make certain claims about the therapeutic benefits. Or they may not. You know, it's sort of subject to speculation. But since Kennedy has said he's taken them and he's benefited from them as recently as last week on Joe Rogan's podcast, one can assume that there'll be some liberalized access.

26:13Felix Salmon: One thing that really struck me reading all the prep and becoming a science PhD last night was how, like you mentioned, Adriel, the pandemic and how that's made people more like, I want my medical freedom. I want to take my ivermectin, whatever. But there's also this amazing impact that the GLP-1s have had where they've done a few things. We've talked about sort of their effect on like the food industry and social relationships and all of this. But like they've also gotten people used to the idea of injecting themselves with things. That's now just like, yeah, that's what you do to take your Wagovir or your Ozempic.

26:47Felix Salmon: And two, they've gotten people, and Tina Reid makes this point in her piece for Axios, which I thought was really good. They've gotten people used to going outside of the official medical system to get their prescription drugs. They go to Roe or they go to HIMS or HERS. You chat with a doctor and you get your prescription. You pay a few hundred dollars. like people have gotten used to that. All of that together combines to make people more receptive. And the GLP-1s, they do work and they are clinically proven. So people have that like baseline and all of that sort of combines to make you more receptive to the idea that there are other kinds of peptides that you would inject that would be just as miraculous.

27:28And at the same time, I just want to sort of jump in here and say the flip side of the coin is that we are living in this world of broadly growing mistrust in institutions where, you know, the fact that something has gone through clinical trials and has been improved by the FDA and all the rest of it is not only something I don't particularly care about, but I think that might even go to first to say is it's something that people mistrust and actively like want to run away from. I think all true. I mean, it is just the way that treatments are being distributed, the way that people are accessing things.

28:05It's just, you know, a lot of the old lines are coming down and the direct-to-consumer movement is strong. The social media influencers are influential. And the telehealth is sort of supercharging all of that to the point where, you know, you put a couple of clicks and you get this wonderful injection that's going to, you know, heal your torn ligament and make you look beautiful too. And then you add the wellness clinics, the longevity clinics that are going to be peddling this. And it really is kind of a multifaceted phenomenon if people are convinced this will really help them. And to your point about GLP-1s, I mean, those keep being, they find new uses for them.

28:45It's not just for obesity and diabetes anymore, but potentially Alzheimer's disease and dementia. What I'd love to do, Andrew, let's just ask you to sort of extrapolate forward a little into what happens if we enter a much more libertarian world when it comes to drugs. One of the things that I think about quite a lot is the fact that mRNA vaccines for COVID were developed in less than a week. we sequenced the the covid genome and we created the vaccine and then it took you know a couple of years to go through all the clinical trials and to get them approved and to make sure they did what they were supposed to do and didn't do what they weren't supposed to do and then they got rolled out and did wonderful things but there was that very long and painful period in the middle and you know i kind of think to myself like if those had just been rolled out and i could have like injected myself with an mRNA COVID vaccine after three weeks after COVID was discovered.

29:49Maybe I would have done that. I think a lot of people would have done that. And I think arguably many, many lives might have been saved. Would that have been a terrible idea? You know, you have to dial back the clock to how little, you know, that was a very novel treatment, right? It had never been deployed on a wide scale. So I think the medical community, You know, wanted some proof in the pudding. But yeah, I mean, as we learned, it did save lives. It did save hundreds of millions, potentially, of more serious infections and maybe help keep people from being set up for long COVID. So, yeah, I mean, there is, you know, sort of an argument for liberalized access.

30:29And, you know, with the FDA in the shape that they're in right now with depleted staff and giving priority vouchers to certain products they deem, you know, in line with the administration's priorities, the calculus is shifting a great deal. Where this all ends up, you know, I hate to say it, but a lot of this may end up in the courts. It may end up being a huge liability issue. So people start taking these things, injecting themselves through these things, and there's some contaminants and there's some awful thing that's going to happen. And then somebody is going to haul off and sue someone.

31:03Is it the telehealth company? Is it the compounding pharmacy? Is it the FDA that approve it? I don't know. But I think if I were to point to one place where this might get sorted out a bit or not, it's probably there's going to be some serious liability concerns as this goes forward. How much of this is really driven by the difficulty and expense of our current healthcare system? Because especially with the rise of compounding pharmacies, I think a lot of people have turned to that because buying a Zedberg even with insurance is so expensive and the compounded versions are so much cheaper. How much of that is just driven by people looking for alternatives where it's not as complex to get access to these drugs and it's cheaper?

31:45Yeah, well, I mean, what's interesting about this, certainly with the GLP-1s, I mean, a lot of that was cash pay because the insurance coverage has been, you know, really spotty, including Medicare. So I don't know. I mean, it sounds like the tech bros we've been talking about in San Francisco and some of the other people, you know, this sort of makes the case for just paying out of pocket and bypassing the insurance, the gatekeepers, you know, give me a user case for this prior authorization, whatever. So that's another cap coming out of the bag. it definitely puts pressure the more popular these things get on the insurers to cover them but then put limits on for what and it's still a kind of a wild west whatever the administration says what order they're putting into it you know the hall payer equation the regulatory equation i don't know but maybe you're right that some people are doing it to kind of become immortal ward off chronic diseases that are going to drain their pockets, maybe that's driving some of it too.

32:46One of the interesting wrinkles here is that unlike WaggaVee and Asempic and Zerbound, which are owned by these big, you know, by Nova Nordisk or Eli Lilly, the peptides that we're talking about here are basically unpatentable. They've been around forever. They're part of the prior art. No company is able to come in and get a patent on them. And if you're not able to come in and get a patent on it, then you have absolutely no reason to do any kind of clinical trial, because a clinical trial might prove that it works. But then if it works, anyone can make it and you can't make your monopoly money.

33:24So is there any hope at all? I mean, let's just assume that one or two of these things really do work. Is there any kind of pathway to trialing them? Who would pay for that? I could see a business argument for customizing them. If, let's say, as you say, one of the real popular ones, you know, the one that's a gastric juice derivative that's supposed to be for inflammation. Every time I read gastric juice, I just... Well, it's derived, you know. But we've been putting botulism in our foreheads for years. Like, gastric juice is nothing. So let's say that works. There's this whole push now for customized medicine, personalized medicine with prescription drugs.

34:02So, I mean, you could see that product being customized for someone who's got diabetes or for someone hypoglycemic or someone who's got some other set of chronic problems for a senior citizen, maybe. So I do think there's like a market for continuing to customize, tweak them, take this peptide and then add something that makes it coexist with the three drugs you're taking. And that itself then becomes kind of a piece of intellectual property. Or at least, you know, the compounding pharmacy can say this is a unique, distinct thing from the regular off-the-shelf peptide. And then if that goes through trials and gets clinically approved, then that's a kind of implicit approval of the peptide itself.

34:48Because if that's safe, then the ingredients are safe. Yeah, I mean, in a backdoor way, that could validate perhaps the case. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're all kind of projecting three, five years out. But sure, I mean, everyone wants personalized cures. And that definitely applies to prescription drugs and such. So you could see if these things really take off, it could become something that a drug company would be very interested in customizing. I think they could also just be treated like supplements. You know, the people are interested in peptides that are coming out of the fitness community in particular seem to view peptides as a kind of safer alternative to steroids.

35:23But also, they are accustomed to evaluating supplement products based on third-party testing or NSF certification, which is what supplement companies have to have in order for pro athletes to use them. Could you see a pathway like that where these peptide companies just decide to forego FDA approval generally and treat it like a supplement? Yeah, I mean, I don't think they're going to need full FDA approval. I don't think it'll ever come to the point where these are subjected to the same, you know, rigor as a prescription drug or something like that. No way. It's very hard to say because we don't know, you know, what the next administration is going to do.

36:00We still have three years of a Trump administration. But if, say, you know, a Biden-esque or an Obama-esque administration were to come in down the road and throw up the gates again and say you can't manufacture these things, you could have these pendulum swings changing the market. So it would be a kind of an issue at this point, almost putting the genie back in the bottle since the demand is being stoked since there's product coming in from China, all sorts of back channels, too. Adriel, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for squirreling down in the bowels of the Capitol. I feel like I'm getting a view into how the sausage is made here.

36:37Can I get you some paint? I'll take the eggshell. Thank you. Get you a can go. No, thanks for having me. It's been great. You're a complete star. We really, really appreciate it. Thanks, guys. Take care.

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37:38For instance, there's an episode with Marlene Engelhorn, which is called The Only Honest Philanthropy Abolishes Itself. I like that idea. And there's another one with Nikki Marin-Bajana saying, how do we break the fake rules of a broken immigration system? Basically, there's a bunch of conventions and actual laws governing charitable institutions, and some of them make no sense. To listen to Break Fake Rules, search for Break Fake Rules in your podcast app. That's Break Fake Rules.

38:13Slate Money is sponsored this week by Upwork, which is a service that you can use to make your business grow. Scaling a business takes expertise, and it takes expertise at the right time. Upwork makes it easy to hire specialized freelancers quickly, so you can get that expertise you need right now. Now, Upwork is a one-stop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across web and software development, data and analytics, marketing, business operations, you name it. With Business Plus, you can access the top 1 % of talent on Upwork. And with AI-powered shortlisting, you'll get matched to the right freelancer in under six hours.

38:57No endless searching required. It's free to sign up, and posting a job is easy. So visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That is Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's U-P-W-O-R-K dot com, Upwork.com. Okay, and then we should talk as well, because this is like an awesome podcast where we jump all over the place, about the latest iteration of The Onion vs. Infowars, which I love this story so much. Alex Jones, terrible man, conspiracy theorist, lost a court case and declared bankruptcy and had to give up his assets to the court. His assets include Infowars.com.

39:45And so now the assets have to be disposed of in a way so as to maximally benefit the Sandy Hook families and the people who have the judgment against him. There was an auction for Infowars.com. The Sandy Hook families and various other people said, yeah, we want this to go to The Onion because obviously that's just like the best possible outcome. But Alex Jones appealed and won on appeal because the judge basically said, yeah, no, we really need to care mostly about the finances here rather than about the vibes. So the whole sale to The Onion was put off pending like a second auction. And now The Onion has said, well, listen, while we're waiting for this second auction to happen, can we just run Infowars anyway?

40:27We will lease it off you at$81 ,000 a month. And they seem to have an agreement to do this. And I love that idea too. It's such a hilarious and weird story. I co-founded a newsroom in Texas and we bid on it too. But our bid was much smaller. How much did you bid? I think we bid 400K. We did a fundraising appeal around it. We were hoping to gather more money before we had to submit the bid. But part of it, when the assets went into bankruptcy, they separated out the supplement business from the media business. And so the supplement business is, as far as I know, it's still in receivership. And that's primarily how Alex Jones made his money, you know, stoking fear and then selling you prepper equipment.

41:09Yeah. The media assets were for people who are actually shopping for something that might have value. Like, I think less important than the business of selling supplements. You can only sell supplements if you have a media channel through which to do so, right? Well, I think they had distribution partnerships elsewhere, too, because they had proprietary products. But regardless, I do think this is a genius way to thread the needle in the meantime. It also sort of gives the Onion an opportunity to kind of just see if this works and see if they can monetize it before they have to commit to paying a much larger amount to acquiring it, if that's what they end up doing.

41:45Felix Salmon: I mean, I don't really understand why Felix loves this story. I And it's good marketing for The Onion. And of course, Alex Jones did bad. He perpetuated the conspiracy theory that Sandy Hook was staged. I don't even know what the conspiracy theory is, but it led to those poor parents getting called and harassed. I mean, just truly the most terrible things you could ever imagine. So good on The Onion for like doing what? Taking over the site and making it funny. It's a very unconventional way to deal with the bankruptcy situation. yeah yes to answer emily's question one of the reasons i love this story is because it is in a weird way a perfectly conventional way to deal with the bankruptcy situation the assets of the bankrupt entity get sold off to the highest bidder and in this case global tetrahedron which is you know the owner of the onion it's like we want to be the highest bidder and the other thing i like about it is the global tetrahedron you know does it want revenues yes does it like making money yes but ultimately this is just you know it's the twilio founder right it's the jeff what's his face from twilio who you know is by the standards of silicon valley rich people he's not amazingly rich but he's rich enough to go out and have fun doing things like setting up a company called global tetrahedron and buying the onion and trying to buy info wars and like enjoying himself in the media world and i'm like good on you mate they had like a parody article where they said the info wars of tomorrow will converge into a swirling vortex of content about content and talent acquiring talent which i really liked content about content i mean like who who does not love content about content i was like that's my job that's slate money maybe they should buy slate money content about content content about content we're good at that their publication has done decently well like they which is they're bringing print back like everything they do people like no There's very few people who don't like what The Onion is doing.

43:51Especially when they don't have that kind of founder CEO guy who's like, I need to make money from this.

43:56Felix Salmon: Yeah, they're just doing it for the love of the game. It's like cards against humanity, you know? It's like, well, you know, we might make money or we might lose money, but mainly we just want to have fun doing this. And here at Slate Money, we approve of companies and businesses that don't care about money. We're going to antagonize the bad people with comedy.

44:32We should have a numbers round. Emily, do you have a number?

44:36Felix Salmon: I have a number. All right. I feel like your number is going last in that case. We're going to save Emily's number for last. Elizabeth, do you have a number? Yeah, my number is 18 million, and that's the number of people who have been scanned by Sam Altman's orb technology. WorldCoin? Is that it? Yeah. Although now it's not. They dropped the coin and now it's just called World something. Scanned or scammed? Scanned, but maybe scammed too. How does it scan you? So they have a partnership with Tinder now. So that if you want to just demonstrate that you're an actual human being on Tinder and you scan your iris and you use this to verify your profile on Tinder, they'll give you five free boosts where they elevate your profile so more people see it.

45:23Felix Salmon: So they scan your eyeball, that's what it does? The idea behind WorldCoin and the whole thing was basically, yeah, they scan your eyeball and that proves that you're you. And so now you can use your eyeball to prove identity. and that was linked to some coin and now it's just linked to private key on the blockchain yeah and now and now i guess if i want the person i hooked up with on tinder to be the person they say they are they can prove that by having their eyeballs scanned aren't there other ways to prove who you say you are it's a surprisingly difficult thing you know on the internet no one knows you're a dog this whole thing is that well then you can do it without having to submit your government id for validation.

46:04You can just use your private key that's, you know, and blockchain. Blockchain is going to change dating.

46:10Felix Salmon: Do you think people want to date someone who's not willing to share their government ID? Like it seems like. No, but I would actively not want to date someone who had had their eyeball scanned. It's complicated. It's complicated. My number is$10 billion, which is the number of dollars that SpaceX, XAI, whatever this weird company that Elon is taking public, will pay to Cursor, which is a company it wants to buy, if it ends up not buying it. It's basically a breakup fee for a merger that has not been announced. The Financial Times called it among the largest termination fees in history. So basically, SpaceX wants to buy Cursor, but it can't because it's going public and there's too many moving parts right now.

46:59So instead, what it's done is it has bought the option to buy Cursor for$60 billion in the future. And then if it doesn't go ahead and exercise that option, it needs to pay$10 billion, which is an insane breakup fee. That is just like, I don't, I think it, I can't remember any breakup fee being anywhere near that high, but that's just an example of how numbers have just stopped meaning anything anymore.

47:24Felix Salmon: Do they think it's definitely going to happen? Is that why they feel confident with such a big breakup fee? I don't understand. Yeah, there's no, I don't think there's going to be any kind of antitrust risk or anything like that. So I feel like they feel like as long as they have$60 billion to spend on this, and I'm sure they can pay it in equity or whatever, then, yeah, why would they not? Cursor is basically a company that helps engineers fix their code. So it's a direct competitor to Claude Code. Okay. Anyway, Emily. Did someone say something about Fuzzy Math? Is that your number? My number is 600, Felix.

47:58Oh.

47:59Felix Salmon: 600%. 600%. Oh, my God. I love this story. This story is so great. Okay, so speaking of RFK Jr., he was in Congress earlier this week and he was testifying and Elizabeth Warren had him up against the wall or whatever. Just like, really, we do not need that image. We do not. Sorry. Elizabeth Warren was questioning him about President Trump claiming that he has gotten a reduction of 600 % on some drugs, a cost reduction of 600%. And she's like, that's not a thing. You can't reduce the cost of something by 600%. As listeners of Slate Money, who I imagine are quite numerate, know, like 100 % is the most you can reduce the cost of something goes to zero.

48:41Felix Salmon: So but then - I guess you could pay people to take the drugs. So then RFK Jr. says - Are you going to quote? Because the quote is just so amazing. He says, President Trump has a different way of calculating. I mean, he does. Because if you have a$600 drug and you reduce it to$10, that's a 600 % reduction. Sir, no, it's not a 600 % reduction. The quote itself. That is the quote. If you have a$600 drug and you reduce it to$10, he said, that's a 600 % reduction, I'm quoting. I mean, that's a 90%. Yeah. It's a 98 % reduction. Wasn't there like a beginning of the quote? He was like, if it goes up from 100 to 600, then that's a 500 % increase.

49:23So therefore, if it goes down from 600 to 100, it must be a 500 % decrease.

49:27Felix Salmon: Yes, Felix. Later, the next day, he doubles down. He is in the Oval Office. He is among a few men standing behind President Trump. He doubles down. He tells the story. He says, I was on Capitol Hill and a senator was grilling me. And the senator, he doesn't say Warren, was saying it was mathematically impossible to have a drug drop by 600%. And she does have a PhD. And then RFK Jr. says, quote, well, if the drug was$100 and it raises to$600, that would be a 600 % rise. I'm interjecting, no, it would not. No, it would not. It would be a 500 % rise, but never mind. Then he says, and so, quote, if it drops from 600 to 100, that's a 600 % savings.

50:11Felix Salmon: Reader, it is not. Listener, it is not. And everyone behind him, all the dudes nodding, President Trump, exactly, he says. I want you to tell me that like Scott Bessent was there nodding, going, yeah, this is making perfect sense. I don't remember who was behind him nodding, but everyone was nodding. It was incredible. President Trump was like, yeah, duh. And I think we need more math instruction in the country. This administration makes me think that we should have basic, you know, tests for cabinet members and presidents. And they should include basic civics, basic math, and maybe cognitive tests, like generally, you know, just minimum.

50:49Felix Salmon: And I say I was a little bit sympathetic because I'm a word type person. And I unfortunately have to write about business and finance. I'm constantly like, wait, what percent did this go up? I'm constantly struggling to figure out the percents. I spoke to a colleague, I won't name them, who was like, yeah, I kind of felt this one too, because we're always like, oh my God, did it go down by 50 %? Did it go up by 25 %? Please double check my math. I've had occasions where I ask an editor, double check my percent math, and they cock it up too. So I feel for everyone, but this is not okay. I will say that journalists are notoriously innumerate, but yes.

51:25Can you just please ask Neil and Courtney, who run Access Macro, the next time they interview Scott Besson, can they just ask him, like, if something goes from 600 to 100, how much is that in percent? Just see what his answer is.

51:40Felix Salmon: They should ask the new guy, Kevin, Kevin Warsh. They could ask my 10-year-old. Because he was on Congress this week at his confirmation hearing, and they were like, who won the 2020 election? He was like, oh, I don't want to get political. But now it's the new political question. It's like, what is one plus one? I don't want to get political. Even math has become political now. Math has become political. So my favorite example of this particular math is the way that the stock price of Avis went up by 600 % and then went down by like 70 % and wound up basically where it started. And that would blow RFK Jr.'s mind.

52:20We are going to talk about that in Slate Plus, which it's a very fun story because short squeeze is a fun. So we're going to talk about the Avis short squeeze in Slate Plus. I hope you subscribe and listen to that. Other than that, that's it for Slate Money this week. It's been a fun one. Thank you for listening. Thank you for emailing us on SlateMoneyAtSlate.com. Thank you to Jessamyn Molly of Seaplane Armada for producing. And we will be back next week with more Slate Money.

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