The Louvre Heist Affair

0:11Emily Peck: Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon from Bloomberg. I am on YouTube in the Bloomberg podcast studios at 731 Lexington Avenue. It's a whole brave new world here. I am joined by Emily Peck of Axios.

0:34Felix Salmon: Hello, hello. I'm here in my home studio from an undisclosed location.

0:38Emily Peck: An undisclosed location, but not far from wasps nests. We're going to talk about that. I am joined by Elizabeth Spires, who's coming from Pokemon Central.

0:50Elizabeth Spiers: Yes, I'm in my son's Pokemon-themed bedroom, which if you go to YouTube, you will see is bright orange.

0:55Emily Peck: Because orange is the color of Pokemon, right?

0:59Elizabeth Spiers: Charizard is orange, and he is the most valuable Pokemon, apparently.

1:04Emily Peck: We are going to talk about the Louvre heist, of course. We have to, and it's awesome. We even have a Slate Plus segment about our favorite heist movies. We are going to talk about the government shutdown, which is another thing that is still going on, and what it means for economic data and whether ADP is screwing the Fed by not sharing their data with the Fed. We are going to talk about how hard AI researchers are working and whether that's a bad thing. It's a good one this week, so I hope you enjoy it. It's all coming up on Slate Money.

1:47Emily Peck: Okay, so obviously, in a world of massive geopolitical trade tensions, where Donald Trump is breaking off trade negotiations with Canada, where there's a summit meeting with President Xi, where there's a war still going on in Ukraine, which everyone's trying to fix, and where we are stuck in the middle of a government blackout, and we don't even know what's happening. in the economy because there's no data. The most important thing in the world is a necklace got stolen from the Louvre.

2:17Felix Salmon: Several necklaces. Several pieces.

2:20Emily Peck: But not the crown.

2:22Felix Salmon: This is the best and chicest news to break in quite some time. We can all admit we woke up or whenever it was on Sunday, you get a news alert, you're braced. Is it war? Is it new tariffs? What is it? It's a heist from the Louvre. It was amazing. It's the highest in the Louvre.

2:40Emily Peck: It's the most iconic crime and it's the most iconic museum in the world. I mean, I think that's fair to say, right?

2:47Felix Salmon: Yes, absolutely. Most visited museum in the world.

2:50Emily Peck: It's like 800 ,000 square feet of exhibition space, which is why, frankly, like everyone's like, oh no, the security camera was pointing in the wrong direction. But like, I do think that it's really hard if you have a museum that's 800 ,000 square feet that gets millions of visitors per year, that by its nature is open to the public. The thieves are robbing it during opening hours, you know, at 930 in the morning when it's already open. I think that, yeah, obviously you don't want this to happen and you want to take precautions to make sure it doesn't happen. But I don't think this is a major, I think that statistically speaking, this kind of thing is going to happen every so often.

3:31Emily Peck: And this is one of those every so often.

3:32Elizabeth Spiers: Yeah, I felt bad for the director who offered to resign and they didn't accept her resignation. But it does seem like there's not much they could have done to prevent it, really.

3:44Emily Peck: Emily's like, well, let me stop you there.

3:47Felix Salmon: I don't disagree that in the grand scheme of things. I mean, I did write down in my little list of talking points, this seems fine. Like they could spare the jewels. Also, they belong to all of France. So why not the French thieves on mopeds? Why can't they have a spin with these jewels for some time? It's their country too, right? We all get a turn.

4:08Elizabeth Spiers: Everyone should be able to borrow the crown jewels every now and then. Exactly.

4:13Emily Peck: Yeah. Okay, so first question, do we think that these were French? Or do we think they were, like, Romanian?

4:19Felix Salmon: I like to think that they're French and, like, very dashing. I'm a little upset that they didn't break into the Louvre during, like, some kind of gala event and wear tuxedos or something, a la Hupen. Exactly.

4:31Emily Peck: Exactly. We want this to be a heist movie. This is why I really love the Ed Caesar New York Times Magazine piece from 2013, which we're going to throw in the show notes, where he's like, yeah, heists are not glamorous, romantic things like Ocean's 8. You know, they are much more just petty thieves with hammers breaking things.

4:54Felix Salmon: But this one, they had a truck with a mechanical ladder, right?

4:58Emily Peck: Oh, by the way, did you see the German company that makes that mechanical ladder is like, if you want things done really quickly and efficiently, use our mechanical ladder.

5:08Felix Salmon: I mean, it's a good ad. It took them, what, seven minutes?

5:11Elizabeth Spiers: And I love the little line underneath that says something like, your Bacher Agile transports your treasures up to 400 kilograms. Quiet as a whisper.

5:24Felix Salmon: And they were so fast. I mean, they set off the alarms, but the security in the Louvre couldn't reach them fast enough or maybe was trying to keep people safe rather than the jewels from the empress, you know, who was married to Napoleon.

5:36Emily Peck: I mean, the reason why we know this was a little bit Keystone Cops and Shambolic was that the prize jewel that they stole, Princess Eugenie's crown, they just kind of dropped on the way out. It got dinged a bit when they dropped it, but I don't think that even managed to leave the building.

5:53Felix Salmon: Right. And one of the stories was like quoting Anthony Roman, a private investigator with art crime experience, which what does that mean? We don't know. Does he experience doing the crime or investigating the crime? I have lots of experience doing art crimes.

6:09Emily Peck: Yeah.

6:10Felix Salmon: But he said, if the thieves are going to drop a crown, they're not pros. I think they are pros because they were like, you got to move fast. If something drops, you just keep going. Like if you stop to pick up the crown, you could get nabbed.

6:23Emily Peck: One of my favorite bits of the discourse around this is shock, horror. The jewels were not insured. It's like, guys, you cannot insure the entire Louvre. That's like not possible. That's like conservatively$100 billion worth of art. Let me just do the math for you here, because if you manage to get a super low insurance premium of like 0.5 % a year, that would be$500 million a year in insurance premiums, which is, you know, these jewels would value that$100 million. But like, even if you could find the $500 million, which you can't, then there's no insurance capacity, the entire insurance capacity in London for this kind of thing is like$4 billion total, you can't insure this, which is why, you know, what the French government says and what all major state museums say is we self-insure.

7:15Emily Peck: And honestly, if you look at the value of stuff that has been stolen from the Louvre over the past 20 or 30 years, it works out to much less than any insurance premium would have been.

7:24Felix Salmon: Does it make more sense if you're going to do a jewelry heist? Is it smarter actually to steal jewels from the Louvre than like your run-of-the-mill jewelry store, which probably has like more elaborate security than the Louvre?

7:39Emily Peck: Well, yes and no. It makes sense to steal jewels from the Louvre, but not for that reason. Louvre security is not quite as bad as people are making out. If it was as bad as people are making out, then we would see many more Louvre heists. But the reason why you want to steal an ancient piece of jewelry rather than a modern piece of jewelry is that all modern jewelry has little microscopic serial numbers, basically, on all of the diamonds. So they will be registered as being stolen. And if any jeweler gets given one of those diamonds, offered to let you, would you like to buy my diamonds, sir? They will see the serial number.

8:19Emily Peck: They will look up the serial number. That will be like, oh, this was stolen from such and such a shop. And then they'll turn you in and get the reward. So one of the great things about the Louvre jewels is that no one has laser etched them with serial numbers.

8:32Elizabeth Spiers: But even then, wouldn't it make sense to steal from, let's say, a slightly more obscure museum than the Louvre? But also in my mind, I'm a James Bond obsessive, so I imagine some scenario where people steal the crown jewels and then secretly sell them to some billionaire who wants to just put them in a room and stare at them and say, I own this for the rest of their lives. But you can't really, it's hard to sell these things, right? It's super hard.

8:59Emily Peck: It's super, super hard to sell these things. Basically, what you need to do, because the jewels are recognizable, what you need to do is find a crooked diamond cutter. Take all of the jewels apart. And the jewels are the French national patrimony. And like, it's the minute you take the jewels apart and melt down the gold, you've destroyed, you know, probably three quarters of the value of the jewels right there, right? Just by ripping it all apart. and then you need to take it to a diamond cutter and get them to like recut the diamonds so they're not recognizably the same diamonds anymore. And then that diamond cutter is going to charge you a fortune because obviously they know where it's all from.

9:35Emily Peck: And so the whole thing is just incredibly economically inefficient. They're destroying a massive amount of value. And no, there aren't a lot of like evil mustache-twirling billionaires out there who are like, I would happily pay you$10 million just to be able to parade around in an emerald necklace. Like, no. This reminds me, by the way, I have to say, little digression here, one of my favorite stories in the art world of all time was when Ileana Sonnabend died, the great art dealer. She owned a Robert Rauschenberg work called Canyon, which is on display at the Museum of Modern Art. And when she died, the IRS wanted to levy an estate tax on the value of that piece.

10:19Emily Peck: The problem is that that piece has a bald eagle on it. And under various bits of law, you're not allowed to sell anything with bald eagles. What? So, yeah, like it's a federal crime. It's a felony to conduct any commerce in stuffed bald eagles or dead bald eagles.

10:36Felix Salmon: Oh, it was an actual real bald eagle. Yeah, exactly. Carry on.

10:40Emily Peck: And so like basically what the estate said was the value of this painting is zero because it is a felony to sell it. We are not allowed to sell it. And what the IRS said was that you could sell it to an evil mustache-twirling Chinese billionaire who would pay you for it, and we're going to charge you estate tax on the value that the evil billionaire would pay. And everyone was like, what? No, this is crazy. But yeah, no, those billionaires don't exist.

11:06Elizabeth Spiers: There was another second-day story that sort of reinforced how much people romanticized art heist. there was a an ap photo of four french policemen and then a random guy standing next to him who

11:18Emily Peck: was wearing a three-piece suit oh my god the fedora guy we love him and he just looked like

11:26Elizabeth Spiers: the platonic ideal of a french investigator detective whatever from the 1950s he is literally

11:34Emily Peck: if you look up the word soignee in the dictionary this guy comes up

11:40Felix Salmon: So my question is then, like, what even is the value of these jewels? Because I mean, all the reporting was they were worth$102 million, but they're not. Because once you take them out of the context of the museum, just like you outlined, Felix, like they have to be broken up, and that's not going to come out to$102 million. So it's almost like things in museums are worth a lot because they're in museums. And once you kind of take them out of museums, it's like the stuff in your grandma's house. You know, it's sentimentally of value, sure. But like no one really can do anything with it.

12:15Emily Peck: As we have discussed on this show, the value of diamonds has been plunging because, you know.

12:20Felix Salmon: Yes.

12:20Emily Peck: Lab-grown diamonds are very good now. And so you can take out all the diamonds, take them to a corrupt diamond cutter, get them recut, sell them. You might be able to get seven figures for them if you're lucky. A lot of the discourse, I mean, it's not very long since we had an entire Slate Money segment on the price of gold. A lot of the discourse is about, well, maybe what they were really after was the gold that they are set in rather than the jewels themselves. And rather than the stones themselves, I should say. and yeah again like this is beautifully beautifully worked high ultra high craftsmanship and they're going to take all of that and just melt it down and be like oh yeah we can sell this gold for four thousand dollars an ounce it's depressing and sad it is not like romantic and sexy i did

13:08Felix Salmon: have a few other hot takes okay um there was were like a list of examples in one of the stories like These heists happen often. These museums aren't being kept up. They're not safe. They're not well-staffed enough. And I was like, is the Louvre heist like a signal of the demise of liberal democracies and neoliberalism? I don't know. We're letting our precious, you know, souvenirs. They're just souvenirs, right? Be stolen and squirreled away and like leaving the front door open to our museums. Like it's all falling apart. That was one of my hot takes.

13:44Emily Peck: I'm going to come back to that one and say the golden era of heists was much more the 60s and 70s than it is right now. And I think that museums in general are much, much more secure than they were. And actually, liberal democracy has done quite a good job of protecting our cultural patrimony compared to 50 or 60 years ago.

14:05Elizabeth Spiers: Maybe not the White House, but otherwise.

14:07Felix Salmon: Yes, exactly. On the heels of the White House just being knocked down half of it or something. I'm not paying attention to that because it's like too much to bear. East Wing is gone.

14:16Elizabeth Spiers: Who cares? It was built by Teddy Roosevelt in 1902.

14:20Felix Salmon: Yeah.

14:20Emily Peck: That's cultural patrimony.

14:22Felix Salmon: Yeah. So everything's falling apart and crumbling. That's the hot take. Okay. That's the hot take. That I'm weekly standing by. Okay. The other one is that museums are one of our few remaining tactile places. It's as everything has moved online, we can still go to a museum and see things in real life in person. And that is important. That's my second hot take. It's a little more lukewarm, I think.

14:43Emily Peck: Yeah, that's a lukewarm take. And I hope that you are correct about that. I would like to believe that you are correct about that. I do worry about the way in which museums are virtualizing themselves and insisting on putting video screens in places and the rise. Well, I mean, I'm taking some solace in the fact that the sort of project art onto screens museums, the Hall de Lumière or Super Blue or, you know, like Refik Anadol and this kind of stuff seems to have had its moment and is in the past now more than in the future. People got very excited about it for a minute like four or five years ago, and it doesn't seem to have fulfilled the hopes that people had.

15:32Emily Peck: And I do really hope that nowadays we are back, we are going back to a world where people would much rather go and see, you know, a Van Gogh painting in person than to go see like the immersive Van Gogh show. So maybe you're right. I will sign on to your lukewarm take.

15:50Felix Salmon: Yay. Oh, and the third thing, not really a hot take, just a point to make, which is that stealing things can make them more valuable. Mona Lisa was stolen. And that was how it became so famous. And that is how it became so famous. So in the long run, who knows how this actually works out. Very soon there could be long lines to see these various jewels back at the Louvre.

16:12Emily Peck: I think that's right. I mean, I have been to the Louvre, you know, a fair number of times over the years. And I have to admit that, yeah, historically, if I'd ever like made it over to the Apollo Gallery, I'd be like, oh, jewels and just like wander on while, you know, looking for a painting somewhere. But probably the next time I go to the Louvre, I'll be like, oh, look, there's the crown they stole.

16:33Felix Salmon: Exactly. The crown they stole is going to be huge. There's going to be big lines for it, Elizabeth, don't you think? Yeah. They'll probably update the little card or whatever they put by the, you know, the displays. And they'll be like, this was dropped by chic thieves on mopeds making their escape.

16:48Emily Peck: In my local art museum when I was growing up, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, there was this very little Rembrandt that was called the Takeaway Rembrandt because it had been stolen like six times.

17:00Felix Salmon: Fun. Did you try and steal it? I could see you as an art thief.

17:03Emily Peck: Yeah, totally. That's my avocation right there.

17:19Emily Peck: let's move on and talk a little bit about this whole shutdown situation because we're what three weeks into it now and no end in sight and my first big question i guess for you elizabeth is Have you noticed any difference? Have you noticed the fact that we don't have a government?

17:39Elizabeth Spiers: I think me personally, no, but I'm not really affected by the stuff that would affect people. You know, I'm not somebody who works for the government who's not getting a paycheck right now. I'm not someone who's dealing with services that have been suspended. So I do think there are people who are feeling this. It's just not, you know, me personally or probably you.

17:59Emily Peck: No, but I mean, but like what percentage of the U.S. population do you think is feeling this?

18:04Elizabeth Spiers: I would say lower income people in particular are feeling it. However many.

18:08Emily Peck: Why low income?

18:09Elizabeth Spiers: Well, because a lot of the services that people are dependent on for funding at the local level are funded by federal agencies that are suspended right now.

18:17Emily Peck: But if it's local, then like the local agencies aren't suspended. Right. And they can always just wait to get reimbursed by the feds for whenever the government. But that's the point.

18:26Elizabeth Spiers: If you need to get a check next week, like it's not going to happen. You know, this is disrupting services that people actually need.

18:33Emily Peck: Wait, wait, if who needs, like if the local agency needs to get a check next week, because the local agency, like they can just borrow it from the bank.

18:41Felix Salmon: No, some things aren't. So Social Security and disability, they're still carrying on. They haven't been shut down. So people are getting that money. But Head Start programs, which are preschool programs for poor kids, some of their funding has already been cut off because of the shutdown. And I think more is expected than on November 1st. If we're still shut down, which is kind of looking like we will be, that's when the money for SNAP runs out. And that's when a lot of people will really be affected because they won't have money for food. But that hasn't happened yet.

19:11Emily Peck: But just to be clear, because I'm a little bit, you know, I genuinely don't know. When you say that the money for Head Start programs has not been flowing, does that mean that the Head Start programs are not happening or that the people paying for the Head Start programs just haven't been reimbursed by the government yet?

19:28Felix Salmon: For some Head Start programs, it's my understanding that they will have to shutter. They won't be able to go.

19:33Emily Peck: But they haven't shuttered yet.

19:34Felix Salmon: I think a few have, according to the news reports I'm seeing, but most of them have not.

19:41Emily Peck: Most of them have not, right? So in terms of the real-world impact of the shutdown, even the people who are consuming these Head Start programs, even if the money isn't blowing, up until now, they have still been consuming them.

19:53Felix Salmon: And for federal workers, a lot of them, their most recent paycheck was just a little lower than the one before because it covered like 70 % was pre-shutdown of the last paycheck they got. but the paychecks that are coming will be zero checks. There are no paychecks coming, in other words.

20:08Emily Peck: That would be such a Trump move, though, to send everyone a check saying like zero on it. This is the fault of the Democrats. It's like blame Chuck Schumer for your zero check.

20:17Felix Salmon: The other big impact I think we are seeing now is the delays at airports and things as like the air traffic controllers stay home and things like that. That is happening. And you'll see more reports about that, I think, as this rolls along. Because those air traffic controllers are required to come to work. They just aren't going to get paid. So they start to no-show a little more. And the last shutdown, the last Trump shutdown anyway in 2019, conventional wisdom is because they stopped coming to work is why there was pressure to end that particular shutdown.

20:47Emily Peck: Yay, I'm flying this weekend.

20:49Elizabeth Spiers: Also, we should mention because this does affect, well, our coverage on Slate Money, the shutdown also means that the Fed isn't getting data that they need.

20:58Emily Peck: Right. So this is like from day one. And we've mentioned this like the first time that there was a slate money after the shutdown. We're like, the main thing that people are bellyaching about is the Fed isn't going to be able to have the data that it needs to be what they love to call data dependent. And so now what the hell are they going to do? And there was a fascinating story this week about how, well, you know, they don't get the BLS data, but they get the ADP data. ADP is a private company, and ADP shares their data with the Fed. ADP, if you get a paycheck, there is like a 20 % chance if you work in the private sector and you get a paycheck that that paycheck is processed by ADP.

21:36Emily Peck: ADP has incredibly granular information about millions of workers. And they shared that information with the Fed on a very granular basis. and the Fed was like, this is awesome. And then one of the Fed governors, Chris Waller, gave a speech saying, this is awesome, back in August. And then David Dianne found out for the American prospect, for some reason that no one entirely understands, ADP was like, well, actually, fuck you, no, and stopped sharing the data. And this was just like a month or two, or just a few weeks before the Fed started really needing it. And so far, the ADP has not turned it back on.

22:16Elizabeth Spiers: Well, there was some speculation that part of the reason was, you know, providing data is not ADP's core business. It's payroll servicing. And so they were a little bit worried, according to the speculators at least, that providing the Fed with data might imperil some of their client relationships. Presumably, if the Fed made decisions based on it that the clients didn't like.

22:36Emily Peck: This just like, this puzzles me. If I'm a corporate client of ADP, I would be so incredibly happy if that made monetary policy better. That's just like gravy. I don't understand why I'd be upset about that.

22:51Elizabeth Spiers: They're worried about it making monetary policy worse. That's the liability angle.

22:56Emily Peck: So explain.

22:57Elizabeth Spiers: So let's say the Fed does something. You run a big construction company or a big developer, and the Fed makes a decision that you don't like. and you believe that ADP had some role in facilitating that decision fairly or not, that could be a point of tension between your company and ADP. And I think that's what ADP is anticipating because that is their core business. It's not providing data to anybody.

23:22Emily Peck: I remember when ADP revamped their jobs data a couple years ago. I wrote about it for Axios. I talked to Eric Grinielsen, friend of the pod at Stanford, who was very involved in putting this data together. He was talking about how they were super proud about being able to open source this data. They were putting it up on Fred. Now, the stuff that they release on a monthly basis and the stuff they put up on Fred, they are still releasing on a monthly basis. It is still public. The Fed has access to it. The stuff that they cut the Fed off from was like the super granular weekly data that was never public.

23:59Emily Peck: But it was always a point of pride for ADP that this was something they could do. Obviously, they weren't making a lot of money from it, but it really did give them a bunch of, like, kudos and access and, you know, warm fuzzies.

24:13Elizabeth Spiers: Don't you think the Fed decision-making, though, is more politicized right now than it probably was five years ago?

24:21Emily Peck: Yeah, of course. Three years ago, perhaps. Like five years ago, it was Trump one, and that was still very politicized.

24:28Felix Salmon: But it's more now. Maybe the deal is like that other ADP data that we all look at and use is public to everyone. But this ADP data had like a tinge of like, I don't know, secrecy in a way that maybe made it a little weirder. Like maybe they were worried. This is full speculation. I didn't even read anyone speculating this. Maybe they were worried there would be demand, you know, from other people to see the data the Fed gets or some kind of thing like that. and they didn't want to share it. And maybe it was granular and private information about specific companies. We don't know. Do we know very much about the actual reports that the Fed got from ADP?

25:03Felix Salmon: I do not think we do.

25:04Emily Peck: I am coming out here using my highly influential bully pulpit as one of the three hosts of Slate Money to humbly request the powers that be at ADP to turn this information pipe back on because the Fed needs your data. to do it, people, because the BLS is MIA.

25:25Felix Salmon: We need just the shutdown to end and the BLS to pump out its data. Again, we got a little taste of what that life was like. I mean, on Friday when we were taping, they released a CPI report. It's the only data report they put out all month, you know, and it made the markets really happy, gave journalists something to do. So how did we get a CPI? You did ask, like, has the shutdown affected people's lives? The journalists, the economic journalists, they have no data. They're just writing takes every day. It's hard for them.

25:54Emily Peck: Okay, number one, why do we have CPI?

25:56Felix Salmon: We have CPI today, October 24th, Friday, because the Social Security Administration needs to calculate the cost of living adjustment for Social Security recipients. And they base it on this month is like the last piece of the puzzle for them to come out. They just announced on Friday the raise will be 2.8%. So the White House said they were statutorily required to come up with the COLA. They didn't want to be late with it. They don't want to upset the seniors. So that's why they called back the BLS employees just to do that report. They haven't compiled any new data in October on CPI. So I don't know how that's going to work once the shutdown ends.

26:42Felix Salmon: All these agencies are going to be behind in their data reports. Like we're supposed to get GDP the end of next week. And even if the government reopens, I think it'll take them some time to like actually make that happen. So everything's going to be a little delayed and a little dodgy. And the longer this goes on, like the worse it's going to get. And we might just like be missing some things, which I think is really sad.

27:02Emily Peck: There might be a couple of data points we missed. And that would be sad. But no, OK. So to answer your question about what journalists can do. and specifically what Washington-based financial journalists can do,

27:16Felix Salmon: which is a very, like, wankish subset.

27:20Emily Peck: My answer is very clear, which is start really cultivating all of your sources in Treasury to start pointing their fucking cameras at the East Wing because, like, all of the photographs we have of what's going on at the East Wing of the White House or like, you know, terrible angles and satellite photos and stuff because the Treasury building is in the way. And so what we need is all of the journalists to get their sources to be taking good photographs from the windows of Treasury, which is the best view of being able to see what's going on.

27:52Felix Salmon: I guess I should follow what's going on with the East Wing and not just ignore it, like I said earlier. All I know is it was knocked down.

27:58Emily Peck: The East Wing is RIP. The East Wing is gone. The colonnade that connected the White House to the East Wing, that's gone.

28:07Elizabeth Spiers: And this is after Trump saying that he wasn't going to touch it. But this is, you remember when Trump bought the Bonwit Teller building and turned it into Trump Tower, he sort of did the same thing. He said that he was going to keep those beautiful Art Deco freezes and donate them to the Met. And then he instructed workers to just rip them off the building and throw them into the interior. And he's still angry that people are mad at him for that. But obviously it hasn't changed his behavior because he's doing basically the same thing here.

28:36Felix Salmon: What was in the East Wing? It was like a bunch of offices and it was the main entrance that people would go into whenever they entered the White House.

28:45Emily Peck: And so if you're a visitor to the White House, if, you know, anything like that, you would go into the East Wing. And it was historically also where the First Lady would have her offices. And I believe it would have been where the First Gentleman had his offices if Kamala had won.

29:00Felix Salmon: So where's Melania's offices now? Does she not have offices? Mar-a-Lago.

29:04Emily Peck: No, Melania famously just never used it. All of the first ladies in history have been very active users of the East Wing, except for Hillary, apparently, who was more of a West Wing person.

29:16Felix Salmon: Oh, right. That was a big thing. Like, she was going to be in the West Wing and like, oh, no.

29:20Emily Peck: But Melania has no particular interest in that kind of thing. And so she just hangs out in Trump Tower in New York.

29:26Felix Salmon: And so the issue is he just did it kind of like without asking anyone for permission. Exactly.

29:31Emily Peck: It's always better to ask forgiveness than permission, right?

29:34Felix Salmon: We know that.

29:34Emily Peck: If he'd asked permission, they would have said no.

29:37Felix Salmon: They would have said no. It would have dragged on and on. There have been a thousand stories about his fight to demolish the East Wing.

29:43Elizabeth Spiers: Well, he also just doesn't think that he has to do any of that because he doesn't think any normal laws apply to him. But the last big renovation of the White House was under Truman, and it was the West Wing. And it was because the West Wing was a fire hazard because when they electrified it under Coolidge, they made all these mistakes. And so they had to renovate it in part. And Truman went to great lengths to preserve everything in there that was historical and also to just maintain the outside part of it. And Trump just went in there with a bulldozer and said, fuck all of this.

30:14Felix Salmon: So that's why people are mad.

30:15Emily Peck: There are so many reasons why people are mad. People are just so mad.

30:19Felix Salmon: They should just be delighted because there was a Louvre heist and just ignore the rest.

30:25Emily Peck: Well, OK. You know what? Well, I think we should have a Slate Plus segment on heist movies because I feel like this is the reason why you are so into the heist. I was looking on the internet at Rotten Tomatoes' top heist flicks. Rotten Tomatoes!

30:41Felix Salmon: Yes. You just made me so happy.

30:45Emily Peck: And there are 88 of them. We will talk about that in Slate Plus. We don't have time for that now because we have to have a numbers round.

30:51Felix Salmon: No, we have to do a third topic.

30:53Emily Peck: Oh, that's right. We have to have a third topic. like guys guys remember how this works it's only been a decade i can't i can't be expected to keep up with where i am in the show i

31:21Felix Salmon: thought you were doing like a fun thing because you're like it's the numbers round? The number is 996. And then we would talk about it.

31:27Emily Peck: Oh, yeah. So a proto numbers round, the numbers, wait, okay, Emily, what is 996?

31:33Felix Salmon: Felix, 996 is the practice of working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week, i.e. a 72 hour work week, the term was popularized in China, where people eventually got so overworked and so sick of it. And perhaps some workers even died from overwork. I don't know the details there. That a court in China even said, like, we need to cut this out. Now, U.S. tech firms in Silicon Valley have adopted 996 as, like, the standard mode of work and are actually advertising 72-hour in-person work weeks and more to their well-paid employees.

32:12Emily Peck: Yeah, but let's be very specific about this. Be specific. It is very specifically AI teams. It is just AI. No one else is like going out there saying, we want you to work 996. We need you in office six days a week. But there is this feeling in the AI world that things are moving incredibly fast, that there's a winner-takes-all kind of thing going on, that the entire science of AI can change between Thursday and Friday or between Saturday and Sunday. And there's been a bunch of reporting about this, which I like because they've talked to a bunch of different people. And there does seem to be this through line of people basically saying, we are working incredibly hard, and this is one of the reasons why we're getting these seven or even eight-figure salaries, but we want to.

33:03Emily Peck: And the super interesting thing in contradistinction to the, you know, first-year analysts at Morgan Stanley or the, you know, put upon salarymen and China is that like a lot of this really does seem to be just like, this is what they want to do.

33:22Elizabeth Spiers: I think that's true for a certain subset of, you know, AI researchers who feel like they are under time pressure to achieve certain milestones. But I will say that the hustle broke culture has always been part of Silicon Valley. And maybe it's coming back a little bit. I feel like it went down a little bit during the pandemic, partly because people had to do remote work. But to me, it reminds me of their first dot-com boom where the co-founders of Yahoo would brag about sleeping under their desks, never going home.

33:52Emily Peck: Yeah, exactly. It's like Elon saying that it's going to be extremely hardcore. There's a bunch of venture capitalists who are putting together like a grind index, like how hard do you grind? And it's very Silicon Valley bro in its own way. I am fascinated, though, at the way that it does seem to be confined to AI.

34:12Elizabeth Spiers: I don't think it does, though. I just don't see that anecdotally from it really is pervasive in a lot of tech companies, AI or not, especially if they're Valley based.

34:22Emily Peck: Well, I mean, the thing that we're talking about, just to be clear, is companies that are going out, you know, when they're advertising for jobs, the first thing it says is, this is a job that requires coming into the office six days a week we want to be very open about that and we are hustle silicon valley grind hustlers or whatever the hell they want to call themselves and some people want that and some people don't and if you don't that's fine but like we want someone who wants that and i do think this is unhealthy but i also do think this is in on some level you know it's consenting adults you know so i have a tight take about this which is that

35:02Elizabeth Spiers: But when these companies sort of promote this culture, and they know, despite all claiming to be data-driven, we know from research that over a certain number of hours, you become less productive. And things like sleep deprivation affect your cognitive performance. But they're promoting it anyway. And the people who really are harmed by this are disproportionately women, especially if they're at the age where you have children. Because the women always end up in the caregiver roles. And you just end up with a less diverse workplace as a result. Return to office mandates, I think, are having the same effect.

35:37Felix Salmon: And it's not good overall for, if you think about it, I agree that it does seem to be very AI driven. And there's a great piece in the journal about how the top paid AI researchers now are like, we have to keep grinding. We have to do 20 years of research in two weeks. We got to beat this AI clock. Like, we got to invent the AI. Whatever. So this lack of diversity, which I agree with Elizabeth's hot take, you know, you get a certain kind of person who wants to work 100-hour weeks. Everyone quoted I saw was very young in their 20s. I think you're locking out, you know, women, whatever. Think about what you're doing.

36:16Felix Salmon: You're inventing or iterating on artificial intelligence, which allegedly is going to be the driver of our economy for the next, I don't know, half a century, 10 years, five years, two weeks. whatever and you're you're relying on this very specific type of people to innovate on it to come up with how it works to invent it you're sort of just you're setting us all up for the same old when it comes to new technologies new solutions like what they're going to be focused on like another decade of you know pizza delivery apps or whatever instead of other things we might need more than a more diverse cast of researchers or scientists might come up with.

36:57Emily Peck: Maybe. I mean, I don't, it might be true. It's entirely possible that it's true. One of the things that fascinates me is the way that probably the highest paid employee in the entire AI universe is this guy, Alexander Wang, who got acquirred by Mark Zuckerberg at meta and he is the person who's like in charge of their ai you know subsidiary division whatever and he's throwing around eight nine figure salaries to people to do incredible work and obviously if you are able to get like a hundred million dollar salary you have a very specific set of skills this is not like a fungible job where they'll be like well if you don't want to we'll get someone else and what alexander wang has also been doing we was reported this week is going out and firing like 600 other ai people at meta and we do seem to be entering this world where the number of ai researchers is not really going up the demand for a very small number of researchers is almost infinite but demand for ai researchers in general is not and the ones there's like a few humans who both want to be working incredibly hard are working incredibly hard and are being paid incredibly well and this is just like this weird bubble in money and prestige and work for those few humans and i wanted to talk about this a little bit because of exactly what elizabeth was saying about like productivity falls off after you start working a certain number of hours per week.

38:44Emily Peck: And I think that is broadly true for the workforce as a whole. But I also am 100 % convinced that everyone in Silicon Valley is convinced that if you are, you know, this famous like 100x engineer, or even a 10x engineer, then, you know, you can suffer a 30 % diminution in productivity, and you're still like a 70x engineer, or a 7x engineer, And you're still so much better than anyone else.

39:11Felix Salmon: Well, what is the work we're talking about? I read this book and I interviewed Cal Newport on our show last year, I think, Slow Productivity. And he has all these examples of, I think he points to like Sir Isaac Newton, Jane Austen, the guy who came up with the idea for CSI, the CBS TV show that spawned a thousand spinoff TV shows. and like true original ideas and innovations yes they take hard work and experience and knowledge but it's like a slow build you know like you guys know you're writers too like you have an idea sometimes it comes to you while you're just like laying in bed before you fall asleep or like in the shower like you need a little bit of time to like mentally process things before you come up with something really good.

39:59Emily Peck: Showers are so important for coming up with things.

40:02Felix Salmon: It's not like time spent at a computer or like 996 schedule, grinding it out will get you to those ideas. Like you need to take a step back sometimes.

40:12Emily Peck: Taking time is a wonderful, wonderful thing. And I have to say like one of the things I'm super enjoying in the move from Axios to Bloomberg, because I'm not really doing news anymore, is I have the luxury of having a lot more time to be able to spend on my stories. And a story that I would have spent a day or two writing at Axios is a story that I will now spend two or three weeks writing at Bloomberg. Maybe I'll do other things at the same time. But just being able to have all of those showers in between and be able to just think is just like percolating in the back of my head. And I'll go around and I'll twiddle a couple of sentences here and there.

40:50Emily Peck: And at the end of the day, it's a better article. It's not 10 times better. even if I spent 10 times more days writing it. But it's better, and that's great.

41:01Elizabeth Spiers: Well, also to go back to your 10x engineer example, though, if you are the 10x engineer, you are probably somebody who has a lot of decision-making power and a lot of responsibility. And after 60 hours a week, your cognitive performance really drops off enough that in a lot of productivity studies, it starts to go negative. And the thing is, if you're talking about these super talented, but also very powerful within the organization engineers. Do you want them making major decisions about AI once their cognitive ability starts going into that negative territory?

41:36Felix Salmon: I don't want that.

41:36Emily Peck: Yeah, no, this is definitely one of my big sort of theory. I think I had a podcast. I can't remember. But I think I had a podcast with Arianna Huffington once about this, about the financial crisis. And if you read Too Big to Fail, the Andrew Ross Sorkin sort of TikTok about the financial crisis of 2008 and what happened in like around September 2008. The one through line is no one is getting enough sleep. And people are working through the weekend and we need to like do the bailout before Asia opens and all of this kind of stuff, right? And, you know, you get all of these stories about Tim Geithner's like, you know, phoning up all of these bank CEOs and trying to orchestrate mergers on like a three-minute time horizon.

42:22Emily Peck: And no one is taking a minute to just take a breath. And I do think that a lot of very bad decisions were made over those months because people weren't getting enough sleep. And people felt they just didn't have time. There was too much stuff happening too quickly and they just didn't have the luxury of sleep. But yeah, I do think that definitely hurt the world, for sure.

42:45Felix Salmon: There's also something to unpack here about the discrepancy paradox of AI, which is supposed to put, I know you don't want to talk about this, Felix. I don't care I'm bringing it up.

42:55Elizabeth Spiers: AI, which is supposed to put us all out of work

42:58Felix Salmon: and increase productivity, pushing people to work 72 to 100 hour work weeks. If AI is supposed to get us to stop working, why is it making people work so much more? Is this just like a temporary phase before we all retire and are pushed out of our jobs? or is this just the cold reality of innovation?

43:18Emily Peck: There was that one woman who runs an AI company who was quoted basically saying, yeah, we should be working 24-7, but it should be our AI agents who are working 24-7, not us.

43:29Felix Salmon: And I spoke to one startup, I think over the summer, that had gone to a four-day work week because they were using AI. And I spoke to their founder and he was like, yeah, it does things a lot faster. So we don't need to work five days a week. We can't keep up with the AI. Like we need time to understand what it's doing for us with coding or whatever. So we're actually working less now because AI is taking on a lot of our work.

43:51Emily Peck: I think that's true. I think outside this like little baby Silicon Valley bubble of people actually building the AI models, I don't think that AI is making people work more.

44:03Felix Salmon: I think it is. I think people are scared because there's been a thousand and million bajillion articles, some written by AI that says that AI is taking over. And if you don't understand it, you're like going to lose your job or be obsolete or whatever. So I think it's freaking people out at the same time as Elizabeth said, we're out of this pandemic phase where employers for a minute, they were like, maybe we should make workers happy and have lives. There was like a little time where that was a thing. That's over. Now is the time to maybe we should scare the crap out of people and make them fear for their jobs consistently so that they work harder kind of a time.

44:39Felix Salmon: And you know, and you have the policy from the White House that sort of like reinforces that. So I think we're in this moment where we're being told we're obsolete at the same time we're being told to work like our asses off. And it makes no sense.

44:53Emily Peck: I want to hear from the smartest people in the world, i.e. the Slate Money listeners. SlateMoney at Slate.com. Are you working harder because of AI? If you are, let us know and let us know why is it as Emily implies out of fear that you think that the way to outrun the AI is to just work harder and then the AI can't replace your job because you're so good at your job because you're working hard

45:18Felix Salmon: or are you going Felix's route and working less

45:21Emily Peck: or are you going Felix's route go slow think slow people take more showers it is how to improve your comparative advantage over the robots

45:31Felix Salmon: and smell good

45:34Emily Peck: honestly hygiene is important when was the last time you met an ai that smelled good

45:39Felix Salmon: it's a good point riddle me that

45:51Emily Peck: all right now we are actually going to have a numbers round i'm going to start with 112 which is the number of percent that beyond meat stock rose in like two hours on what was it wednesday morning only to then turn around and fall back and close down on the day that basically there was this sort of three hour period in the morning of the trading day where the stock opens it more than doubles it then does a u-turn and crashes back down and closes basically down one percent on the day and if you were just sort of slept through the morning you would be like nothing has changed but meanwhile there's been all of this chaos and it just like you know meme stocks are still alive people and they're moving even faster than ever and beyond meat the stock is like it's like a dollar or something or two dollars like it's like three dollars not good you would think

46:52Felix Salmon: they would be doing much better because the price of beef is so high right now you'd think like a beef substitute would be crushing so my conclusion is that this company the stuff might not be that

47:01Emily Peck: good i think the reason why the price of beef is so high a large part of it well there's lots of parts of it and we've talked about it on the show but a large part of it is people like demand is going up people just want to eat their burgers yeah that's very expensive though i mean steak

47:17Felix Salmon: have you you know what we've talked about this we've talked about rolling along let's let's roll

47:21Emily Peck: Follow along, Emily. What's your number?

47:23Felix Salmon: I'm also doing a percent. 43. 43%. That is the drop in food allergy rates in children from 2017 to 2020 after new guidance was issued saying that you should introduce babies to peanut products. There's been this big fall in peanut allergies among children. Oh, wow.

47:43Emily Peck: That's awesome. I love good news numbers.

47:46Felix Salmon: Good news, guys. I was really excited about it. It was out this week from the medical journal Pediatrics. And I guess when they first started changing the guidance back in 2015, you know, people were afraid because the guidance used to be don't introduce this stuff to kids because it could be bad for them. Then you remember all the hand-wringing about peanut allergies that used to go on, like in the early aughts.

48:09Emily Peck: Yeah.

48:09Felix Salmon: People were always freaking out about the peanut allergies. But now there's been this progress and it's heartening and people listen to this guidance and I think they'll listen to it even more. and there's like sanity out there. People listen to the research sometimes.

48:23Emily Peck: Serve your baby's peanut butter because it is an amazingly rich form of nutrition. Like the thing that you give malnourished kids in parts of the world where kids really suffer from malnourishment is peanut butter, basically. It's the most incredibly magical thing in the world. It gives you all of the nutrients you need in a little small packet. Elizabeth, what's your number?

48:49Elizabeth Spiers: My number is$250, and that's dollars. And for$250, you can get a designer wasp nest, or as the New York Times calls it, an alternative house plant to add to your interior decor so that you have some nature inside.

49:03Felix Salmon: Yes. A few years ago, we have massive wasp nests around where I live. Huge, like bigger than my head, dangling from trees. You see them everywhere when the leaves start falling. And one year we had a really big one on my back porch and I had to have someone come and like get rid of it because it was terrifying. And he was like, do you want to keep it? A lot of people keep these things.

49:23Emily Peck: What? And they pay$250 for them? I mean, I'm assuming that this is like son's wasps.

49:30Elizabeth Spiers: Yes, yes. So apparently the wasps all leave after the first frost. So that's when people go out and gather them. I understand wanting some nature in your house.

49:38Felix Salmon: Yes.

49:38Elizabeth Spiers: But just personally, as I was reading this, I feel like if I walked past a wasp nest in my house every day, it would just stress me out just subconsciously. My lizard brain would be like, this is bad.

49:50Emily Peck: It's like being exposed to peanut butter. You know, you get used to it and then it's fine.

49:55Felix Salmon: I kind of get it, though, because whenever I see one, and they're everywhere where I live. No joke, you guys. I had one in the trunk of my car. They had, like, started making a nest, like, in the corner of the trunk. Me and my daughter were like, we're not. Will you open it? I'm not opening it. will you open it but they're so fascinating you were going for the sacrificial daughter thing you were like are you brave kid you open it you're young i dare you one year i got really obsessed with these pictures from like georgia where like wasp nests would take over like an entire car like an abandoned car would like be turned into a wasp don't you've gotten me down a path where i cannot get off so we just need to cut me off because i am so obsessed with the wasp nest i don't

50:35Emily Peck: understand it really send us your photograph of your interior decor wasp nest sleep money at slate.com what a good number it's a good number 250 bucks i mean bargain really and just think like if your kid needs to supplement their income they can just go out in the woods near where emily lives and grab a bunch of wasps nests and sell them for 250 bucks a pop yeah free money people it's just growing on trees. When was the last time that you actually saw money growing on trees? It really happens. That's it for us this week, unless you want to treat yourselves to our Slate Plus segment on ice movies.

51:15Emily Peck: Thanks to Jessamyn Molly for producing. Thanks for keeping us all posted on your goings-on on SlateMoneyAtSlate.com. Thanks for watching us on YouTube now that we are now a proper YouTube channel on video. and we will be back next week with more Slate Money.