How The Affirmative Action Ruling Changes Corporate America
Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the
week I'm Felix Sam and I'm here with Emily Peck, both of us work for Axios.
We are joined with the New York Timesary own, well it's not really, it's just one of her
many fiddles, Elizabeth Spires. Hello. We are going to talk about the big Supreme Court case
that was decided this week, or at least one of them, the one about affirmative action, what
it means for corporations, but honestly the heart of this show is about marketing. We're
going to talk about influencer marketing, she in and Bud Light, we're going to talk about
mega marketing at Mattel with the Barbie movie, and we're going to talk about whether we're
going to watch Barbie and Offenheimer on the same day and if so, which one comes first. That is
all coming up, we have a Slate Plus segment on Vanna White, who is earning $3 million a year
and wants more. So we'll talk about that, it's all coming up on Slate Money. Hey everybody,
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So yeah, let's start with this affirmative action ruling from the Supreme Court. And I was thinking
this being the corporate arm of the Slate podcast empire that we could concentrate on what this
means for business. I think it's pretty clear what it means for selective universities. But
I think there are implications and I think Emily, you agree with me on this one that it could affect
not only admissions to universities but also corporate hiring decisions. Yes, exactly. I think
maybe there's two different kinds of impacts for business real world purposes. First would be
the most prestigious schools would be graduating fewer people of color, which would mean fewer in
the pipeline just naturally. And that would have all kinds of downstream consequences. One of the
justices brought up a really big one, which would be in medicine, which already has very few
black doctors and there's all kinds of research and studies that show black doctors
for black children, black babies, and mothers having a black doctor can make a life or death
difference. Or just in regular business hiring, you're going to hire fewer people of color because
they're not coming out of the same university pipeline as usual. There's a second business
consequence that's more murky at this point. And that is what happens to corporate diversity,
hiring programs, and initiatives. And I think that's a little more unclear. And we should
probably talk about that. So, yeah, in terms of the first one, I think
number one, you're absolutely right. There are a lot of companies who love the whole
credentialism system and think that if you graduate from Harvard, then if so factor, you're
highly desirable potential employee. I have been arguing against this for as long as I can
remember. And if this goes a little way, if this helps corporate DEI departments to help persuade
HR departments that they should not just be looking at selective universities and they should be
looking at the full range of colleges or maybe even people who haven't gone to college at all
when they make hiring decisions, that would be amazing. But you're right that certainly among
the, you know, elite, or the companies who like to think of themselves as hiring only the elite,
then this is bad news. But you're right that the bigger broader question is like, there's
something in the water now. A woman who was a manager at Starbucks just got a 25 million
dollar jury award after she got fired and claimed that it was because she was white. And the
actual award was $600,000. And then there was an extra 25 million of punitive damages. And clearly
that like juries feel, or these some juries feel much the same way that the Supreme Court does
about this. There's definitely a feeling that there is, you know, anti-white sentiment in
work corporate America. And companies are going to be worried about getting taken to court. And
potentially losing even if they appeal all the way to the Supreme Court.
Yeah, I think, you know, one of the big problems with this is that it's murky in terms of how
eliminating race-based consideration might translate into a corporate environment because
a lot of DI initiatives are not necessarily or more, you know, informal. It's not just a matter of
reaching quotas. And the conservative talking point about affirmative action is that it's just a
matter of saying we're going to have this many hires that check a diversity box. And they're
not really clear about what the criteria are. So I mean, that's that, but that wasn't the case
in this case, right? It wasn't that the university's had any kind of quota. And yet they were still
not allowed to take race into account. Yeah, but I'm pushing back on your point that, you know,
there's something in the water and that people don't like wokeness in these scenarios because
affirmative action has majority of support from, you know, most Americans. And that's most
Americans, not just most liberal Democrats. Is that true? I mean, most of what I've been reading
says that the polling shows that Americans don't support race-based college admissions.
The polling. We saw that in California. I see. And when it's specifically, when you talk about
affirmative action in colleges, there's majority support for that. I think, you know, it's part of
it as poll design and how you ask a question. You're certainly a way that you can ask a question
about racial considerations and hiring or college admissions that frames it a little bit differently
and doesn't specifically talk about affirmative action. But affirmative action as a policy does
enjoy majority support from Americans. But in any case, this is not a question of, this is not a
question of, like, democracy. This is a question of the judicial system. And there's definitely, as
we've mentioned many times on this show in the past, this, like, increasing anti-work sentiment,
even if it's a minority sentiment. But people are becoming more aggressive and they're becoming
more aggressive about taking companies to court. And it is almost certain, I think, that the
louder a company proclaims the strength of its commitment to DEI principles,
the more likely it is that they're going to wind up getting taken to court by someone claiming
that this is illegal or that they were discriminated against. And no one wants to have that
court fight, whether or not they're going to win. And increasingly, it looks like they could
even lose. Yeah, I think this decision is really bad for a corporate diversity initiatives.
First, to pull on the string of what Felix said, I mean, companies are conservative. They're
afraid of cats. They're not going to want to go out on a limb for something like this. And
already there's been backlash to some of the diversity initiatives pushed forward after George
Floyd's murder in 2020. And the Supreme Court obviously didn't talk about corporate diversity
initiatives. But in his majority opinion, Roberts did say that diversity, I'm not going to have
the wording right, but he basically said it was kind of like a squishy goal that was hard to prove.
So you could kind of see the seeds of something planted there. You know, if you're a company
and diversity is one of your goals, if the Supreme Court just ruled that diversity is like a squishy
goal that's hard to to show in the data, you could see where that might lead. Now, to be fair,
like the EEOC came out with a statement yesterday, that's the agency that enforces civil rights laws
for employers. And they came out and they said the Supreme Court's decision doesn't have anything
to do with employers and diversity initiatives are fine and totally legal. So I don't want to like
get out ahead on my skis. I just think this is part of like a big backlash that's brewing obviously.
And part of it's going to hit corporate America. And corporate America is not this big,
strong bastion of civil rights. Like they'll fold. Like look what Budweiser just did. They fold it,
you know what I mean? So that's what I'm worried about.
We're going to talk a little bit about Budweiser later on in this show. But one of the interesting
twists here is that there is this broad expectation slash understanding that college admissions
should be in some sense fair or meritocratic or somewhere between the two. And I don't think
that people really have that expectation for corporate hiring. That, you know, that hiring
decisions are always, they always feel so weirdly random and idiosyncratic. That, you know,
possibly you could make an argument if you're just, if you have like a complete hiring machine
situation going on, like, you know, if you're hiring from Amazon warehouses or something like that,
you're hiring people by the thousands. But a lot of corporate hiring really is just I'm hiring
one individual person for one individual job. And, you know, they need to fit into this specific
team and work with these specific people. And I think that it's that the other, the flip side
of what we just saw from the Supreme Court is that the Supreme Court and we've seen this from both
democratic nominated judges and Republican nominated judges has become much more corporate
friendly over recent decades. And if corporations just come out and say, look, we can hire whoever
we want. That's up to us. That's our prerogative. I think that's a conservative argument that could
actually win. Well, but with who? I mean, there's, I guess, you know, when you take into consideration
that most hiring managers are, you know, they skew white and male and a lot of corporations,
maybe that's true. But, you know, when we're talking about equity initiatives and race-based
considerations, specifically, which is what the Supreme Court ruling is about, you know, those
sort of things, I agree with Emily that it could get a little bit squishy in terms of how you
define that. But we have a lot of data that says that race comes into hiring considerations,
even if even in the absence of DI initiatives. And one good example of this, yeah. I mean,
that's why DEI initiatives exist, right? I mean, I don't think, yeah, that's the whole point.
And the question is, do corporations have the prerogative to hire whoever they want and to do so,
you know, with written down DEI initiatives? I think the big risk here, just to be clear,
is that DEI initiatives are going to become hidden and secret rather than out and proud. And
corporations aren't going to stop doing them so much as they're going to stop talking about them.
And if you stop talking about them, that itself is, you know, bad for DEI broadly, because the more
that we talk about it and the more that we embrace it, the more normalized and a good thing that
people understand it to be. And I think that the risk here is the corporation, it's not so much
that they're just going to stop doing them, but they're going to say, like, we just don't want
to give a bunch of red meat to the kind of people who are inclined to sue us for this kind of thing.
Yeah, I mean, it's too early to say obviously what happens in corporate America because of this
decision, but this is not a good decision for diversity and hiring. And I think there are
plenty of companies that would probably like to toss out the whole notion of diversity and
hiring, like Felix, you're saying they'll take it on the down low or something, they'll do it
quietly, but I think a lot of companies will take this as an opportunity to just do less.
Because there was a lot of dissatisfaction, I think, with the increase in efforts around
diversity post-George Floyd. You know, you hear a little whispers here and there, even in media,
which has made a really, really strong effort to hire a lot of people who are different races.
So I just think this is like a great day for the racists.
Yeah, I think what it may do is give smaller employees who don't really understand EOC protections
in the first place or have some general idea of what they're supposed to do and excuse to
discriminate and violate EOC protections because they think it's the same thing.
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Okay, I need to ask you to Emily on the scale of 1 to 10.
How caught up in Barbie further are you and will you be watching the movie?
I'm so excited for the movie. I'm unabashedly captured by Mattel's evil genius marketing campaign.
From the moment I saw the Barbie preview, which I hope Patrick can play a clip from,
where she says, Hi, Barbie. Hi, Barbie. Hi, Barbie. Hi, Barbie. Hi, Barbie. Hi, Barbie.
I'm just like so excited for this movie. I don't know quite,
a can't quite articulate it. Maybe we can talk about it. Maybe we can dig in to why I'm so excited,
but I have a daughter who is 12. She is also excited. We're both going. I was just thinking today.
Maybe I'll wear pink to the movie. I don't know. I don't usually dress up for movies. It's not my thing.
But I love the idea of going on opening weekend and wearing pink. As you know, I have a pink suit,
so maybe I will do that. Yes, everyone do it. It will brighten our days from these dark,
these dark times. Elizabeth, are you with us on this one?
Yeah, I'm shamelessly bought into anything that taps into my Jinx nostalgia for
anything I grew up with, but particularly whenever it has a thick layer of irony on top of it,
which this film absolutely does. I'm a complete sucker for that kind of thing.
I don't have a pink outfit to wear, but... You don't have a pink outfit, it's true. I rarely see
you wearing pink. Then again, I rarely see Emily wearing pink either. We all have to share some
photographs, but the thing which I really love about this whole marketing onslaught from a
just capitalism perspective is the way in which Mattel not only got paid somewhere between 25
million and 50 million just for allowing the movie studio to make the movie in the first place.
But then they turned the movie into a just part of a much broader ad campaign for Barbie,
the doll, the brand, the icon, which has roped in every single conceivable brand you can think of.
There's a Barbie Xbox, there's a Barbie pool flip. There's Barbie everything right now and they're
also pink and they're also delicious and they're also desirable. In a way, for the first time,
people like me who don't particularly like playing with dolls can go out and excitedly buy
Barbie product and be into it. This is so much bigger than the movie and the movie, if anything,
is just an ad for the product and an ad for the brand. The idea that this is one of those ads that
instead of paying for it, you get paid for it and you get paid a lot of money for someone else to
do an ad for you just blows my mind. It's amazing. Yeah, it's like a marketing feat unrivaled, unparalleled.
If you go and look at all the trade magazines and websites that cover marketing and ads,
they're all just like Mattel and its genius. How did Mattel pull off this genius move and
they go back to 2018 when Barbie was, no, 2015, I think, when Barbie was declared dead and had
the lowest sales in 25 years and the millennials didn't like Barbie anymore. She was sexist. Everyone
hated her and then the company embarked on this big turnaround plan for Barbie, which is really
coming, really culminating right now with this insane marketing campaign with the life-size Barbie
Dreamhouse, the Barbie handbags from Balmain, that Barbie cardigans and hot topic, there's like
Barbie toothbrush, there's Barbie ice cream and Barbie frozen yogurt and it's really about
marketing the toy, not just marketing the toy at kids anymore, but marketing them at us,
at the three of us. We're totally bought in. It's like getting adults to come in and it's really
it's really working. Plus in 2023, even us Gen Xers were not turned off by commercialism anymore.
We're like, okay with it now somehow. I think we're okay with it if it seems vaguely entertaining.
And I think part of the reason why the Barbie stuff is working a little bit is that it's
become a trend with brands to do collaborations between wildly disparate brands and products.
The Marvel movie comes out and you see X-Men, Gillette Razer, it's like, well, why?
But it also, I think you get both of the brands get a little bit of lift from it and in the case
of the Barbie stuff, I think this has been an opportunity for a lot of CMOs who need to check
a creativity box to just put crazy ideas out there and get them funded. So some of it I think is
just about incentives and advertising to do really high concept stuff in these crazy collaborations
because they do get a lot of buzz. I mean, the Airbnb Barbie Dreamhouse has been covered so
many times already. And that seems like an expensive thing to do. But when you look at all the
earned media, it gets it makes total sense. And just like the think pieces on Barbie too,
like the New York Times last in last weekend's paper, they had a huge spread on the Barbie Dreamhouse
and they took it really seriously. They went back to the first Dreamhouse and they were like at the
time, the first Dreamhouse launched. Women couldn't even get mortgages. And they sort of laid out
the history of women buying houses with the Barbie Dreamhouse and made it this very feminist thing
where the first Dreamhouse had no kitchen, big deal, because little girls here to four had been
given doll houses with kitchens because that's where they'd be working in the future kind of a thing.
And just the proliferation of think pieces, the earned media, it's really.
But it's a really successful rebranding though too. When you consider the 2015 criticism,
the Barbie was very retro in a bad way and bad model for young girls. Now the whole narrative
is that actually Barbie is a feminist icon and they were able to do that with just the run-up
to a movie product. That's an incredible control change. I haven't quite, I haven't quite
gone so far as to buy into the idea that Barbie is a feminist icon. I do think you haven't seen
from your program or Barbie. I do think that hiring Greta Gowick to
write the movie was a stroke of genius because she has that ability to be kind of third wave
about these things and be a little bit beyond reproach while also not being remotely
strident or on message about. I haven't seen any reviews. I don't know if anyone has really seen
the movie yet, but I'm sure it doesn't have some deeply divisive message. It's going to be a very
fun, fluffy summer movie and it's going to be enjoyed as such and that's awesome. We really need
this. We need Barbie right now. So I just think it's bringing darkness and Barbie is bringing light.
Yeah, I just need to ask you, Emily, are you going to do the double bill of Barbie and Oppenheimer?
And if so, which one are you going to see first? Our producer Patrick asked me about this and
I'm embarrassed to say I didn't even know at all anything about this Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer
comes out the same day. The Barbie movie comes out and it's some like big prestige bomber movie
about the guy who invented the nuclear bomb and I guess I will not be seeing it.
There are internet memes now of Oppenheimer Barbie crossovers that people are making. There is one
with a big pink cloud and it was just a shot from some still.
Barbie and Heimler. I'm totally going to see Oppenheimer though and I'll see it probably before
the Barbie movie. What on the same day? On the same day. Yeah, I think that's the sequence. You see
Oppenheimer first and then you see Barbie and you go out and get it and nice uplifting note.
Exactly. So Oppenheimer then Barbie. Yeah. Then cocked it. Yeah. Oppenheimer, Barbie,
perfect. Pink Martinez. Cosmopolitan. That's what they're called. They're probably Barbie branded
cocktails out there. I'm sure there are. No, it's been a few years since I was unabashedly drinking
cosmos and I feel like I should go back to those days. Let's talk about the other end of the
marketing spectrum because marketing fail while the ultra expensive ultra professional ultra high
dollar marketing push by Mattel around Barbie has been a clear success. We have begun to see
the way in which influencer marketing which was the new hotness for the past few years
can backfire massively. You have these much lower budget campaigns that are greenlit much lower
down the org chart that don't have full corporate buy-in necessarily and that like suddenly
go viral for all the wrong reasons and the one in the news right now is she in the Chinese
fast fashion company that may or may not be going public but it's certainly incredibly successful
and has been kind of low key battling pretty predictable narratives which around all fast
fashion companies about how it's closed and made in sweatshop conditions and some bright spark
as she in decided that the way they were going to battle this narrative was to fly a bunch of
influences that no one ever had ever heard of over the China show them the factories and get
them to do TikTok saying I saw these factories and everyone there seemed very happy
which they did and then everyone just said oh my god this is ludicrous and pounced on them and then
by and then I suppose I can make out very few people sort of organically saw those original
influence of videos but everyone saw the backlash videos and the backlash think pieces and how
you know it wasn't working and the thing that made me think of was and you know we'd mentioned
this earlier the the Bud Light campaign with Dylan Mulvaney which again was just like they sent
this trans influencer like a kind of Bud Light with her based on it and then suddenly it created
billions of dollars of earned media in the wrong direction that everyone got really angry about
and is this the first indication that influencer marketing campaigns are possibly much more volatile
and much more dangerous than people had really realized I think if you if yeah I've done some work
with influencer agencies and they're always a little bit volatile because what you're paying
for is access to that influencer is very specific audience who is going to respond to that single
person in a way that you can't entirely control and you know for influencers who have a ton of followers
you know in the millions they get really strict creative briefs about what they can and can't do
and sometimes things are very scripted in this case it seems like they weren't but the influencers
were so excited to get a trip you know they were not clearly people who were used to getting
comped those sort of things and so they I don't even think they had to push them to be
effusive about you know what was happening in the factories I think they did it organically
because they felt like they were being treated really well and that's probably part of where
it backfired you know they they should understand that they're they're too over the top in terms
of defending the companies labor practices that people are going to be skeptical about that
and that that is not going to go the way that they wanted it to you're saying that she
should understand that or the influencer should well she ends up in a company that they should
understand enough about influencer marketing to know that when influencers push something too hard
or they're too over the top about it their audiences generally don't like it because people generally
don't like to be felt like they're they're being propagandized to or you know products are being
shoved down their throat my general take on this is that that's a risk but it's not necessarily
what happened in these cases that you know as I say these were relatively small scale influences
and for all we know their audiences were fine with it and they went oh okay that's interesting
and moved on with their lives and thought that she in was probably fine but then what happened is
that a few of people a few people who like weren't in the audience you know found these videos
and started amplifying them to a whole new you know anti-corporateist audience that this is
that this is the this is the risk like if Dylan Mulvaney's Bud Light video had stayed within her
fan community that would have been all for the good they all went horribly sideways when it kind
jumped over to the anti-work community and then you know everything went really bad
and I think that's the risk here is not so much that the audience of these influences is going
to take things the wrong way but more that the videos will reach people who aren't in the audience
of the influences and then things become really really unpredictable yes and I think that
the she-in marketing idea was just bad like right I mean it's obvious propaganda this company has
been accused of forcing people to work like 18 hours a day for very very very little money
and also been accused of using you know forced labor and so the idea that they could sort of
whitewash all that by taking six influencers and not even the highest profile influencers and
showing them one very cleaned up you know factory in China and then making it seem like everything's
fine that's just that's a bad idea right there like if I had if they'd asked me I would have told
them it was a bad idea and the idea that maybe you should go away appreciate in marketing department
Emily and and and and the other thing is you know the idea that you can have an influencer just
talk to their audience on a public facing platform and it's not going to go to other audiences I
think they should also know better I mean TikTok is is public and these things go viral the goal
of this kind of marketing for things to go viral not just to target a particular audience but like
you'd hope that more people would see it right so hope that more people would see it I think the
it just went viral in the wrong direction for them right right I'm saying like you can't like
Felix was saying you know the problem is when this goes outside the target audience but like
that's part of the goal so if the goal the goal is problematic right so I think I think that's
exactly it that that the people are realizing now we're realizing and maybe we should have known
this all along that micro targeting is is never going to be something you can control right like if
you're trying to reach a small group of you know fans of Dylan Mulvaney that's all well and good
but inevitably you know if you're putting that on the public platform and much larger group of
people are going to see it and this is why historically marketing messages have always been
very very carefully controlled and where it takes you know 18 different layers of approval before
any kind of marketing message goes out from anyone and why you know it's so difficult to get
feeling of honesty and humanity out of any brands because you know because
intuitively brands have understood this that everything that comes out with their name on it is
part of their marketing and they need to be very careful about making sure that it's in line with
exactly what they want the brand to be and so yeah it's it's not easy to send one message to one
group of people and another message to another group of people and half them happily go exist
I think they also just may have assumed that this would not be yet they might have not anticipated
the blowback because she and is such a popular brand on TikTok and I doubt very seriously that
they've seen any sales drops because if you are familiar with the brand and you're the kind of
influencer who's been promoting she and products you're also aware of your labor practices
I mean this is not a big secret I think you're just the kind of person who doesn't really care
or you're not going to boycott the brand because of it so I think in terms of their actual
customers I would be surprised to this move the needle at all yeah but just stick with the unboxings
people stick with like sending the influencers free shit and getting them to like rave about
how amazing it is that's that's a lot more reliable that's how she and became popular they sent
clothes to influencers who posted about it on TikTok and and went viral and then everyone was
shopping at she in and yeah totally Elizabeth I don't think this is unlike Budweiser also in
that it's not going to affect sales in any way I think we should have a numbers round Elizabeth
do you have a number my number is 22 and that's a million and there are three people who've been
indicted for gaining illegal profits and trading ahead of the proposed merger of Trump social media
company into a spec called digital world acquisition court and every time I read an insider
trading story like this I'm just baffled that anybody thinks that they can get away with it
it's because these things are so straightforward um did they buy short dated out of the money
call options no because that's always the way to be guaranteed you're going to get caught
no they they left a paper and electronic trail where they were talking about the merger ahead of the
IPO. Tisk, Tisk, Tisk. At least someone made money off of Trump's social media site is that the
wrong take? Well if they don't they don't have the deal isn't done yet so if it's not done by September
8th they have to liquidate the 300% or so a million that they raised uh sad. Well but at that
point this Trump go back to Twitter. That's why I have the take because I don't I want Trump to
just stay on truth social I didn't want him to come back to Twitter though I'm almost done
with Twitter to be honest. Yes I'm here um Emily. Okay get ready. I'm ready. My number is four
that's a number of words in the sentence livi rised up baby gronk that I did not understand.
I don't know that's a five that's a five word sentence. No no no listen again four is the number
of words in the sense I did not understand I understand a word up but I did not understand
livi rised or baby gronk but like really really if baby gronk is one thing then rised up is one
thing really it's it's like a three word sentence in that sense in that case. Okay well should I
should I you should you should keep it again. I know I feel like we should talk about this sentence
because it's an important sentence. Yes so livi rised up baby gronk that is something
Felix brought up last week I don't even remember exactly why he brought it up but I was like I
don't even know what that means and then I thought about it and I was like I shouldn't be so close
minded and then our producer who I've mentioned three times already in the show sent me a link
so he sent me a link called livi rising up baby gronk explained which I read and now I understand
what all the words mean and I can explain it to you the audience if you like do you want to know
wait wait I mean I know what it means I think I feel like the audience deserves an explanation
a lot of people don't we're we're terminally online people so so but this is this is the question
before before we explain what livi rised up baby gronk means why would anyone need to know this
because you branched it on slight money and I needed to know what it meant okay if because I
want to be in the conversation if Emily if Emily felt the need to know what it meant then maybe
one of you guys out there also feels the need to know what it meant so here with
Emily's explanation of what it meant here goes okay livi Olivia done 20-year-old gymnast at
LSU she has millions of followers and relevant top earning female athlete in NIL deals which we
talked about last week rised is genwise slang derived from ris which is like charisma or flirting
so if you're like risen someone up you're kind of like flirting with them if you have ris you have
charisma you know what I mean baby gronk is a 12-year-old with 312,000 followers on instagram and his
real name is madden san Miguel okay he met with livi and there was a video of it and in the video
it's really sweet like she is obviously very charismatic she has ris it's clear to me and she says
hi to him and she said you should come to LSU someday or whatever and he posted a youtube
youtube video of it where which he titled livi done knows i got riz which now all the audience
listening understands what that means none of this really mattered very much until gentleman who
goes by the name hoopify on tiktok posted kind of like a joke tiktok about baby gronk's visit to LSU
and he said you know livi rised up baby gronk and then that is my understanding went viral and
that's when it became a subject of conversation oh and ps gronk i don't know philix knows this short
for rob gronk haski who played on the patriots with tom brady and they went to super bowl a bunch
of times and they he is called gronk so that is it and apparently he is a little bit fed up with all
of this baby gronk thing and has threatened nasty grams to baby gronk or least baby gronk's dad
which i feel like don't do that no these are children doing fun things and now i know what riz
means and i also spent time on a Wikipedia page learning about gen why slang so i might be using
more of it so i'm sorry to everyone who has to hear me do that going forward um i i thank you for
doing that Emily and i will be raising you up all week for doing that i can't follow that but
somehow i have to uh my number is 64 billion which is the number of dollars by which the bureau
of economic analysis apparently got the gdp number wrong when they came out with first quarter gdp
in april um at the end of april the advanced gdp estimate for the first quarter came out um they
said that it had grown 1.1 percent this week there was the third estimate for first quarter gdp
and they said 1.1 percent what were we thinking no in fact first quarter gdp grew by 2 percent
and the difference between the two in terms of gdp is 64 billion dollars which gives you an idea of
the magnitude by which economic statistics you know have error bars it's funny because you know how
like people in people are saying lately that economic statistics are made up or something um
but if they were made up they wouldn't keep getting revised like that there's no revisions when
you're making up numbers you just stick with them everybody knows that and if you did
what if you were making the rap you suddenly wouldn't have huge revisions where you doubled
the gdp number from one to the next because that yeah come on people get your conspiracy theory
straight although i guess if you wanted people to think you weren't making it up you would do it
like this ooh ooh so i don't even know what to think there's a lot of red string on the wall
i think that's it for us this week unless you want to know about um we had an awesome
sleepless segment lined up and i've already forgotten what it was what was it Emily um well
would you like to buy a bow banner white it was vanna white vanna white yes because this is
this is a great pop culture episode we have livy we have baby grunt we have barbie and in sleepless
we have vanna white so make sure you're a sleepless listener listen to us talking about vanna white
who according to some people might be underpaid and otherwise thanks for listening thanks for
writing in on sleight money at sleight.com thanks to patrick fort for giving Emily lots of material
this week and we will be back next week with more sleight money