Blood Farming: Purdue Pharma, empty voting and frozen heads
2024-07-12 00:35:23
<p>The audio companion to Bloomberg Opinion’s beloved Money Stuff column hosted by its author Matt Levine, “whose deadpan style mixes technical elucidation and wit” (NY Times). Once a week, Matt and his friend, Bloomberg News reporter and TV host Katie Greifeld, talk about Wall Street, finance and…other stuff. New episodes every Friday.</p>
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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players. And that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show.
We're gonna be discussing everything.
from high stakes poker to personal questions.
Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.
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Hello, and welcome to the Money Stuff podcast, your weekly podcast where we talk about stuff related to money. I'm Matt Levine, and I write the Money Stuff column for Bloomberg Opinion.
And I'm Katie Greifeld, a reporter for Bloomberg News and an anchor for Bloomberg Television.
What are we talking about today, Katie?
We're going to be talking about Purdue Pharma and non-consensual third-party releases. We're going to be talking about empty voting. And then we're gonna talk about cryogenics. Yeah. And blood farming.
Yeah.
But before that, there's only one piece of news this week.
Yeah, come on, let's go.
I got a puppy.
You got a puppy. Tell us about this puppy. I've seen a ton of pictures, and I want to hear you describe her for the audience.
She is extremely cute. She is a Wheaton Terrier. She's 11 weeks old. She's like mostly brown. Like Wheatons are sort of beige when they grow up, but when they're babies, they're mostly brown, with like a black nose and black paws and a little white spot on her tummy.
Yeah.
It's pretty good, man.
Yeah. She has that cute dark face, though. Does she keep that? Like, how does it work with Wheatons?
All of their fur lightens, and it becomes more uniform, but sometimes their muzzle is darker than the rest of them, but it won't stay black.
Okay, interesting. Because my parents have an Irish wolfhound, and we got her as a puppy. They did. I don't live with my parents. And she started out much darker, and, like her face was a bit darker, and then she lightened out, so.
So you're physically here, but I feel like you're probably thinking about the puppy.
I'm thinking about the puppy. Yeah.
But you know what else we're thinking about?
Non-consensual third-party releases and bankruptcy. Yes, you are so. Oh, wow, we stuck that transition.
You are so right. Purdue Pharma, this decision actually came down a little bit ago.
Yeah, it's in the news this week, and I read about it this week, because they went back to bankruptcy court, and they keep doing stuff. But basically, Purdue Pharma, opioid manufacturer, makes OxyContin, responsible for untold devastation, owned by the Sackler family, and it went bankrupt a few years ago to basically deal with, like, fairly paying out the opioid claims from victims and victim families, and also state attorney generals. And as part of the bankruptcy, basically, there's not that much money left in Purdue, although what's left is basically, we're gonna continue to sell OxyContin and give the proceeds to the people who became addicted to OxyContin.
Right.
They reached this deal to pay out the victims, where they would take what's left of Purdue and give them money out of the continuing business, and they would also take $6 billion, give or take, from the Sackler family, who had owned Purdue, who had taken a lot of money out of Purdue over the years, because it was a profitable company that made them billionaires. And they reached this deal where the Sacklers would kick in $6 billion, and in exchange for that, the bankruptcy court would say, no one can sue the Sacklers anymore over opioids. Their liability is capped at the $6 billion they're putting back into the Purdue bankruptcy. And this was a controversial thing in bankruptcy law, where some bankruptcy courts thought, you can do this. You can say, we're gonna do what are called non-consensual third-party releases.
We're gonna say, everyone's lawsuits against these people who are not in bankruptcy, but are connected to the bankruptcy, everyone's lawsuits are extinguished forever. And the bankruptcy court is just sort of like a powerful arbiter of fairness, could extinguish those claims. And this was controversial at the time, and it eventually went to the Supreme Court, and last month, the Supreme Court said, no, you can't do that. Only, essentially, the company that's in bankruptcy can have all of its lawsuits terminated. So the Sacklers can't get this sort of like universal release from liability.
And so, one thing that means is like, the deal is off. The Sacklers were gonna kick in $6 billion of their money. It's not like sitting in a bank account, it's like in these trusts. that's overseas.
It's like- It's complicated.
It'd be hard to get that money without them voluntarily giving it to you. And they said, we'll give you the $6 billion, we'll still be rich. We're gonna keep a lot of the money we took out of Purdue over the years, but this way, you'll certainly get the $6 billion, which is better than you'd do if you had to try to sue us in foreign courts and all this stuff. And now that deal is off, because the Supreme Court said, the Sacklers can't get what they want from that deal. They can't get a total release from claims.
And so now, it's sort of in this limbo. And the thing that happened this week is that, you know, it's back in the bankruptcy court, and the Purdue creditors, the people who are trying to get money out of Purdue, basically said they're gonna file a lawsuit, or they're seeking permission to file a lawsuit against the Sacklers, trying to get money from the Sacklers to get back into the bankruptcy estate, because that's kind of like how this goes. When the Supreme Court says, you can't do this universal settlement, the next thing that happens is that Purdue itself sues the Sacklers to try to get some money out of them.
I guess this raises the question of, what does this mean for other bankruptcy cases? If you don't have non-consensual third-party releases, just practically or pragmatically speaking, whatever you want to say it, that seems like it would get pretty messy pretty quickly.
Yeah, this is an unusual case in that the Sacklers are so personally identified with this, and like they have a lot of money. But right, there are a lot of these, what are called tort bankruptcies, where it's not just like a company owes money, and, like doesn't have enough money to pay it back, but it's like asbestos and tobacco, like the company does something dramatically harmful, and ends up owing much more money than it ever made. And it's like people are looking around for third parties, often who made a lot of money running those companies. And if you can't get the third party released, then, like, those people are less likely to contribute to the bankruptcy. Now it's an unusual case here, because the Sacklers took so much money out of Purdue, and are quite rich.
And so getting their money is, like, really important to the bankruptcy. There are a lot of other cases where it's like, the company itself is the main source of money. And so, like, you can still release claims against the company, that's what bankruptcy is, right? The bankruptcy process is designed to end all lawsuits against Purdue, and sort of parcel out the money among everyone who had a claim. But it's just, that's Purdue, right?
Purdue is in bankruptcy.
The problem- Purdue Pharma.
Purdue Pharma, right.
As we've been instructed to call it.
Yes, right. When I wrote about this, I did occasionally call it Purdue, and I got an email from a student at Purdue University saying, it is not the same thing. Please call it Purdue Pharma, which is fair.
That school allegiance just runs deep.
It's fair, you don't wanna be associated with bad stuff. But anyway, you know, here, like, most, of the money went out to the Sacklers. And so, it's particularly important to have their contributions.
So those two numbers there, $11 billion, what the Sacklers took from Purdue Pharma, and $6 billion, what they've agreed to give to the victims, if they had agreed to give $10 billion of their $11 billion, do you think that we'd be having this conversation?
First of all, they say, all these public statements, that a lot of that money, they didn't really take out $11 billion. It's like, a lot of the money went to paying taxes, and so, like, really, the $6 billion is much closer to all of the money that they took out than it is to half of the money that they took out. Although, no one thinks they're gonna be poor after this. But no, I mean, the answer is no. The Supreme Court decided, not a fairness question, but a legal question.
I think it's tainted by the fact that people are really angry at the Sacklers. And I think there are a lot of other bankruptcy cases where the third-party release was less controversial, and, like, was clearly useful to getting a deal done, and, like, the Supreme Court took a case where the third-party is particularly unsympathetic, where it's these billionaires who, like, sort of, caused the opioid epidemic. But if you just, like, read the reasoning of the Supreme Court case, it has nothing to do with whether the settlement is fair. And had they kicked in 100% of their money and agreed to work for the victims for the rest of their lives, it's still, they wouldn't get a third-party release. So, no.
We could talk about the dissent.
Yeah, I mean, like, I. just, it's a hard case. Like, I think that bankruptcy is this weird area of law where it's, like, the bankruptcy court has a lot of power to kind of craft the deal that seems fairest to it, right? Like, it really is the case that bankruptcy gets rid of all of the lawsuits against Purdue, right? Like, everyone has claims against Purdue, and the bankruptcy court says, all those claims are gone forever, and in exchange, you get whatever you get from the bankruptcy settlement, which could be pennies on the dollar, could be nothing.
It extinguishes all the claims. Like, that's what bankruptcy is. It's, like, dividing up and ending all the claims against the company. And because of that, bankruptcy courts are really in the business of, like, trying to craft fair deals, and then, like, sort of imposing them on people who are making everyone unhappy, basically, right? Like, imposing a deal on everyone, even if they object.
And it's sort of natural for the bankruptcy court to say, well, in order to get the fair deal, that, like, works the best, we need to not only end claims against Purdue, but we have to end these claims against the Sacklers. And because that's part of, like, achieving our goal of fairness, it's, like, sort of part of our powers. But the Supreme Court said, it's not really part of your powers, right? Like, you only have jurisdiction over the bankruptcy, not over the, you know, everyone else who comes into contact with it. And so it's not part of your powers.
And I think there's, like, a good argument for that. It's just, like, a matter of law. But it was a 5-4 decision in the Supreme Court. And Justice Kavanaugh wrote this dissent saying, you know, this is a shining example of the bankruptcy process, right? The point of the bankruptcy is to get as much money as you can for the victims.
And they did that. And they did it here by a sort of compromise that made everyone unhappy, but kind of, like, achieved the rough justice of getting as much money as possible for the victims. And then the Supreme Court says, no, you can't do that. And so now it's sort of in this limbo where probably the victims will get less money.
Yeah, in that dissent, he wrote, because some victims or creditors may hold out for any potential future settlement for any one of those reasons and instead still sue, the Sacklers are less likely to settle with anyone in the first place. Maybe the clouds will part. But in a world where non-consensual, non-debtor releases are categorically impermissible, any hope for a new deal seems questionable. So we'll see.
Yeah, and I wrote on Thursday that they're trying for a new deal, right?
Yeah.
The biggest claims against the Sacklers don't belong to, like, individual victims. They belong to Purdue, right? The biggest claim against the Sackler is they took all this money out of Purdue and Purdue has, like, in bankruptcy, claims that they should give the money back. And so they will bring those cases against the Sacklers and they will hope that the Sacklers will settle those claims and will say, you know, we're not gonna get released from all the other creditors, but we'll get released from Purdue, and that's, like, the biggest thing, so we're gonna settle that. But will they settle it for $6 billion?
There's some chance that it is, in fact, a pure fantasy that they'll get any money out of them.
So watch this space.
This podcast is supported by Apollo Global Management. When it comes to building and financing stronger businesses, Apollo turns some of the world's most complex challenges into growth opportunities. Apollo's customized capital solutions help drive innovation and growth, turning the great businesses of today into leaders of tomorrow. As one of the world's largest alternative asset managers, Apollo is helping to fuel the real economy by generating investment-grade credit, helping to fill gaps in America's financial ecosystem and providing greater access to more resilient and diverse pools of capital. By providing companies with access to flexible financing solutions and partnering with management teams to help grow their businesses, Apollo is there every step of the way to drive positive outcomes for companies and power economic growth.
Apollo, investing in tomorrow, today. Learn more at Apollo.com slash private investment grade.
I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're gonna be discussing everything.
from high-stakes poker to personal questions.
Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.
Let's talk about empty voting and Politin versus Massimo, which you've described as a long, weird proxy fight.
Okay, here's how weird it is. So, Massimo, is this company, it's like a health tech company. They like sued Apple over Apple Watch, like they're, you know, do something.
Yeah. Health, polls, something. That was a big deal like a year ago.
Yeah, so anyway, there's a company, public company, and Politin is a hedge fund that ran a proxy fight complaining about how they run their business, and won and got two seats on the board of directors, which has like five members. And so they're on the board and they're running another proxy fight to get more directors. because they're like, this company is still stonewalling us. Like they're having three, two board votes where, like the Politin, guys lose out on the vote and they claim they're not getting enough information and they're sort of, they're keeping the board in the dark. So it's this very like awkward boardroom tension where, like the activist and the company's chairman are both in the boardroom at the same time and apparently still vehemently dislike each other.
But anyway, they're running a proxy fight. So there are companies holding a shareholder meeting at the end of July to vote on whether the company's nominees or the Politin nominees will get elected. And Politin just filed this letter saying that the company is doing some empty voting. So empty voting is like, in theory, it's like you own 1% of the stock or whatever, and you get the votes for like 10% of the stock. So, like classically, you like buy 11% of the stock, you short 10% of the stock, right?
So you're like long 11%, short 10%. You're net long 1%, so you only own 1% of the stock, but you have 11% of the votes. And then you vote way out of proportion to your economic interest. This is the thing that people like talk about as a concept a lot. And you rarely see like actual cases of it.
And here, I'm not sure you see actual cases of it. But, like Politin says, you know, we got like the voting records and it seems like this one brokerage firm voted a lot of shares, like a lot more than it owned a week before the record date and a lot more than it owned a week after the record date. So what they think happened is essentially it borrowed that stock from other shareholders just around the record date for the vote, so that it would own 9.9% of the stock just at the vote. And then it got rid of that stock afterwards. So it never had the economic exposure.
They say it's a brokerage firm affiliated with an investor who's a friend of the chairman of the company. And so it's like, they called it a favor and like just got a lot of votes.
How do you prove friendship?
I mean, do they have a podcast together? What is this?
It doesn't matter. Like, if someone actually borrows 10% of the stock to vote it and then, like, gets rid of it the next day, then that's weird. Yeah. That's weird. And then, you know, like politicians are like, oh, you should investigate it, right?
And like, if it turns out that the chairman of the company was like emailing the guy being like, hey, borrow 10% of the stock so you can vote, then that's bad, whether or not they have a podcast together.
I was gonna ask you that. Is it bad? They're alleging that this happened, et cetera, but is this not allowed?
I don't know. I don't know. No one knows, right? I mean, like, this is the thing that people talk about and people like write papers about because they think it's interesting. It seems like it should be bad, right?
It seems like the point of shareholder voting is that you own a portion of the company and you care about the company being good because it's like your stock, right? So you want the stock to go up. You want the company to be profitable, all those things. And so your votes are in proportion to your economic interest in the company. And if you find a way to get votes that are not in proportion to your economic interest, that seems like it's wrong and not how voting is supposed to work.
But there's no actual rule that says your voting has to be in proportion to your economic interest. And we've talked a lot about the Paramount deal, where the whole point of the Paramount deal is that Sherry Redstone owned 10% of the stock and had 75% of the votes, right? So it's not like a law of nature or, as far as I can tell, a rule of the SEC, that you need to have votes in proportion to your economic interest. I just don't think there's a rule that says if you own 10% of the stock and then do a swap with a bank where you're short 10% of the stock, I don't think there's any rule that says you can't vote.
I do wonder what the incentive for this brokerage firm, associated with an investor who is a friend of the Massimo chairman, what is their incentive to do this beyond their friendship? I have a lot of friends and there's not a lot I would do for them.
I feel like, if I had a lot of money and someone was like, would you empty vote for me in a proxy fight? I would say yes, just because it's like a cool legal precedent. Yeah. I don't know. You've got a good column out of it.
Yeah, exactly. But no, I mean, what's in it for them? Well, it's unclear how much it costs them, right? Because you do have to do it, right? It's like the pain.
Yeah, I mean the effort alone.
There are some transaction costs. Loosely speaking, what you're doing is borrowing the stock for a couple of days, which is like you pay a stock borrower fee, which is like, you know, for, like most liquid stocks, it's like, yeah, on the order of 25 basis points per annum. So it's like not that much, but it's a little cost. But probably you're not literally just paying a stock borrower fee. Probably you're like doing some sort of thing where you're like buying the stock and simultaneously shorting it, or like buying the stock and doing a derivative.
So you're paying some transaction costs. So it costs you money. It doesn't cost you like as much money as buying 10% of the company, but it costs you some money. What's in it for them? I mean, like literally.
one possibility is like, there's no allegation they weren't a shareholder, right? And so if you're like a 1% shareholder of the company and you think one side here is clearly right and one side is wrong, and it's better for the company, for Massimo to win this proxy fight, then doing this empty voting costs you a little bit of money, but it gets you the right result in the proxy fight. And then your 1% stake is worth more, right? So that's a possible explanation.
Right, I mean, but that comes back to the point you made that, like in activist hedge fund, like they would want to have the economic exposure as well.
Yeah, it's hard to know, right? Like loosely speaking, if you're an activist, you can own more than 10% of a company's stock without like running into complicated issues around trading. Some people do, but it's like often, activists will sort of cap themselves at 9.9%. A lot of activists will run proxy fights owning less than 9.9% because they're not that huge a fund and the company is big, right? Like you have, you know, like the engine number one proxy fight at Exxon, where they own like essentially zero, but you know, they own like a tiny fraction of 1% of the company because they were a little hedge fund and Exxon is a giant company, right?
And so maybe they would have liked to own 10%, but they didn't have that kind of money. And so they owned a lot less. It's a lot cheaper to buy votes than to buy stock, right? I don't know how much cheaper, because it depends on the stock broadcast and exactly how you structure the transaction, but yeah, it's cheaper. And so if you are an activist and, like you, are sort of capped out economically at like 1% or 2% of a company, you might want to get to 10% of the company just to win the vote, right?
Just in empty voting. Now that's an interesting case because that's like clearly your motivations there are good. You're just buying votes, right? But like you want the stock to go up and you do have economic exposure to the stock. The really interesting case is like what if your motivations are to tank the stock, right?
I mean, like. I wrote about this and people email me like, what if you're actually short? Like you're a short seller. You want the stock to go down, right? You're short 1% of the stock.
Why not get long 8% of the stock and short 9% of the stock? And you're still net short and you still want the stock to go down, but now you have 8% of the votes. You can like mess up the voting. Yeah. I don't think there's a ton of cases where you can actually do any damage to a company by voting, but there are a few, right?
The one that I thought of immediately is, and this is hard to do just because of the size, but we talked about Elon Musk's compensation vote.
We certainly did.
But had he lost that vote, I think the stock would have gone down, right? He might've quit in a huff, right? The stock probably would have gone down. And then, if you were short, you would have made a lot of money. And so if you were short, you know, 2% of Tesla and like you got to be short 9% and long 7% and like, messed up his vote, then, like you might've made some money on that.
Now you can't really do that because Tesla's enormous, but there's maybe some circumstances where you could be a short seller who gets some empty votes to like, mess up some sort of shareholder vote.
You know, I am happy we're talking about this.
Why?
I feel like we're getting closer and closer to talking about closed-end fund proxy fights.
Oh yeah. I'm, gosh.
It's just, I don't know, the inevitable tug of the universe pulling us towards talking about this.
Talking about closed-end fund proxy fights.
Yeah. Anything else you'd like to add?
Uh, I think the only thing I'd say about empty voting is like people talk about this all the time in credit. In credit, there's a lot more you can do. And so you can buy up like 50% of some series of a company's bonds and be like much more short with credit default swaps than you are long bonds. And then you can like mess things up. And so like the classic case, and no one knows if this is true for some reason, but like a company called Windstream, basically like was forced into default by a hedge fund, Aurelius, that owned a bunch of its bonds and said, you have defaulted on these bonds.
And it was widely rumored, never like really fully reported. It was widely rumored that Aurelius bought a lot of CDS protection. And so it was net short. the company's credit, which makes sense because it like bought all these bonds, said you're in default and the value of the bonds dropped precipitously. So that's not a good trade unless you're also doing something else.
But there's a lot of like people call it empty creditors or empty voting and credit, where, like you can be more short somewhere else and cause a lot of problems with your long position. Also, creditors can kind of do more to like cause problems. Like there's only so much a shareholder vote can do. Cool. Empty voting.
Empty voting. Empty voting.
This podcast is supported by Apollo Global Management. When it comes to building and financing stronger businesses, Apollo turned some of the world's most complex challenges into growth opportunities. Apollo's customized capital solutions help drive innovation and growth, turning the great businesses of today into leaders of tomorrow. As one of the world's largest alternative asset managers, Apollo is helping to fuel the real economy by generating investment grade credit, helping to fill gaps in America's financial ecosystem and providing greater access to more resilient and diverse pools of capital. By providing companies with access to flexible financing solutions and partnering with management teams to help grow their businesses, Apollo is there every step of the way to drive positive outcomes for companies and power economic growth.
Apollo, investing in tomorrow today. Learn more at Apollo.com slash private investment grade.
I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're gonna be discussing everything.
from high stakes poker to personal questions.
Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.
All right.
Oh, now we're-.
Now we're cooking with frozen heads.
I'm so excited to talk about this. There was just a fantastic article in Bloomberg this week talking about and interviewing estate attorneys for people who freeze themselves and want to be brought back to life. There's so many questions that just, I feel like they can't be answered, but they're so fun to talk about.
Bloomberg's. Aaron Schilling wrote about it and says it's like a philosophy class hypothetical. And it really is. It's like Derek Parfit. It's like, if you were cloned, is like your new consciousness you, or is it somebody else?
And if that matters, it's like a matter of like legal inheritance, right?
Yeah, absolutely. If you set money aside for 200 years in the future and you're brought back to life, is that your money?
Depends on what your trust says.
Exactly.
But are you you?
Are you you?
It's like one argument, apparently. Some kinds of trusts, you can't get the right tax benefits. You can't be the beneficiary of your own trust. And so, for some people, the answer that you want is no, you are not you. If you're brought back to life, you're a separate person.
And therefore, you can inherit from yourself. Well, also- There's probably other contexts where you'd want the answer to be the other way. Like, no, I'm the same person, so I get to keep mine.
I mean, if you freeze your brain, does your soul get frozen too, when you're reanimated?
I don't know that your soul, there's like a separate third thing, which is like your legal person. Right.
Well, someone makes the point-.
The law doesn't care about your soul.
Someone makes the point in this article, one of the estate attorneys, that reversing a death certificate is super complicated. So, for legal purposes, maybe you should be a different person when you wake up.
Yeah. One thing you learn in law school is the rule against perpetuities. Are you familiar with the rule against perpetuities? I mean, in the context- As an ETF person.
We're all aware, I mean, I hope, of the spy kids.
The spy kids, right. So, the rule against perpetuities says that certain kinds of trusts, traditionally all trusts, can't go on forever. There are some places where can't go on forever means they can't last more than 100 years or whatever, which is like a natural thing. But the traditional rule is they can't last longer than lives in being plus 21 years. So, lives in being means you write some list of specific people who are alive today.
And when the last of those people dies, plus 21 years, that's when your trust has to end. And so, famously, SPY, the S&P 500 ETF, is a trust.
A unit investment trust.
It's a unit investment trust. And it terminates when the last of like, it's like what, like 30?.
It's something, it's like something like that.
It's like a dozen-ish people.
Yeah, below 20.
Yeah, when the last of them dies, 21 years later, SPY ends, right? And, like, the people, they're called, the spy kids, are all, they're like the children of people who worked at the company at the time.
Like lawyers, yeah.
Yeah, they're like lawyers, kids. Because that's what you do, you try to pick the longest life. And so, you pick like 12 people, so if one of them dies by a freak accident, you still got like 11 more. Yeah. And you pick young people, because then, like they're likely to live longer than if you picked old people.
And so, that's the traditional rule against perpetuities. But that doesn't help you if you're planning to be reanimated in 200 years, because then everyone will be dead, plus 21 years, everyone alive at the time. Except you, maybe, right? Because, like, one question is like, if you're reanimated, do you spring back to life? And therefore, the trust springs back to life.
I don't know, I don't know. Well, also, I mean, looking far into the future, what if you set money aside, and then you aren't reanimated, this never comes to fruition, what happens to the money eventually? And at what point do you, does someone say, okay, this clearly isn't going to work, let's crack open the piggy bank?
Well, I think that the legal rule is still the rule against perpetuities. Like, I think the answer is like, you know, they do this in states where, instead of like lives and being plus 21 years, the rule is like trust can last for 500 years. And so, you set aside money in a trust, and it's like, if I get reanimated, the money goes to me, and if not, after 500 years, it goes to charity or whatever, right? But like, we'll all be dead.
I mean, speak for yourself.
Right, exactly.
Apparently.
Like, if you're not reanimated in 500 years, like no one cares about that.
If I found out that I had an ancestor who left me some money 500 years ago, I'd be psyched about it.
Contingently, right? Like, your ancestor, left some money for himself to reanimate his frozen head, and then, 500 years later, his frozen head's still not reanimated, and it's like, okay, it goes to Katie.
It's probably kind of gross, too, because I don't know about the technology. But apparently, by one estimate, about 5,500 people are planning for cryogenic preservation. That's, actually, I was gonna say, that's so many people, but actually, in the grand scheme of things, that's not that many. I kind of want to be one of them, though.
If it works, sure.
If it works, I mean.
I'd like to not die.
Yeah, but eventually, we will die, Matt, so you might as well, you know, take a gamble on it. I will say, though, like, if my parents were some of these people who were, like, estate planning for their frozen heads, I would be so mad.
It is a little, I don't want to say, selfish, but right, instead of the money going to your heirs, it goes to maintain your frozen head.
Yeah, I'd be like, I need this now.
For, like, a pretty small chance of, maybe not a small chance, I don't know, for some chance of reanimation.
Yeah, actually, I have no idea, either. I did love this quote, though, in the article. This is from Mark House. He's an estate lawyer who works in Scottsdale, Arizona, and he says the idea of cryo-preservation has gone from crackpot to merely eccentric, and now that it's eccentric, it's kind of in vogue to be interested in it. Eccentric is such an interesting word because that is the word that wealthy people use to just say weird.
You can be eccentric if you have money. If you don't have a lot of money, you're just a weirdo.
Right, and you definitely need a lot of money to-.
Be eccentric.
Set money aside for cryo-preservation.
Exactly, yeah. Right. There's also, I mean, there's also the big question of, like, what currency are we going to use in 500 years?
Oh, yeah, like, you wake up and you need money, right? And, like, what if your dollars are worthless? Yeah. Put it in Bitcoin. What if your Bitcoins are worthless, right?
But also, like, along the way, like, presumably there's some warehouse that is billing somebody to keep your head frozen, right?
It's just a warehouse of heads. This is just the perfect topic. I love this.
This also, I must say.
Yeah.
Can we talk on the air?
About my novel?
About your novel.
So, I am such an egomaniac that, like, I actually believe that I have gold here. Okay. I have an idea for a sci-fi novel. I'll talk about it in general terms. I really am worried someone's going to steal it and write it before I have a chance.
But it involves blood farming. It involves time travel.
There's our episode title.
And, I mean, there's a lot of ethical questions there. Yeah, like, to save the human race, if you needed to, like, farm people's blood, is that okay? I don't know. Well, maybe I should-.
What a great financial podcast this is. I don't know.
I'm worried. I'm going to get canceled. Like, I don't know.
Katie doesn't really want to farm people's blood.
No, I don't want to. But, like, if you traveled in the future and, like, through the method of travel, the population was weakened and everyone had bad blood, and you needed more blood, you know, what would you do? I don't know.
It's just blood farming. Yeah. Science fiction is always, like, these sort of, like, technological or, like, societal hypotheticals. But it's like, what about the lawyers, right? Yeah.
It's like, what are the legal regimes applicable to these, like, science hypotheticals?
I mean, that's the type of world-building that you have to do in a sci-fi. You have to do it, right.
You need to think about the trust in a state's rules.
I'm reading a book about fairies right now, which is just, like, straight fantasy. And I feel like you don't run into these kind of questions as much. in fantasy that involves fairies and magic, because you have magic, whereas sci-fi, you know, you have to create a world where these rules make sense.
I often think that you should have more of it in fantasy, right? Because, like, what are the financial implications of, like, having magic, right? What kind of society would you have?
I guess Harry Potter did try to tackle a lot of those questions.
Some of them, right? Yeah, they had a bank. They had a bank. There's, like, some brief mention in Harry Potter. that's, like, there's, like, some laws, somebody's laws of transfiguration, where you can't, like, create food out of nothing or something.
I forget exactly what it is. There are characters in Harry Potter who, like, don't have a lot of money. Yeah. Like, wizards. And it's like, well, they're wizards.
They can do whatever, you know, they can, like, create stuff out of nothing. They can create magic, right? Yeah. So, like, why do they not have a lot of money? And there's sort of, like, a nod in that direction, but it's, like, sort of perplexing.
So, like, they can't create food out of nothing, but they do have spells that could kill people. Right.
Yeah. So you could, like, rob a bank.
Yeah, exactly. You could get into Gringotts, but then there's-.
Not Gringotts, but, like, just a regular bank.
Yeah. Or, you know, you walk into a shop.
Right.
Yeah.
Take what you want. Disappear.
Yeah, there you go.
Anyway, right. World building in science fiction.
Yeah.
And fantasy.
Anyway, I just feel like I've accomplished everything I want to in journalism, so it's time to-.
You've been a TV anchor. You've been the right kind of TV anchor for four days.
Yeah, it's over.
Anything else you want to say?
My dog is really cute.
And that was the Money Stuff Podcast.
I'm Matt Levine. And I'm Katie Greifeld.
You can find my work by subscribing to the Money Stuff newsletter on Bloomberg.
com.
And you can find me on Bloomberg TV every day between 10 to 11 a.
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The Money Stuff Podcast is made possible by Anna Masarakis and Moses Andong.
Our theme music was composed by Blake Maples.
Brendan Francis Newnham is our executive producer.
And Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.
Thanks for listening to the Money Stuff Podcast. We'll be back next week with more stuff.
I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists who moonlight as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show.
We're gonna be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions.
Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.
Thank you.
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