Author: openjargon

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Welcome back to our Sunday edition, a roundup of some of our top stories. Ever dream of packing it all in and moving to Southern Europe? You may have to rethink: The golden age of golden visas is already over.

On the agenda today:

• Chess is taking over modern culture. It's never been more toxic.
• Meet the best early-stage investors of 2024.
• Blackstone's high-profile real-estate fund could be in trouble.
• Want to sell your home? Get ready for disappointment.

But first: Apple's advertising flub reveals how Silicon Valley, and we, have changed.

If this was forwarded to you, sign up here. Download Insider's app here.

This week's dispatch

Apple under pressure

A Space Invaders arcade game. Brightly colored paint cans. A cute squishy toy. Each slowly succumbs to a hydraulic press. What's left is a new iPad.

Apple's ad, titled "Crush," was meant to show how the new tablet can be a creative tool. Instead it debuted to derision. The company responded by pulling the ad from TV and apologizing, saying it "missed the mark."

The damage to Apple's business is likely to be minimal. First quarter iPad sales came in at $7 billion. In comparison, iPhone sales were almost 10x that. Apple is a $2.8 trillion giant.

The reputational damage is to be seen. Thanks to the almost instantaneous backlash, the ad didn't air widely. If the ad has changed your perceptions of Apple, let me know at mturner@insider.com.

But the ad, and the reaction to it, highlights our changed relationship with our devices.

Apple's iconic 1984 Super Bowl ad was about the promise of technology, of breaking free from drudgery, of revolution.

Forty years on, creatives are concerned that AI will coopt their work or replace them entirely. Vinyl sales are booming. Teenagers are choosing dumb phones. Digital cameras are back. We're tracking and limiting screen time for our kids.

It shouldn't come as a surprise then that an ad portraying a powerful machine crushing much-loved tools of human creativity hit a nerve.

Apple's mistake should serve as a lesson to every tech company.

The dark heart of modern chess

Chess has never been more popular, but its ugly side has also never been more exposed.

The same characteristics that have driven its popularity online — an easy-to-understand eight-by-eight grid, a strategy without chance or luck — have also made it a cheater's paradise. Meanwhile, rampant sexism festers at chess' heart.

One reporter's quest to understand chess' degeneration.

2024 top seed investors

Behind most startup founders is an investor who saw their potential, nurtured their ambition, and backed their ideas. Now in its fourth year, our list celebrates these figures, from Y Combinator's Dalton Caldwell to Verge Genomics' Alice Zhang.

Plus, we're also highlighting the top 40 women early-stage investors, including Cowboy Ventures' Aileen Lee and Array Ventures' Shruti Gandhi.

Meet the kingmakers:

• The Seed 100: The best early-stage investors of 2024
• The Seed 40: The best women early-stage investors of 2024

Trouble at Blackstone

Blackstone's $114 billion real-estate fund has veteran analysts worried. The private-equity giant found success pitching ordinary investors on BREIT, a commercial real-estate fund.

But some veteran analysts, accountants, and investors believe Blackstone's estimates of BREIT's assets are wildly inflated, making it essentially a house of cards.

Inside the growing alarm over BREIT.

Home sellers' summer from hell

Sellers have had the upper hand for the last few years, but that's about to change.

Home prices are still rising, but buyers are slowly starting to have more options — meaning the days of desperate dealmaking are over. Plus, mortgage rates have spiked back up to 7%, which is deterring prospective buyers and changing the calculus for many sellers.

More on why it'll be a rough summer for sellers.

This week's quote:

"I think what we all would want is some acknowledgment about what happened, and at least not completely dismiss the fact that it could have been work-related."

• A junior banker at Bank of America, after the death of a 35-year-old BofA associate.

More of this week's top reads:

• How spending has changed for young adults in the last 30 years.
• "Seriously underwater" mortgages are on the rise throughout the US.
• I've been offered every job I've interviewed for. I always ask five questions.
• Three reasons Norwegians are so effective at work.
• OpenAI destroyed a trove of books used to train AI models.

• Meet the millennials who accidentally gamed the economy and wound up wealthy.

  ---

  The Insider Today team: Matt Turner, deputy editor-in-chief, in New York. Jordan Parker Erb, editor, in New York. Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Lisa Ryan, executive editor, in New York.

• Flora Batts, 65, has had it with Texas' high cost of living, hot weather, and divisive politics.
• Batts is moving to northwest Pennsylvania, a part of the Ruset Belt where homes are cheaper.
• She said the city, located on one of the Great Lakes, has more tolerable weather and politics.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Texas native Flora Batts, a 65-year-old retired Medicaid program coordinator, who is moving to Pennsylvania in May. The essay, which also incorporates quotes from emails between Batts and BI, has been edited for length and clarity.

Austin has been my home for more than 60 years — minus the time spent following around my military husband.

I have family buried from Odem to Amarillo, but we're leaving the state for Pennsylvania.

We found our next home and will close on May 17, with the movers arriving on the 22nd to take us 1,500 miles north.

This decision wasn't made in haste or as a knee-jerk reaction to current affairs. It's like a marriage slowly dying over the years.

The quality of life in Austin has plummeted. Forget about buying a house here — the cost of living puts Dallas to shame. Moreover, most of my favorite restaurants are gone, replaced mainly by expensive fusion or fast food, and the traffic congestion makes it feel like Houston in the '70s. Plus, I hate hot weather.

It comes to a point when you know — you know — it's over.

Austin just isn't what it used to be

My family and I moved to Austin in 1963. The house my parents bought was considered the furthest reaches of North Austin at the time.

I grew up in the city, probably during one of the better times. Back then, there were open fields, and my brother and I used to go sailing and fish for crawdaddies. It was almost like living in the countryside.

Coming of age in Austin in the 70s was just an incredible time; you could do anything. The city had enough to allow us to get into trouble but still be safe.

I lived 20 minutes from a lake, so we would have bonfires and parties. You could go to the Armadillo and see Shawn Phillips, and catch drag shows downtown. The University of Texas students really kept the city young and on its toes.

I don't see that so much anymore. Tech has totally changed everything. Michael Dell kicked the door down and let everybody in. All that tech money changed Austin and drove up the cost of living.

It costs so much to afford homes in Austin now

After moving to South Carolina for the military, my husband and I moved back to Austin in 1998. At that time, I believe there was a 98% occupancy rate. Even back then the rents were sky high — they've just never really come back down.

The homes have gotten more expensive here, too.

In 1963, my parents bought their house for about $30,000. It's just a tiny house, one story and very simple. When my sister sold it after my mother passed away, it went for $220,000. It was later flipped, remodeled, and sold for around $500,000.

The 40-year-old, 2,400-square-foot home my husband and I bought in 2001 for $197,000 sold for $350,000 six years ago — and later resold for $550,000.

Texas brags that we don't have a state income tax, but we do have property taxes. And they're some of the highest in the nation.

I'm a retired state employee, and I have a pension and my Social Security. My husband is also retired from the military and on Social Security, but our incomes aren't enough to buy a nice house in an Austin neighborhood.

We're renting as we wait to move out of the state. Right now we pay $2,300 a month for a three-bedroom, two-bath home that's around 1,900 square feet.

We know our money is going to go a lot farther elsewhere.

The political climate in Texas has changed

When I was a young woman, I felt very proud to be a Texan. To be a Texas woman meant you were strong and that you could stand on your own two feet — and, in some cases, chew tobacco.

But it seems to me that the current government would prefer women to be demure and submissive, which is everything I was told was not characteristic of a Texas woman.

Thanks to 20 years of evolving conservative politics that seem to promote the idea that mom stays at home and raises the kids, I'm not comfortable identifying myself as a Texas woman.

I'm 65 years old, so abortion laws don't affect me. But they will affect my 14-year-old daughter.

I really don't think it should be the government's decision to tell her what she can and cannot do.

I want her to establish her own boundaries and have autonomy over her own body and life, but it's becoming less and less acceptable here.

Although my daughter was born in Austin and has only ever lived here, she doesn't really identify as a Texan. I think that speaks volumes.

Austin has become a playground for the wealthy

In the past, every Christmas, my sister-in-law and I would go with our kids to the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar. It was always a blast.

But it started getting more high-dollar vendors. It's making money hand over fist because there's a large population in Austin now that has a significant amount of disposable income. I'm not one of them. So I stopped going.

Many local businesses can also no longer afford to rent their retail space. We lost Nomadic Notions, a store that sold jewelry beading that also had all sorts of imported fabrics. It was so Austin-nesque, a very hippie vibe. We almost lost Toy Joy, too.

Back in the day, it was not a big deal to go down to the Paramount to watch a play. But because we're in far North Austin, the traffic really discourages us from venturing that far into town anymore.

The problem is that Austin is progressing faster than it can accommodate its population. We've been pushing the envelope for over 20 years now, operating at maximum occupancy off and on.

The city is trying to address the issue. It's doing a lot of expansion on the highways, and we've seen residential and retail building surge in the city. I believe it will eventually improve the infrastructure enough to handle the increasing population.

Our money will go further in Pennsylvania

For the past 10 years, we've been talking about leaving Austin. It was just a matter of deciding where to go.

At first, we thought about Colorado, but the pandemic really changed the whole landscape. Tech companies sunk their big dollars into the state. We got priced out of a real-estate market we used to think was affordable.

After Colorado, we started looking up states that would not tax our retirement income. We thought Virginia would be a good fit, but after visiting it for a week, the universe made it very clear that it was not for us.

We eventually decided on Pennsylvania, where my husband is from and still has family living. We're moving to Erie, where my daughter will be attending the same high school he graduated from.

The biggest driving factor is that there are an array of properties there that are affordable. We also wanted land with a lot of trees — something we couldn't afford in Austin.

In Erie, we bought a three-bedroom, two-bath home on two-thirds of an acre. It's an almost 100-year-old house that has been completely remodeled and expanded. It has a 16'x16' shed, which will be my clay studio. I'm just smitten with the property.

The area we're moving to is really quiet and 15 minutes away from Lake Erie. It's almost like going to the ocean because its waves are so strong, and there's a beach.

I'm also really stoked that it's always at least 20 degrees cooler there. I'm outdoorsy and like to be outside on my patio with my plants. But in Austin, I would always get hot flashes. Last summer, the weather was 110 degrees.

My life is going to change for the better

Pennsylvania is a purple state. I like knowing there's a nice balance between both sides, so everyone seems to get a voice and representation.

There will be a night-and-day difference between our lives in Texas and Pennsylvania. It won't be comparable.

My quality of life is going to be different. My husband has just retired. We'll have more time together in a quiet, peaceful neighborhood — very different from Austin, where it's loud and congested and there are condos in every backyard.

There are things I am going to miss about Austin, like the cheap gas, and the HEB grocery market. But Erie has local produce everywhere, miles of vineyards, and fruit trees in abundance.

I'll probably have to start making my own tortillas again and learn to replicate HEB's flaxseed waffles, but I like a good culinary challenge.

• Recycling standards vary widely across the US.
• Recycling the wrong material or including wet or dirty items can contaminate the waste stream.
• Some items may need to be dropped off at specific locations instead of having them collected.

Many of us have been guilty of "wish-cycling" — tossing just about every piece of paper, plastic, metal, or glass in the blue bin because it should be recyclable. Unfortunately, recycling is more complicated than that.

What belongs in curbside recycling bins varies widely in the US. "There are literally thousands of recycling standards across the country," Rajesh Buch, a professor at Arizona State University's Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation, told Business Insider.

That's, in part, because recycling systems that can sort through piles of discarded items can cost tens of millions of dollars. "In most communities," he said, "they don't have the resources to have these fully loaded, full-capacity systems."

Conflicting standards can be confusing, but dumping every container or scrap can contaminate the waste stream, Buch said. One estimate puts recycling's contamination rate at 17%.

Therefore, it's necessary to check with your municipality to see the types of recyclables it's equipped to handle. Earth911 has a recycling locator that can help you find where to dispose of certain recyclables, or you can pay a company like TerraCycle to do the work for you.

That said, there are some items that almost always need to go in the garbage or a special recycling facility.

1. Aerosol cans

Aerosol cans are metal with plastic caps, which should be recycled separately. Some recyclers accept the cans but others don't.

You'll want to make sure they're empty if you are able to recycle them, especially if the cans contained chemicals. "Some of these are dangerous to put in the blue bin," Buch said.

2. Batteries

Some cities, like Seattle, have barred people from throwing batteries in the trash because they can cause chemical leaks and fires. Batteries usually can't be recycled curbside, either.

Instead, a battery recycling facility needs to take them, Buch said.

If you want to recycle them, you can find retail locations willing to take batteries on the site Call2Recycle.

3. Chip bags and other snack wrappers

Chip bags, granola bar wrappers, and other snack packages are often multi-layered materials, Buch said.

"You've got foil on the outside," he said. "You've got a plastic coating on the inside, and that's not recyclable." The machines aren't able to separate the layers.

Some brands' packaging is recyclable through How2Recycle, though you'll have to drop it off at a participating grocery store or retailer.

4. Coffee mugs and other ceramics

It might seem like your blue bin is the perfect spot for a broken coffee mug, but there isn't good technology to recycle ceramics, Buch said. They can even damage equipment.

The same is true for heat-resistant glass used to make items like baking dishes.

5. Coffee pods

Over the years, coffee companies have made their pods more environmentally friendly by switching to a different type of recyclable plastic. But you still can't just toss them in your recycling right out of the machine.

"The foil is recyclable," Buch said. "The plastic is recyclable." But you have to remove the foil top from the plastic cup. As with all other recycling, it should be clean and dry.

Even when properly separated, though, the pods can be what Buch calls a "nuisance item." They're so small that they often fall through slots or holes in sorting machines instead of getting recycled.

"Anything that's two inches or smaller is going to fall out of the sorting system," Buch said.

There are still ways to recycle some pods, though. Nescafe accepts pods you return to them, for example.

6. Diapers

Disposable diapers are difficult to recycle "even if you didn't have all the poop inside," Buch said. They contain a variety of materials, like plastic and cellulose.

Some recycling companies like TerraCycle might take them, but municipal facilities most likely won't.

7. E-waste

Cellphones, printers, and computers contain plastic, metal, and a mix of other materials that make them poorly suited for standard recycling systems.

Many cities have separate facilities where you can drop your e-waste off, or you might be able to schedule a special pickup. For example, if you have a coffee maker that's gone kaput, a retailer like Staples might recycle it and other small appliances for free.

8. Inflatable pools and toys

In 2018, the US generated 35.7 million tons of plastic waste and only recycled about 9% of it, according to the EPA's most recent estimates. Because there are so many different kinds of plastics, it can be difficult to know what you can and cannot throw in your blue bin.

Many plastic containers have a little symbol on them, recycling arrows with a number in the center. This is what's known as a resin identification code.

Most recycling facilities accept empty, clean, dry number 1 or 2 plastic. Some locations accept numbers 1 through 7, while others won't take number 3, 6, or 7. It's best to check before you chuck your plastic in the bin.

PVC, which is number 3, is used to make inflatable pool toys, faux leather, and other goods and is very difficult to recycle.

9. Light bulbs

There are many types of light bulbs, from CFLs to LEDs. It's important to figure out what type you have before tossing it because many municipalities have different rules about where they go.

"Some of the old light bulbs even have mercury or other kinds of chemicals in them, like fluorescent light bulbs," Buch said. You may have to take them to your local hazardous waste collection site.

Some hardware stores will take certain types of bulbs, and Batteries Plus accepts a wide variety, including LEDs, incandescent bulbs, and fluorescent tubes.

10. Medical waste

Needles, syringes, and other sharp medical products can injure workers at waste and recycling facilities. Some locations have drop boxes or other collection sites that take them.

Safe Needle Disposal offers lists of disposal locations by state as well as mail-in services, which often require a fee.

11. Napkins and paper towels

You may know that you only used a paper towel to dry your hands, but the recycling facility doesn't. They have to assume it could have been covered in food, grease, or even something hazardous.

"Those things become contaminated waste in the blue bin," Buch said. Plus, the fibers in these paper products are too short to get recycled.

12. Prescription pill bottles

As with coffee pods, some prescription pill bottles, and their lids, are small enough to fall through sorting machines and won't be recycled.

"There might be some communities where they don't take the pill bottle and other communities where they do," Buch said.

For example, Madison, Wisconsin's recycling program accepts prescription pill bottles that are taller than 3 inches, with their plastic lids attached.

13. Greasy pizza boxes

Cardboard is one of the most recycled materials in the US, but over half of what's tossed still ends up in landfills, according to a 2019 estimate.

While most pizza boxes are made of cardboard, they're also often greasy. "Sometimes the cardboard has cheese stuck to it, so now you've got cardboard with food, so it's contaminated," Buch said.

Unfortunately, grease-coated cardboard can damage recycling machinery. Some facilities will still take the boxes if they're not too dirty.

14. Plastic bags and bubble wrap

Plastic bags and film and bubble wrap can cause serious problems for recycling equipment, acting a bit like hair caught around a vacuum roller brush.

"Plastic film stretches and becomes literally filament-like," Buch said. "It gets wrapped around inside these sorting systems."

Many grocery stores have collection boxes for plastic bags.

15. Loose plastic bottle tops

Whether you should leave plastic tops on water bottles before recycling them varies between municipalities.

"The lid is made of a different material than the plastic bottle itself," Buch said, so they're recycled differently.

Many facilities can separate the cap and bottle. However, you'll still want to check with your local recycler because some require cap-free bottles.

16. Styrofoam

Many cities and states have banned styrofoam food containers, but the substance still arrives in a lot of products and shipping packaging.

Styrofoam, also known as polystyrene, isn't recyclable in most curbside bins. Many cities have drop-off sites, though, they may only take certain types, like styrofoam blocks.

• Donald Trump held a rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, on Saturday night.
• The former president launched vulgar jabs at his opponents and roused crude chants from his supporters.
• Trump is on trial accused of making a hush money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016.

Donald Trump launched a slew of vulgar jabs at his legal and political opponents and encouraged crude chants at a rally Saturday evening in Wildwood, New Jersey.

Thousands of MAGA supporters listened as Trump referred to the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, as "fat Alvin," calling him "radical" and "a corrupt guy."

The presumptive Republican nominee for the 2024 elections then turned his attention to the judge presiding over his hush-money trial, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan. He said Merchan was a "highly conflicted judge."

Trump's trial, where he stands accused of falsifying 34 business records to cover up a $130,000 hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels days before the 2016 election, is about to enter its fourth week in New York.

Daniels testified before the court this week, giving granular details about a sexual encounter she claims to have had with Trump in 2006.

At the rally, Trump said the whole thing was a "Biden show trial."

The former president said he had been indicted "more than the great Alphonse Capone… on bullshit, too." It prompted members of the crowd to chant "Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!" in response.

As Trump continued his typical attacks on the Biden administration, he asked the crowd: "Everything they touch turns to what?"

"Shit!" the crowd chanted in response.

"You can't use the word shit," Trump joked back.

The last time Trump was in Wildwood in January 2020, the Senate had been holding Trump's first impeachment trial. At the time, he told his supporters, "Democrats are obsessed with demented hoaxes, crazy witch hunts and deranged partisan crusades."

Trump took a similar line on Saturday night: "The radical left Democrats rigged the election in 2020, and we're not going to allow them to rig the election in 2024."

Trump predicted on Saturday that he would "win the state of New Jersey," per The Washington Post.

Wildwood is a Republican enclave in a solid blue state. New Jersey has not voted Republican since George H.W. Bush in 1988. Latest polling for the 2024 presidential election puts Biden comfortably ahead by 7%.

• I ate at Shake Shack for the first time. My friend and I spent $57 on burgers, fries, drinks, and frozen custard.
• My vegan burger tasted delicious and I'd definitely order the frozen custard again.
• But I was disappointed by the cheesy fries and my friend had expected a bigger burger.

I'd heard good things about Shake Shack, the burger and frozen custard chain that started life as a hot dog stand in New York City.

My friend gushed about its cheesy fries after returning from New York, and I'd seen billboards advertising its delicious-looking vegan crispy shallot burger.

So I decided to give it a try.

Shake Shack first came to the UK in 2013. It now has 15 restaurants in the UK and three delivery kitchens.

I went to the Shake Shack in Stratford, located in a shopping mall near London's Olympic Park, to see what the hype was about.

Upon entering the restaurant, I was struck by how upmarket it looked for a fast-casual chain. The interior mainly consisted of subtle, natural colors — there was lots of exposed wood, green and black paint, and what I took to be fake plants.

You could place orders with a staff member at the counter, next to the pickup spot.

But while I was there, I only saw customers placing orders at the three digital order screens. Digital kiosks are a massive priority at Shake Shack.

Source: Business Insider

The chain’s execs have said that they’re Shake Shack’s biggest and most profitable order channel and that customers place orders that are, on average, more than 15% bigger than orders placed at a cashier.

Sources: Business Insider, Shake Shack earnings call

There was also a stack of printed menus, which I found unusual. This may have been for people who ordered with a member of staff or who wanted to browse the menu at their tables before ordering at a kiosk. It gave a better overview of the full menu than the kiosk screen did.

The kiosk was easy enough to operate.

I was able to customize some of the items, like adding pickles and tomato to my Crispy Shallot Burger for no extra cost. I wouldn't have thought to have asked for these at a staffed kiosk.

I felt like Shake Shack had a slower ordering process than other fast-food chains, though. I was surprised that it asked for my collection date and time when I was placing an in-store order.

When your order was ready, staff called your name, which was also displayed on screens in the seating area. The screens meant you could sit down to wait for your food to be prepared rather than having to stand by the pickup counter.

While I waited for my food, I looked at the decor. The kitchen was open plan, which is increasingly common at quick-service chains, and there was a foosball set.

I noticed that some of the tables were labeled as being made in Brooklyn from former bowling lanes. I felt that there was a contradiction between the eco-friendly upcycling and the final product then being shipped across the Atlantic.

In the UK, Shake Shack sells a range of beef, chicken, and vegetarian burgers, frozen custard, and milkshakes. You can also get hot dogs and crinkle-cut fries, as well as soft and alcoholic drinks.

Digital screens, including the order kiosks, advertised some of Shake Shack's limited-edition items. These included a couple of Al Pastor burgers — a flavor that burrito chain Chipotle has seen huge success with.

Source: Business Insider

My friend and I ordered a Crispy Shallot Burger, a ShackMeister with bacon, a pot of Shack Sauce, a portion of cheesy fries, and two large drinks. The drinks were massive.

My friend had the ShackMeister. The base price was £9.25 ($11.50) for a single patty, though he paid an extra $1 to add bacon. My friend thought the burger was delicious but was disappointed by the size — he said it definitely wasn't filling enough. Perhaps he should have got a double.

My friend said that the bacon was fairly priced and an "excellent addition." He chose the burger partly because of the crispy shallots it included, which we both thought were an interesting addition and differentiated Shake Shack's burgers from those sold by other chains.

My vegan Crispy Shallot Burger cost £9.55 (about $11.90). It contained a vegan fake-meat patty topped with vegan cheese, beer-marinated crispy shallots, lettuce, and Dijonnaise sauce. I added pickles and tomatoes to my burger for free.

The patty, which Shake Shack said is bespoke for the chain, tasted delicious. I was glad I added the pickle and tomato which gave the burger an extra crunch. I usually avoid mustard, but the Dijonnaise sauce gave it a tasty tang. It was a delicious burger.

But I was disappointed in the portion of the cheesy crinkle-cut fries we got to share. I felt like the fries were underseasoned — they tasted bland — and the cheese sauce was very thick and tasted artificial. There wasn't enough to spread over all the fries, too.

For £5.25 ($6.50), the portion seemed quite small, and unlike many other chains that offer a range of sizes for their portions of fries, there was only one size available.

For £1 I added on a tub of ShackSauce. It tasted great and gave my fries some much-needed flavor. To me, it tasted just like garlic mayo. Serious Eats suggests you can make a copycat sauce from mayo, ketchup, mustard, chopped dill pickle, garlic powder, paprika, and cayenne pepper.

Source: Serious Eats

Of course, we couldn't go to Shake Shack without trying its famous frozen custard. You can get chocolate or vanilla frozen custard in a cup or cone, or you can choose from a range of so-called "Concretes" that come with toppings. We ordered the Sticky Toffee one to share.

This was delicious. I love creamy desserts, and the frozen custard was basically thick ice cream. The toppings were tasty and didn't cost much more: Our £5.60 ($7.10) Concrete only cost £1.35 more than a plain one-scoop portion of frozen custard.

We got a milkshake to share, too. The portion seemed quite large, though I was surprised that the shakes only came in one size. After having the delicious, rich, thick Concrete, our £5.90 ($7.35) Cookies and Cream Shake seemed a bit underwhelming.

In total, we spent £45.85 (just over $57) at Shake Shack, which seemed like a lot for a meal for two at a fast-casual chain. But we did get a lot of food because we wanted to try out the menu: two burgers, two soft drinks, fries, a shake, a Concrete, and a tub of sauce.

I enjoyed the vegan burger and loved the Concrete, but if I came back I'd skip the fries and shake. Though our large soft drinks were massive, my friend said the burger sizes were more like snacks than full meals. After his burger and half the portion of fries, he was still hungry.

In mid-March, a scammer in California tried to buy $150 worth of Wingstop using my debit card. Aside from being impressed at the sheer size of the order, I was relieved because Citibank, which issued my card, declined the transaction on the spot and alerted me to the fraud. In minutes I was able to shut off my card, heading off any more purchases by the scammers, and order a new card. All's well that ends well.

When I went to Buenos Aires in April, I figured I might run into a similar situation. Sure, the banks say you don't have to call ahead when you travel anymore, but I assumed I'd still have some purchase flagged as potential fraud, as had happened in past trips abroad. Miraculously, everything went off without a hitch. I don't know how JPMorgan Chase knew that I would spend $200 on Botox in Argentina, but it did. (No, I didn't book my flight on the same card, and whatever, everybody gets Botox now.)

It's great that banks and credit-card companies are getting better at discerning which payments are fraudulent and which are legit. Many people have some horror story about having their credit card stolen or having their own legitimate transactions flagged as suspicious. And it's nice not to have to spend 20 minutes on the phone before a vacation explaining where you're going and when. Credit-card fraud protection is still far from perfect, but there's no denying that the technology is improving. On the flip side, it's also kind of wild to consider just how much financial institutions must know about you to make the right calls.

I was curious about how it all works — and, frankly, a little creeped out. So I reached out to some credit-card companies and academics to learn more. Why don't people have to alert their credit-card companies about travel anymore? And, more broadly, just how have banks gotten so good at figuring out what's normal about our spending habits and what isn't?

The Federal Trade Commission receives thousands of card-fraud complaints each year. The Nilson Report, which tracks the card industry, says payment-card fraud resulted in $33 billion in losses worldwide in 2022 and $13.6 billion in losses in the US. As such, credit-card issuers and banks are keen to do what they can to spot fraud. They want to keep their customers happy, and, more importantly, they want to stem their losses. In the US, the major credit-card issuers and banks generally have a zero-liability policy, which means that when a customer gets scammed, the organization, not the customer, has to eat the cost.

Years ago, whether a transaction went through was based on things like whether a physical card was present, whether you had enough money to make the purchase, and (if the cashier wanted to look) whether your signature on the receipt matched the one on the back of your card. In some cases, the cashier may have even asked for ID or called the bank to verify the funds. We've come a long way from those bad old days by using the same tools that power most innovations: data and computers. Credit-card companies and banks know a lot about us — where we shop, when we spend, and how much we're usually willing to pay for things — and they're getting better and better at turning that knowledge into action.

The models are evaluating a trillion dollars' worth of transactions a year.

While it's all the rage to talk about newfangled forms of artificial intelligence, fraud detection owes a lot to machine learning, a field within AI that's been around for years. A bunch of data gets dumped into computer systems, and algorithms figure out patterns and relationships. The algorithms create decision trees to predict the likelihood of different outcomes and identify what may be considered normal or fishy. It's not that your credit-card company knows that you, specifically, would blow a bunch of cash on A and not on B — it knows that customers with your profile are in the "likes A" camp and not the "likes B" one.

"It's looking at what's happening that is very much out of the ordinary for your general behaviors," said Tina Eide, an executive vice president of global fraud risk at American Express. "And when I talk about general behaviors, it is generalized, right? It is not down to the specific purchase or to the specific merchant." Eide added, "The models are evaluating a trillion dollars' worth of transactions a year."

The machines know more now than ever. Mike Lemberger, Visa's regional risk officer for North America, said that over the past five years the number of data points people generate with their credit cards has grown tremendously. People are increasingly using cards over cash. And they don't just have a physical card they're pulling out at the store — they've got their card credentials in their Amazon account, Netflix account, iPhone, etc. The more purchases the card issuer can analyze, the more accurate the fraud detection will be.

"Visa, we don't have consumer information — that's your financial institution that has that — but what we have is this triangulation of all these data points," Lemberger said. "We can create more and better scores, layer on top of that machine learning and AI abilities, and it becomes a much, much more powerful predictor, which we then feed into all of our partners to say, 'Hey guys, if you want to make the best decisions, here's a whole bunch of really good information.'"

Visa isn't going to block your card directly, but it'll alert your bank that your purchase looks suspicious or that fraud has been detected at the merchant you're dealing with.

This all seemed pretty simple until I talked to Yann-Aël Le Borgne and Gianluca Bontempi, a pair of researchers at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium who work on machine learning and card fraud. They emphasized the vast scale of this fraud-detection technology. Companies and their algorithms are ingesting millions of transactions and creating so many decision trees to categorize certain activities that it can defy human logic, they said. Basically, the computer may be right that your transaction looks funky even if it's made in your home city at a fairly innocuous vendor, or it may be right that the transaction is fine even though it's made in a faraway place — but when humans try to figure out what did or didn't sound the alarm, nobody will really be able to pinpoint why.

"Machines can consider many more features, and at the end of the day it's not clear if all those features have meaning for humans," Bontempi said. "Humans are used to working with two, three features, at most five features, while machines can work with hundreds of features. So there are really different levels between what a machine can do."

There are human-written rules, which are generally interpretable, and there are machine-written rules, which can be a black box. They're more accurate, but they may be harder, if not impossible, for people to reverse engineer. And banks may be using several different algorithms, making this even more complicated. Data scientists are the ultimate decision-makers, but the information they're dealing with is based on highly complex tech.

Humans are used to working with two, three features, at most five features, while machines can work with hundreds of features.

When I explained to experts my somewhat embarrassing wings-versus-wrinkles conundrum and asked what may have triggered one alert and not the other, they offered up different explanations. Eide, from American Express, said that even though I hadn't booked my trip to Argentina with the credit card I used to buy the Botox, something else had probably tipped off the system that I was there. I realized I'd also bought a package of spin classes in Buenos Aires on my phone with the same card. I had also paid for a meal in the city. Lemberger, from Visa, emphasized that it's about all the data and spending patterns and said that given my spending patterns, the Botox likely matched my profile more than the massive delivery order.

"I hate to say this to you, but at the end of the day, all these data points build personas. Just like in marketing somebody would use personas to market to you, we're using that same technology to protect you," he said. "And the fact is that we use those data points to not just secure you but the whole ecosystem."

At some point it occurred to me that the supercomputers that credit-card companies and banks are working with could know more about me than I even know or understand about myself.

"It's probable that the exact reason why a transaction caused your card to be blocked has no straightforward interpretation," Le Borgne said.

I also asked whether there was a big difference in credit-card protections and debit protections and was told not really — maybe banks will be a little more restrictive about credit because they're technically lending you money that's not limited by your actual cash balance. I also asked if companies don't worry about preclearing travel because they don't care as much about losing money to fraud anymore, to which the answer was a hard no.

"At the end of the day, somebody's got to pay for the fraudulent activity," Lemberger said. Credit-card companies will give you your money back if you're a victim of fraud, but they'll find another place to recoup that money, just as they always do.

Instinctually, I am not a technology-is-awesome person — if the AI really is going to kill us, I feel like we should unplug it. I'm not super freaked out about the privacy stuff, but I also don't love the idea that AmEx and JPMorgan and Citi have me so pegged. But it's cool that companies really are making fraud detection better, especially in a world where fraudsters themselves are constantly getting better. I don't want to be like "Yay, banks!" but maybe here the answer really is a little "Yay, banks!" At least that's the case until the next major data-privacy breach, at which point I will regret everything.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

• Trump's lawyers say he didn't pay attention to his checks reimbursing Michael Cohen for hush money, too busy running the country.
• But Trump Organization and White House employees say he was discerning about the checks he signed.
• And in his books, Trump says he meticulously monitors his finances.

Imagine it's early 2017. You have never held office before. You are now the president of the United States. You didn't really expect to win the election, but here you are, at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.

For decades, you have been in charge of a multi-billion dollar real estate company run by a small staff of about 20 people. And even though you're now the president, you still have to deal with unfinished business. One of your employees in New York sends you a pile of checks to sign.

You have North Korea to worry about. You're paranoid that the FBI director is out to get you. People are talking about Russia. The checks. The checks! What do you do with the checks?

You sign them. You get them mailed back to New York. You have more important things to worry about.

This is one of the arguments Donald Trump's lawyers have advanced in his defense for his hush-money trial: Trump didn't do anything wrong. It was Michael Cohen who paid the hush money.

And if Trump's signature was on a few checks? Well, he was trying to run the country and wasn't really paying attention to every check he signed.

The Manhattan District Attorney's Office has indicted Trump on 34 counts of illegally falsifying business records. According to the prosecutors, Trump disguised records reimbursing Michael Cohen — his former personal lawyer and a Trump Organization executive — for a $130,000 hush-money payment made to Stormy Daniels in the chaotic final days of the 2016 election.

The purpose of that payment, prosecutors say, was to keep Daniels quiet about an affair she says she says she had with him, keeping that information away from American voters as Trump's campaign was bruised by the revelations of the "Access Hollywood" tape.

According to witness testimony and records shown so far at the trial, held in a chilly 15th-floor courtroom in downtown Manhattan, Cohen fronted the hush money out of his own pocket in October 2016 using a shell company he created. Trump then reimbursed him, prosecutors say, in a series of 11 checks, nine of them bearing his handwritten signature.

Some of the payments to Cohen came from his personal bank account, others through a Trump Organization account.

Trump's lawyers have sought to pin all the blame on Michael Cohen. According to testimony from Trump's former press secretary and aide Hope Hicks, after the Wall Street Journal first published articles about the hush-money arrangement in 2018, Trump said Cohen "did it out of the kindness of his own heart" to "protect him" but "never told anybody about it."

When questioning his former employees, Trump's lawyers consistently ask whether he was "multitasking" while signing checks. And under questioning from a prosecutor, Hicks offered that Trump would have a constant flow of people coming in and out of his office.

"He is a very good multitasker and a very hard worker," she said. "He is always doing many things at once."

Trump's attorney Susan Necheles drilled into the question Friday while Madeleine Westerhout, Trump's White House executive assistant who kept a desk right outside the Oval Office, was on the witness stand.

Trump didn't use a computer and requested hard copies of everything. He "felt that if someone was getting his signature, they deserved his real signature," Necheles said.

Westerhout agreed Trump was "a person who multitasked" and signed "commissions, proclamations, executive orders, memos, and other documents" throughout the day.

It wouldn't be unusual, she said, if Trump signed a stack of documents while meeting with members of his administration or even foreign leaders.

To secure a felony conviction, prosecutors need to convince jurors that Trump knew what the money was for: That whenever he signed a check to Cohen, it was for the purpose of reimbursing him for the Stormy Daniels hush money.

And while Trump may not seem like the most detail-oriented person, prosecutors say there's something he's always watching: the bottom line.

Trump was discerning about which checks he signed

Trump has made no secret of his parsimoniousness. He has bragged about not paying vendors for his buildings. And he is using political donor money to pay his lawyers.

Prosecutors presented excerpts from Trump's book "Think Like a Billionaire," which includes a chapter titled "How to Pinch Pennies." In it, Trump relayed a famous story where he cashed a 50-cent check from Spy magazine, winning its "cheapest millionaire" contest. Every check counts.

"I always sign my checks, so I know where my money's going," Trump said. "In the same spirit, I also always try to read my bills to make sure I'm not being overcharged."

In the book — which defense attorneys were sure to point out was written with the help of a ghostwriter — Trump reflected deeply on budgeting, even musing about the innate ethics of room decorators.

"When you are working with a decorator, make sure you ask to see all of the invoices," Trump wrote. "Decorators are, by nature, honest people, but you should be double-checking regardless."

The books that prosecutors presented were written when Trump was a businessman, not yet best known as a political figure. But prosecutors suggest his thoughtfulness about his bills continued into his presidency.

Cohen met with Allen Weisselberg, the now-former Trump Organization CFO, in January of 2017 to hash out how he'd get reimbursed by Trump and the Trump Organization, according to records shown at trial.

Ultimately, Weisselberg agreed to give Cohen $420,000 in multiple payments over the course of 2017, which would cover taxes and include a bonus, Weisselberg's deputy Jeffrey McConney testified.

When Trump was running the Trump Organization every day, it was easy to get ahold of him in his Trump Tower office to approve expenses and sign checks paying for them.

But with him in the White House, employees had to figure out another way to have him sign off on expenses. They devised a system where they'd cut the checks and print invoices in New York, then FedEx a pile of them to Washington, DC, a few times a month. They'd pass through the hands of Trump's bodyguard-turned-White House employee Keith Schiller, then make their way to the Oval Office. Trump would review and sign them, and then send them back to Manhattan — all with the logistical assistance of taxpayer-funded government employees.

But Trump didn't automatically put his signature on every check. Occasionally, he'd write "VOID" on one he didn't want to be paid, according to Trump Organization employee Deborah Tarassoff.

"It was signed in a Sharpie in black," Tarassoff testified. "That is what he usually uses."

While Trump was making life-or-death decisions in the Oval Office, the billionaire was also discerning about trivial-seeming expenses. Prosecutors presented an invoice from the Winged Foot Golf Club, located north of New York City, for Trump's dues, that was sent to the White House from New York. Rhona Graff, his executive assistant at the Trump Organization, asked if he wanted to suspend his membership for four years — or to "continue paying annual dues + the food minimum."

Trump wrote in felt-tip pen: "Pay- ASAP OK" and signed "D."

"This was included in the stack of checks, so I passed it along," Westerhout, Trump's White House executive assistant in 2017, testified at the trial.

Westerhout didn't send back every single check to the Trump Organization. Sometimes, Trump didn't pull out his Sharpie (sometimes a Pentel felt-tip pen, she testified) to sign them.

Rebecca Manochio, the bookkeeper at the Trump Organization who was first to handle the checks when they came from the White House, testified that sometimes checks would be missing. When that happened, she checked with Westerhout.

"Either it got lost, or he had questions about it, and he had to speak to someone," Manochio said.

If Trump had a question about a check, he'd talk with a Trump Organization employee about it, Westerhout testified.

"I think I remember, maybe, a couple times him having a question about a check and then calling Allen Weisselberg or somebody else in the Trump Organization to ask for clarification," she said.

Graff, for her part, testified that "it wasn't unusual" to see Trump on the phone while signing checks.

"Am I correct that when he would sign checks, he was often multitasking?" Necheles asked her.

"It happened on occasion," Graff answered. "It would depend what was going on at the moment and how important the checks were that needed to be signed."

Trump — now a commensurate multitasker as he defends himself from multiple civil and criminal cases — employed a similar legal defense in his civil fraud case last year, where the New York Attorney General's Office accused him and his company of fudging numbers to commit insurance, bank, and tax fraud.

In a deposition, Trump said he was too busy saving the world "from a nuclear holocaust" to be paying close attention to the Trump Organization's finances.

The judge in that case didn't buy the argument, ultimately ordering him to pay nearly a half-billion dollars in penalties.

Trump perhaps said it best himself.

In the trial, prosecutors have trotted out passages about his thriftiness from several of his books.

You can negotiate every bill, even when shopping at "high-end shops," he once wrote. You need to watch out for "computer error" in billing, he says. The only solution, he says, is to peronally review and sign "as many checks as possible," he advises.

"When you sign a check yourself, you're seeing what's really going on inside your business," Trump wrote in one book. "And if people see your signature at the bottom of a check, they know you're watching them, and they screw you less because they have proof that you care about the details."

• Layoffs are hitting workers at some tech giants like like Google, Microsoft, and Tesla.
• The job cuts can damage morale, decrease productivity, and deter potential new hires.
• The impact can offset some financial savings benefits, hitting reputation and employee engagement.

"We only fire in thousands weekly."

The recent quip on Blind came from a worker at a large tech company commenting on word of more job cuts at Google.

There's little doubt that for some tech workers, this gallows humor feels spot-on after waves of layoffs at some of the industry's biggest names — including Google, Microsoft, and Tesla.

Elon Musk told staff last month that Tesla will lay off 10% of its workers. Then, in early April, it reportedly cut 500 more roles at its Supercharger division. Google cut about 12,000 people in 2023, followed up with more in early 2024, and then circled back last week with plans for a small number of further reductions.

CEO Sundar Pichai recently told Bloomberg that the search giant was being methodical about handling worker cutbacks — "taking the time to do it correctly and well," he said. Pichai has also said that Google's layoffs could slow in the second half of the year.

But while this scalpel-versus-ax approach sounds reasonable, layoffs in general — particularly the drip-drip — come at a cost. Even at marquee companies that are unlikely to ever be hard up for fresh résumés, the cuts can ding morale, crimp productivity, drive away prime workers, and keep at least some top talent from joining the organization, labor market experts told Business Insider.

In short, the effects of layoffs can counter the financial benefits of expenses carved out of a P&L.

"These are still people who work together, and the thought that somehow they can absorb that loss as if it's nothing just shows a lack of understanding of how human psychology works," Sandra Sucher, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School who's studied layoffs, told BI.

The cost of not doing business

Even when leaders deem layoffs necessary to trim costs, organizations making the cuts take a hit, according to Wayne Cascio, a professor of management emeritus at the University of Colorado Denver, who's researched corporate cutbacks.

"You're wondering when the ax is going to fall again," he told BI. That pushes remaining workers to start looking around, especially if layoffs continue without an all clear from the company. "They spend a lot more time surfing the web, getting their CVs up to date, networking — and that detracts from productivity. There's no way around that," he told BI.

Cascio said that at organizations that shed workers, the share who leave voluntarily typically goes up about 50% in the following year. And often, those departing are the ones who are "most marketable," he said.

Take Tesla, which has lost several high-profile execs recently. One of the most recent, Rich Otto, the former head of product launches, said on Wednesday that he'd decided to resign amid the mass cuts.

"The recent layoffs that are rocking the company and its morale have thrown this harmony out of balance and it's hard to see the long-game," he wrote on LinkedIn.

Many of the cuts at tech firms are coming even as the companies are doing well overall. Yet leaders can feel a need to let go of workers for reasons that include pleasing Wall Street, operating more efficiently, focusing on newer efforts like artificial intelligence, and generally making do in a slower-growth environment brought on, in part, by interest rates that are far higher than just a few years ago, as BI has previously reported.

One reason the cuts don't always come all at once is because companies are trying to address changes where they believe they need them rather than making across-the-board cuts, Harvard's Sucher said.

It's tough to recruit with a reputation

The most prestigious names in Silicon Valley can have an easier time making routine cuts because they have a steady supply of people who'd like to add a high-profile logo to their LinkedIn profiles.

"They think that their brand is bulletproof," Cascio said, referring to big-name tech companies. "To some extent, it is, but that's not true of most employers — by far the majority of employers."

But even for the biggest names in tech, there can still be harm at the margins when it comes to recruiting top talent, he said. Those who might entertain multiple offers will consider where there have been cuts and often will opt for the company that has never had layoffs rather than one that has gone through multiple rounds, Cascio said.

"That's going to be a tiebreaker," he said.

And Gen Zers entering the workforce are prioritizing employment security — knowing that even if their jobs change within an organization, they still have a role there, Cascio said.

Caroline Ogawa, a director in the HR practice at the research firm Gartner, said that even though the job market for white-collar employees might be softening, many workers have yet to let go of the sense of power they developed a couple of years ago during the Great Resignation. That means many are remaining picky about where they work.

"Although candidates may be receiving fewer offers, their expectations have held firm," Ogawa said. "With that level of candidate agency, it's going to be hard to replace those employees."

Dumping on your former employer

Social media makes it easier for spurned workers to sound off on how their former employers handled a layoff, Cascio said. That's a risk that didn't exist years ago and one that even top companies face when it comes to recruiting the next hot job prospects.

"It's so easy to tarnish a company's reputation," he said.

Gartner's Ogawa also told BI that when employers lay off workers, those left behind are often forced to take on the work once done by their former colleagues. That can lead to burnout and even disengagement, prompting some to wonder what their purpose at the organization is.

That makes it important for leaders to communicate about why they're making the reductions and how workers can re-engage with their jobs.

"Fear is managed through transparency," she said.

Harvard's Sucher also said offering workers a rationale for cuts is essential — not just for those who are getting let go but for those who remain.

"'What's the reason?' And, 'How plausible is the reason?'" she said. It matters "when you're communicating externally, but it matters hugely when you're communicating internally."

Eight months into Joe Biden's presidency, the MyPillow guy, Mike Lindell, staged an event in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that he promised would return Donald Trump to the White House. The three-day Cyber Symposium revolved around a mysterious cache of computer data that Lindell had surreptitiously acquired. In his telling, the data proved that Chinese hackers had manipulated American voting machines into securing Biden's victory.

"The election was stolen, and we're proving it right here, aren't we?" Lindell crowed to some 200 attendees on the first night, sweating through his suit. "President Trump is the rightful president, are you with me?"

One attendee, Bob Zeidman, who had voted for Trump twice, hoped this was true. A mild-mannered, 64-year-old Republican, Zeidman chafed at the former president's demagoguery. But he's more repelled by the Democrats, whom he believes have "gone so crazy with their wokeness and socialism." As an authority in software forensics — the art of digital problem-solving — Zeidman has been an expert witness in more than 260 court cases, including the 2021 Supreme Court battle between Oracle and Google and the fight between Mark Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss twins. He wanted to see the evidence of vote rigging that Lindell claimed to have collected, and he was open to the possibility that a vast conspiracy, including Democrats using mail-in voting and ballot harvesting to fabricate votes, had stolen the election from Trump.

"There was fraud in the election because there's fraud in every human endeavor," Zeidman said. "How much fraud? I don't know." He had traveled to Sioux Falls intending to find out.

Lindell had purchased his prized data for some $1.5 million from a software developer named Dennis Montgomery. In the early 2000s, Montgomery had won millions of dollars in Pentagon contracts after he convinced the CIA that he had built software that could intercept terrorist messages concealed in Al Jazeera broadcasts. But it turned out to be a hoax: A top CIA official called Montgomery's software "imaginary voodoo" and "bullshit," and one of Montgomery's own lawyers called him a "con artist" and "a habitual liar engaged in fraud." But none of that bothered Lindell. He praised Montgomery as "one of the smartest people that has ever walked this Earth." And to prove his confidence in Montgomery's data, he announced a high-stakes wager: If anyone at the Cyber Symposium could demonstrate that the data did not show election meddling, he would award them $5 million. He called it the Prove Mike Wrong challenge.

Bob Zeidman has many obsessions, and one of them is poker. He lives in Las Vegas, where he competes in poker tournaments every week. He entered the Prove Mike Wrong challenge with low confidence he would win the exorbitant pot, estimating he had a 0.5% chance of disproving Lindell's "evidence." Still, as he later wrote in a lengthy LinkedIn post, he would have a "100% chance of being able to write about what would certainly be one of the most interesting and important conferences in recent history."

The numbers purporting to demonstrate election fraud, Zeidman concluded, were themselves a fraud.

But as Zeidman analyzed the reams of data provided to him and the other cyber experts at the symposium, his confidence rose. When he converted the data into a Word document, he discovered it was filled with line after line of meaningless letters and numbers. It was as if somebody had typed in what they imagined computer code might look like. "I confirmed that it was perfectly formatted, legitimate gibberish," Zeidman said. "In other words, it was a real Word document filled with gibberish, not a document that Word didn't understand." Even more suspiciously, the data files were time-stamped to just a few days before the symposium, meaning they were likely created for the event, not collected from errant voting machines. The numbers purporting to demonstrate election fraud, Zeidman concluded, were themselves a fraud.

By the second day, Zeidman was certain he had disproved Lindell's claims. He filed a damning report and registered a copy online with the US Copyright Office as proof he had written it by the contest deadline. Then he called his wife from the hotel parking lot. "All I want to say," he told her, "is that you should start thinking about how you want to spend $5 million."

After returning home to Vegas, Zeidman waited to hear from Lindell's people about the award. Though he is already a multimillionaire, with several patents and businesses to his name, $5 million remained an exciting prospect. Antsy with nervous energy, he upped his poker playing. But as a Trump backer, he was puzzled by the obvious fraudulence of the data, which he laid out in his LinkedIn post: "Was someone sabotaging Mike's data? Or had Mike been bamboozled? Or was Mike the bamboozler?"

Several weeks later, Lindell's team finally got back to Zeidman: They were refusing to pay up. Zeidman, they argued, had failed to meet the requirements of the challenge, which stipulated that a winner must prove "to 100% certainty" that the data was not "related to the election."

Undeterred, Zeidman sued one of Trump's most vociferous advocates for contract violation. In February, after days of deliberation, an arbitration proceeding in Minnesota sided with Zeidman. He had indeed Proven Mike Wrong, and now Mike must pay.

Soon after the ruling, I arrived in Vegas to meet Zeidman. His handsome home sits in a gated community in Sumerlin, a residential area in the high desert. A "Stand With Israel" sign adorned his front yard. He and his artist wife, Carrie, collect modern art, which crowded the walls of their living room. Out back was a large pool. Recently, after Zeidman started swimming regularly, he became frustrated with trying to keep track of his laps, so he invented a counting instrument to do it for him. A newly patented prototype sat on the kitchen counter.

I was interested in what impact, if any, Zeidman's experience with Lindell had made on his politics. Lindell, for all his cartoonish bombast, has clearly been following a path of election denial forged by Trump. It is Trump, after all, who has made his case for voter fraud the centerpiece of his reelection campaign. The fabrications have been wildly successful at firing up his base: Recent polling suggests that nearly 70% of Trump's supporters believe that the 2020 election was "stolen" by the Democrats.

Zeidman, though sympathetic, is not fully on board. "What Lindell is doing is hurting America and hurting Republicans, because it's dividing us and it's wrong," he told me. "I've had a few other Republicans say to me, 'OK, but you don't have to broadcast this.' And I say, 'No, it's the truth. The truth has to be out there. We allegedly stand for the truth, OK? Not the relative truth, but the absolute truth.'"

Zeidman requires constant stimulation. During meetings, he makes sure to sit by a door in case boredom forces him to flee. Whenever he's idle, he becomes "terribly depressed." To keep busy, he invents gizmos and software. He pens satirical political novels and computer-science textbooks and conservative op-eds on his Substack or for publications like the Cleveland Jewish News. He adores movies, though plot holes ruffle him. His favorite film is "Memento," because "it all connects together." He speaks regularly at engineering conferences and attends political ones.

Since young adulthood, Zeidman has "leaned conservative." But it was not until the presidency of George W. Bush that he started going to political events and closely following party politics. He describes himself as a "rare species": a Republican Jew. American support for Israel is one of his chief concerns. He remains a great fan of Bush.

He has always found Trump distasteful: "He's a really nasty guy." Yet he understands Trump's appeal as a totem of conservative grievance, much of which he shares: left-wing media bias, high taxes, political correctness. He pinpoints the genesis of Trump's rise to Mitt Romney's loss to Barack Obama in 2012.

"The Democratic Party attacked Romney so strongly on moral issues when this man was an outstanding moral leader," he said. "I think that pissed off so many people that they said, 'OK, whoever we put in office is going to be trashed, so let's find a guy who trashes back.' And that was Trump."

Another guy who trashes back is Mike Lindell. After numerous failed ventures — a bar, a food truck, a carpet-cleaning business — the Minnesota native found wild success with his company MyPillow, which he claims hit revenues of $300 million in 2018. His zany infomercials, signature mustache, and Midwestern whimsy became a TV staple across the country. (Zeidman himself is a happy customer; he enjoys the pillow's "slumber-inducing qualities.") Even more impressive, Lindell prevailed after overcoming a severe crack addiction, as recounted in his memoir "What Are the Odds? From Crack Addict to CEO." In recovery, he became a committed evangelical Christian. Trump, he believes, was "chosen by God" to be president.

In his transactional way, Trump has returned the compliment. Following his victory in 2016, he invited Lindell to meet him in Trump Tower. Since then, the two have appeared together at the White House and at campaign events. In March, during a rally in Wisconsin, Trump praised him as "the great, legendary Mike Lindell." Lara Trump, Trump's daughter-in-law and the new cochair of the Republican National Committee, hawks MyPillow products on her podcast, "The Right View."

But no amount of praise can make up for the losses Lindell, now 62, has endured for his favorite president. In a defamation suit brought by the voting-machine firm Dominion Voting Systems, Lindell and MyPillow were found liable for a staggering $1.3 billion in damages, which far exceeds his net worth. Lindell's lawyers have since quit, because, they say, he has not paid them. Another defamation case brought by the voting-machine firm Smartmatic is ongoing. Recently, Lindell claimed he had just $10,000 left to his name.

When I spoke to Lindell, he balked when I asked if he regrets his decision to wage a one-man crusade against electronic voting machines. "Do I regret spending $40 million trying to save our country to get rid of these computers?" he boomed. "No!" He repeatedly disparaged Zeidman as "not a cyber expert," which is patently untrue. "It was all contrived," he said of Zeidman's report. "Whatever their plan is, whoever he's working with — it's disgusting what he's trying to do."

Under deposition in the arbitration proceedings over his refusal to pay Zeidman, Lindell was a tornado of evasion and contradiction. He claimed, confusingly, that the 23 gigabytes of data he bragged about at the Cyber Symposium were not actually intended to prove election interference; they were only "related," in some unspecified fashion, to the 2020 election. Moreover, he said, he could not make public the parts of the data trove that do prove election interference for reasons of "national security." With a Trumpian redirect, Lindell assured Zeidman's lawyer, Brian Glasser, that he had far more shocking evidence in hand — but he was being blocked from releasing it by a "government gag order" issued by a judge in Nevada.

"It's the same data we're talking about as it relates to the Cyber Symposium?" Glasser pressed.

"No," Lindell said. "I think it goes a lot deeper than that." The explosive evidence, he implied, would prove that Zeidman was wrong: The election was stolen. "Dennis Montgomery has a lot more than just that data," Lindell insisted.

Later, Zeidman's lawyers tracked down the case Lindell was referring to. Nobody, it turned out, was preventing Lindell from releasing any data. The so-called "gag order" was issued in 2007 as part of a contract dispute between Montgomery and eTreppid Technologies (the company Montgomery ran that had defrauded the government), relating to government contracts and related "trade secrets." Lindell had filed a motion to remove the order, arguing that he somehow needed to release the data to defend himself in his unrelated defamation cases. The court denied his request, saying the order didn't apply to him. "Lindell provides nothing more than speculation," the court wrote, "that he will somehow be precluded from presenting this information because of the protective order in this litigation." In December 2022, Lindell said he would release the data within 60 days. He never did so.

Zeidman pities Lindell for what he sees as his sincere conspiratorial convictions. "Some people believe the world's out to get them because they think they are doing everything rationally but the world is not acting rationally in response, when really it's the other way around," he said. "I think that's the way Lindell is. He's angry because he doesn't understand why people don't believe him. In his mind, people irrationally hate him for telling the truth."

In Vegas, Zeidman drove me to The Venetian for lunch, where he had a poker tournament later that afternoon. On the way, he gestured toward the Trump International Hotel, towering over Sin City like a giant golden Zippo. Long before Trump ran for office, Zeidman had followed his business ventures with bewilderment.

"He would run his businesses into the ground yet somehow make a windfall profit and get investors to invest in his next project," he said. "I'm thinking, don't they look at the records and see that people have gotten burned by him? Why would they invest in his next project? How can he talk them into that?"

Yet for all his problems with Trump, Zeidman sees the incumbent as no less deceitful. "Biden is the Democrats' version of Trump," he said. "He's a liar. He's uncouth. He says stupid things and insults people." This equivalency struck me as an exaggeration of Lindellian proportions. But Zeidman stood by it.

In all likelihood, he said, he'll be voting for Trump come November. "I don't want to vote for Trump because he's scary, but I can't vote for Biden," he said. "For me, the decision is: Biden's policies have made America weaker and Trump's policies made it stronger."

On the way to The Venetian, Zeidman stopped by his bank to retrieve cash for the tournament buy-in ("This one is $800, which is relatively cheap"). He was already strategizing. "The way to win a poker tournament is to survive until later in the tournament," he explained. "It doesn't really matter how many chips you have, because later in the tournament, the blinds — the minimum bets — are so big that one hand can flip everything."

What worries Zeidman most isn't election interference. It is the perilous state of the country those elections have produced: woke lunacy, border instability, and rising antisemitism.

At the casino, hundreds of players sat silently at small tables in a windowless poker room. The exchange of chips crackled through the stale air like the snapping shrimp of coral reefs. Zeidman competed until 2 a.m. The next day, he came in 10th out of 330 players, earning a $1,000 profit.

"I was happy," he told me. "But the big money is really at the top."

It is unlikely that Zeidman will see his $5 million from Lindell. Lindell is appealing the binding arbitration ruling in federal court. In March, his lawyers subpoenaed records of Lindell's financial assets, but Lindell's new lawyer has been slow to respond. Zeidman suspects that Lindell will try to transfer his assets out of his company, Lindell Management, which, legally speaking, is the offending party in their dispute. When we spoke, Lindell wanted to make that distinction clear. "This isn't against me," he said. "This was against Lindell Management, a management company that managed that event and other events. You know that, right?"

Still, Zeidman is glad to have Proven Mike Wrong. He had played his part in disseminating an important truth. "I think most Republicans don't believe Lindell now, and maybe I had a part in that," he told me. Then he added: "But they still believe the election was stolen through ballot harvesting" — allowing political campaigns to collect and submit absentee ballots on behalf of voters — "and things like that."

I asked the obvious follow-up: Does Zeidman believe this improbable claim, which numerous studies, scholars, legislatures, and judges have thoroughly disproven?

He isn't sure. "I have no idea if things would have been different if we didn't have all the ballot harvesting and mail-in ballots," he said. "I just don't know."

An inveterate engineer, Zeidman avoids too much speculation. He prefers the hard certainty of numbers: differentiating complex code, investigating algorithms, analyzing technical patents. These are the skills he used to debunk Lindell's data. What Zeidman is sure about, and what worries him most, isn't election interference. It is the perilous state of the country that those elections, as he sees it, have produced: woke lunacy, border instability, unrestrained crime, and rising antisemitism. Trump, he concedes, is no paragon of order. But if the former president can mend all of that, then perhaps he is the only logical choice. A guy like Bob Zeidman looks at America and wonders: Where did all the rational people go?

Brent Crane is a reporter based in San Diego. His work can be found at www.brent-crane.com and @bcamcrane on X.  

• Most indicators suggest the US economy is humming along.
• Consumers aren't buying it, per the latest monthly survey of how Americans feel about the economy.
• These charts show how gloomy Americans feel, despite the numbers.

Indicators be damned: US consumers are still gloomy about the state of the economy.

In the latest University of Michigan survey, the consumer sentiment index dropped a whopping 13% from April, after staying roughly the same since January.

"This 10 index-point decline is statistically significant and brings sentiment to its lowest reading in about six months," said Surveys of Consumers Director Joanne Hsu.

Researchers found that consumers across demographics were worried that inflation, high interest rates, and unemployment would get worse in the year ahead.

Inflation worries were reflected in survey results that showed consumers predicted a 3.5% jump in prices over the next year, the highest guess about inflation since last November.