Hi there, hope you had a great week. Wall Street whipsawed today, erasing yesterday’s record-breaking gains as investors sweat about an AI bubble. We’ll talk about it in today’s newsletter, plus President Donald Trump’s Fed chair finalists, the context around Warner’s latest merger and the economics of “6-7.” 

For a lot of people, the pandemic was an economic low point — for Fidel, a carwash worker in Los Angeles, the immigration raids are hitting him even harder.

“To me, this is uglier than before,” he said in Spanish. “If you leave the house, you have this fear that they’re going to detain you, they’re going to deport you.”

Fidel is in his 50s and came to the U.S. from Mexico about 30 years ago. Marketplace isn’t using his real name due to his concerns about immigration enforcement.

For years, Fidel made a living cleaning cars — working six days, 48 hours a week. Then, in June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids targeted carwash workers.

Now, Fidel said, it’s much harder to get work if you don’t have immigration papers. He’s lucky if he gets an hour a week.

When he thinks back, during the pandemic, he missed work for a total of about six weeks. This time, it’s been six months without a steady paycheck. He spends his days inside his home and is scraping by to pay his rent, medication, and food.

“I’m not eating three meals a day. I eat two times, and just a little bit,” he said. “Sometimes you have to pay [the bills] and go without eating.”

Acquaintances and friends are helping him find odd jobs here and there, or are loaning him money. But Fidel isn’t hopeful his economic situation will improve soon.

“It’s horrible,” he said. “You live with so much fear.”

Months after they began, ICE raids have continued, wreaking havoc on LA’s carwash workers.

In early December, the CLEAN Carwash Worker Center in LA, which aims to empower, organize, and advocate for carwashers, reported multiple raids in one day.

“We had two car washes be raided,” said Flor Melendrez, executive director of the worker center. “One where they took one person that was a U.S. citizen, and another one where they took six workers.”

From the lead-up to Thanksgiving, all the way through New Year’s, the holiday season is a busy time for anyone who loves to cook and cooks a lot. It's especially busy for restaurant chefs and their families.

So, how do high-end chefs, with fully-booked restaurants and specials on the menu, deal with all that pressure? We talked with Pisha-Duffly and his wife Mariah, Gado Gado house manager, about how they balance restaurant ownership with family time.

Now the fast food chain In-N-Out goes from order number 66 straight on to 68, because workers were sick of young customers yelling “six-seven!” non-stop. If you’re not familiar with this viral trend, consider yourself lucky. In-N-Out skips order 69 as well, employees told People.

We should note, there are two sides to every meme. Marketplace’s parent company was founded in ‘67, and “coincidentally” just started selling a tote bag about it. Also, the massively popular video game Fortnite sells players a “6-7” emote for about as much as a Double-Double.