Updated at 3:30 am ET

On his way to the Group of 20 summit in Japan, President Trump complained about all of its members that take advantage of the United States. But once he arrived in Osaka, he appeared to set aside those concerns, using a rapid-fire series of meetings to flatter his fellow leaders and boast about improving ties.

He thanked Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for investing in auto plants in the U.S. He congratulated India’s Narendra Modi on his landslide reelection as prime minister. And, he greeted German Chancellor Angela Merkel as “a fantastic person, a fantastic woman,” adding, “I’m glad to have her as a friend.”

The happy talk was a marked contrast to the grievances the president aired before the summit, when he tweeted that India must reduce tariffs on U.S. exports and groused about a decades-old defense pact with Japan.

“If Japan is attacked, we will fight World War III,” Trump said during an interview with Fox Business Network before the summit. “But if we are attacked, Japan doesn’t have to help us at all. They can watch on a Sony television.”

In person, Trump was more conciliatory. With Abe, he spoke fondly of attending a sumo wrestling match during a state visit to Japan last month.

“That was a very special evening and something that everybody’s talking about all over the world,” the president said.

It’s not unusual for Trump to adopt a hard line when discussing fellow leaders at a distance, only to make nice when they’re face to face. The public show of courtesy doesn’t defuse the real tensions around the G-20 table. It’s still not clear, for example, whether Trump will sign on to a joint statement at the end of the summit, especially if it includes a strong warning against protectionism and the dangers of man-made climate change.

Trump also made no promises about his much-anticipated meeting Saturday with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The president disputed reports that he’s already agreed to suspend further tariffs on Chinese imports, but urged people to stay tuned.

“It will be a very exciting day, I’m sure, for a lot of people, including the world,” Trump said. “It’s going to come out, hopefully, well for both countries.”

One of Trump’s highest-profile meetings on Friday was with Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was the first time the two leaders had met since special counsel Robert Mueller concluded his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Trump has long advocated closer ties with Russia, and he told reporters during a photo op with Putin that “a lot of very positive things are going to come out of the relationship.”

Pressed on whether he’ll warn Putin about interfering in the 2020 election, Trump said, “Of course I will.”

He then turned to Putin and said, “Don’t meddle in the election,” wagging his finger in mock sternness.

Even on the other side of the world, the 2020 presidential election was never far from Trump’s mind. He paused on his way to a meeting with Merkel to watch a few minutes of the Democratic debate, which was taking place 13 time zones away.

“I wasn’t impressed,” Trump said later. “I heard a rumor that the Democrats are going to change their name from the Democratic Party to the Socialist Party.”

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The Federal Aviation Administration has found a new problem in Boeing’s troubled 737 Max that the company must address before the regulatory agency will allow the airplanes to fly passengers again. The discovery further delays the airliner’s return to service.

Southwest, American and United Airlines, the three U.S. carriers that fly Max jets, have already pulled the aircraft from their schedules through Labor Day weekend and this latest development could set back the plane’s return to commercial flight well into the fall.

Boeing’s popular narrow-body aircraft has been grounded since March after an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max crashed shortly after taking off from the airport in Ethiopia’s capitol, Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board. It was the second crash of a Max plane in five months; as a Lion Air jet crashed in Indonesia last October, killing 189 people.

Investigators link both crashes, in part, to an automated flight control system that acted on erroneous information from malfunctioning sensors and put the planes into nose dives the pilots could not pull the planes out of.

Boeing has developed a software fix for that flight control system, called MCAS, but sources familiar with the situation tell NPR that in simulator testing last week, that FAA test pilots discovered a separate issue that affected their ability to quickly and easily follow recovery procedures for runaway stabilizer trim and stabilize the aircraft.

A statement from the regulatory agency says as part of a process designed to discover and highlight potential risks, “the FAA found a potential risk that Boeing must mitigate.”

Boeing says in a statement that the company is working on the required software fix to address the FAA’s request. A spokesman told NPR the company is committed to working closely with the FAA to safely return the 737 Max to service.

Just a few weeks ago, officials with the FAA and Boeing had suggested the 737 Max could be certified to fly airline passengers again by the end of this month. Now that timeline is being pushed back at least a few weeks, if not considerably longer.

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Enveloped in soft, blue, dim LED light, Southwest Airlines Network Operations Center in Dallas looks a little like a Hollywood set piece on a science fiction film. It’s the heart and mind of the largest domestic carrier in the country with a 4,000-flight dance card every day. Bad weather, mechanical breakdowns, delayed flight crews, improvisational dispatch performed here day and night.

That day in March when the Federal Aviation Administration said, “Park all your Maxes right now,” demanded a whole lot of improv.

“We had to go in and … piece things together to where we were able to run an operation with 35 less airplanes,” Tim Anderson, superintendent of dispatch in the Network Operation Center, said.

The Boeing 737 Max was grounded this spring after two of the jets nose-dived into the earth killing nearly 350 people. The airline most impacted by the FAA’s action is Dallas-based Southwest Airlines which only flies 737s and has nearly three dozen of the new Maxes.

Southwest has kept its 35 Boeing 737 Maxes off its base schedule through Labor Day, although that’s almost certain to be extended into the Fall. Regulators at the FAA have indicated the Max could stay grounded through the end of the year.

Unlike United, American or Delta, Southwest doesn’t utilize a hub-and-spoke network but flies point-to-point instead. A Southwest jet will start the morning in Oklahoma City, fly to Dallas Love Field then Austin, Texas, on to Houston Hobby, turn west to Phoenix followed by San Jose, Calif., and end the evening in Portland, Ore. If that plane’s a Max, that’s 175 seats times six flights — somewhere around 1,000 passengers with no plane that day. Multiply that by 35 Maxes and you’ve got an unholy mess. Anderson says they had one stroke of good fortune. The published flight schedule, called a “Base Schedule” was ending in three weeks.

“And our team that that does the schedule planning was able to then kind of erase those planes off the books, come out with the new schedule that came out let’s say April 8th,” he said. “That had less flights on it.”

Schedulers targeted routes between cities that had numerous flights each day and tried to subtracting the flight that averaged the fewest passengers. Those planes were then used to plug the holes the Max groundings had left in the carrier’s schedule.

Once the new base schedule was in effect, Southwest could begin acting instead of reacting — notifying the affected passengers in advance they needed to call and rebook. Still a major inconvenience, but considerably less trauma than getting your flight cancelled a few hours before departure. Which was what had been happening in spades. Ten-thousand cancelled flights.

At Southwest’s home airport, Dallas Love Field, operations have largely returned to normal. The airline has grown into such a behemoth that the grounded Maxes represent just 6% of the airline’s flying. How much is this costing Southwest?

The mass grounding is a “net negative financially” to Southwest, says Andrew Watterson is an executive vice president and chief revenue officer.

Fewer seats means less revenue even though fewer seats also translates into those seat prices going up. Prices are set by supply and demand, Watterson said, but the grounding is still a net negative. “We wish it had not happened.”

The cost in foregone revenue due to the grounding, weather and other factors was north of $200 million in the first quarter. Still, the airline managed to beat analysts’ expectations in spite of all the cancelled flights. But airline analysts like Helane Becker at Cowen say the Max grounding will act as a drag on the carrier through the lucrative summer months. And not just Southwest either.

“We’ve said it’s in the hundreds of millions of dollars possibly as high as a billion for the airlines in the Americas,” Becker explains. “But because it’s a moving target, we haven’t been able to quantify it specifically.”

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Anyone who has tried to shop around for hospital services knows this: It’s hard to get prices in advance.

President Trump signed an executive order Monday that he says would make such comparisons easier, and make the pricing process more transparent.

The order directs agencies to draw up rules requiring hospitals and insurers to make public more information on the negotiated prices they hammer out in contract negotiations. Also, hospitals and insurers would have to give estimates on out-of-pocket costs to patients before they go in for nonemergency medical care.

“This will put American patients in control and address fundamental drivers of health care costs in a way no president has done before,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar during a press briefing Monday.

But just how useful the effort will prove for consumers remains unclear.

If the executive order leads to finalized HHS rules, proponents say it could encourage competition and lower prices.

Other health care analysts say much depends on how the administration writes the rules over the next several months — rules that govern what information must be provided and in what format. Trump’s executive order already is running into opposition from some hospitals and insurers who say disclosing negotiated rates could drive up costs.

As health care consumers await more details on those rules, here’s what we know:

Q: What does the order do?

It may expand price information consumers receive.

The order directs agencies to develop rules to require hospitals and insurers to provide information “based on negotiated rates” to the public.

Currently, such rates are hard to get, even for patients, until after medical care is provided. That’s when insured patients get an “explanation of benefits,” which shows how much the hospital charged, how much of a discount their insurer received and the amount a patient may owe.

In addition to consumers being unable to get price information upfront in many cases, hospital list prices and negotiated discount rates vary widely by hospital and insurer, even within the same region. Uninsured patients often are charged the full amounts.

“People are sick and tired of hospitals playing these games with prices,” says George Nation, a business professor at Lehigh University who studies hospital contract law. “That’s what’s driving all of this.”

Some insurers and hospitals do provide online tools or apps that already can help individual patients estimate out-of-pocket costs for a service or procedure ahead of time. But research shows few patients use such tools. Also, many medical services are needed without much notice — think of a heart attack or a broken leg — so shopping for price simply isn’t possible.

Administration officials say they want patients to have access to more information, including “advance EOBs” that outline anticipated costs before patients get nonemergency medical care. In theory, that would allow consumers to shop around for lower cost care.

Q: Isn’t this information already available?

Not exactly. In January, new rules took effect under the Affordable Care Act that require hospitals to post online their “list prices.” These are prices hospitals set themselves, and have little relation to actual costs or what insurers actually pay.

What’s resulted are often confusing spreadsheets that contain thousands of a la carte charges — ranging from the price of medicines and sutures to room costs, among other things — that patients have to piece together (if they can) to estimate their total bill. Also, those list charges don’t reflect the discounted rates insurers have negotiated, so they are of little use to insured patients who might want to compare prices from hospital to hospital.

In theory, at least, the information that would result from Trump’s executive order would provide more detail based on negotiated, discounted rates.

A senior administration official at the press briefing said details about whether the rates would be aggregated or relate to individual hospitals would be spelled out only when the administration puts forward proposed rules to implement the order later this year. It also is still unclear how the administration would enforce the rules.

Another limitation to the executive order: It applies only to hospitals and the medical staff they employ. Many hospitals are staffed by doctors who are not directly employed, or rely on laboratories that are also separate. That means negotiated prices for services provided by such laboratories or physicians would not have to be disclosed.

Q: How could consumers use this information?

In theory, consumers could get information in advance that would allow them to compare prices for, say, a hip replacement or knee surgery.

But that could prove difficult if the rates are not fairly hospital-specific, or if they are not lumped in with all the care needed for a specific procedure or surgery.

“They could take the top 20 common procedures the hospital does, for example, and put negotiated prices on them,” says Nation. “It makes sense to do an average for that particular hospital, so I can see how much it’s going to cost to have my knee replaced at St. Joe’s versus St. Anne’s.”

Having advance notice of out-of-pocket costs could also help patients who have high-deductible plans.

“Patients are increasingly subject to insurance deductibles and other forms of substantial cost sharing. For a subset of so-called ‘shoppable services’, patients would benefit from price estimates in advance that allow them to compare options and plan financially for their care,” says John Rother, president and CEO at the advocacy group National Coalition on Health Care.

Q: Would the availability of this extra information push consumers to shop for health care?

The short answer is maybe.

“The evidence to date shows patients aren’t necessarily the best shoppers, but we haven’t given them the best tools to be shoppers,” says Lovisa Gustafsson, assistant vice president at the Commonwealth Fund.

Posting negotiated rates might be a step forward, she says, but only if the information is easily understandable.

It’s also possible that insurers, physician offices, consumer groups or online businesses would find ways to help direct patients to the most cost-effective locations for surgeries, tests or other procedures based on the information.

“Institutions like Consumer Reports or Consumer Checkbook could do some kind of high-level comparison between facilities or doctors,” says Tim Jost, a professor emeritus at the Washington and Lee University School of Law.

But some hospitals and insurers maintain that disclosing specific rates could backfire.

Hospitals charging lower rates, for example, might raise them if they see competitors are getting higher reimbursement from insurers. And insurers say they might be hampered in their ability to negotiate if rivals all know what they each pay.

“We also agree that patients should have accurate, real-time information about costs so they can make the best, most informed decisions about their care,” said the lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans, in a written statement. “But publicly disclosing competitively negotiated, proprietary rates will reduce competition and push prices higher — not lower — for consumers, patients and taxpayers.”

Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit, editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, and is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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It’s gotten a lot harder for first-time homebuyers to nab that dream house. The pool of smaller, affordable starter houses is low. And increasingly, first-time homebuyers are competing with investors who are buying up these homes.

Last year, investors accounted for 1 in 5 starter-priced homes, according to data released by CoreLogic on Thursday. The rate of investor purchases of starter homes has been rising and has nearly doubled since 1999.

Tonya Jones, a Realtor in metro Atlanta, says it is frustrating both for agents and for their first-time homebuying clients when they can’t compete with investors.

First-time buyers typically put down 3% to 5%, Jones said. “Then they’re walking in competing with an all-cash buyer who can close whenever that seller is ready,” she said. “Typically, a first-time homebuyer can’t work under those parameters.”

Investors have always made up a big part of the market for starter homes. But smaller investors are playing a growing role. Last year, these mom and pop investors represented 60% of investor purchases — up from 48% in 2013, CoreLogic said.

As investors snap up more properties, they’re helping drive up prices in many cities nationwide. In May, the median price of existing homes was $277,700, up 4.8% from a year earlier, the National Associations of Realtors reported Friday. For single-family homes, the median price was $280,200, up 4.6%.

Some regions saw a slowdown in home sales at the end of 2018. And last month, sales of existing homes fell 1.1% from a year ago, even as median prices marked the 87th straight month of year-over-year growth, the NAR said.

Jones, who is also a small investor, said rising prices have kept her from buying new properties.

“Investors count on appreciation,” she said. “We’re at a pretty elevated price point right now, so it’s hard to imagine price per square foot getting any higher.”

Investors tend to buy cheap homes with the goal of renovating them and putting them back on the market at a higher price, or renting them out. Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, said investor buying could lead to greater wealth inequality as homeowners and investors profit and nonhomeowners are left behind.

“If first-time buyers are less capable of buying, we’ll have a strange situation where the economy could be good, but the homeownership rate will be underperforming by historical standards,” he said.

In 2018, eight of the top 10 metro areas with the highest investor purchase rates were in the Eastern half of the U.S., CoreLogic said.

The top markets for investors were Detroit, where they accounted for 27% of sales, Philadelphia at 23.3% and Memphis at 19.7%. Some cities with the least investor activity are in Ventura, Calif., and Boise, Idaho, at 4.8% each, and Oakland, Calif., at 5.1%.

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A while back, Jonah Berger was talking with a lawyer friend from Washington, D.C. The friend was lamenting the impact of social influence on his peers.

He was saying, “‘God, you know, all D.C. lawyers are the same. They make it big, and they go out and they buy a new BMW.’

And I said, ‘Don’t you drive a BMW also?’ He said, ‘oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, but, you know, they all drive gray ones. And I drive a blue one.'”

Our friends may not be independent thinkers, but we are…right? Not quite. Researchers have found that many of our personal preferences are heavily shaped by the whims and wishes of others.

This week, we talk with Jonah Berger about how our choices are influenced by social context. Then, Neeru Paharia takes a closer look at our behavior as consumers. She says the things we purchase send invisible signals – projecting the values we have, and the identities we want.

Additional Resources:

Invisible Influence by Jonah Berger, 2016.

“Sweatshop labor is wrong unless the shoes are cute: Cognition can both help and hurt moral motivated reasoning,” by Neeru Paharia, Kathleen D. Vohs, and Rohit Deshpandé in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, (2013).

“The Underdog Effect: The Marketing of Disadvantage and Determination through Brand Biography,” by Neeru Paharia, Anat Keinan, Jill Avery, and Juliet B. Schor in Journal of Consumer Research, 2010.

Hidden Brain is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Jennifer Schmidt, Rhaina Cohen, Parth Shah, Thomas Lu and Laura Kwerel. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. You can also follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain.

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In just five years, Slack has grown to have more than 10 million users and has become a verb in the process. “I’ll Slack you” is shorthand for sending a message via the workplace chat platform.

On Thursday, the company will take that popularity to the New York Stock Exchange, where its shares will be publicly listed for the first time.

At a starting price of $26 per share set Wednesday, Slack Technologies would be worth about $16 billion.

Instead of having a conventional initial public offering, Slack will enter into the market as a direct listing, which means the shares will simply be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Most firms that pass on an IPO are widely known companies that are in good financial shape.

As Fortune explains:

“Unlike an ordinary IPO, a direct listing means the company doesn’t issue any new shares and doesn’t raise additional capital. It’s primarily a way for company insiders to sell some of their holdings to investors, while bypassing the formidable fees and requirements of using an underwriter.”

Spotify, the music-streaming company, went public as a direct listing last year.

In the fiscal year that ended Jan. 31, Slack nearly doubled its revenues, to about $400 million. But it had a net loss of nearly $139 million.

As it continues to grow, Slack’s biggest hurdle will be proving to its users that it’s more than just a chat application.

Forrester analyst Michael Facemire says it’s hard for people to understand why the platform is more useful than other chat applications without trying it for themselves. With Microsoft Teams as a major competitor, Slack is facing pressure to distinguish itself in the market.

“If the world were only composed of technologists and developers and Silicon Valley illuminati, then Slack would be far, far ahead,” Facemire says. “There is a large percentage of the population that isn’t that. This is where tools like Microsoft Teams do just as well.”

Slack’s decision to begin trading as a direct listing follows a wobbly start for Uber, which has had one of the most anticipated initial public offerings in the tech sector. Last month, the ride-hailing company reported a $1 billion loss in its first public financial report, just weeks after its IPO.

Slack, which was publicly released in 2014, stemmed from an internal chat platform created by CEO Stewart Butterfield during a failed video game development. The software was created to avoid the confusion of email and, per its acronym, provide a “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge” for the team, which had people working all over North America.

Butterfield co-founded Flickr, which he sold to Yahoo for around $25 million in 2005. But despite interest from Amazon, Google and Microsoft in 2017, he held on to Slack, which continued to compete with emerging chat platforms.

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