DiscoDance

0:10Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Bloomberg. I'm here with Elizabeth Spiers of the New York Times. Hello. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios.

0:25Felix Salmon: Hello, hello. And we are going to talk about Skydance, which is a big new company in Hollywood. As of this week, we are going to talk about protests in France and Spain and other places and what they tell us about the state of people in this AI dominated world. We are going to talk about the way that AI is dominating mathematics and education and what is happening there and whether we are all just getting dumb. Emily is going to ask whether we've all forgotten how to make fires.

0:57Elizabeth Spiers: And the answer to that is yes, we have. We have a Slate Plus segment on Trump accounts and whether it's bad that you can put stock into them, like individual stocks. It's all coming up on Slate Money.

1:21Felix Salmon: Slate Money is brought to you by Charles Schwab. Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching? Listen to Washington Wise, an original podcast for investors from Charles Schwab, to hear the stories making news in Washington right now. Host Mike Townsend, Charles Schwab's Managing Director for Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, takes a nonpartisan look at the stories that matter most to investors, including policy initiatives for retirement savings, taxes and trade, inflation concerns, the Federal Reserve, and how regulatory developments can affect companies, sectors, and even the entire market.

2:02Felix Salmon: Mike and his guests offer their perspective on how policy changes could affect what you do with your portfolio. Download the latest episode and follow at schwab.com slash Washington Wise or wherever you listen. Slate Money is sponsored this week by Your Next Dollar, a podcast from NerdWallet Wealth Partners. Your Next Dollar is built specifically for high earners like you. It covers the financial complexity that comes with a higher income. If you have equity compensation, RSUs, tax planning, housing decisions, figuring out when it's actually okay to enjoy your money? It turns out that the more you earn, the more complicated the questions get.

2:42And yet, somehow, there's even less content built for you until now. Your Next Dollar covers both sides of the equation, building wealth and spending on what actually matters to you. Because at a certain income level, the question isn't, should I save more? It's, what should I do with everything I have? Financial advisors from NerdWallet Wealth Partners join the show regularly to discuss the questions they hear from high earners like you. The nuanced, real-world stuff that generic financial content doesn't cover. If you want help getting more out of every dollar you earn, follow Your Next Dollar wherever you get your podcasts.

3:21Sponsored by Your Next Dollar, a podcast from NerdWallet Wealth Partners, an SEC-registered investment advisor. This podcast is for informational purposes only and is not investment, tax or legal advice. Okay, so the merger has happened. The biggest media merger that I can remember. Much bigger than Disney buying 20th Century Fox. One of the Ellisons, or both of the Ellisons, or some Ellison entity, wound up buying Warner Brothers. The Ellison entity was actually called Paramount Skydance. And so people were talking about what this combined entity was going to be called. And in the press, it was often called Warnamount.

4:05Some people thought it should be called Parabrothers or Maximount. I was very keen that it be called Disco Dance because it's Discovery and Skydance. Put them together, you get Disco Dance. And I thought that was very clever and wonderful. And Emily is shaking her head and she's like, no, no. The Ellicons are no fun.

4:24Elizabeth Spiers: They would never go for it. It's a bit like when Penguin merged with Random House. I was like, you can either call it Random Penguin or you can call it Penguin House. And either would be wonderful, and they chose neither.

4:37Felix Salmon: They call it Penguin Random House, right? Yeah, which is so boring. Anyway, so now, Elizabeth, you can tell us what the final actual official name for this merged beast is, which is... I actually don't know. Now you've confused me. It's Skydance. Skydance? It's Skydance. Skydance. Which is the name of the first little production company that David Allison set up a million years ago to finance his acting career, which wound up going nowhere. And so it's named after basically the smallest and least profitable bit of the combined company. But hey, it's his company. He can do what he likes.

5:12Elizabeth Spiers: This feels like a succession move. No.

5:14Felix Salmon: He did explain the reasons in the 1200 word memo that they sent out when the deal was finalized to all the employees, which the memo is like, now the real work begins and also says, we're going to do layoffs. And it's like they explained it because this is the mashup of Paramount, basically this very storied Hollywood movie studio that did like the Godfather and stuff with Warner Brothers, another storied Hollywood studio that did like, I don't know, Batman, Bugs Bunny, whatever. and in the memo he says it would be a disservice to do like a mashup kind of name to both of those storied iconic brands so instead of messing with their names by doing a mashup along the lines of disco dance or whatever they're just calling it this other name and leaving those names also there does that make sense is that something it's a bit like alphabet and meta you just give the holdco some meaningless name and then the brands remain yeah exactly they did that at remember when I worked at Verizon, you guys?

6:14Felix Salmon: Do you remember? I remember. It was called Oath or something? Oath, yes. Verizon Media had bought Yahoo, AOL, Huffington Post, da-da-da-da-da. And so they decided to call it Oath for like a hot minute, for like a year. And we were like, okay.

6:30Elizabeth Spiers: That's kind of a creepy sort of holding company name. It's better than Tronk.

6:35Felix Salmon: Tronk, yes, that's another one. So this is like very, yeah, there's a storied history of weird hold co-names and it doesn't often go well but at least skydance was a name that they didn't just pluck out of thin air from marketing executives it's just this nepo babies brand name thingy that he did apropos what elizabeth was saying about it all being very succession it really does strike me as a case of congratulations you said the highest number yeah that's it there was this bidding war between david ellison and netflix for warner brothers and netflix put in its bid and david ellison put in his counter offer and netflix was like yeah okay it's yours congratulations you said the highest number and and his bid by the way for warner brothers ended up being i think 68 higher than his original bid like it was a massive premium so in a little weird way you could say that david zaslav who sold warner brothers earned the 606 million dollars that he got paid for selling it but yeah so he not only does he wind up spending 68 percent more in nominal terms for the company which he clearly didn't particularly want to do but also most of that was in the form of debt and as we all know debt prices have skyrocketed debt yields have skyrocketed since, you know, the takeover was finalized until now.

7:59So now he just issued the big debt package to pay for all this. He wound up paying much higher yields, I think, than any of his bankers would have anticipated back when he put in the bid. So what that means is we have an extremely large but also very, very debt-laden company that has to service billions of dollars of debt service every year. And Hollywood is worried about this. And this is a standard worry whenever anyone does a big takeover, which is funded by debt. This is a standard thing, you know, in private equity or LBOs as they're known, which is basically you're going to have to cut everything just to try and reduce expenses and be able to make the debt service and there'll be no money left to actually invest.

8:43Do we buy this?

8:44Elizabeth Spiers: So I think there's also another concern, which is that I don't know if the debt is collateralized with Oracle stock, but there is some perception in the market that the risk is kind of intertwined because the Ellison family is backstopping some of the debt. So, no, it's definitely, well, so it is true that the Ellison family is standing behind this and it is generally understood. One of the reasons why the debt actually wound up selling very easily is this idea that, you know, this is a Ellison family hobby, even though it's like, it has an enterprise value of$110 billion. Apparently, when you're that rich.

9:17Felix Salmon: It's like thousands of people's jobs at stake. But yeah, the idea is, you know, a little bit like Elon Musk wasn't going to default on the Twitter debt because he wanted Twitter more than he wanted to lose the company. The Allisons probably aren't going to default on the Paramount or the Skydance debt, unless, of course, they lose all their money, which is also possible because Oracle is also borrowing insane amounts of money and it's becoming a very, it is by far the most levered big tech company. Its stock has come down a lot recently, partly because of worries about Oracle's debt service. And so, yeah, like if you are a fixed income investor worrying about Skydance debt performance, you might be worried about how is Oracle stock doing and that kind of stuff.

10:01But for the employees and for the people who watch movies and watch TV shows and that kind of stuff, the capital stack is not that important in terms of who owns what. What's important is like how much debt service is there and is that all of that money that they're spending on debt service, is that money that they could have otherwise been spending on making quality movies?

10:25Felix Salmon: Yeah, I think it's going to be a big problem. I think it already is. Axios is... Axios is? Sarah Fisher had some reporting that we were talking about in a meeting recently. Basically, the whole challenge for a company like this is you have a profitable TV business. Throws off a lot of cash, but it's in rapid decline. That's the disco part of disco dance. Yeah, you have these old Discovery Channel, whatever, CBS. They still on CBS? Yeah, they still on CBS. So yeah, that's all like making money and everything. But it's a declining business. And at the same time, you're getting all the cash from that.

11:01Felix Salmon: While it's in decline, you want to build up your streaming business, maybe your movie business also, so that one day when the switcheroo happens, you're going to be okay. But now because it has all this debt that's more expensive, these loans that cost more now than even before. It's like$80 billion of debt. It's a lot. It's like one day of open AI revenue, but we'll talk about that later or never. I don't know. Anywho, they're more dependent on that TV revenue than ever before. And that's not kind of what you want. You don't want to be dependent on the dying part. You want to have the resources to invest in the growing part.

11:35Felix Salmon: But now they're kind of, it's just, it's harder for them to maneuver. Everybody knows this when you have a big credit card bill and you only have so much money coming in. You're like, oh crap, you got to like juggle around. It's not, you're not free to do weird experiments and stuff like that. And then they have the monkey on their back also now of Oracle, which I mean, is kind of cuckoo bananas.

11:56Elizabeth Spiers: All of this makes me think that David Ellison just doesn't know what he's doing. Or is there some like 3D chess thing happening here that I just don't understand? No, I think he knows what he's doing, which is that he merged Skydance, which is his company, bought Paramount, which is a much bigger company. And he's like, I am going to become a real major player in Hollywood. And then he realized that even Skydance and Paramount together, which I guess is about 1.05 times the size of Paramount on its own, is not enough to compete in Hollywood. The Paramount Plus, the streaming network that he had, was always going to be an also-ran, and he wasn't going to be able to compete.

12:37And there was a very strong belief in Hollywood and rumor in Hollywood going around that basically after buying Barrow Mount, he was already putting it on the block and trying to sell it because he was like, I just don't have the scale I need. I can't make this work. And he kind of reached this go big or go home moment. And he was just about to go home when Warner Brothers put itself up for sale. And he was like, oh, I don't have to go home. I can go big. And like, if I combine myself with Warner Brothers, then maybe then I will be big enough to be able to compete with Disney and Netflix.

13:11Felix Salmon: But that's not who he's competing with.

13:13Elizabeth Spiers: What's the point of doing that, though, if he's put the company in a position where he can't really invest in the businesses that are growing and is highly dependent on the ones that are dying for revenue to service the debt? Well, we don't know that, right? Like the whole point about being an Allison is you always have a few extra billions of dollars spare if you need them. So if he needs to invest in something that is growing, unlike most CEOs, he is not constrained by the cash flows of the company. He can always phone up dad and say, hey, I need another$10 billion. And if dad is game, he'll write a check.

13:44So there is a case to be made that he has the sort of financial wherewithal to be able to invest. If Skydance doesn't succeed, like compete with Disney and Netflix, you know, maybe it'll be partly because of financial constraints. But I think it will partly be for other sort of more quotidian reasons about like how it's managed and stuff. Right now, they have two streaming services. They have Paramount Plus and they have HBO Max. They need to work out how they're going to rationalize that, make it into maybe one which is bigger and sexier. I don't think they've announced what their plan is on streaming, but ultimately the way they win and his stated plan is I am going to be at least as successful in streaming as Netflix, which of course is worth a gazillion dollars.

14:34And if he becomes as successful as Netflix, then he's won.

14:38Felix Salmon: I think also it's cool that he wants to be big enough to compete with Netflix or other media companies. But the real competition is the tech companies. It's Apple, it's YouTube, and it's Amazon. And none of those little companies can, like Paramount plus Warner Brothers plus Skydance equals like a crumb of Amazon or Apple. Like it doesn't even matter. I don't think that's true. I mean, you're right that YouTube has a massive media business. You know, there's really a lot of ads and even subscription revenue in YouTube. YouTube is a huge media player. Apple and Amazon, I don't think, are big players in media.

15:18Amazon has a medium-sized media business, most of which is brands paying for placement on the Amazon search results. Apple has a hobby, which is Apple TV, where they get 12 people to pay money to watch slow horses. That is not a media business at all. I don't see how Apple is even a competitor in this space. I'll explain to you.

15:39Felix Salmon: Apple and Amazon buy content and have hit shows. And they compete for content and hit shows with all the other companies that want to make a splash in streaming. Like the way to make a splash in streaming is to have really good content that gets people to sign up for your thing. And when Apple and Amazon, as their hobbies, are going after like, I don't know, whatever, Widow's Bay or the Ted Lassos or the young adult weird shows on Amazon that they have that people watch. maybe they're not as price sensitive when they're buying the content. So they're driving up the price of content for everyone playing in the space and making it harder for a cost conscious streaming company that actually needs that streaming revenue and needs those subscribers way more than the Amazon and the apples makes it harder for them to operate.

16:29Felix Salmon: So that competition does matter. I think your East Coast media elite is showing, Emily, like the fact is that severance and Slow Horses and Widow's Bay and all of these like prestige TV shows. Yeah, they probably compete with HBO, but HBO is a tiny little sliver of the Skydance empire. And that little corner of like prestige TV, you're absolutely right. There is like competition there between Amazon and Apple and HBO and even Netflix and even Disney with, you know, Hulu, whatever it's called. they all do some of that but that's not where the real money is that's not where the real audience is that's like that's the media classes watch those shows it's not a mass thing i don't know i think having they're also amazon and netflix are also buying like rights to nfl games netflix has reality tv like they are important in the competitive space of creating content driving up prices for everyone they are important you're right but i i all i'm gonna say is that right now Skydance is bigger than either of them in terms of just the breadth and the number of people watching their stuff.

17:44Yes, definitely. If it falls down to being smaller than either of them, then that would be moving in the wrong direction. Okay.

17:52Felix Salmon: I feel like I won this fight, but I'm just

17:55Elizabeth Spiers: I think it's also worth pointing out that the tech companies can, if they wanted to crush Skydance, if they really wanted to spend that kind of money. They view the Prestige TV as brand building and so on, to Felix's point. But also, they do have the cash flows where if they wanted to come in and do more innovative things or whatever, they could. And because of the structure of the company now, Ellison is cash constrained. Hollywood is littered with people coming in with money and saying, I can turn money into success. It almost never works. But they already have. Amazon does make money on their streaming business.

18:31Elizabeth Spiers: and Apple's streaming business is good for them. No, they don't. Wait, Elizabeth, explain to me how Amazon makes money on its streaming business. I don't think it does. What revenues does it have from its streaming business? Well, first of all, I think a lot of Prime subscribers subscribe specifically for video, not for free shipping on everything they order. So that's important for them. The Prime subscription business is huge for Amazon. It's not AWS, but when they're dealing with it, it's super. Prime is huge. I will agree that Prime is huge, and I will agree that at the margin, people are maybe slightly more reluctant to cancel crime if they have a couple of Amazon shows that they like to watch.

19:07I'm not sure that that marginal reluctance turns, you know, Amazon crime video into a profitable business. I don't think it is.

19:16Felix Salmon: Here's how I know that the tech companies are the real competition for a company like Skydance. It's one anecdote. The Emmys. Do you know where the Emmys will be broadcasting for the next five years exclusively on Amazon Prime. They will not be on TV. The TV award show is no longer broadcast on TV. It is broadcast on Amazon Prime. Case closed. These are the competitors. These are the competitors. Mic drop. Emily won. I don't know if I won. I'm just saying I think they're important competitors for Skydance. And yet, if you look at who wins the Emmys, Amazon never wins Emmys. Fair enough. Look at Widows Bay though.

19:57Felix Salmon: But those Emmys only matter to the people like me, apparently the Northeast elite of the world, right? CSI doesn't win Emmys. The interesting thing to me about what you're saying, Emily, no, it doesn't. It wins like primetime Emmys. But it's the opposite of the standard bellyaching that we have whenever there's a big merger and it's the opposite of what all of the unions in hollywood were complaining about which is basically this merger is going to reduce competition and create this oligopoly of movie studios just like no one making movies anymore whatever the idea that mergers are inherently anti-competitive and therefore bad is very intuitive and often true but what you're saying in this case is well actually the competition is so strong we kind of like the only way that we'll ever be able to save Warner Brothers or Paramount is by merging them.

20:51You're kind of buying into that as an argument.

20:54Felix Salmon: I guess I am a little. I'm like, these industries are dying. What does it matter? I don't know. I think I'm in the media industry, right? So I don't know. I don't know if that's the right argument or not. Because you see smaller entertainment companies. I mean, A24 is a great example. So I don't know if it's right to say like, it doesn't matter if the little companies become bigger. I think it probably isn't good for competitive reasons, for the reasons we already talked about that they have too much debt and that's going to hamper their ability to create stuff that is interesting and compete so i'm just a jumble right now it's very complicated so the question is you know david zaslav when he was running warner brothers you know he ran discovery he bought warner brothers did the same thing basically that david ellison did had a small company bought a bigger company merged the two tried to make it work had a huge amount of debt struggled wasn't really big enough and then sort of threw his hands up and said oh fuck it i'll just sell it and made an absolute fortune like that is a win for him yeah but david ellison doesn't really have that option like it's i guess maybe in some weird parallel universe if he just winds up slowly imploding and struggling under a debt load and his dad says i'm not gonna fund you anymore and he winds up going oh shit now i need to sell it maybe you know at that point netflix takes another bite of the cherry but i kind of don't think they would i think that would be like an antitrust violation too far.

22:16I think he doesn't have the same sort of exit option that Saslav had. You know, he owns this now. And whatever happens to Skydance is, you know, on his watch.

22:26Elizabeth Spiers: He's dancing on his own. Disco dancing on his own.

22:38Felix Salmon: Today's episode of Slate Money is brought to you by Olympic Hospitality. The Olympic Games are coming to Los Angeles in 2028. This is a once-in-a-generation event that you will not want to miss. It's more than a ticket. It's a story you share with your family and friends. And the ultimate way to get closer to the action is with an Olympic hospitality package. Ticket-inclusive packages offer a range of prime seating and lounge access options, venue-dependent priority entry, food and beverage selections from LA's diverse dining scene, and elevated service and continuous support, making your day at the Olympic Games one to remember for a lifetime.

23:19Felix Salmon: Get ahead of the curve with an LA28 hospitality package. Discover more at hospitality.la28.org slash slate money.

23:31Felix Salmon: You know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself reaching for over and over again? There's a sweater that you have that works with everything, jeans that always fit the bag you carry everywhere that is totally what quince does so well i am talking to you whilst wearing an awesome blazer that i got from quince that's a really gorgeous color now as the weather gets colder you might be looking to do a little update you might want like a new down jacket so maybe a new cashmere sweater i'm kind of eyeing the ones with the zippers. I really like those. Actually, I just bought a white button down from Quince.

24:11Felix Salmon: Classic. Also, everything at Quince is priced, you know, 50-80 % less. Similar brands. It's not just clothes, you guys. They make bedding, bath stuff, furniture. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for the most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know that with Slate Money, it's the best way to support the show.

24:49Today's episode of Slate Money is brought to you by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value and fixed income is not easy. Bond markets are massive, murky, and let's be real, lots of funds throw a couple flashy funds your way and call it a day, but not Vanguard. Vanguard bonds are institutional quality. It's a commitment to your clients. It's top grade products across the board. There's more than 80 bond funds. They're actively managed by a 200 person global squad of sector specialists analysts and traders of course this isn't about star portfolio managers it's about active strategies that aren't locked away with one person that is shared across the team so that every client benefits from the collective brain power no one individual can really mentally encompass the bond market it's way too complex so if you're looking to give your clients consistent results year in and year out go see the record for yourself at vanguard.com slash audio that's vanguard.com slash audio.

25:57All investing is subject to risk. Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. Oh, consumer confidence. Well, let's start in the US because we just had a couple of very, very bad consumer confidence figures. The conference board just put one out, which is like the lowest in living memory. University of Michigan is also really low. You know, this is not news, but it is getting worse. Generally speaking, the confidence that Americans have in the economy and in their own finances is lower than it was during the pandemic. And sometimes, according to the survey, even lower than during the Great Recession.

26:33There is a malaise in the country, which, you know, is one of the reasons why the Republicans are so worried about the midterms. Turns out, however, that this general sort of malaise about things are terrible is by no means confined to the United States. We just had the German elections, which, you know, the same kind of misery with the incumbents. And now there are massive riots. Well, not massive riots. There are protests in France. The French will protest anything always. It's just like a French national pastime to protest. But this time, it's not the truckers. This time, it's the students.

27:09The student protests are always fun. And Elizabeth, I guess you're saying that there are also protests in Spain?

27:14Elizabeth Spiers: Yes, and they're protesting partly immigration. There's a Spanish territory that sat a lot of Moroccan immigrants, and their right-wing people are mad about that. They're angry about housing. And there was an 87-year-old woman who was evicted in Spain, and she was literally carried out on a stretcher when they evicted her, and this became like a big national story. She'd been living in her rental place for 70 years, and she was 87, and this like corporate landlord thing was like, you know, they had some faceless bureaucrat was like, oh, no, we can kick you out. And they did. And then, yeah, that caused a whole bunch of...

27:49She also died this week, by the way. So that's another...

27:51Felix Salmon: The quotes were like, this was preventable. I'm like, okay, but she was 87. Emily. The corporate landlord did obviously agree to let her in, but she died before she could go back to her apartment. The whole story was terrible. Just to pause, reading about this 87-year-old woman who was evicted, carried out on a stretcher, sparking like massive protests in Spain. Is this ever going to happen in the US? I feel like in the US, this is happening probably every day. No one cares. Do you agree with this? So the question is like, when you're saying, is this ever going to happen? It's not like, is people being evicted and carried out on the stretcher going to happen?

28:27That happens all the time.

28:29Felix Salmon: I'm assuming it's happening all the time. You're assuming it's happening all the time. The thing that isn't happening is like mass protests complaining about it. Yeah, I assume in the US, we'd be like, that's great. That's capitalism. That's the free market. This lady was a free lady.

28:42Elizabeth Spiers: I don't think we've ever seen a mass protest around an economic issue. Everything that we've had the last few years that are protests. There was Occupy Wall Street. Yeah, I guess that. But that feels like it wasn't a national giant thing. I mean, was it? And I somehow missed it? I don't think so. The physical encampment in New York City was a physical encampment in New York City. But it wasn't nationwide. We can agree.

29:04Felix Salmon: And I guess like Martin Luther King, There was housing protests and things like that. But like overall, I'm saying old people probably getting evicted every day. No one seems to care in the United States in 2026. I do think that the protests in Madrid were in Madrid, like they were in a specific square in Madrid, a bit like Occupy was in a specific square in New York. And the other thing I'll say is just that Madrid and New York are similar in that they They have by far the highest proportion of rental housing in the country. You know, people don't protest renters getting evicted in places where like 80 % of the housing is unoccupied.

29:48So I think one of the reasons we don't see those protests in America is because renters getting evicted from their rental units, precisely because America is so heavily weighted towards owning rather than renting. is just not something that reaches the level of you know mass people caring about it you know

30:07Elizabeth Spiers: right there's a stigma associated with renting and so i think people assume like if you got evicted from your place like you you kind of deserve it you're being irresponsible on some level and because you're a renter like you're not oh yeah you're not you're not paying your rent and therefore you know yeah you're 87 you're not paying your rent get to work but this is europe

30:28Felix Salmon: So no one's working, right? You know, and so in Spain, yeah, in Spain, it's housing related. The prime minister has called an election because he tried to do something with housing and was blocked by the right wing parties. And he's like, well, no, I'm going to call an election, try and increase my majority to the point at which I can push through some housing stuff. We'll see whether that works. Obviously, you know, it's not easy for incumbents anywhere right now, but he seems more popular than most incumbents. in france it's not housing it's it seems to be interestingly air conditioning one of the main reasons that the students are protesting and one of their biggest complaints is that they are being forced to study in like 100 degree classrooms and that none of the schools and not the colleges the universities the high schools the middle schools none of them are air conditioned and they're like we can't think in this heat you've got to do something about it along with the standard

31:30Elizabeth Spiers: complaints about class sizes and you know what's interesting is that it seems to have metastasized into all these other issues that people are pissed off about like once they got the protests going then they're they're mad about the debt and all these other things it just became a magnet for other frustrations yeah when was the when were the gilets jaunes protests like yeah the french will always come out and protest.

31:53Felix Salmon: That was like 2018, the vests that postponed the raising of the retirement age, which is still an issue for France. The retirement age is still like 62 and people live to be as old as that one lady on the stretcher. Or even older. It costs a lot of money to support these people. France is a Mediterranean country. We know all about the Mediterranean diet and how long people live. Oh, right. Of course, the solid science there.

32:19Elizabeth Spiers: I'm being sarcastic. Well, the wine and cheese really just kind of increases longevity.

32:24Felix Salmon: Right. And there's that book from the 90s about French women, they never get fat or something. You guys remember that book? Yeah. But Felix, I feel like if I was a listener, I'd be like, okay, he started out talking about consumer confidence in the U.S., then moved to protests in France and Spain over these specific issues to those countries. What's the connection? Where are you going here? Emily, thank you for that question. I do like the softball teeing it up. All of this is happening at a time when the stock market is reaching new record highs. The way I see this is that there is a global swinging of that pendulum that we talk about so much on this show between labor and capital.

33:05The people, whether it's people in America or people in France or people in Spain, are seeing the pendulum swing away from them. They are seeing the wealth and the power move into big tech and AI and anyone who has a massive stock portfolio. And it's like, well, that's not me. I'm struggling here. Elon Musk is a trillionaire. What the fuck? And I think this is a global phenomenon. And, you know, this is Slate Money. We like to talk about stocks. But now more than ever, I think probably in my very long multi-decade career as a financial journalist, now more than ever, I think we have to just shout from the rooftops that the stock market is not the economy.

33:49There has never been, I can never remember a bigger disconnect between the stock market and the lived experience of living in an economy. I mean, the stock market has gotten really, really big since 2009.

34:04Felix Salmon: nine. I had an interview for Money Talks. I don't want to spoil it too much, but we talked about how, let's see if I have this right, the value of all outstanding equity shares, public and private, together is worth 250 % of GDP right now, which if you look at the chart, it's just up and to the right. It's a disturbingly bubbly looking situation. The stock market is just so big, and it's sucking up so much money. But it's making just so few people rich that, yeah. Well, it's making a lot of people rich in America. One of the interesting distinctions between Europe and the United States is that Americans broadly are invested in U.S.

34:47stocks. Europeans broadly are not. The European stock market is not doing as well as the American stock market. It doesn't have the big hyperscalers and tech mega caps. And in any case, Europeans are much less likely to be stock owners than the Americans are. So you can kind of sympathize a little bit more with the Europeans than the Americans. But also, one of the things that Alan Greenspan used to talk a lot about was the wealth effect of a rising stock market, and that people still wind up spending money when they feel rich, and they feel rich when stocks are doing well. And I'm struggling with the degree to which that wealth effect is happening and visible in America.

35:24On the one hand, everyone's moaning and complaining and saying that things are terrible, and you don't see it in like survey results. But you do kind of see it in consumer spending data. The consumers, you know, for all that they're moaning and complaining, they're still spending. And, you know, we still have pretty healthily positive GDP growth, even if you strip out the data centers.

35:44Felix Salmon: I've covered some or read some reports, various, showing that a lot of the spending growth is coming from the wealth effect and even people spending some of their equity down, like spending stocks and stuff. because we have good for them right if we're gonna have some like massive crash like why not spend it when it's high and a lot of the spending is from like old people who are starting to live off their off their stock off their wealth also so there's also that disconnect where the people doing the nice spending are the ones with the stock and the ones that are old and not the young people that are taking to the streets well at least in france we are living in a world we are We're relatively new to this world, but we are definitely living in a world in the United States now where the bulk of retirees in the United States have defined contribution pensions rather than defined benefit pensions, which means they are spending their own money, which is mostly in the stocks rather than just being paid money by a pension fund.

36:45And so if they are doing the standard back of the envelope, whatever it is, of like you can spend 4 % of your wealth every year in retirement, if the stock market doubles, that 4 % doubles, you know, and they spend twice as much in retirement. So that is on some level that wealth effect is an obvious and real thing just when you're looking at the D.C. retirees.

37:08Felix Salmon: It's kind of like not what you want for your economy to be like vibrant and growing. Like you want young people to be doing well and like moving up and succeeding, right? Instead of like... But that's what the old people are spending their money on. All of that money that old people spend is on some level being spent on young people, right? That's spending at companies and the companies are staffed by people who by definition have not retired. Right. The people working on the cruise ship are young. Or at the hospital. So this is all fine. Yeah, it's totally fine. I think it works, you know, unless and until there's some big stock market crash.

37:40it does kind of manage to keep on ticking along.

37:43Felix Salmon: I was thinking about you, Felix, because you look at all the stock charts right now as I do, because I write Axios markets, please subscribe. And they are insane. Things are so obviously in a bubble right now. I think about you because you are one of these people that are like, stocks always go up. And I'm like, do they though? I'm not. I'm not. It's a matter of degree. I'm not a stocks always go up person because I am old enough to remember the decade of the 2000s when they went sideways for 10 years and they didn't go up. I absolutely don't believe that stocks always go up. But I am also, I struggle a little bit with the idea of a bubble.

38:27Because in my mind, a bubble is a speculative bubble. A bubble is like people buying because they think it's going up.

38:36Elizabeth Spiers: That is AI right now. There's a lot of speculation around AI. I don't think so. I mean, like, for one thing, look at the hundreds of billions of dollars of debt capital that's going into AI. Like, debt capital is never speculative, right, by definition.

38:50Felix Salmon: What? Ask Robin Wigglesworth that. I mean, asking what happened to the railroads in the late 1800s.

38:57Elizabeth Spiers: Does anyone remember junk bonds? No, no.

39:00Felix Salmon: What about all the bonds they sold for those, like, weird countries that didn't exist? Right. So that's my point, right? You can have a crash without a bubble. Ah, so you're quibbling. You're quibbling with bubble. You're quibbling. I'm quibbling. But clearly something is happening where it's very boomy and it's too hot. Things are getting a little too bananas.

39:18Elizabeth Spiers: I don't think a bubble requires a certain intent. Well, no. So that's exactly what I was saying. Speculative bubble requires a certain intent. If you're saying this is a bubble, but it's not a speculative bubble, then you need to define what a bubble is. And I have yet to find a definition which is helpful of bubble and how you can tell the difference between a bubble and not a bubble beyond something very tautological about like it's when prices are high and before they go down. I think it's concentrated sector risk and overvaluation, some combination of the two.

39:52Felix Salmon: I think it's people throwing money at stuff that is clearly dumb. And it's happening way too much.

40:13Slate Money is sponsored this week by Monarch. Your personal finances are complicated. All of us are. And it's hard to keep track of where exactly all that money is going. It's just very difficult to see it in one place. Monarch allows you to do that. From the very big picture, this is your network. all the way down to you are spending a lot of money on restaurants this week. Most taps will only tell you what you've already spent. Monarch will help you set goals, map out big purchases in the future, see if you're on track, help you adjust before it's too late. You can ask the AI assistant anything about your finances.

40:53How much did I spend on travel in 2024? Can I afford this vacation without touching my savings? Or how about this one, which is really germane right now? Has my spending actually gone up in real terms, or is it just inflation? With Monarch, you just get to be in control. So write your own money story with Monarch. Use code SLATE at Monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch core half off at just$50. That's$50 off your first year at Monarch.com with the code SLATE.

41:31Felix Salmon: Hey, I'm running out to drop off a stack of letters and packages. Need anything shipped while I'm gone? Save the gas. Stamps.com lets you print postage and schedule pickups right from your desk. Sync your contacts into the address book, get detailed accounting insights, and get notified the moment your certified mail is delivered. All from my desk? All from your desk. Join the 4 million businesses using Stamps.com right now with code podcast and get your free welcome gift. Stamps.com code podcast.

42:04That is our perfect segue, which is, is AI clearly dumb or did it just solve the Napier-Stokes equation and like dozens of other major unsolved mathematical problems and basically prove that it is the opposite of dumb and in fact, it's smarter than any humans that have ever lived in the history of the world. Emily, are you in the clearly dumb camp?

42:28Felix Salmon: I don't think AI is dumb. I think AI, I mean, I don't know enough about math, you guys, to be like, well, we always knew that the Napier problem was going to be solved. I don't know. So I'm going to do a politician thing of being like, well, a different question. I think AI is not dumb. My concern is that AI is making people dumb. I think at the level of math where AI can solve a problem and so that freaks people out because they're like, we don't need mathematicians anymore. I think that's dumb. I think you're always going to need mathematicians to look at what the AI, I think you are. Maybe I'm wrong.

43:06Felix Salmon: You're always going to need a mathematician to sort of look at what the AI did and try to make sense of it and see if it's valuable and monetize it or not monetize it or explain it.

43:15Elizabeth Spiers: So there's a big controversy around that specific problem because now the researchers are saying actually the AI did not do the work that, you know, OpenAI is suggesting that it did originally. Right.

43:25Felix Salmon: You need the humans to be like, to look at what happened. Like you can't just have an AI be like, here's a new drug and like release it to the world. That would be crazy. Yeah. I mean, AI is trained on the corpus of everything that humanity has created. So all advances in mathematics and in science, you know, are based on what came before. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants and all of that kind of stuff. So, like, I don't think it's a criticism of the AI to say, well, you are basing what you did on what somebody else did. Like, that's what mathematicians do.

43:59Elizabeth Spiers: That's not what they're saying, though. They're saying OpenAI took credit for new— All right, yeah, I'm not going to start assigning credit here. But the fact is that OpenAI did solve a whole bunch of mathematical problems that were previously unsolved. And it did so in an interesting way. If you look at the proofs, which is really, really hard to understand or to follow. It did not solve these problems in the way that mathematicians solved them. It solved the problems by like throwing a whole bunch of formulae and words into a page and like saying, look, this passes the clever little test that mathematicians have invented to determine whether it's real proof or not.

44:41But other than just passing that test, which is great, congratulations, you've done it, no one at this point really understands those proofs. And to Emily's point, you know, now comes kind of the real work, which is to go through those proofs, maybe with the help of a, you know, robot, and say, so, okay, explain to me what you're doing here. Explain to me how this works because right now one of the metaphors that have been thrown out this week right now we're like we have reached the top of the mountain but we don't know how we got here and it's very foggy and we don't know what the route was and so now like let's try and reverse engineer how we got here and once we've reversed engineered how we got there then that will be that will feel like a meaningful advance in mathematics but right now it's like yeah technically it's a proof But a proof without understanding is a very weird creature.

45:30Felix Salmon: So I think like at that high level, like this math problem that we're talking about, AI can be a complement to what sophisticated, smart expert types already know. Journalists can use it to organize their data and make new conclusions about whatever is already out there. My concern is more this Wall Street Journal story that I read this week that looked at a lot of studies and talked to kids using AI. And it's making them dumb, you guys. Like they're not taking what AI says and like thinking about it, testing it. They're like, I have a math problem. AI can solve it. It's not complicated. It's not an unsolved theorem that mathematicians have been struggling with.

46:14Felix Salmon: It's just like. It is just like, what is seven times 15? Yeah, whatever. I'm just going to. But they're doing basically what you used to be able to do with a calculator. But now they are doing it with more, you know, with like essay questions and that kind of thing. Essay questions. What is the meaning of the raven? There was like an example in the journal story where like they read something. Maybe it was the raven and everyone came in with the same essay because it's like it's better than cliff notes, right? You just like do it for me and then it pops out.

46:42Elizabeth Spiers: There's a great stat that I thought illustrated this perfectly. It said there was a study that looked at Chinese students and they saw an 18 % increase in homework scores simultaneously at 20 % decline in exam stores. And so that's sort of like being able to produce the work product without understanding it and then actually being asked to explain it and they can't.

47:01Felix Salmon: Yes, yes. I think that is a real, when the calculator came out, you know, people were upset and they're like, kids won't be able to learn math anymore. But guess what? They still learn math. It's probably fine. So I don't want to like be alarmist at the same time. I feel alarmist. When I read the journal story, I was like, this tracks with me. If I use like AI when I'm reporting and ask it questions, I don't think I'm like, I don't absorb the information like I do if I read a journal paper or if I do an interview with an expert or something. It's just like, it's not as good and you don't, kids aren't retaining anything.

47:35Felix Salmon: They're just using it. You do need the thinking. I am very happy to. You do need the thinking. I am very happy to do an interview with someone, record the interview, be thinking using my human brain while I'm talking. Yes. Take the transcript, drop it into AI. I mean, like now I've done the thinking, I just, you know, for other sort of prose related reasons, I could use some quotes. Can you give me like the fine good quotes? Yes. Like AI is good at that. It's pretty good at that. But you still got one of the things that we know about kids. And this goes through undergrad at the very least. They're not at school with the intention of learning.

48:12They're at the school with the intention of like ticking the various boxes that the schools and the parents have told them to tick. They're like, you need to do this homework. You need to do this exam. You need to get these grades. You need to answer this question. And they're like, OK, I will do this. I'll do this. I'll do this. And then like somehow magically, like the magic of pedagogy is that if the kids do all of these things and they come out the end of the sausage machine, having gained a certain amount of knowledge and sophistication. But AI does, you know, pedagogy needs to sort of recalibrate itself to make sure that we're not just asking kids questions that they can answer with AI and not really gain any understanding of what they're saying.

48:52Elizabeth Spiers: There's a conventional wisdom in education that the best way to learn something is to have to teach it to somebody else.

48:57Felix Salmon: Yes.

48:58Elizabeth Spiers: And I was thinking about that. My kid until this year was in a majority-minority public school that was mostly immigrants. So they had this extra layer of language programming on top of everything where they had to write out. Like if they were solving a math problem, they had to explain their thinking in a way that wasn't just show your work. Like they had to write whole paragraphs about it. It had the effect of forcing the kids to kind of articulate their logic in a way that if you are just dumping something into AI or Googling it and repeating whatever it spits out, you can do that while bypassing every single part of your brain that does the heavy lifting when you do critical thinking.

49:35AI will happily give you paragraphs of why you are subtracting five from seven in this situation. But that doesn't mean you understand it. And I do think this is also showing up in what we were just talking about in French protests. On some level, the kids are aware of the fact that they're not learning and they're upset about that. But on another level, they have a bunch of questions they need to answer. And they also have a, you know, game of football they want to play. And so they want to get those questions out the way as quickly as they can so they can go play football.

50:04Felix Salmon: Yeah. Some of the kids quoted in the journal, too, where they were like, I realized that I didn't know anything or like they were upset about it. I mean, these are a self-selected group, obviously. But yeah, the kids are maybe not be learning, but they're not stupid. One of the things that I've been thinking about quite a lot about the Nicole Hannah-Jones essay about her daughter was the way that her daughter went into like a math exam and came out of it and was like, I fucking nailed it. I got every single question right. I did so well. I'm so happy. I'm so smart. And then it turns out she got every question wrong.

50:37And that disconnect between what you think you know and what you actually know, I think is new. I don't think kids had that 20 years ago pre-AI.

50:47Elizabeth Spiers: When standardized testing became the primary metric for whether a school was successful or not, there was a lot of moving to things like multiple choice tests, which are a little bit easier to do than, say, an open-ended question. When I matriculated to college, I was a little unprepared for it because I grew up in multiple choice land. and then I would get a question on an exam that would be like an international security class that would be like... Democracy, discuss. Saddam Hussein has one nuclear ICBM explain all potential ramifications using every theory that you've learned. There is no way to cheat on that.

51:21Elizabeth Spiers: You're writing in a blue book. It's not a take-home. And I think students are often already unprepared for that kind of thing, which is more similar to what you would face in the real world if you were working in national security. we've already sort of gone down this standardized testing route that's heavily not requiring them to do complex thinking where there is no right or wrong answer necessarily but they need to show their work and and so giving them access to ai tools and letting them use it like i'm very glad that new york city is banned it now in public schools but so but i i need to ask though like if we are entering a world where analysis of the ramifications of Saddam Hussein's ICBM is always, you know, when you give it to the professionals, going to be done with the aid of AI, you're like a computer-enhanced human, then on some level, schools should and must be teaching.

52:19And when I'm saying schools here, I think I'm talking about tertiary education, not secondary. But once you get to university, they have to teach, like, what is the way to use AI for you to get smarter? And what is the way to use AI for you to get dumber? And it's to distinguish between the two and encourage the former and discourage the latter.

52:37Elizabeth Spiers: That's true. But I don't buy that, you know, everybody's going to use AI to do all their analysis and make every decision. You know, we've already seen their amputations of doing that. No, I think they are, to a greater or lesser extent. You know, maybe it'll just be whatever the international relations equivalent of, like, pull out the good quotes is. And maybe it'll be like, can you just work this out for me? But it'll be on the spectrum somewhere. Everyone is using AI all the time everywhere. This is toothpaste that is not going back in the tube. I don't think it's going back in the tube. But I also, you know, I was in prep for the segment.

53:11Elizabeth Spiers: I was looking at the stats. and there's an MIT report from last year that says something like 95 % of corporate AI investments have produced zero quantifiable returns. Right, because it's really hard to quantify that stuff. Well, but also there's other studies that suggest that for whatever time it saves, you put 40 % of time back into it because you have to do rework. You have to check the AI's work. And in a lot of cases, and this is what somebody, we talked about this a while ago, people call it work slop. where just using AI creates more work for you? I guess I would disagree. I mean, I agree empirically with what you're saying about how we have experienced AI in the recent past.

53:54But when I turn around and look in the other direction at the sort of medium-term future, I do have probably a little bit more optimism than you do that many, if not all of those, will become addressed. We all try and work out how to avoid the bad ways of using AI and start trying to get more comfortable with the good ways because it's so new to us right now. We don't really know what we're doing. It's hardly surprising that we're kind of flailing around and making a bunch of mistakes. You know, eventually we're going to, some people at least, most of us perhaps, are going to work it out.

54:28Felix Salmon: Yeah, and the question is, is it going to make us dumber or smarter? And I feel like we still don't know. And it's freaking me out. And I think for younger people, the question is particularly urgent because you literally have to teach younger people how to think. Like, ostensibly, we know how already. I don't know. One of the things that has been true in chess for well over a decade now is that computers can beat people, but a person using a computer can beat a computer. If you combine a human intelligence with a computer assistant, that is the most powerful and best thing that you can have.

55:01Elizabeth Spiers: Okay, but I see where you're going with that. One of the things that I think we don't talk about enough with AI making people dumber is just that when you outsource that kind of critical thinking to a computer, especially at a young age, kids also kind of lose their tolerance for doing tedious, difficult work, which makes it harder for them to do deep work or work on longer projects. I agree, and I do think, and this is why I'm drawing the distinction between undergrads and middle schoolers. I think there's a case for bringing the AIs in and what's the best way to really turbocharge your intelligence when you reach that undergrad level in a way that does not make sense in middle school when they don't really have much of an intelligence to turbocharge in the first place.

55:48Felix Salmon: But it's so interesting because it's like, like I was saying before, there are all these technologies that were introduced and people at first were saying the things that I'm saying, like, oh, no one's going to know how to think anymore because no one's going to do. We won't need any accounts or finance people anymore because we have spreadsheets now. We don't know where we're going because we have Google Maps or, you know, we won't know how to add. But like, it turns out it doesn't matter. And this is actually, and this is also really important, is that we have lost wayfinding abilities. Like the parts of our brains that understand where we physically are in the world have atrophied.

56:25They are smaller now than they used to be before Google Maps came along. We are relying on Google Maps to do things that we used to rely on our brains to do. And when it comes to wayfinding and knowing where you are on the planet, we absolutely as a population as a country as a planet have become dumber that's probably bad is that bad it but that's the question that's the that's the million dollar question is that bad because i guess if you ever get lost and your phone is dead bad but the computer assisted humans our wayfinding is not zero right no the combination of human and phone is much more sophisticated and much more able to know where they are and know how to get around than the human was on their own previously yeah so there is in on one way in one way like we are now computer-assisted humans and the computer-assisted humans are smarter than the old humans on another way the humans son's computer are dumber than the old humans which one is better let's have another round you could just

57:28Felix Salmon: keep coming up with examples like when like ovens came out people were like but no one's gonna know how to make fires anymore. It's like, it gives a shit. It's true. We are so bad at making fires.

57:56Felix Salmon: Okay. Okay. Yeah. 20 billion is my number and that's a dollar amount,$20 billion. It's the difference between the revenue that OpenAI said it was making a few months ago and now the number it maybe is making now. A few months ago, it was$60 billion and now they're saying$40 billion. But the reason I'm bringing it up is because OpenAI is not a public company and we're all going to be honest, we really don't know how much money they're making. They're just saying numbers. They're not audited by any kind of... They could say whatever they want. And there's a whole debate going on right now between OpenAI and Anthropic about how they calculate these numbers.

58:37Felix Salmon: Are they taking into account all the things they need to be taking into account, et cetera, et cetera. No one really knows. And I think it's important because a lot of public companies, a lot of the stock market gains that Felix was talking about is all riding on the ability of this company to make these amounts of money, but we don't actually know how much they make. So it's kind of... The OpenAI IPO can't come soon enough because then we'll know. So what are you saying? We never can know? No, I'm saying we will know. Once they're a public company, they will have the gap numbers and we'll know what the gap numbers are.

59:09Felix Salmon: Well, at least we'll have a number that we can agree is a number that is real and comparable to other numbers.

59:15Elizabeth Spiers: Yes, they might make up some like weird accounting. They will have long gap metrics, but they will also have the gap numbers. They'll have the gap numbers. My number is 41 billion, which is the number of dollars that Chipotle is worth. And Chipotle, as we know, was, you know, there was this big run up in the share price, thanks to this visionary CEO, Mr. Nickel, who then got poached by Starbucks. And guess what? Now there's all these rumors going around that Mr. Nickel at Starbucks is going to buy Chipotle. And if he does that, he's going to buy it for$41 billion or thereabouts, which would by far be the biggest restaurant acquisition in the history of humanity.

59:57And I just need to quote Elena Nisanov on Twitter because, bless her, she said, when the singularity comes, we will all subsist on venti chicken burrito chinos and there's nothing you can do about it. Yum. Yeah, I don't see a lot of synergy between Starbucks and Chipotle.

1:00:18Felix Salmon: No, because I was, yeah, you don't want to be drinking a pumpkin spice latte whilst eating a burrito bowl. It sounds like a really disgusting mashup, right? Two tastes that just don't go together.

1:00:28Elizabeth Spiers: They could do like a cafe diolio, which is like a sort of Mexican coffee. And they could make that like a fancy Starbucks-y thing and then also put it in Chipotle.

1:00:38Felix Salmon: I kept thinking, you guys know that song about the KFC Taco Bell? I'm at the KFC Taco Bell. I'm at the Taco Bell, KFC, whatever. But then it would be I'm at the Starbucks Chipotle. It's Pizza Hut Taco Bell. I'm at the Pizza Hut. I'm at the Taco Bell. I'm at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.

1:00:57Elizabeth, what's your number?

1:00:58Elizabeth Spiers: My number is 71%. And that is the amount of increase in prices of Halloween candy over the last five years. So in five years ago, you could buy a hundred piece bag of candy for$9.91. And this was just like an average and a study. And now it's$16.96. I went down this rabbit hole and I was like, well, what's the worst Halloween candy? And for me, it's those peanut butter taffies that come in like a orange and black wax paper. So you can still get those very cheaply because no one likes them. You can get a bag of those for 11 bucks. Wait, wait, is this demand-driven inflation, that the prices are rising because the Halloween candy manufacturers are like, you love our stuff so much, you will pay anything for it?

1:01:44Elizabeth Spiers: Yes, I mean, some of it's also driven by, and these are sort of averages, so the fact that chocolate prices have gone up precipitously is affecting it. But I also need to tell you that the city of High Point, North Carolina, has actually banned the peanut butter taffies because nobody likes them. What? What?

1:02:04Felix Salmon: So they can't sell them there? You can't give them out on Halloween?

1:02:07Elizabeth Spiers: You can't give them out on Halloween. I don't think they really enforce it, but if you do it, you're just being an asshole.

1:02:13Felix Salmon: Wow, that's amazing.

1:02:14Elizabeth Spiers: Can you give out a Granny Smith apple? They don't ban it. I think if you want children to hate you, you can definitely do that.

1:02:22Felix Salmon: Yeah, that's a terrible thing to do. Who would do that? Yeah, I may or may not have had parents who would be like, here, have an apple. Oh, no. Oh, no.

1:02:34Elizabeth Spiers: That explains so much about you, though.

1:02:36Felix Salmon: It really does. We were the house that ate all the Halloween candy before October 31st, and then on the 31st, we're like, oh, my God, we have to buy candy, and then there's no good candy to buy. That still happens in my house. If you guys have struggled with rising Halloween candy prices, let us know. SlateMoney at Slate.com. Otherwise, thank you for listening. We are going to have a Slate Plus segment for you lovely Slate Plus subscribers. on...

1:03:02Elizabeth Spiers: Trump accounts. Trump accounts. Are they becoming problematic? Were they problematic all along? We will get into it. Otherwise, thank you for listening. Thank you to Jessamyn Molly of Seaplane Armada for producing. And we will be back next week, as every week, with yet one more episode. Sweet Honey.

1:03:39Felix Salmon: This episode is brought to you by Perk. Now, if you work in an office on a scale of mild annoyance to I'm going to throw my laptop into the ocean, where does booking work travel and filing expenses land for you? Because the numbers are staggering. Every person on your team could be losing up to seven hours every single week to the work behind the work. We're talking about matching receipts, chasing card charges, managing travel, nearly an entire workday spent doing administrative chores nobody was actually hired to do. It's a massive drain on productivity, which is why Perk exists. Perk is the intelligent platform for travel and spend.

1:04:13Felix Salmon: Instead of suffering through five different tabs and a broken spreadsheet, Perk combines business travel booking, expense management, and corporate card control into one single system. Your finance team gets real-time visibility and everyone else gets their sanity back. Save yourself the headache. Sign up at perk.com slash slate money to enjoy no platform fees for the first three months. That is perk.com slash slate money. New U.S.-based corporate customers only terms apply.

1:04:47Felix Salmon: 98 of the top 100 U.S. accounting firms trust Bill to simplify and secure bill pay. That's proven financial infrastructure built on over a trillion dollars of secure payments. Visit bill.com slash proven for a special offer.