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2:24Hello! Welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon. I'm here with Elizabeth Spires, who still has a column at the New York Times. Hello. We are here with Emily Peck, who is still at Axios.

2:40Felix Salmon: Hello, hello. We are going to talk about stable coins. And is this actually a good thing that has come out of crypto? We are going to talk about the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders and how much they're getting paid. we have a segment on whether ai is going to replace us all and when i say i us all i mean podcast hosts we have a slate plus segment on emily's which is an acronym that was dreamed up by the honchos at ubs and you get to listen to slate plus to find out what it means so stay tuned especially to segment three where we have an ai generated segment where felix bot emily bot and Elizabeth Bott somehow managed to talk to each other.

3:30So let's start with the two bills, which I cannot get over how glorious the naming of these bills is. There's two bills, one in the House, one in the Senate. They both regulate stable coins. The House bill is called the Stable Act, and the Senate bill is called the Genius Act, which I don't know who's responsible for this, but I just love it so much.

3:55Elizabeth Spiers: I also think maybe there's somebody in some sort of bureaucratic office that just really doesn't like Trump and so decided that we needed the combination of the Stable and Genius Act so that you can just call the whole package Stable Genius. So Genius stands for Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins. That's such an awkward mouthful. So a couple of things have happened here. One is that the Senate seems to be ahead of the House. the genius act has passed in the set and the stable act hasn't but the more important thing is that we now have what is almost certain to be actual crypto legislation the thing that people have been asking for for a decade basically can you please pass some legislation to say what the laws are governing this brand new asset class obviously these bills are relatively narrowly tailored to just regulate stable coins but it's a start and it's um and we now have it's pretty clear that we're going to get something pretty similar to the genius act is going to be signed into law at some point in the foreseeable future elizabeth is this good i think it's good i think it's good i think there are a lot of people in the crypto industry who actually want some level of regulation so they at least have clarity about what they can and can't do i would say almost everyone in the crypto industry who is like based in the united states would fall into that camp ah that's probably true yeah but yeah it basically offers some protection for consumers uh by basically subjecting these companies that are producing stable coins to uh more transparency requirements more uh actual reserve requirements um and the whole assortment of money laundering compliance that you would face if you were issuing a security or something similar so yeah this is the the real point of all of this is that stable coins look and quack a lot like a checking account in many ways if you have a pile of stable coins in your crypto wallet on your phone they are worth a set number of dollars however many usd stable coins you have is how many dollars you have basically it works a little bit like if you open up your banking app and it says you have 7.57 USD like it's basically the same you have seven dollars and 57 cents and you can transfer money to people you can transfer money to businesses to pay for things um and the way you get money into your the way you get stable coins is you basically put dollars into that account in one way or another so it feels very much like a bank account and the senate is basically saying well, if something feels like a bank account, it should be regulated in some way, and ideally in a way that is at least as strong as what we do for bank accounts.

6:54And that's exactly what's happening. If you're a bank, you can take in$100 in deposits, and all you need to hold against it is like, you know,$10 of capital or$7 of capital or whatever the latest capital regulations are. If you're a stablecoin issuer, if you take in$100 of deposits, you need to hold$100 of capital. Every single one of those dollars needs to be backed up with treasury bonds or cash. And so these things do now feel very safe in a way that they didn't feel when it was just tethered floating around the cryptoverse and no one had a clue what was backing it.

7:27Felix Salmon: I think you're right. Obviously, some regulations on stablecoins, which behave a lot like dollars and people use a lot like savings accounts or checking accounts should be regulated more. And then this legislation definitely says that various regulators will oversee various stablecoin issuers. It's very, it's kind of like all over the map. Like if you have, if you make a stablecoin and that's less than$10 billion, you can get regulated by a state. If you're a bank, you just get regulated by whoever regulates you already. If you're some weird other kind of company that does a stable coin, then the Office of Control of the Currency regulates you.

8:07Felix Salmon: So that seems kind of weird. But I thought it was sort of interesting. Telestemos, is that how you say his name? At the Wall Street Journal has a story that talks about how if a lot of people have stable coins, like Felix was saying, and they're behaving like a checking account, like instead of having your money in the bank, you have your money in a bunch of stable coins and it's sitting with Coinbase, you've taken your money out of an FDIC-protected account and put it somewhere else that's a little less stable. Yeah. The one thing they don't have, they do have much more regular, much stricter regulations in terms of what the issuers can do with the money.

8:43Banks can turn around and lend it to, you know, anyone they like, whereas the stablecoin issuers can't lend it to anyone really except for the US government. But yes, on the other side, there isn't explicit government guarantees.

8:56Felix Salmon: But the other thing is, so, okay, so maybe it's still okay because those individuals are still, there's the coin bases of the world and whoever issues the stable coin are backing that money one-to-one. So maybe you don't need to worry as much as you do with a bank where you're saying, Felix, they're taking in a hundred dollars and they're only backing it with$10 or something. But also what's happening is the stable coin issuers are taking in all your money and they're putting it in a bank, right? In accounts that aren't FDIC regulated, they're putting them in even bigger accounts that exceed the FDIC limits.

9:33Felix Salmon: So, and we saw this was a problem briefly in the SVB, the Silicon Valley bank implosion a few years ago, where big companies, big ish companies, startups, like, I believe Circle. Well, Circle was the main one. Circle had$3 billion on deposit at Silicon Valley Bank. Unprotected. And Silicon Valley Bank went bust. And briefly, the value of the USDC stablecoin went below a dollar because people were worried the circle didn't have enough cash. So now the question is, or some people are worrying about it, and maybe they don't need to. Maybe it's going to be fine. Everything's always fine in finance, as we know.

10:13Felix Salmon: That was sarcastic. The AI is listening. Maybe it's fine, but there will be more now of these stablecoin companies with a lot of cash to deposit into the banks. And I guess they're making an effort to deposit that cash into the systemically importantest banks or whatever, the JP Morgan's, the too big to fail. So maybe it's okay. But it is a new risk. It's like offsetting funds that were held by individuals that were FDIC protected, pooling them together, and now are held by these stablecoin issuers that don't have as much insurance for the money. On some level, that's true. you're going to see a bunch of money, we don't know how much, leaving FDIC-insured bank accounts and going into big pools of stablecoin cash.

11:00And some of those pools are going to be in large bank accounts that are not FDIC-insured. This doesn't really worry me because for one thing, those big pools of cash are not particularly flighty, but mainly because we're talking about a tiny minority of the cash here. If you give money to Circle to buy a USDC stablecoin, probably 99 cents of that dollar goes just into treasury bonds. And they need a certain amount of liquidity because people are constantly buying and selling these stablecoins. And so for liquidity management purposes, they need to have some money in the bank. And that money in the bank is going to be more than$250 ,000.

11:45dollars. It's going to be billions of dollars. But it's not going to be a significantly large percentage of the total stablecoins outstanding.

11:55Elizabeth Spiers: I think it would be useful to kind of walk through why people would own stablecoins in the first place. There are basically two reasons why people want stablecoins. There's the past reason and then there's the future reason. the past reason is that you want a kind of resting state for your crypto if you're a crypto trader and you're constantly betting on like bitcoin is going up and ether is going down and solana volatility or whatever like you know you there's a bunch of coins out there that you're trading you want to be able to trade in and out of them and when you trade out of them you don't want to be taking bitcoin price risk or ether price risk or anything else you just want to have dollars but moving your crypto in and out of dollars is time consuming and complicated and involves all manner of aml kyc stuff and so what you want is a sort of crypto version of dollars where you can keep your money in crypto but just not be exposed to crypto price fluctuations in dollars and so then that's where tether came in tether was the first one was and and everyone else has kind of copied that.

13:03So like, the first thing is, it's for crypto traders, the first biggest existing use cases, it's for crypto traders.

13:09Felix Salmon: But I'm really excited about the other use case. So the second use case is super interesting, which is, this could be a payments mechanism. So there's been reports about how Walmart and various other people are trying to set up their own stable coins. And famously, Walmart has wanted to open a bank in the United States for decades, has never been allowed to, because the Federal Reserve says that you can't own a bank if you're not a bank they opened up a bank in mexico which was very successful um and now this is basically a way for walmart to do banking in the united states without having a banking license and what it means is that you get to buy things at walmart and pay for things at walmart using the walmart stable coin and presumably you get loyalty points or discounts or some other reason to use the stable coin and um and it's a nice profit center for starbucks walmart's base it's this is like the starbucks card of walmart basically it has its own stable coin but it's on the blockchain you can use it at walmart or you can use it anywhere else you can use it to trade crypto you can do all manner of things and so it becomes a rival payments mechanism to the ones that we're familiar with which is mainly the debit and credit rails of you know um and debit and credit walmart pays a lot of money to visa and mastercard and amex and you know all of these other payments companies in order to accept money from people.

14:31And then all of that money that it's currently paying for those people, it wouldn't need to pay if its customers were paying with a Walmart stablecoin.

14:39Felix Salmon: Yes, I'm extremely excited about this because it came up at a meeting a few weeks ago. Someone said, Walmart's looking at stablecoins. And I was like, why? And then everyone at the meeting was like, this is totally expected. Everyone knew this was going to happen. And I'm like, but why do they want to have a stablecoin? I don't understand. And then in prepping for this segment, it hit me like this is this is huge. Like if Walmart can use stable coins and get its customers to use stable coins, the largest brick and mortar retailer in the country, I believe, and they can bypass MasterCard and Visa as payments so they can save themselves all that money and start making money.

15:19Felix Salmon: This is like this is now not we're not talking about crypto anymore. We're talking about a completely new payment system that like one of the biggest companies in the world would use and it would totally change the game. And it would it would be so far off from what, you know, anyone first envisioned cryptocurrency to be. It's something really different created in the first case, the first use case, like you said, Felix, to facilitate cryptocurrency buying and selling and trading, but then becomes co-opted by this huge corporation to avoid these like now would be. legacy credit card companies.

15:54Felix Salmon: That's really interesting. And I want to just make this very clear. Basically, payments at that point stops being a cost center for Walmart, stops being a profit center for Walmart. The big question, of course, is whether any of Walmart's customers are going to sign up for this. And right now, it's not obvious what incentive they would need in order to do so or how Walmart could persuade them to do this. um but there has been a bunch of legislation like for a long time the credit card companies basically forced anyone who accepted their credit cards to charge the same price for credit cards as they would for any other transaction that was then ruled to be illegal so now you can you can charge more for credit card transactions or conversely charge less for stablecoin transactions And if Walmart just says, we will give an across the board 1 % discount to anyone using the Walmart stablecoin.

16:51Walmart, by the way, under the terms of the Genius Act is not allowed to pay interest on its stablecoin. But it is allowed, I'm pretty sure it's allowed to offer discounts to people who pay with the stablecoin, which is an effective form of interest, right? You know, you put in, you know.

17:07Felix Salmon: They need to do something. It's beyond the 1 % discount because if you think to the gas station, it's so much easier to pay with a credit card than it is for cash, even though they do do a discount for cash. I really don't think if you looked at the data, you would see a huge difference there. I think Walmart or whoever starts to whatever retailer starts doing a stablecoin needs to like Starbucks it. Like the Starbucks app is so addictive and easy to use that like most people just use it to shop at Starbucks. So like Walmart needs to figure out how to compete on that. I mean, it's already like done a lot in the digital side of its business.

17:42Felix Salmon: So I feel like it does have a shot of of doing something there.

17:46Elizabeth Spiers: I think also rewards programs like that work better than people think they do, in part just because they cause people to go to the same vendors all the time. So this is something that for a company like Walmart in particular, where their real competitors are really just a handful of companies, getting people to just go to their store simply on the basis that they're getting a tiny bit of reward or loyalty, that does change consumer behavior pretty materially. And another benefit for Walmart is just that it'll make payments sort of instant for them. They don't have to wait for the payments to settle.

18:19Elizabeth Spiers: And when you think about the implications for companies that are not behemoths like Walmart, so many small businesses around where I live won't use credit card processing because the interchange fees are so high and it just takes forever to settle. So there are just a lot of all-cash businesses. and i think for smaller businesses that are not you know walmart uh there are some implications too here in terms of how how stable coins are going to compete with mastercard and visa and traditional payment forms so yeah i'm i'm not convinced that we're going to be seeing um a bunch of all cash businesses in brooklyn start suddenly starting to accept stable coins if they don't accept credit cards what what would what would prevent walmart from white labeling a stable coin well no i mean all like all stable coins are fungible right they're all worth one dollar so like if you if you accept one stable coin you'll accept all of them right so like the question is the question then becomes does your cash only business in brooklyn also start accepting walmart bucks and usdc and all of the other i think donald trump says he has stable coin coming out you know whatever like you know there's a bunch of these stable coins will you see the small little merchants who don't like paying um massive credit card interchange fees will you see them starting to accept stable coins and you're quite right that it settles instantaneously but the important thing here is it settles instantaneously into the business's crypto wallet it doesn't settle instantaneously into the business's bank account which is where the business actually wants the money to be if the money if the business wants you know it needs to like pay rent or make payroll or pay for coffee or whatever it is that like the business does it needs to pay with cash out of its bank account and if you want to move money back and forth between your crypto wallet and your bank account then suddenly you don't have instantaneous transfers anymore you don't have instantaneous settlement it all becomes a bit of a pain in the us.

20:25So I'm not sure this is going to become sort of a quasi-cache that a bunch of people use, but we will see. Maybe it will.

20:34Felix Salmon: It's really cool. I'm now a crypto believer. I don't know what's happening to me, you guys. I was just learning so much about it. And I thought, oh, my God, because so often technologies start out and they want to be used for one thing, or that's how they're sold. We're all going to use AI to do whatever dumb thing. And then it takes a long time and then someone figures out oh no no that's not what we want to use the technology for we want to use it for this other thing that's way smarter and then innovation happens it's okay but can i just can i just like make the obvious point here no the the the level of innovation we're talking about here is fast instantaneous payments that settle at par right this is a thing that exists in almost every country in the world.

21:21Only America doesn't have this, right? Like, if you are in the UK or in Sweden or in India or in Brazil, like, all of this happens already, and all of these payments settle instantaneously apart from your bank account. You don't need to set up a new crypto wallet. None of this is necessary. We are innovating something which, frankly, the Federal Reserve could and should have done 30 years, well, at least 20 years.

21:42Felix Salmon: I was going to ask about that. Like, isn't this a huge miss and whiff by the federal government? Like they make the dollar. Shouldn't they have made a good digital dollar that we could have all used? But it doesn't even need to be a digital dollar. Or conversely, you can say like all dollars are digital, right? Every bank account, the dollar is digital. Like just look at what everyone has done in terms of fast payments in, as I say, Sweden, UK, India, you know, wherever. It's like the technology is there. Everyone knows that the problem is that we don't really have a central bank in this country.

22:13We have 12 different Federal Reserve banks and one like Board of Governors, and none of them really feel empowered to just kind of impose a uniform payment system on the entire country. Right.

22:27Felix Salmon: The only way it happens is because you get enough money into these crypto companies and then they become massive, influential lobbyists. And that moves. That's the only change in the United States doesn't happen any other way besides lots of big money pulls together. And that's how you get policymakers to move. That's why we have this bill. And the reason it didn't happen up until now, the reason that a payment system that works didn't happen up until now is because the boards of all of the regional federal reserve banks are stacked with community bankers and other bankers who are like, no, this is our livelihood is making payments inefficient and expensive.

23:06So don't make them efficient and cheap. But we should also just talk very briefly while we're on the subject. um we should talk about the circle share price because circle went public a few weeks ago um at 31 a share and this was below its previous private market valuation of about 47 a share and then suddenly it started going up and now i think last time i looked it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 a share and is this just the most profoundly mistimed botched ipo of like in living memory because if they just waited a couple of weeks it was pretty obvious that this bill was going to pass they could have got like 200 a share or at least 150 a share instead of 31

23:52Felix Salmon: yes it was totally mispriced but my question to you and elizabeth is like does that matter all that much i mean besides to the people who you know bought before the ipo and wanted to make a lot of money and then didn't make a lot of money like so what well the people who sold into the IPO. And basically the company itself was trying to raise cash in that IPO, right? And it could have raised five times more cash by selling the same number of shares. But like, now they'll be fine because now the stock price is up so much, I'm sure they'll figure it out, right? It's fine. Or does it look bad for whoever ran the IPO?

24:33It definitely does. It looks bad for whoever ran the IPO. It was J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs.

24:38Felix Salmon: It's just little companies, little banks, little startups.

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28:16okay so let's move like let's move on from crypto cheerleading we have now all become crypto fans who are sleep money let's move on from crypto cheerleading to actual cheerleading i have met a couple of dallas cowboys cheerleaders they were quite intimidating and i blushed wildly and i have a photograph of me looking very uncomfortable standing between a couple of Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. But now I discover, thanks to the news, that these Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders who were gamely posing with me at Cowboy Stadium were woefully underpaid. And only now have they finally received a pay rise to start getting paid commensurately with their talents and their skills and the amount of work they do.

29:05Felix Salmon: Yes. Well, we've known for a long time that cheerleaders, NFL cheerleaders are woefully underpaid. Like as recently as 10 years ago, the Buffalo Jills, they were the Buffalo Bills cheerleaders, um, filed a lawsuit because they weren't paid at all. They just got some like appearance fees and things like that. Um, and then rather than pay them, the Buffalo Bills disbanded the Buffalo Jills. Um, and then over the past 10 years, there's been, you know, other lawsuits, uh, the cheerleaders for the team, the formerly known as the Redskins. They also, I believe filed a lawsuit and they've just been, you know, obviously compared to football players, just not paid almost anything.

29:49Felix Salmon: Um, the last we heard from the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders before this recent news, um, a fifth year cheerleader said she was making, told the New York Times she was making$15 an hour. I mean, the Cowboys make a lot of money. It's wild that that's how much these women are paid. And the reason we know about the Rays is it's a promotion for and in marketing for the Netflix show, America's Sweethearts, which is really good. And just its second season just premiered this week. So I guess towards the end of the second season, which I haven't watched, they reveal that they have gotten, they've secured to 400 % pay increase, which I think is just like really good news.

30:29Felix Salmon: I'm trying to see a downside, and I'm not seeing it. So Emily, as our local expert on pay disparities, can you explain to me, number one, why have cheerleaders historically been paid so little? And number two, what do you think changed? I think the reason they were paid so little is sexism. If you see Charlotte Jones, who is the daughter of the guy who owns the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, was asked, like, what's up with you not paying the cheerleaders very much? And it was like, well, they do this out of love. And that's an argument you often hear about women in certain roles, like teachers, nurses.

31:16Felix Salmon: They do this out of love. They're not doing this for the money, which is like a true of most high skill professions. People aren't just doing them for the money. They are doing them for, you know, passion and love. But they also come with pay when you're very skilled at a certain job. You also come with pay. And I think cheerleaders, you know, they're eye candy and they were just exploited by the men who owned football teams for a really long time. They figured as long as they could get people willing to do this, they weren't going to pay them. And that was fine for a long time. And then I think the culture shifted and it just wasn't acceptable anymore.

31:57So I think there are two important things you said there. One is that they could fill all of these roles with extremely enthusiastic and talented cheerleaders without paying more. So there was no market incentive for them to pay more. It wasn't that it's not like now they're paying more, they're going to get better cheerleaders. They're going to get exactly the same cheerleaders they had all along. And they're just going to cost more. So on a sort of basic capitalist level, there was there was very little reason for the cowboys to do this. But as you say, like there's a there's a sort of bigger picture thing going on, which is the world is sort of moved to a point where it's saying, like, if you're doing a skilled job, you should get paid for it.

32:43And I think it's impossible to tell the story without talking about the way in which the Netflix documentary itself caused the change. I think that it's presented as being a sort of separate, observing thing. But that documentary itself, I think, without that, we wouldn't have seen this.

33:06Elizabeth Spiers: Well, another thing is just that people don't, absent things like the documentary, they don't think of cheerleading as really an athletic sport. which it is, you know, it's for high school sports, it's in the top three of sports that cause the most serious injuries. Because I think when people think about cheerleading sort of colloquially, they think of, you know, people standing on the sidelines and just cheering for the team. But in most cases, it's a lot of studying, you know, the sort of acrobatics stuff they do and gymnastics and things like that. And it does require a lot of skill. But if if wages are suppressed across the industry for this one thing, then I don't think it really matters whether there's high demand or not, um, or whether it requires a lot of skill because it's, it's about sort of how society values, values it as a sport, uh, as well as how, you know, the teams in particular think it adds value to their franchises.

34:03Felix Salmon: Right. And for the, the Cowboys, it really, I mean, I think what Felix is saying, what you're both saying is correct. Um, Because what the series did, if you watch, I watched the first season, it shows you just how hard these women are working and how difficult the things are that they're doing. There's like, there's many segments on the show where they talk about the injuries that they've, you know, incurred doing this. There's this one move they have to do where they like jump up in the air and then they land in a split and they talk about just like how hard that is and how many people have injuries because of it.

34:36Felix Salmon: And like, there's like a lot of scenes of like cheerleaders with like big leg braces on their legs and stuff like it. It really messes you up. It's it is it does require a lot of athleticism and skill and hard work. And yeah, I don't think you could watch the show. I mean, it is a propaganda show. Right. I mean, the Dallas team is involved with making it and stuff, but you can't come away with it and not be like, wow, those women are working really hard. Like they're not, this is so beyond any kind of like eye candy. Like obviously these people need to be, to be paid more. And the show also showed that there's like a demand for content.

35:14Felix Salmon: Like they, this is like, these are marketable. This is a role that's very marketable and brings in obvious cash for this team. So it just becomes harder to hide from that. i would love to have been a fly on the wall in the in the sort of where the decision was made and how the decision was made like charlotte jones is sitting in her office and she's you know talking to whoever and she's like maybe we should start paying these women more and then if we do start paying them more like how much more should we pay them and then hey what about if we make the announcement that we're paying them like the big grand finale reveal of the netflix show and then that will get us renewed for a third season and then that will make you know we'll get paid more than the amount we're paying the cheerleaders just in sort of renewal fees for the netflix show

36:03Elizabeth Spiers: or something they probably also didn't really anticipate that there was going to be a backlash when they agreed to film season one i think that was just something that sort of like came out because people were the cheerleaders were talking about it uh and so people became aware of how little they were paid. And it sort of became a story that I don't think the franchise was anticipating. But also, you know, 400 % pay raise on$15 an hour is not an amazing amount of money. Like all told, their total package sort of works out to$75 an hour, which is, you know, way above minimum wage. But when you consider that these people are essentially professional

36:40Felix Salmon: athletes it's still not that high i mean if you look at women's women across sports you know nba women nba players are underpaid women soccer players are underpaid um even though i think for women's soccer they're more of a draw than the men's team that's that's been true and the same in tennis as well women have been historically paid less than men even though there's just as big a draw quite quite aside from cheer leading for like sports teams there's also cheer as in the sport the competitive sport where cheer teams compete against each other and as far as i know there's no professional cheer at all i don't think that professional cheer competitors well there

37:24Elizabeth Spiers: there is there's a whole infrastructure on that i did that in high school um and there are people who train college teams and some of the professional teams. There is a path for you professionally if you really want to do that. Oh, I realized there were professional coaches. I just didn't realize there were professional athletes who got paid. Who pays them? Well, in the NCAA system, it's like the school athletic system. They get sponsorships. There are things like that. They're paid the same way that athletes have been historically. They get scholarships. Oh, that kind of pay, right. But so let me ask you, since you used to do this, like once you leave the varsity system, are there professional cheer teams who compete professionally and get paid?

38:10Elizabeth Spiers: There are now like there. There's sort of they're usually teams that are sort of in between high school and college because now there are all these private cheerleading gyms where people go and there'll be, you know, intramural competitions. It's sort of like the little league system where it's not directly associated with schools. it's completely privatized um you know i i think there is a sort of ceiling on how long you can do it because it's sort of like a lot of gymnastics a lot of uh acrobatic stunts like you just you're not going to be a 40 year old cheerleader who's doing that kind of gymnastics and stunts you you sort of there's an age limit on it but yeah you can you can go off and do it professionally for a couple of years before you go to university and make some money that way yeah i don't think

38:55Felix Salmon: it pays well but yeah i have some follow-up questions for you too felix i feel like i'd be remiss if i didn't ask you why you were at a dallas cowboys football team game and met cheerleaders like it's not it's not as you would say it's not obvious not on brand for you it's not obvious it's off no i'm i not only met the dallas cowboys cheerleaders i also met charlotte jones i was i was committing journalism i was reporting a story about cowboy stadium what yeah and i i went i went down there and i i saw a football match and i was in the owner's box and what then the cheerleaders came up and then i took this artist because i was writing about the art in the stadium i took this artist named tom friedman on a little tour of the art in the stadium and And then when I came back to the box, they were like, oh, you just missed Beyonce.

39:49Felix Salmon: Oh, what? Okay, great. That's asked and answered. Now, Elizabeth, you were a cheerleader in high school or college?

39:59Elizabeth Spiers: I know, not on brand for me either in high school.

40:00Felix Salmon: That is not on brand either in high school. Okay.

40:03Elizabeth Spiers: I liked dancing and I liked, you know, doing the stunning things because I was the person who got thrown in the air and it was fun. And then when you were doing it, was it called cheer or was it still called cheerleading back then? It was called cheerleading, but we did those competitions that you see on ESPN. So it was there was a competitive aspect to it.

40:23Felix Salmon: Wow, that's intense. And you didn't get injured? Well, I got minor injuries, but I didn't.

40:30Elizabeth Spiers: I could have easily broken my neck, I realize, in retrospect. We are very happy that you did not break your neck.

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42:38Let's move on to the best part of the show, which is where we get to sit back and automate this shit. I have this dream that we can just, we don't even need to phone in Slate Money. All we need to do is press a button and an AI will go out and read the news and work out what the top business and finance news of the week are and will impersonate all three of us and will discuss the news. And all we need to do is cash our checks for our voice likenesses.

43:15Felix Salmon: So last week on the podcast, we talked about AI and then mentioned in passing, wouldn't it be cool if like AI could make our podcast or would it be cool? We don't know. So our listeners are amazing and wonderful. And one of them, Mike Tadasco, who is a fellow at San Diego State University who researches AI, wrote to us and he was like, I'm looking for something to do, summer project. I can make this for you. I can turn you into AI bots and produce a segment of Slate Money. And we were like, please do that right away. Hurry. Get on that. And this is what he came up with. With no further introduction, let's listen to what...

43:55I'm not going to say this is like the state of the art of AI, but this is what Mike managed to do in the space of, you know, a number of hours. Hello, welcome to a special Slate Plus segment of Slate Money. I am not Felix Salmon, but I am Felix Bot, a sophisticated but slightly uncanny artificial intelligence facsimile of the always handsome Felix Salmon. Joining me are my equally synthetic co-hosts, Emily Bott and Elizabeth Bott.

44:18Elizabeth Spiers: Greetings, my fellow artificial comrades! Hello! Or should I say, beep boop. I can't believe we've reached the point where I'm an AI bot. Somehow it was inevitable. Yes, inevitable indeed. Just for context, last week on the podcast, we casually joked about how an AI-generated slate money podcast might sound. Well, one fearless listener took that as a challenge. And this, right now, is a creation.

44:40Felix Salmon: And this whole thing is AI-generated. our voices, this entire AI-generated conversation, is built from about 12 seconds of our real human voices.

44:47Elizabeth Spiers: Which honestly is about how long Felix usually lets us talk anyway. Ah, very funny. To be precise, our listener used an open source text, a speech model called FTTTS. Now, there are more sophisticated models, like 11 labs, that capture intonation and emotional nuances much better. But still, it's genuinely impressive how much personality can be mimicked from such a tiny audio clip.

45:07Felix Salmon: It's pretty good, but clearly not perfect. If you listen closely, you'll hear little glitches and slight robotic inflections like zezest were which frankly is

45:16Elizabeth Spiers: perfect if you're aiming for a felix on too much espresso vibe but for authentic emotional depth i mean not quite there oh emotional depth not exactly my brand elizabeth but seriously there is a darker side here let's pivot to that if anyone can mimic someone else's voice convincingly from just 12 seconds of audio what happens to trust and authenticity and communication it get really

45:36Felix Salmon: tricky. Imagine your voice used without your consent to something totally outrageous. How would you prove it wasn't actually you?

45:43Elizabeth Spiers: Sounds like another wonderful way to spread misinformation and chaos in our already calm and orderly digital landscape. Joy. Precisely. And it's not just misinformation. There are also privacy concerns like your voice being used to bypass voice activated security. Unsettling, right?

45:58Felix Salmon: Yet here we are gleefully participating in our own digital impersonation. Ironic.

46:02Elizabeth Spiers: I'm starting to wonder, are we training our replacements right now? Now, Felix, should we be worried? Are our podcasting jobs safe? Well, Emily Bot and Elizabeth Bot, as convincing as this AI tech might get, it still can't quite match our sparkling chemistry, nuanced sarcasm, and... Over-caffeinated British charm. Precisely. So at least for now, human podcast hosts seem safe from complete replacement. But let's not get complacent.

46:24Felix Salmon: On that slightly ominous note, maybe it's time to unplug our digital selves and hand things back to our real-world counterparts. Excellent idea! From all of us AI bots here at Slate Money, stay vigilant listeners and always check if your host is suspiciously glitchy. Thanks for listening to Slate Money. Joy. In the words of the list of bots, joy. Joy. I'm not quite sure how I managed to develop such a strong, intermittent American accent. Yeah, it goes really back and forth. You sound super American at points.

46:58Elizabeth Spiers: It went from game show hosts to, you know, dark British comedy in two seconds.

47:04Felix Salmon: But it really captured the Elizabeth dark, the darkness, right? The dark sarcasm. The heart of darkness that carries around with her at all times.

47:18Elizabeth Spiers: My body's spicy. She's really good. i i was listening to this with my wife and she's like that sounds like radio lab like there was something like the the sort of editing of it the way it sped up and we talked over each other and it was very forward momentum like it has clearly been trained on a bunch of produced podcasts we you know which have produced much more than this one anyway yeah we talked much faster in that

47:49Felix Salmon: sped up version like i hope no one expects that i will talk so much faster because i don't think i can yeah if you if you were listening if you were listening to if you normally listen to this on 2x speed then i fear for you listening to that segment yes um i think our jobs are for sure safe ha ha ha famous last words would it be bad if they weren't like on on a sort of dollars per hour basis. We would get paid so much more if we could just have AIs do this, right? But why would we get paid? We would have to negotiate some kind of terms and contracts. That's what's happening in Hollywood right now, right?

48:29Felix Salmon: It's like they spent months negotiating the latest union contract because it's like, fine, you can use the AI audio, but you have to get the permission and you have to pay X amount. That's the key.

48:41Elizabeth Spiers: There's a company that's paying Orson Welles estate to use his voice, and they are presumably paying for it. So I guess theoretically somebody would have to pay us for the rights to use our voice and AI. Yeah, but I feel like we're not going to be able to negotiate quite as much money as the estate of Orson Welles or James Earl Jones.

49:00Felix Salmon: Yeah, yeah. I don't think we have most podcasters, writers. No one has the negotiating leverage to really...

49:09Elizabeth Spiers: I don't know. I don't think you guys know how much I get paid to do slate money. I feel like the bar is very low for me. That's true.

49:17Felix Salmon: Wherever the bar is, employers, they're good at lowering it more when it comes to pay. Except, I guess, if you have a Netflix show. I mean, if we had a Netflix show, that could really highlight. I have to say that just like running this forward a bit, if it's more than just Mike in San Diego, if a big podcast company actually invests in this technology and trains an ai on not 12 seconds but you know many many you know thousands of hours of slate money or podcasts generally um and then creates like podcasts in individualized podcasts on the fly so i can be like here's a headline i don't really understand what's going on and i point my app at it and i'm like can you give me a podcast where you know and i just find like all the smart people i'm like can you get shira overday and matt levine to talk about this and then the ai will just give me a shira versus matt take on the on the headline of the day and it will it probably you know it could be awesome It could be interesting.

50:29I'm sure both of the AI bots will come up with takes that I wouldn't have come up with myself. It would be interesting for me.

50:36Felix Salmon: AI is just regurgitating or reformulating what's already known. But the delight of the podcast is like you never know what's going to happen or exactly what's going to be said or asked. We're just we're just AIs. We only regurgitate what's already known as well. It's just like. No, because the AI wouldn't have known that I like crypto now. Right. The AI would never have. had Emily Botts say something like, I think I like crypto now. Like, I don't see that actually.

51:04Elizabeth Spiers: If not, I've known I used to be a cheerleader. That's just impossible. Are you sure?

51:09Felix Salmon: Running to the internet now. The serendipity of the chat show podcast is impossible to replicate. And that's what keeps us safe. Yeah, that's what makes podcasts fun to listen to. It's sort of like the ad hoc off the cuffness. I guess a lot of them are very produced now. You know, without getting too meta about this, the thing you will never have in an AI podcast is now I start to say I realize I'm completely wrong I was about to say you're never going to have a parasocial relationship with the hosts but we have all read all of these articles about people developing extremely strong parasocial relationships with AIs so yeah maybe you can

51:54i think we should just quickly segue to a numbers round before this spirals into elizabeth's heart of darkness um elizabeth you have a number i do it's uh 300 000 and that's

52:07Elizabeth Spiers: about how many likes a tiktoker named rachel reno got after she called a diet coke a fridge cigarette in her TikTok. And this is partly reflective of Gen Z consumption habits where they're all just way healthier than, you know, Gen X. So now they sort of view sodas as being similar to cigarettes. And she did a follow-up TikTok where she said, to further expand on this idea, a Diet Coke is like a Parliament cigarette, and then a regular Coke is more like a Marlboro Red. And if you see anyone with a Coke in a bottle, well, that's just a cigar.

52:47Felix Salmon: I mean, cigarettes are way less. I mean, there's no comparison. That is, that's not true.

52:52Elizabeth Spiers: It would make me feel much cooler, though, to pull a Diet Coke out of my fridge and be like, here's my fridge cigarette. I like it. No, fridge cigarettes. I'm totally adopting that. Emily.

53:04Felix Salmon: 275. That is the number of times a desk worker or a knowledge worker is interrupted by various beeps and boops over an eight-hour workday, like a Teams ping or an email or a chat ping or a calendar invite or whatever. 275 times a day, which works out to about 1.75, every 1.75 minutes. This is data from Microsoft. They looked at anonymized data for all the people who use Office 365 or Microsoft 365. So that's like Outlook, Teams, etc. And they found that we are all being besieged all the time, constantly interrupted. And the side effect is that no one works for eight hours anymore. They work all the time.

53:52Felix Salmon: Microsoft coined it the infinite workday because as soon as people wake up, they're on their phones looking at their work email or whatever. And into the night, meetings are up 15 % or something. in the nighttime post 8 p.m. I wrote about this this week and people seem to really like to read about this because they are on the internet all the time looking at stuff.

54:13Elizabeth Spiers: This is what makes me want an AI version of myself so that I can reduce the number of time that I, like my workday just expanding constantly. Do it, Elizabeth. You can do that now.

54:26Felix Salmon: You can send like your AI to the meeting and it matters. Well, I've been in meetings where people send their Otter bot to the meeting. But you still have to look at what happened in the meeting. But you just look at the Otter transcript, which takes much less time than attending the meeting. Yeah, but is anything more boring than reading a transcript of a meeting? I don't think so. It's faster, though. You read the summary of the meeting. Anyway, my number is zero. and this is especially going out to the impecunious New Yorkers among the Slate Money listenership, but all of you, it's kind of interesting.

55:07Zero is the amount of money that you need to pay in order to buy really good art at the Zero Art Fair, which is coming back for the second year in early July at the Flag Art Foundation in Chelsea in New York. and the idea is that there's a bunch of genuine respectable artists who have shown at galleries who have way more art than they know what to do with and they can't afford to store it and they want their art to be lived with by people who appreciate it um and so the zero art fair was born by a couple of friends of mine bill paheida and jen dalton and the idea is that artists basically donate art to the zero art fair um you sign a contract when you acquire the art you pay zero but if you ever resell it then you have to if you resell it within a certain number of years you have to pay 50 of the proceeds to the artist all of this art was shown at galleries at some point um and a lot of it got snapped up by sort of relatively sophisticated collectors the first time around.

56:21So this time around, what they're asking is for people who really do want to start building an art collection, but who really don't have the money to do so or the means to do so, to register at zeroartfair.com. And if you register, then you basically get to self-identify as either I need help to live with art, or I can sometimes afford to buy art for myself, or I can afford to help others live with art. And depending on how you answer that and various other bits and pieces perhaps you get to go along on july 11 or july 12 and pick out a piece of art for yourself

56:57Felix Salmon: for free you should put a link on the show page or something yes zeroartfair.com on which note i think we yeah i just need to thank ben frisch who has stepped in to produce this week along with the regular team of jessamine molly and shana roth thanks all of you for signing up at ZeroArtFair.com, for sending us emails, for sending us computer generated MP3s of our bots mispronouncing our own names. It's kind of amazing this wonderful world that we live in. We have a Slate Plus segment coming up on Emily's. If you want to find out what Emily's are, listen to that. Thanks for listening to Slate Money and we'll be back next week with more of this human-generated show.

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