Slate Money Submits To The AI Overlords
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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. 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 us all, I mean podcast hosts. We have a Slate Plus segment on EMILYs, 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 Bott, Emily Bott and Elizabeth Bott somehow managed to talk to each other. 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?

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So 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.

I don't know who's responsible for this, but I just love it so much. 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. Gotcha.

So genius stands for guiding and establishing national innovation for U.S. stable coins. 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 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 based in the United States would fall into that camp. That's probably true. Yeah.

But yeah, it basically offers some protection for consumers by basically subjecting these companies that are producing stablecoins to more transparency requirements, more actual reserve requirements, 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 real point of all of this, is that stablecoins...

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 $7.57. Yeah.

And you can transfer money to people. You can transfer money to businesses to pay for things. And the way you get stablecoins 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. And 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 $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. I think you're right. Obviously, some regulations on stablecoins, which behave a lot like

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 stable coin issuers. It's very, it's kind of like all over the map. Like if you have, if you make a stable coin 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 OC, the office of

control of the currency regulates you. So that seems kind of weird, but I thought it was sort of interesting. Tell us Demos. 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, um,

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. Banks can turn around and lend it to 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 regulation.

government guarantees. 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 a 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 $100 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. And accounts that aren't FDIC regulated, they're putting them in even bigger accounts that exceed the FDIC limits. So and we saw this was a problem briefly in the SVB, the Silicon Valley Bank implosion a few years ago, where big company, 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, you know, it's going to be fine. Everything's always fine in finance, as we know. 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 in.

into the banks. And I guess they're making an effort to deposit that cash into the systemically important 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 stable coin 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. And some of those pools are going to be in large bank accounts that are not FDIC-insured.

This doesn't really worry me because like for one thing, those big pools of cash are not very, 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 stable coin, um,

Probably 99 cents of that dollar goes just into treasury bonds, you know, and they need a certain amount of liquidity because people are constantly buying and selling these stable coins. 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. It's going to be like billions of dollars, but it's not going to be...

A significantly large percentage of the total stablecoins outstanding. 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, 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 money.

crypto price fluctuations in dollars. And so then that's where Tether came in. Tether was the first one and everyone else has kind of copied that. So the first thing is it's for crypto traders. The first biggest existing use case is it's for crypto traders. 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. 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 stablecoin. And it's a nice profit center for Starbucks. This is like the Starbucks card of Walmart, basically. It has its own stablecoin, 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, 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. And then all of that money that is currently paying for those people, it wouldn't need to pay if its customers were paying with a Walmart stablecoin.

Yes, I'm extremely excited about this because it came up at a meeting a few weeks ago. Someone said, Walmart's looking at stable coins. And I was like, why? And then everyone at the meeting was like, oh, this is totally expected. Everyone knew this was going to happen. And I'm like, but why do they want to have a stable coin? I don't understand. And then in prepping for this segment, it hit me like this is crazy.

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. 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

companies in the world would use and it would totally change the game and it would be so far off from what 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. That's like really interesting. And I want to just make this very clear. Basically, payments at that point stops being a cost center for Walmart. It starts 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. But there has been a bunch of legislation. 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 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,

Walmart, 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? They need to do something. It's beyond the 1% discount because if you think to like 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. Like, I really don't think if you looked at the data, you would see a huge difference there. I think Walmart or whoever...

starts doing a stable coin needs to Starbucks it. The Starbucks app is so addictive and easy to use that most people just use it to shop at Starbucks. So Walmart needs to figure out how to compete on that. I mean, it's already done a lot in the digital side of its business. So I feel like it does have a shot of doing something there. I think also rewards programs like that work better than people think they do, in part just because they come

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 that

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, you know, 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. And when you think about the implications for companies that are not, you know, behemoths like Walmart...

You know, 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, there are some implications too here in terms of how stablecoins are going to compete with MasterCard and Visa and traditional payment forms. So yeah, I'm not convinced that we're going to be seeing...

bunch of all cash businesses in Brooklyn start suddenly starting to accept stable coins if they don't accept credit card What would what would prevent Walmart from white labeling a stable coin? Well, no, I mean all stable coins are fungible right? They're all worth $1 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 and

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 money,

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 ass. So I'm not sure this is going to become sort of a quasi-cash that a bunch of people use, but we will see. Maybe it will. It's really cool. I'm now a crypto believer. I don't know what's happening to me, you guys. Yeah.

I was just learning so much about it. And I thought, oh, my God, because so often technologies start out and they're

like they want to be used for one thing or that's how they're sold. Like 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 very exciting. 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. Only America doesn't have this, right? If you are in the UK or in Sweden or in India or in Brazil, all of this happens already and all of these payments happen.

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. I was going to ask about that. Isn't this a huge miss and whiff by the federal government? They make the dollar. Shouldn't they have made a good digital dollar that we could have all used? It doesn't even need to be a digital dollar. Or conversely, you can say 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.

We 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. The only way it happens is because you get enough money into these crypto companies and then they become massive importers.

influential lobbyists and that moves then 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 you know 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. So like, yes, don't make them efficient and cheap. So, but we should also just talk like 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, um,

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 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. 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 the IPO, right? And it could have raised five times more cash with the same by selling the same number of shares. But like now they'll be fine because now the price, the stock price is up so much. I'm sure they'll figure it out, right? It's fine. Yeah.

Or does it look bad for whoever ran the IPO? It definitely looks bad. It looks bad for whoever ran the IPO. It was J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs. It's just little companies, little banks, little startups. Slate Money is sponsored this week by 1Password.

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Okay, so let's move on from crypto cheerleading. We have now all become crypto fans who are at Slate 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.

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, 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 a

not paid almost anything. The last we heard from the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders before this recent news, 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 raise 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 a 400 percent pay increase, which I think is just like really good news. 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.

Um, if you see Charlotte, 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, you know? And that's an argument you often hear about women in certain roles, like teachers, nurses, they do this out of love. They're not doing this for the money, which is like.

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

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. So I think, I think there are two important things you said there. One is that like they could fill all of these roles with extremely enthusiastic and talented people.

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 um 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. And I think it's impossible to tell the story without talking about like the sort of the, the way in which the Netflix documentary itself caused the change. I think that, you know, it's, it's presented as being a sort of,

separate, you know, observing thing. But like that documentary itself, I think without that, we wouldn't have seen this. Well, another thing is just that people don't, you know, absent things like the documentary, they don't think of cheerleading as really an athletic sport, which it is, you know, it's, it's for high school sports. It's, it's, um, in the top three of sports, they cause the most serious injuries, um,

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 acrobatic stuff they do and gymnastics and things like that.

And it does require a lot of skill. But 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, or whether it requires a lot of skill, because it's about sort of how society values work.

values it as a sport, as well as how, you know, the teams in particular think it adds value to their franchises. Right. And for the Cowboys, it really, I mean, I think what Felix is saying, what you're both saying is correct. 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. And like,

There's a lot of scenes of cheerleaders with big leg braces on their legs and stuff. It really messes you up. 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, and the show also showed that there's like a demand for content. 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 pay, we'll get paid more.

more than the amount we're paying the cheerleaders just in renewal fees of Netflix show 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. 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 athletes, it's still not that high.

I mean, if you look at women across sports, NBA players are underpaid, women's soccer players are underpaid. Even though I think for women's soccer, they're more of a draw than the men's team. That's been true. And the same in tennis as well. Women have been historically paid less than men, even though there is just as big a draw. 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 competitive well there there is there's a whole infrastructure around that i did that in high school

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, yeah. I realized there were professional coaches. I just didn't realize there were professional athletes who got paid professionally.

Who pays them? Well, in the NCAA system, it's like the school athletic system. You know, they get sponsorships. There are things like that. They're paid the same way that, you know, 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 diversity system, are there professional cheer teams who compete professionally and get paid? There are now like 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 will go and they'll they'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. You know, 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 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. There's an age limit on it. 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 it pays off.

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 it's 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 Cowboys Stadium. What? Yeah. And I went down there and I saw a football match. And I was in the owner's box. 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 then when I came back to the box, they were like, oh, you just missed Beyonce. Oh. What? What?

Okay, great. That's asked and answered. Now, Elizabeth, you were a cheerleader in high school or college? I know. Not on brand for me either in high school. That is not on brand either in high school. Okay. I liked dancing and I liked dancing.

you know, doing the stunny 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. Wow, that's intense. And you didn't get injured? Well, I got minor injuries, but I didn't, I could have easily broken my neck, I realize in retrospect. So...

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Let's move on to the best part of the show, which is where we get to sit back and automate this shit. Like I have this dream that we can just, we don't even need to phone in slate money. What we need to do is press a button and

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 we'll impersonate all three of us and we'll discuss the news. And all we need to do is cash our checks for our like, you know,

voice likenesses. 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 Tedasco, 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... I'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 Bott, 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.

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. 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. Which

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 FTTTTS. 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. It's pretty good, but clearly not perfect. If you listen closely, you'll hear little glitches and slight robotic inflections like Zezist were.

Which, frankly, is perfect if you're aiming for a Felix on too much espresso vibe. But for authentic emotional depth, 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 in communication? It gets really tricky. Imagine your voice used without your consent to something totally outrageous. How?

How would you prove it wasn't actually you? 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? Yet here we are gleefully participating in our own digital impersonation. Ironic. I'm starting to wonder, are we training our replacements right 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. 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! I

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 a little bot, 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. It went from game show host to, you know, dark British comedy in two seconds. But it really captured the Elizabeth dark background.

The darkness, right? The dark sarcasm. The heart of darkness that carries around her with her at all times. My body's spicy. She's really good. I was listening to this with my wife and she's like, that sounds like Radiolab. Like there was something like the sort of editing of it, the way it sounds.

sped up and we talked over each other and there was very forward momentum. Like it has clearly been trained on a bunch of produced podcasts. We, you know, which are produced much more than this one anyway. Yeah. We talked much faster in that sped up version. Like I hope no one expects that I,

We'll talk so much faster because I don't think I can. Yeah, if you were listening to this on 2x speed, then I fear for you listening to that segment. Yes. I think our jobs are for sure safe. Ha ha ha. Famous last words. Would it be bad if they weren't? Like on a sort of dollars per hour basis, we would get paid so much more if we could just have AIs do this, right? Yeah.

But then at some, but why would we get paid? Like we would have to negotiate some kind of terms and contracts. That's what's happening in Hollywood right now, right? 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. 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 in 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 L. Jones. Yeah, yeah. I don't think we have most podcasters, writers. No one has the negotiating power.

Leverage. Leverage. To really. 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. Yeah.

Whatever 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 technology,

Not 12 seconds, but you know, many, many, you know, thousands of hours of slate money or podcasts generally. 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 I

And then I just find 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 headline of the day. And it probably, you know, it could be awesome. It could be interesting. I'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. 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 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 Bot say something like, I think I like crypto now. Like, I don't see that actually happening. It would not have known I used to be a cheerleader. That's just impossible. Are you sure? 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 it also, 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.

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I think we should just quickly segue to a numbers round before this spirals into Elizabeth's heart of darkness. Elizabeth, do you have a number? I do. It's 300,000. And that's about how many likes a TikToker named Rachel Reno got after she called a Diet Coke a fridge cigarette in her TikTok account.

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 use 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. So...

I mean, cigarettes are way less. I mean, there's no comparison. That is that's not true. 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, no. Fridge cigarettes. I'm totally adopting that. Emily? 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, et cetera. 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. 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. 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. You can send like your AI,

to the meeting and at others. - 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 and like digest it. - But you just look at the Otter transcript, which takes much less time than attending the meeting. - Yeah, but like is anything more boring than like 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. Zero is the amount of money that you need to pay in order to buy something.

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.

And so the Zero Art Fair was born by a couple of friends of mine, Bill Pahida and Jen Dalton. And the idea is that artists basically donate art to the Zero Art Fair. You sign a contract when you acquire the art. You pay zero. But if you ever resell it, then you have to. Or 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.

And a lot of it got snapped up by sort of relatively sophisticated collectors the first time around. So 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 for free. You should put a link on the show page or something. Yes, zeroartfare.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 Jessamyn Molly and Shana Roth. Thanks, all of you, for signing up at ZeroOutfare.com, for sending us emails, for sending us computer-generated MP3s of 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