Hello, welcome to the burning platform episode of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week.

I'm Felix Salmon of Axios here with my

colleague Emily Peck. Hello, hello. And Elizabeth Spires. Hello. And we are going to talk about

Southwest Airlines booking platform and how it blew up over the holidays. We are going to talk about non-competes and whether the entire

country can or should move to become basically California, where non-competes have been outlawed

for as long as I can remember. We have a slate plus about e-bikes. And of course, because this is slate money and we can't

go three weeks without talking about crypto, we're going to talk about Silvergate, which was a

big bank, which suffered a bank run and it's crypto related. And we're going to talk about regulation

of crypto and finance more generally and where it's working and how it should work.

It's all coming up on Slate Money.

Emily, this is a big day for workers.

You called it in Axios.

What was it like the biggest thing that the Biden administration has ever done for workers?

Yes.

What is it?

So earlier this week on Thursday, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a rule that would ban

employers from requiring their workers to sign non-compete agreements.

These are contracts where you say, after I leave this company, I won't work for a

competitor for one, two, three years. And non-competees used to be a thing that like executives

had to sign because, you know, they didn't want to run off with the secrets of the company

and take them to a competitor. But in more recent years,

everyone has been made to sign these things. Sandwich makers, famously Jimmy John, sandwich makers,

...