Hello and welcome to the Lambos or food stamps episode of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week.

Emily Peck of Axios is here. She hates this so much.

I protest. I formally protest the title of this podcast. It's offensive. It is offensive.

We're going to go dark in this show. I am Felix Salmon of Axios, and we Genex

axions are being joined this week by Genevra Davis. Geneva, welcome. Thank you so much for having me.

Introduce yourself, Geneva. What brings you to this show? I am a senior at Stanford studying symbolic systems, which is basically

computer science, philosophy, linguistics. We're major Stanford invented. And I write for Palladium

magazine about crypto and culture. And I recently published an article called When the Stagnation Goes Virtual

about decadence in

NFT culture. So we are going to talk to you about that. We are going to talk to you about

the darkness at the heart of Gen Z and how terrifyingly nihilistic the vision is these days. And it's an amazing conversation, which we're

going to actually continue in the Slate Plus, because there's so much of it and it's so rich.

We are also, however, going to talk about the news. We are going to talk about the sanctions

that companies are imposing on Russia and why they're doing that and what they hope to achieve

by it. And I am going to have a little rant as well about the London Metals Exchange and

the nickel market and whether the LME should have suspended trading in nickel. It is a

packed show and it's all coming up on Slate Money.

Okay, Emily, let's start with sanctions.

We haven't really gone into a lot of detail on the astonishing degree of especially corporate sanctions

that are being imposed on Russia right now. We've had a whole

bunch of household brands, Starbucks, McDonald's, Nike, H&M, those kind of people pulling out

of Russia and saying they're not going to do business anymore. This isn't because they have to,

...