Hello and welcome to money talks from Slate Money. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios, and this is the show where we talk to super interesting people about super interesting things.

And one of the things that I have been thinking about and utterly failing to understand for many years now is this whole question of how America is asserting its power globally through methods other than, you know, invading people.

And this is kind of important right now in particular.

And I noticed that the lovely folks at Penguin Random House have no fewer than two books out at the same time on this.

So I thought I would invite both of the authors

on to try and explain what on earth is going on. So I am talking this week to Edward Fishman

and Saleha Mosin. It's all coming up on Money Talks from Slate. Money.

Eddie, who are you and what is your book?

Well, thank you, Felix.

It's great to be here today.

So my book is called Choke Points, American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare.

It came out on February 25th.

And the goal here is really to tell the story of the rise of what

I call the Age of Economic Warfare, in which sanctions, tariffs, and export controls

have become the primary way that great powers compete with one another. This is true, not

just of the United States, but also China, Russia, the EU, Japan. It's just the way that great power competition is playing out.

And so my goal was really to explain how this era came to be,

introduce people to the characters,

the folks who actually built this new age of economic warfare,

and to potentially look ahead into the future

and try to speculate on where things are headed in the coming years.

My crystal ball has never been Claudia, but Salaya, tell me, yeah, who are you and is your book

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