Slate Money - Digital Cash. IRL Wrenches.
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 16 August 2025
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week: Trump continues to involve himself in the operations of large US companies. Felix Salmon, Elizabeth Spiers, and Emily Peck discuss this slide toward state capitalism, which seemingly goes against the GOP’s usual stance on government involvement in business. Then, so called “wrench attacks" are on the rise wherein wealthy crypto holders are being targeted with real life violence for their digital wallets. The hosts discuss NYMag’s cover story about a particularly wild crypto kidnapping and examine whether this type of wealth makes you more vulnerable. And finally, AI startup Perplexity has made a cheeky bid for Google's beloved Chrome browser. The hosts talk about what makes the free platform so valuable and whether Biden era anti-trust laws will force it to spin off from Google.
Emily’s Bat Story the Numbers Round: A Tourist Ended Up With a Wild Bat in Her Mouth — And Nearly $21,000 in Medical Bills
In the Slate Plus episode: Shamans at the Wedding? In This Economy?
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Podcast production by Jessamine Molli and Cheyna Roth.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. |
| 0:18.8 | I'm Felix Salmon. I am here with Emily Peck about here. |
| 0:23.2 | Hello, hello. |
| 0:24.1 | I'm here with Elizabeth Spires of the New York Times. |
| 0:26.5 | Hello. |
| 0:27.2 | We are going to talk about state capitalism, the country getting involved in private |
| 0:33.9 | businesses and telling them what to do and extracting money from it. |
| 0:38.3 | And guess who the great avatar of this is, what you've already guessed. |
| 0:41.6 | We're going to talk about that. |
| 0:42.9 | We are going to talk about wrench attacks and how to stop yourself from getting kidnapped and losing a finger if you're a crypto gazillionaire. |
| 0:52.3 | We are going to talk about Chrome and how central |
| 0:56.7 | it is, the piece of software that is, not the metal, to the entire world and especially to |
| 1:02.3 | Emily's life and how much money it might be worth in the world of AI. We have a slate-plus segment |
| 1:08.9 | on rain stoppers and whether there's any correlation between |
| 1:13.4 | price and quality if you're paying someone to make sure there's no rain on your wedding |
| 1:16.8 | day. |
| 1:17.8 | It's a fun one this week. |
| 1:18.8 | So it's all coming up on Slate Money. |
| 1:26.1 | Here's the truth about AI. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into. Service Now puts AI to work for people across your business, removing friction and frustration for your employees, supercharging productivity for your developers, providing intelligent tools for your service agents to make customers happier. |
| 1:45.5 | All built into a single platform you can use right now. |
| 1:49.1 | That's why the world works with ServiceNow. |
| 1:52.3 | Visit ServiceNow.com slash UK slash AI for people. |
... |
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