Slate Money | Everyone Cares About Power Grids This Week

Slate News

Slate Podcasts

News, News Commentary, Politics

4.6 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week: The entire Iberian peninsula lost power for 18 hours. Felix Salmon, Emily Peck, and Elizabeth Spiers are joined by energy expert John Kemp to talk about why that might have happened and nerd out on power grids. Then, the GDP is down by 0.3%. But is that really the right metric to care about? Finally, the tech world is bringing back the brutal system of stack ranking management. The hosts discuss why this might be ill advised. In the Slate Plus episode: Are Toy Tariffs…Good? Want to hear that discussion and hear more Slate Money? Join Slate Plus to unlock weekly bonus episodes. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Slate Money show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/moneyplus to get access wherever you listen. Podcast production by Jessamine Molli and Cheyna Roth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. I'm Felix Simon of Axios with Emily Peck of Axios.
0:20.0	Hello, hello. With Elizabeth Spires,
0:22.2	from New York Times. We are going to talk about energy this week. We are going to talk about
0:27.8	the electrical grid in Iberia, in Spain and Portugal, which crapped out spectacularly. Hospital
0:35.0	operating theaters suddenly lost electricity, elevators lost electricity. It was bad.
0:40.8	And we're going to try and work out what happened and whether it was the fault of too much solar power.
0:45.8	We have a great guest, John Kemp, who can help walk us through that.
0:49.8	We are going to talk about GDP. The first quarter GDP figure came in negative, and we're going to talk about whether that is a bad thing. We are going to talk about GDP. The first quarter GDP figure came in negative, and we're going to talk about whether that is a bad thing.
0:57.1	We are going to talk about stack ranking and whether firing people for being lower performers is a good idea.
1:04.9	We have a Slate Plus segment on toys and whether they're too cheap.
1:10.4	It's all coming up on Slate Money.
1:18.7	The Autopilot Order. Now, informal. The strong urge felt at the ordering kiosk or drive-thru
1:24.6	that takes over the entire body and mind and results in a person ordering a
1:28.4	Big Mac without even having to think. Related phrases. Looks like I've ordered a Big Mac again.
1:33.6	The autopilot order at McDonald's.
1:36.7	Serves from 11am, subject to availability.
1:39.3	Okay, so I think I would like to start this week with the biggest news of the week if you are a citizen of the world, which I think a lot of Americans kind of ignore the rest of the world.
1:49.6	But the entire Iberian Peninsula basically had a blackout this week.
1:54.5	That's a lot of people.
1:56.4	And not a lot of people really understand what happened.
1:59.6	But the one person I felt who might be able to explain this better than anyone else is my old Reuters mucker.
2:06.9	John Kemp. Hi, John. Hi, Felix. Nice to see you again. You are no longer at Reuters. You now have your own shop called Base Research. That's right. I left Reuters at the end of August last year to set out
	...

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