Hello!

Welcome to the Free Brittany episode of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week.

There has been a bunch of news about conservatorship this week.

So I, Felix Herman of Axios, along with Emily Peck.

Hello.

And along with Stacey Marie Ishmael.

Hello.

Going to talk about conservatorship.

We're going to talk a little bit about the conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but honestly, you don't want to hear about that. You want to know about the conservatorship of Britney Spears. So we're going to talk about the conservatorship of Britney Spears. We're going to talk about Covacs, the noble attempt to vaccinate the world, which failed miserably. And we're going to talk a little bit about why it failed.

We're going to talk about Peter Thiel's Roth IRA, which is much bigger than anyone ever imagined.

It turns out that he's much richer than anyone really ever imagined.

And in Slate Plus, which you can subscribe to for just $1 if you want an introductory membership.

We will talk about small businesses because a lot of them have opened over the course of the pandemic,

much more than you might think.

So all of that is coming up on Slate Money.

So let's talk about Brittany, the one and only Britney Spears, whose pop music I love,

but who has been imprisoned in a conservatorship for the past 13 years. Stacey, what's up with that?

Well, why we know about exactly what she's been going through is there was a trial this week

in which she had an opportunity to speak directly to the judge and the court and the assembled media

about what she's been dealing with for the past 13 years.

And one of the, to me, more terrifying details that came out of that was her saying that she, in addition to not having

any control over the ability to decide, like, dance moves and in her choreography, she also

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