Hello.

Welcome to the naked swimmer's edition of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week.

I'm Felix Simon of Axios. Here as well is

Anna Shamansky. Hello. And in the seat normally filled by Emily Peck, we have the one and

only Charles Duhigg. I'm a pale comparison to Emily. You are a bit paler than. It's true.

But I'll try. I'll try my best. So Charles, last time you were on this

show, you had written an amazing thing about Elon Musk. Yeah. And you were just recording

something mysterious in the studio next door. And we were talking about Elon Musk. And we were like,

Charles Duhigg is literally in the studio next door. We need to drag him in there to talk in here to

talk about Elon Musk. And the one thing that we didn't know is what the hell were you doing in the studio next door? And now it's come out. Now the show is in the world. Now you know. And now we know that Charles Duhigg is now a slate podcaster. I'm a slate podcaster. So we're making a show called How To. And the idea behind it is the tagline is, what if Dear Abby was an investigative journalist? So every week, someone calls up with a problem. They want to learn how to, they want to learn how to be funnier. A pastor called us and says, I want to be funnier from the pulpit. And so we find an expert, this guy, Gary Goldman, who's a comedian, to give him advice.

Or someone wants to learn how to rob a bank. That was actually me. I want to learn how to rob a bank. So I went and I hung out with a bank robber all day. And then I robbed a bank. You robbed a bank? Well, I kind of tried. my my my um my um my feeling about robbing banks is that it's incredibly easy to rob a bank.

The difficult thing is not getting caught.

That's exactly right.

You hit the nail on the head.

And it turns out that I'm robbing a bank.

It's less sexy than I thought it was.

And like the amounts that people steal when they rob banks, I've seen the stats on this.

Like you walk in, you're like, give me all your money, you panned them note over. And they're like, sure, here's my money. And you get like, what, $3 or $400 and you walk out. And it's just like, and then you're like, wow, I got $3,400. dollars that was two minutes work.

Yeah. And then you go to jail.

Exactly. For seven years.

It's not the best long-term investment strategy, but on the other hand, it's kind of cool to learn how to do it. So, okay. I'm totally going to learn how to rob a bank. So can I call into how to and say, like, once I've robbed a bank, how do I not get caught? You could try. I'm not sure. Actually, that's a good point. Is that if anyone actually listening has a problem, if they send us their problem at how to at slate.com, we will read it. And hopefully have you on the show because we want people to send us what the things that they want to learn how to do. But if I come on the show, will you describe, disguise my voice? Absolutely. It's not obvious that I just robbed a bank because like that could, that could be problematic right there. Anyway, we are not going to talk about robbing banks in this show. We are going to talk about banks in other contexts because we're going to talk about how they, the big banks in America spend, I think, a billion dollars putting together this thing called

RTP, which you haven't heard of and which has basically gone nowhere. And we're going to talk

...