Hello, welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week.

I'm Felix Hammond of Axios. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios.

Hello, hello. Elizabeth Spires of Slate and the New York Times and places like that.

Hello.

And we have hand-rolled a very less than optimal episode of Slate Money this week. And don't take that

the bad way. Take that the good way.

We have a special guest this week. Coco crummy, Coco, welcome.

Thank you. Glad to be here. Introduce yourself. Who are you? And what book are you plugging?

Well, I happen to be plugging my own book this week. It's called Optimal Illusions. It's out on Tuesday, September 12th. And it's about how optimization became our modern gospel and the ways in which it's failed us.

So this is a wonderfully sort of meta episode of Slate Money because one of the things we do on Slate Money

is we use all manner of efficient modern technology to put this show together in a way that

people can be all over the planet and record it. And you, Coco, are on an island in the Pacific Northwest with a bunch of less than optimized computer hardware, which we had to get working.

And it took a minute.

So apologies if there's slightly weird audio, but it's partly because of suboptimal recording devices.

We're going to have Coco talking about her book and about

artificial intelligence. We're going to have a conversation about China. Without Coco, we're

going to talk in Slate Plus about the city of Birmingham in the UK and basically the whole

question of whether and how women will ever be able to get recompense for decades of being paid less than men.

Coming up on Slate Money, all about de-optimization.

So, Coco, you have written what I thought was going to be a sort of hard-charging manifesto against optimization. I'm like, I hate optimization.

This is what I want to read. Turns out to be a bit more sort of elusive and literary and

discursive. But maybe that's just right. Maybe like the whole point about being against optimization is that we don't just get, you know, create these beautifully linear arguments that come, that land perfectly at a certain point. But in fact, what we just need to do is get in our cars and drive around the country and wind up on our

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