Hello and welcome to the Meta Points edition of Slate Money Travel.

This is the one I've been really looking forward to.

I have been searching high and low

for an unconflicted person. And I found someone who is almost kind of sort of perhaps,

if you squint unconflicted, who can talk to us about points. We've had one episode about

points from like the airline's point of view and from the credit card company's point of view and how they make money from that. And that was super interesting and I learned a lot. But then I got a bunch of requests and it was basically, well, talk to me about, give me some like news I can use here. Is it actually worth getting involved

in this whole points economy? And I, and it's very hard to find an expert on this because there's

a lot of people who make a lot of money by selling you cards, which are, you know, part of the points economy. And by talking about how

wonderful these schemes are, and they're obviously conflicted by this. And so I have found Mr. Ron Lieber.

Hello. Hello. Ron, you are connected in various ways to the New York Times and its subsidiaries.

So we are going to talk to you. Ron is the personal finance columnist at the New York Times and its subsidiaries. So we are going to talk to you. Ron is the

personal finance columnist of the New York Times and has been for how long? 11 years or so now.

A long time. And so he's been writing about this kind of stuff for a long time. And then now

he's also joined the advisory board of wirecutter. Of the wirecutter money site.

The wire cutter money site, which is going to be entering this world, which is why he's

maybe a little bit less unconflicted than you might ideally hope, but that has not

changed his opinion on any of these things.

So, Ron, we're going to talk to you all about basically whether it's worth people's time and money to

start paying annual fees or cards and care about this thing because it's a large cognitive load,

which I'm sure that most of us really don't need in our lives. All of that is coming up on slate money

travel. Okay, Ron, you are about to do what with wire cutter money?

So in addition to my duties, as the personal finance columnist, the Your Money columnist

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