The following podcast contains explicit language.

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

I'm Felix Salmon of Fusion. I am joined as ever by

Kathy O'Neill, the data scientist and author of Weapons of Math Destruction. Hello, Felix.

And calling in from the distant plime of Austin, Texas Texas is Jordan Weissman.

Thankfully, we do have the technology for me to connect and share this wonderful morning

with you guys.

So we are going to be devoting this entire episode to, well, living forever.

You know that thing that vampires do?

I need to tell the story because on Thursday night last week, I went to the opera,

because I'm a sophisticated kind of gentleman.

I went to see Yenufa at the Met, which is one of Yannichick's greatest operas.

And the Kostelnika character, the sort of tragic evil stepmother character,

at the beginning of Act 3 has this whole speech about how, because she's so tragic, she can't

wait to die basically, and that living forever is a really horrible thing, which is a bit of a

theme in Yanashik operas

because, as Kathy will remember, in the Macropolis case, you know, Amelia Macropolis is like

330 years old, and the whole opera is all about how she realizes that, because she took a magic

potion, and, you know, it's the opera. And then at the end, she rapidly ages and dies and welcomes death rather than trying to live for another 338 years.

And it's all about this idea.

And there's this theme running through Yanichick, which is basically the immortality is much worse than it's cracked out to be, which is also a theme running through most vampire novels, I think.

Yeah. And I would also jump in and say the fact that it was a woman who said,

...