The Burger CEOs Are Beefing
Slate Money
Slate Podcasts
4.1 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 7 March 2026
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week: The U.S. started a war in Iran. Felix Salmon, Elizabeth Spiers, and Emily Peck break down why the war is bumping the US dollar and threatening the UAE’s image as a safe haven, with a notable lack of “oil-shock.” Then, the hosts get into why Pete Hegseth’s Department of War is clashing with Anthropic, as modern warfare becomes increasingly reliant on AI. And finally, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski went viral for taking a very small bite of a very big burger. So, Emily dares to eat a Big Arch—the whole thing—and the hosts talk about how this kind of PR cannot be bought.
In the Slate Plus episode: Daylight Saving Forever.
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Podcast production by Jessamine Molli and Justin Wright.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to sleep money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. |
| 0:17.2 | I'm Felix Salmon of Bloomberg. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios. |
| 0:21.2 | Hello, hello. I'm here with Elizabeth Spires of the New York Times. |
| 0:25.0 | Hello. |
| 0:25.6 | And we have a busy news week this week. There is a war going on, and we are going to talk about it. |
| 0:32.5 | We're going to talk about the effect on the oil markets, on the dollar, on the status of Dubai as a financial center. |
| 0:39.7 | We are going to talk about the way that all war is AI now and there's a big fight going on, |
| 0:45.4 | not a war, but a fight going on between the Department of War and Anthropic, the main provider |
| 0:51.2 | of its AI systems. |
| 0:52.8 | We are going to mostly, however, talk about the really important use of the week that involves 1,750 grams of sodium. |
| 1:00.9 | It is terrifying, but it's also fun, so stay tuned. |
| 1:03.5 | It's all coming up on sleep money. I feel like this is the week, if there's ever a week when we need to talk about the |
| 1:23.0 | straight-of-hore moves and it's important to global oil markets, which is a conversation we could have |
| 1:28.5 | had at literally any point in my career or even like my parents' careers. This has been a known |
| 1:34.9 | issue in global oil markets for what, 75 years, something like that. The straight of Hormuz, |
| 1:41.8 | if you look at not just oil, but now LNG, gas as well from Qatar, |
| 1:46.3 | all of this shit comes through this tiny little gap connecting the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world. |
| 1:51.7 | And if the oil can't get through that tiny little gap, then, well, Emily, what happens? |
| 1:57.3 | The price of oil goes up, up, up, up, up, which has been happening since Trump started this war. Just a week ago, the price of oil has spiked. And is that just purely a sort of supply and demand thing that the demand for oil is more or less unchanged, but the supply has gone down because there isn't oil coming through the straight to four moves? And one of the reasons I should say why it's not coming through the straight to four moves. It's not just the oil tankers are too scared to do it because they'll |
| 2:22.2 | get blown up by Iranian missiles. It's also that Saudi Arabia has closed its two big pipelines, |
| 2:29.8 | which refill those oil tankers. So there's no point in even going into the Gulf because if you do, |
| 2:35.6 | there's no oil there right now to be refilled. Yeah, I think that's a really good question. And I think |
... |
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