What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future - The A.I. Disruption Is Here
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2026
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tech companies proudly touting that the imminent artificial intelligence revolution are pushing the stock market to ever higher heights, even as workers wonder what their role will be in this brave new world. But outside of the big A.I. players, the rest of the market seems to be wondering the same thing.
Guest: Emily Peck, co-host of Slate Money and national correspondent at Axios.
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Podcast production by Evan Campbell, and Patrick Fort.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you've been watching the stock market the past couple of days, you may have seen a company called Algorithm holdings being talked about a lot. |
| 0:13.6 | I mean, no one had heard of this company before last week. |
| 0:18.7 | Emily Pack is a national correspondent at Axios and one of the hosts of the Slate Money podcast. |
| 0:36.0 | This is a former karaoke company with a stock market value of just $6 million. |
| 0:43.5 | And it decided karaoke wasn't working for the company. |
| 0:48.8 | So it changed and became a logistics firm. |
| 0:52.2 | And last week it fell victim to something called the AI scare trade. |
| 0:57.8 | Dut, duh, duh. |
| 0:59.9 | The AI scare trade is exactly what it sounds like. |
| 1:05.4 | Earlier this month, algorithm holdings told clients that with the help of AI, they were doing big business without |
| 1:12.9 | hiring additional workers. This one little announcement sent the trucking and logistics |
| 1:19.2 | industries into a tailspin because right now, the stock market is very hanky when it comes to |
| 1:26.7 | AI. This started a few weeks ago with software, legal software, where Anthropic and AI firm announced a new legal plugin. |
| 1:38.3 | And the stock market decided that meant all the legal software companies were in trouble on the edge of absolution, |
| 1:46.8 | and their stocks went down. |
| 1:48.5 | And then we saw this play out across other industries. |
| 1:52.5 | There was commercial real estate, other software firms. |
| 1:58.1 | Yeah, those are just some as the sort of like the trend sort of ripples through the markets. |
| 2:03.2 | I should say for the record, Shana, that the algorithms stock rose on the news. |
| 2:14.4 | Clearly, when it comes to moves by companies related to artificial intelligence, the markets |
| 2:20.3 | are having issues. |
| 2:22.3 | More than a trillion dollars wiped out from big tech market caps in just the last week, |
... |
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