Things Felix Salmon Has Said on Podcasts

“If there were price-insensitive home developers in the same way that there are price-insensitive data center developers, we would have homes everywhere.” — Felix Salmon, Slate Money

Emily Peck had just pointed out that data center construction is up sharply even though people protest the projects and try to pass laws against them, because so much money is chasing AI. Salmon turns that into a point about housing: what holds building back is the incentive to build, more than the rules.

Slate Money · 2026-10-03 Permalink → Listen →

Slate Money Around 30:15 into the episode

Felix Salmon

abundance. What you're saying. Okay.

Emily Peck

…as we've talked about on Slate Money. So guess what? People are building data centers. It's like problem solved. Doesn't matter what the regulations are. In fact, people hate these things. They are protesting them. They're trying to pass laws to stop it and they can't do it. The only difference. If

Felix Salmon

there were price-insensitive home developers in the same way that there are price-insensitive data center developers, we would have homes everywhere.

Emily Peck

So many homes. That's it. That's all you need. You don't need to like tinker at the margins. That's my hot take. I don't know. Well, people who want affordable housing don't have the giant lobby that real estate developers do. There's nobody on the side of people who need affordable housing really…

Felix Salmon

housing. No, the real estate developers have a decent amount of clout.

Emily Peck

Well, what I'm talking about, I'm talking about affordable housing, though, specifically. Yeah,

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

“I think that a country like the United States, which has a 65% home ownership rate, that number is way too high. … The optimal home ownership rate is probably closer to maybe 35 or 40%.” — Felix Salmon, Slate Money

From Slate Money's personal finance episode, during a conversation about renting versus buying. Salmon argues that buying only makes sense for households with predictable income who won't move for a decade, and that this group is much smaller than the share of Americans who own. He puts the gap down to social pressure and the feeling of safety that ownership gives.

Slate Money · 2026-10-03 Permalink → Listen →

Slate Money Around 20:52 into the episode

Felix Salmon

Would you have been sad about that? Would that have been like something that disappointed you? I wouldn't

Emily Peck

have, but I'm a weirdo. It also, I kind of like moving and living in different places. So I'm one of those people who likes novelty. And I think whenever we committed to doing this house, that was a change for me. So

Felix Salmon

…know, I am a big fan of renting over owning. I think it absolutely gives you a bunch of labor market flexibility. It gives you just options. When you buy something, sometimes it works out really well and sometimes it works out really badly. And the cost of it working out badly is huge. And that's a big risk that is kind of uninsurable in a lot of different ways, even if you have home insurance. I think that a country like the United States, which has a 65% home ownership rate, that number is way too high. And I do think that for a very stable nuclear family type situation like Emily has, it does make sense a lot of the time to buy a house. But the proportion of households who fall into that bucket of predictable income, we're not going to want to move for over a decade, yada, yada, yada, is much lower than 65%. And that the optimal home ownership rate is probably closer to maybe 35 or 40%. And…

Emily Peck

also stigma, though. We stigmatize renters kind of as a matter of policy. If you read the financial report in the aftermath of the credit crisis, the first couple of chapters of it are entirely about the extent to which

Speaker 4

U.S. encourages home ownership by a policy. And so I think if you're renting in Germany, nobody thinks like, oh, well, that's not a successful person. They don't own a house yet. You know, here it's

Felix Salmon

just very different. The orientation toward homeownership

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

“I have yet to find an AI technologist who is convinced that a kill switch is something that they can just code up in a couple of weeks and implement.” — Felix Salmon, Slate Money

Elizabeth Spiers had just observed that the one AI measure politicians of both parties seem to agree on is a master kill switch. Salmon's answer is that nobody who actually builds the models thinks a kill switch is a thing you can ship. Two turns later he goes further, saying enough open-weight models are already installed on enough computers in enough countries that it cannot be turned off at all.

Slate Money · 2026-09-19 Permalink → Listen →

Slate Money Around 10:35 into the episode

Felix Salmon

…with the interests of the person who holds them. The point is, I am only going to drop a nuclear bomb on a city if I want to drop that nuclear bomb on the city. It is doing exactly what I want it to do. It might not be good for humanity, but it's the person in control of it is in control of it.

Elizabeth Spiers

…interesting point because one of the arguments is that one of the worst case scenarios here is that becomes not the case. But the one area around which I see all these politicians on both sides of the aisle actually coalescing around is the idea that there needs to be a kind of master kill switch.

Felix Salmon

Yeah. A lot of people are talking about kill switches. I have yet to find an AI technologist who is convinced that a kill switch is something that they can just code up in a couple of weeks and implement. Have

Emily Peck

you tried turning the AI off again to save humanity?

Felix Salmon

Or just turning it off? Like, I don't think it can be turned off. I think we've already reached the point at which it can't be turned off. You know, there's enough open source models installed on enough computers in enough different countries that you can't turn it off.

Emily Peck

A lot of what we're talking about was informed by this really good piece from The Verge called Inside the Suddenly Explosive World of AI Safety. Everyone should just go and read it. That talks about meter and what's the other lab? Redwood?

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

“We have definitely reached the point in the AI bubble at which people just feel they need to get on this train at any price.” — Felix Salmon, Slate Money

The panel was working through Stripe's acquisition of an AI payments company and whether a chatbot could plausibly handle the unglamorous plumbing of finance. Salmon says it cannot, and that this has stopped mattering to buyers. He notes the same price-insensitivity is now turning up in the M&A market, not just in venture rounds.

Slate Money · 2026-09-05 Permalink → Listen →

Slate Money Around 12:41 into the episode

Felix Salmon

financial plumbing.

Emily Peck

So that you couldn't just replace

Felix Salmon

and I don't, yeah, I don't see how, I don't really see how ChatGPT can do financial plumbing. We have definitely reached the point in the AI bubble at which people just feel they need to get on this train at any price. And the people driving the train are completely price insensitive. And this is showing up in a bunch of different ways. And it's now showing up in the M ⁇ A markets, which is kind of interesting.

Emily Peck

Well, when we first talked about talking about this, if you want to get meta, not meta, like Facebook, just meta meta. I said, wow, this is a big deal, $12.9 billion. And Felix was like, is it? NVIDIA is worth, you know, more than $4 trillion. This is like nothing for them. Like they get out of bed…

Felix Salmon

Exactly. Yeah. I think for NVIDIA compared to their market cap, a $12 billion acquisition is a rounding error. For Stripe, it's huge.

Speaker 4

Strategically, though, it is interesting because it's NVIDIA sort of really getting behind open weight models, which are in some ways competitive to AI and Anthropic. Yes. And they've been trying to sort of talk OpenAI and Anthropic out of closed models. Systems for a while. And so this is just…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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