Gary Rivlin joins Elizabeth Spiers to discuss his book on Silicon Valley's race to capitalize on AI. Please enable javascript to get your Slate Plus feeds. If you can't access your feeds, please contact customer support. Check your phone for a link to finish setting up your feed. Please enter a valid phone number.

For this Money Talks, lawyer/podcaster Peter Shamshiri, co-host of If Books Could Kill, reveals the secrets of junk nonfiction to host Emily Peck. He explains why "airport books" like The Secret, Hillbilly Elegy, and The Tipping Point tend to be rife with non-advice, pseudoscience, and outright junk, and what that means for our culture at large. He also tells how to get rich with your own crappy self-help book! If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and an additional segment of our regular show every week.

Earlier this month the thermal imagery manufacturer FLIR bought the UAV developer Aeryon Labs for $200 million, beating their previous record in publicly disclosed drone investments of $134M. This has been yet another signal that even though the drone industry suffered some hard hits in 2018, the period of consolidation, larger investments and serious R&D advances is ahead. In fact, if one were to look at merely the investment figures for 2018, it wouldn't even be that easy to tell that the drone industry struggled. Records were set, partnerships formed, and accelerators continued to support exceptional start-ups. A total of $702 million was invested into the drone industry in 2018 (up from $625M in 2017), $483 million of which was funnelled into the top 20 drone deals.