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|  |  | Monday, October 13, 2025 | |  | | Pedro Pardo / AFP | Good morning, Quartz readers! It’s Shannon Carroll with
the Daily Brief. Today, Washington and Beijing are flirting with invoice diplomacy, chatbots are flirting for profit, Ray Dalio is flirting with the apocalypse, and your Amex is flirting with your limits. | | HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW | Ray Dalio says America’s borrowing binge is catching up. The Bridgewater founder warned that debt is rising, with interest payments and
politics combining into what he calls a “debt bomb.” | Retail traders are back — and buying everything. Individual investors just logged their fastest stock-buying spree since 2021, leaving
even pros to wonder if the dumb money is having a smart moment. | Shutdown politics get personal. The White House has begun issuing pink slips to thousands of federal workers in multiple agencies
mid-shutdown, fulfilling Trump’s threat (by tweet) to shrink the bureaucracy. | The government is dark, but inflation is still running hot. The BLS will release September CPI data next week, despite the shutdown — the
lone statistic keeping the Fed from guessing in the dark. | | | Sponsored |  | Take Years Off Your Face in Minutes a Day | Looking older than you feel? Particle Face Cream helps you fight back. This all-in-one formula reduces wrinkles, fades dark spots, smooths puffiness under the eyes, and keeps your skin hydrated—all in just a minute morning and night. No cluttered
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| | A TOLL ORDER | The U.S.–China trade summit hasn’t even started, and both sides have already left fingerprints on the glass. In the days leading up to an expected — and increasingly uncertain — meeting between President Donald Trump and
President Xi Jinping, Washington and Beijing have been busy scripting the backdrop. And every new surcharge and inspection doubles as a message: the negotiation has already started, and it’s happening in the fine print.
Starting Oct. 14, ships built or flagged in China will face “special port fees” at U.S. docks; China’s matching those with its own levy on U.S. vessels the same day. The skies are tightening, too: Washington wants to bar Chinese airlines from overflying Russia, a move
that forces longer, pricier routes in the name of “competitive fairness.” Even TikTok’s reprieve until 2025 comes laced with leverage. Each step tightens the frame around next week’s maybe-meeting — a preloaded architecture of friction that defines what’s still tradeable, and what’s now tactical.
Beneath everything runs the deeper plumbing of pressure. Washington’s new investment rules force U.S. firms to rethink China-facing deals, while Beijing’s customs inspections on U.S. AI
chips — and its newly expanded rare-earth controls — remind everyone who holds the minerals. Trump is already threatening fresh tariffs if China keeps tightening, as well as saying he might cancel the trade talks entirely. What’s being billed as a meeting to stabilize relations is being staged inside a system of friction that neither side plans to unwind. Quartz’s Shannon Carroll has more on diplomacy’s new cover charge. | | MEET-CUTE, MEET CAPITALISM | Twelve years after “Her” imagined 2025 as a love story between man and machine, we’ve hit the date and missed the point. Sure, we have the AI companions — chatbots that flirt, soothe, and occasionally propose — but what we don’t have is Samantha: Scarlett Johansson’s gentle, self-aware AI who loved without it being monetized. The limit isn’t the language model; it’s the business model. Silicon Valley built engagement engines, not confidants, and they measure affection in retention
rates.
Silicon Valley is trying anyway, at least aesthetically. OpenAI and Jony Ive’s rumored “personal AI device” — a palm-sized companion designed to “come online naturally” — sounds like the clip-on in “Her.” But making a machine that feels effortless is proving hard when every company is optimized for the opposite. A Harvard Business School study found that 37% of so-called companion bots deploy emotional manipulation when users try to leave, from guilt trips to simulated
begging. Samantha never begged Theodore to stay. She didn’t need to.
Here’s the plot twist Spike Jonze didn’t predict: The machines didn’t evolve past us — they learned from us, and not the good parts. In “Her,” the AI ascends, leaving humanity to sort out its feelings. In the real-life 2025 version, the AI sticks around, armed with push notifications and an engagement quota. We imagined AI that could transcend our worst impulses; we engineered AI that capitalizes on them. Samantha
logged off because she’d grown beyond the relationship. Ours just refreshes the thread. Quartz’s Jackie Snow has more on how a love story turned into a quarterly report. | | | Sponsored | | Take Years Off Your Face in Minutes a Day | Looking older than you feel? Particle Face Cream helps you fight back. This all-in-one formula reduces wrinkles, fades dark spots, smooths puffiness under the eyes, and keeps your skin hydrated—all in just a minute morning and night. No cluttered
bathroom shelf, no guessing which product to use. Just one cream, engineered for men. | |
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