Johnny Halife was born and raised in Argentina. As such, he takes soccer very seriously. He is a die hard fan of Boca, and has taken his family to live games in Miami and Nashville. He is the father of 2 young boys, which he notes completely changed his life. He has been slowly introducing them to soccer, as an Argentina after would do, and they love the roar of the stadium during a game. He also claims to be a really bad golfer, which I can relate to.
Twenty one years ago, Johnny started working for Microsoft Engineering behind the scenes, helping them shape products. Eventually, he and his team started asking the question - if we are helping Microsoft, why don't we help other companies?
The White House deletes a racist social media post from the president’s account, after vociferously defending it. The Guthrie family adjusts its language in messages to potential kidnappers. And Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show sends a stark message, both inside and outside the United States.
Natasha Blycha's path into emerging technology law started in an unlikely place. As a gap-year volunteer teaching English and economics at a school outside Gweru, Zimbabwe, circa 2000, she was simultaneously working for a small rural law firm on constitutional questions — an experience she credits with shaping the questions that have driven her career since.
In conversation with Andile Masuku, Blycha — who co-authored the Oxford Smart Legal Contracts textbook and was named the Financial Times' Most Innovative Lawyer — traces a line from those early days to advising global banks on whether their crypto experiments were even legal, to building LexChip: technology that embeds enforceable contracts directly into AI-powered devices.
The conversation spans smart contracts (the technical kind and the legally binding kind — they're different), why crypto adoption in Nigeria and Ghana has less to do with speculation and more to do with broken banking infrastructure, and what Jensen Huang's "five-layer AI cake" means for nations trying to build sovereign AI stacks without the energy, chips, or legal infrastructure to hold them together.
Blycha's central argument: if we can't put code in jail, and AI systems are becoming economic stakeholders that can book a million flights or displace entire workforces, then the law as currently designed has a problem. Her proposed contribution — smart legal contracts that act as referees inside AI systems, capable of stopping a device when it breaches its own rules — sits at the intersection of contract law and responsible AI.
Key insights:
On why this isn't Y2K: "This is so much more complicated, so much more geopolitically complicated. And if we said that Y2K didn't happen, it was one day we got to find out. What we're seeing already with AI systems is we're already getting the proof in the pudding that they are working." Blycha argues Y2K was a manageable vector of complexity compared to AI. The difference: AI systems are actively delivering on their promise, and big tech's mandate to reach AGI means we can't simply wait for one day to find out.
On why Africa's slower adoption might be an advantage, not a liability: "If I cannot keep the power on, am I really talking about agentic AI?" But Blycha points to a counterintuitive upside: countries without legacy infrastructure can leapfrog, just as India and parts of Africa bypassed landlines for mobile. Crypto adoption in Nigeria and Ghana demonstrates this — populations using blockchain not as a speculative instrument but as functional money in economies where traditional banking fails them.
On the difference between smart contracts and smart legal contracts: A smart contract is code that executes on a blockchain — "if this happens, do this." It's a technical term, not a legal one. A smart legal contract, by contrast, is a real, enforceable agreement where specific clauses are automated. Blycha uses the example of a lease where rent adjusts automatically based on CPI. The distinction matters because conflating the two obscures where legal accountability actually sits.
On the fundamental legal problem AI creates: "The law needs a person to ascribe responsibility to." Bitcoin was invented by someone who may not exist. Decentralised autonomous organisations insist the code is responsible, not them. But you can't put code in jail. As AI agents proliferate — booking flights, managing finances, making hiring decisions — the gap between what the technology does and who the law can hold accountable is widening faster than regulators can respond.
On smart legal contracts as AI's conscience: Through LexChip, Blycha's team is embedding contracts directly into AI edge devices — robotics, autonomous vehicles, hardware with embodied AI. These contracts can monitor behaviour in real time and, critically, act as a referee: stopping a device safely when it breaches its rules. "You've taken an analog thing, you've turned it into a performance-based contract and it can speak to an AI system."
On Ubuntu as an AI governance framework — with a warning: Blycha was moved by the Ubuntu principle of interconnectedness during a family visit to South Africa. She sees it as a potentially powerful ethical framework for AI policy — but cautions against using it as "window dressing for someone to write a wishy-washy policy that then doesn't deal with the hard stuff." The hard stuff: GPU clusters, cloud compute, sovereign data infrastructure. Values without investment are just declarations.
On who opposes all of this — and why: Peter Thiel and a portion of Silicon Valley divide the world into accelerators and decelerators. In their framing, lawyers like Blycha are slowing down progress toward a post-human, transhumanist future of brain-computer interfaces and infinite lifespan. Blycha's response: "This is not a lawyers versus the tech bros conversation because there is an extremely large majority of the tech bros who are also saying there is a big problem here."
Notable moments:
1. The first text message: At the Bata Club in Gweru, Zimbabwe, circa 2000 — a social venue attached to a Canadian shoe factory — Blycha saw her first SMS travel between England and Zimbabwe on a feature phone. "It wasn't a smartphone, it was a dead phone." She'd bought her flight to Zimbabwe on the day of the Y2K bug because tickets were cheap. That moment — witnessing a communication revolution in a country experiencing currency crisis and fuel shortages — frames the conversation's central question about technology adoption in constrained environments.
2. The Mennonite test: Visiting Amish communities in Ohio, Blycha learned their approach to technology adoption. "They don't prohibit technology at all. They ask two questions: does this technology bring me closer to my family and does this technology bring me closer to God?" Asked how everyday people should think about adopting AI tools, Blycha offered this as her "heart answer" — a striking conclusion from someone who has spent her career at technology's legal frontier.
3. The McKinsey displacement reality: Blycha points to McKinsey's replacement of significant portions of its workforce with AI agents as evidence that displacement is not theoretical. The legal question this raises: how do you write an employment contract with an AI agent? And when that agent — operating at a scale no human can oversee — breaches the law, the "human in the loop" principle that underpins every AI governance framework starts to break down.
Historical accounts tend to neglect mixed-ancestry Native Americans: racially and legally differentiated from nonmixed Indigenous people by U.S. government policy, their lives have continually been treated as peripheral to Indigenous societies. Mixed-Blood Histories: Race, Law, and Dakota Indians in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest(U Minnesota Press, 2025) intervenes in this erasure. Using legal, linguistic, and family-historical methods, Dr. Jameson R. Sweet writes mixed-ancestry Dakota individuals back into tribal histories, illuminating the importance of mixed ancestry in shaping and understanding Native and non-Native America from the nineteenth century through today.
When the U.S. government designated mixed-ancestry Indians as a group separate from both Indians and white Americans—a distinction born out of the perception that they were uniquely assimilable as well as manipulable intermediate figures—they were afforded rights under U.S. law unavailable to other Indigenous people, albeit inconsistently, which included citizenship and the rights to vote, serve in public office, testify in court, and buy and sell land. Focusing on key figures and pivotal “mixed-blood histories” for the Dakota nation, Dr. Sweet argues that in most cases, they importantly remained Indians and full participants in Indigenous culture and society. In some cases, they were influential actors in establishing reservations and negotiating sovereign treaties with the U.S. government.
Culminating in a pivotal reexamination of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, Mixed-Blood Histories brings greater diversity and complexity to existing understandings of Dakota kinship, culture, and language while offering insights into the solidification of racial categories and hierarchies in the United States.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
Take a break from the downfall of democracy and instead get outraged at the deep injustice of a year-long feud over a bronze medal in women’s gymnastics. This story’s got everything: bravery, racism, the best and the worst of sportsmanship, bad blood that’s been brewing since the Cold War, and, somehow, the Swedish Federal Court. Come for the weird gymnastics scoring rules, stay for the legal analysis of international arbitration rules.
Sunday was the Super Bowl, which means betting. A lot of betting. And even if you're not a gambler– and even if you don't particularly care about sports, you've probably noticed that in the last few years, sports betting has gone from obscure to nearly omnipresent. But that's not necessarily for the better. According to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey, "43% of U.S. adults say the fact that sports betting is now legal in much of the country is a bad thing for society." So, we spoke with Hannah Vanbiber, a senior editor at The Athletic, to talk about sports betting ahead of Sunday's big game.
And in headlines, survivors of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein release a Public Service Announcement, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries says Democrats are ready to shut down the government partially, and the Japanese prime minister's governing party secures a supermajority in parliamentary elections.
SCOTUS may be between argument sessions, but the legal news isn’t slowing down. Kate, Melissa, and Leah cover the latest out of Minnesota before touching on the Department of Homeland Security’s troubling use of administrative subpoenas and Jodi Kantor’s reporting on the introduction of non-disclosure agreements to the Supreme Court. Then, some election news: the Tulsi Gabbard-supervised FBI raid on an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, Trump’s desire to “take over” elections, and an update on the challenge against California’s Proposition 50, Gavin Newsom’s counter to racial gerrymandering in Texas. Finally, Kristi Noem’s attempt to revoke Temporary Protected Status for Haitians gets shot down by the District Court for the District of Columbia, and a smörgåsbord of other legal bits and pieces.
In 1928, a chance contaminant in Scottish physician Alexander Fleming’s lab experiment led to a discovery that would change the field of medicine forever: penicillin. Since then, penicillin and other antibiotics have saved millions of lives. With one problem: the growing threat of antibiotic resistance. Today on Short Wave, host Regina G. Barber talks to biophysicist Nathalie Balaban about the conundrum — and a discovery her lab has made in bacteria that could turn the tides.
Interested in more science behind our medicines? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.
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This episode was produced by Berly McCoy, edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and fact checked by Tyler Jones. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer.
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Kate loves her husband and their family, but she’s also involved in a long-standing affair with a married lover. Ellie Levenson opens her novel Room 706 with the secret lovers in their London hotel room. There, they soon find themselves trapped during a hostage crisis. In today’s episode, the author talks with NPR’s Scott Simon about why she chose to tell a story about modern womanhood and motherhood through such extreme circumstances.
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