How far would you go in pursuit of a Greater Good? How much evil would you permit -- how many crimes would you commit -- if you believed the result was beneficial to the world overall? These are the kind of questions the US government wrestled with at the height of the Cold War, when they considered launching a number of false flag and terror campaigns to shore up support for a hot war with Cuba. Join Ben, Matt and Noel to learn more.
This week we revived a TTSG tradition of answering your questions on the air. Topics covered range from why Tyler puts on a wetsuit and swims out to rocks to fish for striped bass, the rise in extreme sports, why standardized tests are actually good, the state of the student protests going forward and our worries about state repression, and Jerry Seinfeld complaining that all sitcoms are too woke.
(One note, we recorded this yesterday morning before the NYPD crackdown at Columbia and CCNY. We included a short note at the start of the episode.)
Enjoy!
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The Columbia encampment is shut down and the students who occupied a campus building are charged with burglary. A mile north of Columbia, cops are attacked by protestors, who are promptly zip-tied and thrown into an NYPD bus. Order is being restored, but for how long? Give a listen.
Cashless: Is Digital Currency The Future of Finance?
On this episode of Stanford Graduate School of Business chart-topping management podcast “If/Then,” GSB finance professor Darrell Duffie explores the intriguing premise: “If the United States wants to future-proof banking, then a digital dollar could be the solution.”
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If/Then is a Stanford Graduate School of Business podcast that examines research findings that can help us navigate the complex issues we face in business, leadership, and society.
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This episode of ‘If/Then’ is distributed by CoinDesk with introduction and production by Senior Producer Michele Musso. Our Executive Producer is Jared Schwartz.
Police on both coasts move in on campus protests. Florida abortion ban takes effect. Growing complaints about scams targeting seniors. CBS News Correspondent Steve Kathan has today's World News Roundup.
A dramatic overnight raid in New York City was just one sign that protests at American universities are set to continue—a clear historical echo in an already-fraught election year. We ask why a niche newspaper run by Japan’s communist party has so much influence (13:05). And a study of new books on loneliness reveals both the benefits and drawbacks of solitude (20:39).
Listen to what matters most, from global politics and business to science and technology—subscribe to Economist Podcasts+. For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account
For this week’s update from City Hall, we learn about Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s plan to spend the remaining federal COVID-19 dollars before the funds expire at the end of the year. Plus, why the Mayor didn’t attend the funeral of a slain CPD officer, and how he’s defending support for the Chicago Bears $4.7 million stadium proposal. We get the latest from WBEZ’s Tessa Weinberg.
For a full archive of Reset interviews, head over to wbez.org/reset.
In this episode of Unchained, host Laura interviews Alexei Zamyatin, co-founder of Build on Bitcoin, Willem Schroé, founder of Botanix Labs, and Orkun Kılıç, co-founder of Chainway Labs. They discuss their respective projects, all of which are focused on developing Layer 2 solutions for Bitcoin.
Zamyatin's Build on Bitcoin is a hybrid Layer 2 that connects to both Bitcoin and Ethereum, aiming to bring innovation back to the Bitcoin ecosystem. Schroé's Botanix Labs is developing a decentralized Layer 2 solution using the ‘Spiderchain,’ which uses a series of multi-signature wallets to secure the chain. Kılıç's Chainway Labs is building Citrea, a zk-Rollup on Bitcoin that aims to create a Bitcoin-backed economy.
All three projects are in various stages of development and testing, with BOB’s mainnet launch expected shortly.
Show highlights:
Introduction to Build on Bitcoin (BOB), Botanix, and Citrea: How they aim to innovate and expand Bitcoin's capabilities, including their architectural designs that integrate Ethereum users and work toward decentralization and trustlessness.
Security Aspects and Integration Strategies: What the security risks associated with BOB, Botanix, and Citrea are, and strategies to enhance decentralization over time?
How these layer 2s influence Bitcoin fees, and how Botanix's integration can leverage the Bitcoin ecosystem, with insights on the potential of Layer 3s and zk-rollups to transform Bitcoin's utility and fee dynamics.
How these projects aim to attract Ethereum users and developers, and the reasons why this may be an attractive opportunity for them
How Runes, Ordinals, and BRC-20s operate on Citrea, Botanix, and BOB
How Bitcoin is always a derivative when it’s not in its layer 1 and the pros and cons of different bridging solutions
The concept of forward secrecy and how it can help improve security in blockchains
Why Willem believes that Layer 3s are possible and bullish for Bitcoin
How ‘merged mining” resembles Ethereum’s restaking and why it’s positive for Bitcoin
Unchained Podcast is Produced by Laura Shin Media, LLC. Distributed by CoinDesk. Senior Producer is Michele Musso and Executive Producer is Jared Schwartz.
New York City police used force overnight to zip-tie the hands of dozens of Columbia University student protesters and haul them away in buses, clearing the encampment two weeks after tents first popped up. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is back in Israel to pressing for more aid to Palestinians in Gaza — and a hostage deal. And Florida's six-week abortion ban takes effect today — with exceptions only in rare circumstances.
Want more comprehensive analysis of the most important news of the day, plus a little fun? Subscribe to the Up First newsletter.
Today's episode of Up First was edited by Kevin Drew, Vincent Ni, Acacia Squires, Lisa Thomson and Ben Adler. It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Ben Abrams and Lilly Quiroz. We get engineering support from Stacey Abbott, and our technical director is Zac Coleman.
Here's a thought experiment: You want to spend a reasonably large sum of money providing assistance to a group of people with limited means. There's a lot of ways you might do that with a lot of strings and safeguards involved, but what about just giving them money -- "get cash directly into the hands of the poor in the cheapest, most efficient way possible." You and I might prefer that, since we, of course, are reputable people and good stewards and understand our own particular needs. But what about, well, others?
Economist Tavneet Suri has done more than just think about that; her fieldwork includes handing out money across villages in two rural areas in Kenya to see what happens. Her experiments include giving out a lump sum of cash and also spreading out that same amount over time. The results she details for host David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast are, to be frank, heartening, although the mechanisms of disbursement definitely affect the outcomes.
Despite the good news, the idea of a universal basic income is by no means a settled remedy for helping the poor. For one thing, Suri says, "it's super, super expensive. It’s really expensive. And so, the question is, “Is that expense worth it?” And to understand that I think we need a few more years of understanding the benefits, understanding what people do with the incomes, understanding whether this can really kickstart these households out of poverty."
And perhaps the biggest question is whether the results of fieldwork in Kenya is generalizable. "I would love to do a study that replicates this in the West," she says. "The one thing about the West that I think is worth saying that's different is you wouldn't add it on top of existing programs. The idea is you would substitute existing programs with this. And that to me is the question: if you substituted it, what would happen?"
Suri is the Louis E. Seley Professor of Applied Economics and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. She is an editor at the Review of Economics and Statistics; co-chair of the Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, known as J-PAL, at MIT; co-chair of the Digital Identification and Finance Initiative at J-PAL Africa; a member of the executive committee at J-PAL; and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
