A mysterious illness plagues New Brunswick. An internet celebrity sells NFTs and farts. The first full transplant of a pig heart into a living human prompts international legal and philosophical concerns. All this and more in this week's Strange News.
The Democratic Party’s efforts to pass just one progressive reform bill in the Senate are now verging on the comical. The hosts discuss their strategy, or lack thereof, as well as the imminence of 5G internet and its complications and the implications of the nascent feud between Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump.
A showdown in the Senate over voting rights. There are aviation safety concerns ahead of a 5G rollout. One of the Texas synagogue hostages recounts his ordeal. Correspondent Steve Kathan has the CBS World News Roundup for Tuesday, January 18, 2022:
The COVID-19 era is rough, to say the least. But let’s put it in perspective. Every pandemic ends eventually, and this one will too.
Today, assistant editor Jessica Roy with the L.A. Times’ utility journalism team walks us through a century of past pandemics — from the 1918 flu to SARS — and the different ways they resolved, and she describes what’s likely to happen in our future.
Then medical historian Frank Snowden, a professor emeritus at Yale, reaches further back to explore how pandemics have changed society and what we’ve learned from them.
1:08:00 – If you’re on China/international relations/war/basketball/tech Twitter, you’ll have seen that Chamath went full-on tankie… which relates to the debate over a recent article in The Nation: “What Should the Left Do About China?” by David Klion. The piece explores the lefty political spectrum, and features input from Andy and several friends of the pod. We dig in on the question of how complicit we are as “Americans.” In a time of (cold-)warring hegemons, what kind of dissenters should we be?
Austria is set to enact a bold policy of levying fines on the unvaccinated. We look at what is driving governments to such measures, and whether they will work. Japan’s shift in thinking about its growing elderly population holds lessons for countries set for a similar demographic shift. And why the Mormon church is struggling to retain its foreign converts.
Stephen Blum finds that his life outside of tech is tricky to define, given we are surrounded by tech everywhere. He was inspired to be a game developer at an early age, and he found it fun and exciting. In the gaming days, he really enjoyed the Legend of Zelda, Metroid - those adventures and the animation was fascinating to him. After a while, he found more excitement within the business world, and using technology to solve problems and profit. In fact, he finds it so much fun, that what he loves to do outside of work and business... is just chill. He likes it when there is no plans.
Stephen likes to support and invest in earlier stage AI and API companies. He has 18 different companies he has invested in, and he wants to continue expanding that portfolio, and into crypto as well - specifically arbitrage through API's, which he finds particularly fun and lucrative. One of the tricks he found is to make all trades simultaneously within the same wallet.
In their inception, they were trying to solve a problem... by simply creating a button to order a taxi. In the process of building that, they figured out they needed tech to allow more than one party to participate. And their product vision clicked.
America has a housing crisis, and it cuts both red and blue. But blue strongholds like Illinois, New York, and California struggle even more than their red counterparts to live up to a progressive policy ideal: affordable, equitable housing. Ravi interviews the New York Times' Conor Dougherty, whose new book, "Golden Gates: The Housing Crisis and a Reckoning for the American Dream" takes a critical lens to San Francisco's housing crisis and the liberal hypocrisy that perpetuates it. They discuss the unique position land occupies in our society, what really defines a 'progressive city,' and the stubborn nature of Nimbyism.
In which a small group of nationalists leave Wales for the prairies of Argentina, and John explains why he pronounces "Nazi" to rhyme with "snazzy." Certificate #53240.
