エピソード

  • Workplace Automation

    Workplace Automation
    2025/10/28
    This week we talk about robots, call center workers, and convenience stores.We also discuss investors, chatbots, and job markets.Recommended Book: The Fourth Consort by Edward AshtonTranscriptThough LLM-based generative AI software, like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, are becoming more and more powerful by the month, and offering newfangled functionality seemingly every day, it’s still anything but certain these tools, and the chatbots they power, will take gobs of jobs from human beings.The tale that’s being told by upper-management at a lot of companies makes it seem like this is inevitable, though there would seem to be market incentives for them to both talk and act like this is the case.Companies that make new, splashy investments in AI tech, or which make deals with big AI companies, purporting to further empower their offerings and to “rightsize” their staff as a consequence, tend to see small to moderate bumps in their stock price, and that’s good for the execs and other management in those companies, many of whom own a lot of stock, or have performance incentives related to the price of their stock built into their larger pay package.But often, not always, but quite a lot of the time, the increased effectiveness and efficiencies claimed by these higher-ups after they go on a firing spree and introduce new AI tools, seem to be at least partly, and in some cases mostly attributable to basically just threatening their staff with being fired in a difficult labor market.When Google executives lay off 5 or 10% of their staff on a given team, for instance, and then gently urge those who survived the cull to come to the office more frequently rather than working from home, and tell them that 60 hours a week is the sweet spot for achieving their productivity goals, that will tend to lead to greater outputs—at least for a while. Same as any other industry where blood has been drawn and a threat is made if people don’t live up to a casually stated standard presented by the person drawing that blood.Also worth mentioning here is that many of the people introducing these tools, both into their own companies and into the market as a whole, seem to think most jobs can be done by AI systems, but not theirs. Many executives have outright said that future businesses will have a small number of people managing a bunch of AI bots, and at least a few investors have said that they believe most jobs can be automated, but investing is too specialized and sophisticated, and will likely remain the domain of clever human beings like themselves.All of which gestures at what we’re seeing in labor markets around the globe right now, where demands for new hires are becoming more intense and a whole lot of low-level jobs in particular are disappearing entirely—though in most cases this is not because of AI, or not just, but instead because of automation more broadly; something that AI is contributing to, but something that is also a lot bigger than AI.And that’s what I’d like to talk about today. The rapid-speed deployment, in some industries and countries, at least, of automated systems, of robots, basically, and how this is likely to impact the already ailing labor markets in the places that are seeing the spearpoint of this deployment.—Chatbots are AI tools that are capable of taking input from users and responding with often quite human-sounding text, and increasingly, audio as well.These bots are the bane of some customers who are looking to speak to a human about some unique need or problem, but who are instead forced to run a gauntlet of AI-powered bots. The interaction often happens in the same little chat window through which they’ll eventually, if they say the right magic words, reach a human being capable of actually helping them. And like so many of the AI innovations that have been broadly deployed at this point, this is a solution that’s generally hated by customers, but lauded by the folks who run these companies, because it saves them a lot of money if they can hire fewer human beings to handle support tickets, even if those savings are the result of most people giving up before successfully navigating the AI maze and reaching a human customer support worker.In India right now, the thriving call center industry is seeing early signs of disruption from the same. IT training centers, in particular, are experimenting with using audio-capable AI chatbots instead of human employees, in part because demand is so high, but also, increasingly, because doing so is cheaper than hiring actual human beings to do the same work.One such company, LimeChat, recently said that it plans to cut its employee base by 80% in the near-future, and if that experiment is successful, this could ripple through India’s $283 billion IT sector, which accounts for 7.5% of India’s GDP. Hiring growth in this sector already collapsed in 2024 and 2025, and again, while this shift seems to be pretty good for the ...
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    16 分
  • Circular Finance

    Circular Finance
    2025/10/21
    This week we talk about entanglements, monopolies, and illusory money.We also discuss electrification, LLMs, and data centers.Recommended Book: The Extinction of Experience by Christine RosenTranscriptOne of the big claims about artificial intelligence technologies, including but not limited to LLM-based generative AI tech, like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, is that they will serve as universal amplifiers.Electricity is another universal amplifier, in that electrifying systems allows you to get a lot more from pretty much every single thing you do, while also allowing for the creation of entirely new systems.Cooking things in the kitchen? Much easier with electricity. Producing things on an assembly line? The introduction of electricity allows you to introduce all sorts of robotics, measuring tools, and safety measures that would not have otherwise been available, and all of these things make the entire process safer, cheaper, and a heck of a lot more effective and efficient.The prime argument behind many sky-high AI company valuations, then, is that if these things evolve in the way they could evolve, becoming increasingly capable and versatile and cheap, cooking could become even easier, manufacturing could become still faster, cheaper, and safer, and every other aspect of society and the economy would see similar gains.If you’re the people making AI, if you own these tools, or a share of the income derived from them, that’s a potentially huge pot of money: a big return on your investment. People make fortunes off far more focused, less-impactful companies and technologies all the time, and being able to create the next big thing in not just one space, but every space? Every aspect of everything, potentially? That’s like owning a share of electricity, and making money every time anyone uses electricity for anything.Through that lens, the big boom in both use of and investment in AI technologies maybe shouldn’t be so surprising. This represents a potentially generational sea-change in how everything works, what the economy looks like, maybe even how governments are run, militaries fight, and so on. If you can throw money into the mix, why wouldn’t you? And if that’s the case, the billions upon billions of dollars sloshing around in this corner of the tech world make a lot of sense; it may be curious that there’s not even more money being invested.Belief in that promise is not universal, however.A lot of people see these technologies not as the next electricity, but maybe the next smartphone, or perhaps the next SUV.Smartphones changed a whole lot about society too, but they’re hardly the same groundbreaking, omni-powerful upgrade that electricity represents.SUVs, too, flogged sales for flailing car companies, boosting their revenues at a moment in which they desperately needed to sell more vehicles to survive. But they were just another, more popular model of what already came before. There’s a chance AI will be similar to that: better software than came before, for some people’s use-cases—but not revolutionary, not groundbreaking even on the scale of pocketable phone-computers.What I’d like to talk about today are the peculiar economics that seem to be playing a role in the AI boom, and why many analysts and financial experts are eyeballing these economics warily, worrying about what they maybe represent, and possibly portend.—The term ‘exuberance,’ in the context of markets, refers to an excitement among investors—sometimes professional investors, sometimes casual investors, sometimes both—about a particular company, technology, or financial product type.The surge in interest and investment in cryptoassets during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, including offshoot products like NFTs, was seemingly caused by a period of exuberance, sparked by the novelty of the product, the riches a few lucky insiders made off these products, and the desire by many people—pros and consumer-grade investors—to get in on that action, at a moment in which there wasn’t as much to do in the world as usual.Likewise, the gobs of money plowed into early internet companies, and the money thrown at companies laying fiberoptic cable for the presumed boom in internet customers, were, in retrospect, at least partly the consequence of irrational exuberance.In some cases these investors were just too early, as was the case with those cable-laying companies—the majority of them going out of business after blowing through a spectacular amount of money in a short period of time, and not finding enough paying customers to fund all that expansion—in others it was the result of sky-high valuations that were based on little beyond the exuberance of investors who probably should have known better, but who couldn’t get past their fear of missing out on the next big thing.In that latter case, that flow of money into early dotcom startups did fund a few winners that survived the ...
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    16 分
  • Tariff Leverage

    Tariff Leverage
    2025/10/14
    This week we talk about trade wars, TACO theory, and Chinese imports.We also discuss negotiation, protectionism, and threat spirals.Recommended Book: More Than Words by John WarnerTranscriptIn January of 2018, then first-term US President Trump announced a slew of tariffs and trade barriers against several countries, including Canada, Mexico, and those in the European Union.The most significant of these new barriers and tariffs were enacted against China, though, as Trump had long claimed that China, the US’s most important trade partner by many measures, was taking advantage of the US market; a claim that economists tepidly backed, as while some of the specifics, like those related to intellectual property theft on the part of China, were pretty overt, the Chinese government fairly brazenly gobbling up IP and technology from US companies that do business in the country before hobbling those US interests in China and handing that IP and technology off to their own, China-born copies, claims about a trade deficit were less clear-cut—most of those sorts of claims seemed to be the result of a misunderstanding about how international trade works.That said, Trump had made a protectionist stance part of his platform, so he kicked off his administration by imposing a package of targeted tariffs against specific product categories from China, including things like solar panels and washing machines. Those were followed by more tariffs on steel and aluminum—from a lot of countries, not just China—and this implementation of trade barriers between the US and long-time trade partners, which had mostly enjoyed barrier-free trade up till that point, kicked off a trade war, with the Trump administration announcing, out of nowhere, new tariffs or limitations, and the country on the pointy end of that new declaration announcing their own counter, usually something the US sells to their country, while in the background, both countries tried to negotiate new trade terms on the down-low.There was a lot of tit-for-tatting in those first couple years of the first Trump administration, and they led to a lot of negotiations between the US government and these foreign governments, which in turn led to the lifting of many such barriers, though the weaponization of barriers continued, with the administration, for instance, announcing a tariff on all imports from Mexico until the Mexican government was able to halt all illegal immigration coming into the US; negotiation ended that threat, too, but this early salvo upset a lot of the US’s long-time allies, while also making it clear that Trump intended to open negotiations with these sorts of threats, whenever possible—which had the knock-on effect of everyone taking the threats pretty seriously, as they were often incredibly dangerous to specific industries, while also taking them less seriously because it was obvious they were intended to be a negotiating tactic.When Trump left office, a bunch of international relationships had been scarred by this approach to trade deals, and when Biden replaced him, he dropped most of the new tariffs against long-time allies, but kept most of the China tariffs in place, especially those related to green technologies like electric vehicles and semiconductors, the local-made versions of which were becoming a big focus for the Biden administration. The administration then went on to expand upon those tariffs, against China, in some cases.What I’d like to talk about today is how this approach to trade protectionism and negotiation has ballooned under the second Trump administration, and what a new threat against China by Trump might mean for how the relationship between these two countries evolves, moving forward.—Trump’s second administration opened with an executive order that declared a national emergency, claiming that the Chinese were trafficking drugs, especially synthetic opioids like fentanyl, into the US, and that this allowed criminals to profit from destroying the lives of US citizens.This declaration allowed him to unleash a flurry of tariffs against China, first imposing 10% on all Chinese imports, then increasing that to 20% in March of 2025.China retaliated, imposing tariffs of 15% on mostly US energy products, like coal and natural gas, and on some types of agricultural machines, while also engaging in some legal pressure against US companies, like Google. They followed this up with tariffs against meat and dairy products, and suspended US lumber import rights, and disallowed three US firms from selling soybeans to China.The US reciprocated, and China reciprocated back. There was a period of spiraling broad tariffs and import bans in the mid-2025 between the US and China, which led to an aggregate baseline tariff on Chinese imports of 104%, which was followed with an aggregate Chinese baseline tariff against US goods of 84%. The US then upped theirs to 145%, and China raised theirs to 125%.Again, vital to ...
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    16 分
  • Gamewashing

    Gamewashing
    2025/10/07
    This week we talk about Electronic Arts, 3DO, and the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund.We also discuss Jared Kushner, leveraged buyouts, and loot boxes.Recommended Book: Bandwidth by Dan CarusoTranscriptElectronic Arts, often shorthanded as EA, was founded in 1982 in California by a former Apple employee named Trip Hawkins, who also went on to found the ill-fated 3DO company, which made video game hardware, and the somewhat more prolific, but also ultimately ill-fated casual game developer Digital Chocolate.EA, though, has been an absolutely astounding success. It’s business model was predicated on the premise of selling video games directly to retailers, rather than going through intermediaries. This allowed them to gain more market share than their competitors right off the bat, and it helped them glean higher margins than their competitors from each direct sale, too.EA also established an early reputation for treating its developers really well. They were the first gaming company to feature their developers in advertising and to give them platforms, promoting them as video game artists, basically, and it shared the profits netted from those direct sales with these develops—which in turn meant all the best developers really wanted to work for EA, which led to a beneficial cycle where they created better and better, and more and more financially successful games.In the late-80s, they started deviating from this model somewhat, scooping up a collection of successful independent game development studios and deviating, at times, from the creative lead’s vision when releasing their games. They also refocused a fair bit of their resources on franchises, like the immensely successful, as it turned out, Madden NFL series, and they branched out into producing games for the console market, including the still-new Nintendo Entertainment System, in 1990.That same year, EA went public on the NASDAQ, the company got new leadership when Hawkins decided to refocus on his far less successful 3DO hardware startup, and in an interesting twist, the arrival of the Sony Playstation in North America caused EA to drop support for 3DO hardware in the mid-90s so it could refocus on Playstation games, which were a lot more lucrative.By the mid-90s, EA had an astonishingly large and successful software library, including franchises like the aforementioned Madden games and the FIFA soccer games, but also celebrity-tied games like Shaq Fu, and military shooters like Jungle and Urban Strike.By the early-2000s, EA was making exclusive licensing deals with the NFL and ESPN, in order to stave off newfound sports game competitors, and it was the only video game company to consistently make a profit, most others experiencing feast and famine cycles, with periodic wins, but a whole lot of losses they had to cover with the profits from those wins. EA, in contrast, had a reliable stable of profit-sources, and it thus had a whole lot of leverage in terms of attracting and retaining talent, but also getting big names and brands on board, for collaborative projects.What I’d like to talk about today is what happened to EA during and following the 2008 economic crisis, and how and why it recently became an acquisition target for Saudi Arabia.—In 2008, when the global economy was collapsing, EA suffered a bad holiday sales season and fired 1,100 employees and closed 12 of their facilities early the following year. Later in 2009, the company announced the firing of another 1,500 employees, which was about 17% of their total workforce at the time, and in 2010 they acquired a gaming company that focused on mobile games, which were becoming increasingly popular, now that many people had touch-capable smartphones, which brought hot new franchises like Angry Birds under their brand umbrella.On the strength of that acquisition and all those downsizings, in early 2011, EA announced that it hit $3.8 billion in revenue in the financial year for the first time, and in early 2012, it announced it surpassed $1 billion in digital revenue during the previous year, which was a huge figure that early in the digital media landscape. It used some of those profits to scoop up another mobile-first gaming company, adding properties like Plants vs Zombies and Peggle to their library.EA completed another mass-firing in 2013, dismissing 10% of their employees under what they called a reorganization, around the same time they announced an exclusive license with Disney that would allow them to develop Star Wars games.Their stock value boomed in the following years, as a result of those cost-savings measures, and those new relationships, and emboldened by record-high stock valuations, in the mid-20-teens, the company started releasing big-name games, like Star Wars Battlefront 2, with random-content loot boxes and other sorts of microtransactions.This did not go over well with players, who decried these in-game purchasing options as ‘pay to win’ ...
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    18 分
  • NATO and Russia

    NATO and Russia
    2025/09/30
    This week we talk about Article 4, big sticks, and spheres of influence.We also discuss Moldova, super powers, and new fronts.Recommended Book: More Everything Forever by Adam BeckerTranscriptThe North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, was originally formed in 1949 in the wake of World War 2 and at the beginning of the Cold War.At that moment, the world was beginning to orient toward what we might think of as the modern global order, which at the time was predicated on having two superpowers—the US and the Soviet Union—and the world being carved up into their respective spheres of influence.NATO was formed as the military component of that protection effort, as the Soviets (and other powers who had occupied that land in the past) had a history of turning their neighbors into client states, because their territory provides little in the way of natural borders. Their inclination, then, was to either invade or overthrow neighboring governments so they could function as buffers between the Soviet Union and its potential enemies.The theory behind NATO is collective security: if anyone attacks one of the member nations, the others will come to their aid. Article 5 of the NATO treaty says that an attack against one member is considered an attack against all members, and while this theoretically would be applied against any would-be attacker, it was 100% created so that the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies knew that if they attacked, for instance, Norway, the other NATO nations—including, importantly, the United States, which again, was one of just two superpowers in the world at that point, all the other powers, like the UK and France having been devastated by WWII—would join in their defense.NATO, today, is quite a bit bigger than it was originally: it started out with just 12 countries in Europe and North America, and as of 2025, there are 32, alongside a handful of nations that are hoping to join, and are at various points along the way to possibly someday becoming member states.What I’d like to talk about today are recent provocations by the Soviet Union’s successor state, Russia, against NATO, and what these provocations might portend for the future of the region.—In early 2014, Russia invaded—in a somewhat deniable way, initially funding local rabble-rousers and using unmarked soldiers and weapons—the eastern portion of Ukraine, and then annexed an important Black Sea region called Crimea. Then in early 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, massing hundreds of thousands of military assets on their shared border before plunging toward Ukraine’s capitol and other vital strategic areas.Against the odds, as Ukraine is small and poor compared to Russia, and has a far smaller military, as well, Ukrainians managed to hold off the Russian assault, and today, about 3.5 years later, Ukraine continues to hold Russia off, though Russian forces have been making incremental gains in the eastern portion of the country over the past year, and Russian President Putin seems convinced he can hold the Donbas region, in particular, even if peace is eventually declared.At the moment, though, peace seems unlikely, as Russian forces continue to grind against increasingly sophisticated and automated Ukrainian defenses, the invading force, in turn, bolstered by North Korean ammunition and troops. Ukraine’s exhausted soldiery is periodically and irregularly bulwarked by resources from regional and far-flung allies, helping them stay in the game, and they’re fleshing out their locally grown defense industry, which has specialized in asymmetric weaponry like drones and rockets, but Russia still has the advantage by pretty much any metric we might use to gauge such things.Over the past three weeks, concerns that this conflict might spill over into the rest of Europe have been heightened by Russian provocations along the eastern edge of the NATO alliance.Russia flew drones into Poland and Romania, fighter jets into Estonia, and aggressively flew fighters over a Germany Navy frigate in the Baltic Sea. Article 4 of the NATO treaty was invoked, which is the lead-up invocation to an eventual invocation of Article 5, which would be a full-fledged defense, by the bloc, against someone who attacked a NATO member.And that’s on top of Russia’s persistent and ongoing efforts to influence politics in Moldova, which held an election over the weekend that could serve as a foot in the door for Russian influence campaigns and Russia-stoked coups within the EU, or could become one more hardened border against such aggressions, depending on how the election pans out. The final results aren’t in as of the day I’m recording this episode, but there are fears that if the pro-Russian parties win, they’ll turn the country—which is located on Ukraine’s borders, opposite Russia—into another Russian puppet state, similar to Belarus, but if the pro-Russian parties don’t do well, they’ll try...
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    12 分
  • Nepal Gen Z Protests

    Nepal Gen Z Protests
    2025/09/23
    This week we talk about corruption, influencers, and pro-monarchy protests.We also discuss Nepalese modern history, Gen Z, and kings.Recommended Book: Superagency by Reid Hoffman and Greg BeatoTranscriptThe Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, usually referred to as just Nepal, is a country located in the Himalayas that’s bordered to the northeast by China, and is otherwise surrounded by India, including in the east, where there’s a narrow sliver of India separating Nepal from Bhutan and Bangladesh.So Nepal is mostly mountainous, it’s landlocked, and it’s right in between two burgeoning regional powers who are also increasingly, in many ways, global powers. Its capital is Kathmandu, and there are a little over 31 million people in the country, as of 2024—more than 80% of them Hindu, and the country’s landmass spans about 57,000 square miles or 147.5 square kilometers, which is little smaller than the US state of Illinois, and almost exactly the same size as Bangladesh.Modern Nepal came about beginning in the mid-20th century, when the then-ruling Rana autocracy was overthrown in the wake of neighboring India’s independence movement, and a parliamentary democracy replaced it. But there was still a king, and he didn’t like sharing power with the rest of the government, so he did away with the democracy component of the government in 1960, making himself the absolute monarch and banning all political activities, which also necessitated jailing politicians.The country was modernized during this period, in the sense of building out infrastructure and such, but it was pulled backwards in many ways, as there wasn’t much in the way of individual liberties for civilians, and everything was heavily censored by the king and his people. In 1990, a multiparty movement called the People’s Movement forced the king, this one ascended to the throne in 1972, to adopt a constitution and allow a multiparty democracy in Nepal.One of the parties that decided to enter the local political fray, the Maoist Party, started violently trying to shift the country in another direction, replacing its parliamentary system with a people’s republic, similar to what was happening in China and the Soviet Union. This sparked a civil war that led to a whole lot of deaths, including those of the King and Crown Prince. The now-dead king’s brother stepped in, gave himself a bunch of new powers, and then tried to stomp the Maoist Party into submission.But there was a peaceful democratic revolution in the country in 2006, at which point the Maoists put down their arms and became a normal, nonviolent political party. Nepal then became a secular state, after being a Hindu kingdom for most of their modern history, and a few years later became a federal republic. It took a little while, and there was quite a bit of tumult in the meantime, but eventually, in 2015, the Nepalese government got a new constitution that divided the country into seven provinces and made Nepal a federal democratic republic.What I’d like to talk about today is what has happened in the past decade in Nepal, and how those happenings led to a recent, seemingly pretty successful, series of protests.—In early 2025, from March through early June, a series of protests were held across Nepal by pro-monarchy citizens and the local pro-monarchy party, initially in response to the former King’s visit, but later to basically just show discontentment with the current government.These protests were at least partly politically motivated, in the sense of being planned and fanned into larger conflagrations by that pro-monarchy party—not truly grassroots sort of thing—but they grew and grew, partly on the strength of opposition to the police response to earlier protests.That same distaste carried through the year, into September of 2025, when the Nepalese government announced a ban on 26 social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Youtube, because the companies behind these platforms ostensibly failed to register under the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology’s new rules that required, among other things, they have local liaisons that the government could meet with in person, and complain to if a given network failed to remove something they didn’t like quickly enough.The general sense about that ban is that while this failure to properly register was used as justification for shutting down these networks, which are incredibly popular in the country, the real reason the government wanted to shut them down at that moment was that a trend had emerged online in which the rich and powerful in the country, and especially their children, many of whom have become online influencers, were being criticized for their immense opulence and for bragging about their families’ vast wealth, while everyone else was comparably suffering.This became known as the Nepobaby or Nepo Kid trend, hashtag Nepobaby, which was a tag borrowed ...
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    13 分
  • GENIUS Act

    GENIUS Act
    2025/09/16
    This week we talk about stablecoins, crypto assets, and conflicts of interest.We also discuss the crypto industry, political contributions, and regulatory guardrails.Recommended Book: Throne of Glass by Sarah J. MaasTranscriptA cryptocoin is a unit of cryptocurrency. A cryptocurrency is a type of digital currency that uses some kind of non-central means of managing its ledger—keeping track of who has how much of it, basically.There have been other types of digital currency over the years, but cryptocurrencies often rely on the blockchain or a similarly distributed means of keeping tabs on who has what. A blockchain is a database, often public, of users and a list of those users’ assets that’s distributed between users, and it makes use of some kind of consensus mechanism to determine who actually owns what.Some cryptocurrencies ebb and flow in value, and are thus traded more like a stock or other type of non-fixed, finite asset. Bitcoin, for instance, is often treated like gold or high-growth stocks. NFTs, similarly, create a sort of artificial scarcity, producing unique digital goods by putting their ownership on a blockchain or other proof-of-ownership system.Stablecoins are also cryptocurrencies, but instead of floating, their value growing and dropping based on the interest of would-be buyers, they are meant to maintain a steady value—to be stable, like a national currency.In order to achieve this, the folks who maintain stablecoins often use reserve assets to prop up their value. So if you produce a new stablecoin and want to issue a million of them, each worth one US dollar, you might accumulate a million actual US dollars, put those in a bank account, show everybody the number of dollars in that bank account, and then it’s pretty easy to argue that those stablecoins are each worth a dollar—each coin is a stand-in for one of the dollars in the bank.In a lot of cases, the people issuing these coins aim for this approach, but instead of doing a direct one-for-one, dollar for coin system, they’ll issue a million coins that are meant to be worth a dollar apiece, and they’ll put one-hundred-thousand dollars in a bank account, and the other 900,000 will be made up of bitcoin and stocks and other sorts of things that they can argue are worth at least that much.As of mid-2025, about $255 billion worth of stablecoins have been issued, and about 99% of them have been pegged to the US dollar; Tether’s USDT, Binance’s BUSD, and Circle’s USDC are all tethered to the USD, for instance, though other currencies are also used as peg values, including offerings by Tether and Circle that are pegged to the Euro.Stablecoins that are completely or mostly fiat-backed, which means they have a dollar for each coin issued in the bank somewhere, or close to that, tend to be on average more stable than commodity or crypto-backed stablecoins, which rely mostly or entirely on things like bitcoin or gold tucked away somewhere to justify their value. Which makes sense, as while you can argue, hey look, I have a million dollars worth of gold, and I’m issuing a million coins, each worth a dollar, that asset’s value can change day-to-day, and that can make the value of those coins precarious, at least compared to fiat-backed alternatives.Because stablecoins are not meant to change in value, they’re not useful as sub-ins for stocks or other sorts of interest-generating bets, like bitcoin. Instead, they’re primarily used by folks who want to trade cryptoassets for other sorts of cryptoassets, for those who want to avoid paying taxes, or want to otherwise hide their wealth, and for those who want to transfer money in such a way that they can avoid government sanctions and/or tariffs on those sorts of transfers.What I’d like to talk about today is a new US federal law, the GENIUS Act, which was heavily pushed by the crypto industry, and which looks likely to make stablecoins a lot more popular, for better and for worse.—The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act, or GENIUS Act, was introduced in the Senate by a Republican senator from Tennessee in May of 2025, was passed in June with a bipartisan vote of 68-30—the majority of Republicans and about half of Democratic senators voting in favor of it—and after the House passed it a month later, President Trump signed it into law on July 18.Again, this legislation was heavily pushed by the crypto industry, which generously funded a lot of politicians, mostly Republican, but on both sides of the aisle, in recent years, as it serves folks who want a broader reach for existing stablecoins, and who want to see more stablecoins emerge and flourish, as part of a larger and richer overall crypto industries.Folks who are against this Act, and other laws like it that have been proposed in recent years, contend that while it’s a good idea to have some kind of regulation in place for the crypto industry, this approach isn’t the ...
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    14 分
  • Salt Typhoon

    Salt Typhoon
    2025/09/09
    This week we talk about cyberespionage, China, and asymmetrical leverage.We also discuss political firings, hardware infiltration, and Five Eyes.Recommended Book: The Fourth Turning Is Here by Neil HoweTranscriptIn the year 2000, then-General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Jiang Zemin (jong ZEM-in), approved a plan to develop so-called “cyber coercive capabilities”—the infrastructure for offensive hacking—partly as a consequence of aggressive actions by the US, which among other things had recently bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade as part of the NATO campaign in Yugoslavia.The US was a nuclear power with immense military capabilities that far outshone those of China, and the idea was that the Chinese government needed some kind of asymmetrical means of achieving leverage against the US and its allies to counter that. Personal tech and the internet were still relatively young in 2000—the first iPhone wouldn’t be released for another seven years, for context—but there was enough going on in the cyber-intelligence world that it seemed like a good point of leverage to aim for.The early 2000s Chairman of the CCP, Hu Jintao, backed this ambition, citing the burgeoning threat of instability-inducing online variables, like those that sparked the color revolutions across Europe and Asia, and attack strategies similar to Israel’s Stuxnet cyberattack on Iran as justification, though China’s growing economic dependence on its technological know-how was also part of the equation; it could evolve its capacity in this space relatively quickly, and it had valuable stuff that was targetable by foreign cyberattacks, so it was probably a good idea to increase their defenses, while also increasing their ability to hit foreign targets in this way—that was the logic here.The next CCP Chairman, Xi Jinping, doubled-down on this effort, saying that in the cyber world, everyone else was using air strikes and China was still using swords and spears, so they needed to up their game substantially and rapidly.That ambition seems to have been realized: though China is still reportedly regularly infiltrated by foreign entities like the US’s CIA, China’s cybersecurity firms and state-affiliated hacker groups have become serious players on the international stage, pulling off incredibly complex hacks of foreign governments and infrastructure, including a campaign called Volt Typhoon, which seems to have started sometime in or before 2021, but which wasn’t discovered by US entities until 2024. This campaign saw Chinese hackers infiltrating all sorts of US agencies and infrastructure, initially using malware, and then entwining themselves with the operating systems used by their targets, quietly syphoning off data, credentials, and other useful bits of information, slowly but surely becoming even more interwoven with the fabric of these systems, and doing so stealthily in order to remain undetected for years.This effort allowed hackers to glean information about the US’s defenses in the continental US and in Guam, while also helping them breach public infrastructure, like Singapore’s telecommunications company, Singtel. It’s been suggested that, as with many Chinese cyberattacks, this incursion was a long-game play, meant to give the Chinese government the option of both using private data about private US citizens, soldiers, and people in government for manipulation or blackmail purposes, or to shut down important infrastructure, like communications channels or electrical grids, in the event of a future military conflict.What I’d like to talk about today is another, even bigger and reportedly more successful long-term hack by the Chinese government, and one that might be even more disruptive, should there ever be a military conflict between China and one of the impacted governments, or their allies.—Salt Typhoon is the name that’s been given to a so-called '“advanced persistent threat actor,” which is a formal way of saying hacker or hacker group, by Microsoft, which plays a big role in the cybersecurity world, especially at this scale, a scale involving not just independent hackers, but government-level cyberespionage groups.This group is generally understood to be run out of the Chinese Ministry of State Security, or MSS, and though it’s not usually possible to say something like that for certain, hence the “generally understood” component of that statement, often everyone kind of knows who’s doing what, but it’s imprudent to say so with 100% certainty, as cyberespionage, like many other sorts of spy stuff, is meant to be a gray area where governments can knock each other around without leading to a shooting war. If anyone were to say with absolute certainty, yes, China is hacking us, and it’s definitely the government, and they’re doing a really good job of it, stealing all our stuff and putting us at risk, that would either require the targeted government to ...
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