Gold was on a tear in August. People, investors, and central banks around the world were buying more and more, in large part because it’s seen as a stable alternative to the dollar, or to any currency. But…why? Why gold? What makes it so special? Friend of the show Jacob Goldstein wrote a book called Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing, and he explains the real, physical reasons why we love gold so much, and the long history of our collective obsession.

Further Reading

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing, by Jacob Goldstein

ThePollenNation.com

America Is Having A Fiscal Midlife Crisis

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If you live in the worlds of financial markets and economics, sometimes it can be hard to remember that not all of life can be neatly packaged into data points and lists of pros and cons. And Nobel-Prize-winning-economist and Stanford professor Al Roth is pretty convincing that markets are Good, and that, if you think it through, we *should* allow some kind of market in the trade of *some* human organs. But across the Stanford campus, philosopher Debra Satz says those frameworks are missing things, important things. She wrote a book that suggests that some things simply should not be for sale. That book is called Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale. We needed remedial help remembering why some things should not be for sale. What things, exactly? And why?

Further Reading

Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets, by Debra Satz

Organs, Sex Work, and Drugs: A Nobel Economist on Why Banning Things Can Backfire, Mary in America

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AI is creating unfathomable wealth for a handful of people, upending labor markets, and jacking up electricity bills for the rest of us. But somehow we have to figure out how to still be a society. We’ve done it before – AI is just the latest "General Purpose Technology" we have to adapt to. Many of the vectors we worry about here are even more pronounced abroad – visible inequality, inconsistent water and energy, and large populations of young people facing increasingly dire job prospects. Rohit Lamba, an economist at Cornell, studies AI’s spread around the world and especially in India. He offers a few ways to think about the big questions so this disruption can be less painful than past ones.

Further Reading:

Breaking the Mold: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity, by Rohit Lamba and Raghuram G Rajan

Barron’s: Why India Is Becoming a Data-Center Hub, Whether Communities Like It or Not

World Bank: AI Offers Lifeline to Developing Economies in an Era of Weak Growth

FT: The AI threat to India’s IT jobs machine

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At the end of July, you may have heard the sound of a hedge fund blowing up. Situational Awareness, a fund focused on the new AI world, had a sudden firesale of its holdings. It seemed like an AI bubble barometer—a way to tell whether the markets have gone too far. Amelia Pollard, investment correspondent at the Financial Times, has been breaking stories on the drama every step of the way. And she says this hedge-fund-implosion was weird and distinct from its hedge-fund-implosion peers and precedents in a few revealing ways. One big example: after it crashed, Situational Awareness didn’t go away. In fact, it’s kind of doing well. Have we learned how to bubble better? Or are we just postponing future pain?

Representatives for Citadel declined to comment.

This episode was fact checked by Francis Carr.

Further reading:

How Leopold Aschenbrenner, the ‘golden child’ of the AI trade, was laid low (gift link)

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Making educational content for kids is fun, but also really hard to do well. Kids are not an ideal audience: they are prone to wandering away, getting distracted, not remembering the plot. Scott Cameron is the head of content & IP strategy at Sesame Workshop, which makes the beloved and long running show Sesame Street. We were curious what makes kid’s content good, what it can achieve, and what Sesame’s history can tell us about how we live today.

Further Watching:

Andrew Garfield and Elmo Explain Grief - Sesame Workshop

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Jae Woo Lee loves coding. To him, it’s an art form, like poetry. He’s a legendary professor of computer science at Columbia, where he teaches advanced programming to hundreds of students a year. Which means he’s on the front lines of the war between AI and education. And what he is seeing…is not exactly heartening. He tells us why coding by hand is still an art worth learning, why it’s still important to do things the hard way, and what we lose when we don’t.

Further Reading

"The Mind Behind the Infamous Advanced Programming: Jae Woo Lee", The Columbia Spectator

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The US Secretary of State Marco Rubio just announced his intention to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court “brick by brick.” Which raised some important questions. Like, what IS the ICC, actually? Where did it come from, and what power does it have? Why does the US want to dismantle it, and is that even possible? We sit down with Maria Elena Vignoli, a lawyer at Human Rights Watch who calls herself a “constructive critic” of the Court. She walks us through the Court’s history, its mission, and its fragile future.

“The United States does not recognize the authority of international bureaucrats an ocean away who seek to upend America’s 250-year history of self-governance and impose an illegitimate legal order on our sovereign nation,” says State Department Spokesperson Tommy Pigott. “America’s sovereignty is and always will be non-negotiable. A wide range of options are available to ensure the ICC is completely and utterly incapable of threatening the U.S. and our people. No diplomatic option will be off-limits in the campaign to dismantle the threat posed by the ICC to Americans.”

This episode was fact checked by Francis Carr.

Further reading:

State Department Launches Campaign to Dismantle International Criminal Court’s Threat to American Sovereignty

Why does the US want to ‘dismantle’ the international criminal court? By Kenneth Roth

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Martha Gimbel, economist and cofounder of the Yale Budget Lab, is a normal, cool person, but she has the same disease as me: she’s obsessed with the US debt. How much our government has borrowed. Like me, she thinks constantly about what the potential consequences of all that borrowing might be. So what happens when we’ve borrowed too much? How will we know if it’s happened? Is it already too much? How will my life change once we are beyond too much?

Further Reading

"Americans Are Already Paying Dearly for the National Debt", The Atlantic

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