Steve Felson is a senior fellow at Carnegy's democracy, conflict, and governance program where he focuses on the intersection of technology, human rights, and global politics. He's also the author of two books, The Rise of Digital Repression: How Technology is Reshaping Power, Politics, and Resistance that came out in 2021. And then an incoming book, Bites and Bullets: Global Riberaly, Private Tech, and the New Shape of Modern Warfare, coming out next year. We wanted to get Stephen on the show today to info ...

OpenAI's brand new video generation model is insane, and I got early access to it. So, let me give you a sneaky look inside. You're met with an onboarding screen that scans your face and records your voice.This verifies to OpenAI that it's actually you while also creating your digital clone in the app. The flagship feature is called Cameo, where you can insert real people like yourself into the videos. And not only that, but you could collaborate with others on the app to also be featured in your videos.Che ...

Google Maps, for instance, made no money for years, but now there's ad revenue inside of Google Maps because it they figured out that like, oh, people are using this on a massive scale. It's providing a ton of utility. We can stick ads in there.And so Google Maps is just top offunnel adoption for Google and Ethereum like onchain sovereign identity. If the whole world's like internet citizenship standard is on Ethereum, that's just a massive top offunnel magnet to the entire world. And at the bottom of that ...

DeFi is far from perfect, not really that decentralized, not really that safe. From the perspective of a wealthy first world citizen, safe DeFi can be unattractive. But for the other 90% of the world that doesn't have the privilege of using trustworthy financial institutions under the purview of a reliable government, local banks are shady, regulation is unreliable, and confiscation is always just one bureaucrat's signature away.DeFi fixes this. We are exporting the best banking system of the world to every ...

What are banks like? What function at their core for society do banks perform? Wow, I love that that question. I have to put a plug in before I even answer it for the book that I wrote about a decade ago with Steve Haber called Fragile by Design, which is um about the modern era from the perspective of banks. that is understanding the history of the world from the perspective of something that started about 400 years ago which is the chartering of banks. So the first thing in answering your question that so ...

We also have some other Fed rate cuts that people predict are are coming. >> So it's not just the 0.25% that we got cut yesterday. There is going to be another 25 bips in October or at least is what Poly Market is predicting with an 80% probability >> that we're going to get another 25 bips cut on October 29th and another 25 bips cut on December 10th.So it's not just about getting 25 bips now. It's about the trend of we're going to get 75 bips cut by the end of the year is what the poly market people are pr ...

We got the first Fed rate cuts in almost a year. Thanks, Powell. December 2024 was the last time they did it. They cut it on the 25 basis points.So, it was pretty much as prediction markets predicted. Want to look at the the Fed fund rates over the a 10-year time horizon even longer. So, we've been up in the five range all the way from 2023 and then it sort of started to drop in the end of 2024 and then we've been hovering at this uh 4.25% range and now we're down another 25 basis points.So, it's not the 50 ...

Stable coins are the gateway drug for fintech into tokenization. The revolution will be tokenized. It's a matter of time till every asset class is a token.Payments are like the core primitive of finance. Once you get those right, then you can build everything else on top of it. That sounds like a trivial sentence.Building payments right is incredibly hard because payments are easy. Edge cases are hard. I saw the NASDAQ is now going to tokenize all stocks from 2026 on Hyperledgeru.I believe that's coming and ...

Bagelization is the second week of September. David downtember is continuing I think on the week. Actually, this is more like flat flat timber. >> Flattber. Flattember. Yeah, >> down timber is ahead of us. >> Yeah, still we've got some more days left in the month. I guess things could be this. This is why people are wondering is the bull market over? I actually saw Anom tweet this over the weekend. He was like, I'm feeling like it's over. >> Why do people even bother asking that question? I don't know. >> I ...

when we were like going through the acquisition process, I went to the Stripe offices to have lunch with John and Patrick and I like walked in and I think this maybe was like the first time I'd met John in person and the first thing he he said to me, he was like, "Can I tell you a joke. " And I was like, "Yeah, sure. " He was like, "What's the difference between a bank and Tether." And I was like, "I don't Oh, and he was like, "Well, one of them is like this big institution that holds a ton of money and you ...