Let's Know Things

This week we talk about plug-in power, renewables, and Germany.We also discuss inverters, solar arrays, and microgrids.Recommended Book: Consider This by Chuck PalahnuikTranscriptMost climate scientists and knowledgable folks in adjacent fields will tell you that, as a species, we’re way behind where we need to be if we’re going to avoid a whole lot of negative consequences caused by global climate change.We’ve blazed past a bunch of tipping points already, and while the worst-case scenarios we were worried about a decade ago are no longer likely because of the energy-generation and related changes we’ve made globally, since then, the damage caused up to this point is already doing some pretty bad things to our water cycle and other temperature-regulating systems, and that’s looking like it will get even worse over the next several decades—even if worse no longer means cataclysmic in the sense of ending all life on the planet.That said, even noting that progress has been a lot slower than most experts would prefer, progress is happening in regards to the deployment of renewable energy sources, and in the replacement and retirement of dirty, carbon- and methane-spewing sources, like coal, petroleum, and gas.As of 2026, the global share of total electricity generation, so all electricity produced by all sources for all purposes, is about 33.8% for renewables, marking the first time renewables have been used to produce more than a third of the total electricity produced, globally; that also means renewables have surpassed coal for electricity generation for the first time.While hydro and wind continue to contribute to the growth of renewables deployment and electricity generation, solar power is by far the biggest growth area for renewables right now, and solar, alone, covers 75% of total electricity demand growth in 2025—which means as countries around the world deploy more electricity generation assets to account for electricity demand growth, three-quarters of that demand is being met by solar. And this is notable because typically that kind of demand, the majority of which arises in huge, rapidly scaling countries like China and India, has up till recently been met by the dirtiest of energy production sources, coal.There’s also been a .02% reduction in fossil fuel generation, year-on-year, which is a very small number, but that level of production is massive, and there are a lot of subsidies and other mechanisms that keep fossil fuels flourishing around the world, so every little sliver of fossil fuel energy production reduction is still a pretty significant thing.Many of these renewables-related wins, in recent years, have been attributable to the large-scale installation of solar facilities, backed by massive, utility-scale battery backups, primarily in China.China is by far the largest producer of solar panels and related technologies—Chinese companies produce somewhere between 80-90% of all the key components and perform the same portion of all key manufacturing stages for the global supply chain, while also controlling the vast majority of resources necessary to manufacture solar panels. And it has been on a tear over the past decade or so, installing just a silly amount of solar infrastructure. Which is good, because China is also seeing a lot of growth in energy demand, so if they weren’t deploying that much solar, they would likely be deploying that much coal infrastructure, instead.That said, while huge solar arrays are important to renewables growth, there’s also been a recent boom in smaller-scale solar energy deployment in recent years, especially but not exclusively across Europe. And that’s what I’d like to talk about today: the emergence of so-called ‘balcony solar,’ and what it might mean for the further expansion of solar’s footprint around the world.—In 2025, Utah, which is a deeply Conservative, Republican state, became the first US state to pass a bill that makes it easier to legally install plug-in solar panel systems.As of mid-2026, about 30 states have followed suit, and even more are considering it, laws allowing for the installation of such solar technologies winding their way through legislative bodies on the back of the popularity and seeming no-downsides nature of this tech product category.Plug-in solar, also sometimes called balcony solar or garden solar, is currently most popular in Germany, which is the biggest market for this product right now, with about four million such systems installed as of 2025.To understand the popularity of this type of solar installation, it’s useful to understand that conventional solar installations have typically required a decent amount of electrical surgery to install. They’ve usually involved a large number of panels operating as an array, and that array has produced quite a lot of electricity that then has to be funneled as a direct current either back into the local grid using what amounts to two-way wiring, which makes these arrays function like any other power plant, or that electricity is converted using an inverter into an alternating current, where AC is the electrical standard, anyway, so that it can directly power a large building like a hospital or school, or be stored in a large battery facility.All of these options require a huge up front investment, and a reworking of local energy infrastructure so that solar can be incorporated. And that investment requirement, and the necessity to hire specialist electricians to get it all done, severely limits the range of this tech, because there are only so many entities that can afford it, only so many spaces that can deploy that number of panels, the number required to make that investment make sense, economically, is generally quite large, and there are only so many specialists of that kind in a given country, so the labor aspect of this is a big deal, too, these sorts of projects often severely backlogged.Plug-in solar, in contrast, is usually sold as a kit with one or two small- to medium-sized panels and a microinverter or plug-in inverter, depending on whether the end-user’s existing electrical setup uses an AC or DC current.A home owner or even a renter with a balcony or garden, or the right amount of space outside one of their windows, can buy one of these systems, hang or place the solar panel or panels in a location where they will get a decent amount of sun, and then plug them in, via the inverter, directly to their home’s outlet.The electricity generated by the panels is then shared through the building’s existing wiring to all of their outlets, and this allows the resident to use that available energy, first, only drawing energy from the local grid when there isn’t enough from the solar panels available. And all of this happens automatically—the solar energy is used if available, and if not, energy is drawn from the grid like normal.This creates a layer of essentially free, clean energy for the resident with a usually fairly small up-front cost: these plug-in solar kits can cost as little as $500, with larger systems that generate more electricity costing between $1200 and $3000; so even on the high-end, because there’s no additional installation cost, the home owner or renter setting it all up themselves, this is an investment that can easily pay for itself, usually within 2-5 years.There are caveats here, including that not all grid systems are complaint with this use-case, so would-be plug-in solar users have to check to make sure their local setup can handle this sort of application, and there are many places where this product type still isn’t legal, in some cases because of concerns about people installing it without checking to make sure their wiring and the local grid can handle it, and in some cases because of old laws that favor local energy grid companies and their business models, or which favor fossil fuel energy production.The explosion in use of this type of small solar setup, though, speaks volumes about how good a deal it is for many people, and even those who don’t live in particularly sunny areas—so places where traditional solar arrays wouldn’t make sense, economically—are finding them useful, because they still pay for themselves within some number of years, due to energy bill savings. It’s also possible to install home-scale battery systems alongside these balcony solar systems, which means even small trickles of solar energy production can add up, and can be used at night, when the sun isn’t shining at all.There are quite a few possible ramifications of this trend.At the local, household level, these sorts of systems can dampen the impact of energy price increases, due to global issues, like the gumming up of the Strait of Hormuz, and due to local issues, like the trend of energy companies increasing prices because of new data centers being added to their grid. That, in turn, can reduce the impact of certain aspects of inflation on individuals home owners and renters.Larger-scale, though, these systems also serve as a sort of deconstructed secondary energy grid.In Germany, for instance, as of late 2025, around 1.14 gigawatts of energy was being produced by balcony solar systems across the country. That’s 1.14 GW of pressure taken off of local energy grids, and that represents more resilience for these grids, too, as reduced pressure means fewer brown-outs and similar negative fluctuations. It also means people who have such systems won’t be as negatively impacted by issues that take down grids; and that means normal, brown-out like issues, but also problems related to potential cyberattacks and hacks and even physical conflicts. That kind of resiliency is what every nation hopes to have, because it makes strikes on them less damaging, and this is one way to achieve that kind of resiliency—a deconstructed network of microgrids, underpinning the macro-scale one—all at a relatively low cost.These sorts of systems are also becoming more widely available, IKEA selling several kits in many countries where they’ve been made legal, and other retailers, like Lidl and Amazon are also getting in on the action, making these kits more widely available as the trend spreads.China still controls the vast, vast majority of solar energy asset production, so there’s a chance, especially in the case of a theoretical future conflict, that they could turn off the tap on this and these types of assets would go away for a time, which would be bad if local grids come to rely on them taking some of the pressure off the local macro-grid.Those theoretical economic warfare concerns aside, though, if legalization continues to spread, plug-in solar could be one of the best and most successful methods for deploying clean energy to areas where it hasn’t been a particularly compelling sell, and where local infrastructure or politics has made such deployment unlikely or impossible up till this point.Show Noteshttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/opinion/solar-panels-balcony-backyard-plugin.htmlhttps://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/globally-86-percent-of-the-new-generating-capacity-was-renewable-in-2025/https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/soaring-solar-and-a-surge-in-hydro-push-more-coal-off-the-us-grid/https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/global-growth-in-solar-the-largest-ever-observed-for-any-source/https://www.iea.org/reports/sdg7-data-and-projections/modern-renewableshttps://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-review-2026/https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/china-solar-cell-exports-grow-73-in-2025/https://rhg.com/research/minerals-metals-and-megawatts-how-chinas-power-generation-drives-its-industrial-metals-ecosystem/https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/what-to-know-balcony-solarhttps://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/balcony-solar-taking-state-legislatures-by-stormhttps://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/balcony-panels-germany-utahhttps://www.energysage.com/news/plug-in-balcony-solar-panels/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balcony_solar_powerhttps://www.pv-tech.org/maine-passes-balcony-solar-law-virginia-and-colorado-to-follow/https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/plug-solar-power-could-be-coming-balcony-near-youhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panelhttps://www.ingka.com/newsroom/solar-energy-for-the-many-ikea-belgium-to-offer-balcony-solar-kits/ This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about mass surveillance, smart doorbells, and the Patriot Stack.We also discuss Amazon, Alexa, and the Super Bowl.Recommended Book: Red Moon by Benjamin PercyTranscriptIn 2002, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the US government created a new agency—the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, operating under the auspices of the US Department of Homeland Security, which was also formed that year for the same general reason, to defend against 9/11-style attacks in the future.As with a whole lot of what was done in the years following the 9/11 attacks, a lot of what this agency, and its larger department did could be construed as a sort of overcompensation by a government and a people who were reeling from the first real, large-scale attack within their borders from a foreign entity in a very long time. It was a horrific event, everyone felt very vulnerable and scared, and consequently the US government could do a lot of things that typically would not have had the public’s support, like rewiring how airports and flying works in the country, creating all sorts of new hurdles and imposing layers of what’s often called security theater, to make people feel safe.While the TSA was meant to handle things on the front-lines of air transportation, though, X-raying and patting-down and creating a significant new friction for everyone wanting to get on a plane, ICE was meant to address another purported issue: that of people coming into the US from elsewhere, illegally, and then sticking around long enough to cause trouble. More specifically, ICE was meant to help improve public safety by strictly enforcing at times lax immigration laws, by tracking down and expelling illegal immigrants from the country; the theory being that some would-be terrorists may have snuck into the US and might be getting ready to kill US citizens from within our own borders.There’s not a lot of evidence to support that assertion—the vast majority of terrorism that happens in the US is conducted by citizens, mostly those adhering to a far-right or other extremist ideologies. But that hasn’t moved the needle on public perception of the issue, which still predominantly leans toward stricter border controls and more assiduous moderation of non-citizens within US borders—for all sorts of reasons, not just security ones.What I’d like to talk about today is an offshoot of the war on terror and this vigilance about immigrants in the US, and how during the second Trump administration, tech companies have been entangling themselves with immigration-enforcement agencies like ICE to create sophisticated surveillance networks.—In mid-July of 2025, the US Department of Defense signed one of its largest contracts in its history with a tech company called Palantir Technologies. Palantir was founded and is run by billionaire Peter Thiel, who among other things is generally considered to be the reason JD Vance was chosen to be Trump’s second-term Vice President. He’s also generally considered to be one of, if not the main figure behind the so-called Patriot Tech movement, which consists of companies like SpaceX, Anduril, and OpenAI, all of which are connected by a web of funding arms and people who have cross-pollinated between major US tech companies and US agencies, in many cases stepping into government positions that put them in charge of the regulatory bodies that set the rules for the industries in which they worked.As a consequence of this setup and this cross-pollination, the US government now has a bunch of contracts with these entities, which has been good for the companies’ bottom lines and led to reduced government regulations, and in exchange the companies are increasingly cozy with the government and its many agencies, toeing the line more than they would have previously, and offering a lot more cooperation and collaboration with the government, as well.This is especially true when it comes to data collection and surveillance, and a great deal of that sort of information and media is funneled into entities like Palantir, which aggregate and crunch it for meaning, and then send predictions and assumptions, and make services like facial-recognition technologies predicated on their vast database, available to police and ICE agents, among others such entities.There has been increasingly stiff pushback against this melding of the tech world with the government—which has always been there to some degree, but which has become even more entwined than usual, of late—and that pushback is international, even long-time allies like Canada and the EU making moves to develop their own replacements for Amazon and Google and OpenAI due to these issues, and the heightened unpredictability and chaos of the US in recent years, but it’s also evident within the US, due in part to Trump’s moves while in office, but also the on-the-ground realities in places like Minneapolis, where ICE agents have been brutalizing and blackbagging people, sometimes illegal immigrants, sometimes US citizens, usually non-white US citizens, and the ICE agents are being rewarded, getting bonuses, for beating up and kidnapping and in some cases murdering people, whether or not any of these people are actually criminals—and it’s illegal to do that kind of thing even if they are criminals, by the way.All of which sets the scene for what happened following the Super Bowl, this year.Ring is a home security and smart home device company that is best known for its line of smart doorbells, but which also makes all sorts of security cameras and other alarm system devices.Even though smart doorbells, complete with cameras and other sorts of functionality, existed before Ring, this company basically created the smart doorbell industry as it exists today back in 2014, when it received a round of equity investment and changed its named from Doorbot to Ring. It was bought by Amazon four years later, in 2018, for a billion dollars.One of Ring’s premier features is related to its camera: you can use your phone or other smart home device to see who’s at your door when they ring the bell, but it can also be set to record when it detects movement, which makes it easy to check and see who stole your Amazon package from your porch when you weren’t at home, for instance, and resultingly Ring door camera footage has become fundamental to reporting, and on occasion pursuing, some types of crime.As a direct result of that utility, Ring introduced its Neighbors service in mid-2018, this service serving as a sort of social network that allows Ring device users to discuss local issues, especially those related to safety and security, anonymously, while also allowing them to share photos and videos taken by their devices. This service also created relationships with local law enforcement, and allowed police to jump onto the network and request footage from Ring customers, if they thought these doorbell cams might have photos or video of someone escaping with a stolen car, for instance, which might then help the police catch that crook.It’s generally assumed that Amazon probably bought Ring, at least in part, to entrench itself as the lord of the internet of things world, as it launched its Amazon Sidewalk platform in 2020, which allowed all Amazon devices, including Ring devices, to share a wireless mesh network, all of them communicating with each other and all using Amazon’s Alexa as an interface.In 2023, Ring was sued by the FTC for $5.8 million because it allowed its employees and contractors to access private videos by failing to have basic security and privacy features in place—so not only could any Ring employee view their customer’s private video feeds, hackers could easily access all this media and data, as well. Just one example surfaced in that lawsuit shows that a Ring employee viewed thousands of video recordings of at least 81 different female users over the course of a few months in 2017.So Amazon was building a surveillance network that worked really well, in the sense that it was predicated on popular, at times quite useful devices that people seemed to love, but which was also quite leaky, giving all sorts of people access to these supposedly private feeds, and it was shared with law enforcement via that social network. It’s also been alleged that Ring (and Amazon) have used users’ footage without further permission for things like facial recognition and AI training. Their partnership with police agencies also allegedly created incentives for the police to encourage citizens to buy Ring cams and other security devices for their homes, creating perverse incentives. And again, these devices connect wirelessly to other internet of things devices, expanding their reach and the potential for abuse of collected user data.In late 2025, Ring announced a new partnership with Flock Safety, a company that’s best known for its security offerings, including automated license plate readers and gunshot detector systems.These are mass surveillance tools used by some governments and law enforcement entities, and they use cameras and microphones to capture license plates, people’s faces, and sounds that might be gunfire and aggregate that data to be used by police, neighborhood associations, and in some cases private property owners.This sort of technology is incredibly useful to companies like Palantir, which again, aggregates and crunches it, on scale, and then shares that information with police, ICE, and other such agencies.These tools can sometimes help flag areas where guns are being fired or where crimes are being committed, but they’re also imperfect and at times biased against some groups of people and areas, and some data show that not only is crime not reduced by the presence of these systems, but there’s a fair bit of evidence that this data often falls into the hands of hackers or is used by employees for nefarious, stalkery purposes, as was the case with Ring’s cameras. So most civil liberties groups, like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are vehemently against them, but governments like the second Trump administration like them, because they create a surveillance mesh they can tap into and use for, for instance, figuring out where to deploy ICE agents, or, in theory at least, spying on your political enemies or ex-spouses for abuse or blackmail purposes.Ring’s late-2025 announcement wasn’t widely reported, but in early 2026 the company bought a Super Bowl ad to announce a new feature called Search Party, enabled by their partnership with Flock.The ad showed a neighborhood coming together to find a lost dog, using the web of doorbell cameras on all the homes in the area to track the dog and figure out where it went—all the cameras activated at once to create a surveillance mesh of live footage.This ad landed with a resounding thud,, as to many people it felt more menacing than heartwarming, the new feature overtly raising the potential that government agencies, including ICE, could tap into it to surveil and track their neighbors. The response was so negative that Ring quickly issued a statement saying that it was no longer moving forward with its Flock partnership, attempting to reassure its customers that “integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever send to Flock Safety.”This result is notable in part because it’s a rare instance of a major tech company backtracking on a major feature decision due to public backlash, but also because it suggests backlash against ICE is reverberating through other aspects of life and interconnected industries.Ring device users mostly buy these things for their surveillance capabilities, but the increasing, and increasingly hostile and violent acts committed by members of ICE seem to have nudged the conversation so that folks are more worried about these agents than about the porch pirates and other criminals that these devices and this partnership could ostensibly help them identify.It’s too early to say what this might mean for the burgeoning patriot stack of tech companies and government agencies, but it does suggest there are limits to what people will put up with, even when those in charge are adhering to a playbook that has typically worked well for them, in the past, and the devices and services they’re using to build their surveillance network are otherwise beloved by those who use them.Show Noteshttps://restofworld.org/2026/big-tech-backlash-alternatives-upscrolled/https://europeancorrespondent.com/en/r/trumps-power-switchhttps://www.authoritarian-stack.info/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/realestate/smart-home-cameras-nest-ring-privacy.htmlhttps://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/platforms-bend-over-backward-to-help-dhs-censor-ice-critics-advocates-say/https://www.theverge.com/report/879320/ring-flock-partnership-breakup-does-not-fix-problemshttps://www.theverge.com/news/878447/ring-flock-partnership-canceledhttps://www.404media.co/with-ring-american-consumers-built-a-surveillance-dragnet/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcementhttps://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/children-of-color-projected-to-be-majority-of-u-s-youth-this-yearhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(company)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_Safetyhttps://www.wired.com/story/ice-expansion-across-us-at-heres-where-its-going-next/https://www.wired.com/story/social-security-administration-appointment-details-ice/https://www.wired.com/story/security-news-this-week-ring-kills-flock-safety-deal-after-super-bowl-ad-uproar/https://www.wired.com/story/ice-crashing-us-court-system-minnesota/https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-ceo-alex-karp-employee-questions-on-ice/https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-ice-forum-where-agents-complain-about-their-jobs/ This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about the European Union, India, and tariffs.We also discuss trade barriers, free trade, and dumping.Recommended Book: The Kill Chain by Christian BroseTranscriptA free trade agreement, sometimes called a free trade treaty, is a law that reduces the cost and regulatory burden of trading between two or more states.There are many theories as to the ideal way to do international trade, with some economists and politicians positing that complete free and open trade is the way to go, because it allows goods and services to cross borders completely unencumbered, which in turn allows businesses in different countries to really lean into whatever they’re good at, selling their cars to countries that are less good at making cars, while that recipient country produces soy beans or computer chips or whatever they’re good at making, and sending those in the other direction, likewise unburdened by stiff tariffs or regulatory hurdles. Each country can thus produce the best product cheapest and sell it to the market where their products are in high-demand, while they, in turn, benefit from the same when it comes to other products and services.This theory leans on the idea that everyone is better off when everyone does what they’re best at, rather than trying to do everything—specialization. But those who oppose this conception of international trade argue that this creates and reinforces asymmetries between different nations and businesses: a country that’s really good at producing soybeans may be at a substantial disadvantage if the country that makes cars ever decides to go to war, because they won’t have the existing infrastructure to build tanks or drones or whatever else, while the country that specializes in computer chips might hold all the cards when it comes to generating economic pressure against its enemies or would-be enemies, because such chips are in everything these days, from military hardware to kitchen appliances.This also creates potential frailties for countries that specialize in, say, buggy whips, only to have a new technology like the automobile come around and put a significant chunk of their total economy out of business.This theory may also leave local businesses that don’t lean into a regional strength kind of in the lurch. If a country with a decent-sized automobile industry decides leaves their borders completely open to international competition, there’s a chance that could light a fire under those local producers, forcing them to become more competitive, but there’s also a chance it could collapse the market for local offerings—their cars might no longer be desirable, because the international stuff flooding across the borders from a nation that has heavily prioritized making cars are just so much better and cheaper, whether naturally or artificially, because of subsidies by that foreign government meant to help them take out international competition.This is why most nations have all sorts of tariffs, regulations, and other trade barriers erected between them and their trading partners, and why those trade barriers are ultra-specific, different for every single possible trade partner. The goal is to make international options less appealing by making them more expensive, or making it trickier for foreign competition to smoothly and quickly get their products on your shelves, while still making those things available in a volume that aligns with local consumer demands. And then ideally making it easier and cheaper for your stuff to get on their shelves.The negotiation of all this is massively complicated because Country A might want to favor their soybean farmers, who are an important voting bloc, and Country B might want to do the same for their car industry, because tax income from that industry is vital, and these two governments will thus do what they can to ensure their favored local industries and businesses have the biggest leg-up possible in as many foreign markets as possible, without giving away so much to their trade partners that they create worse situations for other industries and businesses (and the people who run them) on the home-front, as a consequence.What I’d like to talk about today is a recent, massive and potentially quite vital trade deal that was struck in early 2026, and what it might mean for global trade.—At the tail-end of January 2026, the European Commission announced that they had struck what they called “the mother of all deals” with India, this deal the culmination of two decades worth of negotiation, its tenets impacting about 2 billion people and around a quarter of the world’s total GDP.The agreement, as is the case with most such agreements, is fairly complex. But in essence it reduces or eliminates tariffs on 96.6% of all EU goods exported to India, which means about 4 billion euros of annual duties that would have otherwise been paid on European products in India will disappear—a savings for Indian consumers, and a boon for European producers whose products will now be cheaper in India.This is expected to be especially beneficial for European automakers like Volkswagen, Renault, and BMW, which have long been weighed down by a 110% tariff in India; that tariff will be reduced to as little as 10% on the first 250,000 vehicles sold, following this agreement. Lower priced vehicles will still face higher tariffs, to help protect India’s local carmakers, but electric vehicles will benefit from a five-year grace period, as India has been focusing on allowing as many cheap, renewable energy assets and infrastructure into the country as possible, regardless of where they come from.Tariffs on machinery, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals coming from the EU will be almost entirely eliminated, down from tariff rates of 44, 22, and 11%, respectively. Wine, which has long been tariffed at a rate of 150%, will be cut to between 20-30% for many varieties, and spirits from the EU coming into India will see 150% tariffs cut to 40%.On the other side of this deal, the EU will also open its market to Indian goods, reducing tariffs on about 99.5% of all such goods, including seafood, textiles, gems and jewelry, leather goods, plastic products, and toys. Several of these categories, like Indian seafood, textile-making, and other labor-intensive industries, have had a rough time of late, because of high US tariffs enforced by President Trump’s second administration, so this is being seen as a significant win for them in particular.Interestingly, while the reduction in trade barriers is substantial here, and the number of people and industries, and amount of money that’s involved is massive, this deal doesn’t include, and in some cases explicitly excludes, any agreements related to labor rights, climate commitment, or environmental standards.This means that while the European Union has thus far been pretty strict in terms of ensuring incoming products align with their policies and values regarding things like carbon emissions and ensuring goods aren’t produced by people laboring in slave-like conditions, this deal falls short of such enforcements, allowing India to operate with relative impunity, with regards to those issues, at least, and still sell with dramatically reduced barriers, on the European market. That’s a big deal, and is perhaps the biggest indicator of just how badly the EU wanted to make this deal work.The EU was also able to keep significant protections in place for important local sectors like beef and chicken, dairy, rice, and sugar—all industries in which India would have liked to compete in the EU, but which, because of those maintained barriers, they practically can’t. That would likely have been a feverishly negotiated topic, and it’s likely an indicator of how much India wanted this to work, too.On that note, both India and the EU were apparently especially interested in making this multi-decade deal work, now, because of increasing pressure from China on one side and the US on the other.China has been rerouting many of its cheap products that would have previously gone to the US market, elsewhere, engaging in what’s often called ‘dumping’ which slowly but surely puts businesses that produce comparable products at a profit in those local target markets out of business, at which point these Chinese companies can then ratchet up their prices and profits, operating without real competition.The EU and India have both been targeted by Chinese companies taking this approach, because they’re still producing at a feverish pace and because of US tariffs and the general unpredictability and irregularity of US policy overall under the second Trump administration, they’ve been firing that cheap product cannon more intensely at other large markets, instead—and India and the EU are the next two big markets in line right now, after the US and China.On the US side of things, those same tariffs have been hurting companies in both the EU and India that would otherwise been shipping their goods to the rich and spendy US market, and in many cases these tariffs have been fine-tuned to hurt important local industries as much as possible, because that’s one of Trump’s main negotiating tactics: lead with pain and then negotiate to take some of the pain away.This deal, then, serves multiple purposes in that it creates a valuable, newly polished trade relationship between a rich and powerful existing bloc and the newly most-populous country on the planet, which is also rapidly expanding economically and geopolitically.One last point to note, here, though, is that the European Union has been trying to create these sorts of mutually beneficial deals with non-US partners for a while, now, and the two most recent wins, trade deals with a South American trade bloc and with Indonesia, in early January 2026 and in September of 2025, respectively, have borne mixed results.The deal with Indonesia seems to be moving forward apace, and while it’s a heck of a lot smaller than the India deal, only worth about 27 billion euros, that’s still important, as Indonesia is increasingly important, both economically and geopolitically, especially in a Southeast Asia that’s slowly reinforcing itself against China’s economically and potentially militarily expansionist tendencies.The deal with that South American bloc, however, was referred to the EU Court of Justice in mid-January for legal review due to its lack of alignment with other EU treaties, and that could delay or prevent its ratification.This new mother of all deals with India could likewise face holdups, or could fizzle before being implemented—though most analysts who are keeping eyes on this are seeing it not just as an economic agreement, but a gesture of solidarity at a moment in which China and the US are signaling their intent to carve up the world into hemispheric hegemonies, when those who might otherwise be forced into subordinate positions are scrambling to figure out who they can team up with and create counter-balancing forces capable of standing up against current and future aggression and coercion.There’s a chance that even if politics and propriety threaten to get in the way, then, India and the EU will figure out a way to work together, on this and potentially other matters of global import, as well.Show Noteshttps://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/27/eu-and-india-sign-free-trade-agreementhttps://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/eu-india-trade-deal-leaves-blocs-carbon-border-tariff-intact-2026-01-27/https://archive.is/20260127162349/https://www.ft.com/content/b03b1344-7e92-4d0d-b85e-5ed92fc8f550https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade_agreementhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_barrierhttps://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_184https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/document/print/en/ip_26_184/IP_26_184_EN.pdfhttps://www.ndtv.com/world-news/how-indias-mother-of-all-deals-with-eu-wipes-out-pakistans-trade-advantage-10921011https://theconversation.com/what-the-mother-of-all-deals-between-india-and-the-eu-means-for-global-trade-274515https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/economic-impact-us-tariff-hikes-significance-trade-diversion-effectshttps://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20260116IPR32450/eu-mercosur-meps-demand-a-legal-opinion-on-its-conformity-with-the-eu-treatieshttps://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/1/27/mother-of-all-deals-how-india-eu-trade-deal-creates-27-trillion-markethttps://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/27/trump-reaction-eu-india-trade-deal-fta.htmlhttps://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/inflection-points/the-mother-of-all-trade-deals-in-the-time-of-trump/https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/foreign-trade/with-mother-of-all-deals-in-bag-minister-piyush-goyal-says-mother-will-be-compassionate-fair-to-all-28-children/articleshow/127821015.cmshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93European_Union_Free_Trade_Agreementhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93European_Union_relations 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This week we talk about war, inflation, and currency devaluation.We also discuss tyrants, police violence, and social media threats.Recommended Book: Post-Growth Living by Kate SoperTranscriptBack in mid-June of 2025, a shooting war erupted between Iran and Israel, with Israeli military forces launching attacks against multiple Iranian military sites, alongside sites associated with its nuclear program and against individual Iranian military leaders.Iran responded to these strikes, which left a lot of infrastructural damage and several military leaders assassinated, with large waves of missiles and drones against both Israeli and allied military targets, and soon after, later the same month, both sides agreed on a ceasefire and that was that.Following that blip of a war, though, Iran’s economy suffered greatly. It already wasn’t doing well, in part due to the crippling sanctions enforced by the US government for years, but also because of persistent mismanagement by Iran’s ruling regime, and the resultant deterioration of local infrastructure, both physical and bureaucratic.Millions of people fled Iranian urban centers during the war with Israel, and while most of them returned when the ceasefire was brokered, the pace of life and other fundaments of these cities never got back up to where they were, before, as there have been fairly consistent blackouts that have kept people from being able to function as normal, and these outages have also kept businesses from getting back on their feet. That, in turn, has resulted in closures and firings and an overall reduction in economic activity.The general hamhandedness of the government has amplified these issues, and the countless other issues of trying to exist within a country that is being so persistently targeted—both in the sense of those crushing sanctions from the US, but also in the sense of being periodically struck by Israel—has dramatically increased uncertainty throughout Iran these past several years.Even before that brief war, Iran was already on the backfoot, having suffered the loss of their local proxies, including the Assad regime in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in the Gaza Strip—all of which have been either severely weakened by Israel in recent years, or functionally wiped out—and that in turn has more directly exposed them to meddling and attacks from their key opposition, which includes the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.That new vulnerability has put the Iranian government on high-alert, and the compounding effects of all that infrastructural damage, mismanagement, and the need to reallocate more resources to defense has left the country suffering very high levels of inflation, a severely devalued currency, regular blackouts, mass unemployment, a water shortage, and long-time repression from a government that is in many ways more paranoid and flailing than in any time in recent memory.What I’d like to talk about today is a recent wave of protests across Iran and why the US government is apparently considering taking action to support protestors against the Iranian government.—Iran has long suffered all sorts of issues, including regular efforts by ethnic secessionists to pull it apart into pieces they periodically occupy and want to govern, themselves, and concerns from citizens that the government spends a whole lot of their time and the nation’s resources enriching themselves, oppressing the citizenry, funding what seems to be a pointless nuclear program, and prioritizing their offensive efforts against Israel and their other regional enemies, often by arming and funding those aforementioned, now somewhat defunct proxy militias and militaries.On top of all that, as of October 2025, inflation in Iran had surged to 48.6% and the Iranian currency, the rial, dropped in value to 1.45 million per dollar. The government tried to artificially boost the value of the rial to 1.38 million per dollar in early January of 2026, but it dropped further, to 1.5 million per dollar a few days later, hitting a record low. This combined with that wild inflation rate, made the basic fundamentals of life, food, electricity, and so on, unaffordable, even for those who still had jobs, which was an ever-shrinking portion of the population.For context, the drop of the rial to a value of 1.38 million per dollar, the boosted value, represented a loss of about 40% of the rial’s value since June of 2025, just before that war with Israel, which is a staggering loss, as that means folk’s life savings lost that much in about half a year.When currency values and inflation hit that level of volatility, doing business becomes difficult. It often makes more sense to close up shop than to try to keep the doors open, because you don’t know if the price you charge for your product or service will make you a profit or not: there’s a chance you’ll sell things at a loss, because the value of the money you receive and the cost of goods you require, both to survive and to keep your business functioning, will change before the day ends, or before the sale can be completed.Iran’s economic crisis has further exploded in the past few weeks, then, because all those issues have compounded and spiraled to the point that simply selling things and buying things have become too risky for many people and entities, and that means folks are having even more trouble getting food and keeping the lights on than before; which becomes a real survival issue, on top of the regular crackdowns and abuses by the government that they’ve suffered in various ways for decades.In 2022, those abuses and limits on personal rights led to large protests that were catalyzed by the death of a 22-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini, who was in police custody for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. Those 2022 protests were historically large—the biggest in the country, by some estimates at least, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.On December 28 2025, a group of shopkeepers in Iran’s capital city, Tehran, went on strike, closing their shops in protest against what’s been happening with Iran’s economy; again, it’s basically impossible to safely do business in a country with that much inflation and currency devaluation happening.Other shopkeepers followed suit, and large protests formed around these closed shops. Those protests flooded social media platforms in short order, protestors shouting slogans that indicated they were pissed off about all the economic mismanagement in the country, and then eventually that led to anti-government slogans being shouted, as well.Things remained peaceful at these protests, at first, and they expanded across the country within the next few days, shops closing and people filling the streets.By the fourth day, police had started to use live ammunition and tear gas against protestors, some of the protestors were killed, and things spiraled from there.By December 31, the government ordered a total, nationwide business shutdown, to try to get ahead of these protests, which again tended to revolve around the shutdown of businesses in protest—the government said they were making this call because of cold weather, but the writing was kind of on the wall at this point that they were scrambling to make it look like businesses were shutting down because they said so, not in protest of the government.The government also announced that they would start cracking down on protestors, hard, and on the first day of 2026, things escalated further, police using even more force against those who gathered, which of course led to more protests in more places, more angry slogans being shouted, and more protestor deaths at the hands of government forces.Protests had spread to all 31 Iranian provinces by early January of 2026, and at this point there were only 17 confirmed deaths.US President Donald Trump got involved around this time, maybe feeling confident following the successful nighttime grab of Venezuelan President Maduro; whatever the case, he warned the Iranian government not to shoot protestors, or the US government might have to get involved, coming to the protestors’ rescue.Iran’s government responded by saying the rioters must be put in their place, suppressing the funerals of protestors, and muffling local internet service, slowing down access speeds and increasing the number of outages by about a third. They threatened to execute hundreds of protestors by hanging, then said they wouldn’t. Trump declared this to be a personal victory, though the Iranian government has used his insinuation of himself into the matter to position the fight as Iran against the US, the protestors backed by their great enemy, which has shown itself to be responsible for these protests.The government then started forcing captured protestors to make confessions on video, which only seemed to further anger the non-arrested protestors, and some protestors began to fight back, in one case setting a police officer on fire, and in other cases local militia groups defended protestors against police, leading to several deaths.Iran’s government shut down more communication services in an attempt to regain control, in some cities taking down the internet completely, though some information, photos and videos of police abuses of protestors still made it out into the wider world using satellite services like Starlink, and by the 9th of January, protests reached a scale that rivaled and maybe surpassed those seen during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and protestors began to set fire to buildings associated with the Islamic Republic, the government, and directly clashing with security forces in some cases.Hundreds of people were reportedly killed per day from that point forward, and thousands were rushed to hospitals, overwhelming local doctors.Thousands of people were also violently killed by police, under cover of the now complete internet blackout, and on January 10th, it was estimated that around 2,000 protestors had been killed in the past two days, alone, while other estimates from inside and outside Iran range from 12,000 to 20,000 protestors killed by the government. The most reliable source I could find, as of last weekend, indicated that the true number of dead is something like 3,300 people, at minimum.In the past week or so, the Iranian government has apparently figured out how to jam Starlink internet signals, making it even more difficult for protestors to share what’s happening in the country, and President Trump posted on his social network, Truth Social, telling Iranian citizens that they should overthrow the government and that help is on the way.The Iranian government has arrested tens of thousands of people, has tanks patrolling their towns and cities, and seems to have successfully quashed protests for the time being; no protests at all were reported across the country as of mid-January, and so many people were killed and injured that hospitals and other institutions are still overwhelmed, trying to work through their backlog; much of the country is in mourning.Government forces are reportedly going door to door to arrest people who were spotted in CCTV and social media footage participating in protests, and they’ve set up checkpoints to stop people, look through their phones, and arrest them if any photos or videos are found that indicate they were at protests, deleting that digital evidence in the process.This remains a fast-moving story and there’s a chance something significant, like the US striking Iranian government targets, or renewed, more focused protests will arise in the coming days and weeks.Some analysts have argued that it’s kind of a no-brainer for the Trump administration to hit the Iranian government while it’s strained in this way, because it’s a long-time enemy of the US and its allies that’s currently weak, and doing so would reinforce the narrative, sparked with the capture of Maduro, that Trump’s administration is anti-tyrant; which is questionable by most measures, but again, this is a narrative, not necessarily reality. And narratives are powerful, especially going into an election year.It’s also possible that, because economic conditions in Iran haven’t changed, that this is just the beginning of something bigger; protestors and militias taking a moment to regain their footing and consider what they might do to have more of an impact when they start back up again.Show Noteshttps://www.iranintl.com/en/202601130145https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/31/we-want-the-mullahs-gone-economic-crisis-sparks-biggest-protests-in-iran-since-2022https://www.nytimes.com/article/iran-protests-inflation-currency.htmlhttps://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/06/25/mapping-the-protests-in-iran-2/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/us/politics/trump-iran-strikes.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/world/middleeast/iran-protests-death-toll.htmlhttps://www.reuters.com/world/china/iranian-mp-warns-greater-unrest-urging-government-address-grievances-2026-01-13/https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iran-is-hunting-down-starlink-users-to-stop-protest-videos-from-going-global-d8b49602https://archive.is/20260114175227/https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/bank-collapse-iran-protests-83f6b681https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-protest-death-toll-over-12000-feared-higher-video-bodies-at-morgue/https://sundayguardianlive.com/world/did-irans-currency-collapse-rial-plummets-to-000-against-euro-while-inflation-protests-escalate-across-the-country-164403/https://archive.is/20260116034429/https://www.ft.com/content/5d848323-84a9-4512-abd2-dd09e0a786a3https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2jek15m8nohttps://theconversation.com/the-use-of-military-force-in-iran-could-backfire-for-washington-273264https://archive.is/20260114182636/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/01/14/iran-regime-protest-trump-strike/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/world/middleeast/iran-protests-deadly-crackdown.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/17/world/middleeast/iran-ayatollah-khamenei.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%932026_Iranian_protestshttps://www.en-hrana.org/day-thirteen-of-the-protests-nighttime-demonstrations-continue-amid-internet-shutdown/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iran_internal_crisishttps://apnews.com/article/iran-protests-trump-khamenei-fc11b1082fb75fca02205f668c822751 This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about prediction markets, incentives, and gambling addiction.We also discuss insider trading, spot-fixing, and Gatorade.Recommended Book: The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory by Tim AlbertaTranscriptPrediction markets are hundreds of years old, and have historically been used to determine the likelihood of something happening.In 1503, for instance, there was a market to determine who would become the next pope, and from the earliest days of commercial markets, there were associated prediction markets that were used to gauge how folks thought a given business would do during an upcoming economic quarter.The theory here is that while you can just ask people how well they think a political candidate will fare in an election or who they think will become the next pope, often their guesses, their assumptions, or their analysis will be swayed by things like political affiliation or maybe even what they think they’re meant to say—the popular papal candidate, for instance, or the non-obvious, asymmetric position on a big commercial enterprise that might help an analyst reinforce their brand as a contrarian.If you introduce money into the equation, though, forcing people to put down real currency on their suspicions and predictions, and give them the chance to earn money if they get things right, that will sometimes nudge these markets away from those other incentives, making the markets commercial enterprises of their own. It can shift the bias away from posturing and toward monetization, and that in turn, in theory at least, should make prediction markets more accurate because people will try to align themselves with the actual, real-deal outcome, rather than the popular—with their social tribe, at least—or compellingly unpopular view.This is the theory that underpins entities like Polymarket, Kalshi, Manifold Markets, and many other online prediction markets that have arisen over the past handful of years as regulations on these types of businesses have been eased, and as they’ve begun to establish themselves as credible players in the predicting-everything space.In politics in particular, these markets have semi-regularly shown themselves to be better gauges of who will actually win elections than conventional polls and surveys, and though their records are far from perfect and still heavily biased in some cases, such community-driven predictions from money-motivated markets are gaining credibility because of their capacity to incentivize people to put their money where their mouths are, and to try to profit from accurate preordination.The flip-side of these markets, and some might even say a built-in flaw with no obvious solution, is that they are rife with insider trading: people who are in the position to know things ahead of time making in some cases millions of dollars by placing big bets that, for them, aren’t bets at all, because they know what will or what is likely to happen.This seems to have occurred at least a few times with big political events in 2025, and it’s anticipated that it could become an even bigger issue in the future, especially for markets that use cryptocurrencies to manage payments, as those are even less likely than their fiat currency peers to keeps solid tabs on who’s actually behind these bets, and thus who might be trading on knowledge that they’re not supposed to be trading on.That said, it could be argued that such insider trading makes these markets even more accurate, eventually at least. And that points us toward another problem: the possibility that someone on the inside might look at a market and realize they can make a killing if they use their position, their power to sway these markets after placing a bet, giving them the ability to assure a payout by abusing their position—major events being influenced by the possibility of a community-funded payday for those in control.What I’d like to talk about today is the same general principle as it’s playing out in the sports world, and why the huge sums of money that are now sloshing around in the sports betting industry in the US are beginning to worry basically everyone, except the sports betting companies themselves.—In October of 2025, the head coach of the NBA basketball team, the Portland Trail Blazers, Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat player Terry Rozier, and former NBA player Damon Jones, and about 30 other people were arrested by the FBI due to their alleged illegal sports gambling activities. Rozier was already under investigation following unusual betting activity that was linked to his performance in a 2023 game—he was later cleared of wrongdoing, but the implication then and in this more recent instance is that he and those other folks who were rounded up by the FBI may have been involved in rigging things so they could get a big payoff on gambling markets.Similar things have been happening across the sports world, including a lifetime ban for Jontay Porter, a former Toronto Raptors player, who apparently gave confidential information to people who were placing bets on NBA games—he later pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud as a result of that investigation—and in November of 2025 two Major League Baseball players, both of them pitchers for the Cleveland Guardians, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, were charged by federal prosecutors for allegedly rigging pitches to benefit people betting on those pitches; they’ve been charged with wire fraud and money laundering, and each could face up to 65 years in prison.And those are just a few of the many instances of game-rigging that have been alleged in recent years, the specifics of which vary, but the outcome is always to give someone an advantage in these markets, which are only recently broadly legal across the United States, and which thus allow folks with the right connections or some money to invest ahead of time to, for instance, pay a pitcher to throw an inning, or pay a coach to tell them who will be benched and when, so that they can make a big wager with less of a risk, or in some cases, no risk at all.One of the big issues here is that rather than simply being a which-team-will-win sort of thing, many of these bets are highly specific and granular, including what are called proposition or prop bets that allow folks to gamble on the number of strikeouts a pitcher will tally in a given inning and other very specific things.If a pitcher were to then place a bet, perhaps through an intermediary, on their own prop bet-related performance, they would stand a decent chance of tallying the right number of strikes and balls. They could also sell that information to someone else, taking a guaranteed payout in exchange for the foreknowledge they grant that gambler, who could then do what they want with the information, and then if they do well with it, they could pay that pitcher to do the same again in the future.This type of bet is called spot-fixing, and it’s seen across prediction markets, not just sports markets. Pitchers can fix an inning of a game, but poker players can also go all-in or fold a given number of times in a tournament, and the folks in charge of dumping Gatorade over the winning coach following a Super Bowl event can leak that color, based on their foreknowledge of the setup, to gamblers—these markets are sprawling and varied, and anyone in any position of power who can make decisions about such things, or who’s involved enough to leak information can do so at a profit, either themselves putting down money on spot-fixed prop bets, or selling that information to those who will themselves place a bet.The issue sports organizations in the US are now running into is that while they aligned themselves with sports gambling entities like DraftKings and FanDuel after these platforms were legalized in more states following the striking-down of a federal ban on such things in 2018—as I record this, they’re currently legal in 31 states, alongside Washington DC and Puerto Rico—and they’ve profited a fair bit from that, allowing these businesses to become sponsors, to slap their logos on everything, and to generally become interwoven with the leagues themselves; despite all that, they’ve also created a sports culture in which betting is ultra-common, and that means fans are no longer just fans, they’re putting down money on various possible sports-related outcomes.That means folks who were maybe previously die-hard fans of their local team may no longer just be disappointed when their team loses, they’ll be financially impacted, perhaps even devastated. And many athletes who play on these teams, in these leagues, are now suffering all kinds of abuse and threats from people who decided to put a lot of money on their performance, but who failed to win a game, or maybe even throw the exact right number of strikes and balls in a given inning.This points at two big issues with sports betting in the US right now.First is that there’s a lot of money splashing around in this space. An estimated $160-170 billion was wagered by US citizens in 2025 alone, generating about $16.4 billion in revenue for sportsbooks—the entities that take these sorts of bets.That’s likely a significant undercount, too, as more generalist prediction markets are also getting involved in the sports betting game, blending this type of gambling with other sorts of prediction markets, like those related to politics and international happenings, like war.And second, a lot of people are gambling a lot of money on sports stuff right now, and that’s becoming an issue. In October of 2025, a Pew Research poll found that 43% of US adults think legalized sports betting is bad for society, up from 34% in 2022, and 40% says it’s bad for sports, up from 33%. A whopping 22% of US adults say they personally bet money on sports in the past year, up from 19% in 2022, and 10%, one in ten American adults, say they have placed a sports bet online in the past year, up from 6% in 2022.There has been a significant increase in calls to the National Problem Gambling Helpline in recent years—a 45% increase from 2017 in states where sports betting hasn’t been legalized, and a 148% increase, more than three times as much, in states where sports betting was legalized by August of 2025. Not for nothing, too, it’s estimated that professional athletes are about five-times more likely than the average person to become hooked on gambling, which would seem to amplify all these issues, in addition to the obvious problems this can create for people with often high-paying, but also often financially precarious, short-term careers.The implication, then, is that legal sports betting either sparks or reinforces gambling issues, creating more addictive behavior and triggering more financial issues. And bankruptcy numbers seem to back this up: in states where online gambling is allowed, bankruptcy rates increased by 28% and debt collections rose by 8% just two years after sports betting legalization. Data also shows that there’s a 20% increase in mass-market alcohol consumption in states with legalized sports betting, and that for every dollar spent on sports betting, 99 cents of investment money disappears from records, which means, basically, people are not using spare money they would spend on random stuff anyway when placing these bets, they’re spending money that would otherwise be put into savings, or which is already in their savings on this type of gambling—and much of that money then disappears into the pockets of these gambling platforms.This same general state of affairs has played out in other countries before the US, but things seem to be moving especially fast here in part because this isn’t gambling that’s limited to a physical location, it’s increasingly being conducted on smartphones and other always-on-us devices, and that means it’s easier to get hooked, but also that it’s more accessible to more people more of the time, and the ever-present deluge of information about these topics, and about these platforms that allow us to casually place bets on said topics, make getting sucked in and sold on the idea of easy money, simpler and more likely than ever before.Show Noteshttps://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2025/10/23/nba-chauncey-billups-terry-rozier-arrested-betting-probe/https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2025/11/09/emmanuel-clase-luis-ortiz-indicted-bribes/https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2025/12/29/sports-betting-integrity-fans/https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2025/10/29/player-prop-bets-nba-arrests/https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2025/06/14/sports-betting-athlete-abuse-online/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bookmakershttps://www.actionnetwork.com/online-sports-bettinghttps://nypost.com/betting/best-sports-betting-apps-usa/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_in_the_United_Stateshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_bettinghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportsbookhttps://www.delasport.com/history-of-sports-betting/https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7780080/https://www.espn.com/sports-betting/story/_/id/23561576/chalk-line-how-got-legalized-sports-bettinghttps://www.cnn.com/2024/05/03/sport/sports-betting-usa-impact-on-lives-spt-intlhttps://naadgs.org/history-of-sports-betting-the-transition-from-illegal-to-mainstream/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_match-fixing_incidentshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gambling_in_the_United_Stateshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_and_Amateur_Sports_Protection_Act_of_1992https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_in_the_United_Kingdomhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_markethttps://users.wfu.edu/strumpks/papers/Int_Election_Betting_Formatted_FINAL_NoComments.pdfhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposition_bethttps://www.axios.com/2025/12/14/sports-betting-gambling-young-men-crisishttps://www.espn.com/espn/betting/story/_/id/47337056/scandals-prediction-markets-2025-turning-point-sports-bettinghttps://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/02/americans-increasingly-see-legal-sports-betting-as-a-bad-thing-for-society-and-sports/ This is a public episode. 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