Service, and brought to you today by your television provider. [background sounds]. Host good evening everyone and we are ready to get started and thank you all for being here here. On behalf of townhall, and technical books, set up in cafe over here in a special guest tonight, i hope everyone in the room will get a chance to visit. And so excited to welcome you tonight are very special doubleheader giving you with you gina chang. And Amir Alexander. I am hoping many of you may be returning to our building the first time after a a few years. We have been remodeling the space and for many more of you, maybe this is the First Time Ever to townhall. Welcome, this is exactly the type of thing that we want to do. Im so pleased that we have these two fantastic authors to present to you tonight. We love all of our lecture programs. All of the political talks, arts programming that we do here. But i am especially happy about this mathematical approach to thinking about the world. Im a reformed
Trivial to transact but impossible to forge and duplicate. And to verify they must be able to carry this information about any information so it has to do some platforms and networks and machines to generate effectively those transaction laws and records so to figure out how to make cash digital is a tall order which raises the question of why you would need to build such a thing in answering that question is surveillance to build parallel covert societies to libertarian economics and money to the pursuit of mortality all of these agendas fed into the creation of that coin and cryptocurrency. This isnt a story of just payment platform but a test to engineer a future society. A technological project i call the speculative fiction these currencies were platforms with the aid they are imagining. And then to inspire fear or hope and not just in relation to the future but one of the things i came to enjoy as i was working on the book is the currency world prick on one of the many terms of p
Opium war as an anomaly or something very particular to a very particular time and place. I am saying i am guilty of thinking about the opium war that way. But great scholarship, truly great scholarship like killer high in a lot of the work thats done here at the Watson Institute forces me and us to see the world in a totally new way. This book, has forced me, and i think it forces all readers to really focus on the internal and expansive relationship between drugs and war. That relationship extends from war conducted by people who were on a form of drug, some kind of psychoactive substance. It extends to wars and conquest of drugs or the Raw Materials for drugs, extends to wars for markets and for outlets for drugs, and as we are all familiar with wars against drug. But peter argues so effectively this phenomenon, this interaction between psychoactive substances and conflict, is laced throughout history. And right up until the present. Peter makes a number of very interesting conclusi
[inaudible question] boston and charleston might be seen as opposite but we are talking about two of the oldest cities in america, visual cities, and sections in history. Why do we care about charleston in the year 1860 . Well, we know here why we care. This is my starting point for the book. Charleston was really the vanguard and it was written the last day of 1860s to a colleague, a fellow man of the church in the north, he shed light on this. People are living in these times and that matter actually helped me make up his mind because there has to be story there. Five phases of what might be thought of as madness, public issues. First is fear. The story begins in the fall of 1859, really. John brown, the militants, and the range there was tremendous alarm and the beginning of the broad scale uprising. The hometown paper said your negroes are constantly wanting to cut our throats. They are forming Vigilance Committee and calling for attention to the Abolition Party of the north. Lets