Policy Punchline

Dr. Jamil El-Imad is the CEO of The Brain Forum, a neuroscience, brain-computer interface (BCI), and virtual reality (VR) research foundation in Switzerland, as well as the co-founder of NeuroPro, a Swiss-based Digital Health Solutions company that leverage the latest advances in computer science and digital technology to create new and improved tools that support researchers, clinicians, and innovators in pushing the boundaries of brain science and its applications. He is also an honorary research fellow at Imperial College London, and a former IBM software engineer. His key interests include BCI, VR, brain signal analyses, and big data, all of which we delve into in this interview.

Having been out for many years now, most people are probably familiar with virtual reality technology. However, brain-computer interfaces (also known as a neural-control interface), bridges the gap between our mind and a machine by converting brain signals into commands that can be interpreted by a computer, resulting in the desired action. The potential for this technology is profound and could be applied in myriad fields.

In “Connecting Our Brains to the World”, we discuss Dr. El-Imad’s decision to transition from software engineering to a neuroscience focus. Neuroscience is a fascinating field in which research can be taken in many directions. We inquire about Dr. El-Imad’s interest in deep learning (ex. epilepsy prediction), and the limiting factors in brain-computer interactions. Further, the topic of healthcare is explored in some depth, in particular the lag in the healthcare industry’s adoption of seemingly very useful tools and the administrative, logistical, and technological hurdles cutting-edge interfacing technology faces before becoming mainstream. Continuing on this topic, the inequities between the rich and the poor are also explored, as evidenced by the pandemic. In a similar vein, virtual reality also holds promise in the healthcare industry; for example, in the treatment of phobias. We ask our guest what he thinks the development of VR will look like in the future, including the democratization and commercialization of the technology as well as the value from an entertainment standpoint.

We hope you enjoy this episode listening to an episode on the human connection to the machine, and that it provokes deeper thought and discussion on what is possible in this realm of neuroscience.

Toni Townes-Whitley graduated from Princeton University in 1985 with a B.A. in Public Policy and Economics. She then went to the peace corps for three years in Gabon. With a non-tech background, she went on to become the President of the IT and business consulting services firm CGI Federal and presently the President of US Regulated Industries at Microsoft. She leads Microsoft's U.S. sales for Regulated Industries (Financial Services & Insurance; Healthcare & Life Sciences; Federal, State, & Local Government; and Education). Her teams drive digital transformation across national industries and focus on inclusion, equity and access in the emerging digital economy.

She is one of the leading women at Microsoft and in the technology industry. Her role at Microsoft is shaping the role that artificial intelligence and technology will play in systems like policing, education, the U.S. military, and more, especially since the U.S. government is one of Microsoft’s leading clients particularly through the use of its Azure cloud services.

In this episode, we dive into the intersection of tech development and race, innovation, and ethics and hear Toni’s perspectives on digital transformation. She started off by talking about how she ended up at her position at Microsoft and why she chose to work in regulated industries at Microsoft. She focused on the ability for her work in building tech infrastructure to shape the world we live in. Toni said, “the [regulated industries] is probably the hardest set of sectors to work in terms of designing towards a much more complex set of requirements, but it is also the most meaningful because when you get it right, you have an impact that not only affects the industry but generally affects society at large.”

Throughout the interview, Toni emphasizes the importance of a mission-oriented framework to any institution, from the peace corps to Microsoft to government technology initiatives. Toni then moves into talking about key lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic in relation to digital transformation in the sectors of education, healthcare, financial services, and more. She speaks on the emergence of cloud-based technology particularly in the sector of government and the ways in which it enables predictive capabilities, deep analytics, and stronger security.

She then spends time talking through the relationship between Microsoft and the U.S. government. She talks about how Microsoft’s relationship with the U.S. government spans from providing VR technology to transform training for the Department of Defense to using Microsoft Azure cloud services to keep information secure. Toni concludes by sharing her reflections on the importance of an ethics framework in developing new technologies, which Microsoft developed, that have been adopted by governmental and non-governmental organizations across the world.

Mitch Julis is the Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of Canyon Partners, one of the largest and best-performing multi-strategy hedge funds in the world. If you listen to the end of our interviews or visit our website, you’ll see that Policy Punchline is generously funded by the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance (JRCPPF) at Princeton University. The Center was created by Mr. Julis and named in honor of his father and mother. After 150 episodes, we’re finally having Mitch on the show, and everything is truly coming back in full circle here.

We start the interview with an introduction to Canyon Partners and Mitch’s background. “You can’t be a great equity investor without being a solid credit analyst” – Mitch gives a detailed overview to credit investing, Canyon’s various strategies and funds, and his overarching investment philosophy. We also touch on many of the macro trends before and after Covid, the Federal Reserve’s “insurance policy” for financial markets with persistently low interest rates, the rise of SPACs and Bitcoin, and many more current event topics and beyond.

One of the interview highlights is Mitch’s explanation of “reframing financial and economic analysis as political economy to understand how structure determines behavior and behavior determines structure in the capital markets.” To illustrate how to cope with complex situations, he brings up Canyon’s recent investment in AMC Theatres during the company’s struggle in the Covid pandemic, as well as their previous investment in Caesar Entertainment. He also

A recent book published in April 2021, “The Caesars Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Corruption of the Private Equity Industry,” by Sujeet Indap and Max Frumes talks about the Caesars Entertainment restructuring, which Mitch referenced a few times throughout the interview and recommends those who are interested to read more.

Mitch co-founded Canyon Partners in 1990 with Josh Friedman after his old firm Drexel Burnham Lambert was closed. Canyon subsequently flourished into one of the best-performing hedge funds in the world over the last three decades, growing into various strategies from distressed credit to CLOs and real estate.

Disclaimer by Canyon Partners, LLC:

• This presentation does not constitute an offer or solicitation to subscribe for or purchase any securities in any jurisdiction.

• Certain information contained herein constitutes “forward-looking statements.” Due to various risks and uncertainties, actual events or results may differ materially from those reflected or contemplated in such forward-looking statements.

• Nothing contained in this presentation constitutes investment advice or offers any opinion with respect to the suitability of any security or asset class, and the views expressed in this presentation should not be taken as advice to buy, sell or hold any security or asset class.

• Any representative investment or strategy described herein is for illustrative purposes to describe a type of investment Canyon either has acquired or, opportunity permitting, may acquire in the future. Such descriptions are summary in nature and do not purport to list all the salient features of the investment or the strategy described. There is no guarantee that similar opportunities will be available for a fund in the future, or that a fund will acquire further investments of the type described in such summaries.

• Canyon has numerous other investments – successful and not successful. An investment profiled in this presentation may not be held by all Canyon funds. It is not known whether any position(s) currently held will be profitable when sold.

• Past performance of an investment, strategy, or fund is not a guarantee of future results.

• This presentation may contain confidential information and shall not be redistributed without the express written consent of Canyon Partners, LLC.

Paul G. Haaga Jr. is the former acting CEO of NPR, the former chairman and director of Capital Research and Management Company, and the Chairperson of the Facebook Oversight Board Trust.

In this episode, we welcome back Mr. Haaga Jr. to Policy Punchline to discuss Facebook's recent decision on deplatforming former U.S. President Donald J. Trump.

Paul G. Haaga Jr. is the former acting CEO of NPR, the former chairman and director of Capital Research and Management Company, and the Chairperson of the Facebook Oversight Board Trust.

Tim Roughgarden is a Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and a winner of the Gödel Prize, which is often considered as “the Nobel Prize of theoretical computer science.” His research interests include the many connections between computer science and economics, as well as the design, analysis, applications, and limitations of algorithms. We’ll also talk about his most recent research in the cryptocurrency space, EIP-1559, and the future of Ethereum.

Prof. Roughgarden has been awarded the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the Kalai Prize in Computer Science and Game Theory, the Social Choice and Welfare Prize, the Mathematical Programming Society's Tucker Prize, and the Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science. He was an invited speaker at the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians, the Shapley Lecturer at the 2008 World Congress of the Game Theory Society, and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2017. He has written or edited ten books and monographs, and is regarded by many students as one of the best educators in algorithmic game theory.

We start by discussing Prof. Roughgarden’s early work that helped lay the foundations for algorithmic game theory and won him the Gödel Prize. He takes us back to the late 90’s and talks us through the history of the field and the key researchers and papers that helped kick it off. He unpacks the price of anarchy, a formal measure of the extent to which selfishly acting individuals (thus ideally acting according to a Nash equilibrium) can harm collective welfare. A well-known example of this phenomenon is the prisoner’s dilemma.

Prof. Roughgarden then discusses his later work on revenue-optimal auctions, an ongoing area of research in mechanism design. Here a seller wants to sell some number of items to some bidders that each have different values for different items, and wants to make as much money as possible. How should they structure their auction if they don’t have a strong guess for how much the bidders would be willing to pay for each item?

We then turn to Prof. Roughgarden’s most recent work in the cryptocurrency space, particularly EIP-1559. He outlines the current cryptocurrency landscape for us, likening it to the Internet shortly after its inception. He explains the different layers of abstraction at which cryptocurrency technologies can operate, from peer-to-peer networks to consensus protocols to applications such as smart contracts, along with the vast array of computer science problems that comes with them.

Prof. Roughgarden then shares with us his work on the soon to be implemented EIP-1559 proposal for Ethereum. Instead of the previous method where participants bid to have each transaction included in the blockchain, EIP-1559 proposes to internally compute an appropriate price for each transaction. Moreover, the transaction fee is burnt instead of awarded to miners in an effort to counteract the naturally inflationary tokenomics of Ethereum. Prof. Roughgarden’s role in the project was to closely analyze the game-theoretic properties of this new protocol. He notes the growing appetite in the blockchain community for formal academic analysis of protocols.

Finally, Prof. Roughgarden reflects on what might be necessary in order for cryptocurrencies to flourish in the future. He speculates that it will need to become easier for people to participate in blockchains without much prior knowledge, much as anyone can use a mobile phone to interact without needing to know the mechanics of how it transmits and receives signals. He comments on his journey learning about cryptocurrencies and intends to share what he has learned with other academics as he goes along. This fall, he will be teaching a class at Columbia University titled “Foundations of Blockchains”.

My guest today is someone of great personal significance to me. He is my senior thesis advisor and one of the most important mentors in my student career. Atif Mian is the John H. Laporte, Jr. Class of 1967 Professor of Economics, Public Policy and Finance at Princeton University, and the Director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance, which has graciously supported this podcast since day one. Prof. Mian studies the connections between finance and the macroeconomy, and his book House of Debt became an instant international bestseller when it was published in 2014 and kicked off a critical line of research related to debt forgiveness and risk-sharing mechanisms. He is the first person of Pakistani origin to rank among the top 25 young economists of the world by the IMF.

Matt Levine writes the popular daily newsletter “Money Stuff” on Bloomberg Opinion that has over 150,000 subscribers and a “cult-like” following on Wall Street and beyond. He is widely regarded as one of the most iconic, witty, and sophisticated financial writers of our age. Before Bloomberg, Matt was an editor of Dealbreaker, an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, a mergers and acquisitions lawyer, a law clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, and a high school Latin teacher. He holds a heroic status especially amongst college economics majors, and he in fact inspired Tiger to start writing his newsletter on Substack.

Alex Tabarrok is Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center and a professor of economics at George Mason University. Along with Tyler Cowen, he is the co-author of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution and co-founder of Marginal Revolution University. He is the author of numerous academic papers in the fields of law and economics, criminology, regulatory policy, voting theory and other areas in political economy. He is co-author with Tyler of Modern Principles of Economics, a widely used introductory textbook. He gave a TED talk in 2009. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. It is not an exaggeration to say that he and Tyler Cowen wield an enormous influence over the intellectual discourse today in America, and especially amongst the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

Ramesh Ponnuru is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, senior editor with the National Review, and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. A leading conservative thinker and pundit, Ramesh has made numerous appearances on shows like Meet the Press and Face the Nation. He is also an alumnus of Princeton, earning a degree in History.

In the interview, we discuss a variety of issues relating to the current political landscape and state of partisan politics. We first dive into free speech issues at colleges and universities in the United States— grappling with some of the key considerations that are informing why environments on college campuses are less encouraging for interchange and compromise between ideological groups.

Ponnuru argues that the free speech issues on college campuses are not a new problem and have continued to ebb and flow based on larger political movements, pushing back against the catastrophizing done by organizations like Turning Point USA. Ponnuru also explains his thoughts on media environments and the curating of news by social media companies.

Because Ponnuru writes so extensively about economic and social issues, we cover his stance on the American family, including his continued advocacy for a child tax credit and overall increased welfare for parents and children. Ponnuru also explains why he believes his pro-life stance is consistent with the Constitution.

We move to discuss Ponnuru’s opposition to President Trump, the contention over election security and the threat of delegitimization of the political process, and his thoughts on the infusion of populism and isolationism into the GOP.