Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson.

Today is Wednesday, May 14, 2025, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.

There's something to cold hard cash. You can feel it. You can smell it, and you know clearly how much of it you have.

But what happens as the world goes digital and will traditional currencies soon become a thing of the past?

Who stands to benefit and who might this rapid shift be hurting?

Here to help us make sense of the changing face of money is Nehanna Rula, the director of the Digital Currency Initiative,

a part of the MIT Media Lab focusing on cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. Thank you

so much for joining me, Neha. Happy to be here. So let's get to some recent news that got me thinking

about part of this. President Donald Trump said earlier this year that he ordered the U.S.

Mint to stop making pennies. Now, this might seem

insignificant to some, might be cheered by some. Others, though, warn there could be unseen

consequences. I'm just curious, like, how this news landed with you and what it might tell us about

the state of cash right now. I guess what I took from this news and the reaction to this news

is how nostalgic people feel about pennies, actually.

I think it really shows that money is not just the sort of cold, hard tool that we use.

It's something that we really take quite seriously as humans.

And we feel a real connection to it means a lot in our lives.

And that's why you saw so much debate about retiring the penny.

I think the bigger question is not about the penny, but what happens to physical cash as we move further and further into the digital future?

So pennies right now, I think we could probably get rid of them and everything would mostly be fine.

It's interesting to see the way that people feel about the penny and how they think about it and what it means to them in their lives.

But like I said, I think the bigger question is where are we going with cash as a whole?

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