I've taken the next few weeks off for a much needed summer vacation. I'll be releasing a couple of overtime segments while I'm gone that are normally available only to our Patreon subscribers.
This segment was recorded with Senator Bob Kerrey, one of the ten members of the 9/11 Commission. Not only are his comments about the Kingdom's involvement in the attacks provocative and revealing, but the conversation itself is jovial and pleasant in a way that is rarely seen in our politics today.
This recording also includes information about upcoming episodes, including conversations with the Chairman of North America for Louis Vuitton, the co-founder of Kickstarter, and many other notable guests.
I hope you all enjoy it, and please feel free to reach out to me by email at dk@hiddenforces.io with any feedback or suggestions about the show and our upcoming lineup of guests.
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
In Episode 98 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with famed Hong Kong investor David Webb, an outspoken critic of China’s authoritarian grip over the coastal territory.
There are two parts to this story that we explore during this conversation. The first deals with Hong Kong – specifically, its political and economic future as an independent territory of mainland China. The second deals with China itself – specifically, its political and financial stability as the most leveraged economy at scale, in the world.
The events in Hong Kong over the last several months – exacerbated by Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s determination to push through the Extradition bill despite mounting opposition – have created a terrifying sense of crisis and disorder in the city. Videos of police beatings and retaliatory violence by protestors, as well as satellite images of what appear to be armored personnel carriers and other vehicles belonging to China’s paramilitary People’s Armed Police, have created an ominous sense of foreboding in the city. "One country, two systems," might be the fault line upon which the tectonic forces shaping China’s political and economic development are colliding, creating mountains of civil unrest among Hong Kongers. At what point do the political tremors in Hong Kong become civic earthquakes capable of shattering the fragile peace between these two irreconcilable systems? Will open society prevail in Hong Kong, or will China do whatever it takes in order to reassert control over the former British colony?
In the second part of this conversation, David Webb shares his insights from his decades of experience studying the Chinese economy and investing in Chinese companies listed in Hong Kong. Those insights include a discussion about China’s overleveraged banking system, an overvalued RMB, and a system of Ponzi financing for Chinese companies listed on non-mainland exchanges. David Webb also contests a thesis famously put forward by hedge fund manager Kyle Bass about the precarious position of Hong Kong’s currency and the risk of decoupling with the US dollar. Additional topics include a new “tech cold war,” China’s propaganda battle, the US-China trade war, and much, much more.
There is no overtime to this week’s episode on account of some technical constraints. Instead, we have made the transcript to this conversation available to Overtime subscribers, which will be published in the next day or two. You can gain access to the transcript, as well as a copy of the rundown to this week’s episode directly through our Patreon page.
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
In Episode 97 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Nic Carter, co-founder of both the VC fund Castle Island Ventures, as well as the research and data analytics company Coinmetrics.io. Nic also has a master’s degree in philosophy, and the two spend much of the overtime applying that discipline to bitcoin by examining the works of people like Friedrich Nietzsche and his philosophy around essence, John Rawls and his veil of ignorance, as well as applying a strain of utilitarian thought to questions of money and society.
This conversation with Nic Carter is an attempt to understand Bitcoin as more than just the sum of its parts. One of the lessons that Demetri has taken away from his continued research into Bitcoin through the works of people like Nick Szabo, Paul Sztorc, and others, is that trying to measure the cryptocurrency against existing systems or conventions is almost always counterproductive. This is likely because Bitcoin is more than just money or a payments network. Bitcoin is a movement. Within it exists a competent community of intellectuals who are actively engaged in what often feels like a grand project to remake society. This comes across in the seriousness with which Bitcoiners apply themselves. This is true whether we are talking about the engineers working on enhancements to the base layer or whether we’re talking about those contributing intellectually to debates about governance, economics, and ethics. In this sense, Bitcoin is not what most of us think it is, and even what we think it is, is constantly changing. Bitcoin’s resilience and adaptability, as both a store of value, but also as a diverse community of people who are coming to the cryptocurrency from different backgrounds and with differing motivations suggests that there is much more going on here than just naïve speculation.
As Nic Carter points out during this conversation, Bitcoin is a “subversive idea.” Bitcoin is an experiment in social organization that doesn’t play by the rules of the state or by the conventions of modern society. The momentum behind this movement is likely to grow, especially if governments validate the concerns of its proponents with further debt monetization or preferential bailouts in the event of another global financial downturn. In short, Bitcoin is not going away, and it is incumbent upon all of us to understand the message that it is here to deliver.
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
In this week’s episode of Hidden Forces, I make available the overtime to my episode with journalist Matt Taibbi that aired on February 18th, 2019.
In this overtime, Matt Taibbi shares his experience on the campaign trail with Donald Trump in 2016, as well as his predictions for the 2020 election. Matt and I also discuss the Goldman Sachs 1MDB scandal, which has remained largely out of the headlines.
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod