Episodios

  • Ep.38 - The army of invisibles

    Ep.38 - The army of invisibles
    Jun 26 2024
    On the night of June 14 2017, seventy-two people die in the flames of Grenfell Tower, in North Kensington, London City. 221 feet high, 24 stories tall, housing 120 apartments, Grenfell Tower is built in 1974 as part of a public housing plan. An appendage of urban blight in the poor and multicultural district of Hammersmith. The building is renovated in 2014 with cheap materials that are so flammable that the entire high rise catches fire in just a few minutes. The Grenfell Tower fire is a class fire, emblematic of “necro-politics” which produces both profit and death. And in the West, those that die are always the poor and forgotten, the hordes of the army of invisibles.
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    13 m
  • Ep.37 - Roger Federer and high finance

    Ep.37 - Roger Federer and high finance
    Jun 19 2024
    If tennis is a metaphor of life, then it’s also a metaphor of finance – seeing as finance determines every aspect of life itself. There’s a strong connection between the trajectories impressed onto a tennis ball and the thousands of variables that dominate financial exchanges. Just like there’s a certain manner by which to face an opponent on the other side of the net, and by which to maneuver the fluctuations of the markets. Recently, Roger Federer – one of the greatest tennis players of all time - received a Doctor of Humane Letters honorary degree from Dartmouth College. The champion’s commencement speech is an inspiring lesson on how to accept both victory and defeat: in tennis, on the financial markets, and in life.
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    14 m
  • Ep.36 - What separates us from machines

    Ep.36 - What separates us from machines
    Jun 12 2024
    There’s something in common between Soviet Lieutenant Stanislav Petrov, American activist Aaron Swartz and the co-founder of OpenAI Ilya Sutskever. In different times and ways, all three of them have put aside their timidity and opposed the war-thirsty, proprietary and neo-feudal order incarnated by computers, algorithms and more-or-less thinking machines. Timidity itself (and its antonyms) reminds us of the importance of remaining human.
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    11 m
  • Ep.35 - A bitcoin a day / Part two

    Ep.35 - A bitcoin a day / Part two
    Jun 5 2024
    Since June 2019, Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez has been the President of the Republic of El Salvador. Bukele hasn’t just freed the country from the throttle of drug gangs, but also started an unexpected economic upturn with the introduction of bitcoin as legal tender. It’s something that has never been tried before, and it’s been reaping enormous benefits in terms of the sustainability of debt, on the country’s international image, and on its support of “clean” energy sources for crypto mining. Welcome to El Salvador, where mythology and science fiction walk together. Where the future is already here.
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    14 m
  • Ep.34 - A bitcoin a day / Part one

    Ep.34 - A bitcoin a day / Part one
    May 29 2024
    Leather jacket, mirror shades, a neatly trimmed beard and slick hair, Nayib Bukele has been the President of the Republic of El Salvador since 2019. Following his election, he’s repressed the drug gangs in his country with an iron fist. Last February he won a second mandate using a constitutional loophole. But Bukele has also brought about a significant economic development: starting from 2022 he recognized bitcoin as legal tender in his country. El Salvador is the first nation in the world to attempt such an experiment.
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    11 m
  • Ep.33 - J.H. Simons, the mathematician who conquered markets

    Ep.33 - J.H. Simons, the mathematician who conquered markets
    May 22 2024
    This May 10 we lost James Harris Simons, a legend of high finance, the so-called “King of Quants”, the mathematician who left university and conquered the markets. In 1982, he founded the New York Renaissance Technologies, which would soon become one the greatest global hedge fund firms in the world. Forbes said of JHS that he was “arguably the world’s greatest investor”. Simons found success by applying mathematical models and computer algorithms to financial fluctuations. He turned record profits and he almost always won out. Almost…
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    10 m
  • Ep.32 - The bunker: the dream of the West

    Ep.32 - The bunker: the dream of the West
    May 15 2024
    We live in an age of permanent catastrophes: viruses and wars, nuclear threats and climate crises. If danger is everywhere, then it’s necessary to seek protection in closed up and impenetrable spaces: such as the North Star Missile Silo, one of the most secure havens ever made. North Star can be found in Kansas, and it was built to withstand an atomic explosion and every type of catastrophe. In short, a symbol of the cold war is once again back in fashion. In 2021, during the pandemic, the silo was auctioned off to a private owner at a base price of about 900,000 dollars. The space is impenetrable and the dream of the west is unspeakable. Welcome to the bunker.
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    12 m
  • Ep.31 - The American civil war

    Ep.31 - The American civil war
    May 8 2024
    Theatres are seeing the release of Civil War, by British director Alex Garland, and in the meanwhile the United States truly seem to be under the influence of irreconcilable differences. If we look to the markets we can see the best of all possible worlds, but in the streets Fentanyl is causing thousands of deaths, the middle class is getting poorer and poorer, and student debt is out of control. Meanwhile, investments focus mainly of the defense and arms industries, or towards safe-haven assets such as gold and bitcoin. War is always good business in a nation where the divide between American dream and American nightmare is greater than ever before.
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    11 m