The collapse of the Terra ecosystem, and the tokens Luna and UST, will go down as one of the most painful and devastating chapters in crypto history. Over $60 billion market value has evaporated, and numerous retail investors are nursing major losses. What's particularly bad is that this was a big project, championed by some of the most notable names in crypto. But some people obviously saw it coming, and understood it to be a disaster in the making. On this episode we speak with Kevin Zhou, the founder of the crypto hedge fund Galois Capital. He began warning about Terra publicly earlier this year, and was short Luna starting in early May. He explains the exact mechanics of the coin's implosion. 

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The first true meme stock was GameStop, which went wild in early 2021, delivering brutal losses to short sellers, and a fortune to a handful of independent retail investors who participated in the squeeze. The episode shined a bright light on the WallStreetBets subreddit and the power of social media in disseminating trade ideas. One investor who did well was Rod Alzmann, who had been long GameStop for years as a value/turnaround play. On this episode of the podcast, we speak with Rod, the founder of Wook Capital and the proprietor GMEdd.com. We discuss where the company is now and what happened to the cohort of traders who scored big during that episode. 

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It's really been an extraordinary year for markets and the economy. Stocks are down, particularly, growth stocks which have gotten clobbered. Treasuries are down. Inflation is hotter than it's been in years. For the first time in ages, the Fed is hiking aggressively, having just moved by 50 basis points, with premises to do more. Plus there's a host of other shocks we're experiencing from the ongoing effects of the pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, and the hard lockdowns in China. So how to make sense of it all? On this episode we speak with Neil Dutta, Head of Economics at Renaissance Macro Research and Luke Kawa, Allocation Strategist at UBS Asset Management, to make sense of what's going on, and what to watch next. 

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The aviation industry has never seen a disruption like what it's experienced over the last two years with the pandemic. Air travel ground to a virtual halt initially, but has slowly been climbing out of a hole, with leisure travel in particular starting to boom. So what's next for travelers and carriers? On this episode, we speak with Scott Keyes of ScottsCheapFlights.com about the future of travel and the business model of flying. 

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One of the big themes these days is the return of the 'real' economy. You can't solve problems these days with just money. Not everything can be done by sitting behind a screen. And so some of the most important players in this new environment are the commodity trading shops, which help arrange financing and delivery of oil, coal, natural gas, nickel and everything else you can think of across the far-flung corners of the globe. It's a very different type of business than most trading, which is mostly just about charts on a screen. On this episode we speak with long-time commodities journalist turned Bloomberg Opinion columnist Javier Blas -- the co-author of 'The World For Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth's Resources' -- to get a deeper understanding of how these firms operate, and how they're dealing with this environment of surging commodity prices and extreme volatility. 

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Shanghai, a city of nearly 30 million people, is currently under a hard lockdown, as the Chinese government sticks to its Covid Zero strategy of limiting the virus at all costs. There have been some shocking images and stories over the past few weeks of frustrated apartment dwellers unable to go outside or get basic necessities. Some of those things have improved somewhat, and now some residents are able to coordinate and make their own delivery food orders. On this episode, we speak with David Fishman, an energy analyst at the Lantau Group, who, himself, is in a locked down Shanghai apartment complex. He discusses how he's been able to coordinate with other residents to group-buy food and obtain basic essentials.

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Spring of 2021 was peak meme mania. GameStop was going nuts. AMC was going nuts. And in general, the big cohort of traders that entered the market in early 2020 was riding high. Since then, though, things have turned south. Volumes have dipped significantly. The memes came back to Earth, and a lot of the growth stocks that were riding high have gotten absolutely killed. So where do things stand now, and what happened to all the new traders? On this episode, we speak to Lily Francus, director of quantitative research at Moody's Analytics, as well as Kyla Scanlon, a popular financial commentator across social media (as well as the founder of a new financial education company) to understand what happened, what's changed, and how the last two years have permanently altered financial markets as we know them. 

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The price of major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have been moving sideways for awhile. But it doesn't seem like there's any slowdown in terms of money entering the space. Every day, some new fund is being launched or some legacy financial institution is diving into it. But what's all this money going to do? On this episode we speak with Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO and co-founder of FTX, as well as Bloomberg Opinion columnist, Matt Levine, the money making opportunities that people are exploiting, whether it's directional bets on coins or yield farming or arbitrage, and how much potential profit there is for the taking. 

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The long grounding of the cargo ship The Ever Forward has shone a spotlight on the limited dredging equipment that exists in the U.S. The most powerful equipment here has significantly less capacity than what exists in Europe, or in the Suez Canal. What's more, the U.S. can't use foreign equipment due to a law known as the Foreign Dredging Act of 1906, which requires that any dredging done in the country, be done with U.S. labor on U.S.-owned ships. And while this has come to the fore due to the Ever Forward, the significance could be far wider. On this episode of the podcast we speak with Howard Gutman and Andrew Durant, both of whom are working to overturn the law. They argue that the restrictions on dredging equipment have significant negative ramifications for the environment, port capacity, and therefore the economy overall. 

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With oil prices surging, there's a sense of greater urgency about moving more towards electric vehicles. But of course the metals that go into EVs are also expensive. And that goes for the core technology -- lithium ion batteries. On this episode of the podcast, we speak with James Frith, a lithium battery expert and investor at the VC firm Volta Energy Technologies. We discuss the state of the art of battery technology, as well as the ongoing need for commodities.

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