The Breakdown

Demetri Kofinas is the host of Hidden Forces, a popular podcast that examines markets through the lens of large patterns of change. 

On this episode, Demetri and @NLW discuss:

• How the politicization of the Coronavirus crisis has undermined smart action
• How media incentivizes extreme opinions regardless of underlying expertise 
• What conversations are we not having around Coronavirus - in particular in terms of second order effects
• Why we’ve barely begun to discuss the plan for turning the economy back on

Epsilon Theory’s Ben Hunt joins for a follow up to our pre-lockdown Covid-19 conversation in early March. In the month since, the markets finally started to take Covid-19 seriously, elected officials stopped calling it just the flu, and big chunks of the world economy shut down. 

Now, as markets rally on early evidence the curve may be flattening, the question is: is this premature? 

In this episode, Ben & NLW discuss:

• How the markets have moved from “denial” to “bargaining” 
• Why this rally has all the hallmarks of a type of bear market rally we’ve seen over the last month
• Why the predictability of corporate bailouts doesn’t make them any less detestable
• Why we should be buoyed by an explosion of ground-up, grassroots citizen action
• How Frontline Heroes is creating a p2p PPE purchasing network that gets essential gear into the hands of health professionals without causing additional price pressure for state-led negotiations

Second order effects are things that happen as unexpected outcomes of something else happening. These effects can create surprising causal chains. 

Take this for example: A pandemic makes everyone need to work from home leads to an increase in video calling leads to Walmart reporting that people are buying more shirts, but not pants. 

Emerson Spartz is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on virality and the internet. He founded Mugglenet - the world’s biggest Harry Potter fan site - as a middle school drop out, and would later found and raise tens of millions for Dose. 

In the past weeks, Emerson started an open crowdsourced document on the Coronavirus’ second order effects that has, itself, gone viral, especially among venture capitals and other investor circles trying to understand what the world looks like on the other side of this. 

Emerson brings a surprisingly optimistic perspective on where this could lead a generation of people who are now more fully plugged in to the internet than ever before.

The full week's episode, in one convenient file.

• Monday | Bitcoin, Stablecoins, DeFi and Privacy: How COVID-19 is Changing Key Crypto Narratives
• Tuesday | ‘If You’re Not Radicalized, You’re Not Paying Attention’ Feat. Nic Carter
• Wednesday | How Coronavirus Is Accelerating the End of Globalism, Feat. Peter Zeihan
• Thursday | 5 Reasons For Cautious Optimism In Crypto
• Friday | Will DeFi Even Matter In A Post-Corona World? Feat. Matt Luongo

Matt Luongo got his start in bitcoin in 2013. In 2016, he watched a pivotal moment where the sound money, digital gold narrative subsumed the payments use case for bitcoin. While he agreed, ultimately, with the important of bitcoin as a new reserve asset, he still wanted to build and found his way to Ethereum. 

Now his company is launching tBTC, a trust-minimized bridge between bitcoin and ethereum. Among other uses, it is a new solution to enabling bitcoin to be used as collateral in DeFi applications. 

In this conversation, Matt and @NLW discuss these narrative shifts, as well as what the role and narrative for DeFi might be in a post-Covid crisis world.