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Hidden Forces
Transformation of the News Media and the Legacy of War and Finance | Lee Pacchia
00:35:09
In this special episode of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas and Lee Pacchia discuss their experience working in media during the 2008 financial crisis, as well as what it was like to come of political age during the 9/11 attacks and the invasio...
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- [00:00]
A
Today's episode of Hidden Forces is made possible by listeners like you. For more information about this week's episode or for easy access to related programming, visit our website@hiddenforces.IO and subscribe to our free email list. If you want access to overtime segments, episode transcripts, and show rundowns full of links and detailed information related to each and every and every episode, check out our premium subscription, available through the Hidden Forces website or through our Patreon page. And remember, if you listen to the show on your Apple podcast app, you can give us a review. Each review helps more people find the show and join our amazing community. And with that, please enjoy this week's episode. What's up, everybody? I am mixing things up a little bit this week and releasing the overtime to this week's episode on the main podcast feed and putting the full episode behind the paywall. And the reason I'm doing that is because this is at least the third time and the second time in a row.
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B
The last time was with Pierre Richard.
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A
On Hyper, Bitcoinization, where I feel like the overtime is even better than the main podcast. It isn't just that I want all of you to have access to it, it's that really, I want you all to see how awesome the overtime content is for the show and the subscription content in general, including our transcripts and our rundown. My episode this week is with Lee Pacquiao, who was once the host of Bloomberg Law and who is now doing crisis consulting, turnaround, and restructuring work as.
- [02:01]
B
A director at Traxi.
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A
I've known Lee for quite some time. I've known him since my days working in television. But we hadn't seen each other for a long time, and we scheduled a drink. We got together, we were talking shop, talking about the changes that have been going on in media and which I think impact all of us. And then we started meandering into a conversation about foreign policy and the economy and the financial crisis, because of course, Lee was at Bloomberg. And I just thought, you know, this would be a really great conversation for my audience. And so I invited him on the program and we just turned on the microphones and started talking. And what you're going to hear now is the end of that conversation. It's the last 30 minutes, but if you want access to the full episode just for this week, you can subscribe or in general going forward. I just want you all to know that when we keep the mics running, sometimes the conversation gets even better because we're just getting warmed up on the regular episode. So if you like what you hear, head over to HiddenForces IE and click on the subscribe button and you can learn more about the subscription and hopefully we can convert some of you. All right, please enjoy.
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B
Lee, thanks for sticking around for this overtime segment for my subscribers.
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C
Mm, you're welcome.
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B
See, this is how we're gonna solve the crisis. Feels like the crisis in media. Feels like the crisis. This is how we're gonna solve the crisis in media by having paywalls and subscriptions. What do you think about it?
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C
I feel like we've been dealing with this issue for, like, 20 years in the media space, and it's interesting to me that we have not seen too many new business models emerge. I feel like newspapers are having a really, really hard time trying to figure out a path forward out of the darkness. When we started to see a lot of the layoffs from Huffington Post and buzzfeed announced last week, I was missive from writer named Luke o' Neill up in Boston. An absolutely fantastic writer who is a really interesting follow, not only for the content that he produces, but also kind of getting the experience of being a journalist in today's world.
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B
Luke o'. Neill.
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C
Luke o'. Neill. He's great. He's about our age. He kind of pointed out, look, all of these reductions are coming out of the labor force. If these organizations are having a hard time turning a profit, why does the bureau need to be in midtown Manhattan? And why does it need to be big enough to sit, you know, the entire staff at the same time? I mean, which is true. The real estate costs are probably killing these organizations. Bureaus should probably be relocated to other cities. You know, think Newark, New Jersey. They would love to have 100 staff writers for the New York Times. Downtown rent would be very cheap. People would pay less for lunch. Maybe they could live nearby and spend less on their house. Everyone would win under a scenario like that. But we don't really see those types of solutions brought to bear.
- [04:51]
B
Decentralized meteorganism organizations.
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C
Yeah. People can work from home. Yeah. It is something from the crypto space that could absolutely help the real economy here. I also wonder how much of these organizations invest in R and D on the sales side. I don't see the New York Times reinventing how they approach consumers too often. I don't see them packaging new products, new ways to monetize their product. I mean, this is not an experience I would expect everyone to have. But have you ever placed an ad on the New York Times? I mean, it is A process out of the Middle Ages. The website looks like it's first generation Internet and there's some email address that if you do a little bit of searching, you can find and it's not accessible.
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B
It's not surprising though, because they've been relying on the platforms to do that. They've been relying on Google, AdWords, they've been relying on Facebook.
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C
Yeah. Which I think there are some other stones that they could unturn and try to find a better path forward. Because clearly what journalism is doing today isn't working. Ask the average person on the street, do you want to see journalism just go to the wayside? It's not the same as a shoe factory or, you know, a brand of toilet cleaner. I think the average person in the world today cares about these institutions sticking around, continuing to do what they do. It's not just about the economics here, but if these organizations are going to be around for the medium and long term, they're going to have to figure something out here. I mean, these layoffs, I mean, buzzfeed, cutting their entire national news desk. It's clear there's a problem.
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B
What do you think is going to happen? Do you think that the possible solution is some type of government funding, not for a government media organization like a pbs, but maybe some kind of highly regulated grant system? But again, this is where the rubber meets the road to the conversation we had earlier about incentives. This is. I'm always scared and ner.
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C
Well, what's really killing them is how social media platforms, Google's, Facebook's, Twitter's, they've taken away all of the massive advertising accounts. That's a tremendous source of revenue for media and content producers. That's really been cordoned off to the side. Years ago they were talking about coming up with some sort of arrangement where they might be able to share those monies. That seems not to really be playing out. And now I think Facebook is coming out with a new plan where they're going to help increase the subscriber base of.
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B
They're a horrible company.
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C
Right.
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B
They're a horrible company.
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C
Who was it? I think it was Steve Bannon not too long ago was saying, in the future these platforms are probably going to be more kind of quasi public in a sense the way, I mean, Twitter really is in the process of reinventing television. Television?
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B
How so?
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C
Television is regulated. I mean, just the way people.
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B
Twitter is real inventing television.
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C
Yeah. I mean, you can watch live video, you know, on Twitter. The NFL had a couple games that were exclusive on Twitter last year, I'd.
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B
Say YouTube has been revolutionizing television. YouTube is completely revolutionized television. YouTube TV kids don't watch.
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C
Yeah, YouTube TV is just great. I love it. My brother Thomas Packet got me into it.
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B
How's Tom doing?
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C
He's doing really well. He's your crypto guy.
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B
He's a.
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C
You're saying you wanted to talk about crypto before and he moved out of the.
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B
He had that West Village apartment. Where was it?
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C
Oh, he's all the way downtown now.
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B
He went downtown. I was there for. That was right when we moved to New York. He was.
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C
You gotta have him on the show.
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B
Came for the Super Bowl. We watched the super bowl at his apartment. Apartment in 2013.
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C
That's right.
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B
We're getting near that. It's almost now. Almost six years.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Yeah. Maybe I will have him on. I'll have a good time. Tom Pacquia. So you were talking about Twitter and the. But what about. So, I mean, that also makes me. Dude, this stuff makes me nervous. I think this is part of the problem.
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C
If you can watch live video of sporting events on Twitter, plus you have every person who's on the platform creating content. I would argue that that's really analogous to broadcasting over the airwaves, which is regulated by the government to a certain extent.
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B
And no one broadcasts over the airways anymore.
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C
Right, right. Because you're talking about going back. Because they can do it on platforms like Google, Facebook or cable.
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B
I mean, are the regulations for the cable industry like the broad. I don't know, regulations as well?
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C
No, but they could be. And I think that part of the answer to figuring out the problem in journalism and news starts with some sort of rationalization of the relationship that content providers have with the social media platforms. I do not have the answer to this today, but I think that if there's going to be meaningful progress forward that allows these content producers to invest in stuff like investigative journalism, in depth reporting, meaningful opinion and op ed and analysis and all that stuff that we want big journalist institutions to provide. That is going to be something that is going to require, again, some sort of recalibration of the model between.
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B
I think you're right.
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C
Production and distribution.
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B
Dude, I think you're right about a lot of what you've said. I think also these things move cyclically. We talked about FDR in the 1930s, the change from the Gilded Age to this age of 90% tax rates and a country that had just come out of war and that was highly unified. Right?
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C
Yeah. And your thoughts before about how we as a generation just soaked up all this foreign policy, media and content, and we just were engaging with it. But younger generations don't really seem to have the same proclivities. Maybe that kind of factors into the cyclical nature of this business.
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B
But speaking about cyclical nature, I think there's also something to be said about the dangers of war. One of the things that I've contended with in preparing and doing a number of episodes, specifically, I'm thinking the episode with Joan Freeze on Space Warfare, a couple episodes, but one primarily with Bruce Schneier on Cyber War. These new tools for conflict are creating, again, incentives. Cyber war is a really great example. When I had Bruce Schneier on the show, I tried to create a metaphor to think about this. And I went back to World War I. No one thought books were written on this back then that we would never see another war. There would never again be a war between the continental Europe and the United States or within the continent of Europe, because it simply was not economically advantageous. It was, in fact, counterproductive. There was too much at stake. No one would ever go to war. And I referenced the Schlieffen Plan, which was the cult of offense. It was the General Staff in Germany and similarly in France. The understanding was with this new technology, this heavy artillery and these tanks, the country, the nation which moved first, had an overwhelming advantage. Right. Which is the exact opposite of what happened during the Cold War. During the Cold War, we had the United States and the Soviets, and we got through the entire war, the entire Cold War, without either one firing a shot. Right.
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C
But in both wars, members of the private sector printed money.
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A
Hold on.
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B
My point, though, is that I guess I kind of went off the rails a little bit there, but actually not exactly. So let me bring it back. So back with World War I, the incentives were to go to war. And also the generations hadn't been to war in so long, Right. And then that led to World War I, and then World War II came off the back of that sort of. It was an inevitability, in a sense, when we look back based on the outcomes of the previous war, of the Great War, and then during the Cold War, the generations already had so much war in memory. And on top of that, Mutually assured destruction and the cult of defense. Right. And containment were in vogue. That was the way that we dealt with the Cold War. Now it's been generations past. No one has a memory of war, of World War. And the cult of offense is back, but it's Even bigger. Because with cyber war, not only are you incentivized to act first, you're incentivized to act fast. Because when you find an exploit in cyberspace, the longer that exploit is out there, the less likely it's going to work because more likely they're going to patch it. And so I worry about the possibility of war. I worry about that. That's another thing I worry about.
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C
Yeah. It seems we'll probably experience this in our lifetimes. Maybe some catastrophic event in cyber war that is going to have an immediate negative impact on the majority of people living in the United States all at the same time. I mean, it's probably gonna happen.
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B
We're all wondering why it hasn't happened already.
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C
Right.
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B
I mean, it's evident in all the films and television movies that come out all the time. The television shows. Right. There's so much like that movie Bird Box. Right. Or Interstellar. With climate change, there is an angst that is coming out of the culture, whether it's climate change. Hurricane Sandy was an example. Right. Some people might contend whether that was as a result of man made climate change, but it was most certainly a result of, of higher sea levels and warmer weather that allowed that hurricane to travel up the east coast. Or in the case of any kind of apocalyptic event, there is an anxiety about that because we all understand our population is getting larger, we're getting closer together, everything's being created to be more efficient and with greater efficiencies, more homogeneity.
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C
Yeah. Look, I certainly share your concerns here. When I was back in publishing, you know, we had a beat that kind of covered the whole cybersecurity space. And we talked to a lot of people in government and in this burgeoning private sector companies providing cybersecurity solutions. It's just, it's a gangbusters business, as I'm sure you know, because the threat is real and I think properly termed existential. There are ways to cause turmoil in our society through technological means that if you sit down and think about it for a minute, are profound and nerve wracking.
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B
We're so interconnected. We saw it with the banking system in 2008. Financially, we're interconnected, but also now in terms of technologically.
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C
Yeah. And as a society, I would argue that we're not great at taking 35,000 foot views of our interconnectedness and various networks at play in given scenarios and seeing where problems could arise. Some people in the media, but not many people in government took a look at what was happening on Wall street in terms of derivatives and structured finance. And just looked a little bit down the road and said this could be a problem. We should probably at least have a plan, even if it's in the bottom drawer of someone's desk. I never got the impression that that really ever happened to the credit crisis. We are kind of seeing the same thing. I think the military is involved in a lot of this cybersecurity stuff. So they've probably come up with more sophisticated contingency planning for some of the things that could go wrong. But I'm completely speculating here.
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B
Do you ever worry that our generation is not equipped, Maybe even our parents generation, but certainly us, we're not equipped mentally and sort of in terms of temperament.
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C
The government is run by people who are of the generation before our parents generation.
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B
Right.
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C
You know, I mean, there are still members of the great generation in media and running very, very high functioning positions in government who are well within their 80s and 90s. Yeah, I think that that is. It's not a problem.
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B
Would you ever want anyone from your generation running the government?
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C
You know, brings us back to your girl question. Mr. Kushner has not demonstrated competence as of yet. We'll see. He might get a couple more years out of.
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B
Does worry me.
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C
There are not many people our age who are in government.
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B
This world was built by our.
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C
At the top levels.
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B
It was built by our grandparents and by their parents.
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C
Yeah.
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B
And our parents inherited it and sort of had a basic idea of how to run it because they'd seen their parents and their grandparents run it.
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C
Yeah. But the grandparents are sticking around. Like if you go to many of the top law firms.
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B
I understand what you're saying. What's going to happen? Yeah. What's going to happen though, when we. What do you mean? What's going to happen when we take over? Are you not worried about that?
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C
It might be a ways off. Is it People aren't retiring. If you go to some of the top flight investment banks and law firms, there are people who are very capable, who I consider good people, competent people, brilliant people even still running things.
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B
Dude, we're awesome in the private sector, you and me. Our generation is fantastic in the private sector. I love how the private sector has evolved.
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C
Yeah.
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B
I'm a big fan of the.
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C
I think professional services is behind the curve.
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B
I don't know about all that professional services stuff, but I will tell you that I love how there's been a dismemberment of the corporation. I like this gig economy. I like it much more. It's much more fluid. It's much more in line with some of the libertarian values that I share. And it reminds me much more of that type of an economy. Now, that's a separate issue from the wealth issue. I don't think those two things are necessarily connected.
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C
Yeah, I mean, the gig economy would work great if wages were higher or if the.
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B
I think the wages, though, Lee, are a reflection of the wealth, dude. I think everything comes back to the wealth, probably.
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C
I think that's probably right. Yeah.
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B
It's also why 100%. It's also why interest rates are so low. With that level of wealth inequality, you end up getting a disproportionate amount of debt generation in order to maintain the system, and that necessitates rates to be lower. It also means that very wealthy people are willing to, during the good times, give their money away for practically nothing in order to get a moonshot. Because for them, what does an extra 10 million mean? And it means during the bad times, they hoard it all. It's not a functional system.
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C
And we haven't even talked about globalization as of yet.
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B
No, but the thing that I'm saying, though, is that I don't trust our generation to work the government because I don't think we're serious. I don't think we have attention spans. I think we're overwhelmed. Even me, dude, I'm overwhelmed looking at the mail. When I go home, I pass right by my mailbox. I hate male. It gives me massive levels of anxiety. I don't know how you feel about your. But your thing is, dude, the thing about you that's so fascinatingly to me is you're so. I mean, I'm not immature, you know, in some ways I'm immature, but I think I'm a premature guy. But, like, you're put together. You're responsible. You have some. I would trust you, man.
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C
Can I get this on tape? Can I walk away with this and just carry it? I'll just play it, you know, Play this forever. One of those recorders. I'll just keep it in my pocket.
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B
Play this for. You are, though. You've always been that way. And you're also a hopeful guy, which is interesting because you're so pessimistic on journalism. That might be a reflection of the fact that I work in this field and I see some of the opportunities for it. You know what I mean? I think that's a big part of.
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C
Also, I think journalism's. You know, we could talk about it for days. It's a special situation, as it were.
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B
But anyway, that worries me. To imagine people of my generation at the controls. It worries me. So anyway, that stuff worries me. Two more things I definitely want to touch on are markets, financial markets and crypto. So let's talk about crypto first. What do you do in crypto? You've done a little bit of work, some consulting. What have you done?
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C
I've done a little bit. I've had some clients in the space. My brother really brought me into it. My brother is a bitcoin og.
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B
Where did Tom get into bitcoin?
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C
In grad school, Tom wrote his thesis on, I think it was digital payments and touched on bitcoin, I believe. And it was pretty early in the cycle, but he got into it while he was doing a study abroad with NYU Stern.
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B
He was in London, right?
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C
No, he was in Hong Kong.
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B
Oh, Hong Kong. Where?
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C
Digital payments in Asia, they're ahead of the curve. So he got into it there. And then he went on to get a job at a startup that was dabbling in blockchain and crypto. And after that he went to Fidelity, where he was working at a group that was, you know, researching potential applications for bitcoin and blockchain. Really, really interesting gig. And he went on his own a couple years later to start a fund. He's been, you know, working.
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B
He's a crypto fund. I don't know, what's it called?
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C
Hodl Capital.
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B
H O D L. He's a bitcoiner.
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C
He is a bitcoiner.
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B
Hodl Capital.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Get out of here.
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C
Yeah. So, I mean, I've gotten to know the space through him a little bit over the years. And it's interesting. I can't claim to understand it nearly as well as my brother or you or any of probably your previous guests on this show, but it's an area I'm watching with great interest. And to quote the President, we'll see what happens.
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B
Well, you've done some interesting insights on the regulatory front in this space. You've expressed some skepticism around the extent to which people are in the clear with respect to the SEC and some of the regulators.
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C
Right. Well, I think in many ways the crypto community is very lucky that Jay Clayton is running the sec. He is tremendously capable. He is relatively young. He is open minded to innovation and all the great things that can stem from innovation in terms of creation of wealth and jobs and progress. I think that we have people in the regulatory sphere, Jay Clayton and others, who are careful not to kill a growing industry that could provide tremendous economic benefit to the United States in the broader world. That said, you know, with the ICO craze that we saw in recent months and years, I don't think a ton of attention was paid to existing securities laws and some people may have run afoul. We've seen some prosecutions come out of the SEC and other branches of the government. There may be more. But with any market that catches white hot fire the way crypto did, there's inevitably going to be some pullback and shakeout and then regrowth from there. And I think we're well along the way in terms of recalibrating the market and setting the stage for bigger and better things.
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B
We'll see. Man, there's been so much hype in the space, it's so ridiculous. We'll see what really shakes out.
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C
But by and large, I think I'm reasonably optimistic about this space.
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B
Well, I think Bitcoin itself has promise as a digital store of value, like a kind of a digital gold. I think that Ethereum, I've said privately for a very long time, pretty much ever since I started delving into hashgraph In 2017, before the end of 2017, everyone that knew me personally, I was pretty pessimistic on Ethereum. That's even more true today. I don't think that that's really going anywhere. I think the reason they haven't been able to scale the platform for a while is because they're just not going to or to be able to do it securely. As time has gone on, I've become ever more bullish on Hashgraph. Of course listeners know I'm an investor in Hashgraph, I'm a seed investor. But I wasn't when I started to talk about it and have Lehman on the show and did a conference. I wasn't an investor and I didn't know that I'd even have an opportunity. It was an incredible opportunity that came, but I think they really have an opportunity to build a real decentralized. To an extent there's going to be a governance mechanism with Hashgraph. There's the Governing Council, but I think people will actually be able to build meaningful real applications that run in an environment and in a way that's superior to existing applications that are server based that's going to offer something different than what Bitcoin is. I think both can coexist. It's still early. We'll see what happens when their main it really goes live. I mean, it's live, but when it's sort of publicly available for everyone, we'll see. So what do you think about markets, man? We had a turbulent, really turbulent December, I think. What did they drop, 20%? I think the market dropped 20% in a month and the bank stocks dropped 25%. And then we just kind of back to background noise again. Right. It's kind of the same what we talked about with Trump and the news cycle not impacting the markets. It's just back to basics.
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C
Well, I think a couple things happened at the end of 2018. We started to come off of an incredible bull run, one of the longest bull runs in stock market history. People made an awful lot of money. Earnings look great. All good things do have to come to an end at a certain point. So we saw, I think, a measured, contained, orderly pullback. There wasn't a ton of panic in December. No one was jumping out windows. We started the year with a little bit of sideways action, which, again, I don't think is the worst thing in the world. And I think barring any negative news coming out of this out of Washington, D.C. or I would say negative optics surrounding the China trade deal or tariffs, I think that we're probably poised to go higher. But again, this isn't exactly my lane. But I think markets are probably poised to do at least okay. Problems coming out of the news flow. Other than that, I think we're just waiting for a trade deal to get done here, which God knows what that's.
- [26:17]
B
Going to look like. If Trump's caving on the wall is any indication, he might just cave on the negotiations with China also, or it'll.
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C
Just take so long that new people will be at the table. That's the dynamic about the negotiations between the United States and China that I find so fascinating. Their government is not going to. It's going to be the same people. Our government's going to change very quickly. We're already talking about starting the primaries for the Democratic ticket this week.
- [26:45]
B
Yeah. But what the establishment and what the Chinese, also the US Establishment and the Chinese may be surprised to find is that the next administration might actually be even harder to negotiate with than this one.
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C
It is possible because I think the.
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B
Tide is turned in public opinion against China both on the left and on the right, because there is a universal condemnation against the Chinese for their IP practices.
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C
Yeah. And I think you're onto something there because we are starting to see that while the Trump administration has not made a ton of headway here, they are at least signaling to other members of the American political establishment. And if you step on this line, the world doesn't blow up. I mean, there have been some issues. We've imposed tariffs, which I never thought we would see again. I'm totally against using those tactics in international trade. But he is demonstrating a willingness, at least in the short term, to tolerate all the political fallout that comes along with playing hardball with the Chinese government. Is it the best idea in the medium to long term? Probably not. But he's also showing that it's not a conversation that presents immediate and disastrous results for whoever enters into it, which I think does mark a change in the way people in government think about this issue. Would you agree with that?
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B
Maybe, maybe. But you know, what I was thinking about was some of the usual suspects that you and I know who have been, you know, waiting for a sort of market collapse for a very long time.
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C
Yeah.
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B
And I wonder about that and how that's all gonna play out, because that was like the big thing for a very long time In a small sort of community that, you know, we're both familiar with. The Perma Bears, basically. Yeah. They are starving at this point. They're like. We have an expression in Greek. Looking at my engineer, I don't know what the English expression of that is, but basically just skin and bones, right?
- [28:39]
C
Yeah. I'm of two minds on this. Certain parts of the economy, earnings look great. Companies look like they're doing fine. On the other side of the equation, the bankruptcy and restructuring space is busier now than it probably has been in the last eight or so years. I mean, we're seeing more companies struggle to continue operations. That might be a result of interest rates ticking up a little bit. That might be a result of maybe some unreported or underreported economic headwinds that the American consumer is facing. Maybe it's tariffs, but we are starting to see more companies kind of make their way into the proverbial emergency room of the bankruptcy and restructuring space in the United States. And I think that while I'm generally bullish on financial markets going forward, I'm not 100%.
- [29:32]
B
Why are you not doing a show anymore?
- [29:34]
C
I don't know.
- [29:35]
B
You're so good at this, dude.
- [29:36]
C
Oh, thank you.
- [29:38]
B
You have an informed opinion about everything we talked about.
- [29:41]
C
You know, I did my own shows when I left Bloomberg for a period of time. Yeah, I did a. A bit on criminal justice reform and we had some shows on ip and I did kind of a general cultural affairs long form interview show which was really my passion. I really enjoyed it.
- [29:59]
B
Which one are you talking about?
- [30:00]
C
Nights and weekends.
- [30:01]
B
Nights and weekends.
- [30:02]
C
You know, we had you on for, you know, an hour. Deep dive on life and where we're going.
- [30:06]
B
I gotta hear that again.
- [30:07]
C
And I enjoy creating content a lot.
- [30:09]
B
You love this business, Lee. I know you. You love this stuff.
- [30:12]
C
Look, it's hard to figure out how to make any money at it. And even if you're doing it just for yucks, I always found it challenging to figure out where I wanted to focus my time and energy in terms of creating content. We're living in a world that is totally horizontal. You have the ability to bring guests in from any walk of life and talk about anything. And if you're going to publish a show once a week or once a month or daily, and this is just, I think, a function of my idiosyncrasies, I was kind of overwhelmed by choice at the end of the day of what direction to run in. Should I be covering the top news story that's on the front page of every newspaper that day, or should I buck that trend and go in a different direction? Should I just focus on what I feel like focusing on and make the show much more subjective in that sense? And it kind of got to the point where I was just kind of. I felt like I was just trying to fill the editorial calendar because I couldn't just make up my mind and make a decision.
- [31:12]
B
That's interesting.
- [31:12]
C
It really. It was a facet of the business that I always kind of struggled with. I just wanted a booker and a.
- [31:19]
B
Producer to tell me what we all.
- [31:22]
C
Those were some of the interviews that I enjoyed the most where I had someone at Bloomberg or some external force basically saying, this is the guest, this is the show. Have at it. I love those shows. If you get put in a room with someone and you have no idea and just give me five minutes before, give me a couple things to read real quick and let me do the interview. I wish I could do that. That's good stuff. That's good stuff. I'm probably better at the interviews than the behind the camera work.
- [31:48]
B
That's interesting. That's the exact opposite of how I like to do my interviews.
- [31:51]
C
I know. That's why I said that.
- [31:52]
B
And that's kind of how I did. That's kind of how I did this.
- [31:55]
C
You were a master of the production aspect of this stuff.
- [31:58]
B
You mean back with a capital account?
- [31:59]
C
Yeah, I mean, I remember you put on Twitter a couple days ago, what do you call those things? Rundowns Those big. Yeah, those big.
- [32:05]
B
The rundowns I have here, dude, are epic. Those are nothing.
- [32:08]
C
The ones we needed, that would not come naturally to me, but we would.
- [32:11]
B
Needed those for Capital Account because we had a teleprompter. We needed those things, you know, I'm saying. And, like, I had Lauren, who was phenomenal. Lauren was so talented. She did such a great job as the host. And, you know, I gotta say, she's so.
- [32:24]
A
She is.
- [32:25]
B
But, you know, I say was because in the context of what we were talking about there, she was so smart. She was able to learn things, and she was kind of like the quintessential crammer. She could cram, like right before an exam, learn everything, and then dump it, never remember it.
- [32:39]
C
That's the skill set that I think lends well to this business.
- [32:41]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [32:43]
C
If you'd be on camera.
- [32:44]
B
Yeah. But I loved doing Capital Account. I missed it tremendously. And it was just Lauren and me. And I had a line producer who didn't do any editorial work, and she just interfaced with the control room. But, I mean, that was. I don't even know how I would do that show today. I enjoyed doing this much more, but, yeah, that was production heavy. But bringing it back to you, I've come back to thinking about you often. There's another person who I'm friends with also. His name is Ash Bennington, and he was at Coindesk for a little bit. He's at Rail Vision now, and he was at cnbc and he would work for Roubini. He's kind of been all over the place. Incredibly smart guy. And for other reasons, doesn't do a show. Would love to do a show, but for other reasons, doesn't do one. There's certain people that I think could just belong in this business. One of the things I always liked about what you were doing before was the emphasis on law, because I just think that's lacking and a legal perspective is lacking. So, anyway, I hope that you can find a way to make it back. Maybe if we can really crush it out of the ballpark here with Hidden Forces, we can create a legal force. Lee, it was great having you on, man. This overtime segment was actually really good.
- [33:54]
C
Demetri, my man, anytime. Thank you so much for having me.
- [33:57]
B
Thank you.
- [33:58]
A
And that was the overtime to my episode with Lee Pacquiao. I want to thank Lee for being on my program. Today's episode of Hidden Forces was recorded at Edge Studio in New York City. For more information about this week's episode. Or if you want easy access to related programming, visit our website at hiddenforces IO and subscribe to our free email list. If you want access to overtime segments, episode transcripts, and show rundowns full of links and detailed information related to each and every episode, check out our premium subscription, available through the Hidden Forces website or through our Patreon page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website @HiddenForces IO, join the conversation at Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @HiddenForcesPod, or send me an email at dk@HiddenForces IO. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.