Explore "China" with insightful episodes like "Ellis Martin Report: SkyHarbour Resources' Jordan Trimble's Deep Dive into Uranium Territory>", "#2021 - Mike Baker", "Konfliktbereit? Westliche Außenpolitik in Zeiten der Systemrivalität", "11-30-22 - Pitchforks And Torches" and "S2#EP12【Festival】在美國生活真的沒有過農曆新年的氣氛嗎 ？聽到最後你才知道原來還有這些驚喜 ！" from podcasts like ""ABN Newswire Finance Video", "The Joe Rogan Experience", "Auslandsinfo", "15 Minutes Ov Flame With Robert Phoenix" and "90 Radio"" and more!
Mike Baker is a former CIA covert operations officer and current CEO of Portman Square Group, a global intelligence firm. He's also the host of "Black Files Declassified" on Discovery+ and the Science Channel, and author of "Company Rules, Or Everything I Know About Business I Learned from the CIA." Look for "The President's Daily Brief" podcast he's hosting startring on September 5.
www.portmansquaregroup.com
In addition to the escalating situations in China, Brazil and Arizona, we also take a look at Biden's burnt rentals, the looming rail strike, the revenge of Milo, Musk, Starlink, alt tech networks, and of course the arrest of Sam Brinton, who heisted a $2,600 piece of luggage from the airport in Minneapolis.
After nearly a hundred years of fighting between petty states and half-baked dynasties, the Song Dynasty finally emerged as a unifying force in China. Under their leadership, China would make some impressive technological and cultural gains, forging a renaissance throughout East Asia in the 1000s.
Support the showGet immersed in the busyness of Beijing as we document something extremely rare; the adoption of a 13 year old boy who is visually impaired.
When you think of modern-day secessions, the struggles of Catalonia, Scotland, Kashmir, and Kurdistan typically come to mind. But Papua New Guinea (PNG)’s autonomous region of Bougainville is farther along than most to achieving independence. Following a bloody civil war that ended two decades earlier, 98% of some 250,000 Bougainvilleans voted for independence in December 2019 in a historic but non-binding referendum. Bougainville’s recently-elected president, a former rebel commander, will now lead independence negotiations. But the small island territory, sitting on a wealth of copper and gold, can’t escape larger geopolitical battles -- world powers like China, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand are interested and involving themselves in Bougainville’s independence movement. Shane McLeod, a Research Fellow at the Lowy Institute’s Australia-PNG Network, joined Altamar to shine light on Bougainville’s efforts to join the club of sovereign states. He is an expert on Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands and has written extensively on Bougainville. Formerly a senior editor at ABC News in Sydney, he has managed several flagship radio programs and covered the Asia-Pacific region as a foreign correspondent.
https://altamar.us/bougainville-the-world-next-country/
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Produced by Simpler Media
Guest: Peter Lee. We discussed some of the background story on Xinjiang, a province and autonomous region in the northwest of China that borders on Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India and is part of the historical Silk Road. We also talked about the Uyghurs, the current situation in Xinjiang, the media coverage and the escalating tensions between the US and China. In a bonus question for patrons (Ep 181EXTRA Taiwan and Top Asia-Related Issues), I asked Peter Which Asia-related issues he thinks are most pressing, worrying or important to focus on right now.
Peter has decades of experience in East Asia both as a businessman and as a writer. He produces Peter Lee’s China Threat Report and has been published at Asia Times, CounterPunch at his own blog, China Matters.
FOLLOW @chinahand. SUBSCRIBE to Peter Lee’s China Threat Report.
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Recorded on September 2, 2020. Music by Fluorescent Grey.
Reference Links:
CEO, Queen’s Road Capital
Even as a young boy growing up in California, Fritz Demopoulos thought like an entrepreneur, finding a way to make money from distributing flyers. That lesson in distribution may have been what started him on his journey towards building China’s first travel search engine, Qunar, with his two co-founders. And that wasn’t even their first startup together. Their exit in 2011 to Baidu drew attention to China’s travel market.
In this episode:
Can you recall a mistake made in those early days of Qunar?
“Yeah, innumerable mistakes. I mean, we're almost lucky we survived. But probably the biggest mistake that I think relates to both execution and strategy was, broadly speaking, we didn't value human resources as much as we should have. We didn't think about strategic people management from a top level. We didn't put as much emphasis on it, we were kind of like, ‘Nah, human resources…’ it's almost an annoyance, we just gotta somehow navigate. However, looking back, had we maybe spent more time thinking very carefully about our people resources – from recruitment, to retention, to smart compensation strategies – I think that would have solved a lot of problems that we faced later.”
Reason for starting venture capital firm, Queen’s Road Capital
“We want(ed) to follow our own path. Broadly speaking, I think that if you follow your own path, you can make your own decisions. Yes, we want to be challenged, and sometimes being part of a larger vehicle, you're challenged and you can learn, which is amazing. I do have an affiliate relationship, I guess you could say. But at some institutions, there's a lot of give and take and learning. I guess you're suggesting, why didn't I join a venture fund? Yeah, some of these funds, they have a very specific mandate – their limited partners require them to just focus on China, just focus on Southeast Asia. There's this geographic boundary that many of these funds have to operate within and you know, that's just how the game works. I kind of felt I wanted to do more than that. For example, I wanted to go to Berlin and explore some interesting companies there, and obviously, we know Get Your Guide is an amazing company and I'm one of the first investors in that firm. Had I been part of a fund with those geographic boundaries, I don't think I ever would have had that opportunity to invest in that company. So, we want to try different things and carve out our own path.”
Life as an investor or entrepreneur – which do you prefer?
"Well, I certainly miss the specific mission that one has running a business. That's just amazing and exhilarating, and the wide variety of things that you do when you're running your own company – from dealing with investors, to recruiting staff, to managing the daily or weekly team meetings, to solving all sorts of interesting problems to securing deals – just the wide array of things that we do, I miss that. And of course, underlying that mission of we're trying to really do something amazing. So I certainly miss that. However, as an investor, we get the benefit of, you could say, perspective. We're higher up in the atmosphere, we can see more things, we can get exposure to more things and so we get a bit more variety from that perspective, although we're not the captain of the ship. So, that's the trade-off."
On sci-fi and technology
"In recent years, (science fiction projects) dystopian versions of the future. I guess that's the flavour of the month, really? Or flavour of the year? You know, before Star Wars, a lot of people thought the future would be a very clean, organised rows and columns environment. Star Trek, it's very clean, right?... like Isaac Asimov once said, science fiction is a description of humanity's reaction to technology. So, maybe some of the writers feel ,and of course many of us do feel that, maybe humanity's reaction to technology is slightly negative, ie dystopian, right? With the targeting that the internet companies do against us, and data privacy and some of these other things, you can see how there are some big concerns."
Should there be a day that extra-terrestrial life visits us, what’s the one place on Earth that you’d tell them is a must-see?
“Amazing question. I think some place that is a reflection of humanity and our values – man or womankind, however you want to describe it. So it could be for example, the Parthenon in ancient Greece, because the Greeks were the first society to really say, ‘Hey, you know, all these ethereal gods, they have faults just like humans do.’ It's essentially indirectly elevating humans and, of course, being the birthplace of democracy, I think that might be one cool place. Or it could be fast forward a few hundred years or a few I guess 1000 years to Leonardo da Vinci's workshop in ancient Florence, which is a similar trend. The Renaissance was about capturing what the ancient Greeks had captured, in humanity being the centre of that, and the value of life and, of course, Leonardo da Vinci being like an amazing renaissance man, that might be interesting. Or it could be maybe Runnymede in the UK where they signed the Magna Carta. Again, (it’s) about no one person can break the law. Even the king has to follow the law, or we're going to chop off his head. So, that might be an amazing place to show. Or it could be, the Monty Python workshop, maybe, that might be another [laughs]. I guess we want to take things seriously, but we don't want to take ourselves too seriously.”
Note: This interview was recorded in the early part of the year, when Fritz and his family were planning a skiing vacation. Then chaos broke out with the coronavirus pandemic. Fritz says he’s enjoyed spending time at home for a change. The pandemic is certainly a good time to think about travel in a different light and tech investments which he’s focused on. Like a true entrepreneur, he sees opportunities in crisis and there will be new breakout sectors post-Covid-19. Given the closure of borders and the uncertainty of travel in the near future, he thinks it’s also a good time to explore Hong Kong and be a domestic traveller for now.
Ep. 37 AFRICOM
Dan and Joanne discuss the War on Terror shift to the African continent and the recent loss of US troops in Niger.
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Recorded on October 24, 2017. Music by Fluorescent Grey.
Reference Links:
Interview with Horace Campbell and Mark Fancher Part 2, DemocracyNow
Welcome to The Archibald Project’s very first Blogcast! We've been toying around with the idea of recording our blogs for a while so that everyone who would like to participate in our stories would have an easy way to do so. We’ve found that people love blogs but often do not have the time to fully read a post. However, podcasts are on the rise and are an easy way to consume information. We won't be recording every blog post from here on out, as we don’t want to fill up you iTunes or blast your subscription notifications, but we are planning on featuring blogcasts as a way to introduce a new series or an important story that we believe needs more attention than a traditional blog post.
That being said, you can either download this blogcast and listen to it at a later date... such as while you’re driving, working out, cleaning etc, or you can opt out of listening and read the entry below. We’d love to hear your feedback on our new idea, so please comment below or on our social media and let us know if you like TAP incorporating blogcasts!
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Hear about travel to Guizhou China as the Amateur Traveler talks to travel writer Gina Czupka from thistimetomorrow.net about her trip to this off the beaten path destination.
This week The Kilted One, McBlizzard the Wizard, and The Angry Ginger meet up in the diner to talk trailers (The Martian, Self/less), Geek out over Sense 8 (and all it's silly graphic nudity), Star Wars Rebels and a couple of kids shows that maybe best to experience on illegal drugs...or at least they were created using that method. We also talk Bad Boys 3, The Punisher coming to Daredevil Season 2 and did The Rock hear last weeks episode? All of this, and so much more.
Visit The Angry Ginger's New Webcomic Website www.ExtinctionLevelEventComic.com
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