In Episode 200 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Maureen Farrell, author of “The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neuman, and the Great Startup Delusion.”
Maureen, along with her colleague and co-author Eliot Brown, were some of the first reporters at the Wall Street Journal to cover what is arguably the biggest financial debacle in the history of early-stage investing. And yet, this description doesn’t even begin to capture the incredible story that is the rise and fall of WeWork: a story about a real estate company that was at one point the most valuable start-up in America, despite racking up over $10 billion dollars in losses over the course of just nine years and vaporizing nearly forty billion dollars in equity value practically overnight.
The reality of WeWork—of what it is and what it was—stands in stark contrast to what its founder, Adam Neuman said it was to his investors, employees, and the media. It was going to be worth ten trillion dollars, more than any other company in the world. It wasn’t just an office space provider. It was a tech play. Its spin-offs like “WeGrow” and “WeLive” were going to revolutionize education and change the world. Adam Neuman was going to solve Middle East peace and WeWork would help colonize Mars.
As crazy as all of this sounds, it is emblematic of a larger decay in the most basic principles of capitalism that prioritizes the raising of capital over the turning of profits. It rewards storytellers over businesspeople. Price overvalue.
This episode is broken into two parts, the first half of which is focused mainly on the particulars of WeWork, the characters involved, and the disastrous decisions made by its management along with the dereliction of its board. The second half focuses on the larger macro forces that are responsible for encouraging the type of behavior that we’ve seen in the case of WeWork and applying that template to other companies and their executives. We also explore the intersection of politics and finance, including a rise in demagoguery that parallels the institutional and moral decay we are witnessing across many parts of Western society.
You can access the second half of this conversation, as well as the transcript, and show notes to this week’s episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Episode Recorded on 07/18/2021
In Episode 199 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with investor and financial historian Russell Napier. Napier’s latest book, “The Asian Financial Crisis: 1995-1998,” covers a period of time that many investors are either not familiar with or haven’t studied anywhere near as closely as they should given its relevance to the investment regime in which we are living today.
Today’s investment regime—what Russell Napier called “The Age of Debt”—is characterized by excessive private and public debt levels, financial repression, market concentration, and all of the unintended consequences that arise from the perverse incentives that these dynamics create. We spend the first hour of our conversation discussing the crisis itself, its drivers, as well as the practices and policies that made it possible. The second hour is spent on the resolution of the crisis and applying the lessons learned from that period to today, with implications for the future path of interest rates, inflation, growth, political stability, and most practically, opportunities for investing in the new market regime that we are moving into.
Since this episode deals with markets and investing, we want to make absolutely clear that nothing we say on this podcast can or should be viewed as financial advice. All opinions expressed by Demetri Kofinas and Russell Napier are solely their own opinions and should not be relied upon as the basis for financial decisions.
You can access the episode overtime, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | YouTube | CastBox | RSS Feed
Write us a review on Apple Podcasts
Subscribe to our mailing list through the Hidden Forces Website
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://patreon.com/hiddenforces
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 07/09/2021
In Episode 198 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Lauren Aguirre, an award-winning science journalist whose book “The Memory Thief,” tells the story of a team of doctors responsible for discovering a surprising connection between the use of opioids—specifically fentanyl—and memory loss. This condition, first detected in drug overdose victims with severe damage to their hippocampus has since led to a series of discoveries about the nature of memory, as well as the mysteries that persist about how we remember—where memories live, how they’re formed, and why we forget most of what happens to us in a day but can remember some events with stunning clarity, years, even decades later.
Perhaps the greatest mystery that Lauren tackles in her book is why Alzheimer’s—a degenerative brain disease responsible for causing dementia and early death—has evaded scientific capture for a hundred years despite afflicting tens of millions of people around the world. It’s one of the questions we explore in-depth during the episode overtime, where Lauren also reveals promising new strategies and developments that may finally lead to an effective treatment and perhaps even cure of this devastating disease.
You can access the episode overtime, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | YouTube | CastBox | RSS Feed
Write us a review on Apple Podcasts
Subscribe to our mailing list through the Hidden Forces Website
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://patreon.com/hiddenforces
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 07/03/2021
In Episode 197 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Benjamin Bratton, professor of visual arts at UC San Diego and the author of “Revenge of the Real: Politics, for a post-pandemic world.”
Bratton’s book explores how our collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates a critical inability on the part of society to govern itself. The pandemic in this sense serves as a sort of non-negotiable reality-check that upends the comfortable illusions of a world that increasingly bears no resemblance to the one we have vacated.
Benjamin raises important questions about not only how we came to find ourselves in our current predicament of mask wars, urban riots, and institutional decay, but also, how we might go about constructing a world that is more representative of reality and the needs of the present moment.
In the overtime, Bratton and Demetri explore what a post-pandemic world might look like and what this means for our conceptions of governance and the individual.
You can access the episode overtime, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | YouTube | CastBox | RSS Feed
Write us a review on Apple Podcasts
Subscribe to our mailing list through the Hidden Forces Website
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://patreon.com/hiddenforces
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 06/28/2021