In Episode 14 of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with Christian Madsbjerg. Christian Madsbjerg is the founder of ReD Associates, a consultancy group focused on helping companies bridge the qualitative divide between themselves, their products, and their customers. The anthropologists, sociologists, economists, journalists, and designers who make up ReD employ the methods of social science to study human behavior. Instead of minimizing complexity, they embrace the non-linearities illuminated through human experience, helping companies reinvent themselves and their products from the bottom up.
In today’s conversation we examine the world from the perspective of human experience. This is what philosophers call “phenomenology.” Rather than objectify reality, we will revel in its subjectivity. Rather than discount our senses in favor of hard data, we will discount the data in favor of our experience. Experience matters. Reality is messy. Data is fuzzy. The problem of consciousness is hard. Try as we might to fit the world to our models, reality has a stubborn way of eluding even the most disciplined researcher. The most experienced traders don’t make decisions off of a spreadsheet. They use their intuition. The same intuition that you use when deciding who you can trust, if the price you are paying for something is too high, or if there’s something off about a room, or a scene, or a story you’ve just heard. To discount the authoritative wisdom that comes from lived experience is to discount the very question that has lead you down the path of inquiry. It is to discount everything that makes life meaningful. And if we want to understand the world around us – why we do what we do – then that journey must begin and end, with the human experience.
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
In Episode 13 of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with James Grant. James Grant is a legend of the financial newsletter industry. Once the editor of the yield column in Barron’s, he would leave in 1983 to found Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, two years after the sacred risk-free rate touched just under 20%. This is a level that seems nearly impossible to fathom in today’s world of near-zero and even negative, interest rates. Having observed, reported, and opined on markets for almost 50 years, James Grant represents a bastion of experience and wisdom.
In this episode, we stop to listen. We stop to remember a time, in which the extraordinary measures and unprecedented actions of our monetary and fiscal authorities would have seemed unimaginable. We take a hard look at money. How does this shadow of wealth find its value? How is the rate of interest determined, and what is the role of financial markets in facilitating the discovery of that value? What happened, in 2008 and what are the consequences, realized and yet to be discovered, of those very extraordinary and unprecedented actions taken by governments around the world to douse the flames of deflation? What was done in order to contain the contraction and to prevent the discovery of prices? What does the future hold in 2017? What investments does one make, and where might one find opportunity in these oceans of uncertainty?
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
In Episode 12 of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with economist Steve Keen. Steve is Professor of Economics at Kingston University in London and one of a handful of economists to correctly anticipate the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. Professor Keen is also the popular author of “Debunking Economics,” as well as the timely book, “Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis?”
In today’s conversation, we tear up the textbook of contemporary economics. We dispense with equilibrium. We embrace irrationality. We internalize economic externalities and drop assumptions about the world that do not comport with the reality of lived experience. We begin our history of economics with the physiocrats, enlightenment thinkers of the early 18th century who concerned themselves with the question: “where does stuff come from?” We move through the classical period of economics, exploring the philosophies of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. We stop to question the assumptions of the Newtonian minded neoclassicists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who saw fit to squeeze a complicated world into a set of simple models. Where did our ideas of rational preference, utility maximization, and market equilibrium come from? How have these ideas been debunked by the events, insights, and theories of the last 100 years? What was the role of John Maynard Keynes and his Keynesian revolution? Where did he and the Austrian Friedrich von Hayek meet? Where has the evolution of economics taken us since World War II? What is the role of banking in the economy? How is money created? How does it circulate? What is the role of credit? How might this almost Godly instrument of wealth creation have become a source of global instability and financial distress? Finally, Steve Keen and Demetri explore the landscape of the modern economy. They look at China, with its ghost cities and massive state-directed banking system. They explore Australia, Canada, and South Korea, as possible sources for the next financial crisis and consider possible solutions for society, as well as the individual.
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor: Stylianos Nicolaou
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod