Demetri and Ryan discuss what courage is, why it matters, and if we can learn to live and act courageously. We are living in a time when people would rather stand on the sidelines than speak out against injustice, go along with convention, or bet on their own talents and abilities. And yet, Ryan would argue that we need courage now more than ever.
Our hope is that today’s conversation with Ryan will give cause to reflect on how you want to meet the challenges in your own life and what will give you the courage to face your fears and to make choices in this new year from a place of integrity that honors who you are and who you aspire to be.
If you want access to this week’s premium episode with Ryan Holiday, as well as the transcript and rundown to his conversation with Demetri, you can access all of those through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
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Episode Recorded on 12/22/2021
In Episode 224 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas appears as a guest on the Mining Stock Daily, a podcast by Trevor Hall which focuses on the junior mining and mineral exploration sector. Their conversation centers on the macro, big-picture themes of society, polity, economy, and culture that preoccupy most of Demetri’s attention, as well as on his own approach to investing.
You can find more information about Trevor’s podcast at miningstockdaily.com where you can listen to the entire, original episode, which mainly includes stories from Demetri’s time working in media and his thoughts about the difference between mediums like radio, TV, and podcasting.
There is no overtime to this episode, but you can still subscribe to our premium content and gain access to all past and future overtimes, transcripts, and rundowns through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our premium 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
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Episode Recorded on 12/09/2021
In the first hour of today’s conversation, Demetri and Doomberg discuss how to build a successful publishing company and what it takes to cultivate an audience in today’s decentralized, networked economy and fragmented media ecosystem. They discuss what that process has been like for the Doomberg team, what goes into building a brand from scratch, and the opportunities that have emerged for independent voices, and how to capitalize on them.
In the second hour, they transition into a conversation about cancel culture, the power of platforms vs. audiences, and what it means to have a dedicated group of followers who are willing to go to defend you in the event that you end up in the crosshairs of the censors or a mob of activists. Demetri and Doomberg also discuss some of the topics that he writes about on his doomberg.substack.com page, including America’s and Europe’s energy policies, why he thinks they don’t work, and what it will take in order to fix them. The two end with a more macro-oriented conversation about inflation and the influence of the economy on asset markets vs. the influence of monetary policy and which one is really in the driver’s seat.
You can access the second part of this episode, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s conversation through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our premium 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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Episode Recorded on 12/06/2021
In Episode 222 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Gregg Easterbrook. Gregg was a staff writer, national correspondent, and contributing editor at The Atlantic and has authored thirteen books about a variety of subjects including climate change, globalization, philosophy, and American football.
Demetri and Gregg explore the subject of Easterbrook’s latest book, “The Blue Age.” They discuss the extraordinary transformation of the international trading order that we’ve been living through over the last seventy years and the unique role that the US Navy and advancements in naval architecture and marine engineering have played in making all of that possible.
It’s difficult to appreciate just how unprecedented this long period of peace on the oceans has been and how extraordinary the deflationary pressures are that this peace has unleashed. It has also had huge implications for the expansion of credit, the reduction of volatility, and the growth in asset values in Western markets—topics that we’ve explored from a variety of different angles on the Hidden Forces podcast. What it might mean for our economies and for our lives if the Blue Age comes to an end is a question that is addressed directly during the first hour of today’s episode.
In the second half of today’s episode, which is available to premium subscribers only, Gregg and Demetri focus on the economic and geopolitical aspects of the Blue Age, the likelihood of conflict on the high seas, the incentives for and against it, and its consequences for the global economy. They also discuss some of the factors driving the current bottlenecks in global supply chains, the shipping industry’s contribution to this, and why Gregg feels that those bottlenecks will be largely resolved before the end of next year.
You can access the second part of this episode, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s conversation through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our premium 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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Episode Recorded on 11/30/2021
In Episode 221 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Jim Grant, the founder of Grant's Interest Rate Observer: a legend in the business of investor education and financial media.
What separates Jim from millions of his fellow financial journalists, commentators, and authors is the historical perspective that he brings, informed not just by the immense volume of books and periodicals that he’s consumed over the course of his lifetime, but primarily by the wisdom of his own lived experiences and lessons learned from the experiences of others that he’s had the privilege to know and interview over the course his life.
Given the ongoing controversy around inflation—its causes and consequences—we couldn’t think of anyone better to talk to than Jim Grant. Jim has been warning his readers about the unintended consequences of overly-accommodative Fed policy and dollar debasement for as long as we have known him and he is uniquely positioned to provide us with the historical context to understand where we find ourselves in the present cycle.
What we came to this conversation wanting to know from Jim, as someone who has lived through at least 3 major credit cycles, is if in fact he feels that this inflation is not transitory. If in fact, he thinks that we are in the process of up-anchoring inflation expectations and what this means for the Fed’s policy options, with important implications for assets like stocks, bonds, cryptocurrency, etc., whose prices have depended on the free-flow of credit that becomes less readily available in an environment of rising consumer and producer prices.
This is a phenomenal conversation that will help you integrate the history of inflation and what we know about its causes into the unique circumstances of our modern political-economy, which is characterized by historically high debt levels, aging demographics, and technology-driven deflation, in a way that can make you a better, more thoughtful investor.
Topics discussed during the Overtime include precious metals, cryptocurrency, meme stocks, ethics in journalism, and more. You can access that part of the conversation, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our premium 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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Episode Recorded on 11/18/2021
In Episode 220 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Julius Krein, the editor of American Affairs, a quarterly journal of policy and political-economy that delves into the deeper sociopolitical, cultural, and economic issues facing America and other Western countries.
The episode is broken into two parts, the first hour of which focuses on issues of political-economy, policy, and market dynamics that have driven the American economy into a state of “proletarianization,” where its citizens are increasingly ruled by an oligarchy of global elites whose insatiable appetite for wealth and power is endangering the very systems of free-market capitalism and liberal democracy that this kakistocracy claims to uphold. It’s an outcome that Julius Klein would refer to as “capitalism without competence and feudalism without nobility.”
The second hour of today’s conversation is, unsurprisingly, the most satisfying insofar as Demetri and Julius tackle the socio-political and cultural dimensions and manifestations of the problems created by the perversions of what was earlier described as the “proletarianization” or conversion of the American economy and political system into a more corrupt, upwardly sclerotic, and extractive system of governance than anything experienced in America since at least the Gilded Age.
You can access the second part of this episode, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s conversation through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our premium 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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Episode Recorded on 11/15/2021
In Episode 219 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Matt Ridley and Alina Chan. Alina is a Canadian molecular biologist specializing in gene therapy and cell engineering at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Matt is a British science journalist who has written countless bestselling books on subjects ranging from evolution, to innovation, to genomic science.
They are the co-authors of an electrifying new book titled “Viral” that grapples with the mystery of how Covid-19, a virus whose closest known relatives live in bats residing in subtropical southern China, somehow managed to begin spreading among people more than 1,500 kilometers away in the city of Wuhan, while leaving none of the expected traces that such outbreaks usually create. Instead, nearly two years into this pandemic we’re presented with a trail of evidence that increasingly points towards the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the so-called “Lab Leak Hypothesis” as the most plausible source of the outbreak.
This is a critically important conversation to be having and Matt and Alina have made an invaluable contribution to it by working tirelessly and at great risk to themselves and to their careers in order to bring clarity to many of the facts and much of the evidence in support of the lab leak hypothesis—a theory that was consistently attacked and discredited by various actors, both wittingly and unwittingly, in the earliest days of the pandemic.
We normally release the second half of our episodes for our subscribers only, but because of how important this conversation is and because of how much Matt and Alina have sacrificed in order to educate us all on the origins of Covid-19, we thought it was only right to do as much as we can to share as much of their work as possible.
If you enjoy today’s episode, please take a moment to write us a review on Apple Podcasts and consider being a premium subscriber, if you haven’t already. There's no commitment. You can cancel at any time and the entire library of Hidden Forces subscriber content going all the way back to Episode 1 becomes instantly available to you, including the transcripts, and rundowns, to this episode and every other episode we’ve ever done.
You can access the second part of this episode, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s conversation through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our premium 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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Episode Recorded on 11/09/2021
In Episode 218 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher. Eric is co-founder of Schmidt Futures and the former CEO & Chairman of Google and Daniel is the inaugural dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. They are the co-authors, along with Henry Kissinger, of a phenomenal new book titled, “The Age of AI And Our Human Future,” which explores how Artificial Intelligence is transforming human society—and what it means for all of us.
Eric and Dan spend the first hour discussing the technical dimensions of artificial intelligence—what it is and how it works—as well as how it will continue to shape and transform our social and physical realities. The second half of the conversation focuses on the national security dimensions of artificial intelligence, as well as the profound philosophical challenges that it poses for humanity, specifically our need to find meaning in a world where machines will provide answers to more and more questions but without the ability, in many cases, to provide us with a rational or methodology by which they arrived at those answer.
For those of you who are interested in the field of blockchain and DLT-enabled applications and smart contracts, Demetri had a chance to ask Eric about where he thinks these technologies fit in an AI future, what the main hurdles are going to be, and what some of the interesting projects in the space are.
You can access the second part of this episode, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s conversation through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our premium 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
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Episode Recorded on 11/08/2021
In Episode 217 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with New York Times Op-Ed columnist Ross Douthat about his five-year struggle with a disease that in his own words, officially, doesn't exist. It’s a story about personal suffering but also about what happens when we become terribly ill only to realize that even the doctors who are willing to treat us can only do so much.
Demetri and Ross spend the first half of their conversation discussing the book and its lessons for not only those dealing with chronic illnesses like Lyme disease, which has afflicted Ross, but for anyone who feels the need to challenge or circumvent the medical establishment in order to treat an illness or cure a serious disease. Unsurprisingly, this leads directly into a conversation about Covid-19, a disease which has inspired its own set of alternative treatment modalities and which has afflicted tens of millions of people with symptoms that the medical establishment is still struggling to understand.
In the second hour, Demetri has a chance to ask Ross about a number of political and social issues and questions surrounding the upcoming elections, the enduring popularity of Donald Trump, the ongoing transformation of the news media, the Biden presidency, and much more.
You can access the second part of this episode, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s conversation through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our premium 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
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Episode Recorded on 11/02/2021
In Episode 216 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Robin Wigglesworth, the Financial Times global finance correspondent and author of “Trillions,” a book which chronicles the origins, history, and future of the index fund, arguably the most disruptive financial innovation of the last 50 years.
Robin and Demetri spend the first half of their conversation exploring the history of passive investing and its evolution into what some argue has become a market-distorting phenomenon that is making markets less efficient by inhibiting price discovery and concentrating power in the hands of an increasingly smaller number of index fund managers and purveyors of indices.
In the overtime, the two switch gears to discuss some of the timelier stories concerning investors, including inflation, whether or not it is transitory, and what central banks are able and prepared to do in order to curb it. Robin and Demetri also discuss the ongoing trading scandals at the Federal Reserve and what they say about the extent of corruption in government, the loss of faith in public institutions on the part of investors, and how that loss of faith is reflected in the casinofication of markets and the speculative manias we’ve seen in meme stocks and cryptocurrencies. It’s a phenomenal, hour-long overtime that you will not want to miss.
You can access the second hour of this week’s episode, as well as the transcript and rundown through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our premium 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
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Episode Recorded on 10/18/2021
In Episode 215 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with 2020 Presidential candidate and Founder of the Forward Party, Andrew Yang. Yang is perhaps best known for popularizing the idea of universal basic income, what he called “the freedom dividend” during his run for president in 2020. He recently launched “the Forward Party,” a political party focused on breaking what Andrew sees as a two-party duopoly that is no longer working and whose members and policies have fallen increasingly out of favor with the majority of Americans. He details many of his policy proposals in his new book “Forward,” including ranked-choice voting, open primaries, term limits, campaign reform, and of course universal basic income: one-thousand dollars for every man and woman in America.
Demetri spent most of the first half of their conversation asking Andrew Yang about his experience on the campaign trail, what it was like to run for president, and what it taught him about the American political system and how to go viral in today’s attention economy. The overtime is where Kofinas really had the opportunity to dig into Yang’s policy platform. They discussed Andrew's UBI proposal, its potential impact on inflation, and how to implement such a policy without making politics even more transactional than it is today. They also discuss how to crack the gerontocracy that currently exists in Washington, the misaligned incentives in our news media, as well as how Andrew Yang thinks blockchain and distributed ledger technology can be leveraged for the public good and why crypto is a potential path to universal basic income.
If you enjoy the free content we produce every week, we encourage you to take the leap and become a premium subscriber, if you haven’t already. There's no commitment. You can cancel at any time and the entire library of subscriber content going all the way back to Episode 1 becomes instantly available to you, including the overtimes, afterthoughts, transcripts, and rundowns, depending on your tier.
You can access the second part of this episode, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s conversation through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our premium 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
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Episode Recorded on 10/11/2021
In Episode 214 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Scott Gottlieb. Dr. Gottlieb is a physician who served as the head of the FDA from 2017 to 2019. He currently serves on the boards of Pfizer and Illumina and is a regular contributor to CNBC where he has become one of the most recognizable faces in America. His recently published book, “Uncontrolled Spread,” examines how the coronavirus and its variants overwhelmed our national defenses and outlines the steps he thinks we need to take in order to better protect ourselves and our country from the next pandemic.
The first half of Demetri’s conversation with Scott was spent examining the systemic failures that Dr. Gottlieb thinks exacerbated the scope of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the economic costs associated with the various lockdowns and shutdowns that were imposed in the very early days of the outbreak. Gottlieb also goes into detail about the biological mechanics of the virus, how it spreads, and what we’ve learned about best practices for protecting ourselves and those around us. The conversation then shifts to a discussion about the various vaccines, their effectiveness, how they work, as well as the risk of taking them and how to evaluate those risks when making your own decision about whether or not to get vaccinated. Demetri asks Dr. Gottlieb about alternative treatment options like Ivermectin and whether or not he thinks the mainstream media is censoring information about these types of alternative treatments.
This week’s premium content is a forty-minute afterthoughts segment that Demetri recorded right after the end of his conversation with Scott, where he reflects on not only what was discussed during the first hour, but also, many of the things that the two didn’t get to talk about like the lab leak hypothesis, the arguments for and against mandated vaccinations, the future of sequencing and genomic epidemiology, new antiviral drugs, the risk of new BSL-4 Facilities, and so much more.
If you enjoy the free content we produce every week, we encourage you to take the leap and become a premium subscriber, if you haven’t already. There's no commitment. You can cancel at any time and the entire library of subscriber content going all the way back to Episode 1 becomes instantly available to you, including the overtimes, afterthoughts, transcripts, and rundowns, depending on your tier. The rundown to this week’s episode is a nearly 30-page compendium full of notes, questions, images, and other materials that Demetri put together to help guide you through this conversation.
You can access the second part of this episode, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s conversation through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our premium 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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Episode Recorded on 01/05/2021
In Episode 213 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with David Wessel, a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution and director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy. David is also the author of a new book titled, “Only the Rich Can Play: How Washington Works in the New Gilded Age.”
In the book, Wessel tells the story of the creation of a lucrative tax break in which wealthy elites attend to one another, under the guise of social justice and redistribution. This tax break, known as “Opportunity Zones,” was sold as a way to incentivizing people to invest in distressed, low-income communities, with the official purpose of spurring economic growth and job creation, but which in practice, seems to have served primarily as yet another tax loophole in an already convoluted tax code full of them.
The first part of today’s conversation is spent discussing the Opportunity Zone provision itself, the story of its creation and implementation into law, and what this tells us about how financial and political power are wielded in Washington. The second part includes a discussion about political corruption, corporate concentration, the current infrastructure bill and its associated tax provisions, as well as the upcoming elections and Trump’s chances in 2024.
You can access the second part of this episode, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s conversation through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our premium 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
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Episode Recorded on 09/29/2021
In Episode 212 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with telecom industry veteran and author of “Wireless Wars,” Jon Pelson, about how American companies invented cellular technology, transferred that technology to China, and then sat by and watched as their Chinese competitors drove them out of business.
He shares stories from the executives and scientists who built the industry, as well as those of Western politicians, businesspeople, and members of the military who cooperated with and in some cases actively aided the Chinese government and its state champions in their efforts to overtake and crush their western competitors.
The first part of today’s conversation is spent familiarizing listeners with 5G technology, how it works, and why it’s important to the future of automation, commerce, and national security. Pelson also goes into some of the details around technology transfers, the rise of Huawei, and the relationship between the Chinese telecommunications industry and the CCP.
The episode Overtime focuses mainly on how China uses our weaknesses against us, corrupting public officials and top corporate executives in their effort to overtake American companies in key industries that the Chinese Communist Party deems vital for its national security and global ambitions. Jon also explains how the United States can fight back, turning those same weaknesses into strengths by leveraging a culture of permissionless innovation to retake the lead in global telecommunications and related industries that are vital for the long-term competitiveness of American industry & national security.
You can access the second part of this episode, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s conversation through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our premium 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
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Episode Recorded on 09/20/2021
In Episode 211 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas shares his recent appearance on “The Empire’s New Clothes,” a documentary series where host Bradford Pope McArthur examines the cyclical forces that make and break empires and tries to answer the big questions of how we got here as a society and what might be in store for us in the years to come.
Topics include global macro, cryptocurrencies, geopolitics, and more.
You can access the transcript to this conversation through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. All subscribers gain access to our premium 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
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Episode Recorded on 09/01/2021
In Episode 210 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Kai-Fu Lee, CEO of Sinovation Ventures, a leading Chinese technology venture firm. Dr. Lee was formerly the president of Google China and the New York Times bestselling author of AI Superpowers. His latest book, “AI2041: Ten Visions for Our Future,” provides the foundation for today’s conversation about the future of a world driven by artificial intelligence, what it will look like, and the challenges and opportunities for humanity that such a world will create.
In the first part of today’s episode, Kai-Fu and Demetri discuss a number of key technologies that Dr. Lee believes will play a pivotal role in transforming our lives over the next 20 years such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, how these technologies work, and their application in fields such as autonomous driving and predictive analytics. Most of the first half, however, is spent on the subject of “deep learning,” which is a subset of machine learning, which itself is fundamental to many of the transformative technologies that the two speak about in this episode.
In the Overtime, which is available to our premium subscribers, our conversation turns to the subjects of deep fakes and autonomous weapons, job displacement, as well as digital currency and how to think about money in the type of post-scarcity world that Kai-Fu believes we are progressively moving towards as the technologies we discuss today are increasingly integrated into our applications, devices, and systems.
This is a fascinating discussion that fits right in with the type of content that you have come to expect from this podcast. If you enjoy the first half of today’s conversation, we encourage you to take the leap and become a premium subscriber. There is no commitment; you can cancel at any time, and the entire library of premium content going all the way back to episode 1 becomes instantly available to you, including the overtimes, transcripts, and rundowns depending on your tier.
You can access the second part of this episode, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s conversation through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
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Episode Recorded on 09/13/2021
In Episode 209 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Simon Mikhailovich, founder and Managing Partner of “The Bullion Reserve,” a professionally managed private vehicle providing full-service solutions that ensure legal compliance, jurisdictional diversification, liquidity, physical access, and deliverability of gold bullion. Operating within a single structure, TBR maximizes flexibility and enables the use of gold bullion as a deep out of the money put option on the failure of extreme monetary policies with an asymmetric upside.
Demetri and Simon spend most of the podcast discussing Simon’s experience growing up in and emigrating from the Soviet Union, and the economic and political lessons that he has drawn from that experience and that we can apply to our present predicament in Western society.
The last twenty to twenty-five minutes or so is spent specifically on TBR and the value proposition of holding gold bullion in a world where the traditional, safe-haven asset of US treasuries no longer inspires the same amount of investor confidence that it did only 10 or 20 years ago and what that means for not only portfolio construction but political and social stability as well.
Because some of today’s conversation deals with investing, it’s important to make absolutely clear that nothing discussed on this podcast can or should be viewed as financial advice. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and should not be relied upon as the basis for financial decisions.
You can access the transcript and rundown to this week’s episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.
gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
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Episode Recorded on 09/06/2021
In Episode 208 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Adam Tooze, professor of history and the director of the European Institute at Columbia University. He’s also a prolific public commentator and author of several prize-winning books including his latest, “Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World Economy.”
In the first part of their conversation, Demetri and Adam work their way through the chain of events that occurred between the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in January 2020 and the inauguration of Joe Biden in January 2021. Effectively the period that we now consider to be the first full year of the pandemic. In Adam’s own words we “wrestle with power and knowledge in time,” in an effort to understand the nature of the forces that this pandemic has unleashed, their constancy, and their implications for shaping not only our children’s futures but more immediately, ours as well.
In the second part of our conversation, Demetri and Adam begin to dissect specific aspects and features of the modern world whether those be the fragility of our debt-financed economy and the neoliberal order, the threat, perceived or imagined to the United States, its citizenry, and its power structure posed by the rise of a potential peer-competitor in the form China, as well as the future of warfare and how to think about the proper relationship between the state and the private sector in the context of the types of polycrises of the Anthropocene that Adam and Demetri discuss during this conversation. It’s a phenomenal episode that you will not want to miss.
You can access the second part of this episode, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s conversation through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our premium 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
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Episode Recorded on 09/09/2021
In Episode 207 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Daniel Markey, Senior Expert on South Asia at the United States Institute of Peace who recently served as senior research professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and as the academic director of the school’s Global Policy Program. He is also the author of “China’s Western Horizon: Beijing and the New Geopolitics of Eurasia,” which provides the roadmap for this conversation.
In the first part of their discussion, Demetri and Daniel examine how the communist party in China views the lands, countries, and regions to its west, both historically and in terms of its contemporary security concerns and economic ambitions. How do its Eurasian neighbors view China? What motivates the CCP’s influence campaigns, investments, and diplomatic overtures in its Western region? We also discuss China’s Belt & Road initiative, and how it fits into a larger economic and political vision for a stronger, wealthier, and more assertive China on the international stage.
In the Overtime, the conversation shifts to how the recent US withdrawal from Afghanistan is beginning to alter the geopolitical dynamics of the Greater Middle East by putting pressure on existing relationships, while opening the door to new partnerships and strategic alliances. Daniel explains what this means for the durability of China’s strategic partnership with Russia, how the internal politics of Pakistan and its relations with India are affected by China’s increased involvement there, and the economic and security implications of these developments for other regional players such as Kazakhstan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and what this means for US policy in the region.
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:
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
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Episode Recorded on 08/30/2021
In Episode 206 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Jonathan Schroden, Director of the Countering Threats & Challenges Program at CNA. Schroden has served as a strategic advisor on Afghanistan to the US military since 2008, ranging from commands in-country to operational commands outside of Afghanistan, as well as strategic elements in the Pentagon, including the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
In the first part of today’s conversation, Jonathan and Demetri examine the lens through which the public has become informed about the events unfolding in Kabul over the last two weeks and the public narrative that has quickly formed around what is truly a humanitarian and political disaster.
The question however that has been lost in all of this is why the United States is leaving Afghanistan in the first place, the cost-calculation behind the decision to withdraw, and how this decision fits into a broader strategic shift in the focus of American Foreign policy.
In the second half the two focus on the specific elements that contributed to America’s defeat in Afghanistan, from the adroit battlefield tactics of the Taliban and their use of commercial technologies to fight an information war to massive corruption on the part of America’s partners in the Afghan government. We also look at the ecosystem of terrorist organizations operating in-country and the international threat they pose to Americans, as well as the geopolitical implications of America’s withdrawal for countries like China and Russia, as well as the supporting role played by Pakistan to aid the Taliban in its 20-year resistance against the US occupation.
The goal of this episode, as well as our recent episode with Laurel Miller, is to help you fill in the gaps and put together some of the important pieces that have gone missing in what has largely been a unanimous condemnation of the President’s actions. By the end of this episode, you should be able to understand clearly (1) what went wrong, (2) why it went wrong, (3) and the larger, longer-term implications for the tragic events that are currently unfolding.
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:
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Episode Recorded on 08/24/2021
In Episode 205 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Laurel Miller, Director of International Crisis Group’s Asia Program who previously served as deputy and then acting Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in the U.S. State Department. Laurel also held the position of senior foreign policy expert at the RAND Corporation and served as a Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Senior Advisor to the U.S. special envoy for the Balkans, and Deputy to the Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues during her previous time in government.
Today’s episode is meant to provide you with a comprehensive understanding of the situation currently unfolding in Afghanistan, the unique circumstances leading up to the collapse of the Afghan government, and the political and geopolitical implications of the reconstitution of a Taliban-led Afghanistan for the United States, its allies, as well as its competitors in the region.
The first hour of Demetri’s conversation with Laurel is about the specific events that transpired in Afghanistan over the last several weeks, specifically looking at the contributing factors that led to the seemingly sudden collapse of the Afghan army and the evacuation of the capital by President Ghani and other members of the Afghan government. What were the facts on the ground leading up to the collapse? Who was aware of those facts? And why did the Biden Whitehouse and the US State and Defense departments fail so astonishingly in planning for this contingency?
The two also discuss the history of America’s involvement in Afghanistan, if things could have turned out differently, and what could have been done differently in the context of what we knew then and the priorities and risks facing previous administrations going back to George W. Bush in 2001.
The second half of this conversation is spent looking forward at not only the various scenarios for how Afghanistan’s political and economic future is likely to play out under a Taliban regime, but also how the US’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan changes the geopolitical chessboard for other regional players like Russia, China, Pakistan, India, and Iran, who have a complex set of competing security and commercial interests in Central Asia, along with an equally complex set of bilateral strategic relationships with Afghanistan’s neighbors, as well as with each other. Kofinas and Miller also discuss the political and diplomatic fallout stemming from how the Biden administration is perceived to have handled this withdrawal and its implications for the upcoming midterm and presidential elections in 2022 and 2024. Finally, the talk about how all of this impacts America’s strategic relationships with its allies, in particular its European partners like Germany and the UK, who played such an integral role in the mission to rebuild Afghanistan over the last two decades.
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:
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 08/23/2021
In Episode 204 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with investor and macro-financial strategist James Aitken.
This is an over 2-hour-long conversation that ranges from a discussion about the oil industry and the impact of ESG mandates on prices, to the short-and-medium-term impacts of monetary & fiscal policy on inflation, to the post-Covid economy and opportunities for value investing.
In the Overtime, James and Demetri pivot their discussion to Asia and the ongoing crackdown in Chinese capital markets, as well as the disruptive implications of China’s deployment of its digital currency electronic payments (DCEP) system and what it means for companies and investors doing business in China. They also discuss the impact that these drastic regulatory changes and disruptive technological innovations will have on American foreign policy and the future of the dollar.
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:
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Episode Recorded on 08/18/2021
In Episode 203 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas answers dozens of audience questions about his process for guest selection, outreach, and preparation, thoughts about certain conspiracies, the business side of podcasting, his experience creating a TV show on RT, and much, much more.
All questions were submitted through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. Premium 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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Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 08/10/2021
In Episode 202 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with veteran BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones about the biggest developments and news stories in tech from the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s to the rise of Google and Facebook. These stories and more are included in Rory’s new book “Always On,” which chronicles the rise of the smartphone era and how technology has altered our customs, expectations, and lives in ways that are easy to forget only fifteen years since the launch of the first iPhone.
This is a conversation unlike most any other that you will have heard on this podcast, because there isn’t any one particular lesson that you are meant to take away from it. Instead, we want you to use it as an opportunity to reflect on just how much change we’ve seen in our lives over the last fifteen years and think about not only the causes of that change, but how different the world will be over the next fifteen if current trends continue and what that’s going to mean for our lives, for our businesses, and for our political systems.
In the overtime, Rory shares his impressions of Silicon Valley culture and what he’s learned from interviewing some of the most powerful people in tech. Demetri and Rory also discuss the transformation of media, cultural differences between British and American journalists and the press, and the future of independent publishing and podcasting and what it means for the viability of traditional news outlets, especially those that depend evermore on sensationalism and controversy in order eke out a profit in this hyper-competitive media landscape.
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
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://patreon.com/hiddenforces
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Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 07/20/2021
In Episode 201 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Wall Street Journal automotive and technology reporter Tim Higgins, about his new book “Power Play,” which chronicles the incredible and chaotic rise of Tesla and its controversial CEO Elon Musk.
In the first part of their conversation, Tim and Demetri discuss the origin story of Tesla all the way up until the successful launch of the Model S: a truly remarkable achievement that came during a time when Americans were desperate to find something in their economy to feel hopeful about. Unfortunately, the success that Tesla enjoyed during that period was not something the company would be able to replicate and this is what most of the second half of this conversation is spent discussing. The two examine the difficulties that Tesla faced after the deployment of the Model S, why it faced those challenges, how management and the board dealt with them, and the stunning disconnect between the public’s perception of Musk as a “Tony Starkian innovator” and planetary savior, and the reality of who he is, what he knows, and what he’s willing to do whenever he finds himself backed into a corner. At the end of the day, it’s going to be up to listeners to decide for themselves where they fall on this story. How many people believe the hype around the man and the company? Will he ultimately deliver on the promises that he’s made—despite a long track record of making promises that he consistently fails to deliver on but which have non-the-less substantially improved his personal financials and helped grow the equity value of his companies?
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
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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 07/27/2021