In Episode 230 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Spencer Jakab, an award-winning financial journalist who edits the Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” column and who is out with a new book chronicling one of the craziest news stories of the last few years. The story centers on a motley crew of retail traders on Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets forum who almost broke the Internet by using social media, the Robinhood trading app, and a sophisticated understanding of options contracts to wreak havoc on Wall Street while making a fortune doing it. This is a retrospective on the now infamous GameStop/$GME: the video game retailer who attracted crazy amounts of media attention this time last year. Spencer and I discuss the facts of the story in detail, how the meme stock squeeze unfolded, who the winners were, and what the deeper significance of this story really is. One year later, what does it reveal to us about how our financial system works, the corrosive influence of years and years of easy money, and the dereliction of regulators to regulate? And what do we make of the metanarrative that’s taken hold in society today, which says that “it’s all just a narrative?” If that’s true, what does that say about not only where the markets are going, but our economy and society as well? These are all questions that Demetri and Spencer explore in this phenomenal and thought provoking episode. You can access the transcript and intelligence report to this week’s conversation by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." 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
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Episode Recorded on 01/24/2022
In Episode 229 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born British journalist, former TV producer, and author about the break-down in belief systems and shared mythologies that we are experiencing in the West and why this has left so many people feeling increasingly cynical about the world and indifferent towards the future.
Peter was early in his diagnosis, having first experienced this phenomenon during his time living and working in Russia. It was not long after that experience and the publication of his first book “Nothing is True, But Everything Is Possible” that he began to notice some of the things that he wrote about in that book—the cynicism, the sense of surreality, the nostalgia, and what he described as an “aggressive apathy”—showing up in Western countries. And he began to ask himself the question, “Why did the future arrive first in Russia?”
This is the question that we seek to answer in today’s episode, because some of the same forces that were operational in the late-Soviet Union and in early post-Soviet Russia are at work in Western societies today. If we want to understand what the future might look like when trust in institutions has completely deteriorated, when grounding notions of identity and meaning have all but disappeared, when any independent standard of truth has become so elusive that people are willing to believe in anything and the only thing left to unify us is raw and unbridled power, then we would be wise to not only understand the path that Russia has followed in the last several decades but to do everything in our power to avoid following it any further. It leads to only one place and that is a postmodern, repressive society that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends.
You can access the full episode, transcript, and rundown to this week’s conversation by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." 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:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Episode Recorded on 01/14/2022
In Episode 228 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Kazakhstan-based journalist Joanna Lillis, author of “Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan,” about the recent protests and unrest that unfolded in Kazakhstan over the past two weeks and how this ties into the larger geopolitical chess match currently underway in Eastern Europe.
This is the multi-polar world in action. It’s no longer some theoretical thing that we’ve read about or that we’re moving towards—we are in it. This is the world we live in, and in this world, everything is up for grabs. Every crisis, every border skirmish, every negotiation is an opportunity for any and all of the major powers to change the status quo and to change the rules of the game to their advantage. And this starts with taking control of the story and telling a narrative about events before the facts emerge and before people have had a chance to even begin to form an educated opinion about whatever it is that’s happening.
Today’s episode is meant to provide you with a sense of where and how the events in Kazakhstan fit into this new global disorder of nation states, non-state actors, mercenaries, agitators, hackers—pretty much everyone interested in exercising influence on an international stage that is fluid and where power is constantly up for grabs. The world is becoming ever more complex and if you want to exercise a level of agency over your own sense of reality and be anything other than a spectator in someone else’s story you need to step back from all the noise and all the hustles and exercise a level of informed skepticism without simply resorting to questioning everything and therefore believing in nothing. This is what Hidden Forces is all about.
You can access the full episode, transcript, and rundown to this week’s conversation by going directly to the episode page at HiddenForces.io and clicking on "premium extras." 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:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed
Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify
Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 01/11/2022
In Episode 227 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Saagar Enjeti and Marshall Kosloff, the co-hosts of “The Realignment,” an absolutely phenomenal podcast that consistently produces some of the best conversations at the intersection of politics and society that you will find anywhere.
They are both successful entrepreneurs and thought leaders in their own rights—Saagar Enjeti interviewed former president Donald Trump four separate times in his capacity as Chief Whitehouse Correspondent for the Daily Caller and currently co-hosts the immensely popular “Breaking Points” with Krystal Ball. Marshall Kosloff is an executive producer at “On Deck” where he also hosts “The Deep End,” a podcast where he interviews visionary builders, creators, and experts with world-changing ideas related to the futures of commerce, higher education, governance, longevity, art, and more.
Demetri asked them both to come onto the podcast in order to help him better understand the forces driving dysfunction in American politics, along with phenomenon of rising public mistrust of institutions, and a deeping sense of paranoia in the body politic.
Saagar, Marshall, and Demetri spend the first hour of their conversation discussing how we got here, why the so-called “political experts” whose job it is to explain what’s happening have consistently failed to do so, what the new political consensus is that’s forming in American life, and what it is that the majority of Americans want—what in other words, would constitute a popular platform on which to not only run a successful campaign but from which to govern successfully or are these two things fundamentally incompatible in today’s celebrity-driven, fake it till you make it culture that seems to reward the aesthetics over power in place of power itself?
The second hour of their conversation is spent discussing what Kofinas suggests may be a multi-decade breakdown in belief systems driven by a series of recurring failures, covered up by lies, succeeded by more failures like the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis and its culture of never-ending bailouts, and most recently the Covid-19 pandemic and the confusing directives and open disregard by health authorities of legitimate public concerns around the vaccines, the risks associated with taking them, mandating who should take them, etc. This also opens the door to a conversation about the changing media landscape and the growing power of independent voices like Joe Rogan’s to influence public opinion and force issues into the public square that would otherwise be deemed off-limits by those in positions of public authority.
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. For those interested in gaining early access to the new Hidden Foces subscription platform on Supercast, please email info@hiddenforces.io for a discount link.
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 01/04/2022
In Episode 226 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Dmitri Alperovitch, the former CTO and co-founder of CrowdStrike, the world’s largest cybersecurity company, which has been involved in investigations of several high-profile cyberattacks including the 2014 Sony Pictures hack, the 2015–2016 cyber-attacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and the 2016 email leak involving the DNC. Alperovitch currently serves as Chairman of the non-profit Silverado Policy Accelerator, where he focuses on advancing American prosperity and global leadership by working directly with both the executive branch and Capitol Hill on issues related to cyber, trade & industrial security, and ecological & economic security.
What prompted this conversation was a Twitter thread that Dmitri published recently, in which he explained why he believes the Kremlin has already made its decision to invade Ukraine later this winter—in late January or possibly early February—and that military confrontation is in fact the preferred route for Putin at this point. It’s a fascinating thread and we encourage you all to read through it after listening to today’s episode.
Kofinas and Alperovitch spend the first half of their conversation discussing the various signals that Dimitri believes point to the increased likelihood of a military invasion of Ukraine and the partitioning of the country by Russia in the next several months, as well Putin’s possible motivations and objectives in doing so.
The second part of their conversation, which is available to premium subscribers focuses on the cyber component of this conflict, including evidence of increased cyber intrusions into the Ukrainian government and civilian networks, what the targets have been, and what can be further inferred about the Kremlin’s objectives based on the nature of those targets. Alperovitch also shares his views on how he thinks the Biden administration can credibly respond to the mounting pressure on Ukraine’s defenses, the effectiveness of sanctions as a tool for dissuading Russian aggression as well as for punishing Kremlin leadership after the fact, and the similarities between Ukraine and Taiwan and what lessons the Chinese communist party may be drawing from our response or failure to respond to mounting Russian aggression on Ukraine’s eastern border.
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:
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 12/27/2021