In Episode 279 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Kaiser Kuo. Kaiser is the host and co-founder of the Sinica Podcast, the editor-at-large of The China Project, and the former director of international communications for Baidu, China’s leading search engine.
How does China see the world? What do we get wrong when talking about China? What are the central diving forces in Chinese politics? And what “does China want?”
While concrete answers to such complex social and political questions are illusive, grappling with them is essential if we want to find a peaceful way through what is becoming an increasingly dangerous period in US-China relations.
The goal of this conversation is to provide you with a more circumspect and culturally informed perspective on China. You will learn about the country’s history, the lived experience of its people, their assumptions, values, and beliefs about the world and their place in it, and to learn to see ourselves and the world from China’s eyes.
You can access the full episode, 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 want access to our Hidden Forces genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can learn more at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. feel free to send an email to info@hiddenforces.io and I or someone from our team will right back to you. If you have further questions, feel free to send an email to info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone else from our team will get right back to you.
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Episode Recorded on 10/24/2022
In Episode 278 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Michael Shermer. Michael is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine. He hosts his own podcast, “The Michael Shermer Show,” and is the best-selling author of books like “The Believing Brain, “Giving the Devil His Due,” “The Moral Arch,” “The Mind of the Market,” and many more. Shermer's latest book titled "Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational" presents an overarching review of conspiracy theories—who believes them, why, which ones are real, and what we should do about them.
Long a fringe part of the American political landscape, conspiracy theories are now mainstream: 147 members of Congress voted in favor of objections to the 2020 presidential election based on an unproven theory about a rigged electoral process promoted by the mysterious group QAnon. But this is only the latest example in a long history of ideas that include the satanic panics of the 1980s, the New World Order and Vatican conspiracy theories, fears about fluoridated water, speculations about President John F. Kennedy's assassination, and the notions that the Sandy Hook massacre was a false flag operation and 9/11 was an inside job.
The purpose of today’s conversation is to provide you with a framework for thinking about conspiracies—what they are, the different types of conspiracies that exist, and why we believe in them. You will also learn how to distinguish between real conspiracies and imagined ones and what we can do as a society to tilt the information landscape toward producing more accurate models of the world without resorting to censorship or the policing of thought and information.
You can access the full episode, 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 want access to our Hidden Forces genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can learn more at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. feel free to send an email to info@hiddenforces.io and I or someone from our team will right back to you. If you have further questions, feel free to send an email to info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone else from our team will get right back to you.
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 10/21/2022
In Episode 277 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Perry Mehrling. Dr. Mehrling is Professor of International Political Economy at the Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University, where he teaches courses on global money. He is perhaps best known for having pioneered the so-called “money view,” an economic framework that attempts to put the real-world practitioners’ view of financial markets into an academic perspective.
Mehrling’s most recent book, “Money and Empire,” is in some sense a biography of the US Dollar told through the life and times of the renowned economic historian, Charlie Kindleberger. The book traces the evolution of Charlie’s thinking alongside the rise of the international dollar system. It’s an illuminating history of the economic forces of international trade and finance and how those forces shape and are shaped by the politics of national interest.
The goal of today’s conversation is to help deepen your understanding of a system that has proven to be far more resilient than many of its critics and most ardent supporters could have possibly imagined. What has made the system so strong, the challenges that could impede its function, and the role of politics and war in accelerating changes to it are all topics that we explore today.
You can access the full episode, transcript, and intelligence report of 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 have questions about our genius tier, which includes access to the Hidden Forces community, Q&A calls with guests, in-person events, and dinners, you can learn more at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you have further questions, feel free to send an email to info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone else from our team will get right back to you.
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 10/10/2022
In Episode 276 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Michael Beckley and Hal Brands, the authors of a recently published book titled “Danger Zone,” about how to prepare America and the world for a peaking China. The book argues that the conventional wisdom about the long-term strategic threat that China poses to the existing international order is fundamentally wrong. If a war between the US and China is to break out, it could happen much sooner than the US defense establishment prepared for.
Hal Brands and Michael Beckley's basic thesis is that China is at a perilous moment in its development as a great power: strong enough to violently challenge the existing order, yet increasingly losing confidence that time is on its side. Witness its aggression toward Taiwan, its record-breaking military buildup, and its efforts to dominate the critical technologies that will shape the world's future. While a new cold war with China may last decades, both Beckley and Brands believe that the crucial battle that could determine much of what that war will look like may well be decided before the end of this decade.
This episode is meant to help establish what it would take to win a battle over Taiwan and demonstrate to the leadership in Beijing that attempting to change the status quo in Asia would not only likely result in failure for China but almost certainly in the catastrophic destruction of the global economy and the permanent political isolation of the Chinese Communist Party.
If you want access to the second part of today’s conversation, which focuses on actionable steps, war planning scenarios, and thought experiments on how such a war could be waged and won, as well as the transcripts and intelligence reports, which include my takeaways from every episode, as well as my thoughts on what comes next, head over to HiddenForces.io select the episode that you're interested in and click on the premium extras, where you can then sign up to one of our premium content tiers. All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.
If you have questions about our genius tier, which includes access to the Hidden Forces community, Q&A calls with guests, in-person events, and dinners, you can learn more at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you have further questions, feel free to send an email to info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone else from our team will get right back to you.
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 09/28/2022
In Episode 275 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas publishes the audio from a recent Twitter Spaces event featuring Brent Johnson and Michael Kao, who were both later joined on stage by Michael Nicoletos and Michael Howell for a dynamic conversation about the explosive appreciation in the relative value of the US Dollar, the sources of Dollar strength, and what could bring an end to its role as the main global reserve currency.
Brent Johnson is CEO of Santiago Capital and the author of the “Dollar Milkshake Theory.” Michael Kao is CIO and Portfolio Manager of Kao Family Offices and is well-known for coining “the Dollar Wrecking Ball” as a similar metaphor for describing the dynamics of Dollar hegemony. Michael Nicoletos is a macro investor and the founder and fmr. CIO at AppleTree Capital and Michael Howell is the CEO of CrossBorder Capital and a regular contributor and active member of our Hidden Forces Genius community which you can learn more about at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.
Over the last six months, the US Dollar has appreciated tremendously against a basket of international currencies, from the pound sterling and the euro to the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan. Because of the Dollar’s outsized role as a global funding currency, Dollar strength often translates into foreign weakness, not just for other currencies, but for their respective economies and asset markets as well.
The goal of this conversation is to help deepen your understanding of the dynamics driving Dollar strength, the consequences for the global economy and asset markets the longer it continues, and what the possible end-game could be for economies and governments.
You can access the transcripts and intelligence reports of previous episodes 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 have questions about our genius tier, which includes access to the Hidden Forces community, Q&A calls with guests, in-person events, and dinners, you can learn more at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you have further questions, feel free to send an email to info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone else from our team will get right back to you.
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 10/03/2022
In Episode 274 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Chris Miller. Chris is Associate Professor of International History at the graduate school of global affairs at Tufts University. He is also the author of Chip War, which chronicles the geopolitical history of a decades-long battle to control the modern world’s most critical resource: the microchip (or semiconductor) and the commercial industry that supports it.
We spend the first hour discussing the technological, commercial, and distributional characteristics of the existing semiconductor supply chain. Chris explains the various steps involved in the production process, the incentives that operate in the industry, the technological imperatives that inform investment decisions, and the role of government subsidies and regulations, all of which explain the globally distributed and highly efficient nature of the semiconductor industry and why it is more vulnerable than ever to geopolitical disruption.
The second hour is where we focus our attention on the geostrategic dimension of chip competition, the steps that are being taken to reorganize the industry, the efforts being made to build resiliency into various parts of the supply chain, and what the main challenges are to doing that successfully for both the US and China.
The goal of this conversation is to bring clarity to a subject that has not only captivated the public interest but which increasingly determines the national security priorities and strategic investment decisions of the United States and without which the modern world would cease to function.
You can access the full episode, 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 have questions about our genius tier, which includes access to the Hidden Forces community, Q&A calls with guests, in-person events, and dinners, you can learn more at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you have further questions, feel free to send an email to info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone else from our team will get right back to you.
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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Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 09/27/2022