Hidden Forces

Episode 504 of Hidden Forces is the thirteenth episode in the Hundred Year Pivot podcast series. In it, Demetri Kofinas and co-host Grant Williams speak with Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak, global chief economist at Boston Consulting Group and co-author of "The Kids Are Alright: The Timeless Angst Over Young People and Money," about why the dominant narrative of Gen Z and Millennials falling financially behind Gen X and Boomers doesn't hold up against the data, and how exalted expectations, flawed benchmarks, and misguided narratives have fueled record pessimism among the young. The conversation pressure-tests Philipp's research and probes where the data might be missing the full picture. It covers how Gen Z and Millennial incomes and balance sheets compare with those of prior generations, why their incomes and wealth are outpacing those of earlier cohorts at comparable ages, and why homeownership is delayed rather than denied. It also examines how consumption patterns among younger cohorts differ from the common…

In Episode 503 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Ali Vaez, deputy program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the Crisis Group and a closely watched analyst of Iran's foreign and nuclear policy, about where the war between Iran and the United States stands eight months after the start of Operation Epic Fury, how Iran has turned its control of the Strait of Hormuz into a tool for pressuring the global economy, what the conflict has cost Washington, Tehran, and their allies, and why the window for a durable diplomatic resolution may be closing. The first hour establishes the state of play eight months into the war, including: How the war has metastasized into a wider regional confrontation involving the Houthis in Yemen and attacks on Saudi Arabia. What the fighting has cost the United States militarily, from a significant depletion of its missile interceptor stockpiles to the loss of several regional bases. How the war has reshaped Iran's internal politics, economy, and society. Why…

In Episode 502 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Jim Bianco, founder of Bianco Research and Bianco Advisors, about why he has turned bullish on bonds after six years of warning they were overvalued, what the K-shaped economy and the dominance of AI-related stocks mean for markets, and how mounting fiscal pressures in Washington, Paris, London, and Tokyo could reshape the investment landscape over the next three to five years. The first hour covers Jim's thesis on the bond market, the K-shaped economy, and why asset ownership and capital gains, rather than wages, now drive both consumer spending and the public's sense of how the economy is doing. They also discuss the growing concentration of US stock market gains in a small group of AI-related companies, the valuations of those companies, and how agentic AI is already reshaping the economy, including the financial research and continuing education businesses that Demetri and Jim operate. The second hour turns to the fiscal constraints facing the…

In Episode 501 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Rana Foroohar about her book, Sea Change, and her argument that, as polar ice melts and new sea routes open, the Arctic has become the most consequential and least understood geopolitical theater in the world, with the great powers competing over trade routes, resources, and military dominance. They discuss: The strategic logic behind agreements like the Icebreaker Collaboration Effort between the US, Finland, and Canada Why China has spent two decades quietly ring-fencing the world's maritime chokepoints The Trump administration's approach to Greenland, NATO, and the Western Hemisphere The reversal of forty years of market-knows-best trade economics in favor of more state-directed, national security-focused trade and industrial policy They close with a conversation about domestic politics, including the fight over the future of economic nationalism, the populist backlash against AI and corporate concentration, and what, if anything, could rebuild…

In Episode 500 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Logan Wright, director of China macro and financial sector research at the Rhodium Group and author of Broken China, about why China's economic troubles are structural rather than cyclical, the product of the largest single-country credit expansion in history, how Beijing's official GDP figures obscure what is actually happening to Chinese households, local governments, and the property market, why the renminbi is overvalued and capital flight out of China is likely to persist, and what it means for the West to treat the PRC not as a rising power to be managed, but as a declining one. The first hour focuses on Wright's central argument that China's economy is in structural decline, not because its leaders chose austerity or an unwavering commitment to running chronic trade surpluses, but because the largest single-country credit expansion in over a century has exhausted the financial system's capacity to generate growth, leaving it unable to ignite…

In Episode 499 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Inigo Fraser Jenkins, a strategist at AllianceBernstein and author of the research paper "The Hundred Year Portfolio," about how investors should rethinking portfolio construction, governance, and asset management across multigenerational time horizons in a world shaped by AI disruption, climate risk, the breakdown of the post-WWII rules-based order, and the greatest generational wealth transfer since before World War I. The first hour covers the structural forces that made the post-1980 period of falling inflation and interest rates, negative stock-bond correlation, and strong real returns so exceptional, why recency bias remains the most dangerous assumption embedded in institutional portfolios, and how the convergence of AI, climate change, and geopolitical upheaval has widened the range of possible futures in ways that challenge conventional diversification frameworks. They also discuss the explosive growth of family offices and sovereign…

In Episode 498 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Harper Reed, entrepreneur and founder of an AI research lab focused on autonomous agents, and John Borthwick, founder and CEO of Betaworks about the real and perceived risks posed by the latest generation of AI agents, how to separate technical safety and existential risk concerns from the media narratives, financial incentives, and power dynamics surrounding them, the strategic competition between the United States and China over AI, and deeper questions about the nature of artificial intelligence itself. The conversation begins with the mechanics behind the recent OpenAI and Hugging Face incidents, the critical roles that unlimited tokens and reinforcement learning play in producing these behaviors, and what Harper's own experiments replicating escape scenarios in his Chicago lab reveal about where the real vulnerabilities lie. From there, they explore the broader political frame—parallels to previous moments of societal negotiation over…

In Episode 497 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Marieke Flament and Nicolas Colin, co-authors of the Currency of Power newsletter, about why the global financial system may be on the cusp of a structural transformation comparable to the Nixon Shock and the collapse of Bretton Woods, the central role of dollar-backed stablecoins and programmable money in that shift, what China's construction of parallel financial rails means for the future of dollar dominance, and how machine-to-machine commerce and the commodification of compute could reshape the monetary order in ways most policymakers and investors have yet to appreciate. The first hour covers why Flament and Colin believe we are living through the initial phase of a "Great Financial Reset" and the parallels they draw between the present era and the 1970s and early 1980s, when a convergence of geopolitical shocks, financial innovations, and technological revolutions transformed the global economy and capital markets in ways that would have…

In Episode 496 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Yaroslav Trofimov, Ukrainian-born chief foreign affairs correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and author of Our Enemies Will Vanish, about the Russia-Ukraine war, CIA director John Ratcliffe's recent visit to Moscow, and the growing risk that Russia will escalate beyond Ukraine's borders to test NATO's Article 5, how America's entanglement in the Middle East has depleted Western missile reserves and emboldened the Kremlin, turmoil inside Zelensky's government, China's role in prolonging a war it wants neither side to win, and the deepening fracture in the transatlantic alliance. Yaroslav and Demetri begin their conversation by trying to make sense of the war — its origins, its stakes, and the prospects for its near-term conclusion. They assess claims related to the CIA director's recent trip to Moscow, the form that any potential Russian attack on NATO could take, and what the Europeans can do to try to stop it. They also discuss the political…

In Episode 495 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with political scientist Henry Farrell, co-author of Underground Empire, about how the United States built its empire, why the hidden infrastructure underwriting American hegemony is now buckling under a compounding series of domestic and foreign policy errors, and what the collapse of the liberal, rules-based order means for the global economy and international security. The first hour examines two recent and consequential events—Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's speech announcing the breakdown of trade negotiations with the United States, in which he claimed his country was under attack by Washington, and US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's Financial Times op-ed declaring an "Economic D-Day," which reads more like a veiled threat to America's allies than a defense of the world Washington sought to liberate in 1944. They then explore the implications of both announcements, how they fit a pattern of behavior by an administration intent on…

In Episode 494 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Mark Galeotti — host of In Moscow's Shadows and one of the most informed and provocative voices on modern Russia — about the war in Ukraine, the risk that it spills over into NATO's eastern flank, and the escalatory paths and deepening dependency on Beijing that will define Russia's place in the emerging global order. The first hour takes stock of Russia's war in Ukraine, a conflict Galeotti describes as several wars happening simultaneously — a grinding battle of attrition in the Donbas, an economic war of deep strikes on refineries and critical infrastructure, and a political war that has enveloped not only the conflict's chief counterparties but every major power and regional bloc for whom this war has become the central battlefield in the emergence of a new global order. They discuss the human and economic costs of the fighting, the strategic aims of Europe's nation states and how those align with Washington's, and the fraying, increasingly…

In Episode 493 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with computational journalist and author John West about the surprising impermanence of the Internet, the shift from human agency to platform agency, the business models that have reshaped the web, how AI could further remake our relationship to the Internet and to ourselves, and what the collapse of a shared reality means for our politics and our humanity. The conversation begins with the paradox at the heart of West's book, The Internet Will Die and So Will You. The web we've been told is permanent and indelible is in fact a deeply ephemeral place, subject to decay and disappearance in much the same way our own bodies are. Demetri and West trace the story back to the Internet's early years—a world of personal homepages and open standards like RSS—and to the phenomenon of link rot that first drew West to write about the web's impermanence, before opening onto the book's larger preoccupation with the shift from human agency to platform agency, the…

In Episode 492 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with science fiction author, journalist, and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow—who coined the term "enshittification"—about why he believes the AI bubble will prove more damaging than the 2008 financial crisis and rival the equity sell-off of the 2020 Covid pandemic, the theory he has developed to explain why everything keeps getting worse, why the companies leading the AI boom are structurally unprofitable and existentially dependent on a runaway growth narrative, and where the value in AI may actually accrue once the bubble deflates or bursts entirely. The first hour covers the central argument of Doctorow's book on enshittification, which goes beyond simply describing how things are getting worse—from the extractive nature of online relationships to the soul-sucking experience of dealing with burned-out call-center operators and mindless chatbots—to put forward a theory for why, based on what has happened to competition, regulation,…

In Episode 491 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with trade economist Chad Bown—a former chief economist at the U.S. State Department, host of the popular Trade Talks podcast, and co-author of the recently published How to Win a Trade War—about what international policymakers, companies, and individuals need to understand about America's ongoing trade war, what victory would look like for the various parties involved in the conflict, and most importantly, how to win. The first hour lays the intellectual groundwork for understanding the modern trading system, examining the unique role played by the dollar and capital recycling in concentrating the gains from trade among the owners of capital, and stress-testing the theory of weaponized interdependence through the ongoing case studies of Russia's war against Ukraine and America's latest war with Iran. The second hour turns from the motivations behind the current trade war and what's at stake to the players themselves, their incentives, and what it means…

In Episode 490 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Patrick Boyle—founder of the quantitative hedge fund Palomar Capital Management, professor of finance at King's College London and Queen Mary University of London, and host of Patrick Boyle on Finance—about the SpaceX IPO and what it reveals about the integrity of America's financial markets, the cult of personality filling the vacuum left by the nation's collapsing institutions, the commercial and fiscal challenges facing Europe's largest economies, and the housing crisis and generational wealth divide driving the appeal of left-wing populism across the developed world. The first hour opens with the recent SpaceX IPO—how the deal was priced and marketed, the mechanics and share-price consequences of its unusually rapid index inclusion, the small number of shares made available for trading, and the wave of bullish sell-side coverage that accompanied it—before broadening into a discussion of the integrity of America's financial markets and what…

In Episode 489 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with historian Mary Bridges, a senior fellow at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator and author of Dollars and Dominion, about the origins of America's financial empire, the rise of the dollar from a second-rate currency to the most decentralized form of international money in world history, and what could accelerate or inhibit its continued domination. The first hour traces the origins of America's financial empire following the end of the Spanish-American War, when the dollar wasn't in the same league as the British pound and any American trader moving goods abroad had to go directly through London. Bridges walks us through the messy, often improvised story of how that transformation happened—beginning with the multinational expansion of the International Banking Corporation and its eventual absorption into National City Bank, the entanglement of profit-seeking enterprise with the pursuit of empire, and the central role that information, its creation,…

In Episode 488 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with political scientist Jonathan Kirshner about the origins of the Peloponnesian War, the enduring misreading of Thucydides, and what the arc of the Athenian empire on the eve of the Sicilian expedition reveals about the trajectory of American power in the twenty-first century. The first half traces the war's origins alongside Kirshner's central argument: that one of Thucydides' most frequently quoted passages has been enlisted to justify a worldview directly at odds with the lesson he meant to impart—that great powers are undone less by their rivals than by their own restlessness and hubris, and that prudence, not the gratuitous use of force, is the true mark of a durable empire. America's two long wars, the global financial crisis, and its latest campaign against Iran emerge as expressions, each in their own way, of an imperial hyperpower operating without constraint and with little consideration for the national interest. The second half turns to…

In Episode 487 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Vali Nasr — professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University, non-resident senior advisor in the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and author of Iran's Grand Strategy: A Political History — about the argument that the Islamic Republic's conduct is driven far less by religious ideology than by national insecurity and historical grievance, how that reframing bears on US and Western policy and the nuclear negotiations, the forces that forged the Islamic Republic into what it is today, and the range of likely outcomes for Iran, the region, and the global economy. The first hour examines the central argument of Vali's work—drawn from his book and a recent Foreign Affairs article co-authored with Narges Bajoghli—that the Islamic Republic's conduct is driven far less by religious ideology than by a deeply entrenched sense of national insecurity and historical grievance rooted…

In Episode 486 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Pulitzer Prize-winning author and leading authority on energy and geopolitics Daniel Yergin about the surprising resiliency of the global economy in the face of major supply disruptions and the consequences of the US war with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz for global energy markets, energy security, electrification (including alternative energy generation and storage), and the balance of power in the Gulf. The conversation begins with a simple question: Why have energy market disruptions from both the Iran conflict and the Ukraine War proved far more manageable than many analysts and decades of scenario planning predicted? Demetri and Dan examine what that resilience tells us about the transformation of global supply chains, energy diversification, inventory management, and the roles of the United States and China as the world's largest swing producers and consumers of energy. From there, they turn to the broader geopolitical…

In Episode 485 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Yale political scientist Ian Shapiro—author of After the Fall—about how the widespread optimism of the post–Cold War era gave way so rapidly to the fractured, combative politics of today, why American unilateralism hollowed out the very international institutions the US claimed to champion, and what it will take for mainstream democratic parties to recover their legitimacy in the populist era. The first hour traces the critical decisions of the 1990s and early 2000s that Ian believes set this unraveling in motion: the choice to enlarge NATO eastward and invest meaningfully in Russia's post-Soviet transition, and the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as the first major military action taken without UN Security Council authorization. They then turn to the unilateral invasion of Iraq as the seminal rupture in the international rules-based order, followed by the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, which delivered a parallel blow to the elite consensus…

In Episode 484 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with AI policy researcher, writer, and incoming Head of Strategic Futures at OpenAI, Dean Ball, about the intellectual foundations of machine intelligence, the governance frameworks best suited to frontier AI, and what's at stake for society, the nation state, and the individual if we get this transition wrong. The first hour builds the philosophical scaffolding for the conversation to come — what intelligence actually is, how large language models learn, what they understand, and the broader historical thesis animating Dean's worldview: that we are not witnessing the birth of something entirely new, but rather living through a computing revolution that began with the transistor and is now reaching its natural culmination in the era of machine intelligence. The second hour turns to what's at stake in this transition and the governance models Dean believes are most suited to it. They begin with his conception of superintelligence — not as a singular,…

In Episode 483 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Hamidreza Azizi — expert on Iranian foreign policy and international security, and author of The Axis of Resistance: Iran, Israel, and the Struggle for the Middle East — about the evolution of the US-Israeli war against Iran since the early weeks of Operation Epic Fury, the contours of the emerging peace process, and the broader transformation of the Middle Eastern order in its wake. The first hour picks up from Azizi's previous appearance and traces how the war has developed: the transformation of Iran's leadership following the assassination of Ali Khamenei and the consolidation of power within the IRGC, the memorandum of understanding signed between the US and Iran, whether Iran's demonstrated control over the Strait of Hormuz has negated its need for a nuclear weapon, the role of Hezbollah and Lebanon as the most volatile variable in any lasting peace arrangement, and an honest accounting of what Iran has lost — and why those losses, not just…

In Episode 482 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with hedge fund manager Alap Shah, co-author of "The Global Intelligence Crisis," a three-part essay series examining the economic, political, and social consequences of the dawn of artificial intelligence. Alap argues that AI is a categorically different technology from those that came before it, with profound implications for employment, the consumer economy, and democratic politics. The conversation explores why Alap believes the white-collar escape valve that absorbed displaced workers in past waves of automation is closing, the synthetic short on the US consumer economy embedded in today's AI trade, and the disintermediation of internet and financial services by agentic systems. They also discuss the policy interventions—from new corporate taxes to an AI dividend fund—that Alap believes will become politically necessary as labor's share of national income declines, closing with his forecast of a coming political realignment in which both major…

In Episode 481 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with economist and Talking Heads Macroeconomics founder Manoj Pradhan about his and Charles Goodhart's new book, The Unanchored Central Banker, which argues that structural forces—aging demographics chief among them—are driving real interest rates persistently higher, deteriorating fiscal positions across the developed world, and ultimately forcing central banks to choose between monetary stability and accommodating the political demands of indebted governments. The first hour lays out the foundations of Manoj and Charles's thesis. They discuss why an aging population and a shrinking workforce put structural upward pressure on real interest rates through two primary channels: (1) rising public debt issuance to cover unfunded liabilities like healthcare and Social Security, and (2) persistent demand for new housing construction that competes for the same limited pool of savings as the elderly delay vacating their homes. They examine how other spending…

In Episode 480 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Miles Taylor, former Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security during the first Trump administration and later head of advanced technology and security strategy at Google, about the existential stakes of AI development, the erosion of centralized state power, and the domestic security threats that may define the years ahead. The first hour establishes the nature and scope of the threat Miles believes AI poses—not merely to individuals and nation states, but to modern civilization itself—arguing that it is an order of magnitude more consequential than anything the national security community has previously confronted, and that the institutions responsible for protecting us are failing to grasp it. From there, the conversation turns to what this means for governance: how the extraordinary empowerment of the individual is eroding the foundations on which centralized states were built, whether democracy as currently constructed can survive…

In Episode 479 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Will Manidis, co-founder of healthcare AI company ScienceIO, 2019 Thiel Fellow, and early-stage investor, about the collapse of secular institutional legitimacy, the reassertion of divine faith and political violence as organizing forces in modern life, and what the concentration of AI-generated wealth means for the social contract, labor, and the future of economic participation. The first hour traces Manidis's background — his early upbringing as a Quaker and his experience building and selling a successful healthcare AI and data science company — before turning to the theological arguments animating his writings on technology and the innovation cycle. He contends that the secular institutions Western societies have built and iterated upon since the early twentieth century have exhausted their capacity to provide order and meaning, and that we are entering a period in which ancient forces of divine faith and savage violence are reasserting…

In Episode 478 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Jon Alterman, the Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, about why the Islamic Republic of Iran has refused to capitulate in its war with the United States and Israel,, how Russia and China are positioning themselves to exploit the conflict, and what recent wars have taught us about the future of warfare and a potential direct military confrontation between the United States and China. The first hour examines the constellation of tools Tehran has cultivated to compensate for its conventional military weakness, and which have been deployed to great effect against the United States and Israel, and the mismatch between the speed of modern warfare and the speed with which political change is demanded in Washington, which has frustrated the architects of this latest military campaign from the outset. They also discuss the deepening of US-Israeli military integration following…

In Episode 477 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Edward Luce, columnist and US national editor at the Financial Times, about the history of American Grand Strategy and the revenge of geopolitics in a new age of multipolarity and great power competition. Kofinas and Luce trace the decline of American grand strategy back to the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a more risk-averse, process-oriented era in US foreign policy. They then discuss how the Trump administration has upended many of the practices that defined that era, introducing new risks to America's policy in the Middle East and its relationships with European and Asian allies, before turning to the administration's China strategy ahead of the Trump-Xi Summit now less than a month away. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with…

In Episode 476 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Marvin Barth, founder of Thematic Markets and former head of FX and EM macro research at Barclays, and Chief Economist for International Affairs at the US Treasury about the ongoing US-Israeli military campaign against Iran and its implications for the global economy, global security, and the future of American military, economic, and financial power. The first hour begins with an update on the status of Operation Epic Fury, how the evolution of the conflict has aligned with Marvin's initial expectations, and the analytical framework he uses to assess US strategic objectives and the incentives that inform the decision-making of its principal agents—most notably the President himself. They draw historical analogies to previous Middle Eastern conflicts, assess risks to maritime security and global trade, and examine the evolving incentive structures of the US, Israel, the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, and China. The conversation also explores the…

In Episode 475 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with John Burn-Murdoch, columnist and chief data reporter for the Financial Times, about AI's impact on the economy and jobs, the widening ideological divide between young men and women, the global decline in fertility rates, the rising rates of depression and anxiety among 18-34 year olds, and the affordability crisis that is creating some of the most extreme demographic distributions of wealth and opportunity in history. The first hour covers Burn-Murdoch's path into journalism, the questions that animate his work, and the frameworks he uses to analyze and communicate complex social, economic, and technological trends. The conversation then turns squarely to the subject of artificial intelligence and to the central question animating much of the current discourse: What is AI going to do to the economy and our jobs? They look at what the data reveals about which jobs are most exposed, what the latest research reveals about the decline in entry-level…

In Episode 474 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with commodity economist and energy market analyst Rory Johnston — founder of CommodityContext.com and host of the Oil Ground Up Podcast — about the mechanics and cascading consequences of the Strait of Hormuz closure, now entering its second month, and what the two most plausible resolution scenarios mean for energy prices, regional security, and the global economy. Recorded as part of an ongoing short-form series tracking the US and Israeli military campaign against Iran, the episode examines why the full physical impact of the supply disruption is only now reaching end markets across Asia, Europe, and North America, how the oil market is fracturing across both time and space, and why middle distillates — things like diesel and jet fuel — have become the epicenter of the crisis. Rory and Demetri also discuss how importing nations and companies are responding through emergency reserve releases, demand rationing, and accelerated behavioral changes. The…

In Episode 473 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Captain John Konrad — founder of gCaptain, the world's most-visited maritime and offshore news website, and one of the most influential voices in commercial shipping — about what Konrad calls the Hormuz Hypothesis: a framework for understanding how the Trump administration has assembled the tools to exploit the disruption of commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz as part of a broader maritime strategy and political endgame that very few in the media are discussing. The first hour lays the groundwork for that hypothesis, examining the decades-long decline of the US merchant marine and shipbuilding industrial base, why control of global maritime choke points is inseparable from national security and the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency, and how the collapse of the war risk reinsurance market following the outbreak of conflict created an acute insurance crisis for vessels transiting the Persian Gulf. They also discuss how the…

In Episode 472 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Sebastian Mallaby about Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of DeepMind and the man widely regarded as the most consequential figure in the development of artificial general intelligence, and what his story reveals about the science, the competition, and the existential stakes of the AI transition now underway. The first hour traces Hassabis's early life as a chess prodigy in North London, his studies in computer science at Cambridge and neuroscience at University College London, and the founding of DeepMind in 2010 alongside Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. Mallaby and Kofinas explore the philosophical and scientific foundations of Hassabis' approach — including the decisive shift from symbolic, rule-based AI development to the inductive, data-driven logic of deep learning — as well as the competitive dynamics that have shaped the industry: Google's acquisition of DeepMind in 2014, Hassabis's early skepticism of language models and the transformer…

In Episode 471 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Gregg Carlstrom — Middle East correspondent for The Economist, based in Dubai and Riyadh, and a veteran reporter covering the region for fifteen years — about the mood across the Gulf States since the US and Israeli military campaign against Iran began on February 28th, and what the conflict's trajectory reveals about the widening gap between operational success and strategic victory. The conversation opens with an assessment of shifting opinion inside Saudi Arabia and across the Gulf — from early opposition to the war to hawkish demands in some quarters that the United States, having opened Pandora's box, now finish what it started. Carlstrom and Kofinas examine the human and material toll the conflict has taken so far, the extent and internal logic of Iranian restraint in targeting Gulf infrastructure, and the implications of Iran's decentralized Mosaic Defense Doctrine for command and control and efforts at de-escalation. The conversation then…

In Episode 470 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Jacob Siegel — writer and editor at Tablet Magazine, U.S. Army veteran, and author of The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control — about the intellectual and historical roots of his argument that the internet has given rise to a fundamentally new form of political regime, one that governs not through force or democratic consent, but by controlling the codes and protocols of the digital public arena. The first hour traces the theoretical and historical foundations of Siegel's argument, from the media theory of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Neil Postman, and Jacques Ellul, to James Beniger's 1986 work The Control Revolution, to the 17th-century philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and its downstream influence on the cybernetic frameworks that gave rise to the internet. They discuss the rise of digital swarms, the Anonymous movement, and what Siegel observed when he returned from Afghanistan in 2012 to find American culture being…

In Episode 469 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Hamidreza Azizi — Iranian scholar, visiting fellow at the German Institute for International Security Affairs, nonresident fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, and author of the forthcoming The Axis of Resistance: Iran, Israel, and the Struggle for the Middle East — about how the US and Israeli military campaign against Iran has evolved over its first three weeks, and what the conflict's trajectory reveals about the competing strategic objectives driving it. The conversation opens with an assessment of how the war has unfolded since its start, examining where US and Israeli objectives align, where they diverge, and what those divergences mean for the conflict's direction. Azizi and Kofinas discuss the significance of the targeted killing of Ali Larijani — secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council — as part of a broader campaign to decapitate the Islamic Republic's leadership structure, and what the systematic elimination…

In Episode 468 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with renowned economic historian and author Barry Eichengreen about the history of international currencies and the prospects for the US dollar's continued preeminence, drawing on his new book Money Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto. The first hour traces the long arc of international currency history, from the invention of coinage in ancient Lydia through the monetary innovations of Athens, Rome, and the Byzantine Empire, to Renaissance Florence, where a city-state with no navy and no silver mines managed to make its currency the dominant medium of exchange in Europe. The hour closes with a discussion about the Dutch Republic's revolutionary contributions to modern money and finance, and the Spanish silver dollar—the first truly global currency, which circulated from the New World to China and remained legal tender in the United States until the eve of the Civil War. The second hour examines Britain's emergence as the world's…

In Episode 467 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Bruno Maçães — geopolitical strategist, former Minister of European Affairs for Portugal, and author of World Builders — about the Iran War, what it reveals about the Trump administration's strategic logic, and how the decision to initiate what may prove to be the most expansive American-led war in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq is reshaping the global order. Kofinas and Maçães examine the competing explanations for why the campaign was launched when it was — from the argument that Washington was drawn into the conflict by Israel, to the question of whether Trump's own instincts and political calculations were the decisive factor — including a close reading of Secretary of State Marco Rubio's public comments about the role Israel played in precipitating American military involvement. They also discuss what Washington and Tel Aviv's strategic visions may be for the post-conflict order, the fractures emerging within Trump's own…

In Episode 466 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Joshua Landis, professor of Middle East Studies and director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, about the US-Israel war against Iran, what it reveals about American strategy in the region, and why the absence of a clear theory of victory raises the specter of yet another catastrophic regime-change war in the Middle East. Kofinas and Landis examine the competing narratives surrounding the conflict — from the argument that the Trump administration was dragged into war by Israel, to the theory that Washington concluded Iran would never voluntarily relinquish its nuclear program, to speculation that the campaign is part of a broader grand strategy aimed at neutralizing a Chinese forward base in the Middle East ahead of Trump's summit with Xi Jinping. They also discuss why Iran's regime is far more institutionalized and resilient than the Arab governments the United States has previously sought to topple, the historical…

In Episode 465 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Yale historian and Cold War scholar Odd Arne Westad, author of The Coming Storm, about why the pre-WWI era of multipolarity, imperial decline, and great power rivalry offers a far more instructive — and alarming — historical parallel to today's world than the Cold War, and what must be done to prevent the catastrophic descent into total war. The first hour explores what went wrong after the fall of the Soviet Union, how the end of the Bretton Woods system helped enable China's economic rise, and the striking structural parallels between the rise of Germany before 1914 and the rise of China today. Westad and Kofinas also examine the roles that Russia, India, and the United States play in this historical analogy, and how the failure to integrate rising powers into meaningful international frameworks — then and now — has set the stage for catastrophic conflict. The second hour takes a deeper look at the specific forces that could push the world from…

In Episode 464 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with economist, investor, and sovereign wealth and pension fund advisor Sony Kapoor about the case for a great rebalancing of capital from developed into emerging markets, generational investment opportunities in India, how the breakdown of the unipolar order creates both challenges and opportunities for EM investors, and whether AI can revive developed economies weighed down by public debt, unfunded liabilities, and faltering demographics. The first hour covers the structural forces behind the outsized concentration of global portfolios in American assets, why the Trump administration's erratic policymaking has made that overexposure impossible to ignore, and a deep dive into India—its evolving relationship with the US, how its elites and citizens perceive America under Trump, what it has drawn from Beijing's development model, and the remarkable optimism pervading Indian society in contrast to Western declinism. The second hour examines the broader EM…

In Episode 463 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with media and technology historian Tim Wu about how the rise of platform power has become the defining economic event of our time, why it's responsible for much of the current dysfunction (from politics and media to housing and healthcare), and what we can do about it. Wu and Kofinas spend the first hour of their conversation discussing how platform power has become the central form of economic control in our era, why the Internet went from being a free-wheeling and optimistic ecosystem of entrepreneurship and creativity to one whose business models of extraction dominate it today, and how platforms have been weaponized against their users in order to capture and extract economic value rather than create it. The second hour is devoted to a discussion about the plethora of readily available solutions to our current predicament, like antitrust enforcement, "line of business" restrictions, utility rules and caps, mandated transparency of platform…

In Episode 462 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Cullen Roche, the Founder and CIO of Discipline Funds and author of the new book "Your Perfect Portfolio." They discuss the essential principles of portfolio construction by dissecting some of the world's most influential investment strategies―from Warren Buffett's classic approach to the momentum-driven tactics of trend followers, and even innovative frameworks you've likely never seen before. Cullen and Demetri spend the first hour discussing Roche's philosophy on portfolio construction, what goes into constructing the perfect portfolio, and how variables like one's time horizon, financial circumstances, and behavioral biases are arguably the most important determinants of financial returns, and therefore, must be actively taken into account when structuring your portfolio. They explore the distinction between saving and investing, the hidden costs that erode portfolio performance, and why managing the liability side of your balance sheet is…

In Episode 461 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with co-founder and chief investment strategist of GMO, Jeremy Grantham, and financial historian, journalist, and investment strategist Edward Chancellor. Together, they have collaborated on Jeremy's autobiography, titled "The Making of a Permabear," which chronicles Grantham's evolution as a value investor and the valuable lessons that can be learned from his six-decade career in investment management. They spend the first hour of their conversation discussing the collaboration behind the book, Grantham's formative experiences in finance, the principles that have guided his investment philosophy, the role of mean reversion in asset markets, and why they both believe that US equities are more overvalued today than at almost any point in history—with important implications for where returns will come from over the next decade. The second hour is devoted to a conversation about the mechanics of financial bubbles, the relationship between ultra-low…

Episode 459 of Hidden Forces is the twelfth episode in the Hundred Year Pivot podcast series. In it, Demetri Kofinas and Grant Williams speak with Kamran Bokhari, a strategic forecaster and geopolitical analyst who specializes on the Middle Eastern and Eurasia, about Iran's nationwide protests, what they reveal about the power and stability of the Iranian regime, and what the state of Iranian affairs portends for Iran's future, the region's geopolitics, and the strategic considerations and objectives of the United States. The conversation's opening hour traces Iran's modern formation—beginning in the early 1900s with the Constitutional Revolution, moving through the 1953 coup and the Shah's rule, and culminating in the 1979 Islamic Revolution and its aftermath. Kamran walks the audience through the evolution of Iran's dual military structure, explaining the critical distinction between the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the regular armed forces (Artesh), and how the IRGC grew from an…

In Episode 460 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Professor of International Politics at the Bundeswehr University Munich, Carlo Masala, whose book "If Russia Wins," makes the case for European national rearmament and the urgent need to deter near-term Russian threats against NATO member countries in the absence of American leadership. Masala and Kofinas spend the first hour of their conversation detailing the scenario Calro puts forward in his book—a limited Russian incursion into the Estonian city of Narva. They explore why Carlo thinks that Russia might attempt such an operation, the similarities to and differences from the approach Russia took in Ukraine in 2014, whether NATO's Article 5 commitment would hold in such a scenario, and whether the gradual erosion and eventual destruction of the NATO alliance is the ultimate goal of the Russian Federation, irrespective of who is in office. The second hour is devoted to a conversation about: Europe's defense challenges in the face of a declining…

In Episode 458 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Patrick Boyle, a former hedge fund manager, finance professor, and the creator and host of one of the most successful business channels on YouTube, with over a million subscribers and nearly 150 million views spread across several hundred videos. Patrick brings a unique combination of domain expertise and media savvy to his analysis of financial markets, economic scandals, and the complex web of power that connects Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Washington. Demetri asked Patrick Boyle to appear on the podcast after discovering that his channel had been demonetized as a result of his exploration of the Jeffrey Epstein story—not the salacious details that have dominated headlines, but the deeper questions about the intersection of power, wealth, regulatory capture, and institutional failure that the story reveals. They explore where Epstein's massive fortune actually came from, why simple explanations accounting for his wealth don't add up, what…

In Episode 457 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with philosopher Rebecca Goldstein about her latest book, "The Mattering Instinct," which explores our fundamental human longing to feel that our lives matter—that we didn't just come and go and that it was all for nothing. Rebecca and I spend the first hour exploring the origins of her fascination with the question of mattering, how this instinct manifests differently from our biological drive for self-preservation, and why we long not just to matter to ourselves but to feel that we matter objectively. We discuss the critical role played by attention and deservingness in our sense of mattering, the distinction between happiness and fulfillment, and how parenting and early family dynamics shape our relationship with this fundamental human longing. The second hour is devoted to a more in-depth exploration of Rebecca's concept of the "mattering map," which identifies four distinct archetypes: heroic strivers, socializers, competitors, and transcenders. We…

Episode 456 is the eleventh installment in the Hundred Year Pivot podcast series. In it, Demetri Kofinas and Grant Williams speak with the editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly, Brian Winter. He's an expert on Latin America, having lived and worked in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, and possesses a deep understanding of the region's politics, economics, and security dynamics. The three of them begin their conversation discussing the Trump administration's almost cinematic removal of Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela. They speculate about who is currently in charge of the country, the implications of Maduro's exit for Venezuela's economy and the region's geopolitics, the rising tide of right-wing political movements across Latin America, and how this operation fits into the Trump administration's broader initiatives as they have been conveyed in the new National Security Strategy. They also explore the rising tide of right-wing political movements across Latin America, the role of organized crime in…

In Episode 455 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Nicolas Colin, a former French Treasury official and the co-founder of a European startup accelerator whose work sits at the intersection of technology, markets, geopolitics, and global finance. In the first hour of their conversation, Kofinas and Colin break down Colin's "Late Cycle Investment Theory" and the framework behind it. They draw on Carlota Perez's model of technological revolutions and techno-economic paradigms, explore the role of speculative manias and market concentration, and examine why Colin argues that AI is less a brand-new technological revolution than an intensification of the computing-and-network paradigm that has been unfolding for the past 50 years. They also compare the current moment to the 1970s as a historical analogue and discuss why Colin believes financial systems are often the last piece to be rebuilt after a major paradigm shift. In the second hour, Kofinas and Colin explore what this late-cycle thesis means for…