Get the edge with Hidden Forces where media entrepreneur and financial analyst Demetri Kofinas gives you access to the people and ideas that matter, so you can build financial security and always stay ahead of the curve.
Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more
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-c...
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...
Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official and Google executive, details his journey from combating terrorism to confronting the profound dangers of artificial intelligence. He asserts that AI represents a species-level threat, dwarfing previous national security concerns due to its uncontrollability and the rapid development of asymmetric capabilities that empower individuals with nation-state-like destructive potential. The discussion also explores how traditional centralized governments are ill-equipped to address these evolving threats, advocating for new, decentralized governance models and community-level defenses against future dangers like AI-accelerated bioweapons and domestic unrest.
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 ...
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 th...
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 upend...
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 ev...
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 co...
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 Israe...
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 th...
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 ne...
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 shifti...
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 trac...
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 com...
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 Em...
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 wh...
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 — fro...
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 ...
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....
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 fro...
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 d...
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 co...
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 th...
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 objec...
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...
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 jus...
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 Madur...
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...
In Episode 454 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with author, futurist, and U.S. foreign policy expert Jamie Metzl about the aims and objectives of the 2025 National Security Strategy and its implications for American prosperity and power in the 21st century. Jamie and Demetri spend the first hour of this conversation digging into the Trump administration's 2025 National Security Strategy and the story that the administration is trying to tell to the American people and to itself about Am...
In Episode 453 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Jason Furman, the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, about the state of the U.S. economy, the AI Bubble, monetary policy, inflation, price controls, and much more. Jason and Demetri spend the first hour of their conversation exploring his economic framework, what he learned from his time working inside the Clinton and Obama White Houses, and how these experiences shaped his perspective on the role of government in the ec...
