Hidden Forces

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...

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 m...

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...

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 Un...

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, Haro...

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 wher...

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...

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...

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 Ir...

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 betw...

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...

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...

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 bi...

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...

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 fr...

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, mo...

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, mo...

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...

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 ro...

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 a...

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...

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 America's place in the world, where it went astray, and what needs to be done on a strategic planning level...

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 economy.

The two then delve into Furman's thoughts on artificial intelligence. They discuss whether...

In Episode 452 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Iain McGilchrist, a neuroscientist and author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things. His work on the divided brain has helped millions of people find wisdom, meaning, and guidance for living in the modern world.

Iain and Demetri begin their conversation exploring McGilchrist's core thesis about the divided brain, how the left and right hemispheres attend to the world in fundamentally different ways, where we see evidence of an increased preponderance in left-brain thinking, and how this has impacted the way we conduct science...

In Episode 451 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with author and long-time China analyst Dinny McMahon about the Chinese leadership's efforts to redesign China's economic model in the face of structural headwinds to growth, mounting trade barriers, and growing concerns in Western capitals about Chinese economic and military domination.

The first hour is spent exploring why McMahon believes that China is at a transformational moment. He details the kind of economy that Beijing intends to build by 2035 and the internal debate over whether China should rebalance toward household consumption through welfare and redistribution or double down on...

In Episode 450 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Lawrence McDonald, the founder of The Bear Traps Report and the author of a recently published book about the risks and investment opportunities present in today's radically reshaped economy titled "How to Listen When Markets Speak."

In today's conversation, Demetri and Lawrence discuss how social media and the gamification of investing have amplified behavioral biases and fueled the AI boom, as well as the growth of crypto and other "tertiary" assets.

They then zoom out to examine how the macro environment has changed since the Covid 19...

In Episode 449 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Chase Taylor, head of research at Bulwark Capital Management and founder of Pinecone Macro Research about investment opportunities around the buildout of the new "electric stack" and the AI CapEx Boom that relies on them.

Chase and Demetri spend the first hour of this episode exploring his methodology, how he extracts signals from noise, and why a multidisciplinary approach to investing is especially important during periods of disruptive sociopolitical and technological change like the kind we are experiencing today. They then apply these ideas to two important technological...

In Episode 448 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Nathan Benaich, founder and general partner of Air Street Capital and the creator of the annual State of AI Report, an open-access compendium that tracks advances across AI research, industry, policy, and geopolitics.

Nathan Benaich and Demetri spend the first hour of their conversation exploring some of the most important AI breakthroughs of the year. They unpack the DeepSeek moment, dig into some of the advancements made by the latest reasoning models, and discuss why there appears to be a regression in capabilities across certain domains in artificial...

Demetri Kofinas speaks with financial historian and investor Russell Napier about his "Practical History of Financial Markets" online course, which is provided in conjunction with Edinburgh Business School.

Hidden Forces premium subscribers can sign up using their subscriber email + code "HF50" for a generous 50% DISCOUNT. Genius members can access the course for an even more generous discount of 75%. Sign up today at libraryofmistakes.com/course.

The course runs in three formats: a ~14-hour online version; a two-and-a-half-day in-person version in London (capped at about 30 people); and a university version for mostly post-grad students. This is...

Episode 447 is the tenth installment in the Hundred Year Pivot podcast series. In it, Demetri Kofinas and Grant Williams speak with Peter Atwater, a recognized expert on the impact of confidence and mood on individual and group decision-making. Peter's work has been instrumental not only in helping his clients, students, and readers understand how people make decisions under conditions of chaos and uncertainty, but also in showing how to use those insights to gain a competitive advantage.

The three begin their conversation by mapping out Peter's Confidence Quadrant and using it to explain how individuals and crowds...

In Episode 446 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with geopolitical analyst and forecaster Kamran Bokhari about Trump's 20-point Gaza peace plan and the new security order taking shape in the Middle East.

Kamran first appeared on Hidden Forces in the days following the October 7th attacks to discuss the wider war unfolding between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, and how Hamas's attacks could serve as a catalyst for the remaking of the modern Middle East. In his subsequent appearances, he has provided critical context for understanding U.S., Israeli, and Iranian strategic aims and limitations, as...

Episode 445 is the ninth installment in the Hundred Year Pivot podcast series. In it, Demetri Kofinas and Grant Williams speak with Roger Mitchell, an entrepreneur and writer whose essay "The Answer Was Here All the Time," published in Grant Williams's 2025 compendium, explores faith, meaning, and the search for moral grounding in a contemporary West that feels increasingly unmoored and in epistemic freefall.

The conversation begins with a diagnosis of the cultural and spiritual malaise that seems to have taken hold of Western societies: the fraying of the social contract, the "boomer blues," as Roger Mitchell calls them...

In Episode 444 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Dan Wang, author of Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, about his pioneering new framework that compares the U.S. and China not along ideological lines or modes of governance, but by state capacity and the propensity to build.

According to Dan Wang, China is an "engineering state," focused on building big projects and diffusing technologies across its economy, while America is a "lawyerly society" that has become proficient at protecting what it has and obstructing progress in areas that are vital for its long-term prosperity. Kofinas...

In Episode 443 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with former investment banker turned global strategist Viktor Shvets, whose books The Great Rupture and The Twilight Before the Storm provide an audaciously comprehensive and compelling framework for understanding the forces shaping our world. These include technology and finance, amplified by climate change, demographics, and a series of socioeconomic and geopolitical shocks that have created the once-in-a-century superstorm now enveloping Western democracies.

Viktor and Demetri spend the first hour of this episode exploring Shvets' central critique of neoliberalism and why he believes that much of the current crisis stems...

In Episode 442 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi. Kurt is the chairman and co-founder of The Asia Group and served as the United States Deputy Secretary of State in the Joe Biden administration and as the Indo-Pacific Coordinator from 2021 to 2024. Rush also served under the previous administration in his capacity as the Deputy Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs on the National Security Council and is the author of the extremely influential book, "The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order."

Kofinas, Doshi, and Campbell spend the first...

In Episode 441 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, about the profound transformations underway in the global economy driven by America's transition away from being the world's primary insurance provider for international security to its exploiter-in-chief.

In a recently published Foreign Affairs essay titled "The New Economic Geography: Who Profits in a Post-American World?" Adam compares America's role in the post-World War II era to that of an insurance provider, underwriting global security by protecting international shipping lanes, providing deep and liquid capital markets, and enforcing international...

In Episode 440 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Paul Kingsnorth, a novelist, essayist, and former environmental activist who first came on many people's radars during the Covid-19 pandemic with the publication of his viral three-part series "The Vaccine Moment." His current work explores the intersection of technology, culture, and the divine. In his latest book, Against the Machine, Kingsnorth examines how our increasingly mechanized way of seeing and relating to the world—and to ourselves—has contributed to the death of Western culture, and what it would take to reclaim our humanity and save our souls.

Paul...

In Episode 439 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Douglas Rushkoff, a pioneering media theorist, best-selling author, and leading voice on how digital technologies shape societies, economies, and cultures.

Rushkoff and Kofinas spend the first hour of their conversation tracing the arc of Douglas' career, from his upbringing in a communal 1960s neighborhood in Queens and early work in theater to his role as a cultural and media critic chronicling the rise of the early internet. They explore how the internet's rave-like collaborative ethos and anarchic counterculture gradually gave way in the 1990s and early 2000s to...

In Episode 438 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Charles Calomiris, former Chief Economist at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, about his forthcoming paper "How Stablecoins Will Transform Banking," which is based on a presentation he delivered at the Hoover Institution's annual monetary policy conference this past May.

Demetri and Charles spend the first hour of their conversation laying out what stablecoins are and why Calomiris believes they are poised to transform our standard units of account through a revolution in real-time payments and a wholesale reinvention of the banking system, monetary policy, and...

In Episode 437 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Marvin Barth, founder of Thematic Markets and former Chief Economist for International Affairs at the U.S. Treasury, who previously served at the Federal Reserve and the Bank for International Settlements and has led global macro and FX strategy on both the sell side and the buy side.

Marvin Barth and Demetri spend the first hour of their conversation unpacking his concepts of "localization," "being is believing," and "global entropy," and how these thematic frameworks can help us understand changes in growth, inflation expectations, interest rates, the underperformance...