Hidden Forces Demetri Kofinas

In Episode 336 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman about the containment problem and the AI dilemma that he outlines in his book, “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma."
Mustafa Suleyman and Demetri discuss the rapid advancement and proliferation of Artificial Intelligence and Synthetic Biology, why this revolution is going to be fundamentally different from past periods of rapid technological change, and what can be done to solve the containment problem and prevent some of the more catastrophic outcomes from occurring, while still reaping the benefits of this next wave of innovation.
The first hour of this episode is spent exploring how these AI systems work, how they learn, and how they perceive the world, as well as why they are so difficult to contain. And yet, we need to contain them if we want to avoid some of the more catastrophic outcomes like synthetically engineered pandemics, pandemics of public confusion that undermine our sense of reality, and moves toward totalitarianism or civilization-ending anarchy.
In the second hour, Kofinas and Suleyman discuss various versions of what success and failure might look like and what we can do as a society to help move us closer toward the future that we want and away from dystopian nightmares that we’ve all seen depicted in some of the most famous movies of the last half-century. 
You can subscribe to our premium content and access our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.
If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to email info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone from our team will get back to you.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Episode Recorded on 10/23/2023

In Episode 335 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Marshall Kosloff. Marshall is the host of The Realignment and Arsenal of Democracy podcasts and is a media fellow at Hudson Institute.
Marshall and Demetri spend the first hour applying Marshall’s realignment framework to U.S. foreign policy in light of the recent developments in Israel and the potential for a destabilizing regional war with Iran. In the second hour, they discuss Artificial Intelligence (AI) and social media regulation, the 2024 election, and the risk that we may be sleepwalking into a new world war that would devastate the global economy and put people’s lives at risk in ways that we haven’t experienced since the late 1930s and 1940s.
You can subscribe to our premium content and access our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. You can listen to The Realignment here and Arsenal of Democracy here. 
If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to email info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone from our team will get back to you.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
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Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 10/30/2023

In Episode 334 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with famed historian of American Foreign policy Walter Russell Mead about the evolving war in the Middle East and why we are living through the most dangerous period in international affairs since the 1930s. Professor Mead is a Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at the Hudson Institute, the Global View Columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College in New York.
How have we found ourselves on the cusp of another war in the Middle East when the Biden administration’s explicit goal coming into office in 2020 was to get the United States out of this region so it could focus on China? This is the question that Mead and Kofinas look to answer in the first hour of their conversation. They also discuss the historical parallels and differences between the present moment and previous periods of immense danger in the international system, the apocalyptic strain in American politics and foreign policy, and how political ideology and the culture war inform people’s opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the escalating war in Gaza.
In the second hour, Walter Russell Mead speculates about how international events may evolve, the possibility of outright collusion among America’s adversaries, as well as further avenues of escalation that could lead to direct U.S. involvement in Israel’s war against Hamas. The two also discuss how the war in Ukraine, as well as Chinese military provocations in the Pacific factor into American policy in the Middle East, why U.S. adversaries no longer seem deterred by American power, and what can be done to change that before it’s too late.
You can subscribe to our premium content and access our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.
If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to email info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone from our team will get back to you.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed
Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify
Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 10/26/2023

In Episode 333 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Michael Brenes, the Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University who recently authored an article for Foreign Affairs about the U.S. defense industrial base titled “How America Broke Its War Machine.”
Michael and Demetri discuss the state of the U.S. defense industrial base, American military readiness, and the effect that great-power competition and the expansion and scope of U.S. military involvement in active conflicts overseas could have on the nation’s political stability.
You can subscribe to our premium content and gain access to our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.
If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to email info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone from our team will get back to you.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed
Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify
Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 10/17/2023

In Episode 332 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with geopolitical analyst and forecaster Kamran Bokhari. Kamran is the Senior Director of the Eurasian Security & Prosperity Portfolio at the New Lines Institute for Strategy & Policy and has served at the U.S. State Department and as a Senior Consultant with the World Bank.
The subjects of today’s conversation concern the escalating violence ignited by last weekend’s brutal attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas, as well as the Israeli Defense Forces’ ongoing counteroffensive and bombing of the Gaza Strip.
Kamran and Demetri spend the first hour of their conversation discussing the attacks, what we know about their original scope and intention, what role Iran may have played in helping plan the attacks, and whether or not we can expect Hezbollah to open a second front of attack in the north of Israel, as well as other potential pathways of escalation that could rope in the United States and turn this into a larger, regional conflict.
In the second hour, Bokhari and Kofinas look at how the events transpiring in the Middle East fit into the story that Demetri has been telling on this podcast for years about the fragmentation of the liberal rules-based international order and the emergence of a new multipolarity where nation states will seek to resolve long-standing border or ethnic disputes by force as everyone jostles to reposition themselves favorably ahead of the emergence of a new status quo. What this means for the future of Israel, Iran, Turkey, China, Russia, and the United States, is all part of that discussion.
You can subscribe to our premium content and gain access to our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.
If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to email info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone from our team will get back to you.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed
Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify
Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 10/15/2023

In Episode 331 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Andy Constan and Mike Green after a week of turmoil in the bond market that saw a dramatic repricing of long-term government debt, raising debt servicing costs for the US government and sending yields on 10-year Treasury bonds to nearly 5%.
Demetri, Andy, and Mike spend the first hour of their conversation trying to make sense of the recent sell-off, as well as what the implications of these higher long-term interest rates will be for the economy and asset markets.
The second hour is dedicated to discussing the risk-reward calculus for investors who are trying to decide whether or not they want to use this opportunity to add bonds to their portfolios, in what amount, over what duration, and what the risks and opportunities are of doing so given the continued uncertainty about the direction of interest rates and inflation.
You can subscribe to our premium content and gain access to our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.
If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to email info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone from our team will get back to you.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed
Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify
Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 10/06/2023