Hidden Forces

Demetri Kofinas

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.

  1. 3d ago

    Why the China Threat Is Overblown | Logan Wright

    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 the domestic demand needed to rebalance both the Chinese and global economies. They discuss why optimism about Beijing's reform prospects was once rational, how China's official GDP data obscures what is actually happening on the ground, and why the prevailing narrative that Chinese policymakers retain the capacity to engineer a recovery is, in Wright's view, fundamentally mistaken. The second hour turns to the consequences of China's credit bubble and property market collapse for ordinary households and local governments, the similarities and critical differences between China's predicament and Japan's in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the striking historical parallel between the CCP's political choices and those of Soviet leaders during the USSR's era of stagnation under Brezhnev. They also discuss the structural demographic headwinds compounding the collapse in Chinese demand, why Wright believes the renminbi is overvalued and poses no credible threat to the dollar's international role, the implications for America's strategic competition with the PRC when viewed through the lens of a declining rather than a rising power, and why Wright argues that the threats China poses are deterrable and require coordinated allied action to address. 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 benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, CastBox, or via our RSS Feed Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Join our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and 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 09/23/2026

  2. Sep 24

    How to Invest for A Hundred Years | Inigo Fraser Jenkins

    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 wealth funds, the erosion of the rule against perpetuities and the rise of dynasty trusts, why governance has primacy over allocation for ultra-long-horizon investors, why purchasing power preservation rather than benchmark-relative performance should anchor portfolio construction, and why diversification must shift from cross-asset correlation within the Markowitz framework to robustness across fundamentally different paths of the future. The second hour examines the specific portfolio implications of a hundred-year mindset, including: (1) Why equities should remain the core allocation, even in a lower-return environment (2) The diversifying role played by private assets, including early stage venture (3) Direct ownership of income-generating real estate, including farmland (4) The case for a meaningful gold allocation as a zero-correlation hedge against inflation, fiscal instability, and systemic risk. They also discuss the primary drivers of wealth destruction over time, from inflation and punitive tax regimes to confiscation and behavioral risk, before turning to the current macro landscape and the shift in Treasury ownership from price-insensitive central banks to price-sensitive funds and households, why US equity exceptionalism may prove more durable than dollar or bond exceptionalism, and the growing tension between global fiscal deterioration and the capital demands of the AI investment cycle. 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 benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, CastBox, or via our RSS Feed Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Join our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and 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 09/16/2026

  3. Sep 21

    Will AI Really Kill Us All? | Harper Reed & John Borthwick

    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 political power, questions around corporate concentration and liability, and why the debasement and pollution of our information ecosystems makes mounting a coherent response on behalf of the public interest even more difficult than during the 2008 financial crisis or in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. They also discuss the US-China competition over AI, the strategic importance of open source, and whether calls to pace the frontier represent genuine concerns about AI risk or a convenient narrative serving an agenda of consolidation and control. The conversation closes with deeper questions about the nature of artificial intelligence—whether it was discovered rather than invented, what the attractor for superintelligence might be, the significance of embodiment and human values, and why Western and non-Western cultures are responding so differently in this moment. 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 benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, CastBox, or via our RSS Feed Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Join our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and 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 09/17/2026

  4. Sep 14

    The Great Financial Reset Has Begun | Marieke Flament & Nicolas Colin

    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 been otherwise unimaginable. They discuss how the maturation of the digital economy is creating conditions for new waves of financial innovation and why dollar-backed stablecoins and programmable money sit at the center of that transformation. The second hour turns to what has made Flament and Colin more cautious about the pace of dollar-denominated stablecoin adoption, including China's decade-long effort to build insulated financial rails and the diminishment of American soft power under the Trump administration. They discuss the dynamics of capital repatriation in Japan and Europe, the prospects for financial repression and capital controls, and the potential for the US military to be used as leverage in negotiations between Tokyo and Washington. The episode closes with a discussion of machine-to-machine commerce and the emerging agentic economy—why existing financial infrastructure is poorly suited for AI agents, how stablecoins could become the default payment layer for autonomous systems, and what that means for dollar dominance in a world where compute replaces oil as the most important economic commodity. 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 benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, CastBox, or via our RSS Feed Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Join our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and 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 09/09/2026

  5. Sep 7

    Are Rumors of an Imminent Russian Attack Warranted? | Yaroslav Trofimov

    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 turmoil surrounding a recent shakeup in President Zelensky's cabinet, claims of corruption, and whether Western countries can be expected to continue supporting Ukraine amid declining public support for the war and mounting political resistance movements led by Europe's far-right parties.  The second hour examines Western strategic thinking and the widening schism between Washington and the capitals of Europe's largest countries. They discuss why Yaroslav believes the West's difficulties begin with a flawed diagnosis of the war based on the comforting assumption that this is a fight over territory in the Donbas rather than a contest over the future of Europe, the ideological sympathy many on the right feel toward Moscow, the nature and limits of China's support for Russia, how the war against Iran is reshaping the strategic battlefield by consuming Washington's attention and roughly half of US Patriot and THAAD interceptor reserves while bolstering Russian oil revenues, the implications for Taiwan and US allies in the Pacific, and why Europe increasingly views America not merely as an unreliable ally but as a potential strategic threat—a shift that may have mortally wounded the transatlantic relationship as it has existed since the end of World War II. 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 benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, CastBox, or via our RSS Feed Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Join our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and 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 09/02/2026

  6. Aug 31

    Bessent's Wager and Why the World is Calling America's Bluff | Henry Farrell

    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 converting the once liberal, rules-based international order into a more overt and darker form of American imperial power, why that process is failing, and what its failure means for the global economy, international security, and the lives of billions of people. The second hour explores the hidden infrastructure that underwrites US hegemony—the financial messaging systems, dollar-clearing networks, and internet surveillance architecture that quietly became instruments of American coercion. They trace how this "underground empire" was slowly built and eventually adopted by much of the world, when it began to be weaponized first against America's enemies and then against its own allies and partners, how that weaponization has corroded American power, and where the evidence of its decline is now unmistakable. They also examine how a world once held together by an establishment of lies and hypocrisies is giving way to one organized around clans, cartels, and naked self-interest, the role technologies like AI and social media play in breaking down and refashioning traditional political coalitions, the deeper sources of Western insecurity—including the risk of a new kind of world war that may arrive embedded in our systems of communication and control—and where Henry still finds grounds for optimism in an otherwise frightening new world. 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 benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, CastBox, or via our RSS Feed Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Join our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and 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 08/26/2026

  7. Aug 17

    The West's Forgotten War and the New Russia | Mark Galeotti

    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 uneven state of Western support, before turning to the mind of Vladimir Putin — the insecurities Galeotti places at the core of his character, his survival instincts, his narrow circle of trust, and the forces shaping his perception of how the war is going. The second hour explores what Putin would actually need in order to end the war, why he keeps chasing a symbolic victory in the Donbas rather than the settlement presently available to him, and why his aversion to weakness is essential to making sense of his calculations. The conversation then turns to succession, what tends to follow the death or departure of a personalistic ruler, the lessons of Stalin's untimely death, and why Galeotti expects any transition of power in Moscow to reflect the will of a coalition of post-Soviet elites rather than the machinations of a younger, smarter Putin. They weigh the escalatory paths that worry European capitals, from a direct challenge to NATO's eastern flank to the campaigns of sabotage, subversion, and hybrid warfare that Galeotti considers more plausible, and close by examining how America's entanglement in the Middle East has been received in Moscow, what a hollowed-out but battle-hardened post-war Russia could mean for the world, Moscow's lopsided and deepening dependency on Beijing, the prospects for Washington to cleave Russia away from China's sphere of influence, and what all of it means for energy markets and the global economy. 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 benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, CastBox, or via our RSS Feed Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Join our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and 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 08/11/2026

  8. Aug 10

    The Internet Will Die and So Will You | John West

    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 mechanistic logic embedded in the platforms that mediate our lives, and what it means to live deliberately in an environment engineered to keep us perpetually satiated and unconscious. From there they turn to the business models that have reshaped the web—the move from serving users to serving advertisers—and how AI's implementation into more and more facets of our lives could change that relationship for better or worse. They close on questions of truth, knowledge production, and epistemic collapse, asking how the world would have handled 9/11 in the modern media ecosystem, why people cannot live in a perpetual state of uncertainty, and what the collapse of a shared reality means for our politics and our humanity. 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 benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, CastBox, or via our RSS Feed Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Join our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and 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 08/04/2026

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About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Demetri Kofinas
  • Years Active
    2017 - 2026
  • Episodes
    525
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2018 Hidden Forces, LLC
  • Show Website
    Hidden Forces

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