Hidden Forces

In Episode 109 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Financial Times Global Business Columnist, Rana Faroohar about her latest book dealing with the worlds of Big Tech and finance. We are living in a dramatic period of societal change and uncertainty that most generations rarely get to experience. The changes we are experiencing are being driven primarily by a particular set of Internet-enabled technologies and businesses that are undergoing a rapid phase of consolidation. The last time Americans saw anything similar was during the late 19th century. This was a period where people's relationships to nature and to the land were being radically reshaped by the railroads, industrial capitalism, and urbanization. Their sense of time and space, their relationships to their communities, and to each other were being profoundly reordered and this produced an unprecedented amount of anxiety. Like today, this period coincided with a rise in populism and calls for heavy-handed regulation of what had become industrial monopolies. These monopolies were able to set prices and use anti-competitive tactics to bankrupt their competitors. Independent oil refiners, for instance, had to sell out to John D. Rockefeller, because he not only got preferential rates on his oil shipments, but Standard Oil was also getting rebates from the railroads on every barrel shipped by his competitors. And these types of anti-competitive practices were going on across the board in steel, tobacco, etc. It took a long time for the public to catch up, and for journalists like Ida Tarbell to emerge, who could begin to bring a necessary level of clarity to what was happening. Something similar is happening today with journalists and authors like Rana Foroohar and Shoshana Zuboff. The battlelines of 21st-century capitalism and liberalism are being radically redrawn. If we want to have a say in what this world looks like, we will need to educate ourselves and others about what's gone wrong and how we can start to fix it. This episode is a step in that direction. You can access this week's overtime segment, transcript, and rundown through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers also gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily be added to your favorite podcast application. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 108 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Pauline Brown, the former Chairman of North America for LVMH, the world's leading luxury goods company. Pauline has over thirty years' experience acquiring, building, and leading some of the world's most influential, luxury brands. In this conversation, she shares insights about how anyone can strengthen and grow his or her own aesthetic intelligence and apply that intelligence towards enhancing the quality and prosperity of one's life and business. Pauline's case for aesthetic intelligence rests on four basic points. The first is simply that aesthetics matter, not only in life but also in business. The second is that aesthetic intelligence can be cultivated. In fact, each of us possesses far more capacity than we use; aesthetic vision and leadership also have the power to transform companies and even entire sectors, as has been proven time and again by companies like Apple, Dyson, and others. Lastly, in the absence of aesthetics, most businesses are susceptible to potentially fatal challenges. In other words, when a company's aesthetics fail, so does the company. Her overall message is that aesthetics matter and that they can be cultivated. As Pauline says: "Although I believe that each of us has the potential to boost our aesthetic intelligence, it takes time and effort. It is just like developing other muscles." In this episode, we learn approaches and concrete exercises for building one's "aesthetic muscles" and using them to win over customers, starting with exercises for enhancing what Pauline Brown calls (1) attunement, which she defines as "developing a higher consciousness of one's environment and the effect of its stimuli;" (2) interpretation, which means "translating one's emotional reactions (both positive and negative) to sensorial stimuli into thoughts that form the basis of an aesthetic position, preference, or expression;" (3) articulation, or expressing the "aesthetic ideals for one's brand, product, or service such that team members not only grasp the vision but can execute on it with precision;" and (4) curation, or "organizing, integrating, and editing a wide variety of inputs and ideals to achieve maximum impact." According to Pauline Brown: "When it comes to aesthetics, editorial command is all-important; as Coco Chanel said, "Elegance is refusal." You can access the transcript and rundown to this week's episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers are granted access to our overtime feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 107 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz, about his new book "Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. In the book, Andrew reveals how the boundaries between technology, media, and politics have been erased, resulting in the deeply broken informational landscape in which we all now live. This conversation is meant to help us understand what went wrong and how we might go about trying to fix it. For several years, New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz has been embedded in two worlds. The first is the world of social-media entrepreneurs—the new gatekeepers of Silicon Valley—who upended all traditional means of receiving and transmitting information. The second is the world of the people he calls the gate-crashers—the conspiracists, white supremacists, and nihilist trolls who have become experts at using social media to advance their agenda, influence elections, or just make money. Marantz weaves these two worlds together to create an unsettling portrait of today's America, both online and in real life. He reveals how the boundaries between technology, media, and politics have been erased, resulting in the deeply broken informational landscape in which we all now live. In candid conversations with Silicon Valley executives and social media entrepreneurs, Andrew Marantz discovers a selective community of techno-utopians who took Mark Zuckerberg's motto, "Move Fast and Break Things," to heart. Viewing their role as disruptors to be free of any responsibility to actually monitor the tools they have built, they either choose not to police their users' actions or, in many cases, don't know where to begin. In fact, in Andrew's portrayal, such policing is often seen by these techno-utopians as being antithetical to the nature of democracy, which they synonymize with the Internet writ large. In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, it became apparent to Andrew that something was happening online. On Facebook for instance, while many of the traditional gatekeepers to information—like Reason, Foreign Affairs, the Nation, and more—were seeing less engagement with readers, other, darker corners of the platform were thriving. Most people view social media as a reflection of popular will and interest, but the virality industry is built on a large number of small human choices. At every step, there are people behind the curtain, and ahead of the election, someone was attempting to drag the notion of a Trump presidency from the fringes into the realm of the imaginable. But who were these new virologists? Enter the gate-crashers. Marantz spent years analyzing how alienated young people are led down the rabbit hole of online radicalization, and how fringe ideas spread—from anonymous corners of social media to cable TV to the President's Twitter feed. Along the way, he met with the men and women responsible for it all. He ate breakfast at the Trump SoHo with self-proclaimed "internet supervillain" Milo Yiannopoulos; toured a rural Illinois junkyard with freelance Twitter propagandist Mike Cernovich; drank in a beer hall with white nationalist Mike Enoch; and shadowed histrionic far-right troll Lucian Wintrich during his first week as a White House press correspondent. Marantz also spent hundreds of hours talking to people who were ensnared in the cult of web-savvy white supremacy—and to a few who managed to get out. In the overtime to this week's episode, Demetri shares stories from his time working at RT, including intimate details from his relationships and encounters with some of the characters discussed in Andrew's book. The two also continue a conversation about gender and race, as well as the role of power in society. You can listen to the overtime, as well as gain access to the transcript and rundown to this week's episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers also gain access to their very own overtime feed, which you can easily add to your favorite podcast applications like Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Overcast, Pandora, etc. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 106 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Joshua Landis, a Middle East scholar and Syria expert about the disorderly withdrawal of American forces from Syria and the larger shift in the balance of power that we are seeing as nations scramble to remake alliances in the wake of America's absence. It seems that what we've seen transpire in the Middle East during the past week is a symptom of a much larger trend: the deterioration of the rules-based international order, the fulcrum around which the world has turned for three generations—the entirety of living memory. It is the break-down of national borders, in many cases borders that have been artificially constructed and maintained by the credible threat of American military power. As America begins its long-anticipated withdrawal from the world stage, others will rise to take her place. It was probably naive to imagine that this could happen in a managed way. Perhaps it was always destined to be messy. As much as Trump's detractors wish to blame him for the mess in Syria, the truth is, he is only an accelerant. He isn't responsible for assembling the reactants. The forces currently being unleashed in what was once Northern Syria remain contained within the Greater Middle East, but Turkey's involvement creates the potential for spillover into the Balkans and southern Europe at some indeterminate date in the future. Turkey has been flexing its geopolitical muscles with Greece for years. It is no longer inconceivable to imagine that its membership in NATO will prove to be an insufficient deterrent for curbing Turkish military aggression or the expansionary ambitions of Erdoğan in the Aegean. Erdoğan seems to be staking his political career on the vision of a more assertive and expansionary Turkish foreign policy. Turkey remains strategically indispensable to the US & NATO. If he expands Turkey's current activities in Cypriot waters, it isn't clear who will stop him. It's a cliché, but all bets do seem to be off. If the nations of the world decide that America can no longer guarantee their security or maintain the integrity of their borders, we may start to see a rapid reorganization of the international order along radically different lines. It's hard to believe, but Russia has played its cards better than any one of the major powers. It has capitalized on (and in some cases stoked) the chaos of political dysfunction both within and across the transatlantic relationship. It seems to have positioned itself as the new dance partner for any country suddenly in need of an escort. Its economy may be half the size of California's, but this has not stopped Putin from rebranding the Russian Federation as "the new neighborhood muscle," that will have your back when the US doesn't. America's leaders have exhibited remarkable incompetence in the area of foreign policy, displaying only flickering instances of humility and foresight since being thrust upon the world stage as the new global hegemon and the only standing survivor of the Cold War. For years, we've been asking ourselves what this new world is going to look like, a world without America guaranteeing security for the liberal, democratic order. The events currently transpiring in Syria may be giving us our first real glimpse of what that world will look like. It's chaotic. It's authoritarian. And it's more violent. This is the new backdrop for which the circus that is American politics will play out in 2020. Democratic candidates who have staked their candidacies on demonizing Donald Trump, while avoiding addressing the forces that brought him to office in the first place risk being totally blindsided by even lower voter turnout and a re-election of Donald Trump in 2020. If that happens, American foreign policy will likely go into crisis. It's really unclear at that point what would happen. The proverbial "Deep State" has resisted his candidacy from the beginning but has not gone so far as to overthrow his popular mandate. Should he be re-elected, what will Washington's elite, its intelligence agencies and wealthy benefactors do? Will they sit by and watch while Trump dismantles what is left of their dysfunctional experiment in American empire? Or, will they impeach him? He certainly hasn't made it difficult with his actions, but they no longer have the credibility to do it without further sacrificing their own legitimacy. This is truly uncharted waters. We should all pray that a new consensus can emerge in the next twelve months that will bring enough of the country together to stop the bleeding, but it is not clear from what source this unanimity will spring. This week's rundown is a 16-page compilation of all the information (including pictures and links material referenced during the episode) compiled by Demetri ahead of his recording with Joshua Landis. You can access this document, along with a transcript to this week's episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers also g

In Episode 105 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Jake Hanrahan about the crisis unfolding in the border region between Syria and Turkey following the US withdrawal of forces from northern Syria. This withdrawal precipitated the subsequent assault by Turkish Armed Forces on the Kurdish YPG-controlled region of Rojava. Jake Hanrahan is an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker based in the UK. He has reported from Syria, Iraq, southeast Turkey, and other conflict zones for HBO, Vice News, PBS Newshour, and BBC News, to name a few. Turkish President Erdogan, after obtaining the consent of President Trump, began his invasion into the Kurdish YPG controlled region of Syria known as Rojava this past Wednesday. During Sunday's "Face the Nation," Secretary of Defense Mark Esper confirmed to Margaret Brennan that roughly 1,000 U.S. troops would be evacuated from northern Syria following Trump's troop withdrawal announcement. There are also multiple reports of ISIS families and fighters previously captured and held by Kurdish forces starting to escape after Tukey's bombardments. Also, Lebanese broadcaster al-Mayadeen reported Sunday that the Syrian army would enter Manbij and Kobani in the next 48 hours, based on an agreement with the Syrian Democratic Forces (the latter, according to Mohammed Shaheen, the deputy chairman of Euphrates region told North-Press). It seems that what we are seeing transpire in the Middle East is the disintegration of artificially constructed national borders around sectarian lines. The forces being unleashed have thus far remain contained within the Greater Middle East, but Turkey's involvement creates the further potential for spillover into the Balkans and southern Europe at some indeterminate future date. Additionally, Turkey has been flexing its geopolitical muscles where Greece is concerned in recent years, and it is no longer inconceivable to imagine that its troubled relationship to the EU and its membership in NATO will prove insufficient as deterrents for curbing Turkish military aggression or the expansionary ideas of Erdoğan in the Aegean. This conversation is meant to help Hidden Forces listeners develop some context for what has transpired over the past week, the significance of Trump's decision, and the implications moving forward. Hidden Forces is listener funded. We rely on you to help us keep the program free of corporate advertising. You can help us do that by subscribing to one of our three content tiers through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers also gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily be added to your favorite podcast application. Your support is deeply appreciated. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 104 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Michael Maloney, perennial entrepreneur and host of the documentary series Hidden Secrets of Money about monetary history, libertarianism, and Austrian economics. Before starting GoldSilver.com, Mike overcame his childhood dyslexia to found a series of companies, including a high-end stereo manufacturer, winning several design awards in the process. Few people know this, but one of Mike Maloney's own designs is on permanent display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Mike also grew up dyslexic, leaving school after the 9th grade. Mike's first job was as a traveling salesman, driving all over the Southwest and as far North as Oregon with a van full of samples and catalogs of automotive parts and accessories that he sold to customers. Eventually, Mike started his own high-end stereo equipment manufacturer, as well as an annual show called the Home Entertainment Show that took place during the same day as the Consumer Electronics Show. It was not until the very early 2000's that Mike Maloney got the idea for GoldSilver.com, which began as a gold and silver brokerage, and which eventually developed into a reputable source for educational media content on Austrian economics, precious metals, and libertarian thought. For more than a decade now, Mike Maloney has traveled the world, sharing his relentless passion for economics and monetary history with audiences from Silicon Valley to Wall Street and from Hong Kong to Rome. He joins us today on Hidden Forces to share that experience with us. The overtime to this week's episode includes a lengthy conversation about Tesla, as Mike Maloney is a Tesla Bull, and has taken some issue with our bearish coverage of the electric car manufacturer and its founder, Elon Musk. This segment, as well as the transcript and rundown to the full episode, are available to audiophile, autodidact, and super nerd subscribers through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers also gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily be added to your favorite podcast application. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 103 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand, who argues that the world's cultures can be classified into two categories by virtue of their norms. She offers a lucid explanation of how and why cultures become tight or loose, outlining their different societal attitudes. This episode is full of eye-opening insights for development professionals, policymakers and those working in international business. According to Gelfand, tight cultures have a large number of social norms that enforce order and conformity and tend to evolve in nations that face many natural and human-made threats. Loose cultures, on the other hand, have more lenient norms and tolerate a wider array of behaviors. They generally face fewer chronic threats – but may tighten up temporarily in the event of an acute threat. Furthermore, says Michele, tight and loose cultures each have advantages and disadvantages and it's possible to modify a nation's norms in order to address protracted social problems. This is also true in the private sector. In a particularly relevant part of the conversation, Michele describes how businesses also develop tight or loose cultures and how a cultural mismatch can doom a merger or undermine cooperation among a corporation's divisions. The example she provides is that of Chrysler and Mercedes Benz, but Demetri also raises the example of AOL-Time Warner, perhaps the most prominent failed marriage of the late 90's stock market boom. "Tight" cultures, like Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Germany, embrace rigid norms and mete out harsh punishments for those who deviate. "Loose" cultures, including New Zealand, the United States, and Brazil, are more tolerant of a wide assortment of behaviors. According to Dr. Gelfand, when countries, families, companies, and US states all act in accordance with their divergent conceptions of "normal," misunderstandings and conflict often arise that help to explain many of the phenomena we encounter in daily life, business, and politics. The overtime to this week's episode includes a conversation about changing cultural norms in the workplace, as well as how the norms in some western countries began to change after terrorist attacks. This overtime segment, as well as the transcript and rundown to the full episode, are available to audiophile, autodidact, and super nerd subscribers through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers also gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily be added to your favorite podcast application. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 102 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with economist and former Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada, William White, about the state of our market economy and the prospects for an 'international reset' of the global financial system. William R. White was most recently chairman of the Economic and Development Review Committee at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) from 2009 to 2018. He is famous for having flagged the wild behavior in debt markets before the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. He began his career in 1969 as an economist working at the Bank of England. In 1972 he joined the Bank of Canada where he spent 22 years and was appointed Deputy Governor in September 1988. In 1994, he joined the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and served as its Economic Adviser and Head of the Monetary and Economic Department from May 1995 to June 2008. In their conversation, Demetri and Dr. White discuss a wide range of topics focused primarily on the global financial system. Their conversation begins with a focus on the state of the current system, including a discussion about the consequences of regulatory reform (both intended and unintended), as well as endogenous transformation to the system brought about by independent changes in the behavior of banks and other financial participants. Most of the conversation dealing with possible changes to the International Monetary and Financial System happen during the Episode Overtime, including a discussion about central bank-issued cryptocurrencies, private sector digital money like Libra, and Bitcoin. The overtime also includes a lengthy discussion about government policy in the face of climate change, and how this relates to the politics of monetary policy. William White has spent five decades as a central banker and international financial policymaker, and we are fortunate beneficiaries of the wisdom that he has accrued during these many years. Additional topics discussed during the episode include post-crisis reform, market architecture, currency wars, negative interest rates, the Chinese renminbi, causes for inflation, Japanification, the 'Global Ring of Fire,' and much more. You can access the rundown to this week's episode, along with a transcript of Demetri and Dr. White's conversation through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers are granted access to our overtime feed, which can be easily be added to your favorite podcast application. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 101 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Michael Casey, an acclaimed author, journalist, researcher, and entrepreneur who currently serves as CEO and founder of Streambed Media, an early-stage video production and technology platform that seeks to optimize capital formation and creative output in the digital media industry. Michael is also chairman of CoinDesk's advisory board and a senior advisor at the MIT Media Lab's Digital Currency Initiative, where he has spearheaded research projects that employ blockchain technology to achieve social impact goals. Michael Casey's breadth of experience as a financial journalist for Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, as well as his time spent stationed overseas in Thailand and Argentina, provide him with a unique perspective on the 'problem of trust' and what he calls 'the Internet's original sin.' The latter is a reference to the observation that the inventors of packet switching and the basic Web protocols did, according to Casey, "a masterful job figuring how to move information seamlessly across a distributed network. What they didn't do was resolve the problem of trust." "On the one hand," writes the chairman of CoinDesk's advisory board, "the distribution of public information was disintermediated, which put all centralized providers of that information, especially newspapers and other media outlets, under intense business pressure from blogs and other new information competitors. But on the other, all valuable information – particularly money itself, an especially valuable form of information – was still intermediated by trusted third parties." This intersection between money, communication, and trust serves as the basis for Demetri and Michael's conversation during this episode. The two discuss Shoshana Zuboff's work on Surveillance Capitalism, the loss of faith in financial institutions and central banks (including recent actions by the Federal Open Market Committee and the intervention by the Fed in the overnight Repo market), and how cryptocurrencies and distributed ledger technology aims to reinstill this lost faith by resolving the problem of trust. The overtime to this week's episode is an exhaustive exploration of the forces driving cryptocurrency adoption around the globe, the cultural impetus behind these forces, and the financial imperatives fueling Bitcoin's ascent as truly global money. You can access the overtime, along with a transcript and rundown to this week's episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers also gain access to the overtime RSS feed, which can be easily be added to your favorite podcast application. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 100 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Hedera Hashgraph founders Leemon Baird and Mance Harmon about Open Access, now that the network has officially gone public. This is the go-to-episode for anyone looking to understand the public ledger and why Fortune 100 companies like IBM, Deutsche Telekom, Boeing, and others have joined Hedera's Governing Council. As a seed investor in Hedera Hashgraph, Demetri's involvement with the public ledger goes back to September 2017, when he first invited Leemon Baird onto Hidden Forces to discuss the Hashgraph Whitepaper. Weeks later, Demetri put on an event at the Assemblage NoMad where Mance Harmon joined a panel alongside two other members of the executive team. The panel explored the innovation of Hashgraph consensus, specifically virtual voting and gossip-about-gossip. On March 13th, 2018, Leemon and Mance announced the launch of Hedera Hashgraph at an event in New York City, and on August 1st, 2018, news of the ledger's $6 Billion valuation was made public. Six months later, Hedera announced the initial group of Governing Council Members, and six months after this IBM, Tata Communications, FIS, and Boeing were announced as having joined Hedera's Governing Council as well. Two years since Leemon Baird first appeared on Hidden Forces to share the news about Hashgraph, Hedera has finally gone public. Open Access also marks the beginning of Hedera's strategic 15-year coin distribution, with HBAR tokens beginning to be released on exchanges in the US and Asia. This recording is meant to be the go-to-episode for anyone looking to understand Hedera Hashgraph DLT and the functions of the Hedera Governing Council. Demetri also references a back-and-forth on Twitter between him, Hedera's technical lead, and a number of Hedera skeptics resulting from a medium post by writer and blockchain enthusiast Eric Wall. Hedera's technical lead, Paul Madsen, responded with his own posts. Demetri has encouraged anyone interested in learning more about Hedera Hashgraph to engage with the team through their Telegram channel, as well as on Twitter. Relevant Timecodes: 00:11:53 Governing Council Announcements 00:14:08 Hedera Consensus Service with Hyperledger Foundation 00:16:50 What is Finality? 00:18:57 Probabilistic Consensus: The Problem with Not Having Finality 00:20:25 Proof of Work Slows Us Down 00:21:51 How is This Possible? 00:28:57 Coq Proof 00:34:05 Theoretical Competitors to Hashgraph 00:35:59 Database Sharding 00:44:15 Proof-of-Stake vs. Proof-of-Work 00:49:39 Hedera Proxy Staking (POS) 00:50:58 Private vs. Public Networks /Permissioned vs. Permissionless Databases 00:52:35 Path to Decentralization 00:53:45 Market Capitalization & Network Security 00:56:16 Addressing Scams 00:58:47 Theoretical Attacks, Proxy Staking & HBARS 01:06:12 Network Fees 01:08:08 How Governance Works in Hedera 01:10:07 Governing Council: "Can's" and "Can'ts" 01:17:19 Ownership of HBARS 01:19:21 Stability: Open Source vs. Open Review 01:27:29 Regulatory Approach: Squeaky Clean 01:31:32 Use Cases You can access that rundown, along with a transcript to this week's episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers also gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily be added to your favorite podcast application. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In episode 99 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Claudio Borio about outstanding sources of financial instability and some of the challenges facing Central Banks as the economy and markets begin to show signs of weakness heading towards the end of 2019. Dr. Borio heads the Monetary and Economic Department at the Bank for International Settlements and has written extensively about some of the longer-term, structural forces bedeviling policymakers since the early 2000s. More recently, the Federal Reserve held its annual Economic Symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where Fed Chairman Jay Powell delivered a speech titled, "Challenges for Monetary Policy," in which he addresses "three longer run questions" bedeviling policymakers. In the speech, Powell breaks up the post-war history of central banking into three distinct eras: 1950–1982, 1983–2009, and 2010—. The day before Jay Powell's speech, on August 22nd, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, published a series of tweets where he conducted a similar retrospective analysis of central bank policy going back to the stagflationary period of the 1970s. According to Larry Summers, "the high inflation and high-interest rates of the 1970s generated a revolution in macroeconomic thinking, policy, and institutions," while the "low inflation, low-interest rates and stagnation of the last decade…deserves at least an equal response." Further, Summers writes, "the financial crisis had roots in bubbles and excessive leverage caused by efforts to maintain demand after the 2001 recession," which suggests that perhaps, the maniacal focus on inflation amplified by the experience of the stagflationary nineteen-seventies blinded central banks and policymakers to a build-up in financial risks exacerbated by keeping interest rates "too low for too long" during the 1990's and early 2000's. The conversation you're about to hear was recorded on Monday, August 19th, several days before the publication of Jay Powell's speech, as well as Larry Summers' tweets. Some of the key questions we attempt to answer during this discussion are: "What's driving the slow growth environment that we are in?" "Are rates low because central banks are keeping them low, or are rates low because central banks, encouraged by a prolonged period of disinflation, kept interest rates chronically below the 'natural rate' for too long, thus encouraging the growth of asset price fueled credit bubbles that have turned central banks from being stewards of the expansion to now being managers of the contraction?" Demetri and Claudio also explore the different eras highlighted in Chairman Powell's speech, search for the origins of inflation targeting as a policy objective, question the efficacy of neutral rate targeting, and consider some of the possible consequences that could arise from an economic model that has increasingly come to rely upon debt financing in order to grow. In the overtime, Demetri asks Dr. Claudio Borio questions about the BIS 2019 Annual report, with a keen focus on some of the more immediate risks facing the global economy. This week's rundown is particularly useful for those seeking to gain a deeper sense of the issues discussed during the podcast. You can access that rundown, along with a transcript to this week's episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers also gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily be added to your favorite podcast application. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter a at @hiddenforcespod

I've taken the next few weeks off for a much needed summer vacation. I'll be releasing a couple of overtime segments while I'm gone that are normally available only to our Patreon subscribers. This segment was recorded with Senator Bob Kerrey, one of the ten members of the 9/11 Commission. Not only are his comments about the Kingdom's involvement in the attacks provocative and revealing, but the conversation itself is jovial and pleasant in a way that is rarely seen in our politics today. This recording also includes information about upcoming episodes, including conversations with the Chairman of North America for Louis Vuitton, the co-founder of Kickstarter, and many other notable guests. I hope you all enjoy it, and please feel free to reach out to me by email at [email protected] with any feedback or suggestions about the show and our upcoming lineup of guests. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 98 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with famed Hong Kong investor David Webb, an outspoken critic of China's authoritarian grip over the coastal territory. There are two parts to this story that we explore during this conversation. The first deals with Hong Kong – specifically, its political and economic future as an independent territory of mainland China. The second deals with China itself – specifically, its political and financial stability as the most leveraged economy at scale, in the world. The events in Hong Kong over the last several months – exacerbated by Chief Executive Carrie Lam's determination to push through the Extradition bill despite mounting opposition – have created a terrifying sense of crisis and disorder in the city. Videos of police beatings and retaliatory violence by protestors, as well as satellite images of what appear to be armored personnel carriers and other vehicles belonging to China's paramilitary People's Armed Police, have created an ominous sense of foreboding in the city. "One country, two systems," might be the fault line upon which the tectonic forces shaping China's political and economic development are colliding, creating mountains of civil unrest among Hong Kongers. At what point do the political tremors in Hong Kong become civic earthquakes capable of shattering the fragile peace between these two irreconcilable systems? Will open society prevail in Hong Kong, or will China do whatever it takes in order to reassert control over the former British colony? In the second part of this conversation, David Webb shares his insights from his decades of experience studying the Chinese economy and investing in Chinese companies listed in Hong Kong. Those insights include a discussion about China's overleveraged banking system, an overvalued RMB, and a system of Ponzi financing for Chinese companies listed on non-mainland exchanges. David Webb also contests a thesis famously put forward by hedge fund manager Kyle Bass about the precarious position of Hong Kong's currency and the risk of decoupling with the US dollar. Additional topics include a new "tech cold war," China's propaganda battle, the US-China trade war, and much, much more. There is no overtime to this week's episode on account of some technical constraints. Instead, we have made the transcript to this conversation available to Overtime subscribers, which will be published in the next day or two. You can gain access to the transcript, as well as a copy of the rundown to this week's episode directly through our Patreon page. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 97 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Nic Carter, co-founder of both the VC fund Castle Island Ventures, as well as the research and data analytics company Coinmetrics.io. Nic also has a master's degree in philosophy, and the two spend much of the overtime applying that discipline to bitcoin by examining the works of people like Friedrich Nietzsche and his philosophy around essence, John Rawls and his veil of ignorance, as well as applying a strain of utilitarian thought to questions of money and society. This conversation with Nic Carter is an attempt to understand Bitcoin as more than just the sum of its parts. One of the lessons that Demetri has taken away from his continued research into Bitcoin through the works of people like Nick Szabo, Paul Sztorc, and others, is that trying to measure the cryptocurrency against existing systems or conventions is almost always counterproductive. This is likely because Bitcoin is more than just money or a payments network. Bitcoin is a movement. Within it exists a competent community of intellectuals who are actively engaged in what often feels like a grand project to remake society. This comes across in the seriousness with which Bitcoiners apply themselves. This is true whether we are talking about the engineers working on enhancements to the base layer or whether we're talking about those contributing intellectually to debates about governance, economics, and ethics. In this sense, Bitcoin is not what most of us think it is, and even what we think it is, is constantly changing. Bitcoin's resilience and adaptability, as both a store of value, but also as a diverse community of people who are coming to the cryptocurrency from different backgrounds and with differing motivations suggests that there is much more going on here than just naïve speculation. As Nic Carter points out during this conversation, Bitcoin is a "subversive idea." Bitcoin is an experiment in social organization that doesn't play by the rules of the state or by the conventions of modern society. The momentum behind this movement is likely to grow, especially if governments validate the concerns of its proponents with further debt monetization or preferential bailouts in the event of another global financial downturn. In short, Bitcoin is not going away, and it is incumbent upon all of us to understand the message that it is here to deliver. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In this week's episode of Hidden Forces, I make available the overtime to my episode with journalist Matt Taibbi that aired on February 18th, 2019. In this overtime, Matt Taibbi shares his experience on the campaign trail with Donald Trump in 2016, as well as his predictions for the 2020 election. Matt and I also discuss the Goldman Sachs 1MDB scandal, which has remained largely out of the headlines. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 96 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with investor and co-founder of Real Vision, Raoul Pal about the future of global money in a multi-polar world, including a discussion about Bitcoin, Libra, debt, demographics, and much more. The inspiration for this conversation derives from a theme captured in William Strauss and Neil Howe's Generational Theory, also known as the Fourth Turning, where the authors describe a four-stage cycle of social moods associated with recurring generational archetypes, which they call "turnings." These include: "The High", "The Awakening", "The Unraveling," and "The Crisis." The question we explore in this conversation is: "are we at the fourth turning, and if so, what does this mean for the type of change we can expect to see in the coming decades?" All of this leads to a discussion about digital currency in a multi-polar world where the power of governments to maintain the global order is diminished and where corporations and the private sector may gain an opening to provide alternative forms of money in support of global trade and commerce. Where does bitcoin fit in this world? What about alternative protocols and currencies? Will governments even allow them? Can they stop them or will they welcome them and does this point the way towards a path that will lead inexorably towards truly global money? As always, subscribers to our Hidden Forces Patreon page can access the overtime to this week's episode, which includes a continuation of our conversation about digital currencies, but also a discussion about central bank policy at the Fed, the ECB, and the BOJ, as well as a discussion about economic indicators and what Raoul relies on most for his own projections about where we are in the business cycle. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 95 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with investor and author of Epsilon Theory, Ben Hunt, about the power of narrative and how it is used to shape and control our behavior as investors. This episode also includes a series of in-depth discussions about the long legacy of the 2008 financial crisis, identitarian narratives, three-body problems, the challenge of making accurate predictions, and 'The Great Bitcoin Epic.' Ben Hunt's background and career path have been anything but ordinary. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard, co-founded multiple tech companies, and managed his own billion-dollar hedge fund. When he isn't busy writing about market narratives or indeterminant models, you can find him tending to his horses, gathering a fresh basket of eggs, or engaging in other chores on his family farm in Connecticut. The main themes from Epsilon Theory that we focus on in this conversation include the three-body problem, as well as Ben Hunt's writings on narrative and the power that comes from shaping how people think about the world. This leads to a variety of discussions about various market phenomena, including a unique, thoughtful, and illuminating conversation on bitcoin – its culture, the narrative of bitcoin, how that narrative emerged, how it has evolved, and how it informs the price of bitcoin. Below are time codes for this episode: 06:45 How Markets Changed After March 2009 10:33 The Story that Changed the World in the Summer of 2012 12:24 No Fundamentals for Markets Anymore 15:54 The Three-Body Problem 27:02 Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Behavior 32:14 Turning Capital Markets into Political Utilities 34:45 Origins of Fed Communication 39:04 Forward Guidance and the Loss of Market Resilience 40:40 Informational Feedback at the Fed 43:50 Inflation vs. Deflation Narrative 46:26 The Role of Central Banks 49:11 Bear, Lehman, and the Banking Mafia 53:19 Shitcoin US Dollars 58:15 Facebook Libra and Censorship Embracing Coins 1:05:59 The New Bitcoin Narrative 1:08:01 Comparing Development Models for the Internet and Crypto 1:09:16 Culture of Bitcoin: Tech vs. Finance 1:14:13 Loss of Faith in Government Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 94 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with author of REBOOT, Jerry Colonna about leadership and the art of growing up. This is a deeply personal conversation, but it is also one that draws upon the common wellspring of human experience. Learning to be a great leader is also about learning how to become an adult, and this requires that we learn how to embrace life in all of its beauty, suffering, and grace. The introduction to this week's episode retells the story of Minos, King of Knossos after whom the great Minoan civilization is named. The Minoans populated the islands of the eastern Mediterranean during the second millennium, and are thought by some modern scholars of antiquity to have provided the substance for Plato's Atlantis reference in Timaeus and Critias. As is often the case, this week's episode overtime rivals the full episode in quality and depth, as both Jerry and Demetri share personal stories of suffering, grace, and transformation. You can access this part of the recording, along with our entire library of subscription content on the Hidden Forces Patreon page at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

This is a service announcement for regular listeners of Hidden Forces. I have released a nearly 2-hour long recording of my conversation with Leemon Baird and Mance Harmon of Hedera Hashgraph to my Hidden Forces Patreon subscribers that will be published on the main podcast feed after the network goes public sometime this summer. I wanted to give supporters of the podcast the opportunity to hear that conversation before anyone else. It's a great excuse for those who haven't subscribed yet, to do so. There is no long-term commitment and you can cancel your subscription at any time. Subscribing for even a single month helps fund the podcast and keep it ad-free, but I know that many of you will end up sticking around longer, as the overtime content, in particular, is well worth your support. You can access that episode, as well as our latest overtime segments, transcripts, and rundowns at Patreon.com/HiddenForces and you can expect another phenomenal episode to air this Monday, at our usual time. Until then, have a great weekend everyone!

In Episode 93 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Harvard University's Professor of International Affairs Stephen Walt, about the arch of American foreign policy and the decline of U.S. primacy. The conversation begins by addressing the major arguments made by America's foreign policy elite in favor of US engagement and American military leadership abroad. Before the end of World War II, there was no foreign policy "community" in the United States, as there was in the United Kingdom or France. The US was still largely an isolationist country, and the expectation was that it would return to isolation after the allies signed the Paris Peace Treaties in 1947, just as it had after the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Though demobilization started in earnest shortly after the conclusion of the war, the process was arrested soon after it began as the allies came to realize that the Soviet Union presented an altogether new type of threat to Western countries. In 1946, George Kennan, the American charge d'affaires in Moscow, sent what would become arguably the most important telegram in American foreign policy history, rivaled only by that dispatched on behalf of Arthur Zimmermann in 1917: an 8,000-word telegram to the Department of State detailing his views on the Soviet Union and U.S. policy toward the communist state. Known as "The Long Telegram" or "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," George Kennan's analysis provided one of the most influential underpinnings for what became America's Cold War policy of containment. With the Soviet Union's detonation of its first Atomic weapon on August 29th, 1949, the Cold War was off to the races. If the Cold War began with a bang, it ended with a whimper. Forty years after the Soviet's tested their first atom bomb, the Berlin Wall was torn down by Eastern Europeans and Russians tired of living under totalitarian communism. And yet, rather than demobilize or ramp down America's military presence abroad, the United States doubled down on it. In the thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States has invaded, occupied, bombed, and sanctioned more countries than almost any American can find on a map. Why this aggression? What are the assumptions that underlie American foreign policy? What has been the arch of international relations since the end of World War 2 and is there a better way forward? These are just some of the questions Stephen Walt and Demetri address in this phenomenal, seventy-minute episode on the past and future of American foreign policy. As always, subscribers to our Hidden Forces Patreon page can access the Overtime to this week's episode, which includes a discussion about Trump's foreign policy and how the populist forces unleashed by his election in 2016 are shaping the field of Democratic candidates in 2020. You can access all of our subscription content by supporting the podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In this timely Interview, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Hong Kong activist and politician Joshua Wong, who is often referred to by media outlets and the international press as the "leader of the Hong Kong protests." Joshua shares information about the latest developments on the ground, including ongoing efforts by Beijing and the Hong Kong government to put a stop to the pro-democracy movements and restore order in the coastal territory. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 92 of Hidden Forces, Demetri speaks with East Asian affairs expert Ho-Fung Hung about the upcoming US-China trade talks taking place at this weekend's G20 summit, as Xi-Jinping grapples with the ongoing protests in Hong Kong. Ho-Fung is the Henry M. and Elizabeth P. Wiesenfeld Professor in Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University, as well as the author of two books on China, including the award-winning "Protests with Chinese Characteristics," published in 2011. On June 16th, 2019, an estimated 2 million people took to the streets of Hong Kong to protest the handling of a proposed extradition bill by the Hong Kong government and its Chief Executive Carrie Lam. This followed two massive demonstrations against the extradition bill earlier in the month, including one where police used pepper spray and tear gas against protesters. The controversial bill would allow Hong Kong to extradite to the mainland those accused of crimes under the People's Republic of China's Communist Party-led legal system. While Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam has suspended the bill, she has refused to withdraw it. In this episode, we discuss what the protests mean for the future of Hong Kong and what they say about Hong Kong's relationship with mainland China. This includes an exploration of Hong Kong history going back to the Opium Wars and the signing of the Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing) in 1842, which ceded the Hong Kong island with surrounding smaller islands, to the United Kingdom in perpetuity. Hong Kong activists have raised more than HK$5 million ($640,606) in a crowdfunding campaign to take out newspaper ads in a bid to get this controversial extradition bill on the agenda at the G20 summit. We discuss the details of the extradition amendment, but also consider prior offenses by the Hong Kong government that led to similar uprisings. The Umbrella Movement of 2014 is perhaps the most recent, but Ho-Fung and Demetri also discuss the 2003 protests that were then inspired by similar concerns over Basic Law Article 23 that threatened to roll back important civil liberties like freedom of speech. In addition to the recent Hong Kong protests, Demetri and Ho-Fung Hung spend the duration of the overtime in a conversation about the RMB-USD peg, China's debilitating debt problem, the Belt and Road Initiative, and the China industrial lobby. Ho-Fung provides a path for how China may manage to avoid an all-out economic collapse after decades of uninterrupted growth and massive credit expansion. This part of the conversation, along with the transcript and rundown to today's episode can be accessed through our Patreon page at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at hiddenforces.io/subscribe Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 91 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Chief Economist and Strategist at Gluskin Sheff, David Rosenberg, about the latest Fed rate decision and his outlook for the global economy. In the overtime to this week's episode, David provides listeners with a look into his investment strategy and how he is positioning himself and his clients for a global slowdown that he believes may already be underway. David Rosenberg and Demetri recorded this episode only hours after the FOMC concluded its two-day meeting this past Wednesday. The Federal Open Market Committee decided to keep the fed funds rate unchanged, while simultaneously signaling a strong willingness to begin easing, possibly as soon as next month. It is David Rosenberg's conviction that the Federal Reserve has over tightened monetary policy during this cycle possibly by as many as one-hundred basis points – four rate hikes - and that Jay Powell and the board of governors at the Fed are worried that they may have precipitated the bursting of another bubble. This time, however, the bubble isn't in housing or consumer credit. The bubble in 2019 is in the corporate bond market where multinational corporations have feasted on the issuance of trillions of dollars of new debt used to finance mergers, acquisitions, and share buybacks, while simultaneously cutting back on the capital investment needed to grow their businesses and service their debts long-term. The last ten years have been a great time for stocks, fueled by a bonanza of free money and an implicit guarantee by the Fed to support asset prices at all costs. But the question has always lingered, "What will happen as the Fed continues to raise rates, normalize its balance sheet and tighten monetary policy?" Is this a new financial paradigm where fundamentals no longer matter and perpetual liquidity is the name of the game or does the global economy's increased reliance on debt financing in order to drive earnings and levitate asset prices remain as unsustainable today as it has been in any prior historical period? Is this time truly different? As always, subscribers to our Hidden Forces Patreon page can access the overtime to this week's episode, which includes a discussion about how David is positioning himself and his clients for the likelihood of a recession and return to bear market territory for stocks and commodities. We discuss the US dollar, precious metals, treasuries, currencies, as well as certain defensive stocks that David believes are likely to outperform the overall market in a downturn. You can learn more at Patreon.com/HiddenForces. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 90 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with former United States Defense Secretary Ash Carter. Secretary Ash Carter served as head of the US Defense Department during President Barack Obama's second term in office. Before his time as Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter served in the number two and number three positions at the Pentagon. As you can all imagine, it was a privilege for Demetri to have a cabinet secretary on the podcast, particularly someone with Secretary Carter's breadth of experience and scope of responsibilities. His newly published memoir, "Inside the Five-Sided Box: Lessons from a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon" offers an insider's look at what it was like to head the largest department in the government with its millions of staff members and near trillion-dollar budget. Demetri begins this conversation by asking Secretary Ash Carter about his experience serving under Barack Obama, the unique challenges of dealing with Congress, and the exigencies of protecting the citizenry from threats, both at home and abroad. Secretary Carter also addresses some of the constitutional conflicts that arise from NSA surveillance and targeted assassinations of enemy combatants or terrorist suspects operating outside of traditional warzones and military theaters. In this episode, Demetri attempts to identify and do away with many of the assumptions that are embedded in much of the language and in many of the conversations around US foreign policy. This is meant as an honest and informed exploration about the nature of American power and what it means in practice. How we might begin to think about international relations in a gig-economy where people are increasingly working contractually on projects with team members located in just about every corner of the globe? Also, Dr. Carter has thought extensively about the future of warfare in the 21stcentury, including the role of autonomous weapons, artificial intelligence, and cyberwarfare, topics that he and Demetri discuss in this episode as well. The overtime to this week's episode includes an hour-long excerpt from Demetri's yet-to-be-released recording with renowned political scientist and historian of American foreign policy Stephen Walt. You can gain access to that recording, as well as obtain a copy of the transcript and rundown to this week's episode through the Hidden Forces patreon page at Patreon.com/HiddenForces. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Show at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 89 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Jamie Metzl about the cutting edge of genomic science, synthetic biology, and big data. The two also discuss US-China relations, North Korea's nuclear program, post-Soviet Russian history, Iraq, Iran, and so much more. Jamie Metzl is described by Wikipedia as "an American technology futurist, geopolitical expert, and writer." He's also a novelist, entrepreneur, and media commentator. He's authored six books, including one with his former boss Richard Clarke, who he worked for at the US State Department and while serving in the National Security Council. Richard Clarke, who was National Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism during the late Clinton and early Bush administrations, became a political target after publishing a 2004 memoir about his service in government that was highly critical of the Bush administration's counter-terrorism efforts before 9/11. He also testified before the 9/11 Commission, which was discussed during the overtime of Episode 72 with Senator Bob Kerrey, who served on the 9/11 Commission. Listeners who are subscribed to our Patreon overtime feed can hear Jamie and Demetri discuss geopolitical history and current affairs, including a discussion about US-China relations, North Korea's nuclear program, post-Soviet Russian history, Iraq, Iran, and much more. The focus of this full episode, however, is on the consequences stemming from innovations happening in the fields of genomic science, synthetic biology, and big data (designer babies, biohacking, de-extinction, etc.). This is an honest and open conversation about the ethics and prudence of human innovation, and how it's creating a world that feels alien to many of us. Jamie Metzl also speaks about the social, political, and economic implications of a world where wealthy, well-connected elites or nations with authoritarian governments are able to get their hands on these technologies before the general public. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Show at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 88 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Tony Award-winning playwright, author, performer, and activist Eve Ensler, about her latest book (The Apology), as the two share their life experiences in a deep discussion about gender roles and the responsibility of men in our changing social and cultural landscape. Eve Ensler has been waiting much of her life for an apology. Sexually and physically abused by her father as a girl, Eve has long grappled with his betrayal and its effects for her whole life. In this deeply personal and open conversation, Demetri and Eve discuss chapters from the book, what it was like for Eve to grow up, how she dealt with her pain and trauma, and what lessons may exist for all of us. Demetri and Eve also share personal life experiences, openly discuss the challenges men and women face and engage in a frank conversation about what will be required from all of us in order to move our society and our politics forward. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Show at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 87 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with philosopher David Weinberger about the science of prediction, its evolution, and its future. The two begin by exploring classical approaches developed by early philosophers and mathematicians in the ancient world and upon which advancements were later made by enlightenment thinkers and experimental scientists. The models developed in this tradition have, until now, provided explanations for phenomena, which are used to make predictions about the future states or trajectories of these and other phenomena that adhere the same laws of action or motion. What is new today is the evolution of what are known as "machine learning algorithms," many of which provide superior predictions to those generated by conceptual or working models, but which often times cannot provide explanations for these predictions. They are, in this sense, block-box oracles. This represents a fundamental break with the sort of epistemological approach taken by the ancient Athenian philosophers who demanded that beliefs be justified by reasoned arguments or those of empirical scientists who relied upon falsifiability of testable hypotheses. In other words, whereas traditional approaches to science have necessitated the development of theoretical models of the world that can be tested empirically through the act of making falsifiable predictions, these new approaches are capable of generating predictions without a means by which to understand the causes at play. What are the implications of this new science? If predictions provided by highly intelligent machines become consistently more accurate across all domains of study, would we prefer to accept these inexplicable solutions over less accurate ones whose methodology we understand? At the limit, if we were to implement every prediction of every MLA, would we arrive at a fated, perfectly knowable world? If machines become the equivalent of Delphi's Oracle, what will be the value of doing science? The scientific method, after all, is the means by which we have been able to navigate and understand the material world, in material terms. Does this re-open humanity's door to the preoccupation with the mystery of conscious experience, which cannot be explained through the scientific method of objective, empirical analysis? These are the questions we explore in this week's episode with David Weinberger and Demetri Kofinas. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Show at http://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 86 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with TeslaCharts, one of the leading members of the online community known as TSLAQ, a group of largely anonymous Twitter users who exist to expose the reality behind the Tesla façade. TSLAQ is a hive-like collective of financiers, accountants, Ph.D.'s, lawyers, pilots, and members of just about any other occupational discipline you can imagine. What unites them all is Tesla, or more specifically, their outrage at a CEO who they believe to be a carnival barker running the biggest fraud in corporate America. In the words of TSLAQ's most prominent member Mark Spiegel, Elon Musk is responsible for "the biggest single stock bubble in this whole bubble market." According to an article about TSLAQ published for the LA Times, Russ Mitchell writes, "the channel has emerged as a crowd-sourced stock research platform," where "contributors divide up research duties according to personal interest and ability, with no one in charge." The "major aim" of this collective, writes Mitchell, "is to change the mind of Tesla stock bulls and the media." Activist investing and short selling have been around for as long as anyone can remember, but short sellers have traditionally aligned with intrepid, up-and-coming journalists and prominent media outlets in order to "talk their book" and change public opinion about the stock by sharing their proprietary research into the company. Jim Chanos was famous for having worked to expose the fraud at Enron through various media contacts like Bethany McLean, while simultaneously shorting the company's stock. In other cases, such as with SEC whistleblower Harry Markopolos, "No One Would Listen." What is unique in this case is the emergent nature of the network behind TSLAQ. It is not proprietary, nor is anyone in control. TSLAQ is not a conspiracy of short-sellers. Rather, it is the spontaneous manifestation of a disparate collection of disaffected people united together by their commitment to exposing an increasingly dangerous fraud that they believe is being perpetrated against investors and the general public. In this episode, we bring light to this phenomenon and help to educate you about its history, its impetus, and its prospects for bursting what may be the greatest stock bubble in our entire bubble market. As always, episodes of Hidden Forces are for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as the basis for financial decisions. All views expressed by Demetri Kofinas and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and should not be construed as financial advice. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In this Special Episode of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Kevin Smith and Otavio Costa of Crescat Capital, in a continuation of our recent markets coverage, with a particular focus on specific indicators that could validate a bear market hypothesis. It has been difficult not to feel anxiety and trepidation while looking out across the Value-Price Continuum during the last few years. Many of us understand that our economy no longer functions as advertised. Financialization of the US economy over the past four decades has skewed the relationship between price and value in favor of price, specifically in favor of higher prices. The unprecedented support that monetary authorities provided financial intermediaries and asset holders during the last bear market has created noticeable price distortions and has raised serious questions about the usefulness of traditional indicators in assessing asset values. It is also unclear how meaningful traditional economic data like GDP and unemployment are in the face of ever-higher nominal public/private debt levels and aging populations. We have experienced three intermediate corrections during this secular bull market. Most notably, the periods between the summers of 2011 – 2012 and 2015 – 2016, which proved to be head-fakes for investors who were expecting the market to enter bear territory. With the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite climbing above their all-time closing highs last week, will this last year's declines prove similarly inconsequential, leading us ever higher in an unusually prolonged bull-market? Kevin Smith and Otavio Costa make their case for why this market rally is different and how they are positioning Crescat Capital and its investors for the bear market to come. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 85 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with China expert Anne Stevenson-Yang about the imminent dangers facing global financial markets in the event of a break in the renminbi-dollar peg. In the years leading up to the Great Financial Crisis, it was generally understood that the Chinese were artificially depressing the value of the RMB vis-à-vis the USD, in order maintain an abnormally large current account surplus that would be recycled into western financial markets in the form of government securities, equities, real estate, etc. By recycling so much of the proceeds from trade back into foreign markets, the CCP managed to maintain a lower exchange rate than it otherwise would be, were it to convert those dollars back into renminbi. In other words, China was suppressing the value of its currency. Bob Wittbrot calls this recycling process the "Boomerang Greenback." This dynamic worked extraordinary well until the world went into recession around the time of the great financial crisis, which marked a peak in China's current account. The CCP also met the crisis by expanding bank lending, easing credit, and fueling investment even further. In addition, by maintaining interest rates and the cost of capital well-below the rate of inflation during China's multi-decade boom, the CCP has managed to keep households' share of the economy at low enough levels to induce an overall high-savings rate for the country (by having less disposable income than would otherwise be expected for an economy this size, the average Chinese citizen spends less on consumption than he or she otherwise would, absent financial repression). This has been an additional shot in the arm for investment. At some point post-2008 (judging from their foreign exchange reserves, this appears to have started somewhere around the start of 2014) China went from artificially suppressing the value of its currency to artificially supporting it. Unlike a country like Thailand, however, whose currency peg famously broke under the speculative attacks of foreign investors during the 1997-98' Asian Financial Crisis, the Chinese have managed to avoid such a scenario on account of maintaining a closed capital account (exercising tight capital controls). Coupling that with a current account surplus, the CCP has been able to obtain the hard currency it has needed in the last 5 years or so in order to buy the various inputs required to run their economy and keep the cycle going. The problem is that China generated a tremendous amount of money and credit since the GFC, in particular, and therefore risks a major devaluation in the value of the RMB should the country no longer be able to get the foreign exchange reserves it needs through a sustainable current account surplus. They are, at the moment, running a negative current account, a negative fiscal balance (of roughly 9% of GDP), their foreign exchange reserves are declining for the first time ever, while the country's external debt has doubled in the last five years, increasing by an average of $70 billion per quarter since the beginning of 2017. More than half of this debt is short-term, which means it needs to be constantly rolled over. Up until the Fed paused it's tightening cycle, the rising interest rates coupled with new tariffs on Chinese goods were creating a pincer-like effect on China's economy and on its ability to maintain its peg, forcing it to fund more of its dollar needs through borrowing at ever higher interest rates. China cannot maintain a credible peg between the RMB and the USD when its money supply is growing, by some calculations at more than 10x that of the United States over the last 10 years. This is a fundamental problem of accounting. If China were completely self-sufficient – if it had access to sufficient energy, food, base metals, etc. within its own borders – then its inability to obtain dollars would not be an issue. The problem is that it is desperately short these commodities as inputs for its manufacturing and domestic consumption. The recent drop in the price of oil helped them out a bit, but it has been rising again, just as China's oil imports are surging. The recently surpassed the United States as the world's largest crude importer. For a nation with dwindling foreign exchange reserves, this is not a good trend. And, it isn't even clear what the real FOREX numbers are in China. Official foreign exchange reserve put that number at $3.2 Trillion, but US treasury tick data shows that China owns a little bit less than $1.2 trillion in US Treasuries, which according to some people, suggests that their overall FOREX position is closer to $2 Trillion. Meanwhile, the U.S. trade deficit fell to $49.4 billion in February, the lowest level since June 2018, and well below what economists had expected. A 20.2% drop in imports from China was the main driver behind the nearly 3.4% improvement in the trade deficit in February, data from the Commerce Department showed. Th

In Episode 84 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with celebrated author Johann Hari about his book "Lost Connections" and the silent epidemic of depression and anxiety that is pervading our society and burdening the lives of so many people. Lost Connections begins as a chronicling of Johann's search for answers to the causes of his own depression, but becomes an investigation into the reasons for its increasing prevalence in the lives of others. In the introduction to the book, Johann tells us that some one in five U.S. adults is taking at least one drug for a psychiatric problem and that nearly one in four middle-aged women in the United States is taking antidepressants at any given time. Addictions to legal and illegal drugs are now so widespread that the life expectancy of white men is declining for the first time in the entire peacetime history of the United States, and these statistics are not exclusive to Americans. When scientists test the water supply of Western countries, they always find it laced with antidepressants, because so many people are taking and excreting them that they simply can't be filtered out of the water we drink every day. We are literally, as Johann writes, awash in these drugs and we have come to accept that a huge number of the people all around us are so distressed that they feel they need to take a powerful chemical every day just to keep themselves together. This is an extremely sensitive issue because so many people suffer under the burden of depression, but unlike other disabilities, this one is particularly difficult to talk about. No one wants to be seen as a downer or weak, even though more people are starting to understand that depression is not a sign of weakness. But what is it a sign of? Certainly, there are people in this world who are predisposed towards various forms of mental illness, including severe, sometimes debilitating depression. However, it is difficult to comprehend how the epidemic – the rising rates of depression and anxiety – can be explained in biological terms and treated in pharmacological ways. Johann Hari would say that this epidemic is not a malfunction caused by a biological deficiency. He would say that they are the natural response to a deficiency in how we live. This point, in particular, resonates. The Indian philosopher Krishnamurti, famously said that "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." On the surface, things have never been better. This is literally the best time to be alive in all of human history by almost any metric, and yet, if you look between the cracks you find people struggling. Some of them are depressed, others are just overwhelmed, grieving, or lonely. It isn't just people in poverty who are struggling. This is a society-wide phenomenon. We see it in our politics, but we also see it in our culture. What do we value in our societies today? Who are the heroes that we idolize? If an alien species were to visit earth, what would be the appeal we would make to save our lives? It's not a coincidence that there has been an outpouring of interest in questions of ethics, moral philosophy, and epistemology. What are we to infer from the resurgent public curiosity in psychedelics if not that they may hold the key to revelation – the revelation of some elemental truth about life that we seem to have forgotten in our haste to remake the world and ourselves along some artificially manufactured, commercially sanitized avatar of a human life. Joseph Campbell, the great mythological scholar and mystic once said, "I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive." Could this epidemic be a reflection of our struggle to fulfill the demands of a culture whose values are no longer compatible with the needs of a human life? As Johann Hari writes in the final paragraphs of his book, while addressing his younger self, "You aren't a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met. You are not suffering from a chemical imbalance in your brain. You are suffering from a social and spiritual imbalance in how we live. This pain is not your enemy, however much it hurts, and Jesus, I know how much it hurts. It's your ally – leading you away from a wasted life and pointing the way towards a more fulfilling one. You can try and muffle that signal or you can let it guide you, away from the things that are hurting and draining you, and towards the things that will meet your true needs." Those of you who are regular listeners to this show know that we've devoted more time and attention to the subject of life – it's properties, its merits, and how we come to know and understand it – as we move into a new paradigm of human experience at the frontier of technological futurism. No one knows exactly where this is all going. We are all still figuring it out, but it seems that this is an important piece of that puzzle. Ther

In Episode 83 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Raghuram Rajan, about the future of capitalism and the global economy amid rising rates of populism and disintegration in the global order. Raghu Rajan was named by Euromoney magazine as Central Banker of the Year in 2014 while serving as the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. Dr. Rajan has also held the position of Chief Economist at the IMF and is currently a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is the author of several books, including his most recent, The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind. In this conversation, Demetri engages Raghu on a wide range of issues, from central banking and interest rate policies to geopolitics, populism, and the systemic risks facing the global economy, including a discussion about leveraged loans, junk bonds, and emerging markets. The two talk about the demographic challenges confronting countries around the world, particularly developed nations with large unfunded liabilities and debt levels that exceed, in many cases, one-hundred percent of gross domestic product. They go into great detail about the Chinese political economy and the challenges it faces amid prospects for slower growth, while simultaneously exploring the challenges it creates for the United States amid a disintegrating global order. Demetri asks Raghuram Rajan if he thinks that the market's confidence in central banks' abilities to stem deflation is misplaced or if extraordinary measures, including the outright monetization of government deficits and bailouts of non-financial companies, will come into play during the next downturn. He also gets the former Governor's opinion on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), regulations, immigration, and how to reform education for the 21st century. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 82 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Dr. Nicholas Christakis about the evolutionary origins of ethics, morality, and a good society. A renowned sociologist and physician, Dr. Christakis was named to Time Magazine's 2009 list of the 100 most influential people in the world. He is known for his research on social networks and on the socioeconomic, biosocial, and evolutionary determinants of behavior, health, and longevity. He directs the Human Nature Lab and is the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science, as well as the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University. Listeners to this show will recall our prior episode with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, where we discussed a 2015 incident at Yale, involving Dr. Christakis, who was accosted and berated by a horde of belligerent students for approximately two hours over the contents of an email sent by his wife, an esteemed childhood educator, in what was one of the earliest examples of a bizarre phenomenon of public shaming and moral outrage that has overtaken college campuses in recent years. Though Demetri and Nicholas do discuss that experience, as well as this larger move to moderate or in some cases, shut down speech entirely, the episode focuses on the professor's book, which is an exploration of the evolutionary origins of a good society. Their conversation explores the biological foundations of culture-making and the features that define the social landscape that we have evolved to create. Dr. Christakis highlights some of the profound similarities that can be seen, not just cross-culturally, but across time and space. He shares research into what is known about some of the earliest groups of hunter-gatherers, impromptu societies formed by the survivors of shipwrecks, as well as the deliberately constructed communes of 19th-century transcendentalists. Nicholas Christakis also explains the biological origins of romantic love, examines polyamorous cultures like those of the Na people of the Himalayas, and compares human societies with those of chimpanzees, elephants, and whales. This is an episode full of fascinating stories, statistics, and scientific research that weave together insights from the fields of evolutionary psychology, moral philosophy, and genetics. It is a conversation that cuts right to the heart of society's resurgent interest in human origins, social norms, and moral values. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 81 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Safi Bahcall, a physicist, biotech entrepreneur, and the author of "Loonshots," a book about how to nurture the types of crazy ideas that win wars, cure diseases, and transform industries. In the early days of World War II, the Third Reich's commander of submarines Karl Dönitz submitted a memorandum to the German Navy, advocating for a system of submarine warfare that would devastate allied supply lines, merchant vessels, and warships. For a nation with a second-rate navy, this was asymmetrical warfare at its finest. With the implementation of the plan, known as "Rudeltaktik," allied losses began to rise rapidly, from 750,000 tons of cargo lost in 1939 to 7.8 million in 1942. Every month, U-boats were sinking ships faster than the Allies could build them, and the losses kept mounting. By early 1943, food supplies to Britain had dwindled to two-thirds of normal levels. Less than three months of commercial oil reserves remained: The British were on the verge of defeat. At just the time when all hope seemed lost in the Battle for the Atlantic, an American physicist by the name of Alfred Loomis appointed to assemble and lead a team of the country's best engineers and physicists, presented the Army with the first of two timely innovations. When mounted on Americas' B-24 Liberator bombers these tiny boxes with their microwave antennas could detect the periscopes of surfaced submarines, through daytime cloud cover or fog of night. By the spring of 1943, these long-range bombers, equipped with Loomis' microwave radar and pulsed-radio navigation were fully operational and actively patrolling the Atlantic. What ensued was a massacre. In the month of May alone, Allied bombers operating through fog and darkness and who could now see the once invisible German submarines lighting up their oscilloscope screens, sank 41 U-boats nearly one-third of the German commander's total operational fleet and more in one month than in any of the first three years of the war. Allied shipping losses, in 90 days, decreased by 95 percent: from 514,000 tons in March to 22,000 tons in June. The lanes to resupply Europe had been opened making way for the ground invasion at Normandy only a year later. The Allies turned what had appeared by all accounts to be an imminent loss into the first great Allied victory of the War, all because a small group of scientists working out of an anonymous building at MIT, had the crazy idea to use an unproven technology to turn a German hunting ground into a turkey shoot for the allies and their microwave configured, B-24 bombers that were busy lighting up the Atlantic. This week, on Hidden Forces, we explore how to nurture the types of crazy ideas that win wars, cure disease, and transform industries, with our guest Safi Bahcall. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In this Special Episode of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Ed McCabe about the latest woes plaguing Tesla after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently alleged in a federal filing that its CEO Elon Musk, violated a settlement with the agency when he tweeted in February about the electric carmaker's 2019 production targets. Midway through the episode, the two are joined by Lawrence Fossi, known by his pen name as Montana Skeptic, and the three continue their conversation for the rest of the episode and into the overtime segment. When considering the performance of Tesla's stock in the face of sober calculations, one cannot help but be reminded of Benjamin Graham's famous quote: "In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run it is a weighing machine." For anyone looking to weigh the merits of Tesla's valuation, he or she would be best served by obtaining a degree in forensic accounting. For anyone looking to understand how or why the stock has remained as high as it has while the company has been busy liquidating assets, shutting down distribution points, and restructuring operations in order to keep the electricity running, he or she will likely need to rely upon the expertise of cultural anthropologists and theologians. The immediate danger for Elon and Tesla is one of insolvency and lifeless demand. On a personal level, it was recently reported that Musk's banker, Morgan Stanley, who likely holds most or all of his margin debt, extended itself further last December by making mortgage loans on five of Musk's California mansions. Elon took out $61 million in mortgages: four in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles and one in the Bay Area. The loans, signed in the final days of 2018, represent about $50 million in new borrowing. Considering Tesla's deteriorating financial position in the face of cratering demand, massive mismanagement, and continued disarray in its manufacturing and logistics operations, it is instructive to know that the CEO may conduct his personal finances with comparable degrees of recklessness and malpractice. If Tesla's share price continues to decline, Musk will eventually need to post more collateral, which means approaching the Tesla board and asking it to waive its pledging limits of company stock. Assuming the board gives him the waiver and the stock continues to drop, Morgan Stanley will be forced to begin selling collateral to recoup some of the outstanding loan. This could cause the bottom to fall out very quickly, for both Tesla, as well as Elon Musk. As far as demand is concerned, the picture has gone from alarming (going off a publicly available spreadsheet that tracks VIN numbers) to downright nightmarish (the rushed slashing of the Model 3 price). Pictures of lots stacked with ownerless Model 3's have been circulating on the Internet for months. There is also a theory that the number of Model 3's being returned to Tesla is much higher than is being reported and that this helps to explain the persistent gap seen since September between the number of Model 3's Tesla claims to have delivered and the number showing up as registered. The theory is that this is the result of a strategic decision on the part of Tesla to delay registering newly sold cars for 3-4 weeks in order to provide an opportunity to resell the car with a "clean" title to unsuspecting new buyers. On top of all this, Tesla's list of executive departures continues to grow by the day with the VP of Engineering, the General Counsel, the VP of Global Recruiting, and the Chief Financial Officer among the company's latest casualties. In short, Tesla appears to be in the midst of an informal restructuring and liquidation process being driven on the fly by a Shakespearean CEO whose personal finances and singularly large ego are so fragile that nothing seems capable of standing in his way. As always, this episode of Hidden Forces is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as the basis for financial decisions. All views expressed by Demetri Kofinas and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and should not be construed as financial advice. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 80 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with CTRL-labs CEO Thomas Reardon, about his company's ground-breaking innovations in neural interface design, computational neuroscience, and machine learning that turn science fiction into reality. Thomas Reardon's career is no less impressive than his most recent endeavor to displace the graphical user interface and revolutionize immersive computing. He is a founding Board Member of the World Wide Web Consortium and famous for having created Internet Explorer at Microsoft, which, at its peak, represented 96% of all web browsers in existence. Over one billion people on earth have used Reardon's software to access the Web. After leaving Microsoft, Reardon decided to go back to school, receiving his undergraduate degree in Classics from Columbia, gaining fluency in Latin and Greek. He followed that up with a Ph.D. in Neuroscience split between Columbia and Duke. It's hard to capture the paradigmatic nature of the innovations stemming from the work being done at CTRL-labs without seeing it for yourself. Anything that I can say is insufficient to capture the awe of watching someone type on a screen without moving his fingers, use her intentions to pick up and finely control objects in three-dimensional space or play a video game while remaining visually motionless. The implications of this technology are perhaps, rivaled only by the practical genius of its implementation. By focusing their attention on translating only the final, neuronal output of our brain's commands as expressed through electrical impulses sent directly to our muscles, the team at CTRL-labs has managed to create a device that can capture the brain's intentions non-invasively, through the use of a simple armband that you can wear like an article of clothing, a wristwatch, or a fancy bracelet. It's not an exaggeration to say that this technology turns yesterday's future into today's reality, blowing wide-open the world of immersive computing and expanding our sense of possibility beyond our wildest imagination. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 79 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Shoshana Zuboff, about the rise of "Surveillance Capitalism," a pernicious new economic logic, which robs us of our experiences, dispossess us of our sanctuaries and makes our lives increasingly unlivable. In 1609, while in search of a rumored, northeast passage to Asia on behalf of the Dutch East India Company, the English explorer and navigator Henry Hudson, landed on what is modern day New York City. Though written accounts exist of Hudson's encounters with local tribes, native accounts have been handed down to us through oral tradition, often transcribed much later by missionaries and settlers. In 1765, a Moravian missionary who lived for many years among the Delaware and Mohican tribes recorded a native account of the first meeting: "A long time ago, some Indians who had been out fishing, where the sea widens, spied at a great distance something remarkably large swimming or floating on the water. It was agreed among those who were spectators, that as this phenomenon moved towards the land, it would be well to inform all the Indians on the inhabited islands. Chiefs, from scattered tribes who arrived in numbers, concluded the strange appearance to be a large canoe or house, in which the great Supreme Being himself was coming to visit them." Such descriptions by native peoples of their first encounters with white settlers were common throughout the Americas. The first man to bring news to the great Aztec King Montezuma of Spanish ships described what he saw from the Gulf coast as "towers or small mountains floating on the waves of the sea." In other accounts, natives looked from the shore and thought the awesome, approaching ships were giant, white seabirds or floating islands. There are even theories that the Arawak - the first tribe to encounter Columbus' ships off the coast of Hispaniola - could at first, see only their ripples across the horizon. They were unable to picture what was for them, unprecedented. Unimagined. Alien. What all these people had in common was that they were unable to name, let alone recognize a force of creative destruction so vast and boundless that it would make their worlds unrecognizable, their homes uninhabitable, and their lives unlivable. They were unable to see the ships and their crew for what they were – the vessels of conquerors, pillagers, and looters of unsullied lands. Unable to name them, they welcomed them, agents of their own annihilation. This week, on Hidden Forces, we explore the unprecedented force of surveillance capitalism – how it threatens to dispossess us of our experiences, our sanctuaries, and our very lives. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 78 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Matt Taibbi, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and winner of the 2008 National Magazine Award, about his latest book, Hate, INC. Matt Taibbi is someone who truly needs no introduction. His polemical, but also highly illustrative and expository writing stands apart from his contemporaries, and the significance of his contributions, particularly to the public debate during the 2008 financial crisis cannot be understated. He served as an interpreter for what was, in his own words, "a crime story that most people mistakenly thought of as an economic story." His attacks on those he identified as being chiefly responsible for the crisis were relentless, and in a media environment tenanted and owned by government apologists and banking sycophants, they were noticeably ruthless and unforgiving. In an article he penned in the spring of 2010 titled, "The Great American Bubble Machine," Taibbi referred to the investment bank Goldman Sachs as a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." Fortunately for Goldman Sachs, Matt Taibbi has since turned his attention towards the media itself, embarking on an ambitious project to update Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, for the 21st century, as a serialized book that he's been releasing through sub-stack. The majority of this conversation deals with the subject of that book, which is a sort of operational manual for those looking to understand how journalists and the media shape social reality. When Manufacturing Consent was first published in 1988, the media landscape was still largely dominated by print and broadcast television. We've since gone through two, major technological disruptions, first with cable, and then with the Internet, both of which altered the traditional pathways through which governments and big business try to shape and control public opinion. Matt and Demetri discuss these changes at length, including the amplification of "flak" through social media, the new orthodoxies of groupthink, as well as an exploration of victimhood hierarchies as understood through Herman and Chomsky's "worthy vs. unworthy victims" framework. Finally, Matt Taibbi and Demetri discuss the circus that is the media's political coverage, including some amazing stories from Matt's time on the 2016 campaign trail, as well as a scathing critique of his old buddies at Goldman Sachs, who are back in the news over their role in a scheme to defraud the Malaysian government and its citizens of billions of dollars through the use of a state-owned investment fund known as 1MDB. If you want access to this part of the conversation, as well as a transcript of the full episode along with this week's 14-page rundown, which includes an updated outline of the propaganda model and a timeline of important events in the evolution of the news business, head over to HiddenForces.io or subscribe directly through our Patreon page at Patreon.com/hiddenforces. Subscribers instantly gain access to our entire library of content, including nearly 80 transcripts, close to 60 rundowns, and overtime segments going back to the end of December 2018. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 77 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Cal Newport about his latest book, Digital Minimalism and the act of "choosing life" in a hyperconnected world. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," writes, transcendentalist author and essayist Henry David Thoreau, in the first chapter of Walden titled, "Economy." "But men labor under a mistake...the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence." In an effort to uncover those "essential laws" Thoreau went to the woods: "I wished to live deliberately," he says, "to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear;" What is often missed in Thoreau's reflections from his 2-year excursion into the woodlands of Concord, Massachusetts, is the rigor with which he calculated, measured, and weighed those "essential facts of life." Philosopher Frédéric Gros calls Thoreau's "New Economics," a theory that builds on the following axiom, which Thoreau establishes early in Walden: "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." "The striking thing with Thoreau," Gros argues, "is not the actual content of the argument. After all, sages in earliest Antiquity had already proclaimed their contempt for possessions…what impresses is the form of the argument. For Thoreau's obsession with calculation runs deep…he says: keep calculating, keep weighing. What exactly do I gain, or lose?" In the century and a half since its publication, Thoreau's economics – his methodology for apprehending the cost of a thing by weighing and measuring it against the dearness of life's value – has been supplanted by allegiance to growth at all costs. But unlike the "mass of men" about which Thoreau writes in the mid-19th century, today's society is burdened by more than just the labor of miscalculation. In today's hyperconnected, surveillance economy, the mass of humanity has lost autonomy over that calculation, ceding authority to the commands of a new technocracy that governs the behavioral forces of our primitive biology through platforms scientifically engineered for addiction, supervision, and control. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 76 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Robby Soave, the journalist at the center of what has become the biggest national news story in America, eclipsing the thirty-five-day-long government shutdown that ended today. This conversation centers on a drama that began unfolding over the previous weekend and which has continued into this week. It concerns a group of Catholic school students from Kentucky's Covington Catholic High School, who were thrust into the national spotlight for seeming to have denigrated and mocked the dignity of a native American man who was solemnly beating his drum at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during MLK weekend and on the day of an Indigenous Peoples March in the nation's capital. This story hit all the trigger buttons. The protagonists were a group of adolescent, white, privileged, Catholic schoolboys from Kentucky wearing MAGA hats who were smirking at and mocking an individual from what is perhaps the most marginalized group in American society. The oppressors were taunting the oppressed. Here it was in all its despicable glory, and the media and millions of people across social media ate it up. They swallowed it hook, line, and sinker and these students were all but crucified by both sides of the political spectrum before all the facts had been collected and laid bare. Were it not for our guest, Robby Soave, and his timely reporting about what actually transpired at the Lincoln Memorial this past Friday, the 18th of January, this news cycle may have ended and these Covington Catholic High School kids could very well have been expelled, their applications to colleges denied, and their families attacked before anyone would learn the truth of what really happened. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 75 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Pierre Rochard, a self-ascribed Bitcoin Maximalist who co-founded the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute and who has been a researcher, investor, and software developer in the space since early 2013. In addition to developing Bitcoin software, Pierre is an outspoken advocate for Bitcoin's decentralized governance, the operator of one of the largest Lightning Network routing hubs, and the host of the Nodded Bitcoin Podcast. This conversation is broken into two parts. The first deals with fundamental questions concerning bitcoin's base layer protocol, the supply schedule, governance, decentralization, utility, and challenges to layer 1 scalability. Included in this first part is a fascinating conversation about anarcho-capitalism and the role of Austrian economics and theories of hard money in the bitcoin community with comparisons made between bitcoin and gold. The second part of the conversation, which is available as a 40-minute overtime segment for our subscribers, consists of a prolonged series of discussions on hyperbitcoinization, including the mechanics of a speculative attack by bitcoin against the US dollar and other fiat currencies. Also discussed are the existential threats posed by governments and how Pierre believes that bitcoin will manage to overcome all of them on its path towards becoming the global currency standard in the 21st century. Demetri ends by asking Pierre for his predictions and forecasts, not only for bitcoin but for the market more broadly, including a conversation on how he's positioning himself for the start of the next bull phase in crypto. Additional topics include monetary theories of value, the Lindy effect, Gresham's law, and layer 2 solutions for scaling bitcoin as a viable medium of exchange. As a reminder, all information provided in this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be viewed as financial advice, nor should it be relied upon as the basis for financial decisions. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 74 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Peter Boockvar. Peter is Chief Investment Officer for Bleakly Advisory Group and a regular on CNBC, where he provides market commentary about fed policy, market trends, economic data, stocks, bonds, etc. Every now and again, Demetri brings people from the media onto Hidden Forces in order to get their take on the markets and to hear their interpretations about the latest data, news, and information. The purpose of this is to gain a better understanding of how the news media is constructing the very narratives that given reason to what we're seeing and what we can expect to see in the coming weeks and months. There has been a significant shift in how the financial press has been talking about markets recently. Even the words that they have been using to describe developments that could otherwise be viewed in a positive light are being characterized in bearish terms. Demetri asks Peter for his interpretation of some of the recent economic data, including the latest manufacturing numbers out of Germany, as well as the recent anecdotal data provided by Apple in their 1,400-word letter to investors, which lead to a 10% drop in their stock price (their worst, one-day performance in five years). The two discuss recent comments by Fed chairman Powell, the prospect and performance of financial stocks, concerns about liquidity, the government shutdown, trade, China, marijuana stocks, Tesla, and what Demetri believes is the resurgence of democratic socialism as a powerful force that markets will need to contend with in 2020. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Special Episode of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Haseeb Qureshi of MetaStable Capital about the recent 51% attack against Ethereum Classic, its implications for exchanges that continue to list smaller market-cap cryptos like ETC, Dash, Monero, etc., and what it means for the debate between proof-of-work and proof-of-stake. On January 5th, 2019, the digital currency exchange Coinbase detected a deep chain reorganization of the Ethereum Classic blockchain. In order to protect customer funds, they immediately paused interactions with the ETC blockchain. Coinbase reported the 51% attack on January 7, 2019, but a few people on Twitter had already become aware that something wasn't right with ETC. Pierre Rochard, an emerging thought-leader in the Bitcoin space, asked ETC developer Donal McIntyre on Twitter: "Was there a deep reorg on Ethereum Classic yesterday?… 75 blocks deep I hear, with a double-spend." Donal McIntyre replied: "Well ETC is still small and has many enemies so an attack with sufficient GPU power may be plausible, but I will check with others in the ecosystem." Cryptocurrencies that are not dominant in their respective mining algorithm, especially ones for which hashing power can be easily rented out, are more vulnerable to being 51% attacked than are other cryptocurrencies with larger market-caps that are not ASIC-resistant. According to Charlie Lee, founder of Litecoin, "ETC has less than 5% of the total Ethash hashrate and is 98% NiceHash-able. 1-hr attack costs $5k," making it particularly vulnerable according to these two metrics. Reports of the amount stolen in the attack range from the low six-figures to over one million dollars worth of ETC. Perhaps what is most remarkable is that this is only the latest 51% attack against a smaller-cap currency where the attack did not materially impact the price of the cryptocurrency in question. Demetri and Haseeb explore the reasons why the price of ETC was largely unaffected, what this latest attack means for the listing (or delisting) of similarly sized cryptocurrencies, and how this is sparking a larger debate about the efficacy of proof-of-work vs. proof-of-stake as mechanisms for securing a cryptocurrency. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 73 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Daniel Peris, a Senior Portfolio Manager at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh where he oversees the firm's dividend-focused products. He is the author of three books on investing, most recently: "Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors, and How You Can Bring Common Sense to Your Portfolio." Before transitioning into asset management, Peris was a historian focused on modern Russian history. He is the author of a book and several articles on the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. Today's conversation is about the evolution of financial theory, beginning with the rough and tumble world of 19th century finance with its stock syndicates, market corners, and curb exchanges. Where big personalities like Daniel Drew, James Fisk, and Jay Gould conspired and fought to take from Joe Public, and from each other, the riches afforded to them by laissez-faire capitalism and the industrial revolution. The discussion is broken into two parts. The first deals with the world as it was before 1929 with its unregulated, unstructured, and highly inefficient markets. The second part explores the world after the Great Crash, where a confluence of forces – economic, demographic, institutional, and intellectual – supported the procurement and distribution of a new set of financial theories that promised to explain away uncertainty and guide the allocation of risk in the pursuit of profits. As inheritors of this new world, we cannot help but function under the fallacies of its paradigms. One of these fallacies is the notion that economies are independent phenomena that operate, by and large, according to a certain set of physical laws. Most people will acknowledge that our economic and financial models are imperfect, but most people also think of them as being somewhat analogous to models developed in the natural sciences. Because of this false comparison to physics (equilibrium) and nature (normal distributions), people often remain unaware of the centrality of politics in theories of the economy. Economies are not independent phenomena that answer only to the laws of nature. They are political and social phenomena that exist within a political system. Theories of the economy that do not take into account the system within which they operate are flawed...in some cases, significantly so. Austrian theories of money and credit, for example, are better at describing how the banking system operates in a laissez-faire society, whereas Modern Monetary Theory is better at describing how it works in our current, fiat-based system of unrestrained credit growth. What often happens is that devotees of these different schools are actually advocating for a specific set of policies, under the pretense that their views are scientific and that their policies derive logically from some objective view of how an ideal economy operates, when in fact, they are based on political values and societal ideals. The MMT school is full of progressive social-democrats who want governments to play a larger role in the economy, whereas the Austrian school is full of conservative libertarians who want less government. This sorting along political lines is not a coincidence. Investment theories operate rather differently than theories about the economy, in that there is no argument in the investment world about what matters most. It's profits. In light of this fact, the discrepancies between various investment theories require alternative explanations that do not rely on political ideology or moral sentiment. It would seem sufficient to declare that the widespread adoption of theories like Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), etc., was enabled by the growth of a large middle class with excess income available for investment that had not directly experienced the boom and bust of the Roaring 20's and accelerated by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974. Entrepreneurially minded financial industry professionals saw an opportunity, but this opportunity required a more streamlined approach to investing and one that would put themselves, and their clients, at ease. The need to bring order to the chaotic world of prices has encouraged the adoptions of systematic investment strategies that claimed the ability to quantify risk. When it comes to investing other people's money, having a more coherent, easy-to-understand theory that provides the illusion of control is a very valuable tool. From an evolutionary point of view, it is no wonder how theories purporting to quantify risk and target reward proliferated so quickly. It was in everyone's interest that they do so. How these theories came together to form the dominant, ideological template of risk-adjusted-return measured against exposure to the broader market is the essence of today's episode. Its significance can be found in the implications

In Episode 72 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with former US Senator and Governor from the great state of Nebraska, Bob Kerrey. Senator Kerrey currently serves as Managing Director at Allen & Company. He is also Executive Chairman of the Minerva Institute for Research and Scholarship. Senator Kerrey also served as one of the ten members of the 9/11 commission, tasked with investigating the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. In this conversation, Senator Kerrey shares stories of his experience growing up in 1950's and early 1960's America, his service in Vietnam, and the life-altering injury that sent him down a path of service, first as Nebraska's governor and later, as its senator. We discuss both the cultural, as well as the political transformations that have overtaken American society throughout the course of his life, as well as how the media and social media have altered the political landscape and introduced new challenges to governing and elections that are altogether new. We discuss the tremendous wealth divide currently present in the country, the role of the 2008 crisis and its aftermath in furthering that divide, and the emergence of populism, both on the left and on the right, as a powerful new force that is shaping American politics in ways that we are only just begging to appreciate. We also discuss Senator Kerrey's work on the 9/11 commission, the role that the Saudi government played in orchestrating the September 11th attacks, as well as Demetri's questions about why the Bush administration and the media refused to hold the Kingdom accountable for its involvement. This part of the conversation can be accessed as part of our premium subscription, available through the episode page on our website. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In this Christmas Day special of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas shares twenty-five minutes of never-before-heard audio from his conversation with Howard Marks, but not before announcing the long-awaited-for launch of the Hidden Forces subscription service. Subscribers can gain access to overtime segments, transcripts, and rundowns from each and every episode. Subscriptions require creating a Patreon account, but can be accessed directly through the Hidden Forces website via subscription tabs located within any particular episode Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 71 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with James Mulvenon, Vice-President of Defense Group Inc.'s Intelligence Division and Director of DGI's Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis. Dr. Mulvenon is an expert on the Chinese military and Chinese cyber issues and has published widely on Chinese military affairs, party-army relations, C4ISR, and nuclear weapons' doctrine and organizations. He's a regular commentator on the Chinese military, cyber warfare, and Chinese industrial espionage, all of which we discuss in today's, hour-long conversation. This episode was prompted by the recent arrest of telecommunications giant Huawei's CFO Meng Wanzhou during her transit through Vancouver airport on December 1st, 2018. Meng is currently out on bail, awaiting the service of a formal extradition request from the United States on charges related to Huawei's alleged evasion of Iranian sanctions. James has been investigating and writing about Chinese commercial espionage, and in particular about Huawei, for years, which makes him the ideal person to speak to about this ongoing, diplomatic drama and its implication for US-China trade talks. Will Trump's hard-nosed, no-holds-barred negotiating style work to level the playing field between these two countries? More importantly, is it time to acknowledge that our multi-decade long effort to integrate China into the neo-liberal world order has failed and that a new strategy must be developed to deal with a more obstinate and adversarial China? Considering the important role played by information technology in the 21st century, any strategy for confronting China must also deal with the country's cyber capabilities and its use of commercial espionage in the service of champion companies like Huawei. These are just some of the topics we consider in today's conversation. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 70 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Andrei Shleifer, professor of economics at Harvard University. Dr. Shleifer is the most cited economist in the world according to RePEc's database. Throughout the course of his career, Andrei Shleifer has worked in the areas of comparative corporate governance, law & finance, behavioral finance, as well as institutional economics. He has published seven books, including, A Crisis of Beliefs: Investor Psychology and Financial Fragility with his co-author Nicola Gennaioli. Demetri's conversation with Andrei centers on the subject of beliefs: how they impact markets and how economists and financial practitioners are attempting to model them using data about people's expectations, assumptions, and attitudes in order to make better-informed investment and policy decisions. The first half of the episode is devoted to exploring the mechanics of the 2007-2008 credit crisis, and the role played by structured products and derivatives, off-balance sheet vehicles, money market funds, GSE's, and a policy of ultra-low interest rates that fueled over-confidence in the power of regulators and in the sustainability of the status quo. In the second half, Dr. Shleifer provides us with a more formal approach to thinking about Hyman Minsky's instability hypothesis and how market participants can draw radically different conclusions about that same data when their beliefs about the world change dramatically. Given the destabilizing forces of populist politics, trade tensions, and changing geopolitical fault lines, the ability to draw valuable insights from data about expectations and beliefs is invaluable for any investor or policymaker looking to gain a sense of market sentiment: where it stands and where it might be going. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 69 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with renowned philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein, about the philosophy of mattering and what makes human life worth living. The question of "what makes life worth living," is something that human beings have been grappling with since time immemorial. Perhaps, nowhere did this question pose a more existential imperative than in ancient Greece, which provides the setting for this conversations. The show begins with an anecdote from "The Histories of Herodotus," where the ancient historian recounts the story of King Croesus, the late ruler of Lydia, who governed the lands of western Anatolia in the mid-sixth century B.C. At the height of his reign, Croesus was visited by Solon, the lawgiver who had just laid the foundations for Athenian democracy. "Stranger of Athens," inquired Croesus, "we have heard much of thy wisdom and of thy travels through many lands, from love of knowledge and a wish to see the world. I am curious therefore to inquire of thee, whom, of all the men that thou hast seen, thou deemest the most happy?" Croesus, expecting to hear the sound of his own name sung from Solon's lips, was angered by the Athenian's reply. Solon proceeded to extol the virtues of otherwise "ordinary" men who lacked the trappings of wealth and power that Croesus so readily possessed. Seeing the king's dissatisfaction, Solon responded with words that would come to haunt not only Croesus but which would obsess the whole of Athenian society for decades to come: «μηδένα προ του τέλους μακάριζε». Solon's message was clear: Let me see your life's ending. Only then I can know if you lived a good and happy life. Only then I can know if you lived a life worth praising. Not long after Solon's visit, Croesus' kingdom was invaded and conquered by Cyrus the Great, ruler of the Persian Empire. Condemned to death, it is said that Croesus yelled out Solon's name three times from the flaming pyre atop which his body burned. It was not until that moment that he understood the message that Solon had so dutifully delivered. Croesus believed himself to be the happiest man, because of all the material wealth and power he had accumulated. But we cannot judge the happiness or the worth of a human life until it is over. A good life requires a good death, and learning how to live requires that we wrestle with our own mortality. The question of "what makes life worth living" therefore, was another way of asking: "what justifies life's suffering?" Unlike for the Christians who succeeded them, there was, for the Greeks, no easy answer. It's why they would congregate every spring in the amphitheater to laugh and cry and work out their grief over the pitiless predicament of human existence. 'Fairness' was as foreign a concept to the Greeks as fate is to us. The stories of Croesus, Minos, Oedipus, Agamemnon, and the like were not only reminders of how the fortunes of the fated turn; they were also evidence for the futility of relying on present circumstances for evaluating the merits of existence. It is no surprise, therefore, that this obsession with deriving meaning from one's own life independent of the whims of tempestuous Gods or of fated circumstance manifested itself in Greek philosophy. Its open-endedness posed an existential imperative then, as it does today. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

In Episode 68 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with David Kotok, co-founder and CIO of Cumberland Advisors. David Kotok's articles and financial market commentaries have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, and other publications. This is a fascinating conversation that spans a wide range of issues currently facing the global economy, as well as subjects and themes stretching as far back as 5th century Athens. Demetri asks David Kotok for his opinion on a series of topics including trade, the US Dollar, European monetary policy, as well as what markets he thinks are most at risk as the Fed continues down its path of tightening and as protectionist trade measures introduce new anomalies into the American economy. Kotok also shares his experience investing during the turbulent years of the 1970s and how the lessons he learned during that decade can be applied today. David also gives his outlook for credit markets, specifically the riskier areas of the corporate bond market that include leveraged loans and middle-market lending. Investors will find this conversation helpful, as they adjust their strategies to protect themselves against some of the non-linear impacts of government policies while still positioning themselves and their clients to profit from the rising tide of economic growth. Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod