In Episode 453 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Jason Furman, the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, about the state of the U.S. economy, the AI Bubble, monetary policy, inflation, price controls, and much more.

Jason and Demetri spend the first hour of their conversation exploring his economic framework, what he learned from his time working inside the Clinton and Obama White Houses, and how these experiences shaped his perspective on the role of government in the economy.

The two then delve into Furman's thoughts on artificial intelligence. They discuss whether we're living through an AI bubble, where Jason anticipates the greatest productivity gains from the adoption of AI in the U.S. service sector, and his perspective on AI regulation. They also discuss the limitations of our inflation models, whether we have a good working understanding of the causes of inflation, whether the Fed has implicitly raised its inflation target, and how large, structural deficits and political constraints will shape the Fed's ability to manage that target in the years ahead.

In the second hour, Kofinas and Furman shift to a discussion about the politics of affordability and a growing sense, especially among younger Americans, that the costs associated with achieving the American dream have become insurmountable for almost all but the very wealthy. They debate the political appeal and efficacy of price controls, as well as the extent to which tariffs, industrial policy, and currency depreciation can or should be used to reshape global supply chains and rebuild U.S. domestic manufacturing in areas deemed critical for national security. They also discuss the US trade deficit and capital account surplus, what a weaker dollar may tell us about the government's policy objectives, how corruption, rule of law, and institutional decay might eventually feed back into foreign appetite for US assets, and what is at stake in the choice of the next Fed chair—both for the independence of the central bank and for the long-term credibility of American monetary policy.

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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

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Episode Recorded on 12/08/2025

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

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

Iain believes that our civilization is caught in what some have described as a metacrisis, exacerbated by the encroachment of the left hemisphere onto more and more areas of lived experience. We see it in the procedurally abysmal manner in which modern medicine goes about formulating diagnoses, the ever-increasing obsession with process over outcomes, the commodification of writing, the rise in depression, the policing of language, and the reverence for machine-like efficiency and profit maximization at the expense of almost everything else.

The two discuss the importance of self-actualization in the context of community and why Iain is inspired by the change of heart he sees in younger generations who are no longer satisfied with furthering a broken paradigm and are willing to imagine something different—a different way forward that makes room for our humanity and which provides people with a relational sense of meaning and purpose.

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Episode Recorded on 12/01/2025

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

The first hour is spent exploring why McMahon believes that China is at a transformational moment. He details the kind of economy that Beijing intends to build by 2035 and the internal debate over whether China should rebalance toward household consumption through welfare and redistribution or double down on its investment-driven growth model as the primary mechanism for raising household living standards.

The second hour is devoted to understanding China's evolving industrial strategy that Dinny describes as a potential "China Shock 2.0" driven by legacy industry upgrading, innovation at the technological frontier in sectors like batteries and electric vehicles, flying cars, and humanoid robots, and import substitution in areas like machine tools and semiconductors all while pushing intermediate manufacturing offshore to circumvent Western trade barriers.

McMahon lays out his best and worst case scenarios, as well as what China's economy is most likely to look like by the middle of the next decade; he and Demetri examine the risks of further deindustrialization and strategic dependency by the United States and Europe on Chinese manufacturing; and discuss how all of this collides with global climate goals, the energy transition, and a world in which China's state-driven capitalist model is increasingly setting the pace for innovation, growth, and material abundance.

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Episode Recorded on 11/24/2025

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

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

They then zoom out to examine how the macro environment has changed since the Covid 19 pandemic, and how the government's response to both the GFC and covid crisis have sent investors scrambling for new frameworks to help them understand government's role in the economy and how to position themselves and their client's portfolios for a radically new world—one that you will not learn about in financial text books or most macroeconomics courses.

Kofinas and McDonald also explore the "dark side of passive investing," the extreme concentration risk present in a handful of AI-linked mega-caps, the risk to markets of more capricious government trade policies, and why Lawrence McDonald believes that one of the most underappreciated opportunity sets in AI lies not at the intersection of semiconductors and AI companies, but in the physical energy and delivery infrastructure needed to power them.

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Episode Recorded on 11/17/2025

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

Chase and Demetri spend the first hour of this episode exploring his methodology, how he extracts signals from noise, and why a multidisciplinary approach to investing is especially important during periods of disruptive sociopolitical and technological change like the kind we are experiencing today. They then apply these ideas to two important technological trends underway in the global economy: (1) the transformation of the so-called "electric stack" or electro-industrial stack and (2) the AI CapEx Boom that relies on it.

They begin with a deep-dive exploration of the dramatic cost declines happening across the entire electric stack, beginning with the addition of new sources of energy, advancements in battery technology for storage, the use of magnets and motors that turn electricity into mechanical motion, power electronics that shape it into the precise force needed by today's technologies, and the embedded compute that orchestrates and decides how and when to put that force into action.

They discuss the sources of China's dominance in this industry, the horizontal complementarities in its manufacturing ecosystems, the advantages of vertical integration, and what America and Europe need to do in order to remain competitive in this new industrial ecosystem.

The second hour is devoted to exploring the implications for investors of the current AI CapEx boom, how the USD might behave in a growth slowdown scenario post-Liberation Day, and what the Trump administration's military and covert action threats against Maduro's regime in Venezuela can tell us about his foreign policy and whether we are returning to a more colonial phase of domination by the American empire over the Western hemisphere.

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Episode Recorded on 11/10/2025

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

Nathan Benaich and Demetri spend the first hour of their conversation exploring some of the most important AI breakthroughs of the year. They unpack the DeepSeek moment, dig into some of the advancements made by the latest reasoning models, and discuss why there appears to be a regression in capabilities across certain domains in artificial intelligence at the same time as we are seeing marked improvements in reasoning-heavy use cases like coding and scientific research.

The second hour turns to a conversation about the commercial implications and geopolitical dynamics of the AI arms race, including China's strategy to become the leader in open-weight models and tooling. They look at what industries, sectors, and professions may be most ripe for disruption, where the investment opportunities are, whether we're in a bubble comparable to the 1990s Internet boom, and how export controls, energy constraints, and regulatory red-tape could play an outsized role in shaping the trajectory of the current arms race.

Lastly, Kofinas and Benaich examine where along the AI stack most of the value is likely to accrue—from the underlying picks and shovels, through the foundation models, to the apps that ride on top of them—and what all this means for labor markets, education, and the cadence of scientific discovery.

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Episode Recorded on 10/29/2025

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

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

The course runs in three formats: a ~14-hour online version; a two-and-a-half-day in-person version in London (capped at about 30 people); and a university version for mostly post-grad students. This is not just for professionals—many attendees are principals or retail savers who feel responsible for managing their and their families' wealth.

The course is "radically different" from standard finance classes. Instead of starting from pricing theory or discounted cash flow, it takes a historical approach to asset valuation across equities, bonds, cash, commodities, and property, asking the question: "what repeatable conditions caused valuations to change?" The course leans heavily on long-run U.S. and international data, examines market behavior in different monetary and inflation regimes, and includes a module on investing in periods of inflation, disinflation, and deflation.

After completing this course, you should be able to:

✔️ Critically evaluate different methods of valuing stock markets and identify faults in the valuation methods.

✔️ Explain the idea of mean reversion in financial markets and identify valuation techniques that follow mean reversion using data from the last 100 years to demonstrate this.

✔️ Understand the impact inflationary or deflationary forces have on the returns to different classes of financial assets.

✔️ Understand the impact liquidity and the supply of money has on stock market returns over time.

✔️ Understand the impact of psychological biases on returns in the stock market and the role that they can play in major stock market events.

✔️ Critically evaluate the lessons from the history of the financial markets over the past 200 years or more.

As Russell has often said, "when regime change occurs, the greatest risk for any investor is to get all the right answers to all the wrong questions." The ultimate goal of this course is to teach people how to find and ask the RIGHT questions.

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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

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Episode Recorded on 10/31/2025

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

The three begin their conversation by mapping out Peter's Confidence Quadrant and using it to explain how individuals and crowds move between feelings of high and low certainty and control. They explore the immense contemporary pressure people feel to conform—particularly on social media and in an educational system that rewards conformity. They discuss financial nihilism, the search for community in unusual places, and why real, in-person networks, relationships, and conversations matter now more than ever.

The second half of the episode turns to the political economy of confidence: the rise of leader-centric movements, the fragility of "passenger-seat" societies, the lasting impact of COVID, and the "velvet-rope" economy that has transformed everything from airline cabins to financing. They discuss wealth stratification, powerlessness, the risks of a genuine socialist revolution, the search for leadership, and practical ways individuals can regain agency—through epistemic hygiene, disciplined storytelling, and service to others.

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Episode Recorded on 10/23/2025

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

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

For all intents and purposes, Israel has won its war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. It has decimated both its conventional and unconventional forces and revealed to its proxies, affiliates, and supporters across the region—and even to its own people—that Iran is a weak and tottering power. With the initiation of Trump's 20-point Gaza peace plan and the cessation of hostilities in the Gaza Strip, we may be witnessing the emergence of a new security order in the Middle East—one that relies more on regional stakeholders, allowing the United States to reduce its direct exposure and the commitment of U.S. forces while still maintaining influence over regional politics.

Kamran and Demetri spend the first hour of their conversation recapping the Middle East's transformation over the last two years. They revisit Israel's systematic campaign against Hezbollah's leadership, the subsequent collapse of the Assad regime, and the consequences of the U.S.'s strategic strikes on Iran's known nuclear facilities. They also discuss the diplomatic fallout from Israel's recent attacks in Qatar, Prime Minister Netanyahu's subsequent apology call from the White House, and Washington's push for an international stabilization force in Gaza led by regional partners.

The second hour turns to what a new regional security architecture could look like and how U.S. strategy is shifting from direct management to burden-sharing among regional powers such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. They explore the practical implications of this emerging arrangement for Gaza—including discussions about an Arab-Muslim stabilization force, governance over the Palestinian territories, and a long reconstruction financed by Gulf and international donors—while setting realistic expectations for the creation of an independent Palestinian political entity over the next decade.

They conclude by assessing which countries stand to gain the most from Iran's retreat and the decimation of its proxies, closing with a frank discussion about America's polarized media ecosystem and the growing anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiments being expressed on both the American left and right.

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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

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Episode Recorded on 10/20/2025

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

The conversation begins with a diagnosis of the cultural and spiritual malaise that seems to have taken hold of Western societies: the fraying of the social contract, the "boomer blues," as Roger Mitchell calls them, and why life inside "the machine" leaves us lonely, angry, afraid, and in dire need of real human contact.

The second half of the episode turns to a discussion about the dangers of politicizing religion and weaponizing faith in response to growing social and existential angst in Western societies. Demetri, Grant, and Roger explore Europe's identity crisis, the destabilizing effects of uncontrolled immigration, the cultural consequences of collapsing birth rates, the economic and social tragedy facing younger generations, and the broader epistemic collapse that has made consensus-building nearly impossible and replaced reasoned debate with a totalizing ambition for political domination.

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If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by:

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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

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Episode Recorded on 10/10/2025