Early Topics and European Startup Advocacy

In Episode 455 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Nicolas Colin, a former French Treasury official and the co-founder of a European startup accelerator whose work sits at the intersection of technology, markets, geopolitics, and global finance.

In the first hour of their conversation, Kofinas and Colin break down Colin's "Late Cycle Investment Theory" and the framework behind it. They draw on Carlota Perez's model of technological revolutions and techno-economic paradigms, explore the role of speculative manias and market concentration, and examine why Colin argues that AI is less a brand-new technological revolution than an intensification of the computing-and-network paradigm that has been unfolding for the past 50 years. They also compare the current moment to the 1970s as a historical analogue and discuss why Colin believes financial systems are often the last piece to be rebuilt after a major paradigm shift.

In the second hour, Kofinas and Colin explore what this late-cycle thesis means for investors, the public, and the geostrategic competition between the United States and China. They discuss how tokenization and programmable money could reshape the global financial system's infrastructure, and how today's "Trump Shock" might be the opening move in a broader financial reset.

They also examine what financial fragmentation between two competing spheres—one led by China and one by the U.S.—may look like in practice, why programmable grid infrastructure and a new scale of electrification may be leading candidates for the next technological revolution, and what all of this implies for public debt servicing, inflation, financial repression, and wealth redistribution as proximity services replace the factory floor as the central battleground over which a new social contract will be formed.

Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe.

If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.

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

• Subscribing on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, CastBox, or via our RSS Feed

• Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify

• Joining our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/

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

Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io. Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas

Episode Recorded on 12/22/2025