Hidden Forces

Luke Burgis, founder of Fourth Wall Ventures and author of 'Wanting,' discusses the power of mimetic desire in markets, politics, and culture. They explore its impact on our behavior, the influence of social media, and ways to counteract its destructive forces. They also discuss historical mythologies, scapegoating mechanisms, and the consequences of hyperconnectivity and algorithms on our desires.

In Episode 193 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with world-renowned trainer, author, and CEO of Attack Athletics, Tim Grover. Tim has personally trained and worked with some of the most elite, iconic athletes in the world, including Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade, and hundreds of other sports and business professionals. He is the preeminent authority on the science and art of physical and mental dominance and his latest book, “Winning: the Unforgiving Race to Greatness,” is a testament to that life-long dedication. This is not a conversation that’s going to give you a roadmap to victory. Not even close. In fact, we wouldn’t even describe it as motivational. For some people, Tim’s words will be incredibly validating. For others, unnerving, because “winning doesn’t apologize,” as Tim would say. “It doesn’t explain. In the language of Winning, there is no talk about motivation.” Words can’t capture it. Only you can if you’re willing to pay the price, and even then, there are no guarantees. If you’re already addicted to the taste of success, if you’ve been chasing it for as long as you can remember, if you’ve caught it, and want it again, then this conversation will speak to you. In this episode, you’re going to learn about some of the tools and techniques that Tim and his athletes and high-achievers have used to execute and compete at the highest level of human performance. You’re going to learn about how to harness your dark-side, about how not to care about what others think, about letting go of entitlement, clearing your mind, and learning to focus on the details, and on what matters most to you. As Tim will say, “winning is not a marathon, it’s a sprint, with no finish line.” There is no balance. In order to win anything, you have to live your life with urgency, at every moment, because winning wants all of you—there’s never enough time, so why waste any of it? For those of you who are basketball fans, Tim shares stories from his experience working with Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant during the pinnacles of their basketball careers, about what they were like as individuals, and about what it was like for him to play a part in their success. You can access the episode overtime, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | YouTube | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts Subscribe to our mailing list through the Hidden Forces Website Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 05/26/2021

In Episode 192 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas shares a recent appearance he made on the Grant Williams Podcast. Grant has been on the Hidden Forces Podcast before, twice on his own and twice as a guest along with Ben Hunt. We have provided links to all of those previous appearances in the related section on the episode page on our website. Grant spent the first 20 minutes asking Demetri questions related to his bio and how he got started in media, as well as the origins of Hidden Forces. The rest of the episode is devoted to discussing many of the various forces that Demetri has talked about on this podcast—things like the phenomenon of financial nihilism, the hyperreality of markets & society, China and the changing geopolitical order, and much more. If you are interested in learning more about Grant and how to become a subscriber to both his podcast and his monthly newsletter, you can do that at grant-williams.com. If you are interested in learning how to become a subscriber to Hidden Forces, you can do that through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. For more information about previous guests and topics, we invite you to explore our episode library at HiddenForces.io. If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | YouTube | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts Subscribe to our mailing list through the Hidden Forces Website Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 05/17/2021

Demetri shares his thoughts about the news cycle and provides listeners with a sneak peak into the next 5 weeks of content, including episodes on the will to win and memetic desire.

In Episode 191 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Nikhil Shamapant, the author of a recently published and widely circulated 79-page report that sets an ambitious 18-month price target on Ethereum of $150,000 per ETH—more than 30x the current level. Nikhil believes this will be driven primarily by two upcoming changes to the underlying Ethereum protocol which will reduce the supply of ETH by the equivalent of roughly three Bitcoin halving cycles. The changes are scheduled to take place in two phases beginning with the adoption of EIP-1559 in mid-July of this year and culminating with the formal transition to proof-of-stake in late 2021, turning Ethereum into the preferred savings vehicle in crypto, according to Nikhil. The second part of this episode is an hour-long conversation that we recorded with one of EIP-1559’s main champions, Tim Beiko. We brought Tim on the program in order to do a deeper dive on the protocol changes referenced in our conversation with Nikhil, including changes to the network fee model (i.e., basefee burning & tips) and the block reward subsidy (i.e., staking), as well as changes to the user experience, the impact on miners and miner extractable value (MEV), network scalability, staking rewards, & much more. You can access our episode with Tim and download the transcript and rundown to this week’s episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | YouTube | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts Subscribe to our mailing list through the Hidden Forces Website Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 05/07/2021

In Episode 190 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Josh Rogin, a Washington Post foreign-policy columnist and author of the book Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century. Rogin’s book explains for mainstream audiences how the Chinese Communist Party works: its history, nature, motivations, operations, and objectives. It does so in a language that is both accessible and at times entertaining because it’s full of personal anecdotes colored by Josh’s own reporting which is a testament to his skill as an investigative journalist and as someone with a reputation for breaking big stories. While we don’t break any stories today, some of what you will hear in this episode is probably going to be news to you. You are going to learn how CCP influence operations work, who they target, and how they compromise influential individuals in both the public and private sectors, including CEOs, University administrators, and elected officials, along with their spouses, friends, and family members. You’re also going to learn how the CCP uses tactics of blackmail, repression, and counterprogramming, both within and outside of China's borders in order to coerce and drown out its critics as part of a relentless culture of intimidation that is foundational to the party’s identity and history as an underground influence organization. Lastly, you’re going to learn why all of this matters to those of us living outside of China and how Western governments should respond to a threat that is no longer gathering but is in fact quite clear and immediate to those of us who have devoted time and attention to understanding this very important issue. In the subscriber overtime, Kofinas and Rogin delve deeper into the financial side of this story, and how for years, the CCP has used US financial markets to fund the buildout of not only China’s military but also its surveillance systems, including those used to monitor and control repressed minorities in the country’s autonomous regions. Most notable among these is Xinjiang province, where over 12 million Uyghurs are currently living under what international human rights organizations and governments agree are genocidal conditions that involve atrocities such as forced labor, compulsory reeducation, and coercive harvesting of hair and bodily organs. We also delve into Josh’s independent reporting on the origins of Covid-19, the troubling connections between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and America’s own public health officials, and why the lab-release hypothesis is actually much more credible than the mainstream media would have you believe. This is a serious conversation. No doubt about it. But everything that you are about to hear today has been widely reported on and is becoming increasingly well understood among those in positions of power within the corporate and policymaking communities. The rise of China in this context signifies something very different than what most of us imagined and hoped for at the beginning of the 21st century. Confronting it demands urgency and resoluteness that is arguably comparable to that last seen in our collective response to the Soviet threat enunciated most clearly in George Kennan’s seminal 8,000-word telegram to the US State Department in 1946. It is a challenge that we can and will overcome, but it’s time that we all get on the same page about what it means, what is required of us in order to confront it, and how our lives will drastically change as a result. You can access the episode overtime, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | YouTube | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts Subscribe to our mailing list through the Hidden Forces Website Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 05/04/2021

In Episode 189 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with historian Niall Ferguson about his latest book, “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.” The book is a historical tour de force of epic disasters ranging from pandemics to botched military responses, to nuclear accidents. What all these catastrophes share in common is a striking combination of operator and managerial error resulting from systemic problems that became calamities in the face of predictable, though unimaginable crises. While Doom is mainly a history of disaster, its lessons apply most urgently in our own time, which provided us an opportunity to explore some of the contemporary challenges that we face in western society with someone who thinks and writes about such risks and opportunities regularly. At the top of this list is an emerging cold war between the United States and a coalition of authoritarian powers led by China and Russia, two nations that are increasingly cooperating on matters of national and economic security. This episode also includes a discussion about financial markets, digital assets, and the health of Western economies. In place of an overtime, Demetri recorded a premium-only episode with Grant Williams on endgame scenarios for the economy, including a conversation about the prospects for runaway inflation and how to manage that risk for your portfolio. You can access the premium episode, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | YouTube | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts Subscribe to our mailing list through the Hidden Forces Website Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 04/26/2021

Toby Ord, Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Oxford University, discusses existential risks and the future of humanity. Topics include nuclear war, geopolitical dimensions, pandemics, biological terrorism, artificial intelligence, asteroid impacts, climate change, and supervolcanic eruptions.

In Episode 187 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Steven Koonin, author of “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.” Dr. Koonin serves as Director of NYU's Center for Urban Science and Progress. He previously served as Undersecretary for Science in the U.S. Department of Energy under Barack Obama and as Chief Scientist at BP, where he was a strong advocate for research into renewable energies and alternative fuel sources. The science of climate change has become, like almost everything else, a matter of political identity in 21st century America. A recent Pew Research study found that Democrats are more than three times as likely as Republicans to say that dealing with climate change should be a top priority. And yet, if you ask people independent of party affiliation for their views on climate change and why they believe what they believe, most of them will struggle to give you a coherent answer. In fact, very few people, and this goes for politicians, journalists, and even academics, have actually read the reports put out by organizations like the IPCC and others responsible for doing the actual research that we all cite when we talk about “the science.” And to be honest, can you blame them? Afterall, why would anyone want to spend a minute of their time learning about exactly why we are so screwed? About how we’ve destroyed the planet and “broken the climate?”  We’ve read all the headlines. “Climate Catastrophe.” “Climate Disaster.” “The earth is burning!” But how true is this, exactly? Are we really facing a “Climate Apocalypse?” Is climate science really “more reliable than physics,” something that journalist David Wallace-Wells said in a recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Podcast. Not according to my guest, but more importantly, not according to the science, which, to borrow from the book’s title, is very much “Unsettled.” Before you react to that very provocative book title, you should know that no one is saying climate change is a hoax or that anthropogenic warming isn’t real. The purpose of this conversation is not to surreptitiously undermine the consensus view or to troll those who believe strongly in it. Rather, it is simply meant to help inform those of you who either haven’t read the reports or are simply skeptical about just how bad the situation is and what’s required from us in order to solve it. This is a subject that deeply concerns all of us, but the doom and gloom narrative surrounding it has arguably become counterproductive in helping us actually address the problem. Steven and Demetri spend two hours—between the first half and the overtime—working their way through the data, what it says, and what the models predict about not only future warming, but also the incidences of droughts, forest fires, hurricanes, rising sea levels, climate-induced migration, and pandemics driven by a warming planet.  In the subscriber overtime, they focus most of their attention on the incentives that account for these widely divergent narratives on climate, the importance of morals and values in thinking about how to structure climate policy, and the missing components of costs and tradeoffs that we all need to think about when coming to decisions on how best to adapt our societies and ourselves to the changing climate. Kofinas and Koonin also discuss geoengineering, including carbon extraction and the use of aerosols to dampen the sun’s rays, as well as alternative sources of energy like wind, solar, and nuclear, and their respective roles as alternatives to fossil fuels in the coming decades. You can access the episode overtime, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | YouTube | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts Subscribe to our mailing list through the Hidden Forces Website Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 04/12/2021

In Episode 186 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Sergey Nazarov, Co-founder of Chainlink, the leading decentralized oracle network used by global enterprises and projects at the forefront of the blockchain space, which enables smart contracts on any distributed ledger to reliably connect to real-world data, securing billions of dollars in value across decentralized finance, insurance, gaming, and other industries. Chainlink and other decentralized oracles are not blockchains. They are not, in other words, monolithic networks of distributed databases that all operate in unison. Instead, they consist of a potentially infinite subset of networks that support blockchains and operate in parallel to them and to each other by relying on a common framework that is highly customizable and adaptable to the unique needs of their users, who consist of decentralized applications, data providers, enterprises, etc. The purpose of today’s conversation is to help educate you on not only what Chainlink is and its value proposition, but also to help you understand how this industry is evolving, the design choices that are being made at the heart of these critical networks, and the opportunities that have presented and will continue to present themselves to anyone interested in capitalizing on the disruptive efficiencies and novel sets of use cases created by these systems. In the subscriber overtime, Sergey and Demetri delve deeper into Chainlink’s architecture, how smart contracts interface with oracle networks, how such networks come together to service their users, how they come to consensus about events in the real world, and much, much more. Sergey also shares his views on Internet culture, ontology & epistemology, futurism, and how governance is going to work in a world where more and more of our lives, relationships, and experiences are happening online. You can access the episode overtime, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application. If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | YouTube | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts Subscribe to our mailing list through the Hidden Forces Website Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://patreon.com/hiddenforces Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 04/01/2021