In Episode 115 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Brian Koffman, a doctor turned CLL patient, whose patient education and advocacy efforts have given hope and encouragement to CLL cancer patients everywhere. Brian Koffman is extraordinary, in many ways. He’s extraordinary in the medical sense because, after twelve years of battling blood cancer, doctors can no longer find a single trace of malignancy in his entire body. He is 100% cancer-free going on almost two years, thanks to an experimental therapy that wiped out his CLL cancer in less than a month. But there’s another way in which Dr. Koffman is extraordinary, and this has to do with how he has handled his diagnosis. Brian Koffman's willingness to share his experience undergoing cutting edge treatments, as well as his decision to leave his medical practice behind and dedicate his life entirely to being a CLL advocate have both had an enormously positive impact on the lives of CLL patients and their families. Many listeners will already know Demetri’s story and that he is a survivor of a brain tumor that caused him debilitating psychological and physical distress, but which also empowered him to change his life. It took such an experience for Demetri to truly understand that his time in this world is limited. This is not just true of him; it is true of you, too. It’s true of all of us. We’re all mortal, and how we choose to spend our precious time in the face of this reality is what gives our lives their meaning. It is what distinguishes Dr. Koffman’s life from yours, and yours from someone else’s.  Dr. Koffman has made his choices, and hopefully, he will have many, many more to make. His story is one of perseverance, leadership, generosity, and service to a cause greater than himself. But besides serving as an important source of information and optimism about a very serious illness, we hope that his story and this conversation provide you with cause to reflect on your own life and on the things that matter most to you and how you want to spend your remaining time on this planet. For more information about Brian Koffmar or to learn more about his work in CLL patient education and advocacy, please visit https://cllsociety.org.  You can access the afterthoughts segment to this week’s rundown, the transcript of Demetri conversation with Dr. Koffman, as well as the episode rundown (show notes and educational materials about the substance of today’s conversation) 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 this week’s episode of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with investor Mike Green. Mike Green most recently served as the discretionary portfolio manager for Thiel Macro, LLC, an investment firm that manages the personal capital of Peter Thiel. He's been a student of markets, and market structure in particular, for nearly 30 years. His research into and analysis of the shift from actively managed portfolios and investment funds to systematic passive investment strategies has been presented to the Federal Reserve, the BIS, the IMF and numerous other industry groups and associations. His intention has been to alert regulators to the clear and present danger that he feels these strategies pose to the stability and viability of global capital markets. It is important to note that while the post-2008 period has seen a flourishing of more complex, behavioral approaches to economics that reject notions of equilibrium and mean-reversion, there has simultaneously been a doubling down among investors on passive strategies that see markets as stochastically predictable, efficient, and always mean-reverting. These approaches do not incorporate new information like price data or value metrics in their transaction functions. Most importantly, they do not incorporate the impact of their own buying or selling behavior. Indeed, according to Mike Green, “the incentive of these target funds, from a regulatory and lobbying standpoint, is to demonstrate that they don’t exist.”  The forces of automation driven by our diminishingly available brain space, along with the need for generating higher yield seem to have overwhelmed investors’ understandings about how the world actually works. This imperative to deliver yield above what the market can bear on a reasonably, risk-reward basis, combined with the cognitive overload that investors and clients are experiencing in their daily lives may be leading us down a path of self-destruction. This unease is captured in what Mike Green calls "the uncanny valley," a term most closely associated with the robotics design space. It is used to describe the aesthetic confusion one feels while encountering an android whose human resemblance is noticeably disturbing. Similarly, in markets today, many of us know that something is wrong but can't quite put our finger on what it is. Indeed, some of the best active managers in the business have given up trying to figure it out. The purpose of today’s episode is to help shed light on the source of this unease and to set the foundation for the second part of our conversation, which has been made available to Patreon Audiophile, Autodidact, and Super Nerd subscribers. In the overtime, Demetri drills into the specifics of Mike’s thesis regarding the implications of passive investment strategies that have ballooned in popularity over the last 25 years making up forty-seven and twenty-seven percent respectively of assets under management in equities and bond funds at the end of 2018 – up from less than five percent in 1995. Mike also shares information about how he and his partners are managing their clients’ portfolios in order to mitigate the risks posed by these structural changes, as well as how they’ve sought to monetize the opportunities that these same flows represent.   You can access the second part of today’s conversation, along with the transcript and rundown 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 113 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with John Mearsheimer, professor of political science and international relations at the University of Chicago. Dr. Mearsheimer’s intellectual contributions have had a profound influence on the thinking of an entire generation of students in international relations. He’s been a vocal critic of neoliberal hegemony, nation-building, as well as the so-called “forever wars” that America has been engaged in ever since the Bush administration’s invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. He is most closely associated with the realist school, which views the international system as fundamentally anarchic, where the most dominant concern among the great powers is defined by their desire and competition for security that sometimes leads to war.  This conversation focuses on two major themes of John Mearsheimer’s latest book “The Great Delusion,” in which he attempts to explain why American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War up until the present day has been such a colossal failure, and how much of this failure can be ascribed to a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of America’s foreign policy elite about the relationship between nationalism and liberalism. John Mearsheimer argues that nationalism is by far the more powerful of the two forces and that therefore, liberal hegemony was always destined to fail. Mearsheimer makes the argument for a more restrained, humble US foreign policy that acknowledges not only the limits of nation-building but also the realities of international conflict that the United States is at risk of instigating with countries like China and Russia with whom it is currently in a deep security competition. You can access the overtime, transcript, and rundown 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 112 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Steve Keen one of the few economists to correctly anticipate the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, as well as the subsequent deflationary forces that would frustrate and confound policymakers in the years afterward. The two discuss Keen’s latest work modeling the impact of climate on economic output, as well as debunking some of the most common misperceptions about money and credit held by Keynesian and Austrian theorists alike. Demetri and Steve have known each other going back almost ten years. Dr. Keen was a frequent guest on Demetri’s old television program Capital Account, where he would come on to share his views on markets and the economy. For years, Steve had been warning policymakers and the media about the dangers of a build-up in private sector debt through mortgage refinancing and consumer credit. In the years after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, Steve Keen was one of the prominent voices alongside folks like Richard Koo, Mark Zandi, and others, who were ringing the alarm bell, warning about the risk of a deflationary spiral. Many of the more prominent, Austrian-trained economists like Thomas Woods, Peter Schiff, and others, were pounding the table about the risk of hyperinflation. In retrospect, it was those economists warning about deflation like Steve Keen, who had it right. In today’s conversation, we explore the reasons why and examine if those conditions still hold to this present day. You can gain access to this week’s overtime segment, as well as to the transcript of Demetri’s conversation with Steve Keen 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 this week’s episode of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Politics at Princeton University and of Russian Studies and History at NYU. Dr. Cohen has received several scholarly honors over his lengthy career, including two Guggenheim fellowships and a National Book Award nomination, and was, for many years, a consultant and on-air commentator on Russian affairs for CBS News. Former CBS evening news anchor Dan Rather has referred to Stephen Cohen as “one of, if not the premier expert on the old Soviet Union, Russia, and Russian history in al of what we call Western civilization.” We live in dangerous times, not only in international relations but also in domestic affairs. Russian fear-mongering and gratuitous insults leveled at Russian President, Vladimir Putin serve as powerful political litmus tests in contemporary America. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, a presidential candidate for the Democratic party, was recently accused by former Secretary of State and two-time presidential candidate Hillary Clinton of being a “Russian Asset.” Meanwhile, Donald Trump is consistently chided for what his critics assert is “the conspicuous absence of any criticism of Vladimir Putin.”  In the years since Russia’s occupation and annexation of Crimea, Stephen Cohen has become, in the words of one writer, “the most controversial Russia expert in America.” He’s been openly critical of NATO expansion since the idea was first proposed in the early-to-mid 90’s, and though this criticism puts him in good company, his views on Ukraine and what he sees as America’s role in inciting Russian aggression have left him marginalized and often times disparaged as a “Russian apologist.”  Nonetheless, it is Stephen Cohen’s contention that American is now dangerously close to “War with Russia,” the title that he has chosen for his most recent book, which consists of a series of commentaries on current affairs originally published at The Nation Magazine. He views American foreign policy towards the post-Soviet Union as not only needlessly antagonistic but recklessly endangering of American national security, putting us at the greatest risk of nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis. You can access this week’s overtime segment (an early release of Demetri’s conversation with physicist Sean Carroll), transcript, and rundown through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers also gain access to our 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 110 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Chief Investment Officer of Hayman Capital Management and founding member of the “Committee on the Present Danger: China,” about the gathering threat posed to Western, liberal democracies and open societies by the Chinese Communist Party. Kyle explains how the CCP and its state champions have been using US capital markets to fund the development of China’s armed forces, the threats posed by a Chinese operated 5G network, as well as concerns about the acquisition and use of Americans’ genomic data by the Chinese government. Kyle also goes into detail about his thesis on Hong Kong, its peg to the USD, as well as the fragility of its banking system. Additional topics include the “reeducation camps” and reports of organ harvesting in Xinjiang, the Chinese social credit system, the Federal Reserve Repo market, and Kyle’s outlook for the macroeconomy.  The second part of this discussion is available to Hidden Forces Patreon subscribers. You can access that part of the conversation, as well as the rundown and transcript to this week’s episode by subscribing to one of our three content tiers. All subscribers also gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily be added to your favorite podcast application. Hidden Forces is listener funded. We rely on your support to keep the program free of corporate sponsors. 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 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 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