Get the edge with Hidden Forces, where podcast host @Kofinas teaches you how to think critically about the systems of power that structure our world.
Joined January 2017
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1,629 Photos and videos
Hidden Forces retweeted
May 29
A fund promising 60% returns to outside investors is claiming to outperform nearly every professional who's ever lived. This is how we know it's a fraud.
Patrick, who made his fortune in multi-level marketing selling insurance to the middle class, knows this better than anyone.
The fact that he accepted 1 million dollars from this scammer to market directly to his audience is not surprising given the culture of his organization. It doesn't mean that he had evidence it was a fraud and chose to promote it anyway. It's just that when you run your business in unethical ways you tend to attract unethical people.
People with integrity don't hang around guys who claim they can generate 2x the returns of Stanley Druckenmiller or Peter Lynch with zero-track record, let alone promote them as their headline sponsor to a crowd of "12,000 founders and CEOs" who paid up to $17,000 per ticket for the privilege.
May 29
PBD call is here 🔥 youtube.com/watch?v=O4A3HhLX…
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Hidden Forces retweeted
May 25
Manoj Pradhan joins me on @HiddenForcesPod to discuss how aging demographics will lead to a deterioration in developed government finances, ultimately forcing central banks to choose between monetary stability and supporting growth (and employment).
hiddenforces.io/podcasts/how…
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Hidden Forces retweeted
May 18
I'm joined by @MilesTaylorUSA, fmr Chief of Staff at the @DHSgov to discuss the existential stakes of AI development, the erosion of centralized state power, and the domestic security threats that will define the years ahead.
hiddenforces.io/podcasts/ai-…
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Hidden Forces retweeted
May 11
I'm joined by @WillManidis to discuss the collapse of secular institutional legitimacy, the reassertion of divine faith and political violence as organizing forces, and what AI-generated wealth concentration means for the economy and the social contract.
hiddenforces.io/podcasts/god…
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Hidden Forces retweeted
Apr 21
I've always felt that Trump was a two-dimensional thinker. His success has come largely from his ability to exploit behavioral norms and from his lack of inhibition, including his use of strategic irrationality.
Up until now, he's operated in a world of laws, norms, and rational expectations, banking on his counterparties' commitments to the status quo and their willingness to de-escalate.
What he did by assassinating Iran's leader alongside members of his immediate family at the war's outset and by continuously acting in bad faith during the course of negotiations has been to change the underlying conditions of the game. He does not seem to recognize that. He certainly hasn't adjusted his behavior accordingly, but it seems that the Iranians have.
What worries me is that this behavior will eventually have the same impact on Chinese calculations, whether through spillover from the current conflict or in some future confrontation. While the world can weather prolonged disruptions to the global economy stemming from the constriction of traffic in the strait, a set of similar strategic miscalculations vis-à-vis China could lead to the most catastrophic war the world has ever seen.
Apr 20
New: Some Trump officials privately acknowledge that the president’s public commentary has been detrimental to talks, noting the sensitivity of the negotiations and the Iranians’ deep mistrust of the US.
That was especially true on Friday, when the Pakistanis were in Tehran for talks with the Iranians. As the meeting played out, Trump took to Truth Social and spoke with several reporters, claiming Iran had agreed to a host of provisions that sources familiar with the talks said had not yet been finalized.
He also asserted that Tehran had agreed to many of the most contentious US demands and declared an imminent end to the war.
Behind the scenes w/ @Kevinliptakcnn
cnn.com/2026/04/20/politics/…
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Hidden Forces retweeted
Apr 16
I'm joined by @ThematicMarkets to discuss the ongoing US-Israeli military campaign against Iran and its implications for the global economy, global security, and the future of American power.
We open with ... 👇🏼
hiddenforces.io/podcasts/why…
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Hidden Forces retweeted
Apr 16
Curious about @ThematicMarkets' research? Here's a great opportunity to taste the cooking with one of the best interviewers in the business, @kofinas!
The 1st hour is free & if you like it, you can subscribe to both @HiddenForcesPod & @ThematicMarkets!
Apr 16
I'm joined by @ThematicMarkets to discuss the ongoing US-Israeli military campaign against Iran and its implications for the global economy, global security, and the future of American power.
We open with ... 👇🏼
hiddenforces.io/podcasts/why…
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Hidden Forces retweeted
Apr 16
Much of what is in this video contains memories that could easily be described as traumatizing to the generations that lived through them. In some cases, these events aren't even a year old.
Were we living in ancient Athens, whoever made it would have been fined into bankruptcy.
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Hidden Forces retweeted
Apr 2
I'm joined on @HiddenForcesPod by @Rory_Johnston to discuss the economic consequences of this open-ended war in the Gulf and the most plausible scenarios for energy markets and the global economy.
Hint: The scenarios range from bad to really, REALLY bad.
hiddenforces.io/podcasts/the…
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Hidden Forces retweeted
Apr 1
I'm joined by @johnkonrad — one of the most influential voices in commercial shipping — who argues that Trump has a maritime strategy to exploit the ongoing disruption of commercial shipping with a political endgame that few in the media are discussing.
hiddenforces.io/podcasts/why…
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Hidden Forces retweeted
Mar 31
We are living through a generational reordering of the global economy away from free trade and open capital markets toward one increasingly shaped by national interests, clandestine statecraft, and great power competition operating below the threshold of open military conflict.
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Hidden Forces retweeted
Mar 30
This was one of many insightful anecdotes from @scmallaby’s book. His appearance on Hidden Forces publishes tomorrow morning at 3 AM EST.
Mar 28
Subtext: how Zuck’s obsession with VR lost him AI leadership and “the greatest deal Google ever made.”
“if Facebook didn’t buy DeepMind, they would end up in the arms of Google. Hassabis came out to the West Coast to have lunch with Larry Page, still the strongest suitor. Zuckerberg got wind of his visit and invited him to dinner.
Arriving at Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto home, Hassabis administered a subtle test on him. The two men discussed the potential of AI, and Zuckerberg expressed appropriate excitement. But then, as the dinner continued, Hassabis brought up other hot technologies: virtual reality, augmented reality, 3-D printing. Zuckerberg sounded equally excited about all of them.
‘That told me what I needed to know,’ Hassabis said. ‘Facebook offered more money, but I wanted somebody who really understood why AI would be bigger than all these other things.’ After the dinner, Hassabis got back to Larry Page. ‘Let’s go further,’ he told him.” — book excerpt from today’s WSJ: wsj.com/tech/ai/deepmind-goo…
Zuck’s misplaced devotion to VR and the metaverse hurt the company much more than the $80 billion of wasted spend. It’s the reputational hit. @DemisHassabis divined it in his final test, and Zuck didn’t even know that he blew the opportunity. Eight years later, he renamed the company Meta, doubling down on what anyone with tech savvy knew was DOA.
Then, in a 2025 attempt to play catchup, Zuck spent $14 billion on a data labelling company with a salesy leader and upended his AI team. Once again, anyone with tech savvy rolled their eyes on the acquisition and management changes, further evidence that the tech leadership at Meta was seriously lacking.
TLDR; beware the metaverse. It is a dystopian vision at best, and luckily for humanity, headsets are still nowhere near readiness for mass adoption.
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Hidden Forces retweeted
This is brilliant book and easily bests '1929' as must read @B_Eichengreen Listen to his @HiddenForcesPod interview @kofinas
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Hidden Forces retweeted
Mar 24
I'm joined by @TheEconomist's @glcarlstrom to discuss the mood across the Gulf since the US and Israeli began bombing Iran on February 28th, and what the conflict's trajectory reveals about the widening gap between tactical success and strategic victory.
hiddenforces.io/podcasts/why…
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Hidden Forces retweeted
Mar 23
I'm joined by @Jacob__Siegel to discuss the rise of what he calls "The Information State", a new form of political regime that governs not through force or democratic consent, but by controlling the codes and protocols of the digital world.
hiddenforces.io/podcasts/inf…
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Hidden Forces retweeted
Mar 22
"There's a RAND strategy document from 1996 saying that the Internet is going to efface boundaries between nations and break the distinctions between military and civilian activity. All of these things have happened. The failure was to not fortify the nation state against the effects of the technology and to not discipline the technology so that it didn't undermine our political systems.
Why did this occur? Why is a global communications architecture incompatible with national citizenship or national sovereignty? Well, here's one obvious example: if you are participating in a public debate relevant to things going on in your life, which have to do with the particular political community that you belong to, and I can enter into that conversation uninvited from another country and manipulate it deliberately or distort it through my participation by impersonating a citizen without being one, it devalues the very meaning of that citizenship.
Citizenship requires a boundary that is policed in order to be meaningful. When you wipe away that boundary, the category of citizen itself loses its value. I think this is what we've seen happen."
Excerpt from my recent conversation with @Jacob__Siegel on @HiddenForcesPod. The episode drops tomorrow morning @ 3 AM EST.
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Hidden Forces retweeted
Mar 18
I'm joined by @HamidRezaAz to discuss how the US and Israeli military campaign against Iran has evolved over its first three weeks and what its trajectory reveals about the competing strategic objectives driving the conflict.
We open with ... 🧵👇🏼
hiddenforces.io/podcasts/ira…
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Mar 18
RT @HamidRezaAz: It was a pleasure to join @kofinas on his podcast @HiddenForcesPod to discuss the military, political, and social dimensio…
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Hidden Forces retweeted
Mar 15
Eichengreen's timing couldn't be better. The subject — the history of the world's dominant currencies — arrives right on cue, filling a large void in the contemporary literature that has been conspicuously missing.
His appearance on @HiddenForcesPod drops tomorrow. 🤓💪🏼
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Hidden Forces retweeted
Mar 9
While I think we are understandably focused on the risks of what appears, on its face, to be a calamity in the making, let’s consider for a moment the possibility that Trump is smarter and less reckless than he appears, and that perhaps, we will look back in a few years (or more) and realize that what he did during his terms was to reset the entire game board on terms more favorable to the United States.
The rules-based order was dead, like the zombie banks in Japan, but we kept propping it up because of institutional inertia, because nobody wanted to rock the boat, and because we just didn’t know what else to do.
Well, Trump DGAF. He’s been willing to slaughter sacred cows, break taboos, and punch the reset button repeatedly until a new equilibrium is reached that positions the United States for the world as it is, and not as we wish it were or have been pretending it is for the last 15 years or more.
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