Hidden Forces

In Episode 494 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Mark Galeotti — host of In Moscow's Shadows and one of the most informed and provocative voices on modern Russia — about the war in Ukraine, the risk that it spills over into NATO's eastern flank, and the escalatory paths and deepening dependency on Beijing that will define Russia's place in the emerging global order.
The first hour takes stock of Russia's war in Ukraine, a conflict Galeotti describes as several wars happening simultaneously — a grinding battle of attrition in the Donbas, an economic war of deep strikes on refineries and critical infrastructure, and a political war that has enveloped not only the conflict's chief counterparties but every major power and regional bloc for whom this war has become the central battlefield in the emergence of a new global order. They discuss the human and economic costs of the fighting, the strategic aims of Europe's nation states and how those align with Washington's, and the fraying, increasingly uneven state of Western support, before turning to the mind of Vladimir Putin — the insecurities Galeotti places at the core of his character, his survival instincts, his narrow circle of trust, and the forces shaping his perception of how the war is going.
The second hour explores what Putin would actually need in order to end the war, why he keeps chasing a symbolic victory in the Donbas rather than the settlement presently available to him, and why his aversion to weakness is essential to making sense of his calculations. The conversation then turns to succession, what tends to follow the death or departure of a personalistic ruler, the lessons of Stalin's untimely death, and why Galeotti expects any transition of power in Moscow to reflect the will of a coalition of post-Soviet elites rather than the machinations of a younger, smarter Putin. They weigh the escalatory paths that worry European capitals, from a direct challenge to NATO's eastern flank to the campaigns of sabotage, subversion, and hybrid warfare that Galeotti considers more plausible, and close by examining how America's entanglement in the Middle East has been received in Moscow, what a hollowed-out but battle-hardened post-war Russia could mean for the world, Moscow's lopsided and deepening dependency on Beijing, the prospects for Washington to cleave Russia away from China's sphere of influence, and what all of it means for energy markets and the global economy.
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Episode Recorded on 08/11/2026

In Episode 493 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with computational journalist and author John West about the surprising impermanence of the Internet, the shift from human agency to platform agency, the business models that have reshaped the web, how AI could further remake our relationship to the Internet and to ourselves, and what the collapse of a shared reality means for our politics and our humanity.
The conversation begins with the paradox at the heart of West's book, The Internet Will Die and So Will You. The web we've been told is permanent and indelible is in fact a deeply ephemeral place, subject to decay and disappearance in much the same way our own bodies are. Demetri and West trace the story back to the Internet's early years—a world of personal homepages and open standards like RSS—and to the phenomenon of link rot that first drew West to write about the web's impermanence, before opening onto the book's larger preoccupation with the shift from human agency to platform agency, the mechanistic logic embedded in the platforms that mediate our lives, and what it means to live deliberately in an environment engineered to keep us perpetually satiated and unconscious.
From there they turn to the business models that have reshaped the web—the move from serving users to serving advertisers—and how AI's implementation into more and more facets of our lives could change that relationship for better or worse. They close on questions of truth, knowledge production, and epistemic collapse, asking how the world would have handled 9/11 in the modern media ecosystem, why people cannot live in a perpetual state of uncertainty, and what the collapse of a shared reality means for our politics and our humanity.
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Episode Recorded on 08/04/2026

In Episode 492 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with science fiction author, journalist, and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow—who coined the term "enshittification"—about why he believes the AI bubble will prove more damaging than the 2008 financial crisis and rival the equity sell-off of the 2020 Covid pandemic, the theory he has developed to explain why everything keeps getting worse, why the companies leading the AI boom are structurally unprofitable and existentially dependent on a runaway growth narrative, and where the value in AI may actually accrue once the bubble deflates or bursts entirely.
The first hour covers the central argument of Doctorow's book on enshittification, which goes beyond simply describing how things are getting worse—from the extractive nature of online relationships to the soul-sucking experience of dealing with burned-out call-center operators and mindless chatbots—to put forward a theory for why, based on what has happened to competition, regulation, interoperability, and the bargaining power of workers. From there, they compare the prevailing business models and unit economics of the early web companies and large platforms to those leading the charge in AI, and why Doctorow believes the latter are not only structurally unprofitable but existentially dependent on a growth narrative of runaway AI that will run out of capital before it ever delivers the promise and profits its investors are banking on.
The second hour continues the conversation about the AI boom—how retirement accounts and index-fund concentration have raised the stakes of an eventual bust, and how new forms of regulatory forbearance, including the mechanics of the recent SpaceX public listing, along with other more explicit government bailouts, will be needed to prop up otherwise unsustainable valuations. They close with the narrative gap between AI-driven job displacement and what the data actually tells us, and where the value in AI may accrue once the bubble deflates—from open-source models and cheap hardware to the skilled workers and infrastructure needed to capitalize on them.
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:
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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
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Episode Recorded on 07/27/2026

In Episode 491 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with trade economist Chad Bown—a former chief economist at the U.S. State Department, host of the popular Trade Talks podcast, and co-author of the recently published How to Win a Trade War—about what international policymakers, companies, and individuals need to understand about America's ongoing trade war, what victory would look like for the various parties involved in the conflict, and most importantly, how to win.
The first hour lays the intellectual groundwork for understanding the modern trading system, examining the unique role played by the dollar and capital recycling in concentrating the gains from trade among the owners of capital, and stress-testing the theory of weaponized interdependence through the ongoing case studies of Russia's war against Ukraine and America's latest war with Iran.
The second hour turns from the motivations behind the current trade war and what's at stake to the players themselves, their incentives, and what it means to wage a trade war in the first place—the weapons at each nation's disposal, the defensive measures to be taken, the strategies to be deployed, and the various time horizons and end games to be considered when fighting one.
They close with an assessment of American industrial policy, including the CHIPS Act and the semiconductor export-control regime, Beijing's willingness to weaponize its dominance in rare earths and permanent magnets, and three scenarios for how this new and likely durable era of economic conflict could ultimately unfold.
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

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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 07/23/2026

In Episode 490 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Patrick Boyle—founder of the quantitative hedge fund Palomar Capital Management, professor of finance at King's College London and Queen Mary University of London, and host of Patrick Boyle on Finance—about the SpaceX IPO and what it reveals about the integrity of America's financial markets, the cult of personality filling the vacuum left by the nation's collapsing institutions, the commercial and fiscal challenges facing Europe's largest economies, and the housing crisis and generational wealth divide driving the appeal of left-wing populism across the developed world.
The first hour opens with the recent SpaceX IPO—how the deal was priced and marketed, the mechanics and share-price consequences of its unusually rapid index inclusion, the small number of shares made available for trading, and the wave of bullish sell-side coverage that accompanied it—before broadening into a discussion of the integrity of America's financial markets and what happens to investor behavior and to the country's cost-of-capital advantage when the institutions tasked with regulating those markets can no longer be trusted to do so. From there the conversation turns to the cult of personality and the rise of powerful figures in industry and politics filling the vacuum left by collapsing institutions, and to the growing appeal of left-wing populists whose policies increasingly resonate with younger voters who feel priced out of the American dream.
The second hour examines the commercial and fiscal challenges facing Europe's largest economies: why the continent has produced no answer to America's large technology platforms, how regulation, energy costs, demographics, and labor rigidity weigh on its growth prospects, and what the flood of cheap Chinese goods, high-end machine tools, and electric vehicles means for European industry and for a Germany that cannot afford to miss yet another technological revolution. They discuss the European security picture, the war in Ukraine, and whether Russia is in any meaningful sense winning it given the human, economic, and demographic toll and its deepening dependence on China. The episode closes with a discussion of the housing crisis, the generational wealth divide, and the political incentives that keep home prices high across the United States, the United Kingdom, and beyond—returning at the end to the appeal of left-wing populism and the prospect of redistributive policies as an inevitable response by fiscally overburdened governments looking for someone to blame.
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

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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 07/16/2026