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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
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
In Episode 484 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with AI policy researcher, writer, and incoming Head of Strategic Futures at OpenAI, Dean Ball, about the intellectual foundations of machine intelligence, the governance frameworks best suited to frontier AI, and what's at stake for society, the nation state, and the individual if we get this transition wrong. The first hour builds the philosophical scaffolding for the conversation to come — what intelligence actually is, how large language models learn, what they understand, and the broader historical thesis animating Dean's worldview: that we are not witnessing the birth of something entirely new, but rather living through a computing revolution that began with the transistor and is now reaching its natural culmination in the era of machine intelligence. The second hour turns to what's at stake in this transition and the governan
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