Hidden Forces

In Episode 472 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Sebastian Mallaby about Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of DeepMind and the man widely regarded as the most consequential figure in the development of artificial general intelligence, and what his story reveals about the science, the competition, and the existential stakes of the AI transition now underway.
The first hour traces Hassabis's early life as a chess prodigy in North London, his studies in computer science at Cambridge and neuroscience at University College London, and the founding of DeepMind in 2010 alongside Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman.
Mallaby and Kofinas explore the philosophical and scientific foundations of Hassabis' approach — including the decisive shift from symbolic, rule-based AI development to the inductive, data-driven logic of deep learning — as well as the competitive dynamics that have shaped the industry: Google's acquisition of DeepMind in 2014, Hassabis's early skepticism of language models and the transformer architecture, and the moment ChatGPT's release shattered what hopes remained of a "singleton" scenario in which a single, safety-minded lab could develop AGI on behalf of all humanity.
The second hour picks up with the launch of ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022 and what it revealed about the state of the AI race — including Mallaby's assessment of Sam Altman and the character of the individuals now driving this technology forward. They examine whether personality and values matter when competitive and commercial pressures are this overwhelming, and revisit a conversation Mallaby had with Geoffrey Hinton in which the so-called "godfather of AI" offered his honest assessment of humanity's odds of surviving the AI transition.
The episode closes with an exploration of why the safety and existential risk conversation has receded from public discourse — not because the concerns have been resolved, but because geopolitical and commercial imperatives have made it nearly impossible to slow down — and considers the range of perspectives on that risk, from Yann LeCun's dismissiveness of existential threats to the technical alignment work being pursued inside the major labs themselves.
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Episode Recorded on 03/23/2026

In Episode 471 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Gregg Carlstrom — Middle East correspondent for The Economist, based in Dubai and Riyadh, and a veteran reporter covering the region for fifteen years — about the mood across the Gulf States since the US and Israeli military campaign against Iran began on February 28th, and what the conflict's trajectory reveals about the widening gap between operational success and strategic victory.
The conversation opens with an assessment of shifting opinion inside Saudi Arabia and across the Gulf — from early opposition to the war to hawkish demands in some quarters that the United States, having opened Pandora's box, now finish what it started.
Carlstrom and Kofinas examine the human and material toll the conflict has taken so far, the extent and internal logic of Iranian restraint in targeting Gulf infrastructure, and the implications of Iran's decentralized Mosaic Defense Doctrine for command and control and efforts at de-escalation.
The conversation then turns to the growing gap between the operational success of US and Israeli airstrikes and the larger strategic picture — including the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its consequences for global oil and LNG markets — before examining the divergent strategic objectives of Washington and Tel Aviv, the nuclear question as it applies to both Israel and the United States, the opaque power struggles within what remains of the Iranian regime, and what a near-term resolution — or further escalation — might look like.
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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
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Episode Recorded on 03/24/2026

In Episode 470 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Jacob Siegel — writer and editor at Tablet Magazine, U.S. Army veteran, and author of The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control — about the intellectual and historical roots of his argument that the internet has given rise to a fundamentally new form of political regime, one that governs not through force or democratic consent, but by controlling the codes and protocols of the digital public arena.
The first hour traces the theoretical and historical foundations of Siegel's argument, from the media theory of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Neil Postman, and Jacques Ellul, to James Beniger's 1986 work The Control Revolution, to the 17th-century philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and its downstream influence on the cybernetic frameworks that gave rise to the internet.
They discuss the rise of digital swarms, the Anonymous movement, and what Siegel observed when he returned from Afghanistan in 2012 to find American culture being reshaped by the velocity and incoherence of online mass formation. The hour closes with an examination of his central thesis: that the internet — born out of Cold War Pentagon research and reconsolidated under government auspices after September 11th — has given rise to a third form of political regime he calls the information state.
The second hour examines how the information state differs in kind from the analog propaganda systems of the 20th century, and why Siegel believes it is simultaneously more powerful and more brittle than what came before. They dig into the paradox at the heart of his argument — that the same informational infrastructure built to extend elite control also created the conditions for the digital insurgencies now convulsing Western politics — and explore Siegel's critique of the counter-disinformation establishment, his views on the concentration of private platform power, and what a coherent policy response to the dysfunctions of the modern information environment might look like, including antitrust regulation, private data ownership, and the prosecution of foreign disinformation campaigns, while preserving the essential distinction between the speech rights of citizens and non-citizens alike.
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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.
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Episode Recorded on 03/16/2026

In Episode 469 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Hamidreza Azizi — Iranian scholar, visiting fellow at the German Institute for International Security Affairs, nonresident fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, and author of the forthcoming The Axis of Resistance: Iran, Israel, and the Struggle for the Middle East — about how the US and Israeli military campaign against Iran has evolved over its first three weeks, and what the conflict's trajectory reveals about the competing strategic objectives driving it.
The conversation opens with an assessment of how the war has unfolded since its start, examining where US and Israeli objectives align, where they diverge, and what those divergences mean for the conflict's direction. Azizi and Kofinas discuss the significance of the targeted killing of Ali Larijani — secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council — as part of a broader campaign to decapitate the Islamic Republic's leadership structure, and what the systematic elimination of senior Iranian officials means for Tehran's ability to manage both the military and political dimensions of the war simultaneously.
The conversation then turns to the nuclear question — specifically whether the war has made a nuclear-armed Iran more likely rather than less — before examining the divergent responses of the Gulf states and the key variables Azizi believes are most important for understanding where this conflict goes from here.
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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
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 03/17/2026

In Episode 468 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with renowned economic historian and author Barry Eichengreen about the history of international currencies and the prospects for the US dollar's continued preeminence, drawing on his new book Money Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto.
The first hour traces the long arc of international currency history, from the invention of coinage in ancient Lydia through the monetary innovations of Athens, Rome, and the Byzantine Empire, to Renaissance Florence, where a city-state with no navy and no silver mines managed to make its currency the dominant medium of exchange in Europe. The hour closes with a discussion about the Dutch Republic's revolutionary contributions to modern money and finance, and the Spanish silver dollar—the first truly global currency, which circulated from the New World to China and remained legal tender in the United States until the eve of the Civil War.
The second hour examines Britain's emergence as the world's first modern financial superpower, whose decline opened the door to the internationalization of the US dollar, and the role that figures like Paul Warburg, the Federal Reserve, two World Wars, and the Bretton Woods Agreement each played in establishing dollar dominance—further cemented by the breakdown of Bretton Woods and the era of floating fiat currencies. They then turn to the present, examining what Eichengreen sees as the two most serious threats to the dollar's continued preeminence: the erosion of the rule of law and separation of powers inside the United States, and the fraying of the alliance relationships that underpin global confidence in dollar-denominated assets.
They close with a discussion about whether stablecoins could extend the dollar's network effects, why the Euro and the Chinese renminbi fall short as credible alternatives, and what a world without a reliable global reserve currency could mean for international trade, finance, and geopolitical stability.
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
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 03/09/2026