Demetri Kofinas

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, the show that examines the changing landscape of our world. We'll have candid conversations with VCs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders grappling with our current challenges and providing solutions to key problems we face as a nation. I'm Jim Beer, president of CMG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately how they got to where they are today. I think what people appreciate about Hidden Forces, one of the things that they appreciate is not what I think, but how I think, because it's about the protocol.

It's about the framework that you're applying to the conversations, to coming to the truth. That creates a level of trust. And in the world that we live in today, people are looking for people to trust, to put their trust into. This summer, I had the chance to talk with Dimitri Kofinas, a media entrepreneur, financial analyst, and the co editor and host of Hidden Forces. Hidden Forces is a multimedia educational platform exploring the underlying forces that drive the most powerful changes we see in the world today.

Dimitri discusses how he shaped his own perspective and critical thinking approach, and shares his journey moving between content creation, economics, and political discourse. So, Dimitri Kofinas, welcome to the puck, and we're excited to have you here. And by the way, as a huge fan of Hidden Forces, this is an opportunity because I I really would love to hear more about how you built Hidden Forces and where you see the world going. But one of the things, speaking about new changes, is you've made a recent move. You wanna tell us a little bit about that and how that came about?

You mean to Athens? Yeah. Exactly. Well, we've just been living in Athens since I'm Greek. My wife is Argentine, but we've been living in Athens since May.

And, unfortunately, we haven't had a chance to really take advantage of being in Greece. We took a quick vacation when we got here, which I love going to the beach in May or early June because I like cold water, and I also don't like when islands get too packed. So we got a chance to go somewhere very briefly once we got here, but we haven't had a chance to do anything else. We've literally been working nonstop, and the only place we have gone is recently we were in London for our Genius Community dinner, and I got to do a recording there. And actually it was nice being in London, and we got to go to Oxfordshire because honestly it's not so hot.

Like, it's gonna be I'm looking at forecasts for Athens next weekend. It's supposed to be 106 degrees Fahrenheit, which is crazy. So, yes, I mean, I love Greece. It's really fun for me being here and getting to speak Greek, you know, on a regular basis, besides the fact that most of my day I'm speaking English or reading in English. But, yeah, so that's where we're gonna be.

We're doing also another Genius dinner in Greece, in Athens, then I'm putting that dinner together now. That's gonna be more investor focused and trying to put together bring some together some journalists and stuff like that, but it's fun, man. Yeah. I I definitely love Europe. I missed it.

Good. Well, it's great to hear, and I wanna get back to your Genius Dinters. But before we do that, as a fan of your podcast and your work in media, where you started out, can you tell us a little bit about kind of your background? I mean, you were in financial services, gaming, a middleware company. Can you give us a little bit about your background?

Sure. Well, I, I didn't really kinda figure much out until I got to college, where in my sophomore year, I I took macro introductory macroeconomics, or just macro, actually. I don't think it was called introductory. I think it was just macro. And I found it appealing.

This was after I came into college thinking I was going to do medicine, and then I took the next best thing, which was psychology. I didn't like that because of all I remember the first thing I sort of pushed me away from psychology was the unreliable results of relying on human test subjects who were really didn't even know why they did things, and you had a really hard time. You had to figure out how to trick them in order to get unbiased test results. So, I started studying economics, and then I I started studying political science, and I really loved political science. I ended up majoring in political science and economics, and I graduated thinking that I was going to go work for the European Commission, but I ended up going into living in Italy and working in Italy, just kind of like your dream job, no future in the job, but just, like, an amazing job managing off campus real estate for NYU.

And then when I got back to New York, I worked very briefly in banking, and it wasn't for me, and I dropped out and started a video game company. The company was a middleware skill gaming platform for the console industry, specifically for the PlayStation three. The idea around it stemmed from merging two very popular pursuits for people of my demographic at that time, which was gaming on the console specifically, not on the PC, and everything that came with that culturally, and online gambling. Specifically, PokerStars and Party Poker were the big two platforms where people were spending an enormous amount of time. And it just seemed like a no brainer, well, kind of like sitting around thinking, why have we not combined these two things?

Now, there were good reasons why they hadn't been combined, and there were technological as well as business development challenges to make that work. But it was an amazing experience. And then eventually I transitioned after many years to the corporate space, working in strategic product development for the cable industry, specifically Cablevision, which is one of the major MSOs in the country. And that was mainly kind of stuff around next generation user experience, UX and UI, user interface design, and application development for the set top box, which was a very interesting experience, you know, like as a millennial, at the time a young millennial who's, like, really, like, all about cord cutting and, you know, mobile devices to be trying to think about and I wasn't a developer. I was that wasn't my role, but thinking about developing applications and experiences for a really dumb piece of hardware, which is what the set top box environment is, and one where you have to really create you have to think about the lowest common denominator because you can't just push it out on the best device.

You have to push it out on, you know, the dumbest device that's out in the field. So anyway, that was a really, you know, interesting experience, but ultimately corporate America is not for me. And moving past all the details, I ended up getting a radio show in New York on ninety one five. I then transitioned to television. I created a TV show and then a theater company in New York doing Off Broadway musicals.

And, eventually, I started Hidden Forces, and that's what I've been doing since 2017. So, I mean, you've done a lot. You started Hidden Forces, and you're focusing on real life events. One of the things I believe I read about you was that you developed this theory about the theme of patterns and recognizing patterns and so forth. For instance, the puck, Bencher Cabernet, if you don't know hockey and you don't know Wayne Gretzky, you might not know what that is.

I thought it was a reference to Bidsummer Night's Dream. There you go. And so in reality, it's that if you wanna know where the world is going, in the same way if you wanna know in hockey how to win the game, you wanna skate to where the puck is going. You don't wanna look at where it's here, but you wanna see where it's going. You wanna kind of prophetically look out in front of you.

And so what motivates me in terms of the guests that I have is trying to see what's going on today. But instead of focusing too much on that, look at the direction of it and kind of see if you can get a hint of where the future is gonna look like by focusing on kind of the directionality of things. Yeah. And so Hidden Forces, the idea of these things that are happening beneath the surface that are motivating us and influencing us that we may not be aware of. When I thought about the idea of patterns, it was the same idea that there are certain ways that things reoccur or organize themselves that help us come to understand the world in which we live.

Yes. I've always been intrigued with the diversity of the people you have on your program, the way in which you really give them the oxygen to answer questions and really kind of start to put a framework around where the world is going and deal with some of the complexity that I think is really intimidating to people. Sure. Yes. I mean, I think what patterns serve for me is they they're kind of like information about a system, and that kind of speaks to, I think, the increased popularity of complexity science as a framework for making sense of the world, and it's been applied to economics as well, kind of the move away from these neoclassical physics envy, models that borrow from physics to something that can work better or that is more representative for the world we live in today, that takes into account agency based modeling and stuff like that, and kind of emergent properties.

But the closest term to forces that I think actually reflects what I sort of meant when I started the show is something that Tim O'Reilly has referred to in his book as vectors. His book, WTF, Something About the Future, that's the name of the book. And I like the term vectors as well because when I think about forces, what I really think about are sort of the deeply elemental causal arrows that drive the epiphenomena that we experience. You know, like surface level Most of our life we engage, and most people engage with surface level phenomena. And that's what really I mean, I'm certainly not the guy that's going to tell people what's really going on with markets.

Maybe there's someone out there that can really figure it out, but I think for the most part, all of us are engaging on some level on dealing with the superficial shadows on the cave wall, you know, to borrow from Plato's allegory of the cave, and trying to get as deep down the vector as possible to really understand what is causing all of this. And again, these are deeply complex systems that we exist in, and so it's very difficult to understand those causal forces, but I spend my time on the show trying to get at them. And a lot of times, most of the times, I don't think that I really have a clear understanding until maybe I arrive at a really clear point where I'm able to express it in a term, like when I talked about financial nihilism, or now when I use the term the woke right, which is I think a term I haven't heard anyone else use, but it's a term that I use to describe what I have felt is this sort of counteraction, this counterforce to the woke left movement that we've been dealing with for so many years now.

So I'm constantly grappling. I'm using my intuition, bringing on people that I think are smart, interesting, intelligent, that I can have conversations with, and start to work through these things. So that's kind of my answer to your question about patterns, if that makes sense. It does. And, you know, for the average person that you're seeing is looking at surface things, you strike me as somebody that's kind of going to the other extreme, which is, you know, looking at your topics, you've got things, generational differences, the war in Ukraine, Taiwan, the Fed's most recent rate decision.

Yeah. I think you covered the election in Turkey. And in all of these issues, you're dealing with the evolution of contemporary culture. And you even had Jacob Siegel on talking about the understanding the hoax of the century, and you're discussing the very concept of information. How is it that you have been able like, what are the techniques you've developed?

Or maybe it was you have a superpower you were born with so that you're able to make sense of so much diverse information. I appreciate you bringing all these things together, Jim. That's a really good question. I don't really know. I think that it's probably multifactorial.

One, yes, I was partly born as someone who I'm a deeply social person, but I'm also allergic to conformity, and so I moved around a lot as a kid, and whenever I went to a new school, I really didn't want to participate in the hierarchical sort of political structure of the school system within my class, but at the same time I really wanted to be liked and I wanted to be included, and it's always been a struggle for me. So I think I'm always standing apart in that sense, and because I was also an immigrant, an immigrant family, it was easier perhaps to see the patterns, to talk about patterns, to see the patterns in people's behavior and the common the water that they were swimming in, because I came from a different pond, and I had two sets of experiences, and I could compare and contrast. I think that's part of it. I think I'm also really curious, which explains how I'm able to spend you know, really devote so much time to so many different things. You know, your understanding of something obviously improves the more time you spend focused on it.

So if I were to just focus on the question of, like, you know, what is the what trying to key leave you know, read the Fed's reading the Fed's minutes, trying to figure out where interest rates are going to be next month, Maybe that's not actually a good example, but I don't know. We could pick up something that's more scientific, that's less indeterminate. And, if I were to focus on that, I could see how I could get better and better, but I get really bored doing that, which, again, speaks to some sort of my nature. But, also, I think, and this is now I'm going to quote David Epstein, who I had on the show. He wrote a book recently called Range or some years ago, and he sort of compared the Malcolm Gladwell sort of ten thousand hours thesis of learning to what he was putting forward, which is that it's actually the people that are most successful tend to range widely, and they tend to sample, and sort of varied experience gives you an opportunity to form connections and see patterns that you wouldn't otherwise.

And so I think there's also a benefit to doing that. I don't know. I guess the answer is I've always sort of been curious. I love learning new things, and I get bored very easily, So I think that pushes me to keep finding new things to kind of investigate. And I don't go down the road necessarily with the explicit question, but I kind of let myself and this is actually an important lesson for people, especially young people that are trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives.

And again, David Epstein, credit to him as well. He talks about this. It's important, I think, especially when you're young, to let yourself experiment. If something is interesting, you don't need to know why it's interesting or how it's going to factor into some grand plan. Just let yourself explore.

Let yourself play, and play is super important. So I play a lot. So staying on that theme of playing, where do you go for information, and do you consider it play for yourself to actually find new sources of information? I find it very exciting when I discover something that gives me an insight, a unique insight that I haven't had before, and even more excited if it's an insight that I feel like other people aren't really having. That is something that really motivates me.

I look for those types of things. Absolutely. I mean, I think I've noticed that creating and people building things gives them a sense of accomplishment, and I think curiosity leading to an insight, satori, a new awakening, also brings joy to me and I think to other people. But it's something that if you haven't experienced because you're not out there, it's counterintuitive because it's it comes from nowhere. Right?

It's a new insight, and there's something about it that's we're not physically building up building blocks or wealth, which also I think brings joy to people. You know what? When I started meeting listeners of Hidden Forces, or before I started really meeting listeners, before we created our community, I had a sense that the thing that bound our I thought about what binds our community together. I figured it was mostly people that came for certain financial insights or certain sort of political insights. I kept thinking about it in terms of what they were after in very more concrete terms.

What I've discovered is that more than anything else what people love is that experience, that exact experience of having an insight, of something clicking into place. It's an incredible feeling, and not everyone necessarily gets excited by that. You know, I haven't run a poll to figure out what percentage of the population actually gets off on that kind of stuff, But what I've discovered is that people that listen to this show really do. So I think there's a hunger for that out there, especially today where there is so much social confusion around so many things that are happening in the world. No.

It makes sense. So speaking of your background in terms of finance and the work you're doing in financial forecasting right now, looking at the global economy, look at some of the big issues, whether or not it's China, energy, dependence coming out of the pandemic. From your perspective, and I understand this is a guesstimate part of this, where do you see the world economy going in the next six months? So I think very high level, what I feel is happening is that most of the intellectual frameworks that investors and economists have been operating with come from a world that was either bipolar or unipolar. And in that world people didn't have to really worry I mean, they did to some degree in the bipolar world.

They did. Absolutely. They certainly didn't really have to worry about it in the unipolar world, worry about the political dynamics and national security. You know, yeah, we had terrorism, and that had some impact, for example, financial sanctioning and things like that, and we also didn't we weren't in a place where we were getting closer to some kind of sovereign debt crisis. We weren't in a place where we had increasing trade tensions with our biggest with the second biggest economy in the world, or by some measure, the largest economy in the world.

So we're in this place where a lot of the fundamental bedrock assumptions that underpin the economic order that we understand and know are being challenged and potentially coming unglued. And in that world, I think government power can become quickly unfettered, and many things can change, and the government can take a much bigger role in the economy than people are used to in their kind of neoliberal models of the world, and that's exacerbated by the debt problem. So if we're in a world where inflation, let's say, is structurally high and debt levels are extremely high, and central banks need to try to moderate monetary policy to the extent that monetary policy, that's even the right framework, that monetary policy really has anything to do with inflation or has something significant to do, well, then what is the role of the government? What is the role of fiscal spending? And where do you want to be invested, and where don't you want to be invested in such a world?

And I think those are the big questions that or that's the sort of the big framing that I think is relevant, because in that type of a world, you could easily you could feel like you're or to quote Russell Naper, you could be getting all the right answers to all the wrong questions. And I think that's kind of where I'm focused at, what are the right questions to be asking before we start getting the right answers? And you have to have a political framework, and you have to have a sense of international relations and geopolitics, and we've been covering those subjects since day one on this show. So that's kind of where I've been focused at. Actually, your question was where are we going to be in the next six months?

Great. Totally unfair question, but I'll go ahead and give you my answer. Obviously, I don't know where we'll be in the next six months. Actually, I am extremely surprised at the resiliency of the economy. I'm amazed.

I'm amazed that we're at five or north of 5% on the Fed funds rate. If you had asked me four years ago or three years ago, I never would have believed that we could have gotten this high this fast without some kind of a crisis, some kind of financial crisis, some kind of banking crisis. We had a banking crisis. But I'm amazed that we've managed to get this far this fast, that the economy has seemed this resilient, but of course there are people who look at the forward indicators and point to things that are alarming. So again, I guess I'm surprised we've gotten this far.

If I were to guess, I would still think that in the next six months, we're gonna get a recession. And despite the fact that, you know, let's say Bob Elliott or Andy Constant, who was also in the show, had made the opposite case, that's probably where I'd end up, that when we backdate the recession, then in the next six months at some point, it will have started. But I hey. I know nothing. I'm a total idiot, and so if I if it doesn't happen, don't blame me.

I have no idea. Listen. You know, you and I have both spoken to a lot of smart people on these topics, and I think there has been a lot of surprise and so forth. And one of the things I found interesting in listening to people who talk about previous recessions, like what happened in 2007, 2008, is it wasn't about whether or not it was gonna happen. It was about when it was gonna happen.

And so people who were talking about hedging and shorting, a lot of people got burned because it took a lot longer than people anticipated. And a delay is not necessarily the same as a denial. In putting this together, do you think part of the reason that it maybe has taken longer is that there is so much liquidity. Meaning with fiscal policy, the Fed can influence interest rates by buying its own bonds, quantitative easing, but it's not actually increasing the money supply per se if you don't get the banks to lend. Right?

And so they finally figured out how to get the banks to lend with PPP because they were guaranteeing the loan, so the banks had no reason not to lend. And so they did PPP, which increased the money supply. Exactly. And they increased the money supply by sending out direct checks. So there's a perfect storm in terms of how much money was thrown out into the world economy.

And then it's like, oh my god. It really worked. Like, we finally got the money supply up a lot, and now we wanna take it back. But at the same time that the Fed is raising interest rates, the current fiscal spending is much, much higher than it was pre pandemic. Mhmm.

In fact, I heard recently that our deficit grew $600,000,000,000 in a very short order, but that's actually fiscal spending, meaning that's money that's going out into the economy. So at a time when the Fed is trying to tighten its balance sheet, which, you know, on the monetary side, you've got an election coming up. Right? And so you've got all this spending going out from the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. At least it seems like that both the left hand and the right hand are kind of at cross purposes, which is delaying and making the Fed's job harder.

Yeah. Which we've seen before in previous tightening cycles where that can happen because the federal government or the politicians have a very different mandate than non elected bureaucrats. I agree, and I think I agree also with what you said about checks being sent out and also the very important point about government guaranteed loans. I'm not a numbers guy, so I don't know what the data shows in terms of, or I don't have it, you know, at my fingertips of what the data shows and how I can point to that and say, okay, yes, here is the liquidity. This is why inflation has been so high.

I do think that it's very difficult to address with monetary policy, a problem that's been driven in part by fiscal expansion. If you really wanted to address the demand side of the equation in this context, I think you'd have to raise taxes, and that's not something that is very popular and it's very difficult to do, which is one of my major criticisms, maybe my single biggest criticism of modern monetary theory as it is sort of advocated for in practice, which is that somehow you're going to reduce liquidity through raising taxes. So yeah, I think again, I'm so sorry if I went off the rails of your original question, but I think that what I think is interesting about what we're saying here is really about I think this is actually a term people use, fiscal dominance. The increased importance of the federal government and the Treasury in this latest cycle as, you know, driven through the COVID period, and the government guaranteed loads that are a great example of credit rationing, and so is the bank term funding program, another perfect example where these banks got caught offsides. Of course, the individual institutions are responsible for the risks that they've taken.

No one told them, one, that they had to pile into long term treasuries, nor did anyone tell them that they had to stay there when the Fed began to raise short term interest rates. But be that as it may, they were caught offsides. They had this large position in treasury securities that were now underwater, and they were facing the possibility of having to sell them at a loss. And so what did the Fed do? It created a facility that allowed them to obtain financing and treating by treating the securities at par that allowed the Fed to continue to raise interest rates, which is a very interesting sleight of hand.

Right? Because it's basically saying credit for the but not for the or whatever. You know? It's like we're gonna raise rates on the one hand. We're gonna tighten credit conditions for retail or for whoever else is affected, but at the same time, we're gonna create this special exemption for banks and for this particular asset that has been negatively impacted by the very thing that we are doing to tighten policy.

I think this is the world that we're moving into, this hodgepodge world where the rules of the game become increasingly complicated, there are more and more political interjections, and you have to take politics increasingly into account as an investor if you want to avoid catastrophic loss, let alone, you know, make money. Makes sense. So when we started out in the discussion, you were talking about your Genius Dinners that you've been doing. You're bringing people together, engaging in complex discussion face to face. How do you actually find people willing to have such vulnerable conversations at at your GeniusDinner's?

Good question. I think all the special invites that I've had that's actually not true. It's actually not true. But most of the special invites that I've had, the way that I usually do these dinners is our members show up, and I also bring a good number of guests, special invites, people that I bring in just because I think they could really contribute to the conversation who aren't members of our community. So like in our London dinner, we were 12 people total, seven members of our community, and five special invites, and these were all guests of the show.

So there are people that already know me, that have been in conversation with me, that you know, appreciate my approach and my values and feel comfortable being in that type of situation and are trusting that the people that they're going to be meeting are also going to be of that caliber. So I think I do the same thing in those private settings that I do on the podcast, which is that I set the table quite literally in the Genius dinners. And I think what also is important is that you're picking people, and this is something I've also learned as I curate these, picking people who are not just appropriate for the subject matter, both from our members and from our guests, our special guests, but also people who are actually interested. Because there are a lot of smart, capable, interesting people who don't necessarily want to have these conversations. They might just be at a place in their lives where they're crushing it, and they just they want to relax at dinner.

You know, they don't just want to have a conversation about, well, what this exact thing that we're talking about right now was literally one of the core subjects in our latest dinner, which whose theme was macro geopolitics. It was looking at the intersection of macroeconomic forces and the geopolitical realities that are beginning to assert themselves in this new multipolar world. And so that's how I tend to try and curate it, and I find that people really want to be part of those dinners. One of my passions is dealing with it's kind of how do we work on polarization. When you're doing these dinners, do discussions ever get heated?

Yes. And in those cases, how do you keep things going in the right direction and respect? That happened in one of my recent dinners. I've gotten better at doing that as being an interviewer, being a husband. You know?

There are a lot of things that have made me a better listener, and I try to make sure that everyone feels included. I think also because these are preexisting relationships, and these people have been on my program, and because of how I approach conversations, there is a respect for my authority in the context of these dinners and in general, and people understand that, and my job is to ensure and to kind of help moderate. But the reality is we want these conversations to be animated to a degree. You know, you want people to be in this place where they're actually caring about something, and there is some level of disagreement. Because I think in the context of that, you need to have some friction in order to begin to get closer to the truth.

Or maybe it's actually just that friction is an indication that you're getting into something that's actually worth talking about. Makes sense. So I think there's a level of trust. I guess that I would also say there's a level of trust on the part of everyone that I'm there to facilitate that, and I think also knowing that I'm there makes people feel safe that they can have these conversations. They won't get out of control.

But I don't want to exaggerate and suggest that people are coming in. You know, it's it's not like people are coming in with bad attitude, but it can happen, obviously, when you're, you know, you're having heated conversations. Well, and it's interesting. You know, you go to different gatherings, and in this kind of echo chamber world we're living in, a lot of times, you know, you've got people that have similar beliefs showing up. It almost seems like you have gone out of your way to create these environments where people are coming that do have different viewpoints.

They don't always agree with you, and yet there's enough respect, as you would say, for you. And it's like you create a safe space so that they feel comfortable having a referee in the room so that they can have these discussions. Yeah. And, look, there are many reasons that I started this community. I mean, first of all, my previous company, which I still own, but I haven't done anything with it since the pandemic when all the theater got shut down in New York, which was a theater company, it was called Offline, Offline Productions.

And before I created Offline Productions, I had put on an event in conjunction with the New York Open Center, a conference at the New Yorker Hotel, so I think that was probably my first real experience putting on an in person event, of any kind of size, and I started the theater company in part because not only did I want to do theater for all sorts of other reasons, but I also was interested in developing expertise in putting on in world events, and that's why I called it offline, because it's very much about the offline world, you know, which I felt was going to increasingly command a premium. So there was a business opportunity there for in person events, but there was also, I think, a need, a real need that I felt needed to be serviced. The pandemic really threw a wrench in that temporarily, but I always believed that it would come back. And so as people begin to really struggle not just to find community online that feels real, that connections are strong as opposed to weak, which is what a lot of these online connections are, besides that there's also the thing of trying to figure out what's true and what's not true, and it's very difficult to know who to trust, what to trust.

That's one big reason that I started the community. And another reason I started the community was because I felt that a podcast like this, in order for me to be successful as a business and as a content creator while staying remaining true to my values would be to create a more premium tier like this, which would allow me to focus on quality and not necessarily caught up in trying to chase audience size, which again, we've done very well audience size, but it was more about it was also about aligning values for me. So it was those kind of two things that led me to do it. I would be, remiss if I didn't ask this. I have family that are very involved in theater, and as I was looking into this and doing background on this, one of the questions that came up was your bio list that you've launched multiple Broadway shows, and I was really curious, what Off Broadway shows have you actually launched?

So they were all Shakespearean comedies that we created into musicals, which some people might take issue with, and they were Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night's Dream, and Much Ado About Nothing. Really? Those were the three plays that we produced, and it was an amazing experience. I mean, my role in that process was strictly to be, like, daddy energy. You know, before I started offline, my role was very much like mommy and daddy in TV.

You know, I was the showrunnerEP of Capital Account, which was a macro focused television program, But with offline productions, I was not the director. I didn't have any theater experience. Actually, I did have theater experience. I was in theater when I was, in in middle school, and I was actually really good at it, but kids made fun of me. I also was very, like, physical and into sports, so I just I kinda maybe maybe I would've done it differently now that I'm more mature, but, anyway, I really enjoyed it.

And, the cast used to always joke about how the most dramatic person in the company was actually the person who wasn't an actor, which was me. But anyway, so it was an amazing experience coming from the daddy energy type thing of how do I create this safe space for everyone who is artistic to be able to flourish and enjoy themselves? How do I take care of all that stuff? How do I ensure that we succeed financially, which just basically means breaking even or making a little bit of money, which is definitely a success, and we did do that, and I'm very proud of that. How do we fill the theater every night?

And how do I manage all these business relationships with people that aren't actually very either not necessarily business savvy, but the ethics, at least in the theater businesses and theaters that I dealt with, there was a lot of, like business practices were very different. And in fact, in one of the theaters, I actually I had a real confrontation about getting my money from the guy that ran the theater. So it was a really cool experience. Yeah. You seem like you go into both of these worlds, which is the the world of finance and dealing with politics and legal ease and so forth.

And yet, you also are navigating the world of the arts and and seem to have a real love for it. I mean, how do you navigate both of those universes? Well, look, man. I mean, the podcasting, TV, all that stuff is first and foremost an art. It's the real truth.

It's about entertainment, and you'll see that the people that are most successful, they may not be providing you any valuable information, but they're entertaining you. Those are the people with the biggest audiences. And I don't obviously think that that's ethical. Right. I think that when you're dealing with factual type stuff, I think it's unethical to just kind of It's why, for example, I think even just take the movie JFK, you know, Oliver Stone's JFK.

I think that that's unethical, creating a fictional depiction of a real story and kind of mixing all sorts of facts in there. That's just one example. So entertainment and arts is at the core of it, and, so I think that that's kind of natural. But I've always been an artistic person, so, yeah, I think that's why I'm kind of drawn to it. I don't think, in other words, that those things are inconsistent, But I might be much more cerebral than your typical art person.

You talk about capitalism. We talk about the system economically that we've set up where there is a strong profit motive. But then you also talk about when you're talking about just now telling stories that if you're doing it in an entertaining way, but you're reinventing the facts, that that is unethical. In a capitalistic society where the motive is to make money and you've got these algorithms that are feeding you more and more information that is what you wanna hear and because it leads to more money. How do you bring back truth and the ethics of truth in a society that is so valued or built around the profit motive?

Yeah. That's a really interesting question, and I don't have the answer. I mean, we were a capitalist society after World War II, but we had a much stronger code of conduct and ethics within these journalistic institutions. That wasn't mandated. It was practiced, which I think is also an interesting thing to think about, that a lot of times we want to find policy solutions, but a lot of the way that things were when they worked well, I think weren't necessarily because of something that we did explicitly.

They were from a common understanding, again, a sense of common identity. Because of the power of the platforms today, these social media platforms, as well as non social media platforms like YouTube that have elements of social recommendation engines, etcetera. I do think that these things need to be treated as public utilities. They are immense sources of corporate and private power, the likes of which we've never seen before because they operate in a subconscious way hijacking people's brains and driving them towards the actions that they want, which in this particular instantiation are largely corporate. But in a situation where the government and corporate power begin to collaborate ever so closely, that becomes really kind of like 1984 scary or brave new world scary.

And I do think that as a demos, as a sort of a citizenry, we need to try and push for regulations that will treat these as public utilities. And so for example, in my opinion, social media platforms should not be ad driven. You know? There needs to be because these are public squares where we go to have conversations, and if the incentives that are driving the outcomes are creating misinformation minefields, and I don't just mean misinformation as in the thing that the government says is misinformation, but I mean like ontologically the closest thing that we can identify is misinformation. We need to be mandating at a very high level certain incentive, just like Glass Steagall, just like the separation of investment banking and retail banking, something similar in the tech space, and also transparency around how are decisions made to suppress one thing, to amplify something else.

And this is very complicated because as these systems become more advanced, the people running them understand them less and less, and understand less and less how they came to the decisions that they did. And this is the brave new world that we're entering into, and the challenge is how do we get our arms around this when the very systems that we want to try and regulate or get our arms around are creating, are amplifying the environment that's making us lose our sense of reality, and increasingly disagreeing with each other, and not able to come to consensus. That's a wicked problem. I think one of the reasons that I'm drawn to Hidden Forces and what you're accomplishing in your genius dinners is that if these public places and these social media platforms had the ear of so many people, and we are in these echo chambers where we are being manipulated by these algorithms, one of the ways that you get out of being lost is that somebody comes along and points out to you that you're going in the wrong direction. If you're only in these social media platforms and getting affected by these algorithms and given this information, you don't even know what you're looking for.

Whereas with Hidden Forces, you are trying to bring to the light these kind of unconscious, these hidden things so that people can actually realize, oh, there is an alternative and to create that environment and that community, so to speak, that can actually develop the power to push back on these large institutions. Yeah. And I think I I I'm glad that you feel that way. I appreciate that. I think what people appreciate about hidden forces, one of the things that they appreciate is not what I think, but how I think.

And I think that that's incredibly important. Right? Because it's about the protocol. It's about the framework that you're applying to the conversations, to coming to the truth, and I think that that creates a level of trust. In the world that we live in today, people are looking for people to trust, to put their trust into, and unfortunately a lot of people take advantage of that, and as trust in institutions declines, which I think we've been living through and I've talked about on the show, what replaces that is unfettered power, and oftentimes that unfettered power is in the form of demagogues, or populist orators or rhetoricians, people that can inspire a feeling and inspire a following.

So I don't think it's a coincidence that increasingly the leadership that we find in government are people that are like influencers on Instagram. I mean, that's really what a lot of our most popular politicians are. They're not necessarily politicians. They're just really good on social media. I think the real thing that I'm keyed in on is this confusion that exists today around who we are, who I am, you know, who we are as individuals, who we are as a community, what our values are, in other words, what are the things that are important to us that define us, our belief system, who our community is, you know, our tribe, being able to identify those people.

If you don't know what you believe in or who you are, you have a hard time finding the people that are in your group, and other stuff like that. I I think that we're in this period where that communal sense of identity that is supposed to be channeled into the institutions that we talk to when we say we the people, it's unclear. We're going through a major transformation, and I think we've gone through these transformations before, and I think this is one of the big ones. And helping people understand what's happening there and make sense of it is, I think, one of my core missions, at least, you know, for now. Beautifully said.

And I would say to our listeners that one of the things I look forward to in going to Hidden Forces and listening to your most recent episodes is I feel a little less lonely that there are people out there struggling with these complex issues that are mediating as well as you are and uncovering for us kind of some of these hidden forces, so to speak, so that we do have an easier time making sense of this kind of world that is going so fast. Right? Having a safe place to go to listen to you talk to your guests has just been incredibly rewarding. And so I urge all of our listeners to check out Hidden Forces and get to know what Dmitry's doing. So thank you so so much for making the time for the puck today.

I really appreciate it, Jim. Thank you for the kind words. Thank you for the conversation. The POC venture capital beyond is produced by CMVG Advisors. If you enjoyed the conversation today and haven't yet subscribed to our show, you can find us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.

Feel free to leave a review while you are there and maybe even a five star rating. Thanks for listening. We'll be back soon with a new episode.