Demetri Kofinas: Uncovering the Hidden Forces of Today's Society #360

Transcript

this is epicenter episode 360 with guest dimitri kofanos [Music] hi i'm sebastien cruz and you're listening to epicenter the podcast where we interview crypto founders builders and thought leaders on this show we dive deep to learn how things work at a technical level and we fly high to understand visionary concepts and long-term trends if you like epicenter there's a way you can support us that's super easy and costs nothing and that is to leave us a review on apple podcasts and if you're on a mac an iphone or an ipad

you just need to go to dot rocks slash apple and you'll be done in a jiffy today our guest is dimitri kofanas and he is the host of the hidden forces podcast this is a show that covers a wide range of topics from global finance to geopolitics to technology trends and even crypto and he interviews top people to talk about these topics and try to understand the hidden forces that drives all of them like many people we interview on the show dimitri has a really interesting backstory and prior to doing this podcast he had a tv show on rt where he covered capital markets what i like about dimitri is that he's a bit of a contrarian and also a realist i think he looks at things from a very pragmatic perspective

and isn't afraid to call out and this is a little bit of what we did here in this interview we covered a lot of things here including the u.s presidential election as we recorded this the day after the presidential debate or whatever you want to call it we also discussed the financial crisis and also the role of the federal reserve and all of this and how it is reacting to this crisis but also the role of central banks going forward in this kind of new reality in which we live and of course we also discussed crypto and specifically we talked a lot about defy and got dimitri's thoughts on the sort of exuberance that is

happening in the d5 space he has some very interesting views there so all around this was a really interesting conversation it's a little unorthodox compared to what you're used to hearing on the podcast but uh lake and i had a lot of fun uh talking with dimitri if you're looking to build a crypto finance application or a d5 application you should definitely check out algorand algorand is fast it's secure it scales it has instant finality and it has all the building blocks you need to build fast and secure defy apps in no time i'll tell you a little bit more about that later on during the interview but for now here is our conversation with dmitry kofinas

[Music] yeah so i'm like i'm really excited to have you on the on the podcast i mean i've been listening to you not since very long but since i've started listening to you i think i i you know you're the podcast that has gone from like occasional listening to like all out listening to all the time and also paid subscriber like the quickest um and uh and you're you're one of the few podcasts that i have as like auto download and i get a notification and listen to it the same day so yeah really excited to have you on and and talk about all kinds of things related to crypto but also hopefully much broader and talking about kind of like the financial crisis that we're in and like the implications that all this stuff has coming together uh on

the next you know decades to come and this is also a kind of interesting time to be recording this because yesterday was the debate or whatever you want to call it between donald trump and joe biden so we can maybe uh just address that briefly also yeah that was that was really disturbing and and uh scary yeah it was a really fight it was definitely the most disturbing disquieting debate that i've ever seen in my lifetime and i've also watched a lot of the i've watched all the television debates going back to kennedy and obviously there was nothing like that i don't think we've ever had a presidential debate like that you probably would have to go

back to the 19th century and even then i don't know what you'd find because you don't have you don't have the context of america being a global superpower yeah and maybe to me maybe the most disturbing disturbing thing about it was that i'm not sure whether it actually changed any of the numbers at all i think it it kind of it stayed pretty much the way it was and that actually tells you a lot about the state that the us is currently in for sure and the i mean that the whole theme of political polarization has been it's been something that people have been talking about for the last few years right i mean that's been or maybe even going back to the to the second obama administration

um or even the first was the tea party movement but i think what what's so scary about this election is that absent and enormous and even then it's not clear that that would make a difference but absent an enormous margin of victory the the outcome is going to be bad regardless and i i do worry about the possibility that it's going to be a contested election and that it's going to drag on for months afterwards and given the the geopolitical climate and the adversarial climate that exists between the us and china and russia it's worrisome and a great example is like this recent outbreak in in armenia and azerbaijan but you've got

all these frozen conflicts all over the world the taiwan strait may be less likely but uh you've got all these frozen conflicts that the u.s has kept the peace in and the u.s has been sort of withdrawing from the world gradually in the last few years it didn't just begin with trump but i think with trump it's been so haphazard and so disorganized and disorderly and the messaging and the confusing messaging and the use of twitter it just it creates this underlying anxiety and unease that i think we all feel and that's what's so worrisome for me yeah that's a very astute uh way to uh to look at all of this and uh you know when you talk about the

contested election i had this conversation with an american friend the other day and and you know his doomsday scenario is that you know basically there are these factions that start coming together between states that like don't agree with the election results and then from there like what it what is the scenario possible scenario there well possibly you know on one extreme civil war but you know some different gradients of that might even be like dissolving of congress and the lack of of uh of trust in sort of like the federal reserve and like markets falling apart so there's like all of these things that could that could potentially happen should this election be contested and that contested aspect of the election like

you know dragging on for like a long period of time states at the institutional level or the populations within states because of how they break down politically at the institutional level yeah that's interesting i haven't heard that theory before maybe it's it's a bit far out there well i mean like this if you think if you kind of if you do this experiment of going back four years and putting that i thought about this like the the the debate we saw last night between donald trump and joe biden i mean it was disturbing and i kind of went back and i was like well why was this so disturbing i mean trump is trump but actually if you compare it to 2016 and i didn't actually sit down and do that comparison but just from memory he was way more aggressive on this one

and it it deteriorated way quickly so i think that we continued to set new bars um and and that's and it's not just the case with donald trump i think donald trump i actually think of donald trump as like the alien from the movie alien that like comes out of the body of uh of one of the the ship or the people on the ship in that scene you know that like seeing an alien but it rips out and i think the body is like the republican party and he ripped out of the republican party in 2016 and he that's that now is like a a steaming corpse and if biden in my view doesn't win in 2020 he will have done the same thing to the democratic party and the democratic party is going to go into

organ failure and at that point something's going to come out of them and my concern is that something equivalent to donald trump will come out of the democratic party so maybe maybe we could just first uh introduce our guest for today yeah we kind of slid right into it didn't we so we're here with we're here with uh dimitri gomez who is the host of hidden forces and you know let's let's go back here but i mean i'd like to at least get a little bit of context for for our listeners uh who don't uh already uh know you and telling us a little bit about your background and like what were you doing before hosting hidden forces and how did you come to be a host of hidden forces

yeah i um i'm like very much that guy that david epstein writes about in his book range i mean i'm very much a generalist i've always had general interest areas and it was always difficult for me to focus on any one particular thing and uh and in fact when i went to college one of the first things i told my mother was that i wanted to be a philosopher and she just freaked out she's like she basically thought that i was going to be poor and how was i going to live she had this like idea of socrates sort of you know bumming around the streets of athens but i i studied i the things i was passionate about in college were political science philosophy and

and economics and actually i was most interested in foreign affairs and foreign policy and international relations so when i when i graduated college i initially had this uh intention to go to brussels to work for the eu and uh and an opportunity came and so i was studying french also i think it was junior year i was studying french but i didn't like french very much so i actually was auditing an italian class simultaneously because i had actually on a whim gone to italy to who study abroad for a semester and i just fell in love with the country so when i returned all my free hours i spent studying italian and i ended up getting a job working in italy when i graduated college instead

of going to brussels and you're originally from greece right or you know your parents are greek yes well my parents moved here right before i was born and i was born in cincinnati ohio and we moved around a lot when i was growing up but we would always go back to greece for the entire summer and my experience in greece was completely local so all my friends were kids from from local schools that would be out in the summer so like i'm very i feel very much greek and uh and it was and actually i would say like greece is the closest thing to home that i can think of because we moved around so much but uh but yeah anyway so i i fell in love with italy i loved it so much i really love that country i'm so happy that i did that

i think anyone who hesitates to study abroad should not it's it's just a wonderful experience and um and i made so many friends there so when i came back i had basically a year of experience working in italy but managing off-campus real estate for nyu so there wasn't it wasn't directly connected to anything that i wanted to do with my life and i didn't really know what i wanted to do with my life so i uh i ended up getting a job in internal audit which couldn't have been a worse job for me and uh and i kind of meandered around after that i quit not long after that and i started a company in the video game space which was a skill gaming middleware

platform for the playstation 3. and uh we really gave that a good shot and we got licensed by sony to develop on the ps3 we met a bunch of their top executives in california we were at the gdc in 2007 it was really one an amazing experience but also one that taught me the dangers of venturing into a space that you know nothing about without someone on the team who actually understands the technical the technical challenges and hurdles and then from there i transitioned into application development and design for the interactive tv industry basically set top box applications and uh and next generation uis and that

was for cablevision and i got to work with some really smart brilliant people but again it wasn't really my calling it wasn't really what i wanted to do and i i tried for a little while to transition because cablevision also owned amc and and a few uh tv channels so they had like mad men and i got to meet some of those some of those executives over there but it didn't work out and i eventually left and and that's kind of where i found my way and i i was blogging at the time i was writing about financial markets and uh and i got this opportunity to host my own radio program on 91.5 in new york and that was in very early 2011 and it was pretty much like a rocket ship after that

i got on tv a few months later and i eventually got to create my own television show which i produced and it was a daily live tv program at the market close it at the market close on every day and i did that out of washington dc until 2013 where i also i've written about this i i had a brain tumor and i developed dementia and so like i i ended up getting brain surgery and radiation you know all through 2013 summer through fall and the next few years i was kind of you know trying to find my way again and eventually make a long story slightly less long i um i got to uh to

i got the idea of hidden forces in my head around the summer of 2016. not long after i wrote a a story for the atlantic's quartz magazine about my brain tumor which your listeners can read and uh and i got this idea for hidden forces and it was so wonderful i had so much wanted to feel inspired and have a vision and i lacked it for so many years and without it i really i i had a difficult time and uh so once once i got that vision again it was like a rocket ship and i just i went forward and this time i owned it entirely it was my baby i didn't have to make any compromises and it's been a really wonderful wonderful experience the last three and a half years i was listening to this

podcast earlier that's on your podcast that you did with these other two hosts i can't remember which one it is but basically you're being interviewed and you're talking you're telling your story i couldn't help but feel that there's something a bit metaphorical about hidden forces with regards to your tumor and the the sort of hidden force that was in your in your brain that was like causing this dementia that you know that was there throughout your entire life you didn't know was there and could have quite likely had all kinds of impacts on your life and your behavior and on your overall being and that was sort of like this hidden force you know i don't know if you've ever made that connection yeah well a lot of a lot of people when

i when they found out i had a brain tumor they're like now it all makes sense so maybe it was always affecting me yeah i don't know maybe for i think to the extent that my tumor was part of the story or part of the inspiration i think going through that experience and not just the dementia period and the radiation and the surgery and all of that which what really was transformative i would say ever since the 2009 diagnosis because i was actually diagnosed in 2009 so i lived with it for four years before i developed symptoms and i lived with it for four years because the surgery the surgical options initially presented to me were so consequential and unnecessarily so that it didn't make sense to actually do it

um but i think that that entire experience was it was like transcendent and i i really came to appreciate mystery of existence i ca i had what you would call spiritual experiences or religious experiences or awakenings of various sorts and and of course i learned i learned about as someone who has tried to control things very much in my life and i think most people who have some level of ambition can relate to that i learned the value of surrender that in certain instances there's really

nothing you can do you can't fight the circumstances that you're in and you just simply have to surrender to them and that surrender isn't the same as quitting and so that surrender was also surrender into that mystery and then letting the waves take me and so hidden forces i think was partly came out of that and partly i think it also came out of a an active exploration of what it was that i loved so much about my old television program capital account and doing it and and markets effectively and which is that i think what so amazing about financial markets is that they have this the the price of of the in the marketplace is the epiphenomena but

is the epiphenomenon but underneath that there is there are hidden forces that are driving market outcomes and we're always trying to understand what those are and that i think applies to our entire lives you know and this and when i was created the program this is when you would hear a lot of conversations about simulations you know with that period people don't talk about it that much anymore but i think that's a great example and like i was a huge fan of the matrix like for me the matrix was like you know joseph campbell before he died talked about how our generation needed its own new new myth that that the old mythologies don't apply anymore and i think that the matrix was for me very much that it was it was mythology that spoke to the mystery in a way in a language that

i could understand and that many other people could understand back in january we interviewed steve cookinos and sylvia mccally of algorand and during our conversation we talked about how algorithm's unique design makes it easy for developers to build sophisticated applications on their platform so what's great about algorand beyond the fact that it's fast it's secure it scales and it has instant finality is the fact that they've designed a layer 1 protocol with primitives that are purpose built for d5 so what that means is that they've taken some of the most common things that people do with smart contracts and they've embedded them right in the system right in the layer 1.

so things like issuing tokens atomic transfers well these are built into the layer one and smart contracts are first class citizens on all grant so with these essential building blocks at your disposal you can build fast and secure d5 apps in no time to learn more about what algorand brings to the table and how to get started i would encourage you to check out algrand.com epicenter that lets them know that you heard about it from us and it takes you where you need to go to learn about their tech and with that we'd like to thank al goran for supporting the podcast [Music] so tell us a little bit about hidden forces as a podcast and what kind of guests you usually have on it because

i mean if you look at if you look at the rotor it's incredibly eclectic so what kind of brings it all together i think at first the reason why it was eclectic was not just because i was interested in all these other subjects which i was but i think i was also animated and motivated to create a podcast that really pushed the boundaries of what people thought was possible in terms of exactly that type of general but deep um to be able to talk about all these different topics i mean like one of the early podcasts was on space war which actually turned out to be very prescient and i think what what pulls it all together is well i think that there's an honest quest for

me that is very much subconscious and i don't really understand it to understand the world and so most of the episodes not all because sometimes there really are there there are episodes that i did for example that were biographical some of them were relevant like the the episode on on uh on alan greenspan because of his role as fed chairman but the episode that we did on claude shannon even though information theory is relevant claude shannon himself his his story wasn't necessarily part of that but i think that it's just i just think it reflects my internal seeking you know trying to understand this world which is so complex and which contains so many bodies of

knowledge i mean that's the other thing you know a thousand years ago it was actually possible to know all that there was you know like you had those those enlightenment scholars who studied antiquity and they could pretty much get their hands on most of what existed today there's just so much knowledge and crypto is a great example you know to bring it to crypto i i was working on a thought piece yesterday on uh on defy on decentralized finance and i i hadn't touched the stuff for like you know a couple months because i had it was the first time that i i'd covered it was with vance and spencer who are the framework ventures guys and i just was like man when did all

these new projects come out like what does this do what does that do and and you're also in an adversarial information environment because like 90 to 99 of the stuff that you're seeing is total and it's meant to to swamp your your your senses you know and make it difficult for you to do analysis so it's difficult to weed through all the crap and uh and so like again it's just there's a huge information environment and i think to the extent that you can navigate that effectively you can be successful in life not just professionally but everywhere so there was i guess that's the best way i would describe it there wasn't a conscious idea of like let me do philosophical mathematics let me do an episode on anarchism because i see how they the two tied

together there was a sense that they did tie together but i i i was willing to trust my instincts there are some episodes about crypto actually the way that we connected is you did an interview with camila russo who we also had on and you you mentioned epicenter during the overtime i was like oh he knows about epicenter and i reached out and then we kind of went back and forth with my email and what's interesting is how many times you've covered hashgraph on your podcast i'm a seed investor in hashgraph oh okay so i i i'll tell you this the hashgraph story uh i was at a goldman sachs crypto working group was the first one they put together in the very early fall of 2017 and next to me was

was sitting someone who was an investor in swirls and i didn't i didn't know that but he he gave me uh he sent me afterwards lehman's white paper and i read it and first of all i was i was just you know coming into the space pretty new to the space and there was just something that felt really compelling about it and that you know made sense to me and so i did an episode on it episode 22 with leemon baird and then i i put on an event at the assemblage in new york which was now goes back to october of 2017 so three years ago and uh and so i got really excited about it and they gave me an opportunity to be to invest in the seed round i never sold my investment

i've kept it um that's that's both because i do believe in the team and also because i have a moral obligation to my audience to not you know not just make a quick buck off something in fact actually i own more than i did um when i first invested because i've locked it i've locked up my what i own that's sort of how my my story with hedera hashgraph began they obviously have taken a very different approach which is not super popular with people in the crypto community and also they don't have the same type of like community engagement of some of the other projects so there's not really much for me to to do or to participate and and uh and one of the reasons that i invested was because

not just because i was excited about it and i really took to lehman and mance but because it was a way to kind of get in and learn about stuff and it really was like i learned a lot from lehman and so yeah it was it was a way to kind of learn by doing and have skin in the game because i was never i owned bitcoin now but very little and i was never really excited about bitcoin it never really did it for me for all sorts of reasons that i can go into the ethereum community was much more interesting because it was a community of builders but i think like every project in in the ico boom there was a lot of naivete a lot of scams obviously a lot of ambition that didn't really

reflect reality and the technical constraints and again that's why i enjoyed hedera hashgraph because where i was drawn to it because they oh there were a lot of projects that were doing this but but they were speaking to and trying to focus on overcoming the scaling limitations and so it got me in to learn all about that in a way that i wouldn't have otherwise can i just follow up follow up on that so i see you as a knowledgeable generalist um who has a super deep interest in society and technology and the like but you are not deeply embedded in in the blockchain ecosystem so from within our bubble to us it often it kind of looks

like crypto is is definitely going to change the world and i mean you kind of see it from the outside and you habitually think about the economy and the government and society and technology and how they all loop together how do you see the impact of blockchain at a societal scale pan out that's a really complicated question well i'll say i first learned about bitcoin it was either 2011 or 2010 and and then and i learned about it from max keiser so max keiser i i i think max in his own way is very brilliant and uh and so so i knew about it and i had

actually been to um a bitcoin meetup in like january of 2013 and so like i was interested in it but i never really took the time to try and understand it and i also i guess yeah i think that's mostly why i kind of let it go at the time because at the time i was i was more of a pseudo-libertarian i'm much less so today so i think politically i aligned very much with the crypto ethos and i certainly have strong feelings on the importance of sound money and what our monetary monetary authorities have done to not only forget trash the value of money what they've really done is that i think they've wreaked havoc on asset prices and on the the mechanism of capital allocation the financial markets are

supposed to to play but when i got into it back into in 2017 i think my first guess was andrew keys from consensus i think one the idea that we could escape to some degree from from our corrupt government institutions was appealing to me and to the extent that's possible today remains appealing to me so like the whole ethos of decentralization and with with big giant bold air quotes was appealing i think also it was exciting i i had been going to meetups actually in the city going back to 2015 to iot meetups where people were basically doing dyi drones and

other types of devices and machine learning meetups and and other such meetups and i also went to blockchain meetups and it was an exciting community like this community of builders people excited about the future very focused on making positive change and that was infectious and i think that's ultimately what what drew me in and i think over time i've come to have a much more sobered view of what's possible or at least what i need to see before i can upgrade my sense of what's possible but i still think there's a role for these technologies these distributed ledger technologies to play i just think it's a it's more of a let's see i'm less willing to jump far out and

make make bold claims but i think that like a lot of technologies they go through this initial hype cycle and they're way you know we have this expectation that things are just this same thing happened with ott over the top cable and i saw it from my time working in video games and in the in the tv industry i think people were expecting that people were going to cut the cord way sooner than they did but now eventually we got here and people have cut the cord so i think that it's definitely a field that's worth being in unfortunately it's dominated by scammers and not just scammers but just people just pumping the out of coins that may not necessarily be scams and but in that sense honestly crypto's no different than than an entire ponzi economy i mean what

what what are our financial markets but not a giant ponzi scheme so would you mind elaborating i mean we we've uh we've had this conversation over email i would love you for you to uh talk about well i mean how you how you perceive the economy to be like this this kind of ponzi uh system as you describe it and then how that relates to uh some of the exuberance we see in uh crypto i don't even know where to begin on this one well let's maybe start with uh let's maybe start with the current economic context and the financial crisis we find ourselves in i know i think that there's been a gradual hollowing out of the american economy

and an increased financialization of our economy and on a very fundamental level if you really understand what capital markets are and what function they serve their job is to help allocate capital to the most efficient private sector actors who can use that capital to create productive capacity and grow the capital stock of the economy and that is fundamentally what is supposed to be reflected in stock valuations and of course stock valuations always go through periods of booms and busts of over-evaluation and under-evaluation but there's always been this sort of tenuous relationship to underlying reality even during the the new era of the 1920s

or the or the new age of the 1920s or the the new paradigm economy of the late 90s the bull market story was very much focused on the future and was an exuberant interpretation of of innovations that were going on in the economy what's just what's alarming and deeply disquieting in the same way that in in not the same way but in raising some some of the same feelings for me that the the debate raised is that the story today to justify participation in financial markets and to justify asset prices is actually not based on any irrational interpretation of the

underlying economic data or where we're going to be going in the next few years it's entirely based on this idea that markets are simply a political utility that they are simply a place where public sector actors primarily the the federal reserve at this point act in order to sustain prices that they're just simply a feeding trough for people with 401ks and people with stock market portfolios and that's so incredibly scary because the markets are are fundamentally broken they're no longer actually serving their purpose which is to efficiently allocate capital in order to grow

the economy and without the economy growing eventually it's just like the desert of the real in the matrix you could be in a matrix everything could seem fine but the outside world is is charred and burned so like we cannot live without the world you know we cannot live without resources and a real economy and i just feel like what what our authorities are doing is they are going at this point they've i don't know if they can really go back i don't think they can actually you know they're just not it's they're going to go for broke because they're fully invested at this point and central banks are basically they've got they're handcuffed to the wheel and they're just going to drive this thing right off the cliff so you know i think yeah that's that's my

kind of short answer i can elaborate if you want on different points happy to can you maybe clear for me if you said that the fed or other central banks kind of caused this so how would you say that they cost this is this just um a matter of making capital super cheap or are there other things playing into it yeah so i definitely don't mean to suggest that it's only central banks but i think that central banks are marginal actors and to the extent that they are marginal actors they can have a really important impact on the economy and on markets i think this is like really multifactorial i mean the best starting point for me is

usually going back to the late 60s early 70s and eventually with the the unpegging of of the dollar to gold and the financial deregulation that started in the late 70s through the 80s and i think also of course the the liberalization of trade and the adoption of the kind of neoliberal consensus as a working form of economic logic for how we we conduct foreign policy and and trade relations and i think also technology has had a powerful deflationary force on the economy and all of those factors you know it's so interesting for me and i don't know if this is because i was born in the early 80s and i was in high school in the late 90s and i was in

college in the early 2000s and so this is like kind of they say that those years are the years where you form for example your your favorite tastes in music that the the songs you hear in your when you're 19 or 20 are the songs you love for the rest of your life and so maybe i'm ascribing too much too much value to the late 90s and the early 2000s but i think that the 9 11 attacks from a political standpoint were and generally were the most consequential events the response to those events was the most consequential for the path of american american decline and i think the late 90s the way that in which greenspan responded in the face of not only the exuberant markets

but also things like long-term capital management and the use of and the tequila crisis and the use of the federal reserve to smoothen volatility in financial markets i think and to actually to go back to the point i was making about deflation and trade greenspan relied on what he was seeing in prices which were partly being influenced by the deflationary forces of trade and technology he was relying on that data to make a an assumption about the efficacy of raising rates in the face of low inflation and so he continued to keep his foot on the accelerator

and i think that combined with the fed response which may have been justified to the 2001 terrorist attacks then again subsequently the prolonged period of low interest rates and enormous balance sheet expansion post 2008 coupled of course with the malfeasance in our political system i mean anyone who saw who saw people like hank paulson and i don't want to name names because i don't want to make it personal because it's not really personal but but anyone who saw how our system operated in the in the face of the 2008 crisis i think cannot seriously say that we don't have a deeply compromised political system and people saw that so the combination of the

political malfeasance along with with monetary policy in the face of the liberalization of trade and the deflation caused by technology i think all of those things have led to a hollowing out of the real economy and accelerated hollowing out and i think a disenchantment by the public in a sense i've talked about it in terms of market nihilism but a general nihilism a sort of whatever it's all a scam markets are a scam the dollars of fiat coin just own the ponzi you know love the bomb and just go with it and i think that's kind of what's happened and i think when i watch the biden trump debate

i see trump as like the the an agent of chaos that is here to reap what we've sown and that's what i saw in that debate and i think that that many people in the country don't give a and they understandably don't because they're so angry and human beings we're not rational automata we're understandably emotionally motivated and people are just angry and they want to see it burn so i'm afraid that that's where we are and i just worry about the international components of this because if we didn't have to worry about all of these frozen conflicts and all these tripwires in the international community and these countries like china and russia we could figure it out

but my concern is that we're in a really bad place we're backpedaling and we're facing competitors who are very strong and very capable and they want to hurt us i agree with that and i definitely uh have similar sentiments this nihilism that you describe it's something that i personally feel like on a pretty regular basis it's almost like watching sporting event or like a boxing match or something it's like it's like for entertainment value and then that extends also to the entire show which is like the rest of the world right now it's like but the thing is i would say sebastian and sorry to interrupt but i do want to say this i think that's true for how political debates have been for a long time they've been these political contests and the

and the television media has really profited from doing that they've driven that i think what was so scary about this debate was that trump pierced the veil and he pierced the veil from it being this wwe show contest to like the moment where the guy just broke his neck and he's stabbing him in the neck you know it no longer felt like it was controlled we really were seeing the collapse of the pretense of political decorum and civilization right in front of us and that's what i found so honestly terrifying but see to me that kind of extend that that extends to you know the entire kind of political discourse right now

not only in the us but also all of these insane notions that you know five ten years ago would have seemed absolutely insane people are are saying out loud i'd like to come back to the crisis and get your thoughts on you know like i think people who are not in the weeds of this thing will look at a financial crisis and look at another and just say oh it's just like another financial crisis right like they're the same thing just there's one that happened 12 years ago and like one's happening now like what's fundamentally different about this financial crisis and how institutions are dealing with it and like what are those ramifications for the future like for the next

10 15 years do you think wow so let me just comment on the point about the eu before i go to the to the question i might have to have you re-ask it actually but in terms of europe i think yes there's been a strong secession fever that we've actually seen going back to the early there were pockets of this going back to the early 2000s i do think ironically with with the the retreat of of american power and the damaging of u.s eu relations i think that ironically that could actually lead to further european unification and solidarity

so i think that eu the eu currently is one of those places where i actually feel somewhat bullish on unification i actually think that they can they can hold it together so long as they have the right leaders because they they can see the value of a unified europe um but that really does depend a lot on the french and the and the germans as has always been the case uh could you just ask me again that that last question you had oh the question is like how different is the handling of this financial crisis uh compared to the 2008 crisis and what are the consequences of like the fundamental difference of how that crisis is being handled by institutions

i mean the 2008 crisis was it was it was a crisis not unlike crises that we've seen before in that it was a banking crisis it was a crisis caused by excessive amounts of credit and i i whereas i think that this crisis today is is com is totally a political crisis you know i mean in 2008 there wasn't an expectation that the fed was going to do all the things that it's done there was a deep fear that we were going to have an economic depression because that's what happened the last time this happened i think that because of the fed's reaction and the government's reaction in 2008 they basically took ownership of

financial markets and capital markets and so now when markets look like they're going to decline it becomes a political problem and that's to the point about markets being a political utility and i think that's a term that i stole from ben hunt i don't know if i did but in case i did and so i think that what we're actually dealing with today is not a financial crisis but we're dealing with today is a political crisis because markets are they're like near an all-time high aren't they i mean i i don't really check regularly but we we're nearer again or we overtook again all-time highs i mean we had an insane rebound in the middle of a pandemic with elections coming up where you might get a democratic candidate

who's going to raise taxes which you would expect would cause people to sell a bunch of their stocks so they can take some profits before taxes go up and all the other uncertainty that comes with that all the geopolitical assertions we've talked about but because the fed has been such an omnipotent force in the market people's feelings about risk have to take a back seat to the reality of fed power but the fed's not really isn't omnipotent so there comes a point at which our concerns that would make us want to sell financial assets overwhelm the fed's capacity to one sustain them and to sustain them in the face of a dollar that

continues to hold its purchasing power so it doesn't end well and that's what i would say is the difference between where we are today in 2008 2008 we could have really done something and our economy could have actually been stronger coming out of that but not today so you say it doesn't end well maybe let let me kind of riff off of that so to me what's truly remarkable in this crisis is that it's actually several concurrent crises that are happening at at the very same time so basically it's the crona epidemic it's the the incredible unemployment it's the trade wars um

it's the tangible effects of you know changing climate so uh the u.s running out of uh letters to name their hurricanes after uh the disturbing wildfires and then it's the racial inequality and the class divide that kind of spur this entire black lives matter uh movement and rightly so um and i mean basically you you can it feels from the outside the pictures that we see over here in europe it looks a lot like the start of a you know a civil war that's kind of incited by by the president so a couple of years ago actually in the primaries for the last presidential election i

read a book collapsed by jared diamond yeah so basically it's about just for this is it so it's about societies and how they collapse and um why people don't see it coming as societies um are collapsing so why are people cutting down the very last tree if it's you know a fisheries based economy and so on and basically the the point that jared diamond makes is that it's super difficult to to actually see this while it is happening because it feels so normal because most aspects of our lives don't change during collapse and it only becomes it only becomes apparent afterwards so this is my very long-winded way of

asking do you think the u.s and the world as we currently know it with us as you know the mightiest force um do you think we're in the mid to early stages of collapse that's a very great question and a very difficult one to answer i actually want to tell your listeners that i read an article a few days ago by someone named indy samaravija i i'm so sorry i messed up the name um she wrote the article for i think on medium and uh the article is called i lived through collapse america is already there and i quoted part of the article and i tweeted it out and this part there are a lot of really quotable parts of the article but this is the part that stuck out to me

it relates directly to your question america has already collapsed what you're feeling is exactly how it is it's saturday and you're thinking about food while the world is on fire this is normal this is life during collapse and that felt very very much like what we're going through you mean like there's this denial is that this sort of denial of what's going on around you not not so much denial but but not so much denial but like what is it i'm sure there's a term for it in biology or behavioral psychology where you adjust your sense of normalcy based on you can very quickly things become normal and i think that's probably an

adaptive condition because it's a lot easier to survive if you don't have to constantly feel like everything's abnormal so i think that we just all just quit we quickly become accustomed and a great example is like that debate if you had seen that debate first of all even then that debate felt like a dark comedy but we that debate didn't come out of nowhere it came after 2016 already changed our conception of what was possible in debates and i think that's that's the case for everything and so i don't know that there is some like moment where we know it it's it's collapsed it's just collapsing so i um i guess to be honest with you if i gave you my real answer and i hate i i really try not to do this because i

feel like it's so easy to do it because it gets clicks and views i genuinely feel like we are collapsing that's how i feel i feel like america is collapsing and i don't really see any way just like the financial crisis in 2008 the idea was the those people that were trying to actually use monetary policy to positive effect saw it as a way to create an orderly unwinding of global balance sheets an orderly bankruptcy if you will but that's not actually what happened so i think the best we can hope for is an orderly unwinding but my concern is that this comes back to the geopolitical stuff

i mean that's my biggest concern i i think that what we're in an environment today that feels a lot like both the interwar period and pre-1914 because the interwar period you had all of these economies in in recession or depression and you had rearmament in germany but you didn't have this expect this idea that war was not going to happen again or it wasn't possible you just went through one prior to world war one the european economies were booming and the view at the time was that the interdependence of economies was so great that no one would rationally go to war why would you risk all of that

and and on top of that you had the other thing with world war one which was that you had a massive advancement in the technologies of war making the belgians were still building castles up until the break out of world war one those things were completely decimated by german tanks i mean the the russians were sending cavalry out to the front lines so like that's where i'm concerned that that's where we are today we we haven't fought a war the west hasn't fought a real war like the kind we're talking about since world war ii so even longer than with europe and its skirmishes we've got technologies that are more destructive than anything that we had back then in terms of the the change of what there

was and what what came with steel and industrialization the battlefield has also expanded today back in the nineteen tens and twenties the battlefield was still where the soldiers were that's where the action was today with cyber weapons with political misinformation and active measures the warfare is everything the entire world is a battlefield and so i'm very concerned because i see these combined risks and we've got a president who says crazy on twitter even if you like trump if you're not really in the camp of an of the nihilus that we've talked about i don't see how you can you can think that his tweets

are safe or intelligent they're completely reckless you don't even conduct corporate policy but you would take you would if you had a ceo like donald trump the board would take his phone except if you're elon don't even get me into that conversation but yeah i mean that's that's honestly that's that's my take well i didn't think we would uh we would get to this point this uh depressing uh reality potential reality will you take a look at you know i'll say this i just recorded an episode yesterday or two days ago with ian easton of the 2049 institute and it was a conversation initially meant to be on taiwan i mean it was on taiwan but of

course that drags in the u.s and china and now the one of the questions i asked him and his answer sort of made me kind of appreciate this more deeply which is i asked them like why is taiwan so important to the ccp and and and i asked him a follow-up which was why it seems that symbolism and symbolic victories are so important to the ccp and what he said and what i took away from his answer was essentially that because the chinese communist party is is not a democratically elected government it doesn't rule by popular mandate and so the way in which it gains its legitimacy is through fulfilling goals being able to point and say see we said

we would do this in five years we did it see we said we're going to raise living standards we did it and also to the point about taiwan because they don't have a popular mandate they don't want people in the mainland to look at hong kong and to look at taiwan and and take anything from that and say well maybe if taiwanese can live independently maybe if the hong kongers can have their own system then maybe we can have some more as well and so they're fundamentally unsafe and because they feel so fundamentally unsafe they're constantly provoking they're constantly looking to exploit and to expand and the russians also in their own particular way have this and so i don't see how this is such a delicate issue

and that's again that's that's what worries me it's it's not just that we are falling apart it's that we're dealing with two governments in the case of russia's putin's russia and the case of the chinese communist party parties china that are fundamentally insecure and need to push outwards and that's what concerns me and they'll be there to pick up the pieces after the collapse right i mean that's that's kind of the the i think the the big risk here is that in in absence of power that there you know these forces can come in and take over that void of power but you know when that happens at least we'll we'll have like perfect security also in europe in the us and we'll get cheap iphones and you know all those things there's that nihilism again

it just keeps grouping up um i want to come back just to this uh before we we get in a little bit more into crypto uh i i do want to come back to the fed a little bit and i i heard your recent interview with uh with bill nelson which was great and you know we talked earlier about you know this perception uh that that the fed is is propping up markets and something that he said in the interview which was interesting was that one of the fed's uh mandates is to reduce unemployment so in a context where unemployment is high because of forces that just simply the fed cannot doesn't have any power over like a

pandemic for example like the proliferation of artificial intelligence and things like that what becomes the role of the fed if it can no longer or central banks just generally i mean this is more of a question about like the central banking model and its potential collapse what is the role of a central bank if it if it can't do the very thing that it's meant to do which is to make sure that people have full employment and and keep interest rates uh at a variable level so i think the fed's interventions and markets are really an imperfect reaction to or a reaction to an imperfect situation which is that

fiscal policy has not mobilized in order to try and arrest the declines in asset prices and to try and equilibrate the the gross in equilibria that have been generated from wealth inequality over over the decades as a result of many of those those forces as well so i think this vision i had in my head is like this vision of like a a uh a paper clip factory trying to build a dam because the people with the wood aren't aren't coming and so like i don't know i'm sorry sebastian if i didn't quite answer your question i don't

maybe you can rephrase it i mean it was your question basically what why is the fed i think i lost what is the role of a central bank moving forward when the the conditions in which central banks were you know were created for are totally different you know like the realities of the world in which central banks exist are totally different yeah the so the central bank is is playing a role that it was never designed to play and it cannot play that role well and it's going to destroy itself in an effort to do it i think their intentions are well meaning to a degree but i don't think the feds let's be very clear the fed is not there to serve the public the fed is there to serve the banking system despite what anyone says that's not why the fed is there to the

extent that it that it serves the public it has because it has some it has some popular mandate and so far as it's it's a political institution but it's it's not there to serve the public so i so you know i mean yeah that's my answer do you think there's a role um for crypto to play in this context i mean there's ideas around ubis universal basic incomes that say marriage based so basically the the money that currently is created for the bank so that the banks can create because they are allowed to print money and lend it um would go directly to the people and do you see a way that crypto can or will fit into this

i don't understand exactly what you mean when you talk about signorage rights are you saying that by having a cryptocurrency that basically gives the gains of inflation directly to the public as opposed to exactly you know i don't i don't know i have to really think about that i don't know that that's really the issue actually i find the the focus in crypto on finance and money to be just an extension of this broader phenomenon of financialization and our our the growth of our ponzi economy i think bitcoin's ambitions were were sound you know no pun intended but we've strayed very far from that and i i think that

a lot of what a lot of the stuff that drew me into crypto in 2017 when we talked about the developer community and ethereum that also would have been promising and interesting and projects like that i think could add to real economic value but the stuff like defy i mean right now everything in d5 that i see is just a way to it's an exploitation of the non-regulated landscape of d5 i think d5's greatest competitive advantage is that it's not regulated so you can create a platform like synthetics which is basically a derivatives platform options market and not have it regulated by the cftc and the sec um and i think that what i'm seeing today in d5 are basically tools of speculation

so it's actually kind of disappointing and i think what would be what would be encouraging about crypto to answer your question like is there a role for crypto i think to the extent that you could have sound money and reliable currency the problem of course with bitcoin has been the issue of scale and actually having a payment system that can work that can be secure and they can actually process transactions at a at a scale that is that could lead a lot of merchants and vendors to use the platform and then otherwise it would be it'd be wonderful to see a lot of the kind of the stuff that was promoted in 2017 a lot of these these dapps to begin to actually solve real world problems because again i think the emphasis should be on the

real economy and our political institutions not on financial markets and not on money i don't think i don't think the problem is i mean if if you created some alternative money right now and central banks have up the economy so much and governments have messed it up so much that we have bigger problems to solve the the money issue i don't i don't i'm not one of those people that believes that you can have that bitcoin can be successful without some level of buy-in by the government at the kind of scale that would be like transformational for society though i do think that its presence its existence just like gold does have a can have a powerful impact but i don't think bitcoin has that role today i think gold does but not bitcoin can you give us an example of some of the

depths that were advertised in 2017 that you think would contribute value to society yeah i mean you know off the top of my head it's it's hard to to remember a lot of them now but like we talked about hedera hashgraph or we talked about ethereum if you if you for example i mean like i think like identity you know applications dealing with identity and helping people gain control of their data being able to determine if a file has been altered you know like one of the things that i've talked about on hidden forces is the the incredible vulnerability of hospital systems in the u.s like

some insane number don't even have a firewall or a single dedicated i.t person and yet they have their so many of their machines plugged into the internet and you could you could just scramble blood records at random hospitals in the us on the day of surgery people start dying on the table and you don't know what's causing it and and so the ability to know if if a blood record for example has been altered could have a meaningful impact on people's quality of life and stuff like that stuff that's actually meaningful but it's been a while since i looked a lot of that stuff and i'd have to reevaluate my expectations based on what i know today if i look at them now i think maybe this is me as as the eternal optimist speaking um to me the ecosystem

currently also has a very casino-like feel um and i i'm not loving it i don't think it's 100 true to the original ethos but i do think it is complementary in that the experimentation that is currently going on with real money stakes kind of gives us a data treasure trove you know for um for how people behave depending on where incentives are and how liquidity moves and so on so basically in the i i have kind of fired this under experimentation and uh basically i i think it's good things are going to come out of it

i think it's kind of you know with this level of exuberance that basically whatever button you you you hit with sushi or pickle or sauerkraut or whatever the latest craze you make money but i i think that the the data and the behavioral economics data that will come out of it will will prove super valuable to the space yeah i mean you you raised uh an interesting point early on about incentives and you know since you're being the optimist i'll be a bit of a pessimist or a cynic on this one which is that and this kind of ties into this libertarian anarchic ethos of bitcoin which i think is

actually misplaced you know like certainly governments and this is even more true of governments around the world uh are to some degree or another corrupt uh wasteful etc but we actually have a really great track record in the united states of government having played a very constructive role for innovation and economic growth i mean from world war ii through the 1950s 60s and 70s the united states with different arms of dod was instrumental along with universities in the u.s to fund all the different components that

gave us the digital revolution from silicon chips to software to the internet from which the private sector continues to drive value to this very day and i think that what we're seeing in crypto is a community of open source protocols that are attempting to fund their internal development by relying on financial markets as opposed to having an efficient pipeline of capital where they can work in solitude and when i say solitude i mean without the coin pumpers and dumpers coming in and out and feeling like they're owed something from the price of a token

whose real primary function in a healthy economy is to fund innovation and to fund development of underlying technologies that can actually meaningfully impact and grow the economy and so i think the irony is that the philosophy that animates crypto besides being i think fundamentally incorrect is also very much a it reflects the failures of government to actually play a constructive role and so in terms of incentives i think it's not actually very beneficial for the most part that all of these applications are funded by tokens that trade on exchanges and that people look at as ways to get

rich quickly you know like i don't know if you guys saw that that ample coin thing that came out a few months ago but i did some digging into that before that's that thing started to started to go south i don't know where it is now i actually came to a very clear determination that this was pure and i know that as a fact um and i won't go into all the reasons that i know it but even when i looked at the white paper i was like this is and i don't necessarily think that the creators were trying to scam anyone i think that perhaps they were sort of that they they saw it as a convenient way to get rich but i i think that i think they were and they think they were conveniently ignorant about what they were suggesting from the

white paper and i don't i remember now exactly because but i did a deep dive into it and i totally saw that this does not make sense it does not work it completely misses entirely how markets work and how prices are formed and and that's just one example of something that's created supposedly to solve a real world problem but it's actually it's just a way to get rich quick you know i kind of went off a little bit on that one but the point is that that culture is so powerful that it infiltrates projects that are actually trying to do real work and again it's part of this whole like race to the bottom it's just like the world on fire type of mentality as i say it kind of circles back to this this kind of world on fire mentality and yeah i don't have very formed opinions

about ample force to be honest but uh we had them on oh you did really yeah we had them on but even after listening to it i still had didn't really have formed opinions about it so basically sunny and i had him on the ceo we had evan on we gave him a hard time because we also thought it didn't work the entire rebase mechanism and basically kind of it's just a way of dividing up i mean basically if all if proportionally everything stays the same it doesn't matter what the denominative value of something is anyway so we gave him a hard time what to me was stood out about that project is um the backers that it had because i mean there ask i mean

there are tons of scammy projects in in this space ones that just don't work and once that malicious but um that one had really good backers so basically they they had uh they had a lot of stanford people on the team they are backed by pantera and fbg and true ventures and the great funds in the space and somehow they signed up for this and to me it's not clear whether it's malicious or whether it's whether they just didn't give it enough thought but it was so it was so the white paper was the white paper was so stupid they had terms like macroeconomic friendliness volatility fingerprint

i mean it was so obviously scammy that i just don't think that they couldn't know on some level and also the way that they talked about how they were going to adjust how the protocol counter applies counter cyclical pressure i'm actually looking now i wrote out this piece i was going to publish and i decided not to because honestly i didn't want to like i don't know i just didn't want to but it was like the step function like market cap curve that alters between dynamic states and equilibrium states it was so full of misunderstandings misinformation technobabble terminology and like you said and it had these like these sponsors who were this just goes to show you i mean look nicola have you guys been following the nicholas story

i mean gm has like a what is like a two billion dollar investment nicholas the the other sort of electric or hydrogen car battery manufacturer that's trying to compete with tesla and their ceo has had to resign it turns out it's everything is a giant scam he bought the entire design from some guy in like croatia or serbia like it's insane the level of scam is insane just like elizabeth holmes elizabeth holmes you had tim draper was an investor and you had uh like what was it george shultz or george schultz passed away somebody some former defense secretary secretary of state was invested in the project it's crazy but it makes sense when you think about the larger macroeconomic financial picture

which is that economics fundamentals don't matter what matters is the story the narrative and the fed so of course you're going to get people that can't look at a look at a balance sheet or can't read a white paper and say what macroeconomic friendliness what the hell is that you know and just say i'm not gonna get out of my office who let this person in fire my secretary that's what a normal reaction would have been in 1970 but not today you know because you know it's just like the due diligence on wall street in 2007.

same thing i want to ask you about um cryptocurrencies as as a reserve currency and so we've we've talked about this on the podcast before and actually so we had jim bianco on a couple of months ago he's the head of a research institute on financial markets his vision is that the cryptocurrency that that could become the world reserve currency doesn't exist yet you know it's not bitcoin it's not ether it's it's probably not libra it's probably something that will come at some point in the future do you you share this view that a cryptocurrency a non-state governed currency could become a world reserve currency and how different would that be from anything we've ever known

in terms of like a monetary ecosystem that's a really tough question to answer directly so i'll start i'll start to answer it obliquely i think that yeah i suppose it's possible i mean in a sense gold was for a long time international money uh throughout the the the 19th century and and into the early 20th i uh however i don't know that it can be completely independent money again i really question that narrative because governments are very powerful and uh i did an episode actually on this where my guest and i talked about his arguments for hyper bitcoinization and i just felt that i i i think that

those arguments that are made by bitcoiners they're kind of like they're very ideological and they don't fundamentally adhere to reality so i think i think that the right currency uh sort of a scalable secure highly performative money could actually be very successful in the world but i don't think that that it would come without some level of government regulation that would be my bet yeah i mean of course you know regulation is is one aspect but like proper control i think is like a totally different component well maybe in other words when i okay so let me rephrase that the question is when the united states was on the sort of quasi-gold standard of bretton

woods was it on that standard only because it provided some kind of constraint or was it also because we needed to have dollar bills we need to have a currency that could circulate and you can't have pieces of gold circulating and so if you don't have the the pretext of having the of needing to have some kind of some kind of currency that can circulate would there be a sufficient cause to create an intermediary currency as a government to sit between bitcoin between the sound money in this case if we're using bitcoin and um the final user or would would you just basically end up

having um the equivalent of like the bretton woods gold standard or not the britain was the classical gold standard and everyone actually transacted in gold because you didn't actually have to have an intermediary currency i don't know i um i don't know all i would just say is that i find it very difficult to imagine that um governments who are the most powerful entities in the world not a protocol they have the capacity to exert force on people i just find it difficult to imagine that they wouldn't find some way to get their cut i just think this is a this is a constant force maybe last question and uh as we wrap up here and i know this this episode has been

you know slightly for some perhaps slightly depressing but what is uh what is your your sort of positive outlook on the future uh you know maybe post 2020 what's like a positive scenario you have one plausible possible if you have one yeah yeah so before and in case i forget that let me just say one more thing because i forgot to say this because it was my most profound realization when i studied ample war ample forth because it came on my radar because someone i know who i really i really like uh he's like kind of a 26 year old millennial or zoomer and i i i rely on him to get kind of that particular perspective he he put this on my radar because he was making a ton of money and actually this kid

texted me um a couple couple days ago and he was he was pumping some other coin i want to find it but anyway he was uh he was making a ton of money and all of a sudden he like like a bunch of it got like stolen or got scammed or something i don't know anyway so he's always kind of experimenting with these pumps and dumps and he was making a ton of money with ample worth and so i did this analysis and then i i decided after i was done but i actually don't know if it really matters because the argument here has nothing to do with fundamentals like forget this thing doesn't need to work people are don't care when you go and you look at the discord channels or like the

subreddits people just like are just they're all engaged in a pump and dump they all know it that's what wall street bets is they're not interested in the cash flow of the company that's why they bid hertz's stock valuation up a thousand percent after it went bankrupt you know like so i just want to just say that because that's a that's i think the most profound realization after looking at ample worth not apple ample force none of this none of this really matters the white papers don't matter what matters is like what do you think is going on with the momentum and the memes because that's all that matters that's how you can make money if you're an expert at that you can make money in crypto today so um but don't try that kids this is not financial advice just to be clear

um and your question was do i my optimistic about stuff i think there are many places that i've been and likely continue to be optimistic i think i sound so pessimistic in part because i'm i'm doing all these episodes recently on geopolitics and also i'm pretty tired so that probably i've had a lot of work on my plate the last few weeks and months uh with a new project i've taken on so like that could probably you know impact my disposition but like one area where i've been optimistic very optimistic actually has been with um you know what shawna zubov calls surveillance capitalism and i've been optimistic for a while about free societies pushing back

against the sort of techno utopian technobabble futurist you know what's that expression um ride or die crew like the the sort of wanna live forever silicon valley rich libertarian liberal whatever like the sort of ruling class i uh because i think that people really are awake and aware to just how destructive social media has been and so like i'm optimistic about solutions there i think whether it's stuff that we covered in my episode with cal newport um on digital minimalism of people actually trying to hack these platforms or hack the cameras or whatever

to just large-scale interventions i think this is one of those bipartisan issues that both republicans and democrats agree on and eventually i do think that these companies will be regulated to the extent that they're regulated effectively remains to be seen i think that ultimately will have to do with that really comes down to leadership you know like public education can only go so far i think we haven't seen the kind of education in congress in the senate that you'd need to see for these people to be able to to draft um meaningfully intelligent regulations but i think in my view i think these companies should and hopefully will be regulated like utilities uh because i i don't and i don't think

that i don't think that these companies should be able to operate on an ad model there's something i talked about sonata raw and i said to him you know do you do you think that we should ban the ad model he's like i don't think he should ban any business model but in this particular case i don't think that google or facebook should be running an ad model i don't think it should be getting paid for clicks i think that just that doesn't work and they should just be banned from doing it so i think that's one area where i'm optimistic i don't have anything else on top of my head guys i'm sorry to to disappoint on that i don't know i mean like the the civil strike i'm optimistic on europe like i said i'm fairly optimistic i'm somewhat pessimistic as a greek citizen about

the situation in the eastern mediterranean although maybe a little bit more optimistic based on just how seemingly incompetent and reckless erdogan is and maybe he'll get sucked in like i said in my episode with peter zaihan the best hope for greece is that turkey will get sucked into some confrontation either with iran or up across the bosphorus or down into syria and really will stop being so aggressive in the mediterranean because it would be very concerning if turkey begins to occupy islands and force uh in the east med so europe i'm i'm optimistic about because of the external security factors that could help them become become stronger and more cohesive

so that's another area so there you go yeah i'm glad you i'm glad you found something sure so guys it was a lot of fun i mean uh i uh we definitely talked about more things than i expected yeah it was great thanks for thanks a lot for coming on yeah cool it was my pleasure thank you for joining us on this week's episode we release new episodes every week you can find and subscribe to the show on itunes spotify youtube soundcloud or wherever you listen to podcasts and if you have a google home or alexa device you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the episode podcast go to epicenter tv subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen

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