136 - WWIII vs the Machines | Demetri Kofinas

Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Guys, great episode today. Really good. World War III versus the machines. That's the title of this episode. Those are two of the topics we unpack in this episode. It's a super ambitious episode, but we have Dimitri Kofinus, who is a fellow podcaster, host of the Hidden Forces Podcast, also an aggregator like David and I. Knows a lot of things about a lot of things because he talks to a lot of people. So he's a perfect guest to have this conversation with. A few takeaways for you on today's episode. Number one what's the probability of World War III?

I know you're wondering. So are we. We ask that question. We get into the details. Number two, should the US actually fight China over Taiwan? What would that even look like? Number three, we get into discussion about the unibomber, Ted Kaczynski. Did the unibomber actually predict the future? He had some prescient things to say about it, certainly. Number four, will the US survive the rise of the machines? A lot of conversation about AI, the machines, how they are taking over. Number five, the ultimate question, I think. Have we as a society lost the ability to solve hard problems? Or can we find it within ourselves to solve the hard problems that confront this decade and the generation that we're in? David, really cool conversation. I think we just talked about a lot of things that were in our hearts, on our minds with a fellow podcaster, got into some heavy subjects. But uh Dimitri is an individual who um I think likes to think in the same way we do, which is like if we got something heavy to talk about, let's just dive into it. Right. And it'll make us feel better about the subject when we can actually get into the gritty details and see if there's a way to solve it.

Specifically with another podcaster, because uh podcasters maybe I'm just gonna

chill our own class type here, but in order to be a good podcaster, you have to think at a kind of a meta level.

Because you know, it takes people that can like zoom out very, very broadly to talk about people like deep down at the protocol level and then all the way zoom back out to the macro and talk about like social stuff. And so like Dimitri does the same thing on his hidden forces. He goes and talks about the problems of ETF investing on the stock market and cross-references that with like the social dynamics of the United States. And so there's podcasters do it all related. It's all related, but it's like podcasters that are really the people like stitching these conversations together and zooming out so far broadly that they are actually able to link very distant parts about this world. And so I really wanted to do this episode with Dimitri is like, what happens when we get like a third another podcaster as a guest? And like how meta can we get? And I really enjoyed the conversation that came out of it. And so the idea here was to ask some very basic questions that everyone kind of

Knows should be asked, but doesn't really know how to ask or who to ask or even how to take seriously the question. For the question like,

what is the probability of World War III? What is that stage? What would be the relevant like actors and players and hidden forces to name the name of his podcast that would play in this role? And we kind of let the conversation go from there. Of course, we talk about China and the United States and Taiwan, but it quickly zooms out and gets a little bit more meta to talk about the forces that.

Are making some of these huge geopolitical forces collide with each other. Why are we on this collision course? What about today's society is making this reality happen? And what do we do about it? And it gets back down to the social layer of the domestic US politics, who we are as a people and who we are as a society really, really quickly. And I really just appreciated this episode with Dimitri.

Yeah, it's a really fun episode to do. And certainly, by the way, for bankless subscribers, stick around after the show where David and I do the debrief. That is the episode after the episode.

Some of my favorite conversations happen in the debrief where David and I just take a breath, digest, give our unfiltered raw thoughts right after the episode we just recorded. And if you want to become a Bankless Premium member, there's a link in the show notes to go do that so you can listen to the debrief today. Guys, we're going to get right to the conversation with Dimitri.

Bankless Nation, we are super excited to introduce you once again to our friend Dimitri Cofinas. He is the host of the Hidden Forces podcast. Hidden Forces is one of David and myself, one of our favorite podcasts out there. It's kind of like, you know, those uh cities have sister cities in a different country. I feel very much like Hidden Forces is a sister podcast to the Bankless Podcast. And Dimitri has just a fantastic way of synthesizing a lot of different information across a lot of different subject matters. Today we're talking about power, we're talking about geopolitics, its effect on macro. We're asking some big questions that have been in the back of my mind, in the back of David's mind, and I think probably listener, in the back of your mind as well. Some of these questions we're afraid to surface in other channels, but we're going to ask Dimitri about them today. Dimitri, welcome back to Bankless. How are you doing today?

I'm doing great, guys. Thank you. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you, David, for having me on.

Dimitri, the name of your podcast is Hidden Forces.

Can you talk about that name and kind of the subject matter of your podcast and why you decided to call your podcast Hidden Forces?

That's a good question. I think it really

began with a philosophy around the knowability of truth, the knowability of reality, and that what we experience as reality is really perception. And that there are these, quote, hidden forces that are at the bottom of the ontological world that define what we view as reality, but we can never actually know those things with absolute certainty. And so we're always trying to get deeper down, closer to the bottom of the vector to understand as well as we can what truth is, so that we can develop models that are.

more predictive of reality, more predictive of the future. So it combines both the practical elements that are important to investors and also just kind of the philosophical ideas that have always interested me as a kid.

I think one of those hidden forces we've been kind of unpacking lately on Bankless have been the hidden forces around macro, what drives macro markets. And as we've been digging into kind of some of the macro experts, it has surfaced that one of the biggest hidden forces, I guess, behind macro as a hidden force in and of itself is geopolitics. I think we want to talk about that a little bit today. And I gotta tell you, as we like, I guess we're two years into this crazy decade already, and it feels a lot different than the previous decade. And, you know, I think it feels a lot more uncertain, a lot more chaotic, and the potential for conflict seems to have escalated. And I can't separate, Dimitri, whether this is just sort of an internal gut feeling I have, or it's like the books that I've been reading or the headspace that I'm in. But I think it's kind of shared with a lot of people, like this deep feeling of.

Unsettlement.

What's going to happen next? We're not too sure. I want to ask you about the stage and kind of get this question top of mind because it feels like maybe we are headed closer towards some sort of a global conflict. Maybe we'll start there. Why do you think everyone feels this feeling of unsettlement, this feeling in the air like conflict could be in the future?

Uh I it's a great question.

I think a big part of all of this is that the world feels increasingly out of control.

You know, I don't know how old you guys are, but the world I grew up in, I'm born in 1981. The world I grew up in,

which was really the 1990s, all of that seemed settled.

It was the unipolar moment, and everyone was pretty much on board. There were very few countries that weren't, and they weren't really deemed as significant, or we seemed to have inexhaustible resources to deal with those one off cases of Iran or North Korea or whatever.

Or Iraq to begin. That's really how we started the post-Cold War period. It was Iraq went rogue. We mustered an entire international coalition and we dealt with it.

And so there was a sense of unity, a sense of unity of purpose. Everyone was more or less on board with the international institutions.

And it was blue skies all the way. And I think that we've come to a place now

which I think was pretty much made absolutely clear politically.

Geopolitically, I think the moment was the invasion of Georgia by Russia in 2008, but politically, I think it was really with the election of Donald Trump. And that really changed the tenor and also US China relations. And of course, these are the two biggest, most powerful economies and military powers in the world.

So

I think

that the recognition of all the uncertainty and the sense of instability, particularly in the US, because the Chinese political system is at least

externally so stable.

And things here are so unstable that I think that is what is making us all feel the sense of, well, what's going to be the next shoe to drop? Because it's just been one shoe after the other after the other. And American politics in particular

sort of feeds off of that instability because both parties are able to use it in order to further their own political agendas, which is really sad.

Dimitri, in your answer just now you gave off

A list of things, right? Like a list of sources of chaos or symptoms of chaos in the world. And my mind kind of just goes to the model of a binary star system versus a trinary star system. And a binary star system is famously like stable, like these two stars just rotate and they just don't change. But then sometimes they'll run into a third star and then things get extremely chaotic, and eventually one star gets ejected. And like this is also part of the metaphor of the three body problem, right? This is that book where there's just a random set of

parameters that are just very chaotic and they become chaotic until a moment happens and then they stabilize again. And like this is kind of my model for as a child of the 90s, you know, I only interpreted that stability for so long.

But things have been more seemingly more and more chaotic. And the rate of chaos also seems to be accelerating. And I'm wondering if we can just kind of run through the list of all of like the different inputs that seem to be injecting instability into the like global world order. You know, once upon a time we had this superpower, the American superpower that seemed to be just wholly dominant and that seems to have gone out the door. We had the election of Donald Trump. We have the rise of social media. We have the rise of authoritarianism in China. I'm wondering if just like you can think of the biggest sources of just like chaos that has disrupted what was once an equilibrium in this world.

Yeah, it's a great observation. And it also holds some promise because historically, yes, unipolarity

theoretically, though, uh maybe the US is the only real case of it's certainly the only case of global unipolarity.

Uh but bipolarity

is more stable than multipolarity. And so I think that does capture one of my concerns, which is that we still haven't reached a new state of equilibrium, which presumably will be a bipolar world.

And so between now and when we get there, there's just an enormous amount of uncertainty

And Dimitri

by bipolar

bipolar world do you mean China and the US being sort

two stars in the star system. Exactly. But I think your question, David, just to make sure I follow it correctly, was what are some sources of instability? Was that your question?

Yeah.

Well, I think about this quite a bit in terms of like I wanted to, you know, going back now a year,

I wanted to do episodes focused on different either

potential conflict areas or frozen conflict areas. And I think those areas, whether it's Cyprus, whether it's Greece Turkey, whether it's Kashmir, whether it's the 49th parallel, um Nagorno-Karabakh, we saw that recently flare up.

These areas become more unstable in the kind of world that we're talking about because they're like stress points.

So I think there are clearly, and of course, Taiwan, it's not a frozen conflict, but it's a uniquely unstable equilibrium because China and the Chinese

governing elites have been very clear about their sense of ownership over that and over Taiwan, and that it's a non negotiable issue, an existential issue for them. And clearly there isn't the same level of consensus in the United States. I mean, it's so that's the other thing that's so interesting about all this stuff.

It's so intangible, but especially for a country like China, but the US does this too. So much of what happens on the international stage is actually

it's not

the application of force, but it's the installation and cultivation of norms.

And so for the Chinese, I think.