Launch of The 100-Year Pivot Podcast

what's up everybody i have some very exciting news to share with all of you my friend and fellow podcaster Grant Williams and I have teamed up to launch a new podcast series we're calling the 100-year pivot it's a joint effort based on a shared understanding that we are living through a once- ina century economic political and geopolitical reordering that will require us to develop novel maps and investment frameworks to help us navigate these incredibly consequential times over the course of the series Grant and I will be speaking with the smartest most plugged in people we know to help us chart a path through this gathering storm as we seek to position ourselves our organizations our families and our portfolios for the changes to come premium subscribers to the Hidden Forces podcast and the Grant Williams podcast will have early access to the episodes in this ongoing series go to hiddenforces.io/subscribe io/subscribe to access our premium feed so the episodes in this series will download automatically to your mobile podcast app whenever we publish if you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community which includes Q&A calls with guests access to special research and analysis in-person events and dinners you can also do that on our subscriber page and if you still have questions feel free to send an email to [email protected] and I or someone from our team will get right back to you lastly because this conversation deals with investing nothing we say on this podcast can or should be viewed as financial advice all opinions expressed by me and my guests are solely our own opinions and should not be relied upon as the basis for financial decisions and with that please enjoy this first in a long series of conversations on the 100-year pivot with my friend and co-host Grant Williams welcome everybody to the first episode of The 100year Pivot joining me as co-host on this is my great mate and podcaster supreme Dmitri Cafinas mate how are you i'm so happy that we're doing this yeah yeah we've talked about collaborating for quite some time and we never figure out what to do right but this little project of ours is something that's grown completely organically we didn't sit down with a pad and pen and come up with some kind of great idea we could do it just happened and I think that's such an important component of this whole idea yeah and I love the name that we've chosen i feel like you know that name resonated with both of us we threw out a few titles when we were storming brainstorming over it i think it was just the same day within the same hour or so we came up with this name and I feel like it really captures both the secular trends that are so powerful the forces that I use that term for my show whatever the analogous term that you use you guys obviously talk about the endgame with you and Bill Fleinstein and then the pivot which I think is the actionable part that speaks to investors yeah absolutely and since we came up with the idea and the title I mean the pivots are happening left and right there's so much to talk about but I think it's worth before we kind of just have a little look at the world now it's worth us talking about what we aim to get out of these conversations and the beauty of that is as we set out nothing right that's that's that's one of the we're like the Seinfeld of financial podcasts right right yeah the whole idea of this is to we recognize there's something going on and you know the conversation you and I recorded back in February i'm sure your subscribers were the same but mine it resonated so strongly with them and in a way that none of them were expecting you know that a lot of people said to me I had the same paraphrased response so many times i didn't even know that I was feeling this way until Dimmitri articulated it so perfectly and that feeling you know that feeling sometimes you just have to follow those feelings and try and understand what's behind them and that I think is really what we're trying to do here yeah I agree and I I told you what I love about this also is that so many of my podcasts my mo is like hardcore prep structure and I love that we're going to do something that isn't that way and quite frankly some of the most popular podcasts I've ever released are the ones that haven't been structured because at the end of the day people love people I think don't even realize how much they respond to authentic conversations where they feel like they're actually in the room so I feel like we're going to be able to accomplish that here and I'm very excited i was telling you this as well that there are people that not only the people that you've interviewed that I haven't that we're going to be bringing on the show but also there are people that have I've interviewed that I've really enjoyed talking to that I don't necessarily want to speak to again because I feel like I've gotten most of what I want but the idea of interviewing them with you now makes me so excited to speak with them again yeah and I and I mean the same goes for me and I think the beauty of this is that not only can these conversations go anywhere and be about any kind of subject that that crops up but my questions are going to lead to places that you want to explore and vice versa and and I think having this unstructured idea of look these people are thoughtful interesting people who have perspectives that you and I are both interested in where do they take us because the world is kind of unanchored at the moment and so to have a chance to have these unstructured conversations that just explore ideas and try and understand not just kind of what's happening but how those shifts are happening why those shifts are happening and what it means to people because I think there's a you spoke about this so beautifully and this whole concept of yours of financial nihilism captures it so well this loss of meaning this loss of meaning in financial markets this loss of meaning of money people being unmed from any kind of grounded center just leads to conversations i I've had plenty of them over dinner in the last couple of years with people that you know you go for a quick dinner and you end up three and a half hours later and two bottles of wine in sitting there you know with your head in your hands and I mean these earnest conversations and every single one of them has been profound yeah i can't remember the name of the academic who's associated with the term the meaning crisis but this is a term that we've heard banded about quite a bit especially since the pandemic and I think that sentiment also filters into financial markets and to politics and I think we are part of this hundred-year pivot is about finding a new source of meaning and a new organizing principle in society that's what we're sort of trying to figure out in real time yeah and I mean look it could come from any one of a number of directions you know I published this piece in in March with five essays from great friends of mine many or all of whom will hopefully grace this podcast with us and I gave them a very very broad brief i'd had conversations with them in the last year or so about the world and their thoughts on it so I knew kind of that they were thinking along the same lines as I was in terms of trying to figure things out but I gave them a very broad brief said I'm not going to tell you what to write about i want you to write about how you're feeling and how you see the world and how it makes you feel not what it makes you think and you know it worked beautifully i got I got five completely different essays back each taking a very different line of attack for the problems that the world's facing and you know when you put them together it was an extraordinarily rounded set of ideas and also questions you know that leave you thinking wow what what really is going on and more importantly how do I feel about it i told you that I loved that entire what would you call it it was a newsletter but they were individual essays yeah just just a collection of essays that's all it was really wonderful and my favorite one was Rogers and I told you that I it really spoke to me when he quoted Avita that line from Avita that I still need your love after all that I've done and he asks whose love whose love do we need after all that we've done and uh I think what he was referring to if I remember correctly was forgiveness and grace the grace of God and there is a sense in which we're going through a trial a great trial as a people as a country as a nation as a world and it's going to shape the future profoundly perhaps in the same way that World War II the depression shaped the post-war generation and the war itself and all of that and the sacrifice the collective sacrifice is something you and I talked about in fact it's so interesting that you asked this question in the conversation we had whatever it was was it a couple of months ago Grant when we recorded it and you specifically asked you know could a drop in the stock market cause that collective sense of sacrifice and my initial reaction was like not really unless it was you know cataclysmic it was so significant that it caused it necessitated shared sacrifice and I I recently had a conversation with James Van Galen on the show where we talked about the possibility of a wealth-driven recession a recession that's driven by a fall in the stock market that's so great that it has such a substantial impact on consumer spending because of the fact that the top 10% are responsible for 50% of consumer spending and because also baby boomers do so much to support their children so there are knock-on effects and then AI could accelerate that so I think as I reflected on what you said in the last couple weeks I think there may be more truth to that and we're we're sort of going to see that playing out potentially here with these tariffs that Trump imposed everyone's still trying to figure out how impactful they're going to be because we still live in a complicated internationalized global trade world characterized by global trade and so there are tons of prices that we can't quite figure out because it's not as simple as you know we slap tariffs on China and their goods are going to get more expensive they're importing parts and pieces and sending their goods onto third other third party nations that are assembling the piece so all of that together is something that no one can really quite figure out there's so much uncertainty also in the supply chain and the rhetoric and in the policies of this administration and so this feels like co in a sense right in the sense of like this just feels like uncharted territory you know what's really interesting that that that answer you gave there was a microcosm of of this podcast because you started off talking about Roger's essay on religion and you ended up with tariffs right and supply chains and that to me is fascinating because that's the strange thing that's happening here and you know I'm as I said in my the letter I published and I said in our conversation you I'm not a religious man but there's a spiritual component to this and I've been really struck by the kind of swell in talk about religion in private emails I've had and conversations that those letters and our conversations sparked it's fascinating to me to see that this idea of religion and I don't necessarily mean it in the form of a god but in the form of as you said some kind of moral center some kind of compass that gives principles and and ethics and morals and guidance and all that stuff it feels like people are grasping for it and to go from there to supply chains in the space of a few minutes just shows you how close all this is and and I think how at sea everybody is in trying to figure all this stuff out and you know some of the people we've got lined up when I went through those five essays there was one thread that ran right the way through them one reference that was made by each of the five authors which didn't come as a surprise to me but I think it's very telling and that was uh our mutual friend Neil How's and Bill Strauss's book The Fourth Turning you know this idea of a fourth turning and all that it brings in terms of the things we talked about and morals and ethics and principles that kind of stuff it ran through that letter like a seam of gold through a rock you know it was really really interesting and and we're going to have Neil join us on the on the podcast as one of our first couple of guests to talk about that and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that as a starting point for this kind of exploration of I mean it's right there in the name too right i think Neil's generational cycles are 80 to 100 years roughly i think he's a perfect guest to start this because I think when you when you study enough history and I am by no no means a historian uh there are many people who I follow who I would consider to be people that actually have studied history but from my superficial understanding of history there is so much about this time that just feels resonant it feels like we're playing out something that's happened many times before and there are many shocking similarities to the 1930s you know with these trade wars and potential capital wars and the breakdown of the global order so I think having on a historian like Neil who's also developed a framework that tries to put some of that history into a kind of rhythmic order is a very appropriate first episode for the series yeah I think so too and it's funny you know I read that book I don't know maybe 15 years something like that and I found it profoundly interesting and thoughtprovoking at the time but it's funny with that in the back of my mind there have been a few things along the last 15 years that have I've kind of added and added and added as as a way to as various lenses to look through things and that has definitely been one of them but um you I've talked about this before you brought up the Great Depression and World War II and all these echoes throughout history around the last fourth turning and you know what's fascinating to me is I you know when I grew up in the UK at school history was my favorite subject and and we we learned about World War II and the leadup to World War II and that was a big focus of history in England obviously it would have been and uh from that day to literally a few years ago the piece that I I could never really understand properly even though you kind of read about it I could never really understand it was you think about how could society reach a point where someone like Hitler could be elected elected you know this is not someone who stole power this is this guy was elected in a landslide and I could never really put myself in that place to understand it and uh I listened to podcast called the rest is history which which I really really enjoy and they did a little fivepart miniseries about the rise of the Nazi party in in in the 1920s and 30s in in Germany and and that brought this period to life and going into it not understanding how it could happen I came out of that thinking how could it not have happened and I think that's the important thing for all of us today is is to understand the times we're living through are going to be written about for hundreds of years to come this is a period of time that is changing the entire way the world works it's changing every relationship in the world not just between countries but between generations and between classes and between you know everything is up for grabs here and we talk about in our little corner of the world the financial world we talk about the system being reset and all this stuff and it's kind of a throwaway phrase because we're talking about the monetary system or the financial system we don't really know what we're talking about we just recognize that things are shifting and for me you know as we go through this journey together you and I along with our guests I think the things I'm trying to really put into place is to help people gain the perspective that they will get in 20 years but try and get it now by looking backwards you know I think it was Churchill that said the further back you look the farther forward you can see and and I think that's such a an important concept so hopefully in these conversations we can bring ideas and bring thoughts and bring perspectives to the table that will help people in real time gather a much bigger understanding rather than having their heads in the chaos and not being able to step back far enough to see yeah I love that actually I I recently stepped away from Twitter and it's been so good for not just my mental health but also I think also for my my ability to do exactly what you're describing because it's so easy to get caught up in the noise and not see the big picture and I think you know when we were talking with Neil about doing the show we were also talking with Russell Napier who you and I agree has just been look my personal perspective is that when it comes to finance and political economy there is no one who I have followed these years who has nailed it better in terms of creating the most coherent complete and accurate framework than Russell Napier great and to that point I was saying to both Neil and Russell that when I started the Hidden Forces podcast my goal was to try and understand the forces that are impacting the epiphenomena of the world and we talk about this all the time in markets you know what's driving the market everyone no one knows and you're always trying to extract we were even talking about this with the case of the supply chains and no one no one knows actually what the impact's going to be the problem is very clear tariffs rising cost of imported goods why can't we figure it out because it's a complex system and markets as a whole are even more complex and I said something to you guys in an email which actually I want to give credit to Tim O'Reilly who inspired this with an episode that we had done it was sort of a combination of something he had written in his book about the future it was a book about map making and what I said was that I feel like and this is applies to the series what I think I hope to accomplish with this series is that we are able to draw for our listeners a map to the future by helping us all collectively not just helping them but you and I are trying to figure this out in real time and we're never going to quite know we're just kind of trying to figure it out by understanding the forces that are shaping the present and I think that's the thing that the people and for me that means developing a framework developing maps and for me what that has meant in practice is trying to find the people that have developed either the most accurate map or some map of the territory that is illuminating that creates that aha moment and folks like Neil How have done that with his generational cycles theory Russell Napier has done that with national capitalism and there are others many that uh I've some of whom I've mentioned to you in an email I even mentioned one who I don't know is she's necessarily for us but I think it's a great example again of this for people to have a sense when I had Shosana Zuba on my show back this was a long time ago I think it was episode 79 so this would have been 2018 or 2019 and she wrote her book surveillance surveillance capitalism it was terrific yeah at that time nobody I mean I had read some folks like Sher Turkl who had done great work she had written a book called alone together where she talked about what was going on back in 2013 with social media but no one had quite nailed it in developing this framework that helped to really explain to folks what was going on you know what were the forces that were driving the changes that we were experiencing and putting it into a coherent framework and I think you know for our listeners I'm sure this is true for you and I know this is true for my listeners as well my listeners enjoy boy when they are able to understand something you know I'm that way too right like if you illuminate something for me if you if I'm staring at a problem for whatever period of time a month a year 10 years and someone comes along and they drop something in front of me that suddenly changes something shifts in my understanding it's kind of like moving a three-dimensional object in space right you're seeing only a two-dimensional version of that object all of a sudden you shift it and you see what it is and that is such a powerful experience and it's not just valuable from an investment standpoint but it's it's also just deeply gratifying and I hope that we can accomplish that with the show in fact that that to me is what I'm most excited about about this program Grant is that you and I together will be able to bring on the people that we feel are the highest signal to noise ratio folks and sit down and speak with them and in a sense through a series expose our listeners to those people who over the years we have found to be the most valuable teachers at least that is how I feel yeah i mean the beauty of this for me Demetri is that I come into this with only questions i don't have answers you know I have thoughts and I have perspectives but really I just have questions at the moment and I think you know that it's funny you talked about that three-dimensional object and I was looking at thinking about this and and what we were going to do over the last several weeks and in my timeline popped up one of those terrific pictures that are taken from the air it looks like a drone shot but of animals in a desert walking and you see it looks like a big shadow and then it says zoom in you can actually see that it looks like animals this was zebras in this case it looks like a whole herd of zebras but when you zoom in and look closely it's the shadows of the zebras and the zebras are are there and it's what you just said just brought that back to me about re-examining this 3D object in in space and and it's that you know it's I don't even know what my questions are at the moment all I know is I feel this great sense of uncertainty and this great sense of unpredictability in the world and everywhere you go and particularly this last week has been a perfect example of this you're surrounded by such faux certainty you know everybody is certain about everything you know everybody will tell you exactly what these tariffs are going to mean exactly what it's going to happen in markets and it's utter nonsense you know from day one we're guessing about the future so you cannot be certain it's a physical impossibility so I you know I think this idea that we can just ask questions and just go where those answers take us and that that could mean with that same guest or it might lead us to another guest or it might lead us down a completely different avenue and I have no idea where that's taking us and I cannot tell you how thrilling I find that idea me too man like I said I I love again for me my podcast so often not always but so often is this like structured teaching experience where I do a deep dive on a guest or a topic and I try to extract ahead of time what I think the most interesting things are and then I create a kind of outline so we can explore those things so I can share those things with the audience in this case what I find especially exciting is that I feel like this is going to be a much more inclusive experience this is going to be much more about like hey why don't you come and join us for this conversation as we all try and figure this out together and the fact that there's going to be less sort of conscious preparation I think is a big part of it so again I I can't emphasize how excited I am man this is really going to be an incredible journey well we talked about Neil and the importance that he's had for both of us in trying to figure this out talk a little bit more about Russell because as you said you know you and I both come at this from the financial world that was our route into this whole podcasting space but you touched on it a minute ago you know Russell has been absolutely spoton in just about everything he said and that's why he's probably going to be the second guest in the series to use that as a framework well you know I can't bring up Russell without first just mentioning that you introduced us and I I have to say again it's just important to point out that I think this project is possible because of how generous you are and you are and I don't want to go to do the whole like you know congratulating each other thing where people do that on podcast but you know you're a very generous person Grant and you've been very generous to not just me but all sorts of folks with your network so Russell's an example of that i met Russell through you i don't I'm sure what probably happened was I heard him on a podcast episode and I reached out and said "Hey any chance you could introduce me because this he's just" and he first came on for an episode on the Asian financial crisis you know he he had written a book about his experience in Hong Kong through the Asian financial crisis and I believe it was the book was diary entries from 1995 to the height and resolution of the crisis maybe 95 to98 and I mentioned that first because that was the way that I was exposed to Russell i was exposed to his methodology i was exposed to how he thinks one of the things I really love about Russell and I look for this in all the high signal to noise ratio people that I identify there's a process for coming to an understanding and part of that process involves a baseline level of humility now what I also love about Russell and the reason I bring this up actually in the context of the Asian financial crisis because he was looking at his diary entries he went back and published and analyzed what he thought at the time not what he thinks he thought now but actually what he thought at the time what he was saying what he was writing and that is a level of accountability that I think is something we should all strive for and it comes across in the quality of his analysis the other thing I love about Russell is he's a historian again I don't think it's a coincidence that we're picking two historians and in fact you know I put together a list of names that I shared with you about some people that I I think might be interesting guests to have on and there are certainly historians in there and of course Russell's the keeper of the quote library of mistakes uh a library of financial mistakes and I can't tell you how much I've like I said I've gotten so much value from him i also love that and I think this is really important too Grant i'm trying to think about where I recently spoke with someone about this but in any case you know this let's go back to this thing about frameworks ah right it was a conversation I had with George Freriedman where this came up so this is the thing about frameworks right actually you know you know that I'm a father uh I recently became a father my son's now seven months or something and there's been something really magical about watching him awaken you know like there's a kind of awakening that happens with every day that he grows older and what I also noticed and I knew this already so I already had a quote framework around how this works in childhood development but you can see that he went from being born where everything is just stimuli unstructured streams of information colors lights sounds he has no way to say that sound oh that's an elephant you know or that's a door all he sees is some sort of like you know just overflow of information and what I've read about this incidentally is that it's somewhat like being on psychedelics or having a stroke in your left hemisphere you know it's like you just lose the ability to have any kind of everything just kind of melts into each other and I feel like what happens as we get older is we bring structure to experience we structure the world around us and that's what these frameworks are about it's about and we need the frameworks we need frameworks to navigate the world you know this is also brings us back to questions about God and all all else which is that reality is not as it seems to be right because so much of what we do is we bring order to experience we structure the reality that this chaotic world of information that comes at us so that we can navigate it but the maps we use to navigate it should not be confused with the territory and as we get older we develop these maps and some of us get exceptionally wedded to those maps and what I think is so special about the series is that what we're doing is we're breaking we're acknowledging that those maps no longer work and that we shouldn't be attached to them as though they are the territory and the people and this is my favorite quote by Russell is that the worst thing you can do and I'm paraphrasing now he doesn't say this exact thing he doesn't say he does say the worst thing you can do but the worst thing you can do in sort of periods of great change the kind of change that we're talking about here is to ask to get all the right answers to all the wrong questions and what that really means is what framework are you using what are the the sets of questions that derive from what framework that you're getting answers and you think you're getting all the right answers but you're using the wrong framework because those frameworks are outdated your models no longer work your maps no longer accurately represent the territory that you're seeking to navigate and when you go through these cycles everything has to change your baseline assumptions have to change so one of the things I really love about Russell as well is that he has that sort of deep bottoms up analysis and he's not dependent on a framework and those people are exceptionally intelligent they tend to have if not an academic historical background they certainly have an appreciation for history because you have to be willing to break the old and to build something new so that's what I love about Grant i love about Russell and I think what's great about Neil and again why I think he's such a great person to start the episode with is he helps his framework and his model helps explain why we're going through this transition and then again Russell's is about like building a new model to understand the political economy of a changing global order of a changing economic order and what that world looks like what will increasingly look like and how to navigate it you know I can go in so many directions with what you just said remind me to come back to the fatherhood thing in a second because there's something there's a component of that that I want to talk about but the one piece of that I would add to what you just said there is the time element you have to be able to change your framework quickly because we've grown up in periods of long slowm moving trends you know globalization has been a 40-year trend that has now kind of reached its apogee and we haven't had to really function quickly apart from if you've been in the markets you've had the odd day of chaos where you've had to react but you haven't really had to completely adjust your framework quickly you've had to deal with a 10% down day in 2008 or deal with whipsors when the markets have have rallied in the middle of bare markets and stuff so you haven't had to really break things down to their roots and then rebuild them again and that's what we're talking about here we're talking about a world that we all believe to your point we understand how it works and we simply don't and that has already happened the world no longer works the way we all believe it does and so the quicker we kind of figure out how it's changed and what that means for us and what we have to do to adapt to it the better for all of us but I want to come back to that fatherhood thing because I know and I've it's been such a cool thing to watch you on this journey as a father of a young child because I've you know I've got two grandkids now i'm at the other end of that spectrum but for me this is such an important part of this because I I don't really spend much time worrying about me and I'm worrying about my place in this and how I'm going to deal with this because a I'm far enough down the track and I've you know I've lived a life and I've I've built a family i've done all those things the thing that I spent all my time thinking about and worrying about is how do my kids navigate this and now I look at these beautiful six and four year old girls who are completely oblivious to this and I and my questions are all about what's the world they're going to inherit like and how can we either prepare them for it ideally or try and provide some sort of haven from it if it's really bad those are the questions that I really want to dig into because if we can help the people who are going to have to deal with this in ways that we aren't we're simply not going to have to deal with it in the way that someone who's 15 now is going to have to deal with this world we're just not we're going to be through that stage where it's the kind of thing that overwhelms your most productive years so that's a big component to me and you know this fatherhood the piece and again through these conversations and through the the essays and everything I keep getting that back people talking about their kids and talking about their families and talking about you know we become inure to this when you're staring at markets you become inure to volatility really because it's part of your job and for a lot of people it's how they make their money you know they embrace the volatility but if we take the last couple of weeks for example out of the way and I'm sure I won't speak for you but I've looked at this or I've been forced to look at I should say through a financial lens because the news feeds that I'm getting bombarded and the emails I'm getting are all from people who are financial practitioners and trying to understand the world through that lens but if you step back for a moment and try and imagine the last two weeks without headlines about stock markets down 20% and without talk about recessions and without talk about financial aspects of this what does that world look like to someone who's never read the Wall Street Journal in their lives or doesn't have a 401k or if they do it's in a company pension plan it's manageful they don't think about the stock market ever you know until it's front page news or until it's uh on 60 Minutes about the crash you know that's a very different world that those people are living in that's the vast majority of people you know we are in a minority and so again there are so many different ways that we can take this but there are also so many different vantage points that you can stand and look at it from that will to your point about the wrong questions and the right answers give you a completely different vector upon which to travel towards this thing yeah well that also again brings me back to frameworks one of the things that I I don't know if you and I talked about it but I've spoken about in recent episodes is that you know I feel like we've just gotten to the point now where investors have become comfortable with the idea of mean reversion they become really comfortable with this idea that okay yeah we had the 2008 crisis that was really scary but the markets rebounded we had COVID scary but the markets rebounded every time the markets come back and I'm not saying that markets don't come back or that the world's going to end that's not what I'm suggesting but I think the setup this time could be one where the markets don't revert back to the previous paradigm and there are a lot of reasons to think that that's possible one is the baby broom retirement wall you have uh people that are going to increasingly be pulling their money out you have this tariffs and this intention at least stated intention by the Trump administration to rebalance wealth and income in society which also will change those dynamics and will change dollar recycling which has been a big huge source of asset price appreciation and you also have AI which is something that I just don't think is spoken about enough in this context and this is again something that I spoke about recently in my episode uh titled are we about to enter the first white collar recession and I mentioned the wealth-driven effect which is that if you know stock prices go down substantially down if one's net worth declines especially if they're nearing retirement age or in retirement age they become much more riskaverse about spending consumer spending is so heavily tilted towards the higher echelon income brackets that could drive a recession and in a recession firms that were previously reluctant to experiment with artificial intelligence large language models may become more willing to do so because they've already let go of people and they're costconscious and so Chat GPT went from being not good enough to maybe just good enough and so that kicks off that ignites the beginning of a multi-year multi-deade reordering of the economy a technological revolution that driven by AI and that also has huge political ramifications you know maybe that finally gives the Democratic party whose base consists of white collar workers who previously were organized around the banner of some of this woke ideology to now being focused around UBI and sort of the the effects of losing their jobs and losing economic opportunities in other words maybe we end up seeing happen to the white collar workforce what happened to the bluecollar workforce and that has profound implications for politics now I don't know exactly how I got on this train Grant i don't know how I don't remember exactly what your question was and why I got here but I guess that's in the spirit of the podcast yeah no look exactly right exactly right and I you know I like I said this whole thing is going to be such an adventure and I'm look I'm very conscious of us doing a podcast talking about a podcast again Seinfeld it keeps coming it's a podcast about nothing podcast about Exactly so we won't make this episode too long but we wanted to share the beginning of this journey with you and what we're going to do you know Demetri and I will will publish these conversations and we're going to make sure that everybody gets to hear them because I think these are profoundly important questions we will publish them to our subscribers probably a week before they go public just so they they get the benefit of that for supporting our work but I think you know Demetri a big part of this is going to be the audience out there whether they email you or they email me and ask us the questions and suggest people that they've heard of that brought an interesting perspective to the way they try and order the world around them because you know you and I have our networks and and the network effect of those networks is terrific but I've lost count of how many interesting people I've come across over the years I'd never heard of before and you have these conversations with them or you read something they've written and to your point right it suddenly turns a torch on you in a corner that you've been trying to squint into for quite some time and so you know having the audience be a part of this and join us on this exploration is going to be a huge component of it absolutely I couldn't agree more and I'm very excited by the prospect of hearing back from people again I I go back to this thing of like there's something really exciting to me about changing the format of the show again I'm still doing my podcast you're still doing your podcast but you have actually done series like this before with other people i have never done anything like this i've been doing the show for eight years now roughly speaking and it's been roughly the same format it's been me interviewing people nerding out on their material constructing an outline and sort of quizzing them and occasionally more conversational programming and occasionally kind of more panel stuff but it's been more or less the same and certainly just me i'm very excited by this idea of doing it with somebody else i can't tell you how excited I am and doing it with you of all people well mate I agree as I say we've both been trying to find a the right way to collaborate for quite some time now and I'm I'm delighted we found it well listen let's wrap things up there the first episode of this will be out sometime in the next couple of weeks and we can of course the big problem Demetri with doing this with the co-host is you have three calendars to align right that's the single biggest impediment especially when you're all on different time zones i've recorded podcasts at 4 in the morning in Australia and I've done all kinds of things over the years you're lucky cuz you're right in the middle so you should be fine so in terms of publishing the plan is to uh publish this to the whole world so that everybody gets a chance to join us on this journey because we both believe it's profound our own subscribers will get it first we'll probably publish it a week before it goes public but anyone that's not a subscriber will have the chance to listen to these conversations absolutely so I think you know we were still trying to figure out how we would publish the public feed but we're going to both publish this on our private feeds Grant so your premium subscribers will get it my premium subscribers will get it and then what we're probably going to do is we're both going to publish it on our own feeds publicly we also talked about maybe when we publish it publicly maybe we'll put it on a on a regular feed but we can hash that out for people when we'll Yeah when Neil's episode comes out we'll we'll have a lot to talk about and we'll mention that too at the top hey we did tell people we're doing this on the fly right and there's the proof right there it's authentic it's exactly my friend in the pudding well listen we'll um we'll reconvene when we can pin Neil down and we'll be back with this in the not too distant future in the meantime Demetri just let people know where they can follow all the great stuff you do at Hidden Forces yeah you can go to hiddenforces.io to learn more about the podcast i do have a Twitter feed but I like I said I've taken a indefinite hiatus from Twitter but my Twitter handle if you want to go through it is kofenus with a K and I also have a Twitter handle hidden forces pod that you can follow yep and uh I'm pretty easy to find grant-wills.com and my Twitter handle is ttmy gh and boy did I wish I was taking a hiatus from Twitter at the moment it is becoming almost unbearable it is uh not a very fun place i also should mention if you want to mention it too Grant I have an email address that you can reach out to [email protected] and all the emails get forwarded to me so uh feel free to reach out through there if you need to connect actually and the same goes for me [email protected] and they will come to me too all right my friend this has been terrific i look forward to this journey with you i don't know which one of us is Sancho Penza and which one's Donkeyote but I guess we'll figure that out as we go along this journey as well i'll talk to you soon awesome you too take care Grant if you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed if you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community you can also do that through our subscriber page today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stillanos Nikolo for more episodes you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io you can follow me on Twitter Kofenus and you can email me at [email protected] as always thanks for listening we'll see you next time

what's up everybody i have some very exciting news to share with all of you my friend and fellow podcaster Grant Williams and I have teamed up to launch a new podcast series we're calling the 100-year pivot it's a joint effort based on a shared understanding that we are living through a once- ina century economic political and geopolitical reordering that will require us to develop novel maps and investment frameworks to help us navigate these incredibly consequential times over the course of the series Grant and I will be speaking with the smartest most plugged in people we know to help us chart a path through this gathering storm as we seek to position ourselves our organizations our families and our portfolios for the changes to come premium subscribers to the Hidden Forces podcast and the Grant Williams podcast will have early access to the episodes in this ongoing series go to hiddenforces.io/subscribe io/subscribe to access our premium feed so the episodes in this series will download automatically to your mobile podcast app whenever we publish if you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community which includes Q&A calls with guests access to special research and analysis in-person events and dinners you can also do that on our subscriber page and if you still have questions feel free to send an email to info@hiddenforces.io and I or someone from our team will get right back to you lastly because this conversation deals with investing nothing we say on this podcast can or should be viewed as financial advice all opinions expressed by me and my guests are solely our own opinions and should not be relied upon as the basis for financial decisions and with that please enjoy this first in a long series of conversations on the 100-year pivot with my friend and co-host Grant Williams welcome everybody to the first episode of The 100year Pivot joining me as co-host on this is my great mate and podcaster supreme Dmitri Cafinas mate how are you i'm so happy that we're doing this yeah yeah we've talked about collaborating for quite some time and we never figure out what to do right but this little project of ours is something that's grown completely organically we didn't sit down with a pad and pen and come up with some kind of great idea we could do it just happened and I think that's such an important component of this whole idea yeah and I love the name that we've chosen i feel like you know that name resonated with both of us we threw out a few titles when we were storming brainstorming over it i think it was just the same day within the same hour or so we came up with this name and I feel like it really captures both the secular trends that are so powerful the forces that I use that term for my show whatever the analogous term that you use you guys obviously talk about the endgame with you and Bill Fleinstein and then the pivot which I think is the actionable part that speaks to investors yeah absolutely and since we came up with the idea and the title I mean the pivots are happening left and right there's so much to talk about but I think it's worth before we kind of just have a little look at the world now it's worth us talking about what we aim to get out of these conversations and the beauty of that is as we set out nothing right that's that's that's one of the we're like the Seinfeld of financial podcasts right right yeah the whole idea of this is to we recognize there's something going on and you know the conversation you and I recorded back in February i'm sure your subscribers were the same but mine it resonated so strongly with them and in a way that none of them were expecting you know that a lot of people said to me I had the same paraphrased response so many times i didn't even know that I was feeling this way until Dimmitri articulated it so perfectly and that feeling you know that feeling sometimes you just have to follow those feelings and try and understand what's behind them and that I think is really what we're trying to do here yeah I agree and I I told you what I love about this also is that so many of my podcasts my mo is like hardcore prep structure and I love that we're going to do something that isn't that way and quite frankly some of the most popular podcasts I've ever released are the ones that haven't been structured because at the end of the day people love people I think don't even realize how much they respond to authentic conversations where they feel like they're actually in the room so I feel like we're going to be able to accomplish that here and I'm very excited i was telling you this as well that there are people that not only the people that you've interviewed that I haven't that we're going to be bringing on the show but also there are people that have I've interviewed that I've really enjoyed talking to that I don't necessarily want to speak to again because I feel like I've gotten most of what I want but the idea of interviewing them with you now makes me so excited to speak with them again yeah and I and I mean the same goes for me and I think the beauty of this is that not only can these conversations go anywhere and be about any kind of subject that that crops up but my questions are going to lead to places that you want to explore and vice versa and and I think having this unstructured idea of look these people are thoughtful interesting people who have perspectives that you and I are both interested in where do they take us because the world is kind of unanchored at the moment and so to have a chance to have these unstructured conversations that just explore ideas and try and understand not just kind of what's happening but how those shifts are happening why those shifts are happening and what it means to people because I think there's a you spoke about this so beautifully and this whole concept of yours of financial nihilism captures it so well this loss of meaning this loss of meaning in financial markets this loss of meaning of money people being unmed from any kind of grounded center just leads to conversations i I've had plenty of them over dinner in the last couple of years with people that you know you go for a quick dinner and you end up three and a half hours later and two bottles of wine in sitting there you know with your head in your hands and I mean these earnest conversations and every single one of them has been profound yeah i can't remember the name of the academic who's associated with the term the meaning crisis but this is a term that we've heard banded about quite a bit especially since the pandemic and I think that sentiment also filters into financial markets and to politics and I think we are part of this hundred-year pivot is about finding a new source of meaning and a new organizing principle in society that's what we're sort of trying to figure out in real time yeah and I mean look it could come from any one of a number of directions you know I published this piece in in March with five essays from great friends of mine many or all of whom will hopefully grace this podcast with us and I gave them a very very broad brief i'd had conversations with them in the last year or so about the world and their thoughts on it so I knew kind of that they were thinking along the same lines as I was in terms of trying to figure things out but I gave them a very broad brief said I'm not going to tell you what to write about i want you to write about how you're feeling and how you see the world and how it makes you feel not what it makes you think and you know it worked beautifully i got I got five completely different essays back each taking a very different line of attack for the problems that the world's facing and you know when you put them together it was an extraordinarily rounded set of ideas and also questions you know that leave you thinking wow what what really is going on and more importantly how do I feel about it i told you that I loved that entire what would you call it it was a newsletter but they were individual essays yeah just just a collection of essays that's all it was really wonderful and my favorite one was Rogers and I told you that I it really spoke to me when he quoted Avita that line from Avita that I still need your love after all that I've done and he asks whose love whose love do we need after all that we've done and uh I think what he was referring to if I remember correctly was forgiveness and grace the grace of God and there is a sense in which we're going through a trial a great trial as a people as a country as a nation as a world and it's going to shape the future profoundly perhaps in the same way that World War II the depression shaped the post-war generation and the war itself and all of that and the sacrifice the collective sacrifice is something you and I talked about in fact it's so interesting that you asked this question in the conversation we had whatever it was was it a couple of months ago Grant when we recorded it and you specifically asked you know could a drop in the stock market cause that collective sense of sacrifice and my initial reaction was like not really unless it was you know cataclysmic it was so significant that it caused it necessitated shared sacrifice and I I recently had a conversation with James Van Galen on the show where we talked about the possibility of a wealth-driven recession a recession that's driven by a fall in the stock market that's so great that it has such a substantial impact on consumer spending because of the fact that the top 10% are responsible for 50% of consumer spending and because also baby boomers do so much to support their children so there are knock-on effects and then AI could accelerate that so I think as I reflected on what you said in the last couple weeks I think there may be more truth to that and we're we're sort of going to see that playing out potentially here with these tariffs that Trump imposed everyone's still trying to figure out how impactful they're going to be because we still live in a complicated internationalized global trade world characterized by global trade and so there are tons of prices that we can't quite figure out because it's not as simple as you know we slap tariffs on China and their goods are going to get more expensive they're importing parts and pieces and sending their goods onto third other third party nations that are assembling the piece so all of that together is something that no one can really quite figure out there's so much uncertainty also in the supply chain and the rhetoric and in the policies of this administration and so this feels like co in a sense right in the sense of like this just feels like uncharted territory you know what's really interesting that that that answer you gave there was a microcosm of of this podcast because you started off talking about Roger's essay on religion and you ended up with tariffs right and supply chains and that to me is fascinating because that's the strange thing that's happening here and you know I'm as I said in my the letter I published and I said in our conversation you I'm not a religious man but there's a spiritual component to this and I've been really struck by the kind of swell in talk about religion in private emails I've had and conversations that those letters and our conversations sparked it's fascinating to me to see that this idea of religion and I don't necessarily mean it in the form of a god but in the form of as you said some kind of moral center some kind of compass that gives principles and and ethics and morals and guidance and all that stuff it feels like people are grasping for it and to go from there to supply chains in the space of a few minutes just shows you how close all this is and and I think how at sea everybody is in trying to figure all this stuff out and you know some of the people we've got lined up when I went through those five essays there was one thread that ran right the way through them one reference that was made by each of the five authors which didn't come as a surprise to me but I think it's very telling and that was uh our mutual friend Neil How's and Bill Strauss's book The Fourth Turning you know this idea of a fourth turning and all that it brings in terms of the things we talked about and morals and ethics and principles that kind of stuff it ran through that letter like a seam of gold through a rock you know it was really really interesting and and we're going to have Neil join us on the on the podcast as one of our first couple of guests to talk about that and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that as a starting point for this kind of exploration of I mean it's right there in the name too right i think Neil's generational cycles are 80 to 100 years roughly i think he's a perfect guest to start this because I think when you when you study enough history and I am by no no means a historian uh there are many people who I follow who I would consider to be people that actually have studied history but from my superficial understanding of history there is so much about this time that just feels resonant it feels like we're playing out something that's happened many times before and there are many shocking similarities to the 1930s you know with these trade wars and potential capital wars and the breakdown of the global order so I think having on a historian like Neil who's also developed a framework that tries to put some of that history into a kind of rhythmic order is a very appropriate first episode for the series yeah I think so too and it's funny you know I read that book I don't know maybe 15 years something like that and I found it profoundly interesting and thoughtprovoking at the time but it's funny with that in the back of my mind there have been a few things along the last 15 years that have I've kind of added and added and added as as a way to as various lenses to look through things and that has definitely been one of them but um you I've talked about this before you brought up the Great Depression and World War II and all these echoes throughout history around the last fourth turning and you know what's fascinating to me is I you know when I grew up in the UK at school history was my favorite subject and and we we learned about World War II and the leadup to World War II and that was a big focus of history in England obviously it would have been and uh from that day to literally a few years ago the piece that I I could never really understand properly even though you kind of read about it I could never really understand it was you think about how could society reach a point where someone like Hitler could be elected elected you know this is not someone who stole power this is this guy was elected in a landslide and I could never really put myself in that place to understand it and uh I listened to podcast called the rest is history which which I really really enjoy and they did a little fivepart miniseries about the rise of the Nazi party in in in the 1920s and 30s in in Germany and and that brought this period to life and going into it not understanding how it could happen I came out of that thinking how could it not have happened and I think that's the important thing for all of us today is is to understand the times we're living through are going to be written about for hundreds of years to come this is a period of time that is changing the entire way the world works it's changing every relationship in the world not just between countries but between generations and between classes and between you know everything is up for grabs here and we talk about in our little corner of the world the financial world we talk about the system being reset and all this stuff and it's kind of a throwaway phrase because we're talking about the monetary system or the financial system we don't really know what we're talking about we just recognize that things are shifting and for me you know as we go through this journey together you and I along with our guests I think the things I'm trying to really put into place is to help people gain the perspective that they will get in 20 years but try and get it now by looking backwards you know I think it was Churchill that said the further back you look the farther forward you can see and and I think that's such a an important concept so hopefully in these conversations we can bring ideas and bring thoughts and bring perspectives to the table that will help people in real time gather a much bigger understanding rather than having their heads in the chaos and not being able to step back far enough to see yeah I love that actually I I recently stepped away from Twitter and it's been so good for not just my mental health but also I think also for my my ability to do exactly what you're describing because it's so easy to get caught up in the noise and not see the big picture and I think you know when we were talking with Neil about doing the show we were also talking with Russell Napier who you and I agree has just been look my personal perspective is that when it comes to finance and political economy there is no one who I have followed these years who has nailed it better in terms of creating the most coherent complete and accurate framework than Russell Napier great and to that point I was saying to both Neil and Russell that when I started the Hidden Forces podcast my goal was to try and understand the forces that are impacting the epiphenomena of the world and we talk about this all the time in markets you know what's driving the market everyone no one knows and you're always trying to extract we were even talking about this with the case of the supply chains and no one no one knows actually what the impact's going to be the problem is very clear tariffs rising cost of imported goods why can't we figure it out because it's a complex system and markets as a whole are even more complex and I said something to you guys in an email which actually I want to give credit to Tim O'Reilly who inspired this with an episode that we had done it was sort of a combination of something he had written in his book about the future it was a book about map making and what I said was that I feel like and this is applies to the series what I think I hope to accomplish with this series is that we are able to draw for our listeners a map to the future by helping us all collectively not just helping them but you and I are trying to figure this out in real time and we're never going to quite know we're just kind of trying to figure it out by understanding the forces that are shaping the present and I think that's the thing that the people and for me that means developing a framework developing maps and for me what that has meant in practice is trying to find the people that have developed either the most accurate map or some map of the territory that is illuminating that creates that aha moment and folks like Neil How have done that with his generational cycles theory Russell Napier has done that with national capitalism and there are others many that uh I've some of whom I've mentioned to you in an email I even mentioned one who I don't know is she's necessarily for us but I think it's a great example again of this for people to have a sense when I had Shosana Zuba on my show back this was a long time ago I think it was episode 79 so this would have been 2018 or 2019 and she wrote her book surveillance surveillance capitalism it was terrific yeah at that time nobody I mean I had read some folks like Sher Turkl who had done great work she had written a book called alone together where she talked about what was going on back in 2013 with social media but no one had quite nailed it in developing this framework that helped to really explain to folks what was going on you know what were the forces that were driving the changes that we were experiencing and putting it into a coherent framework and I think you know for our listeners I'm sure this is true for you and I know this is true for my listeners as well my listeners enjoy boy when they are able to understand something you know I'm that way too right like if you illuminate something for me if you if I'm staring at a problem for whatever period of time a month a year 10 years and someone comes along and they drop something in front of me that suddenly changes something shifts in my understanding it's kind of like moving a three-dimensional object in space right you're seeing only a two-dimensional version of that object all of a sudden you shift it and you see what it is and that is such a powerful experience and it's not just valuable from an investment standpoint but it's it's also just deeply gratifying and I hope that we can accomplish that with the show in fact that that to me is what I'm most excited about about this program Grant is that you and I together will be able to bring on the people that we feel are the highest signal to noise ratio folks and sit down and speak with them and in a sense through a series expose our listeners to those people who over the years we have found to be the most valuable teachers at least that is how I feel yeah i mean the beauty of this for me Demetri is that I come into this with only questions i don't have answers you know I have thoughts and I have perspectives but really I just have questions at the moment and I think you know that it's funny you talked about that three-dimensional object and I was looking at thinking about this and and what we were going to do over the last several weeks and in my timeline popped up one of those terrific pictures that are taken from the air it looks like a drone shot but of animals in a desert walking and you see it looks like a big shadow and then it says zoom in you can actually see that it looks like animals this was zebras in this case it looks like a whole herd of zebras but when you zoom in and look closely it's the shadows of the zebras and the zebras are are there and it's what you just said just brought that back to me about re-examining this 3D object in in space and and it's that you know it's I don't even know what my questions are at the moment all I know is I feel this great sense of uncertainty and this great sense of unpredictability in the world and everywhere you go and particularly this last week has been a perfect example of this you're surrounded by such faux certainty you know everybody is certain about everything you know everybody will tell you exactly what these tariffs are going to mean exactly what it's going to happen in markets and it's utter nonsense you know from day one we're guessing about the future so you cannot be certain it's a physical impossibility so I you know I think this idea that we can just ask questions and just go where those answers take us and that that could mean with that same guest or it might lead us to another guest or it might lead us down a completely different avenue and I have no idea where that's taking us and I cannot tell you how thrilling I find that idea me too man like I said I I love again for me my podcast so often not always but so often is this like structured teaching experience where I do a deep dive on a guest or a topic and I try to extract ahead of time what I think the most interesting things are and then I create a kind of outline so we can explore those things so I can share those things with the audience in this case what I find especially exciting is that I feel like this is going to be a much more inclusive experience this is going to be much more about like hey why don't you come and join us for this conversation as we all try and figure this out together and the fact that there's going to be less sort of conscious preparation I think is a big part of it so again I I can't emphasize how excited I am man this is really going to be an incredible journey well we talked about Neil and the importance that he's had for both of us in trying to figure this out talk a little bit more about Russell because as you said you know you and I both come at this from the financial world that was our route into this whole podcasting space but you touched on it a minute ago you know Russell has been absolutely spoton in just about everything he said and that's why he's probably going to be the second guest in the series to use that as a framework well you know I can't bring up Russell without first just mentioning that you introduced us and I I have to say again it's just important to point out that I think this project is possible because of how generous you are and you are and I don't want to go to do the whole like you know congratulating each other thing where people do that on podcast but you know you're a very generous person Grant and you've been very generous to not just me but all sorts of folks with your network so Russell's an example of that i met Russell through you i don't I'm sure what probably happened was I heard him on a podcast episode and I reached out and said "Hey any chance you could introduce me because this he's just" and he first came on for an episode on the Asian financial crisis you know he he had written a book about his experience in Hong Kong through the Asian financial crisis and I believe it was the book was diary entries from 1995 to the height and resolution of the crisis maybe 95 to98 and I mentioned that first because that was the way that I was exposed to Russell i was exposed to his methodology i was exposed to how he thinks one of the things I really love about Russell and I look for this in all the high signal to noise ratio people that I identify there's a process for coming to an understanding and part of that process involves a baseline level of humility now what I also love about Russell and the reason I bring this up actually in the context of the Asian financial crisis because he was looking at his diary entries he went back and published and analyzed what he thought at the time not what he thinks he thought now but actually what he thought at the time what he was saying what he was writing and that is a level of accountability that I think is something we should all strive for and it comes across in the quality of his analysis the other thing I love about Russell is he's a historian again I don't think it's a coincidence that we're picking two historians and in fact you know I put together a list of names that I shared with you about some people that I I think might be interesting guests to have on and there are certainly historians in there and of course Russell's the keeper of the quote library of mistakes uh a library of financial mistakes and I can't tell you how much I've like I said I've gotten so much value from him i also love that and I think this is really important too Grant i'm trying to think about where I recently spoke with someone about this but in any case you know this let's go back to this thing about frameworks ah right it was a conversation I had with George Freriedman where this came up so this is the thing about frameworks right actually you know you know that I'm a father uh I recently became a father my son's now seven months or something and there's been something really magical about watching him awaken you know like there's a kind of awakening that happens with every day that he grows older and what I also noticed and I knew this already so I already had a quote framework around how this works in childhood development but you can see that he went from being born where everything is just stimuli unstructured streams of information colors lights sounds he has no way to say that sound oh that's an elephant you know or that's a door all he sees is some sort of like you know just overflow of information and what I've read about this incidentally is that it's somewhat like being on psychedelics or having a stroke in your left hemisphere you know it's like you just lose the ability to have any kind of everything just kind of melts into each other and I feel like what happens as we get older is we bring structure to experience we structure the world around us and that's what these frameworks are about it's about and we need the frameworks we need frameworks to navigate the world you know this is also brings us back to questions about God and all all else which is that reality is not as it seems to be right because so much of what we do is we bring order to experience we structure the reality that this chaotic world of information that comes at us so that we can navigate it but the maps we use to navigate it should not be confused with the territory and as we get older we develop these maps and some of us get exceptionally wedded to those maps and what I think is so special about the series is that what we're doing is we're breaking we're acknowledging that those maps no longer work and that we shouldn't be attached to them as though they are the territory and the people and this is my favorite quote by Russell is that the worst thing you can do and I'm paraphrasing now he doesn't say this exact thing he doesn't say he does say the worst thing you can do but the worst thing you can do in sort of periods of great change the kind of change that we're talking about here is to ask to get all the right answers to all the wrong questions and what that really means is what framework are you using what are the the sets of questions that derive from what framework that you're getting answers and you think you're getting all the right answers but you're using the wrong framework because those frameworks are outdated your models no longer work your maps no longer accurately represent the territory that you're seeking to navigate and when you go through these cycles everything has to change your baseline assumptions have to change so one of the things I really love about Russell as well is that he has that sort of deep bottoms up analysis and he's not dependent on a framework and those people are exceptionally intelligent they tend to have if not an academic historical background they certainly have an appreciation for history because you have to be willing to break the old and to build something new so that's what I love about Grant i love about Russell and I think what's great about Neil and again why I think he's such a great person to start the episode with is he helps his framework and his model helps explain why we're going through this transition and then again Russell's is about like building a new model to understand the political economy of a changing global order of a changing economic order and what that world looks like what will increasingly look like and how to navigate it you know I can go in so many directions with what you just said remind me to come back to the fatherhood thing in a second because there's something there's a component of that that I want to talk about but the one piece of that I would add to what you just said there is the time element you have to be able to change your framework quickly because we've grown up in periods of long slowm moving trends you know globalization has been a 40-year trend that has now kind of reached its apogee and we haven't had to really function quickly apart from if you've been in the markets you've had the odd day of chaos where you've had to react but you haven't really had to completely adjust your framework quickly you've had to deal with a 10% down day in 2008 or deal with whipsors when the markets have have rallied in the middle of bare markets and stuff so you haven't had to really break things down to their roots and then rebuild them again and that's what we're talking about here we're talking about a world that we all believe to your point we understand how it works and we simply don't and that has already happened the world no longer works the way we all believe it does and so the quicker we kind of figure out how it's changed and what that means for us and what we have to do to adapt to it the better for all of us but I want to come back to that fatherhood thing because I know and I've it's been such a cool thing to watch you on this journey as a father of a young child because I've you know I've got two grandkids now i'm at the other end of that spectrum but for me this is such an important part of this because I I don't really spend much time worrying about me and I'm worrying about my place in this and how I'm going to deal with this because a I'm far enough down the track and I've you know I've lived a life and I've I've built a family i've done all those things the thing that I spent all my time thinking about and worrying about is how do my kids navigate this and now I look at these beautiful six and four year old girls who are completely oblivious to this and I and my questions are all about what's the world they're going to inherit like and how can we either prepare them for it ideally or try and provide some sort of haven from it if it's really bad those are the questions that I really want to dig into because if we can help the people who are going to have to deal with this in ways that we aren't we're simply not going to have to deal with it in the way that someone who's 15 now is going to have to deal with this world we're just not we're going to be through that stage where it's the kind of thing that overwhelms your most productive years so that's a big component to me and you know this fatherhood the piece and again through these conversations and through the the essays and everything I keep getting that back people talking about their kids and talking about their families and talking about you know we become inure to this when you're staring at markets you become inure to volatility really because it's part of your job and for a lot of people it's how they make their money you know they embrace the volatility but if we take the last couple of weeks for example out of the way and I'm sure I won't speak for you but I've looked at this or I've been forced to look at I should say through a financial lens because the news feeds that I'm getting bombarded and the emails I'm getting are all from people who are financial practitioners and trying to understand the world through that lens but if you step back for a moment and try and imagine the last two weeks without headlines about stock markets down 20% and without talk about recessions and without talk about financial aspects of this what does that world look like to someone who's never read the Wall Street Journal in their lives or doesn't have a 401k or if they do it's in a company pension plan it's manageful they don't think about the stock market ever you know until it's front page news or until it's uh on 60 Minutes about the crash you know that's a very different world that those people are living in that's the vast majority of people you know we are in a minority and so again there are so many different ways that we can take this but there are also so many different vantage points that you can stand and look at it from that will to your point about the wrong questions and the right answers give you a completely different vector upon which to travel towards this thing yeah well that also again brings me back to frameworks one of the things that I I don't know if you and I talked about it but I've spoken about in recent episodes is that you know I feel like we've just gotten to the point now where investors have become comfortable with the idea of mean reversion they become really comfortable with this idea that okay yeah we had the 2008 crisis that was really scary but the markets rebounded we had COVID scary but the markets rebounded every time the markets come back and I'm not saying that markets don't come back or that the world's going to end that's not what I'm suggesting but I think the setup this time could be one where the markets don't revert back to the previous paradigm and there are a lot of reasons to think that that's possible one is the baby broom retirement wall you have uh people that are going to increasingly be pulling their money out you have this tariffs and this intention at least stated intention by the Trump administration to rebalance wealth and income in society which also will change those dynamics and will change dollar recycling which has been a big huge source of asset price appreciation and you also have AI which is something that I just don't think is spoken about enough in this context and this is again something that I spoke about recently in my episode uh titled are we about to enter the first white collar recession and I mentioned the wealth-driven effect which is that if you know stock prices go down substantially down if one's net worth declines especially if they're nearing retirement age or in retirement age they become much more riskaverse about spending consumer spending is so heavily tilted towards the higher echelon income brackets that could drive a recession and in a recession firms that were previously reluctant to experiment with artificial intelligence large language models may become more willing to do so because they've already let go of people and they're costconscious and so Chat GPT went from being not good enough to maybe just good enough and so that kicks off that ignites the beginning of a multi-year multi-deade reordering of the economy a technological revolution that driven by AI and that also has huge political ramifications you know maybe that finally gives the Democratic party whose base consists of white collar workers who previously were organized around the banner of some of this woke ideology to now being focused around UBI and sort of the the effects of losing their jobs and losing economic opportunities in other words maybe we end up seeing happen to the white collar workforce what happened to the bluecollar workforce and that has profound implications for politics now I don't know exactly how I got on this train Grant i don't know how I don't remember exactly what your question was and why I got here but I guess that's in the spirit of the podcast yeah no look exactly right exactly right and I you know I like I said this whole thing is going to be such an adventure and I'm look I'm very conscious of us doing a podcast talking about a podcast again Seinfeld it keeps coming it's a podcast about nothing podcast about Exactly so we won't make this episode too long but we wanted to share the beginning of this journey with you and what we're going to do you know Demetri and I will will publish these conversations and we're going to make sure that everybody gets to hear them because I think these are profoundly important questions we will publish them to our subscribers probably a week before they go public just so they they get the benefit of that for supporting our work but I think you know Demetri a big part of this is going to be the audience out there whether they email you or they email me and ask us the questions and suggest people that they've heard of that brought an interesting perspective to the way they try and order the world around them because you know you and I have our networks and and the network effect of those networks is terrific but I've lost count of how many interesting people I've come across over the years I'd never heard of before and you have these conversations with them or you read something they've written and to your point right it suddenly turns a torch on you in a corner that you've been trying to squint into for quite some time and so you know having the audience be a part of this and join us on this exploration is going to be a huge component of it absolutely I couldn't agree more and I'm very excited by the prospect of hearing back from people again I I go back to this thing of like there's something really exciting to me about changing the format of the show again I'm still doing my podcast you're still doing your podcast but you have actually done series like this before with other people i have never done anything like this i've been doing the show for eight years now roughly speaking and it's been roughly the same format it's been me interviewing people nerding out on their material constructing an outline and sort of quizzing them and occasionally more conversational programming and occasionally kind of more panel stuff but it's been more or less the same and certainly just me i'm very excited by this idea of doing it with somebody else i can't tell you how excited I am and doing it with you of all people well mate I agree as I say we've both been trying to find a the right way to collaborate for quite some time now and I'm I'm delighted we found it well listen let's wrap things up there the first episode of this will be out sometime in the next couple of weeks and we can of course the big problem Demetri with doing this with the co-host is you have three calendars to align right that's the single biggest impediment especially when you're all on different time zones i've recorded podcasts at 4 in the morning in Australia and I've done all kinds of things over the years you're lucky cuz you're right in the middle so you should be fine so in terms of publishing the plan is to uh publish this to the whole world so that everybody gets a chance to join us on this journey because we both believe it's profound our own subscribers will get it first we'll probably publish it a week before it goes public but anyone that's not a subscriber will have the chance to listen to these conversations absolutely so I think you know we were still trying to figure out how we would publish the public feed but we're going to both publish this on our private feeds Grant so your premium subscribers will get it my premium subscribers will get it and then what we're probably going to do is we're both going to publish it on our own feeds publicly we also talked about maybe when we publish it publicly maybe we'll put it on a on a regular feed but we can hash that out for people when we'll Yeah when Neil's episode comes out we'll we'll have a lot to talk about and we'll mention that too at the top hey we did tell people we're doing this on the fly right and there's the proof right there it's authentic it's exactly my friend in the pudding well listen we'll um we'll reconvene when we can pin Neil down and we'll be back with this in the not too distant future in the meantime Demetri just let people know where they can follow all the great stuff you do at Hidden Forces yeah you can go to hiddenforces.io to learn more about the podcast i do have a Twitter feed but I like I said I've taken a indefinite hiatus from Twitter but my Twitter handle if you want to go through it is kofenus with a K and I also have a Twitter handle hidden forces pod that you can follow yep and uh I'm pretty easy to find grant-wills.com and my Twitter handle is ttmy gh and boy did I wish I was taking a hiatus from Twitter at the moment it is becoming almost unbearable it is uh not a very fun place i also should mention if you want to mention it too Grant I have an email address that you can reach out to info@hiddenforces.io and all the emails get forwarded to me so uh feel free to reach out through there if you need to connect actually and the same goes for me info@grant-wills.com and they will come to me too all right my friend this has been terrific i look forward to this journey with you i don't know which one of us is Sancho Penza and which one's Donkeyote but I guess we'll figure that out as we go along this journey as well i'll talk to you soon awesome you too take care Grant if you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed if you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community you can also do that through our subscriber page today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stillanos Nikolo for more episodes you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io you can follow me on Twitter Kofenus and you can email me at info@hiddenforces.io as always thanks for listening we'll see you next time

Transcript for:Launch of The 100-Year Pivot Podcast

Transcript for:
Launch of The 100-Year Pivot Podcast