What Happens When Social Trust Collapses? | Peter Atwater

Episode 447 https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/what-happens-when-social-trust-collapses-peter-atwater is the tenth installment in the Hundred Year Pivot podcast series. In it, Demetri Kofinas and Grant Williams speak with Peter Atwater, a recognized expert on the impact of confidence and mood on individual and group decision-making. Peter's work has been instrumental not only in helping his clients, students, and readers understand how people make decisions under conditions of chaos and uncertainty, but also in showing how to use those insights to gain a competitive advantage. The three begin their conversation by mapping out Peter's Confidence Quadrant and using it to explain how individuals and crowds move between feelings of high and low certainty and control. They explore the immense contemporary pressure people feel to conform—particularly on social media and in an educational system that rewards conformity. They discuss financial nihilism, the search for community in unusual places, and why real, in-person networks, relationships, and conversations matter now more than ever. The second half of the episode turns to the political economy of confidence: the rise of leader-centric movements, the fragility of "passenger-seat" societies, the lasting impact of COVID, and the "velvet-rope" economy that has transformed everything from airline cabins to financing. They discuss wealth stratification, powerlessness, the risks of a genuine socialist revolution, the search for leadership, and practical ways individuals can regain agency—through epistemic hygiene, disciplined storytelling, and service to others. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8URhgYos5fjHqFSO4RSIEg, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/demetri-kofinas/hidden-forces, SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/hiddenforces, CastBox https://castbox.fm/channel/2629539, or via our RSS Feed http://hiddenforces.libsyn.com/rss Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP Joining our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io https://hiddenforces.io/. Join the conversation on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenforcespod/, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenforcespod/, and Twitter https://twitter.com/hiddenforcespod at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas https://twitter.com/kofinas Episode Recorded on 10/23/2025

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Demetri Kofinas?

  What's up everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. What you're about to hear is the 10th episode in a podcast series hosted by me and my co-host Grant Williams, titled "The 100 Year Pivot." In it, we speak with some of the smartest, most plugged-in people we know to help position ourselves, our organizations, our families, and our portfolios for the once-in-a-century economic, political, and geopolitical reordering that we believe is currently underway.

• 0:44Demetri Kofinas?

  In today's episode, Grant and I speak with Peter Atwater, a recognized expert on the impact of confidence and mood on individual and group decision-making. Peter's work has been instrumental in not only helping his clients, students, and readers understand how people make decisions under conditions of chaos and uncertainty, but also how to use those insights to our competitive advantage. We begin our conversation by mapping out Peter's confidence quadrant and use it to explain how individuals and crowds jump between feelings of high and low certainty and control. We explore the immense contemporary pressure that people feel to conform, particularly

• 1:26Demetri Kofinas?

  on social media, and in an educational system that rewards it. We discuss financial nihilism, the search for community in unusual places, and why real, in-person networks, relationships, and conversations matter now more than ever. The second half of our conversation turns to the political economy of confidence, the rise of leader-centric movements, the fragility of passenger-seat societies, the lasting impact of COVID, and the velvet-rope economy that has transformed everything from airline cabins to financing. We talk about wealth stratification, powerlessness, the risks of a real socialist revolution, the search for leadership, and practical ways that individuals can regain agency through

• 2:09Demetri Kofinas?

  epistemic hygiene, disciplined storytelling, and by being in service to others.

• 2:15Demetri Kofinas?

  The episodes in this series are published a week ahead of time on both the Hidden Forces and Grant Williams podcast subscriber only feeds. If you want early access to these conversations, go to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed so you can listen to this episode and other subscriber only content on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q and A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like our intimate

• 2:55Demetri Kofinas?

  dinners and weekend retreats, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected] and I, someone from our team, will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this deeply insightful and valuable conversation with our guest, Peter Atwater.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Welcome, everybody, to another episode of the Hundred Year Pivot. Joining me, as always, the donkey otter to my Sancho Panza, Demetri Kofinas. Hello, my friend. How are you?

• 3:33Demetri Kofinas?

  I'm great, man. You know, I was making breakfast right before we jumped on this call, and I was thinking, as I was very calm and relaxed, I was like, man, I love this new format of doing these episodes with Grant, where I don't have to spend all this time preparing, and I can just kind of walk in, turn on the microphone, and we can have a conversation. Like, I like this lifestyle. So I'm a big fan.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  It suits you. I mean, listen, we know you are the most prepared man in show business, but, you know, as I said at the beginning, I think that the very nature of these conversations means that they're going to take us and spin us off in all kinds of directions. And I think the more, the more flexible we are in where we go with them, I think the better. I mean, we've already experienced that. There were some of the things we've talked about with our guests so far.

• 4:14Demetri Kofinas?

  We haven't had a chance to talk about this, but I don't know what you're, I mean, I get, in general, I get great response from people. People love the show. Like, I get tons of emails from people saying, like, please, don't stop these Hundred Year Pivots.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't, I don't know what makes us stop, because I don't think we're going to sort it out. We might either get too hopeful or too full of despair and that might make us stop. But until then, we will keep going and we'll keep going again today with a great mutual friend of both of ours, Peter Atwater, joining us. Peter is an adjunct professor at William and Mary College and the author of the terrific book, The Confidence Map, which he published, I guess it was last year. And his work on mood and confidence is absolutely groundbreaking. He is the person to go to. And so with mood and confidence being such important components of all the things that we're talking about, it felt like a perfect opportunity to get Peter on to come and talk about their place in the pivot and try and help us understand what they look like, how to recognize them and where they might both be at the moment

• 5:11Speaker 01

  and where they might take us to. And I'm really excited for this conversation.

• 5:14Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, I think the subtitle of the book is From Chaos to Clarity. And boy, does that not capture kind of, you know, the spectrum, the political spectrum. And we're currently on the chaos side and have been for a long time. So it'll be really great to dig into that framework with Peter.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Well, let's bring him on, shall we?

• 5:32Demetri Kofinas?

  Sounds great.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Peter Atwater, my friend, welcome to the Hundred Year Pivot. Dimitri and I are thrilled to have you joining us on this little pilgrimage of ours.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Thanks, Grant. I'm delighted to be here.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  It's been a funny old thing. We have these conversations and they're so random and so different and so interesting. And I, you and I were chatting a little while ago after we published, I can't remember if it was the one with Pippa or maybe Jonathan Kershaw, I can't remember, one of the ones we published. And we were chatting about mood's role in this whole pivot thing. And there's nobody that thinks about mood and talks about mood in more detail and more thoughtfully than you. So this is a great opportunity to have you come and talk about just this shift in mood that we're, that we're feeling all around us. And I guess, I guess the easiest way for us to start this would be if you could just give the people listening, because there will be some that aren't familiar with you and the confidence map and your other work, just lay out the confidence map, those four quadrants, just so that when we, because I'm sure we're going to use terminology

• 6:28Speaker 01

  in that throughout this conversation, it'd be good for people to have a representation of it.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Sure. So I teach a class on confidence and one of the first things I had to figure out is what is it? And therefore, why does it matter and what do we do with it? And ultimately, I concluded that to feel confident, we need a sense of certainty, that we have a sense that things are predictable, that life isn't random, that we know what's coming. But that we also need a sense of control. It's one thing to know the road ahead is straight, but if you don't know how to drive the car, you're not going to feel good behind the wheel. And so from that, I developed this very simplistic two by two box chart. And it puts certainty along the X axis

• 7:16Speaker 02

  and control on the Y axis. And it creates four different environments that are mixes of these. When we think about confidence, we think about that environment where we have both of them, where we have both certainty and control. Upper right hand box, I call that the comfort zone because it's comfortable, it's relaxing. We're calm, things feel good, time passes quickly. The opposite box, the lower left hand box, is what I call the stress center. Because all anxiety arises from the fact that we don't have certainty or control in what we're doing. And we're not our best selves there. We're impatient, we're often angry. And when we think about confidence,

• 7:59Speaker 02

  those are the two boxes that we think about. We think about this line back and forth. I either have confidence or I don't. The reality, though, is that they're two hybrid boxes. And those hybrid boxes, to me, matter a lot, particularly today. Upper left hand box is where we have control, but no certainty. And that's where, honestly, we make every investment decision. Every choice to save, invest, borrow, lend. Finance lives in that box. We don't think it does. We often put ourselves in the comfort zone and make bad decisions because we're too confident. We put ourselves in the stress center. But the reality is that what makes finance so different

• 8:44Speaker 02

  is we're making choices where the outcome is unknown.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  And so the launchpad is a huge box if you're an entrepreneur. They love it. That is their comfort zone. They believe, give them the steering wheel and the brakes and the gas pedal. They're very happy. Their comfort zone is boring to them. The last box is the passenger seat. And that is where we have certainty, but we don't have control. And I call it the passenger seat because if you've been on an airplane, you know what that experience is like. And sometimes we choose it as a means to an end. Sometimes we can be pushed into it. Prisons are a passenger seat environment that none of us would care for. But for purposes of today's conversation,

• 9:34Speaker 02

  I want to talk about that lower half of the confidence map. Because if there's a word that I've, that has now become like fingernails on a chalkboard to me, it's the word uncertainty. I hate that word. Because it, to me, it's a reflection of how we feel, not the world at large. But, you know, if I had a penny for every time that word is used, I'd be rich. And I wouldn't be surprised if it'll be the word of the year this year. But that's not the issue today. The issue to me is there are so few people

• 10:16Speaker 02

  that would identify themselves above the middle line. I did a presentation earlier this summer to a group of school administrators, elementary, middle school, high school principals. And I always ask in these situations, you know, plot yourself. And we can see it on the screen, where are you? And that was interesting, not surprising, lot of stress. But then I said, so where are your students? Where do you see them? And you could have heard a pin drop after the result got posted on the screen. Because there was nobody in the comfort zone.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  There was nobody in the launchpad. In fact, the vast majority were sort of clustered somewhere between the stress center and the passenger seat. And so I immediately reached out to all my former students and say, hey, I'm seeing this. This is what administrators see. Do you think it's an accurate reflection of where your generation is today? And the response, overwhelming response was, yeah, yeah. And you can be cynical about it and say, we've raised a generation of veal, as one of my friends puts it, you know, kids who've never been given the opportunity or taken the opportunity

• 11:45Speaker 02

  to be in the launchpad. That between helicopter parents and the like, you know, they associate uncertainty with unsafe. And so God forbid you go into the launchpad. But I'm now watching a generation of adults who are either being coerced, cajoled, or choosing to be in the passenger seat. And they're doing so, choosing to follow, and not surprising, we have this era of cultish figures that they're choosing to follow.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  But what troubles me today is there are too many people in the passenger seat today. And that's a very unstable environment. I would say it's a prison preatica. That it, on the surface, may appear calm.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  But it's not, because within that box today, there are two categories. There are people who think they're beneficiaries and there are people who think they're victims. I mean, if I look at our legislative branch today, Republicans, you know, congressional Republicans are in that box as much as congressional Democrats. The only difference is that congressional Republicans think they're beneficiaries, while congressional Democrats think they're victims. But the risk is that those in that box, which I would put people who are at the bottom

• 13:32Speaker 02

  of the spectrum, those that are willingly compliant because they see the financial or power benefits to followership today, which are enormous. But it's all about utility. And I worry about that moment when those who are in the passenger seat realize that they're being played and ultimately conclude, I gotta go to the launchpad because I'm not going back to the stress center. I'm gonna go to the launchpad and it's gonna be a combination of fight or fuck it. You know, those five F responses.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  So that was a long-winded preamble.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  No, it's fascinating. I mean, I'm picturing that data representation. It must have been, yeah, quite something to see. But I'm curious, Peter, to understand, this is a cohort, your Gen Z is a cohort, that as much as we feel the world changing, and that's one of the big motivations for Dmitry and I to have these series of conversations, that change has been, it's speeding up now, but it's been a gradual shift over the last, let's call it 20 years or so, maybe post-GFC, maybe, maybe post.com.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  So Gen Z have really, this has been the water they've been raised in. This is where they've been swimming their whole lives. And so the fact they feel like that is interesting to me because I don't feel like they have, you know, the grey haired people like us, we have a comparison to look back on. We have the halcyon days to look back on and go, well, it was so much better then. So I'm curious, first of all, to understand why they feel that way when, when this has been that world. And secondly, I'm curious to understand if you think that because we have that backward looking period to compare with, whether a lot of people of boomer and Gen X like me are being pulled down below that line at the same time.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  And we're all ending up down there, whichever way, whether you were born in it or whether you've come into it through its development over time.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  So I think there's an enormous pressure to be compliant today. And compliance, meaning I need to fit in, particularly on social media. I need to comply in an education system that today truly rewards that above all. There are huge benefits, psychological benefits, financial benefits, social benefits today to being compliant.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  And there's an enormous price that people feel that they pay to not be, to be an outsider. And you can see it in terms of the, the trolling and the viciousness on social media where to not be doing, talking, acting like the crowd creates enormous vulnerability. So it is the water that they exist in, but appreciate that the scale of the demand of compliance is staggering. You know, when we were young, compliant meant fitting in with the kids at the, in the lunchroom.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  This is now having to fit in at a scale that is exponentially greater and that is so obvious and so intense and so ever-present that it feels lonely and vulnerable the moment you step out of it.

• 17:21Demetri Kofinas?

  So Peter, I want to go back to something you said earlier, where you talked about the danger of a significant portion of the electorate or society coming to the conclusion that they've been played and shifting suddenly from the passenger's seat to the launchpad. I'm curious to understand both what that means in political terms and why you think there's a risk that people would feel that way. Because my devil's argument would be that when people are as committed, in the way that you're describing, to following someone or some idea and have thrown their lot in with that person or with that movement or ideology, they are less likely to abandon it

• 18:07Demetri Kofinas?

  when facts diverge from their perception or their subjective belief system. And in fact, will actually double down on those beliefs in the face of contravening evidence. So this is actually a two-part question. The first part is why would people, do you think, be likely to feel like they're being played, if in fact, that's what's going on, rather than just doubling down and divorcing themselves even further from reality? And two, what does that look like politically for a large portion of the electorate to suddenly shift from the passenger's seat to the launchpad?

• 18:43Speaker 02

  So I don't disagree that there is an existential element to leaving the passenger's seat. That, you're right, that often people will double down and retell the truth in a way that enables them to stay there. But appreciate that people tend to move into the passenger's seat voluntarily from the stress center. You know, I will follow this cultish figure because he promises that things will get better for me. The challenge is that the longer I'm there, two things happen. I grow impatient.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  And I realize ultimately that they were never going to get me to the comfort zone. You know, the authoritarian cultist leader demands that others are in the passenger seat. In fact, all others.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  And so it becomes obvious that this is as good as I get. And so what develops is a system of intense reward and intense punishment. So if you're going to be in this passenger seat, I am going to reward those who adore me. And I'm going to beat the living crap out of those who don't. And we're seeing variations of that, not just in the United States, but I think we need to appreciate that today we are in a global society that is dominated by individual nationalist authoritarian

• 20:25Speaker 02

  autocratic leaders. I can put Xi and Erdogan and there. The US is one of many. And the challenge, and we're seeing this elsewhere, is that impatience, that reality that, hey, you were supposed to be the savior and you're not. We're seeing a little bit of that in Argentina. And we've really seen that in Nepal. I think people ignore the significance of what we've seen in Nepal. And there's tensions now in Indonesia, there's tension in Russian Georgia.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  What ultimately motivates us to leave the passenger seat is a crowd of people who will jump with me. So if I think about the Me Too movement, what was the tipping point was a group of women jumping together.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  And it becomes much easier for me to jump from the passenger seat to the launchpad when I know I'm doing it with a crowd. And that's what you get with an Arab Spring.

• 21:42Demetri Kofinas?

  It feels like, because to me, what actually feels like has happened is that we have already jumped to the launchpad, that we're not in the passenger seat, that maybe we were in the comfort zone for certain people. And I would say in political terms, that is purely perception based. I don't know that people ever really have control. I think maybe it's a, when it comes to this particular avenue of conversation, there's a perception of control. And then at some point, for some folks, they realized, oh, we're actually in the passenger seat. And we don't feel safe. And now we're resting over the controls. And it feels like that's actually kind of where we are. I mean, I don't disagree with your comment that people are following cultish figures. You know, like, I agree with that.

• 22:27Demetri Kofinas?

  But it feels like, in some sense, like, it's a result of having rested the controls. And so, to me, it feels like we're actually in the launchpad now. Would you disagree with that?

• 22:38Speaker 02

  I do. I think we mistake compliance and submissiveness for control. And I see this with law firms, I see this with universities, where they feel that appeasement is giving them back control, when in fact, it's doing nothing but making obvious that you don't have control.

• 23:01Demetri Kofinas?

  So let me just, let me add one more thing, Peter. You're totally right, Peter. So let me just preface something, so that it's clear what I'm saying. I think in quite, in reality, we're in the stress center. But for me, again, this goes back to, just in this particular area of conversation in politics, perception plays such a big role, because I don't think that we had control. I don't think we do have control. I think there's some perception among people who's, who are supporters of the person who's in office at any particular moment, that they have control, when in fact, they don't. So I actually think that, from a perception point of view, those folks think that they're maybe in the passenger seat. Other people feel like they're in the stress center. But I would agree. What I would, what I would say is, I don't think we have control. I think we're kind of, at least for me, I'm in the stress center. But anyway, go ahead.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, in that conversation, Dmitry, you've raised a really interesting point that I think folks miss, which is, in a authoritarian environment, control rests with the crowd.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  The dominant figure believes he or she has control. But the reality is that so if followership fails to exist, watch out. And this is, you can look at Syria, we can look at Afghanistan. What is remarkably ironic about all of these different regimes is that they are inherently fragile. Control has to be seen as either absolute, or it fails to exist at all. And so the risk, and I think this is not unique to the United States, I think it exists

• 24:38Speaker 02

  in so many places today, that there is this clear sense that these 12 men around the world can maintain the peace. And I think there is a risk of a true global Arab Spring, where crowds decide en masse, we need to take control. And I don't know what it looks like, I don't know how it plays out, I don't know what divides and defines the crowds.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  But I can tell you that there are way too many people today who are lower, you know, below the line, and that's a far more fragile environment than I think anybody realizes. And I think candidly, the rich could be incredibly easy to be the target of the uprising.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  So Peter, it's interesting to me, Dimitri just mentioned the stress center there for the first time. And I find that really curious because it feels as though the world...

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Does find itself in the stress center to me. It feels like there's no control. It feels like there's no certainty. So here you make those points about the passenger seat. They all make sense to me. But when I think about, if I try and step back far enough and characterize what I would imagine the general feeling of most people, it would feel to me as though everyone would be in that stress center. So help me understand the difference of a whole group of people moving from the stress center to the launchpad versus moving from the passenger seat to the launchpad.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we know that as we move to the lower left hand corner of the stress center, there are five responses. Fight and flight get all the attention. We've already exhausted the follow experience. So we're not going to do that again. We're going to go for empowerment as opposed to followership. We're unlikely to freeze. There will be those that do. But the last one is the fuck it response. And I think that we're already seeing financial nihilism. We're seeing that play out in other ways that right now are passive. But one of the points I made recently is that,

• 27:11Speaker 02

  you know, we talk about this K shaped economy in terms of have and have nots. And I don't think those terms are appropriate anymore. I think there are two classes today. There are those who have everything to lose and those who have nothing to lose. And when you have nothing to lose and everything to gain, you are incentivized to take on the fight and fuck it response. Because hey, whether I win or not, I'm now at a point where making others lose is gratifying.

• 27:47Demetri Kofinas?

  So that, I mean, I agree with that, by the way. I don't agree, and I don't know that this is exactly what you were saying, that everyone is either in that binary, but that more and more people have moved to the polls. And I think that this was always a concern of the founders. They were very concerned about people not having a stake in the future of the country. They saw what happened in France in the late 1700s with the French Revolution and mob rule, and did not want that to happen in the United States. I think it's one of the reasons why some of the founders advocated for property being a condition of suffrage. It feels today like a larger portion of Americans, and I'm just going to speak for

• 28:30Demetri Kofinas?

  Americans here, and I'm very curious to hear what Grant has to say about his experience as a Brit, and whether this is also true of people in the UK. But it does feel to me, Peter, like a bigger portion of Americans, and this is, I think, especially true for younger people, and this is where the, it's coming to a question here. Would you say that not only is this more true for younger people because they don't have as many assets, and they don't have as many clear opportunities to build wealth, and maybe to progress in a meaningful career, maybe that's also true, but also because younger people are more willing to say fuck it in general? Younger people are looking for action and excitement. And I remember when 9/11 happened, I was 20 years old. I was scared, I was living in New York City.

• 29:15Demetri Kofinas?

  I was worried about chemical attacks in the subways. But at the same time, I remember sitting around with my dorm mates in October, a month after the attacks, or maybe late September, and we got back to campus at NYU, and we were like, man, this is kind of exciting. And we were like, we were scared to say it, but we remember feeling like this was kind of exciting. And so what worries me especially, and this is the question, is, is it especially concerning to you that it's the younger people that are especially dispossessed of opportunities and wealth? Because it's young people that tend to lead revolutions.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think that you've touched on a great point. You know, when you have nothing to lose, youth is a factor. And appreciate too, they have a longer future ahead of them. So older people will resign themselves to the reality. Younger people will say, I now need to change the future to be what I need it to be. And it's compelling, it's at times irrational. But for a generation that has felt corralled, that has been so compliant and now questions

• 30:32Speaker 02

  to what end? That the impetus to take control is, I think, enormous. And you have issues of generational wealth, generational power. I have long felt, Dimitri, that there is a young, unknown grassroots leader out there who can speak authentically from a position at the bottom, who has enormous potential to unite left and right at the bottom to say, hey, we've been screwed by both sides. And, you know, this is different to me than the populist figures that we've seen so far,

• 31:14Speaker 02

  who I see in many cases as nothing more than predatory figures, who are using those at the bottoms as a means to an end, as props in their bigger plan. But if you get yourself an authentic grassroots leader who can speak about a truth that resonates, that will be a game changer. And not just in the United States. I think that changes the situation in Hungary. I think it changes it in Turkey. I think it could dramatically reshape things in China. Because we have a generation, we see this in the CEO suites, we see this in Congress, that hasn't passed the baton.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  They've said, you know, you're not experienced enough, you're not... We have way too many excuses. It's like, guys, older people, myself included, it's time to leave the stage.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  There is a generation that we either cede control to or who will take control. And I look at the leadership of both our political parties. I look at businesses and other organizations. We've done a dreadful job of not only passing the baton, but preparing those who would perceive the baton to know how to behave. So they're going to figure this out on their own. And it's going to be awkward and at times ugly. But there's a huge baton pass that's about to occur.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  You know, Peter, on that, it's so fascinating you bring that up. I was watching this morning some clips of the New York debates with Cuomo and Mamdani. And as I hear you talking about that, you know, Mamdani is the perfect example of this, right? Some guy who's come out of nowhere, he's young, he's got some wild ideas, but he's resonating with people. And a lot of that feels to me, and I'm, to me, I'd be curious to get your thoughts on this because you're in the middle of it. I'm not, I've been immersed in it the way you have. But it feels to me from a distance as though people are attaching themselves to him, partially because of the ideas, but partially because, to your point, Peter, he's just young and fresh and he's not of that generation.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  And I watched a little clip last night with Cuomo was berating him and saying, you haven't done anything, you haven't had a job, you haven't blah, blah, blah, blah. And basically almost making that case for him, thinking he's dressing him down, but actually saying to the people exactly what you said, he's your guy. He's not tainted with the old system. He's not this generation. So I'm fascinated to hear you say that. And I'd be curious to hear both your thoughts on that and whether there's any symbology in what's happening in this race in New York at the moment.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that that race is incredibly symbolic because you have in Cuomo, a dynastic system, you know, his father, you know, we, it's sort of like, you know, Jeb Bush.

• 34:07Demetri Kofinas?

  A hundred percent Jeb Bush, a hundred percent. I was going to say the same thing.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  And so he's an easy target in a situation like this. My issue with Mamdani is he's not authentic from the bottom. Here's a guy who has lived a very privileged life.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  He resonates, but I think even he is vulnerable to somebody who has grown up in a.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  Poor part of town who has built standing among those at the bottom in a true grassroots, community-based leadership process. I'm curious, Dimitri, because you are.

• 34:48Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, so I don't want to suggest that I have been following this very closely, but yes, I am geographically affected. And I am attuned to some of the ideas that I think are bad, like increasing the amount of rent-controlled apartments or moving them from rent-controlled to rent-stabilized. I don't know what the exact policy proposal there is, but it's essentially price controls, some version of price controls for food. I think those are really bad ideas, for obvious reasons that we can all understand.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  So there's one other point about the New York election. So in this point about advertising for the other side, this message that the wealthy of New York will leave is fuel for those at the bottom.

• 35:31Demetri Kofinas?

  Right.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Because mobility is a privilege that only those at the top have. And it's really irritating. You know, you go to flyover country. It is one of the things that angers people who are tethered to geography is the nomadic nature of those at the top. They come, they go, they bring business, they take business, but we stay. We have to stay. And so one of the things that I'm really interested in seeing is the importance of place and a need for a mutual

• 36:14Speaker 02

  community where we in the real world know each other, have each other's backs, location matters again. And I sense some of that as I was listening to your conversation with Roger. You know, to me, it's fascinating that at the bottom of mood in the early 1980s, the show that was most popular was Cheers. And the song that begins is "Where Everybody Knows My Name."

• 36:48Speaker 02

  And there's a huge want for that today. And I think that in all of this, will be a return to really important personal relationships that happen not online, but that happen hand in hand in community as we build it. I don't know if it'll be churches or community groups, but there is a rebuilding that needs to take place in the real world.

• 37:16Demetri Kofinas?

  So that's a, let's talk about that, too. Let's just tie off this, let me tie up some comments I wanted to make in response to Grant's question. So first of all, I just want to agree with you, like the Jeb Bush-Trump comparison is a an obvious one that came to me as well, as is the comparison, sorry, the Jeb Bush and Andrew Cuomo. And the Trump-Mandani comparison is also, to my opinion, an obvious one because they were both dressed down for not having experience. They were both said to be people also from wealthy families. But what I would also say too, and I don't know if Mandani's wealthy family is certainly not on the scale of Trump, but what are they, upper class or something like that? But to your point about that being a negative, I don't agree with that either because FDR came from a wealthy family and he led the,

• 38:01Demetri Kofinas?

  you know, the peaceful revolution out of the Great Depression, establishing a new economic and political order that lasted, what, 40, 50 years in the United States? So I don't know that that is the issue. I think it's also very interesting, and this is a somewhat sort of hazy observation, but I do think that what's also happening is that one way to interpret what's going on in America today is that we're trying to coalesce around a story that fits. You know, we're trying on different hats and we're trying to decide which one fits. And part of a good story also requires scapegoating. And I think that we're also in the process of looking for scapegoats. Boomers are an example of a scapegoat.

• 38:44Demetri Kofinas?

  There's also scapegoating going on in the Israel-Palestine debate. There's something that I think, I don't know if it was Grant and I that recently talked about this, or it was actually, I think, in a recent episode with Cameron Bahari, where you see this with the Israel-Palestine debate on both the left and right, on the American right. You see it more aligning with the scapegoating of the deep state. And the international conspiracy. And then on the left, you see it as part of the white colonization and perpetrator victim. And it all, in my opinion, it's all part of this. If you think about the larger sort of like archetypical structure, it is us try to, you know, establish a new narrative that works to create a political consensus. To go to your question, to your observation about community, I totally agree with this.

• 39:27Demetri Kofinas?

  You brought up financial nihilism earlier, and I think actually, one of the things that I saw in those early days, whether it was with crypto or later with meme stocks, was that in addition to this embrace of meaninglessness when it came to price discovery, there was also a deep search for community. And there was a desire to, Tesla is a great example of this. Like, people that were invested in Tesla stock weren't just invested in Tesla stock because they were hoping to get rich. They were also investing because they wanted to be part of a community. And that speaks, I think, to themes that we've explored on this podcast most recently with Roger. And then the real question for me in that observation is, is there a meaningful difference, a substantive difference, between an online community and a physical community?

• 40:12Demetri Kofinas?

  Or can people substitute one for the other? And you have guys like, who I've mentioned on the podcast before, who's also been on the podcast before, Balaji Srinivasan, who wrote The Network State, which was a very influential book. I don't know if it still is, or if the concept is still influential in the crypto space. But there are those who push the idea that the future can be one of of networked communities that are so powerful and so fulfilling that they can substitute and control the underlying physical networks and worlds. I don't agree with that. I actually believe that there is more, now more than ever, a need for real, physical, embodied communities. So, yeah, that's my response to you. I agree. And that's a very powerful vector. And I think you've seen that in the Trump movement. What like, what was one of Trump's superpower?

• 40:57Demetri Kofinas?

  His ability to convene crowds of enthusiastic supporters. It doesn't matter if they were the biggest crowds the world has ever seen. They were big enough, and they were excited enough, and they were, they were in themselves of movement. So, yeah, I agree. I think the evidence is clear that that's what's going on, or one of the things that's going on.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of the things I tell my freshmen the first day of class is if you don't have somebody who will go with you at 2 o'clock in the morning to the emergency room, you need to find that person. You need to find people in the real world who will be there in a crisis, because nobody online is going to be with you in a crisis. And when we are in that lower left-hand corner, tangibility, immediacy, proximity, demand, real person-to-person

• 41:52Speaker 02

  relationships. Because you can't coalesce in a true way outside of a physical crowd. You know, ask a comedian. They need an audience. You need real people in the room. And your point about the Trump rallies is exactly right. You see this in sports. You need, it's a completely different experience being in the stadium than watching the game at home. And so there is something, there's a secret sauce in physical relationships with

• 42:30Speaker 02

  a shared purpose. And I think all of these online communities have been wonderful surrogates. But as mood falls, we will need to come together in person.

• 42:46Demetri Kofinas?

  Can I add one more thing here? And this is not well thought out, but I was at a Q and A last night moderated by John Borthwick, where Karen Howe, the author of a book, I forget the name of Karen's book, she was on the show, it was a great book, it was about OpenAI and what's going on in artificial intelligence. And she's unusually smart as a journalist. I mean, she wrote for MIT Technology Review, The Atlantic, and Wall Street Journal, and she understands technology very well. And there was a point in which they discussed kind of this intersection between what's going on with AI and also capitalism. They didn't use this term, but I would describe it as late-stage capitalism, or like metastatically financialized capitalism. And I feel like the political economic modes of organization,

• 43:30Demetri Kofinas?

  as well as the psycho-spiritual modes of organization, are no longer fulfilling. They've either sort of collapsed or have been neglected in the psycho-spiritual, or in the case of Modern capitalism, Grant and I were kind of going back and forth on this earlier, or he texted me about it and I actually offered my views on something somewhat separate, which was this. I feel like capitalism today is broken and it's hard for someone like me or like us to really talk about because, at least I'll speak for me personally, like I've benefited from this world of financial nihilism, materially speaking. Like I've benefited from asset price appreciation and asset price appreciation

• 44:12Demetri Kofinas?

  that really, in some really obvious cases, doesn't align with what's best for the economy or for people. And so I feel like this is something that needs to be addressed and it's going to be addressed one way or the other. And if it isn't addressed constructively, we're going to get some kind of socialist revolution. So that's one thing. And then I think for a while, to bring it to the psycho-spiritual, you were hearing people like Elon Musk say, "Well, maybe we're just, you know, maybe human beings are just here to bootstrap AI." And we got to a point where it was like, "Well, who are we building this economy for? Who are we building this society for? Like, what are we building this world for? Is it just to make it easier for machines to run?" So there's a kind of cult of, the cult of, you know, financial capitalism

• 44:55Demetri Kofinas?

  and then this cult of efficiency and productivity and just like everything is about becoming like more and more like machines. And I feel like this is also part of the story that both of these approaches that have been running in parallel are hitting up against the wall. They're no longer working and where we don't quite have the language to talk about in the case of capitalism. We do have the words from the progressive era about monopoly and price fixing and anti-competition. But that's not what's happening in today's capitalism. We have data capture and surveillance by these very large technology platforms that are increasingly steering and controlling people's behavior and their thoughts surreptitiously. And then we've got this like cultish, you know, hyper-materialist in the philosophical sense,

• 45:36Demetri Kofinas?

  atheistic, transhumanist cult led by these same sorts of people. And the vision of the future is like, "Yeah, we're just going to create more stuff and then AI is going to make your life easier and like ultimately like we're just giving birth to the next species." And the reality is like, most people are like, "Fuck that." Like, "That doesn't resonate. You guys are sick." And I think there's consensus that's developed as an antipode to that. And it feels like there's an opportunity there for that to either be a constructive solution, where those of us that have a stake in the future can help steer it in a positive direction. Or if we can't collaborate, that there's going to be some kind of really awful revolution, and that's going to be really bad for folks like us.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I refer to it as Caligula capitalism. There's a grotesque am morality to it. We're gambling in everything, we're betting on everything. No, we've lost our moral compass. And increasingly, to your point, Dmitry, there's a tone deafness among those at the top who have lost any connectivity with the real world. And they do not appreciate the consequences of what they envision to the vast majority

• 46:57Speaker 02

  of people around the world, who, at this point, are wondering how they eat, how they get healthcare. The contrast in wants, you've got one group who's at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of need, and the other who are questioning basic security. And the gap in wealth is such that you would hope those at the top would say, you know what? It's in our best interest to facilitate greater growth at the bottom. Instead, they're looking for every means to de-jobify the workplace.

• 47:40Demetri Kofinas?

  You know, someplace where I saw this recently, I mean, Grant knows this, and I've talked about it with our Genius community, I recently actually had sinus surgery, but I've been dealing with a bunch of stuff, in part as a result of this. And I've had to interface with the US healthcare system meaningfully for the first time since I had brain surgery in 2013. And the situation has gotten significantly worse. And sitting in the waiting rooms, you can see the condition that most people are in. And this is New York, right? Like, this is not Middle America. You know, obesity has risen noticeably in the waiting room. People are really sick, they're really ill. And the reason I bring this up is because it's an area where, I mean, the reality is, when you talk about like, the elites at the top of Maslow's hierarchy, I feel like, I'm not Hillary Clinton, but I feel like all my needs are met.

• 48:25Demetri Kofinas?

  You know, I never have to feel like I have to wait in line to get something done. Like, I pretty much live my life the way I want. I have a really great life. But in this particular situation, I was kind of stuck like everybody else. And it kind of hit me, I was like, you know, this, it has gotten worse since COVID, right? Because folks like me don't even have to go to the office. Like, I work remotely, I can work wherever I want. My life's gotten noticeably better. And then to go into this one situation and see, actually, actually, it looks like things have gotten much worse. And I do feel like, and one of my concerns is, that I, along with others that I criticize, are actually like oblivious to what's coming. The situation is much worse than we think. And that, just like in other previous countries where we've seen revolutions, I'm not saying we're going to see a political revolution like we saw in the Soviet Union

• 49:10Demetri Kofinas?

  or whatever, but simply stating that things are much worse than we realize. And that when your life is the way that ours looks like, you don't see it coming.

• 49:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, go to a hospital in Kentucky and sit in the waiting room. And realize that the vast majority of Americans have intense powerlessness. And more than that, they have no voice. To me, there's a missing element in Maslow's hierarchy. And I would start at the bottom with voice and the ability to be heard. Because until I can be heard, I can't be safe. I won't be fed. I won't be healed. And what the greatest source of vulnerability I see today is voicelessness.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  And this is where I go back to, there is an enormous swath of America, of other countries, that is looking for an authentic voice. And once that voice is found, the coalescence will be immediate and impactful.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Peter, let me ask, when we look at the really big picture, it feels as though humanity has a cyclical nature to it. We seem to, we make the same mistakes and we look at Strauss and Howe theory and there's plenty of examples of how we just go round and round. And we're at that point now where all the stories have died from the depression and all those years, and so we're making those same mistakes again. But it feels to me that confidence, it may or may not be cyclical, I don't know, be curious your thoughts on it, but it feels like it just oscillates along the middle of that big turning circle. So I'm curious as to, when the cycle aligns with the oscillations, that the way that the broader cycle of humanity interacts with confidence, and whether one leads the

• 51:12Speaker 01

  other or triggers the other, I'm curious as to the relationship between those two.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  To me, there's no question that there are cycles of confidence. And you can see them really clearly in things like the Dow gold ratio, which I think is probably the best, you know, measure of cyclical confidence that we have. But there are, to your point, these ordinary cycles, and then I do think there are bigger cycles. And I think that the turn of the millennium marked the peak of an enormous cycle. And I don't think we've yet experienced the low associated with that. What we're seeing are the natural divisions that come from it, the natural impatience,

• 52:01Speaker 02

  the natural desire for isolationism, for tangibility. Because the network became too big, too complex, too interdependent, too hyper-efficient.

• 52:17Speaker 02

  And now there needs to be a period of retrenchment because it became a super tall skyscraper. It wobbles too much. And now we need to bring it down, to rebuild it, to strengthen its core in order to grow again.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  I've heard one word mentioned once in this conversation, which surprises me because it always feels like it should be mentioned more. But I remember at the time, Peter, back in 2020, you and I were talking about COVID and what an important event it was. But I'd like to understand now with five years in the rearview mirror, how you now categorize COVID in terms of its importance and in terms of the shifts that it precipitated in confidence and mood, some shifts that may have recovered, but many, I would imagine, that are still way off their regular axis because of COVID.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  To me, the two biggest consequences of COVID, I think,

• 53:19Speaker 02

  is societal blindness.

• 53:24Speaker 02

  COVID enabled people, or maybe forced people, to not see others' experience.

• 53:35Speaker 02

  And so those at the top and the bottom no longer saw each other, no longer had a reason to interact in person. So the stories between those at the top and the bottom evaporated.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  And instead were replaced by this enormous, what I think of as Downton Abbey system, where things just magically started to appear. So food, you know, you just didn't need to go out. And so that exacerbates the blindness. If I don't have to go to the store, I don't have to see the people around me. I don't have to experience and hear, overhear what's going on in the real world.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  I think our level of connection post-COVID is like 20% of what it was before COVID. We've institutionalized isolationism at a very local level.

• 54:46Speaker 02

  And that's really troubling to me because nobody needs to experience the life of others. And so it was interesting to me, Dmitry, your, your point that the only place we ever intersect is either in the emergency room of a doctor's office or maybe the subway, but even that, you know, our interaction on a true socioeconomic band is very limited today. And even at sports, you have, you know, this proliferation of luxury boxes surrounding those below.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  So I, I think we have institutionalized the velvet rope economy to a point that's really poised, it blinds us to the fragility.

• 55:41Demetri Kofinas?

  Is that your term velvet rope economy?

• 55:43Speaker 02

  No, that's it. There's a book by a New York Times columnist.

• 55:48Demetri Kofinas?

  Ross Douthat?

• 55:49Speaker 02

  No.

• 55:50Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, in any case, I'd never heard that before. That really captures it. That's right.

• 55:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it destroyed me the other day when I saw that Delta expects to earn more from premium seats in corporate accounts than from economy class ticket holders next year. That to me is devastating.

• 56:09Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, the airlines themselves have created, besides the fact that they've tried to be more efficient and increase the number of different types of options they have available in order to squeeze more out of each flight, they have reconstituted the seating chart in a way that I think captures or reflects some of the social stratification, you know, because I don't know what percentage of passengers on an airplane are economy, but the economy seats today aren't what they were in the 1980s. It's a miserable experience flying economy.

• 56:42Speaker 02

  On the other hand, the seats at the front are

• 56:45Demetri Kofinas?

  Magnificent in some cases, yeah.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, I'm waiting to the point where we now have two boarding gates because we

• 56:55Demetri Kofinas?

  We do. You didn't know that? So JFK, this is the thing, and I, again, this goes back to my point about how I feel this, that I'm losing touch. JFK for Delta passengers has its own special entrance. I don't know if it's only true for international flights, but we often have to take international flights. You literally go into a different area. It feels like you're checking into a hotel. It's amazing. You don't have to go through, you don't even have to go through the special, the first class, you know, velvet rope area. You literally don't even have to see anybody. You have a different experience. You're treated like a different person and it very much feels, Peter, like a velvet rope economy. It feels like social stratification. It feels like aristocracy. And when you live that way, you have no reason to want to go and go through the normal lines

• 57:40Demetri Kofinas?

  because you're going to be stuck in some crazy line forever. The airport security people are horrible. And it's like, at what point is that not going to work? The stratification will make nothing workable in this, in a democracy. The democracy won't function. And also the meritocratic nature of social and military service also is not going to work. When basically you have a permanent class of military people who come from the lowest rungs of society, who you send out to patrol the empire in order to maintain the inflows of capital and patronage to sustain the asset price bubble that sustains your lifestyle. And that's where we're at. You know what I'm saying?

• 58:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we can agree or disagree with the draft, but what it did was to put people from every socioeconomic class together for a purpose that was shared and it broke down those barriers and, you know, talking to my father-in-law and my dad, there's a sense of

• 58:37Speaker 02

  Respect for the skills of others that is no longer present.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  It's funny, guys, the airline thing is interesting because the flip side of that, which I saw, and then I read an article about it recently, and I forget which publication. But you look at the airline lounge, which used to be a privilege. You know, it was a first-class lounge or whatever it was now. And now I was walking through an airport and I was on a trip behind two guys. And they had just come out of one of the lounges and they were bitching and moaning. Man, everyone's allowed in the lounge these days. You know, everyone who's got a credit card now can get into the lounge. So it's weird that on that side of things, it's not democratization because it's another money grab. But there has been a noticeable shift in throwing a bone to people and say, well, we'll let you in the lounge kind of thing, you know, that's, I found that very interesting.

• 59:28Demetri Kofinas?

  It's also true for cars, you know, it used to be that, you know, 30 years ago, if you had a Mercedes or you had a BMW, you were rich. You were probably a doctor, you were probably a lawyer, you were probably somebody that was creating some level of real tangible economic wealth. That's the other thing that today you could be wealthy. It's more possible to be wealthy today or more likely to be wealthy today without having done anything or contributed anything to the real economy. And that's part of the capitalist side of the equation. We were talking about this earlier, like the consumer aspects of capitalism have become a bigger part of people's meaning-making process. So that branding and the brand experience itself has come to fill more and more of people's sense of identity and satisfy their personal aspirations or ambitions.

• 1:00:11Demetri Kofinas?

  You see this with luxury car brands like Mercedes, for example, who have sought to monetize that brand by expanding their touchpoints to appeal to wider audiences as the demand for that kind of aspirational consumer experience has grown because something else on a much deeper level is missing.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  But I think a lot of that is interest rates again. Eighty-six percent of car purchases in the UK are financed now.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  Same in the United States.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  It's up that number.

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  It's a similar number of loans or leases. But we have twice as many models over $100,000 than we do below $30,000.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  The average car price in America is $50,000. Even the wealthy aren't sitting on $50,000 of disposable. So, you know, they're going to lease, they're going to do whatever. But those who are in the best position to do something about the plight of those at the bottom seem at best indifferent. And I worry that their increasing tone deafness and unwillingness to deal with it is going to lead people to the streets because at some point, folks are going to have enough. And, you know, you look at these delinquencies on cars

• 1:01:33Speaker 02

  and it's not going to be long before you see people who can't get to work because their car has been repossessed and then they can't eat. And it's a terrible spiral for those at the bottom. And it's, it is a bipartisan spiral. This is not a left or right. This is, you know, our biggest problems are top to bottom and it frustrates me to see those on both sides seemingly more interested in defeating the other, not realizing their own vulnerability to this.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  So Peter, the leaders, the autocrats, the people who emerge from this mood shift and are kind of thrust into the spotlight to do something about it. They then tend to drive the next change of mood. And we're right in the middle of that now. You know, there's a very, very small window right at the beginning where they're driven into power. They've got a small window to do something about it before they end up essentially getting captured by the system realizing, hey, I'm in power now, I'm going to get mine. Is it possible to turn that back? Is it possible that the next election, the next person who comes through takes us back? Or do we have to carry on down this path and go through to get there?

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  Because through suggests what you're talking about there. You know, some kind of apocalyptic meltdown of people in the streets. Is there a way back from a mood perspective or do we need to go through?

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think Dimitri picked a good example to, you look at an FDR. Now, timing was good for him. I mean, he did come in towards the, you know, apocalyptic point. But what was so vital?

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  Was his impatience to addressing the plight of those at the bottom.

• 1:03:22Speaker 02

  And what has been so fascinating to me in this second administration of President Trump is that he campaigned on one theme and yet has behaved in another.

• 1:03:38Speaker 02

  His initial themes were all about domestic policy. And yet, if you look at where he's traveled, where his focus is, it's all been on an international stage. And I can't think of a place where those at the bottom would least wish him to be. They want him in West Virginia, they want him in Kentucky. And I'm really befuddled. You know, we're not seeing the rallies. The contrast to me is, is really striking. And this whole thing with the, the gilded ballroom, it's not a political statement.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  Again, I can't think of a worse symbol at a time when those at the bottom are struggling.

• 1:04:29Demetri Kofinas?

  Is this the thing that's happening on the east wing of the White House?

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:33Demetri Kofinas?

  What exactly is that that's happening? Cause I don't know.

• 1:04:36Speaker 02

  They're building a $300 million gold ballroom. And you can see the transformation of the Oval Office. Every time I watch a clip, there's another piece of gold something. And I think it's lost on the new administration, what that's saying to those at the bottom.

• 1:04:53Demetri Kofinas?

  It's also, those types of symbolic things are, are very worrisome.

• 1:04:57Speaker 02

  Yes. Just to be clear, I'm as blunt on the left as I am on the right. So this is not a, you know, choosing sides.

• 1:05:06Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, yeah, though, and sure. And the Beltway consensus that has held power for the last however long is, you know, responsible for all sorts of wrongdoings. But this administration is in a class of its own in terms of its corruption, in terms of its public facing outwardly unapologetic corruption, which is a very different type of corruption than the kind you do in secret, where you can do as much as you can get away with, that people won't catch you. But what we're going through is a re-establishment of norms. And a public defacing of the values that many people may have skirted, but that we had all agreed were things to aspire to.

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  And I think it's symbolic of the invulnerability that those at the top now feel. That in every dimension of their life, they are untouchable.

• 1:06:03Demetri Kofinas?

  It's interesting you say that. Is that right? I don't know if that's true. Actually, I think politicians feel more vulnerable today. Look at the political prosecutions that are occurring, that have occurred, that are occurring. I mean, that occurred also against even Donald Trump. I mean, they went after Trump. What actually feels like is happening is that there's been a risk reassessment. And this is actually something that I was speaking about in a recent episode, that we're talking about it geopolitically. In terms of how there's a new security order emerging, whether it's in the Middle East, whether it's in Europe, as countries reassess what they're willing to tolerate. Whether it was Russia tolerating Ukraine on its border, a Western-oriented Ukraine, whether it's Israel tolerating, living in this tenuous sort of equilibrium with the Iranians.

• 1:06:47Demetri Kofinas?

  It feels like actually the gloves are coming increasingly off. And as one side has weaponized the legal system against the other, the other has decided to do it against them. And the only way to really protect yourself is to grab more power, is to go for it. And I feel like that's actually what we're seeing today.

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  But the consequences is that those with power feel invulnerable and put others in a position of being either victims or beneficiaries of that power.

• 1:07:14Demetri Kofinas?

  That's very scary, though, like the way we just sort of came to that idea, right? Which is like, the only way I'm safe is to grab more power. What does that incentivize? It incentivize a move towards centralization, autocracy? That's very scary.

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  But this is not just a US phenomenon. You know, there are a few good men. There are a dozen of these folks around the globe. We can look at Saudi, we can look at Israel, we can look at Hungary, we can look at Turkey. We could, I mean, we have all of these gentlemen. You can look increasingly at India.

• 1:07:48Demetri Kofinas?

  That suggests that we're in the stress center, that those people are in the stress center?

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

  No, they are in the launchpad.

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  They are in the launchpad. They have control.

• 1:07:59Demetri Kofinas?

  They have control? That's interesting. I mean, it feels like they're trying to grab control, but it feels like the base environment is one of stress. And again, I am not trying to hijack your framework here and explain it back to you, Peter.

• 1:08:11Speaker 02

  No, no, no.

• 1:08:11Demetri Kofinas?

  But I mean, to me, and I'll just leave it there, and I'd love for Grant to ask questions, it feels like the underlying environment is one of stress and that people are trying to grab control because they're feeling increasingly stressed. And whether or not they can maintain it and get to a place where they can feel that kind of confidence is another question. But I feel like that underlying stress environment is a feature of the times for me.

• 1:08:33Speaker 02

  The nature of these men is such that they will never feel like they have enough control.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's fascinating how we've ended up here from where we began, just this point a short while ago. You know, we're talking about FDR. And we keep coming back to the politicians, we keep coming back to the leaders, you know, this idea of mood and confidence, Peter, which is probably, one would imagine, more important on a societal level. But we keep getting dragged back to talking about how important it is at the very, very top for these few leaders in that attempt to safeguard themselves and hang on to power. I wonder, going back to FDR, at the time, obviously, the 1930s, politics was not necessarily a means to become wealthy. It was an enterprise you went into when you

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  were already wealthy and you wanted to give something back. And now, politics has become a way to get fabulously wealthy. Because not only the opportunities there, but to your earlier point, the fact that the grift is now out in the open, you know, this whole thing for Dimitri, and I think we were both radicalized by the Trump meme coin on the eve of his inauguration. That was not my radicalizing event, certainly. But coming back to this idea of going through or back, it feels as though because the nature of politics has changed and politics in and of itself is now a means to an end, it's a means to get rich. I don't see how you find another FDR that can take us back. I

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  think we have to keep going down this track until the whole thing, to your point, everybody's out in the streets and we completely reinvent this whole thing, but from a point of there has to be a transfer of wealth, as we've identified. It doesn't feel like it's going to go peacefully to me because the people that have wealth have the means and the motivation to take more of it. So every single thing I hear and every discussion I have reinforces my worst case scenario that this ultimately almost has to be a violent seizure and a violent redressing of the balance because everything we've said so far, no one's going to give up what they've got, no one's going to stop pursuing more voluntarily.

• 1:10:43Speaker 02

  No, you need the courageous empowering leader. The one who says, I want less in order to give you more. And that rather than trying to position him or herself at the center behaves much more like the coach on the sidelines. That it's truly about empowering others and propelling others to success. And that's a leadership model that we are devoid of today. It doesn't exist in the corporate structures, it doesn't exist in politics.

• 1:11:24Speaker 02

  We have a star centric leadership system today. But those at the bottom will ultimately take power. But I would encourage you to look at somebody like Zelensky. Because his combination of empathy and empowering is changing not just Ukraine, but they're transforming how battles are fought. I mean, if you think about what's happening in drone warfare there, it's truly about empowering at a micro level.

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  Others to figure it out, you know, how do you do this? And the grassroots building that's gone on in weaponry there, I think, is emblematic of what can happen when those who are hopeless realize, I have no choice but to figure this out and to work together with those around me to defeat my enemy. It's creative, it's realistic. I mean, it's a really interesting thing, and this is a guy that nobody thought would succeed. I mean, the brutal press that he got when he was a candidate. But he has a lot of the elements of the kinds of leaders that we'll see.

• 1:12:52Demetri Kofinas?

  You know, it's so interesting hearing you talk, Peter, because I exist in two different worlds or try to take in different information environments. Because today, in today's world, people really live in, they can really live in their own realities. And this would come as a shock to a lot of people to hear you say this. Because there's a lot of people in America that think Russia is winning this war, despite the fact that they've lost over 100,000 souls in Ukraine with a population that is below the replacement rate. And there's a view among lots of people in America that Zelensky is this sort of like tyrant in Ukraine. And the question I have for you is, first of all, are you aware of this? Are you aware of these two different, very different realities with respect to how people

• 1:13:34Demetri Kofinas?

  view, whether it's the war in Ukraine, whether it's Israel-Palestine, whether it's all these things, whether it's Charlie Kirk? I mean, actually, Andrew Schultz, the comedian who has apparently a very successful podcast, that I confess I don't listen to, but he was on Joe Rogan, which I used to listen to. I find Joe Rogan also boring these days. I find it's like, basically, non-experts interviewing non-experts about things that neither of them know anything about. But Schultz was actually really intelligent on this point, and he talked about how social media and the digital world flattens people, and it turns them into these, just these small caricatures. And that Charlie Kirk's assassination was a really great example of that, because you had, like, one part of the spectrum that was like, this person was like, you know, this

• 1:14:17Demetri Kofinas?

  church-going, God-loving, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then you had family man, blah, blah, blah. And then you had the other side of the spectrum that was like, this guy was, you know, a kind of white supremacist, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, like, I don't feel any empathy for him or his family or his kids, and the world's better off without him. And it seems like whatever that we haven't even talked about this right today. And God help us if we open this can of worms. But like all these problems that we've identified today, we've talked about. We're attempting to deal with them while we have essentially like a lobotomized brain. We are not functioning coherently as society because in part to go back to this thing about power, AI, capitalism, tech, big tech.

• 1:15:00Demetri Kofinas?

  You've got this community of tech oligarchs and quasi capitalist, whatever, that have created platforms with economics whose malignancies, we don't have the language to describe. I mean, Shoshana Zuboff gave us that language when she wrote The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, or began to give us that language. But we haven't fully armed ourselves with the language to describe what's happening to us. And we're sort of falling through this vortex at the same time as all these other things are happening. And that is just terrifying. And I have tried on my show to raise awareness about that. It hasn't really resonated in part, I think, because the systems of communication have been hijacked.

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, you, your examples are perfect for the metaphor I use these days, which is today on social media, we paint only with a roller and only using black or white paint. There is no middle, there is no nuance. It's either A or B. And if you're a reasonable person, you're now being put in a really difficult place of having to hold ice cold and boiling hot at the same time. Because to concede that it's either A or B is

• 1:16:23Speaker 02

  I just can't, you know, the world is nuanced.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  So Peter, look, before we wrap up, as people kind of sit at home and process this and I'm kind of processing it on the fly and it's given me so much to think about. I've had the benefit of talking to you about mood and confidence a lot. And so I have a, I feel a better than average understanding of your framework and the importance of it. And I still remember the first time we met and the light bulb that went off in my head when I, when we started talking about this. So for the people that are perhaps new to this work and new to the way you think about the world. Give them some practical ways in which they can react to the world around them to

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  try and avoid getting too swept up in this, some things to look for in terms of understanding shifts, not just in the collective mood, but perhaps in their own mood and their own positioning in that quadrant. Just give some, perhaps some practical advice for people that are listening to this and trying to process it.

• 1:17:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, if I had to give folks a simple arithmetic equation, it would be that confidence equals action and equals story. That how you feel is driving what you do and the stories you tell yourself and others. So be really careful with your stories because we can latch on to them, believing them to be truths that then lead us to make poor decisions and to

• 1:18:05Speaker 02

  behave incorrectly. At the same time, appreciate that that equation works for everyone else. So when you're watching the news and the stories that you're being bombarded with, appreciate that they are being curated to mirror your mood. And that our news delivery system, our story system today is a series of deliberate echo chambers that are trying

• 1:18:41Speaker 02

  to capture you and to keep your mood in a place that often is irritable and objectionable so that that's what keeps your attention. And I think we need to be very careful with the stories that we take in and to appreciate that the black or white we are being served is with intent to drive what we do and how we feel.

• 1:19:15Speaker 02

  The technology exists for me to manipulate you relentlessly. The other thing I would say, and this is the best way I know to deal with stress, is service with others for others.

• 1:19:33Speaker 02

  Get out into the real world, doing something that benefits others, and hopefully do it with people that you wouldn't otherwise sit next to, stand next to. Go work in a, you know, in a food bank if you're a Republican with a group of Democrats. Do it with a group of Democrats if you're a Republican. But to realize that today we have far more in common than we have that's different.

• 1:20:04Speaker 02

  And that these human connections are vital to sustaining us in these moments.

• 1:20:14Speaker 02

  I think that we would all be far less in the stress center

• 1:20:21Speaker 02

  if we stop trying to take in this relentless feed of, of information. Go for the facts, not the stories. Tell your own stories on the facts that you uncover. Don't rely on others to be feeding you the facts today.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  Beautifully put. I can't think of a better way to wrap this conversation up, Dee. Nope.

• 1:20:44Demetri Kofinas?

  It was wonderful getting to chat with you again, Peter.

• 1:20:47Speaker 02

  I appreciate the opportunity. As I said, I, I worry less about the uncertainty as I do just how powerless people feel today. And I'll share that the most difficult paragraph in my book for me to write was the one where I said, and I don't know the exact words, but ultimately, it is our choice to remain in the passenger seat. That we can blame others for putting us there, and there are lots of reasons we got there. But it is our choice to remain. And I think that folks need to realize that it is our choice societally, not just in

• 1:21:29Speaker 02

  the United States, but elsewhere, to remain in the passenger seat. And I keep wondering at what point do folks say, I've had enough?

• 1:21:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it feels like it's coming. It feels like it's coming. Well, Peter, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much for doing it.

• 1:21:43Speaker 02

  Thank you both very much.

• 1:21:44Demetri Kofinas?

  Thank you, Peter.

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  Well, there you have it, Dave. As always, every conversation I've ever had with Peter over the years, and we've had many, has been just so interesting. You know, I always leave conversations with him with so much stuff spinning around my head, and this one's no different.

• 1:21:57Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, this was fun. What's fun about these conversations in general is that they're more free range, not to use like a paltry term. Do you guys have the word free range over in the UK?

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  We do.

• 1:22:08Demetri Kofinas?

  Free range chicken. We kind of range pretty widely, and it's, I find it in some sense inspiring because it allows us to explore ideas that, you know, aren't as originally, again, for me, bounded by the outline that I have in my head. And it was also interesting, there was a moment in the conversation, you might remember this, where we were talking about control and power. And for me, it was a bit of an aha moment, that the dynamic is such that in order to have, though Peter made the point that the folks that are attracted to this type of power can never have enough control, but that the underlying environment is such that people's confidence in the legal system protecting them against political

• 1:22:52Demetri Kofinas?

  persecutions is on the decline. And so the best way to protect yourself is to grab more power, that it isn't just about power in order to do the things you want. It's all about power to protect yourself. And that suggests an incentive structure that would drive towards centralization of authority.

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this idea of do unto others before they do unto you is, I mean, we've seen it, right? We saw it with the lawfare unleashed on Trump. We've seen it with Trump coming back at people now. He's back in power. Comey, yeah. Comey's a perfect example, John Bolton and others. So it feels like we're at the start of that particular cycle, not the end, you know? So I don't know where it goes. Yeah, the thing that's been fascinating for me in all these conversations is each one of them. Has contained light and darkness, you know, there have been dark subjects that we've talked about and potentially dire outcomes. And they've also been hopeful points made about community and, you know, last conversation with Roger about a return to kind of spirituality

• 1:23:50Speaker 01

  and faith. And it's amazing how this whole pivot embraces every single part of every spectrum available and just trying to put it all together and focus on the right things and try and understand the way these things are shifting. It's been, I mean, I find it very challenging, but these conversations are a massive help for me.

• 1:24:09Demetri Kofinas?

  You know what? We should do a hundred year pivot event or some kind of like, I can already see, the audience can't see your eyes, but I'm like, I can already see that Grant's thinking, oh God, not one more thing that I have to do.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 1:24:23Demetri Kofinas?

  Grant's schedule is probably packed with like 30 trips all over the world.

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  No, no, no, on the country.

• 1:24:27Demetri Kofinas?

  Interviews and his speaking gigs. But I was at this really great talk, like I mentioned last night with John and Karen, whose book, it came through, by the way, it's Empire of AI. And it was at one of CUNY's conference halls on 365 Fifth Avenue. And it was gorgeous. You know, I used to put on events in New York. So I know the venues and this is a fantastic venue. It's right by Grand Central, right by Penn Station, really great venue. And it's been a while since I did something like that, you know, big, you know, 200 to 300 person event space with a Q and A. And I wonder, you know, maybe we should talk about this.

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, if you want.

• 1:25:00Demetri Kofinas?

  Talking about community and people love this new series, like they'll get to meet us, they'll get to participate in, you know, one of these onstage Q and As and, and feel like, and meet other people who are in this audience of ours for whom this show and this subject is resonating.

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's a great idea. That's a great idea. We will definitely talk about that. That's what I think when the best time to do it is, I guess, new year, new start.

• 1:25:22Demetri Kofinas?

  We'll have to talk about it. We'll have to figure it out. Yep. We're going to get a bunch of emails about this now.

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, we are.

• 1:25:26Demetri Kofinas?

  Confirmation emails from people.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  You've unleashed the beast now, Dimitri. You've opened the cage and at least, at least people know that this isn't rehearsed now. We're just talking about this off the top of our heads as we go. But that's great. I think it's a great idea. Well, look, thanks to Peter Atwater for joining us. You can find out more about what he does if you go to his website, peteratwater.com. That's one T in Peter and one T in Atwater, by two Ts in Atwater, but not next to each other. I've probably made that more confusing than it is to be, didn't I? And Peter's book, The Confidence Map, you can find on Amazon, everywhere else. If you haven't read it already, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's an easy read. It's a fairly short read, and it will change the way you think about an awful lot of things. So again, thanks to Peter for joining us. We'll be back, Dee, with another conversation in the not-too-some future, I suspect. But in the meantime, I guess all that's left is to thank everybody for listening. Thank you.

• 1:26:12Demetri Kofinas?

  Thanks for listening, everyone. 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 Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at Kofinas, and you can email me at [email protected]. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.