The Epstein Files Are Worse Than You Think | Patrick Boyle

22:57And there was plenty of inappropriate stuff in there, but no mention of victims. So once again, it was redacted financial information and legal information that the law said they weren't supposed to redact. Then there were kind of weird ones. Like there was an image of a desk drawer with a photo of Epstein and Trump in it. That was released. And then a few hours later, they pulled it off of the site. And once again, the Department of Justice is supposed to be independent, right? Historically, we've always thought the FBI and the DOJ work for the people. They're not like the protectors of the president.

23:35But anyhow, that thing got pulled. Then there was a huge uproar and it got re-released. And to be clear, I think that there's probably plenty of stories about Bill Clinton. I don't know, but he seems to have spent a lot of time with Epstein. But there was a document released, it was a photograph of Bill Clinton with Michael Jackson, and then a bunch of children with their, oh, and Diana Ross, I think, and a bunch of children with their faces blanked out as if they were victims. And then it turned out that that was just a photo. It was from like a charity do. It was already available. It had been in newspapers.

24:11It was available online. And the children were Michael Jackson and Diana Ross's children. And so the argument there is like, once again, it could be an accident, maybe an FBI agent going a bit fast and just blanked out all kids' faces. But that one was very much pushed as like, look, here it is, Bill Clinton and a man who was suspected of all sorts of wrongdoing with a bunch of children with blanked out faces. And there was one other thing that was very weird was that, because the files were sort of searchable, but if you typed in Trump and hit search, it would say no hits. He's not in the files at all.

24:49Well, if you put in Trump and then hit your space bar and did search, you'd find hundreds of references to him. And so once again, was that a quirk? Is there a problem with the search engine thing they used or did they prevent? And we don't know the answer. I'm not saying I know the answer, but my video was about the fact that the files had been released, that they had probably been inappropriately redacted. The biggest scandal of the files was actually an FBI document on the day that Epstein was arrested. There was an email that went around the various FBI offices saying, we need to pick up the 10 other co-conspirators.

25:31And Kash Patel sat there in Congress and he said there were one man. It makes us wonder why Ghislaine's even in prison if it was just one man. But anyhow, one man, and then there's an FBI document saying that at least back then, back in, what would that have been? 2019 or so? I'm not sure the date.

25:50Demetri Kofinas:I think it was 2019. And I think it was late in the year too. Yeah. And there were at the time, 10 co-defendants, one of them based in Ohio. And a person who is suspected of wrongdoing, who sent an awful lot of money to Jeffrey Epstein, also happens to live in Ohio. People can guess who that is. And so once again, And all those names, some of them were left in. Ghislaine's name was in there, one or two other people, but there's about seven names blanked out. And so once again, are they victims or are they, you know, I believe the way the law was worded, it sort of said that no public people will be protected.

26:29Like it's everything out in the open, only victims are, you know, we're not trying to protect politicians or public figures from embarrassment. yet the documents are heavily, heavily redacted. As I said, only 1 % of the million documents has been released, and it would appear that suspects or potential perpetrators' names are being blacked out. So that was what the video was about. And that one, it really surprised me to have it claimed to be inappropriate because I don't feel it's inappropriate. There was probably nothing in that video that isn't in our conversation right now.

27:09Demetri Kofinas:So again, there are two parallel stories here that I'd like to unpack. One is the demonetization, understanding it, what it can tell us about how modern media works, the power of large platforms to both suppress speech and also to incentivize different types of speech as a result of the fact that certain types of speech is commercially viable and other forms are not. And then the Epstein story. I want to ask a few more questions about the Epstein story here. First of all, I just looked at the date. He was arrested in 2019, but that happened earlier than I remembered. It looks like he died. Yeah, I think he died in late.

27:43It was in August. Yeah.

27:44Demetri Kofinas:And it's interesting because that was right before the COVID pandemic began to emerge in China, and the news media began to cover that at the expense of the Epstein story. It's shocking, actually. I somehow have it in my head that this happened during the pandemic. And even the pandemic would have been like five years ago. So this is more than five years ago. It's like almost, I guess, five plus years ago. It's amazing that we still haven't gotten answers. I'm not shocked that there are efforts by the administration to cover up any trace of the president's association with Epstein, irrespective of what the nature and extent of that association was.

28:23Demetri Kofinas:I'm not surprised. Yeah. And I feel like anyone in a position of power would try to cover their tracks there. What I'm more surprised with is the extent to which this is being covered up. Well, that's even what brought it back. Because as you said, in 2019, COVID hit a few months later and the world, it kind of became a bit of a meme where people said Epstein didn't kill himself or whatever, or people would accuse Hillary Clinton of it and things like that. But the world had moved on. But this administration, or at least a lot of these figures, really ran on that they were going to expose the deep state and the JFK files were going to come out, the Epstein files, all this information was going to come out.

29:06And then suddenly they clammed up. And obviously, this is what threw the attention, right, was that, you know, when you say you're going to release everything. And you remember they had a bunch of influencers in the White House where they handed them a bunch of documents that were already in the public sphere, you know, and it sort of seemed so ridiculous and so over the top. And then when you add in the fact that the sitting president has spent years, as it would appear, very good friends with Epstein, you know, it raises the question like, you know, and who knows, as I said, there may be 100 good reasons or at least good for, let's say, intelligence services or whatever to want to cover stuff up.

29:48maybe there's important data in there, but it's rather, it's sort of almost a perfect conspiracy theory, isn't it? To have these guys say they're going to release it and then really obviously backpedal in a frankly embarrassing manner.

30:04Demetri Kofinas:So I'm trying to think about what the most useful way is to talk about this story and not sort of get caught in this endless loop of either venting and frustration about our inability to get clarity or speculating about things that are unknowable. But in the vein of speculation, I am curious, the one question that comes up for me, the meta question, the deeper three-dimensional question, is what does this tell us about the nature of power, how it operates, how the world works really versus how we think it works. Because here we have what is obviously a conspiracy, both a conspiracy, the act itself was a conspiracy, an ongoing conspiracy, the network, and the coverup is a conspiracy.

30:56Demetri Kofinas:And yet we can't seem to get, there seems to be an institutional breakdown in moving forward any kind of prosecutions. I mean, here we were just talking about this yesterday, Jay Powell, we're recording this on Monday, January 12th. Jay Powell recently let us know there's an ongoing criminal investigation into him and his role in refurbishing or renovating the Federal Reserve Building. So the DOJ has no problem sending subpoenas to the Fed. But the only subpoenas that have showed up for this DOJ as a result of Epstein are subpoenas that were served to it to release documents. And so I'm curious from your standpoint, point.

31:36Demetri Kofinas:Both of us to varying degrees have brushed shoulders with people that make more money, have more power than us in various venues, though I'm not in no way someone that exists in those echelons of power. But I'm just curious, what is your best hypothesis or what is your best framework that explains how someone like this can operate in this manner for so many years, than that when he dies suspiciously in prison and there are all these fumbling releases like the video footage and all this stuff and the Congress can demand that documents are released, they're released, but they're not released according to code.

32:16Demetri Kofinas:What explains both from an institutional standpoint, how the government works that we don't understand that shows up also, I think in the example of UAP, the UAP conspiracy. And then also like, what are the power networks? What are we looking at here? And what do you think this was? Well, that was my big takeaway in kind of the two demonetized videos. My real takeaway is that the reason the Epstein story matters and the reason people care about it, you know, there's people who are angry about it and might even wonder why they're angry about it. But it comes down to this idea of a two-tier justice system.

32:51That's what people are upset about, right? Because if you get pulled over for speeding in your car, there's no dodging the justice system. But this guy, who very clearly was involved in all sorts of things, he was involved in Ponzi schemes. There was a very good New York Times piece that dug into where his wealth came from. And he had a long history of just ripping people off. He was involved in Ponzi schemes. He was fired from... You know, everyone kind of wants to look at the sexual issues, but everything Jeffrey Epstein did was bad. Like he ripped off his friends, he broke laws at will. You know, there was nothing decent about the man.

33:31But, you know, when you look into the finances, a lot of the wealth just came from ripping off people. And he seemed to have a really good instinct as to who to keep on side and who to screw over, you know, because there were certain people that he really cultivated, like Dershowitz, who got him into the halls of power. I believe it was Dershowitz who managed to, or was it, what's his name, the other guy at Harvard, Larry Summers, who's one of those guys that got him introduced into the White House meeting Bill Clinton multiple times. And that Clinton connection really worked for him. But the thing is, he seemed to know who to burn and who to look after.

34:09And I think what really upsets people, and I think everyone, we can instinctively see this in the world, that there are people who get away with all sorts of things, and there are people that don't. And it often relates to who you know. It relates to you having the right lawyer or the right friend who can kind of suggest that the investigators turn a blind eye to you, and then other people go down for next to nothing. One of the things that has enraged people, and I think is the root of many of the issues we have in society today, is the credit crunch, like the you know, the financial crisis of 07-08.

34:49And in all of that, the only person they found to blame was some fellow junior at Goldman Sachs, you know, who got in a bit of trouble over that. Everyone else had a good excuse for what went wrong. You know, it just, it's all bad luck and whatever. Massive bailouts and so on, such that, you know, the wealthy get to walk away with everything. Maybe they lose a year's worth of bonus and everyone else sees their home crater in value, their credit ratings fall and so on. I think that is at the root of the Epstein scandal. It's not really about, I mean, it is of course about the sexual assaults and the sort of salacious stories, but it's really about the huge unfairness where sort of regular people get treated very differently to the people at the peaks of these power structures.

35:44Demetri Kofinas:So I remember a story coming out very early on that Epstein had obtained power of attorney over Les Wexner's estate. And one of the theories, and I don't know what the evidence for this was, what it was based on, one of the theories was that he had a sexual relationship with Wexner, that Wexner was a closeted homosexual, that he, Epstein, maybe wasn't even gay, but was just somebody that could sort of use his sexuality for whatever diabolical purpose he had engineered. And so he developed a sexual relationship with Wexner. He used that to then blackmail him into giving him control of his estate and then also funneling hundreds of millions of dollars.

36:26Demetri Kofinas:I remember reading somewhere - Yeah, yeah. The sums were massive. Yeah. And even I think the house in Manhattan, all this stuff was just handed over to him from Wexner, I believe. And that was described essentially as the seed capital that got him going. Is that your interpretation? Well, once again, we don't know. There's all sorts of theories about what brought these guys together. The thing that doesn't hold water to me is when people say that he was blackmailing all of these guys, if someone's blackmailing you, you're not really going to their parties. You're not writing funny stories in their birthday book and things like that.

37:05But I don't really buy the story that these people were being blackmailed by Epstein. They may have been paying him for services that they felt were worth these massive sums of money, but I don't believe he was giving them tax advice. In fact, there was a great story in one of the recent documents that was released. It described Epstein accompanying someone along on a business deal. I forget, somewhere in the Middle East. This was before Ghislaine got involved. And they commented on him turning up for meetings, badly dressed, inappropriately dressed to a business meeting in sweatpants or something and appearing disinterested and not understanding the financial terms.

37:44This is not a guy you give power of attorney to, to give you tax advice, a guy who turns up in sweatpants and is falling asleep in financial meetings. Yeah.

37:54Demetri Kofinas:That's the thing that, I mean, I feel like I wish I knew people who are, quote, elites on this level so I could talk to them and ask them what they think is going on here. Because I feel like I'm missing, personally speaking, I'm missing some really important piece of this puzzle. But I agree about the blackmailing. Actually, a great analogy for me is how we used to think about, or a lot of people think about, interrogation. I remember after 9-11, there was a show called 24. Do you remember that with Jack Bauer, I think? Yes. Yeah. I only watched bits of it, but yeah, it was a huge hit. Yeah. It was a huge hit in the US.

38:23Demetri Kofinas:In fact, it had already been planned and was supposed to air right after 9-11 or literally like a week after or something. And they held it off for a bit because it was too on the nose. But there were lots of these scenes of Jack Bauer interrogating terrorists who were on their way to conduct some kind of attack and he had to torture them in order to find out the information he needed. And upon further scrutiny, for anyone who's dug a bit deeper into this and listened to interviews of interrogators, it seems almost universally the case that torturing somebody or threatening them with physical violence is not the most effective way to get them to give you both information and more importantly, accurate information.

39:08Yeah.

39:09Demetri Kofinas:And so I feel like the same principle in my view holds when it comes to extracting information in this context. So is the best way of doing this basically running a blackmail network where people are going to find out one way or the other? I mean, even if - even if you're able to silence somebody from speaking publicly, you're not going to be able to silence them from speaking to other people. It's going to get out there running a black whale network, number one. And is that really the most effective way of getting people to do things for you by getting them compromised? Or it seems to me is just the fact that he was the spoke on a wheel that encompassed some of the most powerful people in the world.

39:48Demetri Kofinas:And he was spending lots of time with them, doing them lots of favors. And in so doing, he was in a position to learn a lot of things over time. And that made him a very important conduit and middleman for the intelligence community. But then I'm left with the next question, which is, again, I think speaks to my ignorance, which is, how does that explain the accumulation of this amount of money and this amount of power? That doesn't quite track. So then you sort of ask, well, was there a larger role he was playing for, again, the intelligence communities where he was a go-between. We know that like Ghislaine Maxwell's father was a go-between for intelligence.

40:23Demetri Kofinas:And a lot of these powerful people, basically, they intersect. So I'm curious, how do you think about that, that part of the story? Well, I guess that's really the whole puzzle. And that's often the way I do my videos is I don't really want to tell people my opinion because everyone has an opinion and that doesn't make it valid. But I think a lot of the really simple explanations of Epstein don't hold up. That was really almost the point I was making is the simple explanations don't hold up. The fact that there's a requirement to release this data and they refuse to and they blank out certain things.

41:00And of course, everyone wants to focus on the pedophilia and the sex crimes and this stuff. But the thing is, I think there's much more because there just has to be more. I don't think a high profile pedophile, he's not like in the UK, there was this scandal with Jimmy Savile years ago, a TV presenter. And when it broke, it broke because there's no need to hide this. I guess to me, the takeaway is that there's something bigger to hide than just that Jeffrey Epstein was a really horribly behaved man who committed all sorts of crimes.

41:42Demetri Kofinas:Do you think that this is kind of it? We're not going to get... Because I should also say that, again, speaking to the institutional breakdown, the only real pressure for information comes when the public is outraged. And as long as the new cycle turns to something else like Venezuela or ice raids or something else, people just are not going to have the attention span. So even though this has been the single biggest scandal of the president's entire time in office, both between the first and second terms. At the end of the day, there's only so much attention to go around and so much caring to go around.

42:12Demetri Kofinas:And while it's true that he has lost supporters, and it's true that he's also alienated some very important people with political cachet, like Marjorie Taylor Greene among Republicans, it's not clear that it's really going to make much of a difference at the end of the day. I think this scandal will never go away. It'll outlive Donald Trump. It It may not in any way bring down any of the people in office at the moment, but it's such a, you know, the way that the JFK assassination was almost like kind of a perfect conspiracy as well. Like in that, you know, all these crazy events happen and there's bits of videotape that appear and whatever people are.

42:49You can spend forever putting things together. And even if tomorrow, if they released a very clear explanation of what happened, people would go, nah, not buying it. And I think that's how Epstein will be. I think that the cover up, like the extremes that they went to, the number of people implicated, the positions that they were in, the fact that, you know, Epstein was first reported to the FBI for basically pedophile type behaviors in 1996, you know, where a girl explained that he had taken photographs of her two underage sisters and was selling them. That was the accusation selling them to his friends.

43:31They've known about that aspect of his behavior for 30 years now. He also was involved, as I said before that, in Ponzi schemes and all sorts of stuff. He did some really weird stuff. Apparently, when he worked at Bear Stearns, he managed to do quite well because he was dating the CEO's daughter. He was involved in a number of scandals that he didn't get in trouble for because no one wanted to upset the boss.

43:57Demetri Kofinas:This man was remarkably talented in exploiting human beings. Yes. This guy is really something else. But then he was involved in Ponzi schemes. His partner in the Ponzi scheme went to prison. He didn't. They tried to buy Pan Am. I mean, crazy stuff, right? And this whole thing, like Epstein has somehow dodged every bullet. It's like the Matrix. you know? And so is this a scandal that will go away? I don't think so. Like, you know, people might stop talking for what we talk about Venezuela, what we talk about Jay Powell. But the truth is that like, I think at this point, almost if they came clean with everything, people would go, well, they've told us that, but what are they hiding?

44:38Of course. Of course.

44:39Demetri Kofinas:Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I don't expect ever to get much clarity, though I don't think it's impossible for me or you personally or other people to eventually get, put some further important pieces of the puzzle together. Not so much to help us understand the details of what happened in this particular case, but to understand how this can be possible, fleshing out, in other words, our global model of power. Yeah. Well, it's interesting because there's this mix of competence and incompetence in that they've done a good job of not releasing the files, but they've done an even better job of making it look awful.

45:15You know, like the meeting, you know, when the Trump's attorney goes to meet with Jelaine and like a week later upgrade her such that the head guy at the prison is like sending her emails and stuff for her. Like, it's a wild thing. Like, wouldn't you say to Jelaine, look, thanks for keeping quiet. Let's wait six months till things die down. And then we'll put you in a cushy prison. You don't do it the next day. It's both competent and incompetent. Yeah.

45:42Demetri Kofinas:So let's switch back to the other parallel story thread, which is the demonetization of your YouTube channel. I don't know that you really dug into this much. I think you made the point that you're not really big into conspiracies that explain this. And you know other people that are content creators who have done videos on Epstein that maybe are far worse, and their channels haven't been demonetized. What can you tell us? Because again, you have got such a huge presence, man. I mean, having over a million subscribers on your YouTube channel where your individual videos consistently get... I mean, the lowest I've seen is like 400 ,000, 500 ,000 per video.

46:20Demetri Kofinas:The upper echelon is in the millions. That's way more than what CNN or Fox's videos get online, and probably more than any of their broadcasts get. I mean, I don't even know who watches cable news anymore. So you are in a position today that broadcast anchors were at years ago. What do we need to understand from you and reflecting on this yourself? Acknowledging, of course, that you never worked in broadcast television, so you didn't work in legacy media, but you're on the vanguard of the new media ecosystem, the way that it's being organized, which is how people are learning about stuff, right?

46:58Demetri Kofinas:You're at the forefront of this, you're at the tip of the spear. What can you tell us about how this world is organizing itself, the sort of incentives that drive it, the power of the platforms? Give us more information here to understand - It's a funny thing because I have to tell you, there's no one more surprised by this than me. Because in a funny way, you go out to the store and you buy yourself a camera and a microphone and you film initially in the spare room of my house or in the office. I can't explain how homemade some of my videos are. When I'm teaching in London, I just use a room at the university and prop up a tripod and make a video.

47:41And it has this kind of huge reach, which is sort of amazing to me. But the thing I took away as interesting from this is that I'm sort of lucky, as you said, I get sort of huge reach with most of my videos. So in a funny way, like, you know, if one of them that looked like it would be a big hit isn't, it's not that big a deal. But I think it's more the message it sends. And then the question is, is YouTube intending to send a message or is it just bad luck? Like, it's sort of funny to me, the two videos on one topic, I get dinged for nothing else. And I think if you're much smaller, let's say you're a small YouTube channel, you've got 5 ,000, 10 ,000 subscribers, and you're trying to grow a channel.

48:26If you keep getting dinged on videos about certain topics, like if you criticize a political figure or something like that, and it's getting shut down on you, you're going to adjust your content to avoid that. And there's even a term they use, I learned about this, called algo speak, where younger people making content will use certain words. They won't use the word dead. They'll say unalive because they're afraid that that'll trigger the algo that demonetizes or shuts them down. And it's a weird thing to worry about an algorithmic, sort of an invisible AI sensor who you can't really negotiate with.

49:11You can't call up and say, hey, guys, I think you got it wrong. There's nothing that crazy in there. It's a bit of a computer says no problem. And I think that's more the issue that I focus in on is, do we live in a world of kind of algorithmic censorship? As I said, it might just be bad luck that two videos on the same topic got shut down. But it does worry me that we've already seen all the big dinners at the White House and things like that, where all the tech elites are sitting around. And, you know, Matt Levine, the financial columnist, he often jokes that, you know, the most important thing in power dynamics are seating charts, you know, who sits next to the key guy.

49:55And you can kind of see, you know, did Zuckerberg get a better seat than Bezos or whatever. But, you know, these guys are jockeying for position. They are hoping to win the favor of the administration. And so you do worry in recent years, like we would never have thought about this in the past, but I feel that even if you look at how quiet politicians have been over the last year, like the Republican Party have nothing to say about any sort of crazy scandals or whatever. They keep quiet. Similarly, the Democrats, like they might as well send all the Congress people home. They're doing nothing.

50:34They have nothing to say. The reason for that is quite possibly that they're afraid that the Silicon Valley elites and the crypto people who did an awful lot of funding of the last election. And just to be clear, I'm not taking a right versus left thing. These people funded both Democrats and Republicans based on their attitudes towards the things they cared about, in particular crypto, right? And there were certain politicians, and they learned that if you said the wrong thing about crypto, you were done. They would spend a fortune. They put up campaign videos that in no way talked about crypto, because the public don't care that much about that.

51:13And they'd instead say, oh, he was involved in this law that did this or whatever. And I think all of these guys are afraid that the president has Elon Musk's ear and a few other people's ears, and this huge amount of capital can be deployed to shut them down. And And then the question is, are they shutting down voices that sort of say uncomfortable things? And I hope that that's not true, but I worry that it could be true.

51:41Demetri Kofinas:It is true. We know that's true. When you say they're shutting down, I mean, maybe I misunderstood who they are, but there's so much self-censorship. Yeah. Well, even the Hunter Biden laptop, and actually - It's a great example also. On bigger scale as well, even like Joe Rogan getting, I forget, he got banned from some things during COVID. But the idea was, we were all told by the new people in power that it was just the old group who did that. And they're all free speech advocates, but they don't necessarily seem like free speech advocates to me. Well, they're not. But okay. So also, that's such a stupid, the way that that was described by the quote, free speech bros was so disingenuous and also probably a derivative of genuine ignorance around how speech as a concept operates on the internet, separate from whether or not private platforms are legally binded in the same way that the government is.

52:40Demetri Kofinas:But in spirit, I certainly agree with that sentiment that you should be able to ideally express yourself as freely as possible. But the idea that somehow Twitter under the Stanford Internet Observatory was muzzling people, whereas the way that everyone... As if the information and the voices that go out on social media just go out in the same way that they do when you go to a town hall and you vibrate your vocal cords. Yeah. Well, that's sort of the big algorithmic question, isn't it? because we're in a world where, you know, people don't, even you and I, do people hear about us through their friends or do they hear about us through an algorithm that just sort of says, you've listened to this podcast, you might like Hidden Forces.

53:29And, you know, Twitter and all of these, you know, Instagram, Twitter, all of these tech products definitely work on this sort of algorithmic reach thing, and I have benefited from that. I mean, a million viewers don't come from people just saying, hey, you have to tune into this thing. It comes from - Right.

53:49Demetri Kofinas:You appeal to something, the algorithm. But let me just say this, Patrick, because I don't want to forget it. My point is that the focus has been on the censorship component, but as much of that focus, more of it should be on the amplification. Because it isn't, again, there isn't some objective measure of reach and then either you reach what you're objectively able to do or someone stops you. Everything is controlled. Everything is amplified or suppressed, monetized or demonetized. And also the context through which you experience something also matters. And so we have a piss poor, fully polluted information environment controlled by private corporations.

54:29Demetri Kofinas:And because we're in a phase in the cycle where we are going through a dismantling of institutions and a collapse in institutional trust, there is no vehicle through which people feel that they can actually effectuate positive change for the public good. And so we're kind of stuck in this vortex. But people will argue, well, the situation was as bad or worse when we had centralized media? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know that I'm prepared to make that argument or particularly care. What I think is relevant here is that we have a very bad information environment that could be fixed in some significant ways without political bias, but no one's willing to...

55:12Demetri Kofinas:And a great example is you could just mandate that all social media, everyone who has an account on social media should have the ability to migrate their social media graph onto a different platform. And essentially to create conditions whereby competing platforms that prioritize or incentivize or monetize in different ways that may ultimately generate better quality information can have an opportunity to excel. Because I think about this so often, man, like you and me and my audience and millions of other people in this country and sure tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people all over the world would love to have a central platform, like a Twitter, that is optimized for quality.

55:56Demetri Kofinas:Now, that is a subjective term. We can sit and try to debate what that is, but that would be incredible. So why is it not happening? Well, even if you think like an aggregated version of that, where we'll say, for example, if you loved being on Twitter and I loved being on a different platform, people could have a viewing. Because this is sort of, people at home probably don't know this, but this is kind of how podcasts work in that you and I upload our podcast to some sort of podcasting platform that then sends it out to Spotify and Apple and all the other ones. I don't There's probably 20 things you can listen on, like Amazon speakers and whatever.

56:39But podcasting does work that way to a reasonable extent. You know, YouTube, there's just really one YouTube, and there's not really much competition to that. You know, there's people who've had startups that sort of claim to, you know, be, but they have no reach, you know, like you'll be on there and you'll have five viewers. And then, you know, things like microblogging, which I guess is what they used to call Twitter, That thing, I think, is just gone, because I think Twitter has become ghastly. I no longer go on Twitter. It's just awful. All of the other ones are weird as well, because people have sort of separated out into their own bubbles.

57:18And I don't necessarily want a feed of just one political point. It's funny, I even got on Twitter when I worked in markets. And the day I saw the use of Twitter was when the Fukushima earthquake and nuclear meltdown happened in Japan. And I saw that the news was coming out faster on Twitter. You could question whether it was accurate or not, but it was really coming fast. And it was a lot slower on Bloomberg and on the television. Today, that's no longer the case. If you want quick information on, say, what's happening in Iran or whatever, you log into Twitter, you'll just see Elon Musk tweeting about trans people or something like that.

58:01You know what I mean? There's just sort of -

58:02Demetri Kofinas:There are some accounts that share real-time information. But in terms of like, to use it as a newsfeed, it's no longer a newsfeed because certain voices are amplified and others not. When it was new, you could just sort of put in a topic and you would see just this feed of information that that's gone. And I think there's something important that has been killed in this process because while Well, I understand the argument that the last 40 years or whatever, 50 years, or the post World War II period of centralized media was either an exception or was certainly not the only way in which we understood the world over the course of thousands of years.

58:47Demetri Kofinas:There is something I feel that is necessary at the scale at which we operate in these models of nation states and international institutions. there's something necessary around having an objective view of what's going on. Understanding, of course, that objectivity is simply a consensus view. It's really the consensus. What is the consensus? And there is no consensus, and there's no way to obtain the consensus. And that makes it very difficult for me as someone that works in media, is trying to educate myself in part around the subject of current affairs and what's going on in the world. It's difficult for me to know where to grab the tail of the cat.

59:24Demetri Kofinas:I don't quite know what I'm looking at or what perspective I should be interested in. And that has a very profound downstream impact on politics, on the mechanisms of governance and the ability to forge consensus, political consensus. And I feel like we are caught in this trap. And until we address this aspect of it, I don't quite know how we're expected to operate as a functioning democracy, and I don't think we can. So I don't know where that leads us, but I wanted to say just this before giving you the floor here to end it, Patrick, which is that I probably told you this, I'm sure I've told you this in various contexts and in different ways.

1:00:09Demetri Kofinas:I do believe that those of us who have the right intentions, we don't necessarily get it right every time, but certainly don't, I don't. But I think we have to stick together. I really do. I think we have to, and I don't know if that means that there will be opportunities to work together to create new information networks, platforms. I don't know what it looks like, but I take note of the people who are doing good work or coming from a good place. It's very hard to do that and be as successful as you have, or as our mutual acquaintance, Stephen Fendison, who unbelievable. I mean, that guy has thrown himself into covering grifts and frauds and pumps and dumps and scams and this and that.

1:00:49Demetri Kofinas:And his channel is literally world famous. I mean, he's managed to combine both the entertainment component and the informational component. But I think, I make a note of these people. I try to befriend them. I try to bring them into my network to get to know them, to get to meet them. Because I think over time, something positive has to come out of this for us to make it. Yeah. I think there are people out there that are just trying to do their best. They're trying to take the information, understand it, explain it well, without any sort of evil overlay. Because it's funny, sometimes I'll put up a video and you'll get some angry person who disagrees with me.

1:01:31And just to be clear, people disagree with me all the time, and I'm wrong all the time. I don't claim I'm right, but I do try to explain things as I best understand them. But people will say, who's paying you for this? And I guess in the world, there are people, but I don't think you could do this successfully and be paid to follow a narrative. You and I have talked about this in the past, but the thing is, your audience would notice, like they'd notice inconsistencies in what you say, they'd notice you dodging questions on certain topics or whatever. And I think to do this sort of thing well and to attract an audience that trusts and likes you, you have to just be really honest.

1:02:14You have to explain the information as you found it. You have to also say that you may be wrong, that this is how you understand it. Because we are, of course, wrong all the time, or even the information that we feed our opinions with can be wrong if we have been fed incorrect information and so on. But I think the real thing is just to do your best to provide. I guess I just think if I find something interesting, my audience will find something interesting. And then I dig and I learn and I analyze the situation until I come up with something that's interesting to me that I hope other people will find interesting.

1:02:57Demetri Kofinas:One of the things that concerns me is a derivative of something you highlighted during the course of our conversation, which is that younger people who are coming up now, who are interested in getting into this business, and when I say this business, I specifically mean the business of informing people, not creating influencer type experiences. Those people are going to have a very difficult time breaking through if their objective is to provide quality, factually accurate information. And so that also makes me feel like the big challenge is how do we find those people? Because there are guys like you and me, and we're going to be doing this hopefully for a long time.

1:03:35Demetri Kofinas:But there are other people I know who I hold in high esteem who are older than I am. They're not going to be doing it indefinitely. At some point, they're going to drop off because they're tired. They've been successful enough. They don't need to keep doing it. I think, for example, of my friend Grant Williams, we co-host this show called The 100-Year Pivot, which is a series that runs on both of our podcasts. And there's no way that Grant needs to do this. And at some point he's going to decide, I don't want to do this anymore, whether that's today, tomorrow, 10 years from now, whatever. And so I do worry about those of us who got in early enough, if we just keep exiting down the line, but the conditions are not such that we can identify those younger people.

1:04:13Demetri Kofinas:And so to the extent that we can locate those individuals and try to support them, I think that's also important. That's a great thing about your podcast in particular is that you find interesting people and you bring them on. And to a certain extent, you know, those people will be introduced to a new audience. And even let's say they might be very big amongst their cohort and you bring them on your channel and a new group of people who have, you know, maybe more serious interests or whatever are interested in them. And I think there is, to a certain extent, there is growth through that. And it's sort of a duty, I think, when you have a bigger channel or a bigger podcast to sort of help other people along.

1:04:54And actually, that's one of the things I've really enjoyed about being on YouTube is, in fact, that people seem to help each other out. Like when I worked in financial markets, if you found something really useful and smart, the smart thing to do is, of course, to keep quiet about it because these things usually aren't that scalable. If you've got a good trading strategy, shut up and trade it until it stops working. While interestingly, I think in this media landscape, in this new YouTube, Spotify, podcasting world, there's no cost to helping great people out. And these great people help you out too.

1:05:37And everyone rises together, which I think is good.

1:05:41Demetri Kofinas:Yeah, that's the right attitude to have. One of the greatest benefits of being in a position of having a program that's large enough to get a seat at the table is that you do get to expand your network and you get to meet a lot of interesting people, and that's really been rewarding. I think though, just to put a cap on this, the point I'm making about helping people who are younger, I think part of the challenge is that in this world of the gig economy, where I don't run a news desk, I don't run a newspaper, I don't run a TV network where I can hire young people, they can get through the door, they can use the resources of my firm to begin to develop their craft.

1:06:24Demetri Kofinas:They have to show up on my radar because they were able to get big enough to actually show up. And to get big enough to show up, you have to play by the rules. And to play by the rules, it means you've got to prioritize certain things that almost always make it very difficult for you to create the kind of quality content that I'm going to follow. It used to be a lot easier to do that during the transition from the old system to this thing. That's what really happened. Yeah. You and I, I remember, I mean, I got my start in radio in 2011, 2010, 2011, and then I quickly got on television, but that was when RT was disrupting the cable business.

1:07:03Demetri Kofinas:And I could actually, I had an opportunity to create my own TV show and use YouTube as a way to accelerate the content getting out there. Twitter was there when I started the podcast in 2017. We were still in that transition. It started with the blogosphere in the early 2000s. In that phase, in that transition phase between old and new media, there are opportunities to breakthrough without having necessarily to wed yourself to the incentives of the platform in the same way that is the case today. So anyway, those are, I think, an example of what I often think about as a content creator, even though I cover a lot of different stories on the show, I'm thinking about how is media itself evolving as a platform for educating people?

1:07:43Demetri Kofinas:Because I feel like that's a really important battleground for determining the kind of future we're going to end up having. Yeah, no, it's actually, it's funny, because I even originally, I always thought of YouTube as kind of an educational platform. Like when I realized that YouTube was cool, was when back in around the first year or two of YouTube, I came across a guy called Justin Sanderco, who was teaching guitar lessons on YouTube. And I was, you know, working long hours at a bank, and I wanted to learn the guitar. And I thought, well, this is great. I went out and bought a guitar and started learning how to play.

1:08:17And I kind of love what's great about this type of platform is that you can create content that sort of might find an audience that, you know, no one has to pay you a huge amount of money. They kind of watch an ad or two and, you know, somehow that accumulates enough funds to make it worthwhile for people to create, some of the content that goes on YouTube now, it's beyond. In fact, I find it funny once in a while. A while back, I was making a video about the 1987 crash. I pulled some old TV footage of TV channels talking about the crash as it happened. I was shocked by how bad the cameras were, how bad the audio was, how the editing, these awful crossfades and whatever.

1:09:06You kind to think, wow, it's moved in such a way that someone in their bedroom can make better content than an entire TV channel with writers and producers and teleprompters, all this stuff. It's sort of amazing that people can work this stuff out nowadays. Yeah.

1:09:27Demetri Kofinas:It's amazing. Patrick, tell us again what the name of your channel is, what your Twitter account is, which you said you don't really use. You use actually Blue Sky. Yes. I don't know to what degree you're actually using. You know, to be honest, I'm not big on any, many of these platforms have sort of taken a place so that people can't sort of fraudulently impersonate me. My big thing is YouTube and it's just, the channel is called Patrick Boyle. I'm also - B-O-Y-L-E. B-O-Y-L-E. And then all of my content also goes up on the podcasting platform in both video and audio format. So if you just like listening, go on Spotify or it's called Apple Podcasts or whatever the various platforms are and you should find me there as well.

1:10:10Demetri Kofinas:It's super impressive. I mean, your stuff is so well produced. It's so well written. It's just very impressive. Obviously, I don't do monologues. I almost have never done a few monologues sometimes. Everything is interviews, so it's not comparable, but it is truly remarkable. And I highly recommend it. And it's smart too. I remember I was speaking with Kevin Muir about this. Some people will know Kevin Muir. He's also a podcaster and he has a Substack and he's a trader. And he said to me when he met you at one of our dinners and he was shocked that you, first of all, he was shocked that you were there because he apparently had watched your stuff.

1:10:43Demetri Kofinas:He just assumed that you were just kind of like a TV personality and that you didn't know anything. Did you know this? Did he tell you this? That you didn't know anything about finance? He assumed that you didn't know anything because he couldn't imagine that someone could be this successful and actually also have been a guy that started a hedge fund and sold a hedge fund and worked in finance. And I feel the same way. When I met you, even though I thought your channel was amazing, I was like, I can't believe this guy is as smart as he actually is. So kudos to you, man. And I cannot recommend your stuff enough.

1:11:15Demetri Kofinas:Thank you so much for coming on the podcast again, Patrick. Thanks. If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io slash 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 You can follow me on Twitter at Kofinas, and you can email me at info at hiddenforces.io. As always, thanks for listening.

1:11:55Demetri Kofinas:We'll see you next time.