True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 439: Last Days of Davos
Aired: 2025-02-24
Duration: 01:34:10


=== United States Leadership Challenges (02:29) ===

[00:00:00]  Mr. President, what great honor and pleasure to welcome you back to the Davos community.
[00:00:09]  Just four days into your new mandate, we highly appreciate your presence with us today.
[00:00:19]  We wish you all the best as you take on your critical work ahead.
[00:00:27]  The global challenges we face today are monumental.
[00:00:34]  The importance of American leadership and your personal leadership in this regard is fundamental and paramount.
[00:00:43]  We are here to hear your vision and policies related to revitalizing the economy and addressing the global challenges.
[00:00:55]  As you might expect, Mr. President, your return to office and your forthcoming policies have been at the focus of our discussions this week.
[00:01:09]  The discussions among 3,000 political and business leaders from over 130 countries who came together here in Davos.
[00:01:22]  We look forward hearing first from you and then to the follow-up discussion with business leaders moderated by my colleague Bergie Brende.
[00:01:34]  Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
[00:01:42]  Well, thank you very much, Klaus, and hello to everyone in beautiful Davos.
[00:01:48]  This has been a truly historic week in the United States.
[00:01:52]  Three days ago, I took the oath of office, and we began the golden age of America.
[00:02:21]  Guten Tag. Guten Tag.
[00:02:22]  Willkommen. Hello. Hello. Hello.

=== Liz Discusses Europe (15:09) ===

[00:02:29]  Hello.
[00:02:29]  Liz, Europe.
[00:02:31]  Let's talk about it real quick.
[00:02:32]  Europa.
[00:02:34]  Europa.
[00:02:35]  Kind of a dump, no?
[00:02:36]  I know.
[00:02:38]  I have been like feeling very bad for them all week.
[00:02:41]  I do.
[00:02:42]  I feel bad for them.
[00:02:43]  And I know, and I know, listen, our listeners from the third world are not going to like this, but I feel a bit of pity for the European right now.
[00:02:50]  I know, I do.
[00:02:51]  Well, because it's sad.
[00:02:52]  It's like seeing like a sick dog.
[00:02:54]  Yeah.
[00:02:55]  And Dog keeps getting kicked in the stomach by an American boot.
[00:03:01]  Yeah, okay.
[00:03:02]  So, in your metaphor here, it's a dog that is sick, but the dog is also being physically abused by somebody.
[00:03:08]  Yeah.
[00:03:09]  For being sick, or like it's just making it sicker.
[00:03:12]  I think it's a whole package.
[00:03:14]  I don't know.
[00:03:15]  I don't know where this metaphor is going to go.
[00:03:17]  Maybe they're going to be so bad the situation is in Europe.
[00:03:20]  It's a situation that makes no sense.
[00:03:23]  Yeah, we talked about it a little bit during the interview that's going to come up, but I'm like, dude, maybe they do need to get into a war.
[00:03:31]  But like, if they fought each other.
[00:03:33]  No.
[00:03:33]  Well, I didn't mention this, but you know, the thing about rearmament is that like the war will then happen because you're rearming.
[00:03:40]  Yeah, you got some warmth.
[00:03:40]  I mean, the weapon's got to go somewhere.
[00:03:42]  Yeah.
[00:03:43]  Well, and I was also thinking, like, damn, I guess there was a war in Europe.
[00:03:46]  Not the one that's currently happening now, but before in the 90s in Yugoslavia, and that, I guess that didn't really revive.
[00:03:52]  I guess we're talking more so about like Western Europe.
[00:03:54]  I think Western Europe, I'm like, maybe France and Germany should be.
[00:03:58]  I was just going to say, maybe it's time again.
[00:04:01]  Who would win?
[00:04:03]  Do you think?
[00:04:03]  I think the French would win.
[00:04:05]  They got those jet packs.
[00:04:07]  Do you remember that?
[00:04:08]  Yeah.
[00:04:08]  Some of their drones ended up in Kazakhstan, did you see?
[00:04:12]  Oh, I did.
[00:04:13]  Yeah.
[00:04:13]  You know, they got a, now like, Chevron or whatever has to like rebuild whatever his factory is because whoever was operating the French drone didn't really know where it was going.
[00:04:23]  Yeah, poor guys.
[00:04:24]  I mean, that's the audio for the French, the incoming French-German land war.
[00:04:33]  I don't think they're going to have a land war.
[00:04:35]  What do they have to fight about?
[00:04:37]  The French and the Germans?
[00:04:38]  Just how much they hate each other.
[00:04:39]  Just, I mean, I don't know.
[00:04:41]  I feel like they didn't resolve it last time.
[00:04:43]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:04:44]  They must have some kind of ancient hatred, right?
[00:04:46]  I mean, that's like Germany is really, it's like a pretty new country.
[00:04:49]  I guess France isn't even that.
[00:04:50]  That was like part of the reason for the European project was like, we got to get these two people in a room, connect their economies so hard through trade agreements and their industries that they can't fight each other again.
[00:05:02]  Yeah, but I think they should fight each other again.
[00:05:05]  Like, I think that just, I feel like, because the last time it was kind of the Soviets and the Americans, mostly the Soviets that took Germany.
[00:05:12]  And I'm like, France needs a chance to do it again.
[00:05:16]  And Germany needs a chance to prove that the Second World War was not a fluke.
[00:05:22]  Was not a fluke.
[00:05:24]  And that they can take France like in a straightforward one.
[00:05:27]  We give it like a two-year head start.
[00:05:29]  You guys are going to go to war in two years and just get ready.
[00:05:32]  I do feel like if we give them that head start, the Germans could win.
[00:05:35]  I think that they should do it, but just for our entertainment.
[00:05:39]  Yeah.
[00:05:39]  I mean, eventually, eventually, maybe the Euro will be so devalued that we can just pay them to fight each other.
[00:05:44]  Yeah.
[00:05:45]  Kind of like a bum fight.
[00:05:46]  Yeah.
[00:05:46]  Yeah.
[00:05:47]  A bum fight situation.
[00:05:49]  They could stream it on stake.
[00:05:51]  Which, by the way, Liz has accepted a sponsorship from State Gambling for her side of the podcast.
[00:05:59]  Young Chomsky and I are not sponsored by Stake.
[00:06:01]  We're sponsored by Kick, which is different.
[00:06:03]  It's connected, but different.
[00:06:05]  But Liz is promoting gambling now.
[00:06:07]  See, imagine this.
[00:06:08]  We go to Dubai.
[00:06:11]  We set up our streaming condo or whatever in our high-rise.
[00:06:16]  During the day, we take incredible like wakeboarding lessons, which is what I assume that you do there.
[00:06:23]  Whatever the fuck.
[00:06:24]  And then at night, we stream and we give our picks for our audience of who is going to win in the European land war.
[00:06:38]  And then we get footage that we like, you know, we stream and we'd comment on live footage for the war while letting our audience know who we've bet on and all the prop bets that we're taking on certain troop alignments or, you know, the kind of the French weapons that are being used and so on and so forth.
[00:06:56]  What do you think?
[00:06:57]  You know, I actually, this leads me actually to an incredible idea is that Zelensky, if you are listening to this.
[00:07:03]  Obviously he is.
[00:07:04]  First of all, hello.
[00:07:06]  Tough week.
[00:07:07]  But you need to, I mean, if America is pulling out, if you're still alive by the time this comes out, America pulls out its money, you need to get a partnership with a gambling company and you need to start fucking betting on this shit.
[00:07:22]  And so like, you, I'm telling you, first of all, you need to launch.
[00:07:26]  You need to launch a cryptocurrency.
[00:07:27]  Zelensky, if you're listening, start our fucking cryptocurrency.
[00:07:31]  But also, I'm telling you, headcams live streamed, Starlink, or if he pulls out whatever other one there is, and start doing prop bets.
[00:07:39]  Like, can we take this bunker?
[00:07:40]  Can we take this trench without losing more than two guys, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:07:44]  I don't want this to be the future, but I think it is the future.
[00:07:46]  And I think you can get in on it on the ground floor.
[00:07:49]  Kiev Coin.
[00:07:50]  Kiev Coin?
[00:07:51]  I love it.
[00:07:52]  I think my dream job is, oh, yeah.
[00:07:56]  I think I would like to be a corpulent spy master in Dubai running prostitutes to get businessmen in various corporac situations, which I could then use to get whatever favors that I needed.
[00:08:12]  I think that would be the same.
[00:08:12]  American private equity firms have already taken control over like all of the main sectors of Ukraine's economy.
[00:08:21]  However, if there is a negotiated rump state, because they're not going to join the union.
[00:08:28]  No.
[00:08:28]  This is what I'm saying.
[00:08:30]  Cryptocurrency.
[00:08:31]  Crypto.
[00:08:32]  It's time.
[00:08:33]  Be the first scripto nation.
[00:08:34]  Zelensky, I would like to introduce you to this guy who's had me blocked on Twitter for five years named Melaji.
[00:08:40]  And I'm telling you, Ukraine is, okay, it's a physical place, but it's also a network state.
[00:08:46]  Exactly.
[00:08:47]  You can just exist on the internet.
[00:08:48]  Galicia, the network state.
[00:08:50]  Oh, God, dude.
[00:08:51]  This shit is so fucked up right now.
[00:08:53]  I'm sorry.
[00:08:54]  I don't mean to be like this or whatever.
[00:08:56]  But it's so hard for me to not just all of these things are there.
[00:09:00]  It makes it a network state.
[00:09:03]  Of course it is.
[00:09:04]  Whatever.
[00:09:05]  Everyone's in fucking Dubai doing fucking cryptocurrencies.
[00:09:08]  Fucking everything.
[00:09:10]  I just, you don't.
[00:09:12]  We do need a fucking war, Liz.
[00:09:15]  There needs a fucking war.
[00:09:16]  We need a bigger war.
[00:09:18]  I'm sorry.
[00:09:18]  We need a fucking way bigger war.
[00:09:20]  A war in which America fucking loses.
[00:09:23]  This shit has.
[00:09:24]  We've kind of lost this one, depending on how things should go.
[00:09:27]  God, dude.
[00:09:27]  We don't know.
[00:09:28]  It's kind of like a DM situation.
[00:09:29]  I don't mean the Ukraine-Russia war, Liz.
[00:09:31]  I mean World War III.
[00:09:32]  We need World War III in which America loses.
[00:09:37]  We forgot.
[00:09:38]  Hello, everyone.
[00:09:39]  I'm Liz.
[00:09:39]  Hey, I'm Brace.
[00:09:41]  Sergeant Brace reporting for duty.
[00:09:43]  And we, of course, have producer Young Chomsky.
[00:09:47]  And we are.
[00:09:48]  Truanon.
[00:09:50]  Hello.
[00:09:50]  Hello.
[00:09:52]  We are talking about all this and more with someone who is much smarter and more well-spoken than us and has written a fabulous essay in Harper's, which we will link to in the show notes.
[00:10:09]  But I almost forgot.
[00:10:12]  We got to say, did you know that you can actually get a, you're going to click that article and you're going to be like, oh, there's a fucking paywall.
[00:10:21]  Oh, no, there's a paywall.
[00:10:22]  I got to go to archive.ph and hope that someone, oh, how do I do that?
[00:10:27]  You don't have to do that because you can actually click another link that is in the show notes, which is harpers.org, I think, slash Truanon.
[00:10:38]  Harper's is a dot org.
[00:10:40]  Doggy, you got to investigate it.
[00:10:42]  There's no way that's legal.
[00:10:45]  Harpers.org slash Truanon and you will, and we don't even get a kickback or anything like that.
[00:10:50]  We have no spot, not sponsored by them.
[00:10:52]  Not sponsored.
[00:10:53]  You don't get no money from that.
[00:10:54]  Nothing.
[00:10:55]  No, but we enjoy them and we enjoy their writing and their publishing.
[00:11:01]  And we encourage you all to read them.
[00:11:03]  And you can get a discounted subscription, which will let you read this article at the summit by Caitlin Doherty, who's about to be on the show with no paywall.
[00:11:14]  You can just read the whole thing and more.
[00:11:16]  Damn thing.
[00:11:16]  In fact, there's two pieces by Lamphem, RIP, where he also went to Davos.
[00:11:24]  Great.
[00:11:25]  There's a good one on the Munich Security Conference from last year.
[00:11:28]  We were going to have that guy on.
[00:11:29]  It didn't happen, I guess.
[00:11:30]  Yeah, Thomas Meany.
[00:11:32]  Let's just get into the interview because we are talking about so much.
[00:11:35]  We're talking about Davos.
[00:11:36]  We're talking about the end of Europe.
[00:11:38]  We're talking about the inauguration of Dubai.
[00:11:44]  We are talking about The great socialist hero, Keir Starmer.
[00:11:51]  get brexit done ladies and gentlemen Welcome to the show.
[00:12:03]  We have with us today Kate Dougherty, a writer and editor of the New Left Review.
[00:12:10]  Perhaps a magazine that rates certain kinds of marijuana that were invented in the mid-1970s, who has written a new article in Harper's magazine, which is not the magazine.
[00:12:20]  It's not the magazine with the pictures of women in it, which I found very, that's the Harper's Bazaar, which seems to be more of like a perhaps a Middle Eastern version of Harper's Magazine.
[00:12:31]  It is Harper's magazine called At the Summit, The Last Days of Davos, where she reported from the catafalque of Davos rising up in the middle of the European tomb.
[00:12:47]  My God, the place from reading this article and just from generally checking out various blogs and websites and Google Earth kind of things, this Europe place, it seems like a dump.
[00:12:59]  It seems like a mess.
[00:13:00]  It seems horrible.
[00:13:01]  We sent several of our weirdest guys over there recently.
[00:13:04]  They said some nasty things to these people.
[00:13:06]  They're falling apart.
[00:13:08]  And we have a real European here.
[00:13:10]  Actually, I'm not sure if you guys are European, but we have a real person who lives near Europe here to talk to us about it.
[00:13:18]  Kate, welcome to the show.
[00:13:20]  Or should I say, cheerio?
[00:13:23]  Thank you so much for having me.
[00:13:24]  It's so nice to speak to stability.
[00:13:27]  And yeah, how does it feel to not be breathing in the stench of decay constantly?
[00:13:33]  You have to tell me more about that.
[00:13:34]  It smells like the circuit's overloading for how much money we're about to make in the crypto bonanza that is.
[00:13:41]  I'm telling you guys, Starmer, this Starmer guy, I know you got a direct line to the fella because there's only about 100,000 or so people who even live in your country.
[00:13:50]  You got to tell him about stable coins because Britain needs one.
[00:13:55]  You guys are falling apart.
[00:13:58]  I got two questions to start us off here.
[00:14:00]  One, what is the Davos man?
[00:14:04]  And then two, how is he doing?
[00:14:07]  What is the Davos man?
[00:14:10]  I mean, like an awful person to be around for five days, you know, en masse and that number.
[00:14:17]  I think, you know, like the Davos man himself seems pretty lost, even when he's in Davos, actually.
[00:14:26]  And I think that's one of the interesting things about being there, which is that, you know, often when institutions are in states of disrepair and decline, it's because the end is pretty nigh, right?
[00:14:39]  Whereas getting into the history of Davos, you know, there's not really been a moment, I think, at which you could have argued, okay, this place is flourishing, you know, like, and I think that's one of the interesting kind of points about, you know, the whole polycrisis phenomenon and people really, you know, getting into the, you know, most of the reporting that comes out of Davos, mine included, but especially this year, it's just about how it's about to end.
[00:15:04]  But, you know, you go back into the last 20 or 30 years of these pieces and people have been saying exactly the same thing again and again.
[00:15:11]  You know, maybe not that it's about to end, but has it really got the, you know, the traction that it once did?
[00:15:17]  Isn't this Davos man, he's a bit embarrassing, right?
[00:15:19]  He's wearing, you know, slightly too tight Gile.
[00:15:22]  His kind of his face is just like, it's like Nick Clegg, but like stretched across eternity.
[00:15:27]  You know, he's never really changed from that.
[00:15:30]  Yeah.
[00:15:30]  Sort of Casper David Friedrich situation.
[00:15:34]  Davos man staring out on the Alps.
[00:15:37]  But he's looking over his shoulder and he works for Facebook and he like charged your student loan, you know, three times for you.
[00:15:43]  He's giving you like a little thumbs up.
[00:15:45]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:15:45]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:15:46]  But it's like an emoji thumb up.
[00:15:48]  Yeah.
[00:15:48]  And also the vista in front of him is AI generated.
[00:15:52]  Exactly.
[00:15:52]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:15:53]  And moving at a slightly kind of, you know, disturbing pace.
[00:15:58]  So yeah, I mean, I don't know that Davos Man is well.
[00:16:03]  I couldn't say that he's thriving, but I don't know that those are really the conditions on which we should ever have, you know, assessed, you know, like he was always, how do you want to put it?
[00:16:14]  Like, he was always like a cog in the machine, you know?
[00:16:18]  And I think, again, maybe we, I hear this is a podcast with some interest in conspiracies, but I think this is like partly where some of that, you know, conspiratorial material comes from, which is something I was trying to get at in the piece, which is that it suits these people to be as hollow as possible, right?
[00:16:39]  And to be, to say as little as possible, but to be continually making noise and in photos and having, you know, having meetings and handshakes.
[00:16:47]  So there's a real, yeah, there's a real emptiness to the language and the atmosphere there that is one of the most unsettling things about being in Davos, I would say.
[00:16:56]  It's certainly in Davos that I should make clear during the World Economic Forum because it's also a town of 11,000 people who have put up with just being known as Davos all the time, which is one of the things I was also really interested in.
[00:17:13]  So maybe before we kind of get into how and why Davos Man is sort of, I don't know, unmoored from the movements of history, we can talk a little bit about where Davos, the spectacle and the meeting and even the conspiracy of what Davos accomplishes or doesn't accomplish, like came from.

=== Proxy Votes and Power Dynamics (13:25) ===

[00:17:38]  In your piece, I mean, you trace it, you go back to kind of, it's really the, you know, the US coming off of the gold standard in the 70s as this sort of like fulcrum moment, kind of inaugurating this new global system.
[00:17:54]  And Davos is really, and Klaus Schwab sort of starts there, it seems.
[00:18:00]  Yeah, I think, you know, the first, it was the European Management Symposium, it's called before, it was the World Economic Forum.
[00:18:07]  And maybe one day it will be, you know, the European Management Symposium again, as the continent just retrenches and needs more management.
[00:18:15]  But, you know, it started in 1971, which is, you know, the year of the collapse of Bretton Woods and the end of the gold standard.
[00:18:23]  Also, you know, the year of the birth of the United Arab Emirates, which I think is not coincidental.
[00:18:28]  It's kind of where we end up in the piece.
[00:18:32]  And Schwab is just back, or a couple of years back, from a stint at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where he studied with Henry Kissinger.
[00:18:44]  And really, I think what happens there was that he went off as an engineer, retrained in economics, and absorbed, you know, straight from the teeth of American foreign policy and diplomatic policy exactly what the new world order was going to look like and brought it back with him to Switzerland.
[00:19:05]  And this was a moment of incredible social and political change in Switzerland too, where this country that had essentially been quite insulated in many ways from the occurrence of tumultuous post-war European liberal democracy reasserting itself, started to realize that it was going to have to catch up with some of the kind of the like the liberal thrust of its neighbours.
[00:19:31]  And so it was the year that women got the right to vote, for instance.
[00:19:36]  It was the year in which these very regressive xenophobic provisions in the constitution were overturned to supposedly allow, there were bans on kosher butchers and Jesuits, which basically just means foreigners.
[00:19:56]  That counts as foreigners in Switzerland.
[00:19:59]  So into this tumultuous mix, you suddenly get the arrival of the European Management Symposium in the Davos Alps, which is just, it's a business meet, like networking meeting, right?
[00:20:11]  And I think in our day and age, it's really easy to, you know, forget that the idea of like a company getaway like that is kind of a novel way of doing business, I think, in the early 1970s, right?
[00:20:26]  So like Schwab is really, especially for, you know, Swiss bankers and German industrialists, you know, he's bringing this kind of American sheen of leisure culture with him as a way of like, you know, basically selling the package of ideas that he's picked up on at Harvard.
[00:20:46]  And yeah, I think, you know, he as a figure, just going into the conspiracy stuff, just, you know, embodies so much of the, shall we say, rich continental history of the mid-century.
[00:20:59]  You know, his father managed a factory that produced armaments for the Third Reich using, you know, Nazi labor in Ravensburg.
[00:21:09]  When he came back to Switzerland, he managed a merger between that company and another company that was kind of blacklisted by the Allies for continuing to provide engines to the Axis powers.
[00:21:26]  And I suppose this is the point that then threads through to the WEF stuff, which like all of this stuff, and I think especially from, you know, like a, should we say a non-European perspective, looks dodgy, right?
[00:21:40]  It looks dodgy as fuck.
[00:21:41]  It's really normal.
[00:21:43]  Like, it's really normal in the kind of post-war European setting that, you know, like basically this is the result of like the Marshall Plan and like, you know, America coming in and like trying to make sure that the European continent ran as smoothly as possible under like American control was that like you don't want to get rid of too many of the people who know how to make things run while they worked with the Nazis.
[00:22:07]  So this way in which like these kind of these threads of suspicion emerge in Schwab's biography, I actually think are the things that make Schwab so kind of representative of so many people of his class and type.
[00:22:23]  And that, you know, and it can look, I think, like he's hiding things when actually it's almost like this stuff is maybe not even that worthy of like comment, if that makes sense.
[00:22:36]  It's so mundane that like he wouldn't even think it worth hiding.
[00:22:39]  Right, it's the mundanity of evil rather than the banality of evil.
[00:22:44]  Yeah, it's funny because it's also very stereotypically like post-war European in a way.
[00:22:48]  Like this very like put together sort of formal guy who in the very recent past, his family, if not him himself, like has this very seedy slave labor based company that is drenched in blood or whatever.
[00:23:07]  But it's presented in such like a normal, as a normal thing in Europe because it kind of is a normal thing, especially in post-war Europe.
[00:23:14]  Because there are so many collaborators and so many people in occupied countries, and then so many people who in Germany were just like brought back to positions of power that it's almost like, yeah, it's almost not worth commenting on for the European.
[00:23:27]  Totally.
[00:23:28]  It's like, well, who do you want to make your flamethrowers in the 1950s, if not the guys who made them really well during 1933 to 1945?
[00:23:37]  America seems to want these armaments.
[00:23:40]  So we're going to have to get them from somewhere.
[00:23:44]  And yeah, I guess, you know, it's also just, it's unfortunate that he kind of looks like that as well, right?
[00:23:49]  For the conspiracy stuff.
[00:23:50]  Well, and he talks like that.
[00:23:51]  And he talks about that.
[00:23:51]  Let's be honest.
[00:23:52]  He does.
[00:23:53]  The talking is crazy.
[00:23:55]  Yeah, the talking's, he could have dialed down the talking a bit, you know.
[00:23:59]  I think, Schwab, if you're listening, and I know you might be because you're very, you're a liberal European.
[00:24:04]  You know, you listen to many different things, I'm sure.
[00:24:06]  AI is going to change your thing forever.
[00:24:08]  You just need a nice little, I'm telling you.
[00:24:11]  Just a TikTok lady voice.
[00:24:13]  That would be less freaky than his voice.
[00:24:16]  Yes, I'm telling, it will change everything for the WEF.
[00:24:21]  I wonder if there's ever a Schwab Snapchat filter.
[00:24:24]  You know, you could just Schwab your own face.
[00:24:26]  Well, it's funny because he as a figure was so massive here during COVID.
[00:24:32]  And it's kind of bizarre to see like, I guess, public decline of him.
[00:24:38]  And he was really like, for a huge segment of American society, not huge, but a sizable segment of American society was like a known figure that they like despised and sort of attributed kind of every evil in the world to.
[00:24:53]  And, you know, it's funnily enough, like one of the big things was this WEF ad, you will own nothing and be happy.
[00:25:01]  And a lot of the right-wing sort of based, I don't know what, like the movement people here in the tech sector are literally the people who do that stuff.
[00:25:14]  Like who are the people who like are essentially like with making this world where you only rent things, you don't own anything, you fucking, everything is just like so transitory and made of fucking nothing.
[00:25:25]  But they present it in a based way.
[00:25:28]  And so people really lap it up.
[00:25:30]  I think everybody's kind of searching for their own Klaus Schwab in a way.
[00:25:34]  Yeah, I'd agree with that.
[00:25:36]  I think, yeah, I don't know how much time you've ever spent around people who work in policy, but like, you know, especially in European policy where there's nothing to make policy about, you know, as you were saying, like, you know, all this stuff like, you know, own nothing, be happy, like eat bugs.
[00:25:55]  All this stuff's like, yeah, these people actually did say this, you know, like, but, and, and it's not that they don't believe it as well.
[00:26:02]  That's the other weird thing about being in Davos is that people have really drunk the Kool-Aid of being there.
[00:26:07]  But like, there's also this kind of panic in their voices where it's like they've run out of ideas.
[00:26:12]  And so they just keep talking and keep saying things because it's like, one of these is going to land.
[00:26:16]  One of these is really going to hit.
[00:26:18]  It's going to be like cricket tacos.
[00:26:20]  It's going to be like renting your duvet, you know?
[00:26:23]  It's like drunk John Ham in Mad Men or drunk John Don Draper where he's just like throwing shit at the proposal like when a marketeer like doesn't have anything left but still is like still trying to make it happen.
[00:26:38]  Exactly.
[00:26:39]  And I think that's one of the strange things about Davos, like the broader event, which, you know, in the piece I try to make a distinction between the forum and Davos, which is like, you know, it's a town, as we're saying.
[00:26:53]  But quite often when you see, you know, people, I have to, well, this makes it sound like I was often looking at people posting about being on Davos before they went there.
[00:27:03]  But, you know, people will put things up on their LinkedIn saying, like, what a great honor to be at Davos 2024.
[00:27:10]  I'm here to talk about, you know, broadening gender inclusion in like sustainable vegan eateries or whatever.
[00:27:17]  And like, and like, actually, what they mean is that they've paid for their ticket to go to Davos and they might be speaking on like a panel hosted by like, I don't know, with some support from like the Karnataka state like farming like body or something, right?
[00:27:34]  Like it's not, you know, like that there's this real, like, but there is this belief, I think, that motivates all of these people that by being there, you actually, you know, just like you're proximate enough to like, you know, that power runs in this kind of trickle-down way and investment runs in this trickle-down way.
[00:27:53]  So you can, they're not, it's not so straightforward as to say that these people are scamming.
[00:27:58]  It's actually sadder than that.
[00:28:00]  They've kind of like, they've believed, they believed the scam themselves, you know, and they think that this might actually be their route into some kind of more successful negotiating like position for either their like, you know, their venture, you know, their startup or, you know, their small business or whatever, or their, you know, their policy institute.
[00:28:23]  And that world is just gone.
[00:28:25]  You know, it just doesn't exist anymore.
[00:28:28]  So the, but the less, the less evident power that, you know, that like the forum kind of has, the more people, I think, turn up hoping to catch some of the scraps from it, which is having this horrible effect on the town of Davos itself, which is just like ruined basically by this whole festival that happens.
[00:28:48]  You know, it's just like, it's hell on earth, really.
[00:28:51]  Is it clear that the forum will happen there next year?
[00:28:55]  Yeah, it will.
[00:28:57]  It was contentious when I was there.
[00:29:01]  And, you know the way, the strange way that Swiss democracy works is that you get a vote on absolutely everything, but not like really on like the big questions, if that makes sense.
[00:29:13]  So it's not like the.
[00:29:14]  The people of Davos don't get a yes or no on whether we, whether they host, of the forum, but what does happen is every few years they get the chance to approve whether or not the town will pay for the security costs for the forum.
[00:29:28]  Little proxy yeah, nice.
[00:29:30]  Little proxy vote yeah, proxy vote.
[00:29:32]  Um, and those costs have been pretty.
[00:29:36]  It's, it's a, you know, it's a controversial thing how the costs of hosting the forum are calculated, but there was a general, generally rising feeling that those costs were too great for the the, the taxpayers of Davos, but also that the, like the other costs, like the social and the environmental costs, and just like the, the massive pain in the ass that it is to host this thing, was just getting out of hand.
[00:30:00]  Um, so there were quite a few people that I spoke to when I was there who were, you know, thinking that there would be a vote that would then put it to a public referendum in which there was a chance more of a chance than ever that people would say would kick the forum out.
[00:30:16]  But what actually happened was that um, the forum then negotiated directly with the town council and with the mayor and made a pretty sizable donation I think it was about a million francs um towards a net zero, um initiative to make Davos a net zero destination.
[00:30:36]  Yeah yeah yeah, we love those net zero private jets coming every january um, and and yeah, long story short, basically that circumvented the, the public referendum um, so that's just one of the many, many cases in which you know, Claus Schwab's commitment to democratic principles is like written all over the history of the forum uh, and its engagement with the people of Davos um, which is yeah like,

=== Disconnect Between Words and Deeds (09:35) ===

[00:31:04]  and again another like way in which I think you know some of this like the kind of conspiracy stuff grows is just like the, the disconnect between what they say and what they do is just like phenomenal right, like it's.
[00:31:18]  It's just not.
[00:31:19]  They're not interested.
[00:31:20]  You know like, this kind of here's a million francs, it means nothing to us.
[00:31:24]  You know like, just like, put it, put it, put it into your little Carbon credit tank, Davos, you know, and just like letters come and ruin your parks for three months of the year every year.
[00:31:34]  Like, that's that's all they really want.
[00:31:35]  There's not really any long-standing commitment, I don't think, to anything environmental in the town.
[00:31:41]  Well, I wanted to ask what they did say at this year's Davos.
[00:31:45]  Um, I watched Trump's speech, which boy, it uh schwab introducing him is just it almost sounds like a cartoon or something.
[00:31:54]  I mean, it's really, it was tough.
[00:31:56]  Um, and Trump kind of just did the like I've watched many speeches of his since he became president.
[00:32:02]  It's kind of the same speech, he's like talking about like uh transgender and women's sports and things like that, like things that like were things that he campaigned on to like the American electorate rather than anything to do with like global trade or anything like that.
[00:32:20]  He uh, he did in sort of the parlance of the time glaze uh Saudi Arabia quite a bit, um, which was noted by a couple of the questioners afterwards.
[00:32:30]  But overall, I mean, he didn't even come in.
[00:32:32]  He was slightly apologetic.
[00:32:34]  He said, I'm well, I'm, you know, I just became president, so first place I could go, I couldn't go to Davos.
[00:32:39]  Um, but uh, but it really was such a half-hearted speech, and it felt sort of sad to watch all these Europeans and Americans, fair, to be fair, sitting on the stage kind of under this huge, you know, vision of Trump behind them, having to look backwards and then and kind of talk to this computer screen as after he gives a 15-minute sort of like talk about various right-wing grievances with American culture.
[00:33:05]  Um, but, but, and I watched a couple other speeches, including the speech, I got to tell you, Vietnamese prime minister, you got to stop laughing.
[00:33:13]  It was crazy, really hard to watch.
[00:33:16]  Uh, but I watched a few other speeches, and it seemed, I couldn't, I really, I heard nothing.
[00:33:21]  And I just, I mean, I'm not a big Davos watcher of speeches every year.
[00:33:26]  Um, but what did you pick up from what people were talking about?
[00:33:28]  Was there a common theme?
[00:33:30]  I mean, what are these people talking about?
[00:33:33]  Yeah, I mean, very similarly to you, I was, you know, really geared up to, you know, I'd done the homework, I was ready for it to pay off.
[00:33:42]  But yeah, there was very little of interest that happened there this year, even less than last year, where you did have, you know, yet another speech by Zelensky, but one that was quite interesting in terms of the pivot.
[00:33:55]  I thought at least from, you know, it was one of the first times that he didn't come out asking just for more weapons, basically, but asking for economic investment.
[00:34:04]  And, you know, this was presaged by him having this big meeting with, you know, like 80 CEOs of kind of, you know, asset management and infrastructure companies.
[00:34:14]  So like there was at least in that one instance a way of kind of being able to join the dots between what Davos actually is, which is, you know, as one of my interviewees called it, like speed dating for CEOs, you know, it's like, it's a way of having, they love the phrase bilaterals, which I think just means a conversation.
[00:34:36]  You know, like you can just like whiz round, like have your kind of like, you know, your corporate function meetings, bump into a few people.
[00:34:44]  And then, but I think part of the, you know, the former like pattern of Davos was that this, you know, and it wasn't really like a fabrication or a lie, but it was that, you know, the sense that this is, this is how the world, the world goes around, right?
[00:35:00]  Like these kind of meetings are what kind of, you know, particularly American like political power looks like.
[00:35:06]  It runs off trade.
[00:35:08]  It runs off people doing deals in dollars and, you know, the expansion of like trade deficits and American businesses basically scooping in and like sweeping in and like scooping up like the like the profit run off of that.
[00:35:22]  And that's, you know, then that draws political leaders who Davos have always been really secondary, or at least during the heyday of the forum, in so that they have to, they have to give it this kind of aura of power, right?
[00:35:40]  And now I think, you know, the shoes on the other foot, like the Munich Security Conference is obviously just way more important.
[00:35:48]  And that was already the case last year, but is certainly the case this year.
[00:35:53]  It's, you know, a kind of, or it's understood to be more important by the kind of, you know, the media classes, right?
[00:35:59]  So like the editor of The Economist, for instance, as far as I can tell, didn't go to Davos this year, but did go to Munich, which I think tells you quite a lot.
[00:36:08]  And yeah, and it's now easier really to say who didn't go to the forum than to name people who did or things that actually happened.
[00:36:18]  Because the things that happen at the World Economic Forum are really boring procedural bits of contracting between multinational corporations and maybe minor states with like small amounts of kind of like, you know, minerals or cheap labor reserves to sell off.
[00:36:34]  You know, like that's, that's really what's going on in these small meeting rooms.
[00:36:39]  And then you get, you know, Javier Millé like doing a kind of like a, you know, a Trump puppeteer act, you know, deriding.
[00:36:48]  Exactly.
[00:36:49]  You know.
[00:36:50]  Yeah, I think like Pope Francis sent an envoy to talk about, like, to plead for fraternity with the AI.
[00:36:58]  That was something that happened.
[00:37:00]  I did see that.
[00:37:01]  Yeah.
[00:37:02]  I think he maybe had one functioning lung at that point.
[00:37:04]  So, you know, the flow of oxygen wasn't.
[00:37:08]  I'm sure he started smoking those long, thin Italian cigarettes.
[00:37:10]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:37:11]  Pope Francis with the Vogue.
[00:37:13]  It's funny because I do think, you know, and this is something you point out in the piece, which is that like Davos, whatever Davos is, was, like, exists in a world that we don't live in anymore.
[00:37:23]  Like the world has moved on from Davos.
[00:37:25]  And a lot of what was accomplished through Davos, such as it was, whether it was like big global trade agreements or really just like post-war European nations opening up their economies to American corporate firms to come in and like buy them up, which was the case in the 70s and 80s, or quote unquote invest or liberalize certain sectors, whatever, whatever.
[00:37:53]  And like all of that has been kind of completed, you know, like, and in that process, Davos has made itself irrelevant through its success almost, if that makes sense.
[00:38:05]  And now it's funny because I was, you know, we were, we were talking about this before we started recording and previously just like watching Vance at the Munich conference, you know, where he, I think you pointed out like he, you know, he made some snide comment about Davos, funny enough.
[00:38:25]  So it still is, serves as this like good punching bag for the, for the global right in a way.
[00:38:35]  But also using the success, like this part of the success of Davos was completely subsuming the European project under American guidance, right?
[00:38:49]  Like America fully, and in case people don't know, fully and 100% pretty much controls everything that matters in terms of Europe.
[00:38:57]  And now, you know, I'm realizing this as we're recording.
[00:39:01]  We're almost right at three years of the war in Ukraine.
[00:39:06]  And as like America is meeting with Russia and Saudi Arabia of all places to basically carve up the future of Europe, Europe is left completely like out of the picture because of like its own its own success with its own project.
[00:39:25]  Does that make sense?
[00:39:26]  Like it's like it completely sort of neutered itself without realizing it or having the foresight to do that.
[00:39:35]  And now like Vance is basically and the Americans are like, well, why don't you have it together?
[00:39:40]  Like we're just like kind of gaslighting nation.
[00:39:44]  I feel kind of bad if I wasn't so angry at every European leader, politician, business person of the past like, you know, I don't know, 40 years or whatever.
[00:39:58]  Yeah, no, I mean, I think you nailed it there, where, you know, what is it that Davos or the World Economic Forum has achieved?
[00:40:05]  A number of people that I spoke to, including, you know, Martin Wolfe, who's, you know, obviously a very adept commentator at this, but also very good at putting just the right amount of distance between himself and this project when it behooves him to do so.
[00:40:20]  We're still getting the invite.
[00:40:21]  Well, still getting the invite, yeah, exactly.
[00:40:23]  And presumably the nice hotel suite.
[00:40:25]  But yeah, you know, he was saying, you know, it's very hard to think about, you know, to name something actually that the World Economic Forum has contributed, even to a stalwart defender of globalization like Martin Wolff.

=== Why NAFTA Came Out of Davos (02:36) ===

[00:40:40]  You know, I think when you think about the big trade agreements, like, you know, kind of NAFTA kind of came out of the WEF, the WTO did.
[00:40:47]  But these things would have happened anyway.
[00:40:49]  So then you've got to ask yourself, okay, why is it that they happen?
[00:40:52]  Why did they have, you know, why are they linked to Davos?
[00:40:56]  Why was this, you know, why were these movements not just like, you know, held in kind of like, you know, a New York hotel room or something?
[00:41:04]  Like, you know, and that's where I think your second point comes in, which is about this like the hollowing out of Europe and Switzerland playing this very strange, almost like negative image to the rest of Europe, which allows, you know, it really played to, and some of my best friends are Swiss, but Swiss narcissism, you know, about, you know, they used to call themselves the Sonderfile,
[00:41:30]  like the special exception, you know, like they were like, you know, for, you know, reasons that are too long to go into now, but, you know, like there were kind of negotiated settlements to stop, you know, any kind of labor, labor disputes in Switzerland that basically held from the 1920s onwards.
[00:41:48]  So a lot of the, you know, just internal democratic or economic and democratic like problems that indust, you know, industrial European nations were dealing with, particularly during the downturn in the 70s,
[00:42:04]  Switzerland felt itself to be like somewhat insulated from and also held onto this like and marketed itself as being this neutral like you know exception from you know bellicose Europe but obviously what that really always meant was just like a representative of of like you know at least in the 20th century of like American interests right so that it was like it was the last You know,
[00:42:30]  the last fortress that was going to fall in case of Soviet invasion.
[00:42:37]  And so Switzerland became a way, I think, of, or hosting a conference like this in Switzerland became a way of almost like, yeah, like you're saying, kind of like sneaking in the back door of Europe, right?
[00:42:48]  And like bringing all of these, these like, yeah, kind of like smaller European companies and businesses in to bring them into conglomerates with American multinationals to slowly kind of, you know, like chip away at the idea of there being any need for, you know, state regulation in labor markets, that, you know, like anything to do with kind of like, you know, immigration patterns as well was also like to be, you know, dictated by free movement of goods in the free market first and foremost.

=== Davos Triumph's Pyrrhic Victory (03:03) ===

[00:43:17]  And, you know, like, that's like the slow story of essentially like the socio-economic liberalization of particularly like in France and Germany, right, in the 1990s, which is the same moment as like the, you know,
[00:43:31]  the WEF explosion in its own power and the anti-globalization backlash, which is like, you know, the same idea of like, you know, rejecting the like American cultural and economic dominance over things that used to be dictated by national governments.
[00:43:48]  So yeah, like it won.
[00:43:50]  And like you say, it like just like triumphed itself to death.
[00:43:54]  You know, it's just Pyrrhic victory.
[00:43:57]  That's where we got here, you know.
[00:43:59]  Well, I mean, because there's always like even contemporary politicians that I associate with the sort of like Davos ideal.
[00:44:08]  I mean, Macron, Trudeau, Rishi, I guess, to some extent.
[00:44:15]  Like, I'm trying to think of.
[00:44:17]  He just, he does wear very tight suits.
[00:44:19]  I know, because it's the Stanford in him that Rishi was like reared on the idea of Davos and just came too late and was too ineffective.
[00:44:28]  It's like that's his own personal tragedy, right?
[00:44:30]  He'd have been so good at Davos.
[00:44:32]  A little bit earlier.
[00:44:34]  2002, Rishi.
[00:44:36]  Yes.
[00:44:37]  Davos would have been, we would have a different, we would be living in paradise right now if he had just been born a little earlier.
[00:44:45]  But I mean, all of these guys, all of these politicians, I mean, there's so many more, obviously, but are completely, I mean, have been completely destroyed.
[00:44:56]  Like, I've never seen Trudeau's like the weakest politician in the world.
[00:45:01]  And he was supposed to be the kind of, and Macron too.
[00:45:05]  I mean, Macron is the last standing.
[00:45:09]  I mean, Bryce and I were talking about this.
[00:45:10]  Like, he's like the most articulate and responsible of the European leaders, which is a horrifying proposition for anyone with any sort of rational politics, you know?
[00:45:22]  And he has been completely, just totally neutered, you know, and has no completely ineffectual, completely, just they all seem lost.
[00:45:34]  And that this, there's a whole new world that we are now living in.
[00:45:38]  And it's like they didn't get the invitation.
[00:45:41]  Yeah, it's really, I don't, I don't know if you know the book Ruling the Void by Peter Maer, but, you know, it just predicts this with like stunning prescience, essentially, that it's just like the kind of compromises that these,
[00:45:56]  You know, formerly social democratic, like liberal kind of centrist governing parties are going to have to make for their own survival essentially, is going to chip away so much at the idea of any social base for their political power that it's going to leave them like wide open to, as we're now seeing, like the rise of populism um, on the European Continent, and not, you know, not a left populism, but just like straightforwardly, a right populism.

=== Ozempic's Political Pull (14:30) ===

[00:46:20]  And in the case of, you know um, the Rfday, like one that's always been totally in league with, like finance, capital and neoliberal economic policies right um, and so I think that's one of the interesting things.
[00:46:32]  Again, just going back to, like you know, Vance's critiques of of Europe at Munich, which is like okay, but this is the world that America made right yes yeah, you know, it's like it's all well and good for me to stand up and kind of refuse to meet with Olaf Schultz and then go and meet Alice Weidel, like afterwards, you know, and like to, you know criticize, you know, Romania for like cancelling an election, which you know it should be criticized for, but like let's not,
[00:47:01]  let's not pretend that, like you know, the American State Department wouldn't have been the one calling for the like the, the like, the result of that election to be made like rendered null and void.
[00:47:13]  You know well exactly, especially in the case of Romania.
[00:47:15]  I mean, we're building a massive military base right exactly, it's like it's.
[00:47:19]  I'm sorry like it is.
[00:47:20]  It did feel.
[00:47:21]  I mean with, with Vance, who I don't like for personal reasons because he's from I know you're from a different country, but we have, like the middle of the country is where our losers are from and we on the coast look down on them because they're sort of they're, they're like uh morlocks, it's kind of the same here, the Midlands and in England, just like don't go there.
[00:47:39]  Just, you know, Corvin was caught on tape.
[00:47:41]  That's why he lost, lost it.
[00:47:42]  He was talking about these bums up north in the middle.
[00:47:45]  It's just they're horrible.
[00:47:48]  But Vance, I don't like.
[00:47:49]  I think he's a phony.
[00:47:52]  But he goes in there and he's kicking ass and taking names and talking his shit.
[00:47:57]  It's like three weeks ago, the government that you have was like doing all this.
[00:48:02]  It was encouraging all of this.
[00:48:04]  Liz and I were talking, I think it was yesterday, about how so much of the censorship regime or like whatever comes from a lot of like security concerns that were that were raised as part of this like new, I don't know, way of dealing with social media that really arose out of America.
[00:48:28]  I mean, I got to tell you, from the American perspective, it's funny because we don't do, we technically, you're not going to get arrested for any of that stuff here for saying like, oh, you suck dick or whatever on social media to some fucking politician.
[00:48:39]  But we have our own ways of dealing with that.
[00:48:43]  But we, we definitely have, we encourage this stuff, especially in regards to Russia.
[00:48:50]  And to have Vance come in there and not really take responsibility for doing it.
[00:48:55]  He does a little bit.
[00:48:56]  He talks a little bit about how Biden encouraged this stuff.
[00:49:00]  But yeah, I mean, it just, it seems so.
[00:49:03]  It's funny because it really, I think, you know, you mentioned that guy crying at Munich, but it really does seem, at least from the way it's presented here in the papers, that like Trump is abandoning Europe.
[00:49:14]  You know, he's having, he's having these bilateral talks with Russia, not in Europe, but in the Gulf, and he's excluding Ukraine.
[00:49:23]  He's excluding the Europeans who have sacrificed so much for that plucky little Ukraine.
[00:49:30]  And it really does seem like a sort of detachment.
[00:49:34]  I mean, I know some of it's hard negotiating or whatever that Trump does, but there does seem to be a detachment from Europe.
[00:49:40]  And is that felt over there?
[00:49:42]  Are people freaking out?
[00:49:44]  Yeah, it's hard to say if anyone ever really freaks out in Britain because we just kind of like look at the generally sinking ship of the island in which we live and kind of shrug.
[00:49:56]  But certainly, I think, from what I've been seeing in the German press, people are freaking out a lot.
[00:50:03]  Because that was always, that was the idea of being the representatives of Atlanticism on the continent was like the raison deck of the German state, right?
[00:50:15]  And it has been for the last 70 years.
[00:50:16]  Whereas here, Kirstama is, I find it so funny that he's offering to be a bridge between Europe and America, which like, I mean, it's just too literal because it's like, you know, that involves like bending over backwards and then like letting people walk all over you, which is exactly what's going to happen.
[00:50:32]  You know, he's like, and So really, I mean, I was saying this to Liz earlier that like this, everything that Starma's doing in terms of pledging, you know, like support for Zelensky and boots on the ground in Ukraine, it's like, okay, but like, has anyone even checked like the British Army stalker, but do we have any boots?
[00:50:53]  You know, like, it doesn't seem like clear that like this is that any, anyone is listening, you know, that anyone cares really what like what Britain's contribution here.
[00:51:03]  I'm probably being too globe about that, you know, if, if, if Starmer does start sending British soldiers to Ukraine, that's obviously going to be an I don't want to say that because the second I say that, it'll happen, but I know it's British return to Crimea.
[00:51:21]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:51:22]  We've got unfinished business.
[00:51:27]  But yeah, Florence Nightingale, but, you know, kind of a beleaguered NHS staff nurse.
[00:51:34]  But yeah, it's just, it's like, it's just really hard to kind of get a handle on any of it mattering, if that makes sense.
[00:51:43]  Like it just feels so, so like decisively like the center of global power is migrated away.
[00:51:51]  And for a while, I think it was still important to America's understanding of itself, let's say, under Biden to have, you know, to have the kind of the okay of like, you know, European political leaders and European democracies behind its, you know, like its foreign policy plans.
[00:52:13]  And that's just obviously not the case with Trump.
[00:52:15]  And it's almost, it's almost kind of a relief, you know, because like no one really believed it necessarily.
[00:52:22]  No one really believed that like what Europe had to do or say really made any substantial difference to like Biden's foreign policy.
[00:52:30]  But there was this pretense that we all had to go through, which is like, oh, how is Macron going to react to this?
[00:52:37]  What's Schultz going to say?
[00:52:39]  And now like, who cares?
[00:52:40]  Now we can just be like, yes, it's a vassal continent.
[00:52:43]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:52:44]  And now we can all just recognize that.
[00:52:46]  But the thing that's like, I mean, I find it incredibly frustrating, obviously.
[00:52:53]  But, you know, you hear Vance and Trump, you know, the orientation that they take is like, oh, Europe needs to pull itself up from its bootstraps now.
[00:53:01]  Right.
[00:53:02]  Like, oh, and, you know, I think there's a lot of like credulous commenters who look at that and are like, well, finally, maybe finally like Europe can find its balls and like Europe, European leaders, which is like, I'm sorry, are those European leaders in the room with us?
[00:53:19]  Like, who are you talking about?
[00:53:20]  First of all.
[00:53:22]  But that they could finally chart some sort of Way forward outside of the American, you know, whether it's the security umbrella or literally like American hegemony in a much larger sense, when it's like, no, Like, you misunderstand these men.
[00:53:41]  They are not saying that Europe is, Europe still needs to buy all of the LNG from the American firms.
[00:53:49]  It cannot negotiate its own deals with other countries.
[00:53:53]  And if they, I would love to see them try because the last time they did, a pipeline blew up.
[00:53:58]  And I'm going to use the passive voice there.
[00:53:59]  Pipeline blew up.
[00:54:01]  A pipeline self-exploded.
[00:54:03]  Yeah.
[00:54:03]  Yeah.
[00:54:04]  Self-harm moment.
[00:54:06]  It unalived itself.
[00:54:09]  Consciously decoupled from reality.
[00:54:11]  Yes.
[00:54:11]  But like, but also it's just, it's just American hegemony under another fist, right?
[00:54:18]  It's the same.
[00:54:19]  It's still, you're going to do what we say.
[00:54:21]  It's just now we're not going to flatter you.
[00:54:23]  Now we're not going to spend the capital, physical or otherwise, in making you feel bad about yourself.
[00:54:31]  And you're still going to be hollowed out.
[00:54:33]  And you still are structurally incapable of, I mean, they keep talking about, no, I'm just ranting, but they keep talking about, oh, Europe is going to rearm itself.
[00:54:41]  And it's like, babe, with what budget?
[00:54:42]  You don't have control of your currency.
[00:54:44]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:54:45]  Like, how are you going to do it?
[00:54:47]  Yeah.
[00:54:48]  And I mean, I think this is why this guy, Christopher Hoyskin, was crying at the end of the day.
[00:54:53]  There was a curious realization.
[00:54:56]  I don't know if it was even a realization.
[00:54:58]  It was more like, I, you know, like, daddy, praise me, you know?
[00:55:02]  Like, he kind of came, he got to the end, and it was like, you know, like, like, he didn't get his birthday cake or something.
[00:55:09]  Like, the rest of the year is hell, but at least on my birthday, dad looks me in the eyes and gives me a slice of cake and like that just been like smashed in front of him.
[00:55:17]  But, you know, just in terms of what you're saying about like pulling Europe pulling itself up by its bootstraps.
[00:55:24]  And yeah, obviously fuel is like a huge part of this.
[00:55:26]  And like, you know, like, whichever way you cut it, Europe doesn't have like a, you know, an autonomous relationship, should we say, to like being able to fuel its own industrial like, you know, rebirth, wherever that might come from.
[00:55:40]  But also in security terms as well, like over the years, like NATO has made it like America's made it abundantly clear that like any increase in armament and defense spending from European nations has to be bought from American military companies, right?
[00:55:59]  So like, don't you dare suggest that like, you know, any decline in German auto manufacturing is going to be offset by, you know, good, solid German shells, like which the world is pleading for.
[00:56:12]  Exactly.
[00:56:13]  We got to send them to Israel if they do exist.
[00:56:15]  Right.
[00:56:16]  Yeah.
[00:56:16]  Yeah.
[00:56:16]  Make sure they're signed as well.
[00:56:18]  Yeah.
[00:56:20]  Yeah.
[00:56:21]  Actually, I mean, German shells, just like, like if you, if you spend any considerable time in Germany, which unfortunately I did at one point, like they are like the Second World War ones, they are so durable that they just kind of sit in, like, buried in buildings.
[00:56:37]  And then people often have to be evacuated for the kind of like defuses to come in.
[00:56:41]  So we definitely don't want more German shells.
[00:56:43]  That would be bad for everyone's security.
[00:56:46]  But yeah, sorry, that was a tangent.
[00:56:49]  But yeah, I mean, I just, there's no, I think, you know, exactly to saying this, it's like, okay, like we'd have to have both boots and straps to be able to like pull ourselves up by them, you know, and it's like not clear what either of those things would be made out of.
[00:57:06]  And in other kind of, you know, other areas of the world where you've seen, you know, China kind of enlisting countries into like, you know, Belt and Road, when this started to happen in Europe, everyone freaked out, right?
[00:57:21]  Because it was this idea of like, you know, that's America's role.
[00:57:24]  But no one really reflected on what would happen if, you know, there was this kind of idea of like, well, China's buying undue amounts of influence here and what happens when they pull away.
[00:57:34]  But no one ever stopped to think, okay, what happened?
[00:57:36]  What kind of amount of influence is America buying and what might happen if America were to pull away, right?
[00:57:42]  And that's the situation that, you know, in the last two and a half weeks, we've like we've we found ourselves in.
[00:57:48]  I'm, you know, I'm trying to think about exceptions to this, but I really like at a kind of continent-wide level, I just can't like it's funny.
[00:57:56]  It really reminds me so much right now seems to have so many governments right now, rather, seem to have a lot in common with kind of the latter days of Assad's government in Syria, where it is really just like this hollowed out facsimile of a government.
[00:58:12]  I mean, that's sort of what a lot of like the doggy stuff has felt like in America.
[00:58:17]  You know, we know that like, you know, a large part of our government basically functions as this like inertia heavy machine that doesn't really do anything for anybody's life, but like has to kind of remain in place or else kind of things fall apart.
[00:58:31]  Whereas like in Europe, you know, so much right now seems so unclear.
[00:58:36]  And no country is really like, I was trying to think of like, you know, various countries have been the sick man of Europe throughout the ages.
[00:58:42]  And I'm trying to think right now, who's the healthy man of Europe right now?
[00:58:46]  Like, who's the well man of Europe?
[00:58:49]  I don't think I can name it.
[00:58:50]  Probably one of those fucked up countries like Holland or something.
[00:58:53]  But like, I don't really know.
[00:58:55]  How's Portugal doing?
[00:58:56]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:58:57]  Things were going okay for a bit, I think.
[00:58:59]  Yeah, you know, the Spanish government is doing some interesting things.
[00:59:03]  Right.
[00:59:03]  They're trying.
[00:59:03]  They're trying their best.
[00:59:04]  They're trying.
[00:59:05]  They're trying.
[00:59:06]  And then, you know, we've got Ozempic in the north.
[00:59:09]  You got Ozempic.
[00:59:10]  Yeah, you got Ozempic.
[00:59:11]  That's true.
[00:59:12]  I know every European country needs to be governed well than Ozembek.
[00:59:16]  Every European country needs their own Ozempic.
[00:59:20]  But really, I just, it seems like, especially with the Ukraine talks that are happening right now.
[00:59:28]  I mean, Germany, you could say, has sacrificed so much for this war and is seemingly is completely going to be cut out of whatever resolution comes from it.
[00:59:40]  And, you know, I was thinking too, like, you know, with with the with the kind of end of unipolarity and China's entering into the game, especially in Europe, you know, I think there's still going to be the same jockeying between the US and China in Europe.
[00:59:55]  But the thing is, like, if you go with the US, the Chinese will still invest in you.
[00:59:59]  But it seems to be like what Trump is saying now is if you go with China and what Vance said very, very clearly at multiple points during his trip to Europe, that if you go with China, you are fucking done to us.
[01:00:10]  Like you're dead to us.
[01:00:12]  And it just seems like, well, from my perspective, you know, I don't know much about anything, but the Chinese seem to like at least like build some stuff and like, well, like maybe refurbish your port or do something like that.
[01:00:25]  Whereas I can't really tell what Americans do in Europe besides just like take stuff, like money.
[01:00:32]  There's that great quote where it's like development economists, I think somewhere in West Africa discussing like America versus China, which one to go with.
[01:00:43]  And they say like, you know, well, China gives you an airport, America gives you a lecture.

=== Europe's Future Arms Race (08:39) ===

[01:00:51]  You know, like that's kind of where Europe, I think, is heading here.
[01:00:53]  But yeah, I mean, I suppose one of the real blows to like continental confidence that's just been like been delivered in the last couple of weeks is this idea of exactly as you say, like, I think, you know, America and China probably will fight out over Europe.
[01:01:15]  Will they, will either of those powers see it as like the most consequential battle in terms of determining like a new regime of like, you know, global powers?
[01:01:24]  Probably not, right?
[01:01:25]  It's like that, where that will happen will be in Southeast Asia and in the Gulf, probably.
[01:01:31]  So like Europe doesn't, it's, and this is kind of the, the, the continuity or to get back to the WEF as well.
[01:01:37]  It's like the World Economic Forum is not going to stop next year.
[01:01:41]  It's just going to, it's going to continue and it's going to matter less and less and less.
[01:01:45]  And the people involved in it have to get used to the fact that it's going to matter less and less and less.
[01:01:49]  And so, you know, for similar reasons as to like, you know, the Ukraine talks happening in the Daria Palace and not in the Elyse, right?
[01:01:57]  Like it doesn't mean you can't European leaders gather in the Elyse and have your little talks about what you think should happen in Ukraine, but it doesn't mean anyone's going to listen to you.
[01:02:07]  Like the power, the power's moved on, right?
[01:02:09]  Like, so we're not at like, it would almost be Kind of, I don't know, like validating or something if like the continent were in ruins, you know, everything were falling apart, but it's not you could see something and say, see, look, here's the evidence exactly, something new needs to be built, yeah, but but that's not happening either.
[01:02:31]  We're just kind of drifting in the like, you know, like the ash cloud of like the end of like, you know, unipolarity and like you know, this kind of like regime of neoliberal globalization that gutted all of our welfare states and like sold it off to like asset management companies.
[01:02:48]  I just feel like we are all going in the direction of the UK.
[01:02:54]  Interesting.
[01:02:55]  You guys really might be like the canary in the coal mine a little bit.
[01:02:59]  Oh, that's so that that feels exhilarating that we might be like leading the charge of decline because you'd be leading something.
[01:03:08]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:03:09]  Well, it was like it was always the middleman in the Atlanticist regime that really, yeah.
[01:03:15]  I mean, it's totally by accident, you know, like just plundering into it.
[01:03:20]  But yeah, I keep thinking it's funny.
[01:03:22]  Like everything seems so like sclerotic and just like really, I don't know.
[01:03:27]  Yeah, you're, you're right, talking about like this ash cloud over Europe and like these, everyone kind of like moving in this, in this days.
[01:03:33]  And, you know, I, I really, I pity, I pity the Euro, the Eurocrat or the European liberal.
[01:03:40]  And like, and, and there does seem to be sort of like a, I guess, a melancholia of the technocrat in Europe right now and kind of like a vision of like, okay, well, this isn't really working out, but there's nothing that's actually going to happen that makes us do something else.
[01:03:57]  Like, you know, I was talking about this, Liz earlier.
[01:03:59]  It's like Europe needs almost like a unifying, like a Napoleon rather than maybe a Trump.
[01:04:05]  But like a not a Hitler.
[01:04:08]  Well, unfortunately, that kind of is your last guy you had like that.
[01:04:12]  But I just wanted to make clear our stance on the podcast.
[01:04:15]  Well, maybe a liberal Hitler, but that we can deal with that another time.
[01:04:19]  But Europe, like it needs like a rejuvenating force, which often comes with a war, but nobody even cares about attacking most of Europe now.
[01:04:29]  I mean, it seems like people talk about, look, listen, Russia's going to invade Poland.
[01:04:33]  What does Russia mean about Poland?
[01:04:35]  Oh, yeah, I know.
[01:04:38]  First of all, all the military-age Polish men are in London working in restaurants.
[01:04:42]  And so there's no army anyways.
[01:04:45]  But it would be the middle-aged Polish women I'd be more afraid of in the fight back there.
[01:04:50]  I think Polish women could be a lot to deal with.
[01:04:56]  But yeah, it just seems like, I don't know, it seems like there needs to be some sort of precipitating event for a reconstitution.
[01:05:05]  And Macrone does seem to be the person who's like, you know, he's always talking about we need a European army.
[01:05:09]  We need a European army.
[01:05:10]  We've already dealt with, you're not going to have the European army.
[01:05:13]  But like he seems to be able to recognize that, but unable to do anything about it.
[01:05:20]  And I think with the with the rise of all of these like right-wing, Eurosceptical-ish sometimes parties, or they're more like insane, like Zamor or the Romanian guy whose name I won't even try to pronounce, but who did, I was, I believe, read about in New Left Review, plagiarized an entire speech from the American television show, The Newsroom, while he was giving an interview, complete with the same statistics in the newsroom.
[01:05:47]  Yeah, which is really amazing.
[01:05:49]  That's a beautiful image.
[01:05:52]  It's funny because the classic way that it goes in Europe is you have a right-wing or Christian Democrat, whatever party, a conservative party, and then whatever immigration happens.
[01:06:02]  And then you have like a Nazi party that's like, we need to fucking kill immigrants.
[01:06:05]  And the Conservative Party is like, all right, these guys are rising too much in the polls.
[01:06:08]  We'll steal some of their shit and like integrate it into like, you know, our platform.
[01:06:13]  And then that works.
[01:06:14]  And, but now we have the interesting phenomena of the Nazi parties sort of spawning off just insane guys.
[01:06:21]  And I think that will kind of continue until like maybe we get a really insane guy and he does something crazy.
[01:06:29]  Yeah.
[01:06:30]  Yeah.
[01:06:33]  Sorry.
[01:06:33]  Yeah.
[01:06:33]  I mean, I was just thinking about what you're saying about, you know, Europe needing some kind of precipitating event.
[01:06:38]  I think that's, you know, I guess the last one we had was COVID, right?
[01:06:42]  And for a while, you know, the continental economic infrastructure did kind of rally through that.
[01:06:49]  You know, you did see, you know, there was talk about kind of, you know, Keynesianism in Europe and a return to a kind of like a war economy.
[01:06:57]  And actually something that happened this week was, I think it was an announcement by Ursula von der Leyen that for the first time, I think at a kind of an EU like budget setting level,
[01:07:11]  the relationship between like individual countries' debt to GDP ratios basically was going to be like the way in which that was calculated so that debt couldn't become too great as a percentage of GDP was going to be removed because of this like desire to kind of encourage defense spending.
[01:07:29]  So it's like it's all it's like a kind of step back towards that kind of like, you know, war economy kind of Keynesian mindset, but without the war, right?
[01:07:40]  Because like it's, you know, like we're just going to be funneling money into defense spending, which I'm not, and I'm not saying there should be a war.
[01:07:51]  But it's, it's a, you know, at the behest of America.
[01:07:55]  And as we were saying, like that, that spending isn't spent, isn't like, you know, in the kind of classic Keynesian model where like spending that then like revivifies the industrial base of a particular country.
[01:08:05]  No, no, it's just like it's money that's going to multinational arms corporations instead.
[01:08:10]  So it's like just about like paying for continued attention from America.
[01:08:16]  And, you know, maybe, and I think that might be one of those routes in for, you know, these like kind of populist far-right groups, right?
[01:08:24]  Which are like basically the people saying, you know, like, you know, like one of the kind of like positions of the, you know, the AFT, the RFDA in Germany has been like, you know, to be pretty, you know, like some of the most vocal critique, critics of the war in Ukraine and like Germany's just hawkishness on this.
[01:08:44]  So like, if then Germany continues to like, you know, put huge amounts of its national budget into like just buying arms, you know, from abroad to meet NATO defense spending, but none of that is going into, you know, you know, like back into like impoverished areas in East Germany, then like, that's just like, that's just fodder for the, for the populist far right in these countries.
[01:09:08]  And that's where you'll start to get some of these, you know, these, these movements just like, you know, they're already on track, you know, after to be like second in the polls in the election, right?
[01:09:18]  So it's like they're only going to go from strength to strength.
[01:09:20]  They're like, you know, the Sarah Valkyrie Connected group, it looks like it's going to be knocked out completely.
[01:09:25]  Like there isn't, you know, that's, that's the future of like.
[01:09:29]  No, you're out of your mind.

=== UAE's Rise and Global Impact (07:04) ===

[01:09:30]  I'm telling you.
[01:09:32]  Once the CDU and the Social Democrats get together, we are going to be.
[01:09:36]  Unstoppable.
[01:09:37]  Unstoppable.
[01:09:39]  Let me tell you.
[01:09:39]  They talk about the decline of Europe.
[01:09:41]  The Social Democratic Party are one of the smallest and most, I mean, they really, and the CDU, these guys, they're both Christian and Democrats.
[01:09:51]  It's crazy.
[01:09:51]  You never see anything like it.
[01:09:53]  And we get all these guys in a room together.
[01:09:55]  I'm telling you, they're going to turn Germany right now.
[01:09:57]  I want to mention, I want to talk too about the Gulf, because that kind of seems to be where the action is these days.
[01:10:07]  And it's funny, your description of Switzerland, especially in the article.
[01:10:12]  And everybody should read the article.
[01:10:13]  We'll link to the article in here, by the way.
[01:10:15]  But because there's a lot of stuff we can't even get to, but it feels like the Gulf is kind of, especially like Dubai is sort of what Switzerland, but better in every single way.
[01:10:26]  And kind of a vision for whatever this next phase of the world and like investment.
[01:10:33]  That's what I mean, right?
[01:10:34]  Where capital is looking to flow, which is like you see all of these special economic zones.
[01:10:39]  I mean, even part of the Trump plan in the more like, you know, again, who knows what that means, but a lot of his like, You know, more Yimby elements and kind of developer elements have been pushing for special opening up federal land in America to open up special economic zones that are not dissimilar to, say,
[01:11:04]  Singapore or Hong Kong or many of the sort of like Emirate projects.
[01:11:10]  And it seems to be a kind of model for where capital wants to go in the same way that, like Brace says, you know, Davos kind of felt like an image for the post-war order to kind of latch onto.
[01:11:25]  Yeah, definitely.
[01:11:26]  I think the UAE is a really interesting test case.
[01:11:31]  And it's kind of, I'm trying to, you know, keep track of, you know, the distinctions between that and Saudi Arabia, right?
[01:11:38]  Which, like, Saudi Arabia seems very much to be, you know, just much more politically minded in terms of its like, yeah, its international relations and certainly in the way in which it's able to position itself as a kind of, you know, an ally to the US and like interested in, you know, negotiating, you know, like with Israel and through the Abram Accords.
[01:11:57]  But the UAE is like, I mean, certainly the way in which like it's structured as a country is like completely different.
[01:12:04]  And so you have, you know, these like small, you know, like emirates like Dubai, which as you say, become become this kind of this new Switzerland of, you know, globalization might be like done as like the, you know, the standard of kind of what American economic power looks like across the world.
[01:12:25]  But that doesn't mean that international businesses don't need somewhere to trade that is as easy and like, you know, like frictionless as possible and in which you know unregistered oil tankers from Russia can come in and like dock their wares and Swiss commodity traders can then sell it on to you know like Dutch brokers.
[01:12:46]  Like all of this stuff still has to happen.
[01:12:48]  It just can't happen in Switzerland anymore because Switzerland has become too politically, I guess, like vulnerable and susceptible to like the currents of like American like foreign policy in particular, right?
[01:13:01]  So like, you know, sanctions on Russian businesses, kind of like pressure about allowing NATO to do like military training in the Alps.
[01:13:09]  Like the idea of like Switzerland as being the like the enclave within Europe in which this stuff can happen like is no more.
[01:13:17]  And also it's not well positioned just like in terms of like trade with the East.
[01:13:21]  Right.
[01:13:22]  Whereas the Gulf is, you know, like the geography of Switzerland used to make mean that it was in the heart of like some of the richest territory in like in the world.
[01:13:32]  That's not true anymore.
[01:13:33]  Like the Gulf is just better, it's just in a better place on the map.
[01:13:37]  So all of this stuff, I think, is conspiring to make, you know, as well as like, you know, deeply undemocratic and repressive regimes and like, you know, grass pools of migrant labor being like basically sold into like, you know, chattel slavery and all this stuff.
[01:13:52]  Like, like this is all part of like the rich tapestry that makes a trip to Dubai so appealing for, yeah, for so many traders, especially.
[01:14:01]  I mean, Liz lives there half the year.
[01:14:05]  Yeah, I mean, you have, you have some, um, you have some positive qualities in Dubai that you don't have in Switzerland, such as, well, abundant amounts of slave labor, but you also, you don't have like a democratic system or anything like that.
[01:14:20]  Not that that has really Switzerland has put that to a lot of use in terms of like tamping down on any foreign interference or like excesses of international capital, but like they, that's just a complete non-issue there.
[01:14:34]  And it's, it's, it's just, it's kind of amazing.
[01:14:37]  I mean, Dubai to me, I was actually thinking about it last night.
[01:14:40]  I was like, I don't think there's a place I'd want to visit less in the world.
[01:14:43]  I mean, I'm sure there's some real dumps I don't want to go to, but like a world-class city that I have any interest in visiting less.
[01:14:49]  Because it's just, it's just a new, the whole thing is like a mixed-use crumble cookie fucking 10,000 story tower.
[01:14:58]  like babylon and it's fucking dude i think they're the antichrist is gonna be real no yeah no No, well, first of all, it's not crazy.
[01:15:07]  Believe me, Rastafarians have something they're talking about that does kind of make a lot of sense.
[01:15:11]  But I think they are both making Babylon and the Antichrist right now.
[01:15:15]  And I'm like.
[01:15:16]  That's what Peter Thiel says if you listen to him.
[01:15:19]  I know.
[01:15:21]  About Dubai?
[01:15:22]  No, no, but in general, about the Antichrist.
[01:15:25]  He's talking about the Antichrist.
[01:15:26]  Yeah, sorry, right.
[01:15:27]  Right.
[01:15:28]  I just got excited.
[01:15:29]  He might have said it about Dubai.
[01:15:30]  It's hard to understand when you listen to these guys, like whether, sometimes when they're speaking in metaphor, because they're so obsessed with Gerard that you're like, are you trying to speak in a kind of allegory or are you literally talking about bringing about Christ?
[01:15:46]  I don't think they know either, do they?
[01:15:48]  No, they're just, yeah.
[01:15:50]  I've got to say, it's one of the like the worst things about like the next place I'm going on a reporting trip is Dubai.
[01:15:56]  And it's like, yeah, and hopefully TBD.
[01:15:59]  But like, but it's just like following the trails of like, you know, like the end game of one era of an economy just takes you to some of the worst places on earth.
[01:16:12]  And it sounds like they're going to be like really swish and fancy.
[01:16:15]  And you're like, no amount of like free white wine could make me feel good about having to be here.
[01:16:21]  Like this is just horrible being surrounded by all of it.
[01:16:24]  It just, it makes you feel really miserable all the time.
[01:16:27]  We had we had an someone call into the show.
[01:16:30]  We have like a tip line or whatever.
[01:16:31]  And it was an anonymous call, but he's an architect.

=== End Game Economy Trails (04:00) ===

[01:16:35]  And he's saying that he left the US, one, because he didn't want to pay his student debt.
[01:16:41]  Shout out.
[01:16:41]  That's kind of cool.
[01:16:42]  Respect.
[01:16:43]  But also being, you know, architecture school is insanely expensive.
[01:16:47]  But also that the only projects for architects now are in the Gulf because they're just like building so much, so much, so much, so much.
[01:16:55]  But he was saying that one of the biggest concerns when they cost out their projects, you know, NEOM and the like and whatever, that they have to take into account that they are building so much that the price of steel globally will go up because of their project.
[01:17:13]  And so they have to account for and cost out the like dramatic spike in prices that they will cause in order to cost out their project and that it will affect like global global steel market.
[01:17:28]  And so that then determines like when and how they complete these projects.
[01:17:33]  Just in terms of like when you're thinking about scale.
[01:17:35]  And then, you know, then we start because we're in this new era and it's not, we're not talking about global financial flows anymore.
[01:17:40]  We're talking about like good hard commodities and trade and mercantilism or whatever.
[01:17:45]  Like China makes like all of the world steel, you know, like, so there's all of these very interesting dynamics at play for these cities that nobody lives in, right?
[01:17:59]  We're also like building these massive like buildings and towns that are completely unoccupied.
[01:18:06]  I mean, there seems to be this idea that eventually like Canadian stake streamers, I guess, will live there.
[01:18:12]  I mean, I don't really know what the plan is.
[01:18:15]  That was the real great reset is, you know, Saudi 2030.
[01:18:19]  We're all just streaming from Riyadh.
[01:18:22]  We're just gambling.
[01:18:23]  We're just all gambling on fucking live streams.
[01:18:26]  Isn't it though?
[01:18:27]  Yeah.
[01:18:28]  Yeah.
[01:18:28]  So maybe the Davos dream does live on.
[01:18:31]  We are all citizens of Davos.
[01:18:33]  It's just, it's now in Dubai.
[01:18:36]  Yeah, that's crazy about this, the steel.
[01:18:38]  It makes sense when you think about the scale of these projects, but I hadn't.
[01:18:41]  I mean, they're tremendous.
[01:18:43]  You know, I was thinking for a poor old sick UK, perhaps giving King Charles his due step aside and make it maybe Markle.
[01:18:57]  Well, no, not make it Markle.
[01:19:02]  Bring the lost puppies back into the fold and saying maybe Andrew.
[01:19:07]  Andrew.
[01:19:08]  Yeah.
[01:19:08]  Oh, no, not Andrew.
[01:19:09]  He's kind of back in the fold.
[01:19:12]  But I think maybe make the UK its own Gulf.
[01:19:15]  Because that's really, if you're looking ahead, the Gulf states, if those are the future, well, I know a little other part of the world that's kind of fucked up shaped.
[01:19:24]  And that is the motherfucking UK.
[01:19:26]  And I'm saying, just make the UK the UAE.
[01:19:29]  It's already kind of similar.
[01:19:32]  You just need to liberalize the city.
[01:19:33]  Have you guys thought about that?
[01:19:35]  UKE, yeah.
[01:19:36]  Well, you guys also, yeah.
[01:19:38]  UKE.
[01:19:39]  Or think about just fully accepting, making all of the UK sort of a favela outside of the city of London.
[01:19:46]  Yeah, that's cool.
[01:19:47]  I mean, we already have like the Channel Islands, which these weird, like, feudalistic kind of tax exemption regimes.
[01:19:53]  So maybe, maybe what we need to do is to make the UK the Channel Islands, if that makes sense.
[01:19:59]  We need to take our lead from like our lords and legias, the Barclay brothers, and go back to kind of like, you know, tithed bondage system, except for like an elite class of commodities traders.
[01:20:15]  It can only win, really, this plan, I think, at the polls.
[01:20:18]  Yeah.
[01:20:18]  I feel like I've read a lot of your writing.
[01:20:21]  I feel like you're pretty smart.
[01:20:22]  So I got to ask you this.
[01:20:23]  And things are pretty fucked up right now, no?
[01:20:26]  Yeah, they're terrible.
[01:20:28]  Yeah, really bad.
[01:20:28]  Yeah.
[01:20:29]  I can't tell.
[01:20:29]  My usual reality check is Liz, but she just has been agreeing with me on that for many years.
[01:20:33]  And so I have to ask another lady.

=== Things Seem Pretty Bad (09:04) ===

[01:20:36]  Things seem pretty bad all over, no?
[01:20:39]  Well, yeah, pretty much all around.
[01:20:41]  I was in a, you know, advance coming on here, I was trying to think about, you know, rays of light at a kind of global level.
[01:20:50]  Starmer.
[01:20:51]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:20:52]  And it's a socialist stammer is about it.
[01:20:55]  No, I mean, you know, it used to be the case that we could look to, you know, places in Latin and South America or it's real bad.
[01:21:04]  It's real bad.
[01:21:06]  You know, and even I think the, you know, certainly in the UK, there used to be this balance between like, okay, well, if the parliamentary left was doing badly, that meant there was some kind of social movement like kicking off.
[01:21:18]  And there's nothing.
[01:21:19]  There's just, there's really nothing, you know?
[01:21:23]  There's just the Labour Party, basically, who is like so dull that it makes you kind of miss the Tories who, at least when they like got things wrong by like, you know, like handling suspiciously large contracts to like the wives of their friends.
[01:21:39]  Like that was kind of, that was a story, wasn't it?
[01:21:42]  Yeah, there's a charm to that, you know?
[01:21:44]  Yeah, there was some.
[01:21:44]  We live in a charmless.
[01:21:46]  Yeah, but it's charmless and bad.
[01:21:48]  Yeah.
[01:21:48]  Well, I think that like, we were talking about this before recording, but just to kind of restate it for the audience, that like the right wing globally, but you see it especially obviously in America, across Europe, I mean, in Latin America, certainly, is not just well-funded, but also revolutionary.
[01:22:05]  And like a lot of the vision that, I mean, they're not, I would say it's being kicked up so much more than from what, you know, during the Reagan and Thatcherite kind of revolution in its own right.
[01:22:22]  You know, this is a much, much, much more radical vision than even that was at that time for what remained of the kind of social democratic institutions in the UK, for example.
[01:22:37]  And that like this globally puts the left, such as whatever that is that exists institutionally anywhere globally, in a very odd position of having to defend or be on the defense of liberal institutions that itself critiques, right?
[01:22:56]  And it's a very complicated position to be in.
[01:23:01]  But I think part of the, I think at least first is acknowledging like how revolutionary the right is and how vanguardist they are in organization and kind of taking that seriously.
[01:23:15]  A friend made a, what I thought was a really good point the other day in a kind of a piece kind of, you know, summing up his worldview.
[01:23:25]  And, you know, basically just pointing out that the left has taken on itself like projects of, you know, salvaging welfare states and salvaging like the rescue systems for people who are left behind in the retreat of the state.
[01:23:41]  And that that is, you know, that kind of, you know, protectionist impulse that we have for like not letting things decline or get any worse has meant that we've left the field of like, you know, like cultural analysis and like broader like horizon setting in some ways way open to the right, which has also been way more funded in this regard as well.
[01:24:04]  So like it's, you know, the things for which the left now is like known to stand, exactly as you say, aren't really like, they're not program setting kind of radical new innovations, but, you know, that's like, it's just the idea of like, let's not let things get any worse, which, and we experienced that with Corbynism here, which really was like, you know, this feeling of like that, you know, that final election in 2020, it felt like we were going around and like door knocking for charity, you know?
[01:24:31]  Yeah.
[01:24:31]  And like no one, you know, like I was doing like phone banking to like places like in like in the north of England where I grew up and like I was you know on the phone to people who were kind of like store like union members from kind of like quite economically depressed parts of the country and you'd think that would be like an easy win for the redistributive project that you know Corbynism was but they hated it.
[01:24:53]  They hated it because it felt like you know it felt like saying you're you've lost right you've lost and here I am to say it wasn't fair that you've lost.
[01:25:03]  So like we know and we're gonna not we can't promise we're gonna make it any better but we're at least not gonna make it any worse.
[01:25:10]  And what the populist right is is able to do is just to be like, no, we're gonna win.
[01:25:15]  We're gonna take things back for you.
[01:25:17]  We're going to give you back some sense of like, you know, your own, your own subjective power and agency.
[01:25:23]  And yeah, I think there are many kind of social democratic movements on the left, particularly in Europe.
[01:25:29]  And I don't know, maybe it feels the same in the States as well.
[01:25:33]  But like, we've stopped really articulating a positive thesis for how the world ought to look.
[01:25:41]  And instead, what we've started doing is saying, okay, this far but no further in terms of what you can take from us.
[01:25:46]  Yeah.
[01:25:46]  I mean, that's what I said when I sort of joked about being a conservative earlier, because that's really what a lot of the left has become is sort of like a conservative social democratic, like, yeah, please halt, don't do anything more.
[01:26:00]  Or like, it's one big NGOization, right?
[01:26:03]  Where it's like, it's, it becomes one big charity shop.
[01:26:06]  And, you know, you really, or not charity shop, but like charity drive.
[01:26:10]  When really like a revolutionary impulse is something like you see in a lot of these right-wing parties that are like, yes, we are going to punish these our enemies who are your enemies.
[01:26:19]  We're going to destroy this system which you hate and which we hate.
[01:26:22]  And whether they do that or not, it doesn't necessarily really matter, especially in the short term.
[01:26:28]  But there's really nobody able to articulate that at a non tiny group level anywhere that I've seen, which is sort of fascinating.
[01:26:38]  I mean, I think some of it has to do with money, but also like it really is just like decades of tradition, I think, becoming necrotic and turning the left into something that is almost like, I don't know, a junior partner to liberalism.
[01:26:59]  Right.
[01:26:59]  And an absence of political leadership as well, right?
[01:27:02]  Because for the left to that, you know, certainly in most kind of parliamentary systems, like the odds are so stacked against the left survival within those structures that you, you know, you saw it so much with like the squad, right?
[01:27:15]  And like the kind of like the early like enthusiasm for like the kind of DSA infiltration of the Democratic Party.
[01:27:21]  Well, for, you know, for any of those people to survive in Congress, then they have to, you know, like weep about abstaining or voting for Iron Dome, you know, because otherwise they're going to get beated out.
[01:27:34]  Like, you know, like, and these are the kind of compromises that the left is always having to make.
[01:27:38]  And the right within these kind of electoral structures doesn't have to.
[01:27:42]  And we don't really have a, like, I don't think a kind of a political leadership class that's able to turn, like, to say, I'm not going to make that compromise.
[01:27:52]  And, you know, not making that compromise is worth more than my political career.
[01:27:57]  That's where the liberalism comes in, right?
[01:27:58]  It's like, well, someone's got to do it.
[01:28:01]  I guess I've got to do it.
[01:28:01]  And then you're like, no, no, you doing it is, as Liz was saying, kind of undermining the very conditions of possibility for any like any actual kind of radical or revolutionary position to emerge here.
[01:28:13]  And not to like beat a dead horse or whatever, but also, you know, you talk about no horizon or no kind of vision, positive vision.
[01:28:19]  It's all kind of 20th century nostalgia.
[01:28:23]  It's not just like we're going to be the, you know, defense squad to say, okay, no further, but also what we're going to advance is we'll remember how good it was when.
[01:28:35]  Yeah.
[01:28:35]  You know, and remember how good it was when Germany was making its own shells.
[01:28:39]  That's exactly right.
[01:28:41]  And, you know, for the more extreme vanguardist elements on the right, it is a vision of Dubai.
[01:28:47]  And, you know, there is the horrible underbelly of that and the structure that undergirds that, of course.
[01:28:55]  But it's also very future oriented.
[01:28:58]  It's what if a new city?
[01:29:00]  What if actually more markets everywhere?
[01:29:03]  What if more markets, more freedom, more, you know, it's this really radical libertarianism and really anarcho-capitalism aligned with a kind of techno like accelerationist kind of future that is unfortunately a vision of the future.
[01:29:23]  Right.
[01:29:24]  And one that people can understand or articulate or see the kind of outline of.
[01:29:31]  And it's not, you know, something from the 1960s that never really actually existed in the vision that we all have of it from the past.

=== More Markets, More Freedom (03:55) ===

[01:29:41]  Right.
[01:29:41]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:29:42]  We're living in the like the exhaustive version of a future that never actually came to pass because like the version of the past that we had wasn't capable of producing it.
[01:29:51]  And yet we're still clinging to that view, like that futuristic kind of idea of like continual, like, yeah, private, public kind of adjustments will be the route forward to just managing like all of the contradictions and condemporary social democracy.
[01:30:07]  And we don't really need to worry too much about, you know, like borders or foreign wars or any of these things.
[01:30:13]  It's just tweaking the formula again and again.
[01:30:17]  We're all Davos man.
[01:30:19]  Right.
[01:30:19]  That's what happened to Davos Man.
[01:30:21]  We all became Davos man.
[01:30:23]  Jesus we Davos man.
[01:30:26]  Well, this was really fun.
[01:30:27]  It was so nice to talk to you.
[01:30:29]  Yeah.
[01:30:29]  Thank you for coming on.
[01:30:30]  It's, it's, um, I encourage all listeners to check out the link that we got below.
[01:30:36]  I don't know why I'm pointing while we're recording this.
[01:30:38]  No one can see this.
[01:30:39]  We just released the audio.
[01:30:41]  But the link to the to the to the essay in Harper's.
[01:30:44]  Thank you.
[01:30:54]  Sometimes I'm like, what do I even say?
[01:30:56]  I don't even wonder.
[01:30:57]  What do we need to talk about on this thing?
[01:30:59]  What are we talking about?
[01:31:00]  I'm kind of sad.
[01:31:01]  I'm sorry, but I think things are not great.
[01:31:04]  And I think we should say it.
[01:31:06]  I think things are good right now.
[01:31:09]  But you just said things were bad.
[01:31:11]  I think the only way that you'd think that things are good right now is that you just fucking hate immigrants.
[01:31:16]  Like, I'm genuinely.
[01:31:17]  Not even because you're probably mad that they're not getting enough deportations done.
[01:31:20]  I know.
[01:31:21]  It's so funny.
[01:31:22]  I was reading a bunch of right-wing cope about that.
[01:31:24]  And they're like, well, actually, Homin, Homin, whatever his name is, Homin has to like get rid of all this red tape and all these things need to happen before they can start the mass deportations.
[01:31:35]  And I'm like, all right.
[01:31:37]  I just, I can't keep coming back to the fact that like, you've got these fucking guys in the White House that are putting fucking chips in people's brains.
[01:31:44]  They're fucking making super intelligence that can monitor every movement.
[01:31:48]  They're doing all their fucking, they're having these babies in the fucking test tubes.
[01:31:52]  And like, yeah, these guys are our fucking base Nazi colleagues.
[01:31:55]  And I understand making alliances with people, you know, to get what you want, but like you are the junior partner here.
[01:32:01]  You are not, you're not the senior partner.
[01:32:03]  The senior partner is the guy who's putting the chip in your brain.
[01:32:06]  And it just, it's, and so any Nazis that listen to the show, and I know it's about 50, 60, 70, maybe some are even saying 80, 90% of you.
[01:32:14]  I'm telling you, there's got to be another way.
[01:32:17]  I think that, fuck, Liz, ladies, ladies.
[01:32:21]  If your man is putting a chip in your brain, that's not your man.
[01:32:24]  That's the senior partner.
[01:32:26]  That's the senior partner in the relationship.
[01:32:28]  I feel like I should become the king.
[01:32:29]  I'm not communist.
[01:32:30]  I'm liberal, but I feel like I could become the king of communism.
[01:32:34]  Sounds like a really bad movie that would have come out.
[01:32:38]  I could rescue Europe.
[01:32:39]  Like in 2017, the height of a bunch of bullshit, cultural bullshit.
[01:32:47]  It would have been like, it's not the king of comedy.
[01:32:49]  It's a king of communism.
[01:32:51]  Someone with like some terrible YouTube.
[01:32:54]  Yeah, it's just shit.
[01:32:56]  Everything fucking.
[01:32:57]  I just, I just want to live in a fucking world where things make sense.
[01:33:02]  I think the irrationality of everything is what drives me crazy.
[01:33:05]  Maybe I am neurodivergent, but it just seems like everything's so crazy and fucked up and inefficient makes nothing except for noise and shit.
[01:33:14]  It's like every fucking new invention is just a fart that I have to smell for the rest of eternity.
[01:33:18]  I think it's like it's like a toxic waste that we all live in.
[01:33:21]  It's disgusting.
[01:33:22]  These people made a disgusting world and we have to live in it.
[01:33:25]  And they're still making a disgusting world.
[01:33:27]  And there's nobody who wants to stop them from making a disgusting world.
[01:33:30]  I hate it.
[01:33:32]  That was sponsored by Stake.
[01:33:35]  I'm Liz.

=== A Disgusting World (00:34) ===

[01:33:36]  My name is Brace.
[01:33:38]  We're joined by producer.
[01:33:40]  Can you say it?
[01:33:40]  Are you your mic's off?
[01:33:42]  Young Tomsky.
[01:33:43]  And the podcast, the podcast.
[01:33:45]  The podcast is called.
[01:33:47]  The podcast is called True Non.
[01:33:49]  We'll see you next time.
[01:33:51]  Bye-bye.
[01:34:10]  Come out.