Alright, welcome to the Negotiator Channel. Quoting myself as a proper narcissist: power is a negotiator's ability to achieve what they want, either indirectly or directly. Thinking about this specifically from the US tech bro perspective, we have here — on Finland's scale — at the table of the money men, Ali Omar. Welcome. Thanks. A famous angel investor and also a negotiator guest, and then maybe
at the other table we have the most indirect influence — meaning the most combined YouTube and podcast visibility Finland has ever seen, in this one room: Leevi Leivo, founder of Puheenaihe. Thanks for the invite, here in the broke corner. And Isak Rautio, founder of Futucast. Thank you very much, thanks for the invite — always nice to wake up early in the morning to talk about America.
Great, let's do a quick round. So this refers to the concept of Trump's media-control cluster, and then maybe it originally traces back to Peter Thiel, who — even during Trump's first term, as perhaps the most successful angel investor in the US — went out to support Trump and took a beating for it. But then Elon Musk jumped in during this second campaign's
final stretch to support him, and then the rest of the tech bros — everyone was seen there at the 'coronation,' meaning Trump's inauguration ceremony. Let's think about how we got here. Yeah, well, it's certainly been talked about a lot that now a whole lot of these big money men, these multi-billionaires, have apparently switched over to Trump's side. Well, at least
one question I've been left wondering about, that I haven't heard an answer to yet, is — and it would be interesting for someone to ask this — what was it about the previous Republicans, for example, that meant they couldn't vote for them? So one angle here is that the Democrats went too far into the 'woke' end, this liberalism went overboard, and now this billionaire camp, Silicon Valley, is shifting
behind the Republicans. But that's been talked about quite a lot, I think. Actually, one interesting question that hasn't been discussed is what it was about the earlier Republicans that was such that — no, couldn't vote for that — why did they vote Democrat before, if you take that angle, which I actually haven't really heard yet... What exactly is the question, then? So why couldn't Republicans exactly... vote before? Who do you mean? No, I mean now — specifically these big money men, the Musks and so on, are switching to become Republican voters, so why not before? I think this is
interesting to think about again — clearly earlier, like with Trump 2016, what was it about that that wasn't there yet... So it's interesting. Marc Andreessen, who's another figure people talk a lot about as this inner-circle type, uses a term — 'preference cascade.' Have you heard it? How would you even say that in Finnish — a 'preference cascade'? Okay, well, I'll just anglicize it — you'll all understand — so basically, people have
different desires — different groups, meaning political groups, have different wants — and at some point these kinds of cascades happen where they might merge. So Trump, for example, in this situation, might notice at some point, okay, wait — this Bannon-ite traditionalist core of mine doesn't necessarily fully vibe with this Musk-style new tech-right at its core, but we need this coalition to win.
And yeah, in the US, in Finland, in Europe, in the world, something like this is happening — for ordinary people, ordinary men, there's this kind of Zuckerberg-esque rediscovery of manhood, this right-wing idea of masculinity happening, in a way, right? You know — start grappling, start hitting the gym, wear younger-looking clothes, talk a bit about how this HR culture has eaten away at masculinity and all that.
Yeah, everyone likes politically incorrect humor, so this culture has, in a way, gradually moved closer to that more traditionalist Bannon-ite right — at least in the form of a political coalition. Of course, there's probably also some sense that they're not all in the same camp, and we saw that at Christmas when the H-1B visa debate came up — there are deep disagreements within these coalitions
that will probably show over the next year or so. But I'd read this as an answer to the question — that it's become more okay to start vibing with these new-right ideas. Yeah. And then what we saw at the inauguration — wasn't that like kissing the king's ring? Those billionaires weren't there necessarily because they agree, but because it's in their interest to agree, and even though they weren't there for previous presidential elections, then, like,
present at the inauguration, they'd previously kissed another king's ring specifically. Remember Zuckerberg in 2016? After Trump's first election win, he came out with a big media campaign and said, 'Sorry, sorry, I apologize for not realizing how big an impact Facebook has, and how big an impact fake news on our platform had on these elections.' It was debated — I don't know how genuine that was even then — but he came forward
with statements like that. Now, eight years later, a completely different tune — now he went on Rogan, which is pretty funny by the way. Rogan has become this kind of rite for billionaires — if you manage to talk to Rogan for three hours about hunting, you emerge as this ordinary man of the people, an accepted man. The first step was — he was on Lex Fridman this week, which, interestingly, Lex Fridman is like a lighter
version — a bit more tech-bro-friendly. But I mean, this YouTube power is also, I'd say, to answer Leevi's question, that in a way this media landscape shifted completely — the classic cliché that happens to be true is that traditional media was completely in the leftist-Democrat camp, and then, in a way, the rise of YouTube, the rise of podcasts, broke that power, and after that, for example, Trump's media campaign was basically
in the hands of us regular people. Yeah, and I do notice that it works. Like, personally, I've come to vibe a lot more with Musk's stuff now that he's been out there openly on these podcasts, and of course on X — compared to, say, Bill Gates, who's much more of a stranger to me; I can't really say anything about his personality, so I don't really end up commenting on his projects or following them, and you don't get
that kind of relationship built up. So yeah, I do notice that these figures who go on these long-format podcasts — I notice it affects the image I have of them, meaning it's more positive for the ones who go on. So you mean that at the same time, this media upheaval is affecting people, and through that, also politics and ideas and thinking? Yeah, it definitely has an effect — it would be really stupid, in my opinion, to say it has no effect at all. It definitely affects things,
for whoever presents themselves in this relatively authentic format, and it specifically means the gap — or at least the apparent gap — between that elite, exactly, and the ordinary person seemingly shrinks a lot. So at least a lot of people get the feeling that, wait a minute, someone like Elon Musk is actually pretty close to us. And that's — Trump's whole 'fake news, fake media' concept is, in a way, true — not so much in a fact-checking sense, true, because of course Trump
lied — though by the way he lies less now, which shows Trump is maybe a tactical liar. But in a way, that mainstream media isn't authentic — there, you go and recite talking points, and once the talking points run out between the interviewer and the interviewee, the conversation just doesn't continue. In this authentic media that we represent, there's no such thing as a question you can't ask, and there's also no scoping of the agenda, no framing of what gets discussed and
how it's discussed, or with whom it's discussed. Yeah, I agree with that — this media somehow exposes a person to completely different visibility in relation to the audience. You can't help it — you end up revealing something about yourself that wouldn't come out in a 10-minute segment. And, going back to Zuckerberg for a second, it's really human to relate to the fact that — no, come on, you know, going to the gym and doing MMA is cool, or it's cool, it's
fun to laugh at politically incorrect humor. All of this is stuff that normal people like, and it's been a bit forbidden, maybe, and it's really human that Zuckerberg, as a person, kind of like the rest of us, feels these same things and goes on a podcast to talk about it with the scene's biggest figure. But there's also — I don't know if that authenticity is hiding something that an ordinary
person can't relate to, because it's also just as human and authentic if you're Zuckerberg to be the CEO of a big tech company, and to see that your business, and actually your own life, might be going through a major upheaval now after this new presidential pick, and think, okay, now I'm going to go out there and put out a message about me and about us — a message that helps
me get by, and that I don't end up in jail — like Trump threatened Zuckerberg. So this too is really human, authentic, but it's the kind of thing that isn't necessarily presented authentically. Here's one anecdote — earlier there was suspicion that Mark Zuckerberg might have wanted to run a presidential campaign at some point in the future; he toured America and filmed it extensively. And then, secondly, he had to be
very apologetic after all these scandals — hate speech on the Meta platform, and, well, these data-security issues and political-influence controversies — and he had to be a pretty humble boy about it so the company wouldn't get broken up or start getting regulated. So he's gone, in a way, from this kind of omnipotence to suddenly becoming quite accommodating. And now I also see that
now he's 'MAGA Mark' — he's just evolved. In a way, this is also a kind of acting out — okay, now we adapt to the situation — and suddenly the fact-checking and all that just stops. This kind of extreme power — let me come back to this theme. So if power now is money, which is concentrated power in itself, then the best
example is probably that Elon Musk bought Twitter, turned it into X, and in a way, through his own sympathetic interpretation, freed it up and removed a lot of what he saw as its biggest source of hatred — just with money. And then, that's influence, meaning things like this media visibility, and then there's also direct power, meaning, well, if the world's
most powerful nuclear-military complex, America, is now led by your buddy, who then wields extremely direct power — the kind where, say, if Colombia won't take back illegal immigrants, then a day later it's like, 'let's slap on 25 percent,' and then 'let's make it 50 percent,' basically. And when you combine that triangle, then what
other choice do the rest of us, the world's other nations, have than to either be in the US camp or just keep our heads down and stay quiet as hell? I could answer that, if that was a question — there's no other choice, really, if you look at realpolitik. I've followed John Mearsheimer's realpolitik somewhat, his research and his talks, and yeah, the situation is that great powers always decide on behalf of the smaller ones,
and inevitably you end up on one side or the other. Only a few states are able to stay fully neutral — they usually have some geographic advantage, say Switzerland. And if you look at Austria, even that leans a bit east, but is still somehow locked in. But yeah, that's how it is — you end up on somebody's side. So I'd say our relationship with America will probably become more transactional,
true. Yeah — out of maybe 40 icebreakers, if we build a significant portion of them, transfer the technology to America, then maybe we'll get a cut of it. So Ville Rydman is out there delivering this good news, but yeah, real actual money comes if we play along, understanding, for instance, that we won't say much on Denmark's behalf regarding Greenland. Could I ask a question related to tech-bro power — 'pro-oligarchy,' or whatever Tuomas Peltomäki's new term for it is? Is
America an oligarchy in your view, or is it turning into one? I haven't really landed on any answer on this. The Economist had a really good piece — Biden used the same term Eisenhower used once, was it back in the '30s, or 'military-industrial complex'? Biden said 'tech-industrial complex' — we need to watch out for this new, emerging tech-industrial complex, which somehow echoes that military-industrial-complex thing, which is still a pretty big meme in the US, even though
now, personally, I don't really know anymore how much American defense technology or defense firms affect their foreign policy or war policy. But I don't know about these new tech firms — I mean, they're insanely rich, they have the resources to just fund things. What are Musk and Bezos and Zuckerberg worth — like a tenth of the stock market or something? But then
again, in that Economist column, it was pointed out well that all these top-five companies' combined Gross Value Added to the American economy is actually really small — something like 3%, maybe 2%. It's just a really, really huge economy. So is America the kind of economy where this kind of tech thing could become significant, more broadly speaking? But as an answer to the question — oligarchy, in Greek, just means rule by the few, a
less democratic form. We have sole rule — king, autocrat, dictator — then oligarchy, meaning a small group decides, and then democracy. And democracy has never really worked in its direct form; it requires representative democracy, where you always have a small clique even within that democracy making the decisions — say in parliament and government. But America is not a kleptocracy. I actually had Martti J. Kari on as a guest, and he said Russia is, on top of being an oligarchy,
a kleptocracy — meaning you get chosen from that small ruling group through outright bribery. Go ahead. No wait, sorry, I thought you were pointing to Leevi — Leevi, you go if you were first. Well, maybe one thing worth noting is that these big tech companies now — it's not just the US that they affect; they've spread everywhere, or rather, they don't respect national borders in that sense, and
what I'd say about what we've just seen with Elon Musk and others — what I see as a broader phenomenon, and specifically how power works, is that in today's internet environment, openness can get you a lot more power. If you know how to use social media openly and effectively, it can become this kind of instrument of power that can also act as a bridge through which you channel
economic power into political power. And it's always been the case that economic power has tried to influence politics, but ideally we'd probably want that to be as minimal as possible. But what I think is happening now is that it's happening surprisingly openly, and quite ruthlessly too, and it seems people find that fairly okay — that now there's no longer much attempt to hide it backstage; it's done really openly, and that openness actually brings
it more support and legitimacy — it's become a kind of force in its own right. Yeah, by the way, really good point on how technology changes what power can even be nowadays. In that Economist column, I thought it made a solid point — if you compare someone like Rockefeller to Musk or whoever — Rockefeller, who was that kind of oil tycoon, actually had a much stronger grip on American society; he was able to squeeze it, because
he controlled such a critical raw material for that society — oil. People needed oil. But do we need Amazon, that online store? Do we need Facebook, this social media platform? But on the other hand, let me just quickly wrap up this point — a critical point came to mind, that technology still changes the ways in which you can have influence on the world at all. Valtteri Vuorisalo from Tampere University has a good example of this. This
is a really small, banal example, but it kind of shows what new kinds of ways you can have to wield power in the world. Take some small playground in Vantaa, which is within the borders of the sovereign state of Finland, managed by the City of Vantaa, and everyone somehow recognizes this — everyone understands, okay, this is Finnish sovereign territory managed by Vantaa. Then along comes
an app like Pokémon Go, and suddenly you might see heaps of random people just hanging around in this Vantaa playground, and they're only there because some foreign company has coded that right in this spot there's some random pixel Pokémon that now needs to be caught. So suddenly, in people's minds, it's no longer just a kindergarten playground managed by Vantaa,
but it's a place where you go to find some Pokémon, and this is, in a way, a de facto exercise of power. Yeah, like a digital twin, in a sense — a kind of Matrix world; Plato's world of shadows is fascinating. Zuckerberg's vision was a failure, in fact — that it would happen through VR headsets, which he blew quite a bit of his billion-dollar fortune chasing. People don't want virtual reality, at least not yet,
but they do want augmented reality, and on top of that we could maybe bring in AI as well, on top of these layers of information. To that I wanted to point out that yes, it's clear we're heading into virtual reality and augmented reality, but the technology isn't there yet for it to be consumer-friendly. But I wanted to add to that earlier point that there have always been influential people in business, or influential people anywhere, and they are
somehow committed to that politics, and the state also uses them as tools. If we think about technology, then, well — what technology is at Amazon is commercial power — selling American products and getting a certain added value out of it for the United States. And then if you look at the servers too, Amazon owns a chunk of this internet — exactly, exactly. Then look at Meta — it has a certain kind of monopoly on information distribution.
We have it in WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook. Then look at TikTok — why is TikTok being bought up into the US now? So that it can be used, well, so that they can make sure it's not under anyone else's control. And, well, then what favors get done for politicians in return — I'm not hinting at corruption here, just favors, like where investments go, which region gets the investment, whether it's invested in the US or
overseas, or which state. So this is really this kind of interactive game where the aim is to advance the whole state's interests, and there are various alliances involved. I don't want to over-psychologize this as some left-right situation, but rather that the people have now given Trump a mandate for the second time to change things, coming from the Midwest and from evangelical
Christians, saying, wait a minute, something has to change. And then illegal immigrants coming into the country have been made the scapegoat — who, by the way, as a bit of a curiosity, are actually useful to both parties: the Democrats get voters out of it, and the Republicans get cheap labor down in the southern states. Yeah, this then is — or, as Isak's referring to,
this visa dispute — so it's a bit of a wrinkle in the romance, meaning, I think the relationship between Elon Musk and Trump is a bit stronger than people think. So, in a way, this is now the first real dispute between this Bannon-ite 'get all the foreigners out of America' camp and, in a way, the tech bros' 'but we want those geniuses working in our companies for less pay.' And I'd strongly bet that this is where that Bannon-ite
camp gets tired of Musk — and they've already moved him out to that kind of outbuilding of the White House, this DOGE department. Yeah, so this traditionalist, nationalist core is definitely really strong in Trump's camp. And I think one of the basic critiques of American society, probably of the modern era in general, is how rootedness has — how all these traditional, when
I say institutions — I don't mean anything like the World Health Organization, I mean the nuclear family — all these kinds of things have lost their meaning in people's everyday lives, at least compared to earlier times. Just looking at the statistics, people don't think about or value these the same way they did before, say 20 years ago, but the importance of money has gone up. Here I'm quoting Patrick Deneen, who wrote a good book, 'Regime Change' — a really good book about exactly what's happening right now, so, uh,
uh, and the significance of money — how money has replaced things — like, if you can afford it — well, if you have money in American society today, then in principle you can afford to replace, or live with the freedom that comes, if you cut yourself loose from all these traditional institutions like family or religion or whatever — you're not left stranded, but
then it's basically 'f*** you money.' Yeah, but that's an illusion — that American society is competitive, and that people there dare to flaunt money too. But that's an illusion in the sense that money doesn't bring you any inner fulfillment; we're still human beings who need security and the approval of others, and money only gets you so far,
up to a certain limit, and then you need family and friends and people to love and to give love to and receive love from. So maybe we could move on to the misery of Europe now, since we don't have money — especially not in Finland, even though we have this strange illusion that we do have money. In Finland there are 8,500 people who, through unlisted shares alone, are even single-euro-millionaires — meaning over one million euros. This is an incredibly tiny number — only 3% of Finns even own
unlisted shares. Because of the inheritance tax, these companies keep getting shut down all the time — it looks absolutely terrible for our job-creating companies. Combined with this YEL pension reform, ownership is disappearing on us, and we're really not anywhere close to having anything like America's billionaire crowd. And in a way we don't even realize that we actually need them — we'd need a few of those guys in our corner, defending our
employment. And Europe in general has somehow decided to destroy all ownership in Europe — we're over-bureaucratized. Actually, as we were filming this yesterday, the EU came out with this thing called a 'Compass,' where it was finally decided that we'd do a bit of a Biden-style thing, trim the administration down a little. But we're miles away from this Trump administration, which is going to strip away regulation and enrich the people — we're at a
huge disadvantage. Well, I have to mention there that one thing that belongs to this Tech Bro thing is that people idolize these hyper-competitive, maybe hyper-masculine people — arrogant people who disrupt things and maybe break the rules and go after these kinds of
big projects, billion-dollar valuations, and so on — meaning, in a way, American culture accepts that there's a certain group that's completely unruly, that breaks the rules. And if you look at Finnish society, which is very consensus-driven, we maybe don't have the same kind of space for that. But this is like a division of labor — some, some division of labor in society, some people are given money and told,
'go break things, go burn it down, drive full speed into a wall' — crash and burn. And, as you mentioned, it's still a pretty small percentage of what actually circulates in the GDP, in a way. So this makes me want to push back a little — when you say there's no room to be some kind of masculine high-achiever, or that
it's hard to own things in Europe — how, more so... this wasn't meant as criticism, more an observation, that this is just a division of labor within a state. I'm not saying it's somehow terribly forbidden in Finland, but we don't have that kind of culture, maybe, or the resources — we just don't have that money, it's not really understood. But it doesn't help all that much if we have some small-time achiever here, when this power complex's Eye of Sauron comes to, say, Denmark and says, 'Well, how about
Greenland, with its 58,000 people — let's give everyone, say, two million, it doesn't cost us anything, and make them a state.' What are you Danes going to do about it? Oh, grumble about it, maybe. Well, how about this — you've got that pretty successful pharma company, so how about your diabetes drugs no longer sell so well — what, is Denmark not doing well enough already? Well, you've been to Denmark, but do you actually know Denmark? 'Getting to Denmark' really is a meme, but if
even Denmark can be brought to its knees in front of this complex, then — sure, it's a small country, but it only needs to hold out for four years. And remember, in diplomacy, four years is actually a pretty short time. And then maybe I'd add here that Trump himself doesn't really have any consistent policy at all — it's total chaos — but of course the people behind him, the influential ones, the party elite, so to speak, of course they have
goals, and those get used. I doubt the MAGA core, this Bannon-ite core, identifies with what you just said — they don't necessarily vibe with these billionaires quite as much. This Bannon-ite core is really techno-pessimistic — it actually favors breaking up big tech's monopoly position altogether, talks a lot about how the modern age has somehow destroyed man, somehow — it kind of goes
into this whole philosophy that man was more human before, simpler — yeah, exactly — closer to nature, somehow closer to the natural flow, or whatever metaphors you want to use — exactly that. And, actually, this also showed up in one extreme example — the murder of the United Healthcare CEO, Luigi Mangione — and you could see how the left really suddenly united completely, everyone was
of the opinion that somehow — or at least online it looked that way — a lot of people sympathized with it, could be. Yeah, that hatred for the rich elite is an extremely strong force, and you can't really get away from it. But in itself, if you look even at this Tea Party movement — with this Speaker Mike Johnson — earlier there was that group of about twenty people, that Tea Party bunch, who would always vote against
whatever the Republican bloc did. And now, well, they got steamrolled down to basically one person. So in my opinion, that shows that this Tea Party, Bannon-ite movement is pretty much on its knees in front of this tech-industry-plus-Trump complex. But then Trump is so charismatic, and, well — he is, in a certain sense, like a savior, whether it's for the working class or then for evangelical,
Lutheran evangelical Christians — so that's where that figure gets projected onto. So I think you should maybe look a bit at what policy the United States is actually pursuing versus what Trump himself does. And in this context, if you look at it, well, these billionaires' interest is clearly to support the US as the world's dominant power,
economically, militarily, culturally — if you think about these platforms, how much they also export American culture. And speaking of resilience — as we were filming this, there was a little moment of joy for Western left-wing media: have you seen that meme with the US tech bros, and then the Chinese dragon, and there's DeepSeek and Alibaba, and then there's Europe
with a bottle cork stuck up its nose, meaning Europe specializes in regulation while everyone else just gets things done without all this mess. But there was a brief moment when this Chinese cluster showed a bit of muscle — supposedly they coded both the DeepSeek AI and Alibaba's language model with just a few million dollars, without Nvidia and the tech-bro complex's hundreds of billions. Right when the US had just
announced that 500-million-dollar AI program, and then a billion came right after — there was this brief moment of, 'now Nvidia's valuation is dropping a bit, now it's falling apart over there, the Yanks aren't getting what they want with money and power after all' — and it bounced right back. And now, well, brothers, we've already lost this game. So now we need to understand that here, with regulation, in a way with impoverishment, with big government,
with public spending, there's just no way to win this game. Yesterday the European Commission came out with this, yeah, 'Compass' — meaning, well, now we start regulating. Yeah, yesterday — wait, I saved that link, I should throw it in here — yeah, those are the memes, but that cork thing — yeah, that's the EU's doing. But these AIs, companies should be the ones making them — I think a lot of the time, even here, we focus too much on what taxation does, or
what the EU or the state does — for god's sake, it's people and companies who actually make these things. And I really don't see that — sure, there might be some regulation here that gets in the way, and it would be good to dismantle it, but it's up to us, the entrepreneurs, actual people, to really go build this Europe. That's a good mindset — a really great mindset. I like it. We forget that the US has 360 million people, and it's one single market area, everyone speaks the same language there, and the laws
— roughly the commercial laws are the same, goods move around, people move around, ideas move around. And Europe has roughly the same number of people, but we've got, like, so many different countries here, language barriers and cultural barriers and different legislation, so in a way maybe the comparison is a bit unfair. But I agree with Leevi that it's people, and companies, and, and maybe the thing here is that we're lacking a certain amount of risk-taking. Take ChatGPT, which is still, after all,
an American service. On the way here, I was listening to something, and — 570 billion dollars is spent on AI development worldwide, of which — sorry, 57% — goes to the United States, and of that, half then goes to Silicon Valley. Those are massive amounts. What's concentrated there is capital, capital that takes risks, and now those tech-bro guys are the ones taking those risks. We don't have that capital. Actually, today I'm heading to this Software Finland funding event, as
the final speaker, about the IPO market, and my message is that you need a market cap of 15 million euros, you need to raise at least a five-million-euro capital investment into that company, and then you need growth and profitability. And it's just so typical — companies like that just aren't found around here, and that five million just isn't there either. I mean, they're playing on a completely different field — they're playing on a field a thousand times bigger. Their whole venture-capital complex
is bigger than all our companies put together. It's just incomprehensible to me how we still think, with this kind of leftist hegemony, that this game is somehow won by doing everything we possibly can to tax away all the wealth and destroy every startup with regulation. So this actually brings us to the question of whether — if you think about what money actually is, and what GDP actually is, it's basically
just economic activity — so is it the case that here we're lacking incentive, for one reason or another, whether it's regulation or taxation? Well, that's related to regulation, sure, partly. And is it also a culture thing — that we don't actually work here, that we just kind of go through the motions of working, telling ourselves we're hardworking, that we've got that ethos? I mean, working hours in the US are on average much higher than in Europe. But if I'm now going to play
defender of Europe here, I could argue that the average person's well-being in Europe is actually at least as high as in the United States. And on that point — yeah, sure, a significant part of these new technology tools is being developed in the US, or in China, for example, but you have to remember that we Europeans still get to benefit from them, at a really low cost, and that trickles down into our citizens' well-being too, because we get to use those services here as well. And what maybe was there — what you,
Sami, said — that when there's no capital, nothing gets developed, and what that creates is exactly this — you come back to power, meaning because these Americans own all this, they ultimately hold the power, which means we end up with some kind of dependency on the US. But if we're on good terms with them, then that well-being kind of flows over to us too. Exactly, exactly, that's very true. Then, maybe, as I just mentioned Thiel — well, he has
that 'Zero to One' book, but then he also has these really intense talks where he says a bad business is one that ends up having to compete, and that the whole goal of a good business is to get a total monopoly of its entire target market. And so this American venture-capital complex is such that they can throw an endless amount of billions at these kind of '5%-shot' bets — will this one become the monopoly of this vertical? And then, well, they can
throw those bets around, and twenty of them collapse, but one rises up to become a 'decacorn.' Very briefly, then, what stands out here — I want to point out that, in a way, this breaking of the old and finding these new frontiers, and then, again, the conflict between well-being and, well, humanity, in a way — that's what
comes up here. And in this Tech Bro culture, honestly, nobody cares about well-being — young men are just let to burn out and maybe end up dependent on medication and stimulants just so they can keep performing at this work. But then, on the other hand, there's humanity too. But we really do need to figure something out about how we're going to manage — relatively speaking. I do agree with Leevi that yeah, some benefit does trickle down from there, and this is
innovation, and the benefit spreads everywhere. On the way here I was just thinking about how, with all this AI stuff, we're going to get access to it too, get to use it, and take our own slice of it as companies create value for end users, or for business customers. But we do need to come up with something of our own too. We can't just let ourselves become relatively poorer if every country thinks this way. Hey, we need to do something, do work and learn,
and build something — whether it's abstract things like ideas, or services, or products, but something gets built. If we just let that slide, then we become relatively poorer, and then we no longer have the kind of well-being that other countries have. I'm not saying all technology brings benefit and well-being, but that relative edge disappears. And if you look at Finland now, since the war it has risen
from a really poor country to a prosperous one. And that really is a miracle. What comes next, then — that's the question. So, more than just bottle caps... I do agree that there's something really intoxicating about jumping into that startup Silicon Valley scene, where you can feel like you're in this kind of semi-detached outpost, sort of above it all,
an outpost where nothing is sacred, everything is just a problem that can be solved through optimization — it's really empowering. And then Nietzsche has this master-slave morality idea, that the masters in society — this sort of mentally elevated class — they don't have a concept like 'evil.' Evil, exactly, just like that —
instead it's just good and bad, you have your own morals, the master defines his own morality, and then there are good things that lead you toward your goal, and bad things that don't. Then for slaves, the way he sees the difference is that a slave doesn't refrain from doing bad, evil things because he's a good person, but because he doesn't dare to, he's not capable of it — the slave mentality is such that we
create moral boundaries for each other, a bit like artificial boundaries — 'this is Evil,' for example, and 'this is...' and it's definitely really empowering to be the kind of person who feels that me and my environment, we get to define our own rules, sort of like in Silicon Valley, where they've basically been given a mandate to do that because the economic benefits are huge. I just wanted to add to that — that even though this gets you power, and even though you can disrupt with it, even though this is actually creating the world's
future — this whole planet's future — technology will probably be what determines who holds power in the future, yet even in the US elections this time around, the economy was one of the biggest issues, specifically the ordinary person's economy — the fact that eggs cost too much at the store. That, that is, in a certain sense, a mistake — I'll grab onto that last sentence, because there's an assumption baked into it that democracy then works, and that everyone now makes this enlightened kind of decision
about who to vote for, or, or is it rather that society and communication and the elite influence the people — I'm not pointing to any conspiracy here — but is the public actually making decisions independently? That was one thing. But as a segue on top of that — what you said, that Nietzsche comparison, was a good one. So now, if we look at that elite who have money,
the 'übermensch,' and then look at these young people who want to build unicorns — well, that Nietzschean master-mindset is really only possible when a person has everything going well, no real threats, enough money, protection, security, status, and things are going well for them. Then they can afford to think in really complex ways — is this right or wrong — without having to react emotionally. Then
you have the ordinary person who's carrying a lot of burden and maybe doesn't have much education — he thinks with emotion, shoots from the hip: is this good or bad, is this 'woke' good or bad, or what even is this? Is it like this? And now there's a certain kind of dependency, or relationship, between these billionaires and this elite who have money, and these young men who have nothing to lose because they've only got things to gain. That's when they can override all the ethical
moral values and just think in a new way — and there's a certain kind of pressure over there that creates these kinds of thoughts, whereas over here, freedom and well-being create the space to think more broadly. Let's take freedom of speech, then. We've got Henna Virkkunen with an extremely dangerous portfolio. Actually, I'm not all that happy it landed with us — at first I thought it was great, because it's such a powerful portfolio, but if that Eye of Sauron finds Henna Virkkunen and links it to Finland, that's not going to end well for Finland, because then that commissioner post gets linked to Finland,
and we end up in this Denmark-type situation. Well, this Compass program gave me some hope that maybe even on freedom of speech, they'll start softening that line a bit, out of this chaos. But the first reactions to these tech bros' platform power were basically, 'now let's just regulate them out of here, out of Europe.' No — those angry young men Ali mentioned, they just shouldn't get to hear, like, Musk's ranting, say, in Britain or Germany. Why do we have to
talk about Europe, can't we just... because we don't want that Eye of Sauron pointed at Finland from over there in America. Yeah, well, anyway — freedom of speech, let's take it at the American level. Honestly, I actually felt relief when Trump won, that now I can be more direct, freer, sort of safer. Safe, meaning, in the sense that nobody's going to come after me and try to cancel me. And in America, that feeling is definitely
very widespread. So you feel that it genuinely affected your freedom of speech when Trump won? Yeah. How so? Well, for example, being able to say that under a Trump administration — that if we'd already lost the game to Joe Biden, who represents a tax complex that's 15% smaller, then we're going to lose so badly to America — you just can't say that in Finland. You have to just say, 'bad Trump, bad Trump,' he harasses women and he's
corrupt and lies all the time anyway. You weren't allowed to say that. So, what have you wanted to say before that you couldn't, that you could say now? Well, for instance, that this American model is completely superior compared to Europe, and that it's not in Finland's interest to just go along with the Democrats. I think quite a lot of people... quite a lot of people say — well, now they say it,
not necessarily everyone. I'll go dig up your old episodes from last year and come back at you with them — no, I won't try to gaslight you, I understand what you're talking about. We touched on this a bit at the start too — it's easy to say now because we have freedom, but before we had this cancel culture and a certain kind of chaos. And now, when you see it — it's actually almost grand to watch how, along with DEI, ESG is going to
decrease. And in a way, because Europe with its ESG regulation is kind of the 'plastic-bottle-cap country,' that power is going to come back home to roost. Hey, there are two interesting phenomena here. One is that our field of ideas has now expanded from Finland, basically from Helsinki, to suddenly being global and leaning westward — that's one thing. And then the other thing is that there's
this typical pattern where these ideals, these single values, get optimized to the max. If you think about it, first something like equality got optimized, and along came all this Woke and DEI stuff, and it got taken to an absolute extreme, to the point you weren't allowed to think otherwise anymore. Now we're at the other extreme — behind 'freedom of speech,' you can say anything, except Henna Virkkunen blocks it. But if you look at the United States, they're now optimizing a single value too, and that, to me personally, is
intellectually not all that capable — not being able to grasp that many kinds of values can be true at the same time. And also that a mature person rarely optimizes a value all the way to the max. By the way, DEI and woke's golden age of rising was actually Trump's first term, '16 to '20 — that's when it really shot up explosively. And yeah, the EU actually passed this framework decision on hate speech back in 2008, before any woke or
anything like that — which, in my opinion, didn't cause much of a stir in Finland, because we already had honor... now, I might be getting this a bit wrong, but at least I know that framework decision came already in 2008 — I mean, statutory defamation and legal rights have of course always been something you could pursue through the courts. But there's this kind of fake camp where you get slapped with some Facebook fact-checks or something,
fact-bars, with some one guy checking whether this is a 'fact' or not... go ahead. There are two different things here. Which one are we actually talking about? Are we talking about what some social platform's CEO decides is their own internal policy on what's allowed, or are we talking more about how, say, a particular region's authorities or lawmakers see how much
these platforms need to be controlled. In my opinion, these are two different things. In my opinion, the law is what the law says, and on those platforms, the people posting are themselves responsible for their messages. If you think about the EU, and what's been discussed — in my opinion, hell no, we absolutely shouldn't start practicing any kind of pre-censorship on any platforms. But at the same time, of course I know that those Xs,
Facebooks, Instagrams and the rest — it's not neutral at all, what rises to the top there, and what the algorithms boost. Of course that carries a huge amount of power. But even so, I don't buy into — and there've been some echoes of this lately from Henna Virkkunen and, in a way, her camp, who ultimately decide on these things — this talk that we need some kind of big policy about what can and can't be said there. Hell no to that. Hey,
on that, I have to say — with a general-practitioner's training myself — there was just an article where a doctor... yeah, on paper anyway, though nowadays it's more, but as a joke, a specialist in 'money medicine.' Ali has founded a really successful care-services company, or medical center — how did I forget — a social and healthcare services company. It's actually in our episode, something like 46
or somewhere, where this was explained. But anyway, what I was getting at — I was reflecting on this, and I sent a message to a professor once, about a case where a person became depressed after being bullied, and I started thinking about how, just imagine, without any physical or chemical contact whatsoever, purely through the air like this, you can cause a disturbance in another person's brain function,
one that ends up changing that person's capacity to function, and permanently changes their life — I mean bullying, completely without any wire, without any chemistry involved, yet it starts having an effect. So now, if you look at these platforms, and how they affect our kids, how they affect adults, how they affect people's thinking — it's completely indisputable that we're also dealing with a concept that carries real dangers
in it. And now we get to what freedom of speech actually is, and what safety actually is. So we've got two different values that we both need. And now the state, the government, the EU, and of course the US too, have to think about what that means — what's allowed there, what isn't. And somehow my intuition tells me a couple of things: one, my sense is that a turning point has happened across generations, among mothers who are starting to restrict their kids' phone use —
that's one. And two, that people recognize it has downsides and that something collectively needs to be done about it, if only because parents genuinely find it hard on their own to control what their kids are doing on there, when, and how much. I think this feeling right now, if we go back to the US for a second, is a unifying factor between the left and the right — across a lot of camps there's this sense that we need to do something about the power of these tech giants, and
we're kind of like 'influ-bros' ourselves — we made an episode about this, about Jonathan Haidt's book, with Mikko Alasaarela, a discussion of that 'Anxious Generation,' which, by the way, was number one and number two on Apple's podcast charts in Finland. So we've done our part here with this indirect power of ours. I actually said in that episode — I'm stretching this a bit — I brought up a good point there. By the way, I asked that exact same question to Ivan Puopolo on our episode too — whether words are
violence, if they have a physiological effect, even though it's obviously not the same as actual violence. But that's a good point. 'Screw you, you're not even an MBA' — was that violence? No, that wasn't violence, or, well, maybe a small jab — didn't really sting. I also mentioned in that Mikko Alasaarela episode this thing called Section 230. Do you remember it, from way back in 1996 in America —
the Communications Decency Act, which can, in a way, be considered a kind of constitution for the internet. Have you heard of it? I remember, yeah. This is — this is really important, and it's probably shaped a big part of how the internet has developed. And the principle is actually pretty simple — that law package was about that phone thing, some phone... no, it relates to the fact that if you are, or — I might be phrasing this a bit clumsily, but the
idea is that if I have, say, a platform online — I own it, say I'm Mark Zuckerberg, I have Facebook — and then some third party writes something on that Facebook that isn't allowed, something you could sue over, then in America you can't sue the party that provides the means, the one who owns the platform. They are, so to speak, 'non-liable.' I don't know what that is in Finnish. And this same principle is
used in the EU too, through the e-Commerce Directive, but this DSA — which has come into force in recent years, the Digital Services Act — yeah, that's changed this a bit. As I said in that episode, nowadays in Europe a platform can be held liable if they're aware that
there's something on their platform that violates their own rules, or something illegal. And this is basically a regime change in how the authorities view the internet. And, as a segue from that, this actually shifts the responsibility for oversight from the state onto companies now. And wait a minute — if they're the ones handling the monitoring of communication properly,
the accuracy of what's on there, aren't they then, in a way, a kind of state organization or body? Actually, I had an idea come to mind — what do you think about this — how could social media possibly be regulated? Would it work the same way as it does for, say, food products — you have to know what's in them. Would it be a crazy idea if it worked like this, that if you provide an internet platform, then it
should have to have its algorithm open-sourced. That would destroy a lot of their business models, but then at least, in principle, the consumer would know — you could build all kinds of algorithms favoring whatever kind of message you want, offer that as a service, and people should know, they could choose what to use. Yeah, and it is good — Musk actually released this, I think a year or so ago — Community Notes is a good reform. So the community can, based on certain principles,
do fact-checking, and the same thing is coming to Facebook too. But that Musk-era algorithm, for example — I immediately started liking my own posts and writing my own comments on them, because both boost your visibility now on X. Narcissism pointed outward — you don't see your own... I don't care much for that, I saw it, but well, all the left-wing forces have now bailed
from X. And where did they go? To Bluesky, so now they're over there shouting into that 'fair' algorithm, and, well, hopefully at Yle and Helsingin Sanomat they'll keep writing our stuff for a long time still, people will still read it. But they've completely lost that reach by moving over there entirely, and, by the way, it's a shame if it goes this way, where different political camps end up on different platforms, and the entire discourse fractures. Well, it's kind of — it's a bit brain-dead, then that kind of bubble becomes basically an algorithm's
condensation, a bubble of a bubble. But who's actually at fault here — the ones who leave, meaning the left, while the others just stay put? That's really dumb thinking, in my opinion, coming from the left. I understand both sides on this somehow. I mean, take the Greens — they're leaving X, as an official party. I completely agree with that point — man, what a shame it would be if the internet goes this way, if everyone just digs into their own trench on there, even though it's a dirty place, it's a bit
like a Wild West too — that's actually partly why I like it, but it's great precisely because it's specifically a bubble-breaker, not a bubble-maker, in my opinion — exactly. And then there's this thing that I've had to think about myself too — I actually had to apologize for one post of mine as well, because I was really, really arrogant one evening after the gym — my trigger threshold went and, well, I snapped at someone and threw in some moral superiority on top of it,
myself, right there. Anyway, one thing that comes to mind is that opposing views also need to be allowed to be heard, because if they're not — if, like, you used a good example yourself there, about canceling — it creates frustration, and, at worst, hatred, at worst aggression, at worst violence. And that's why we need to
get to let those thoughts out, even the negative ones, and then social pressure, in a certain way, modulates that and tones it down a bit. But the word 'get to' carries a really heavy load there, in my opinion — or rather, what that word 'get to' somehow implies — because, sure, the Greens can, or could have stayed on X and said whatever they want, but they're completely, completely on the back foot
over there. It's full of right-wingers — it might be worth trying to say things that actually resonate with people. It's not really more complicated than that. Was it, was it, was it five years ago they were on the back foot or the front foot, on X or Twitter? Probably more even back then. No, did they have more of the upper hand? And now it's already like that. And on the other hand, now that they've left, of course, X starts churning out
perceptions, narratives about the Greens that get built up there, and you don't have that many people there to sort of correct that from the other side. But then again, if they had stayed, then everyone's point of contact with the Greens' tweets would have just been — they'd tweet something, either stupid or sensible, doesn't matter, and either way, stupid or sensible, the comments underneath would have just been shouting,
shouting, shouting — that probably doesn't look too great either, what they write on Bluesky. But maybe Ville had a good point there, that nobody really knows what Bill Gates thinks nowadays. So, I've been a Microsoft shareholder for a long time, benefited a lot from him — this kind of forgotten tech bro, an old uncle by now. And, well, one of Trump's executive orders was to bring back TikTok and give it more time so control shifts to America, so I've long been betting, with my own
money, that Microsoft is going to get to buy TikTok. So, everyone, start making some noise about it on LinkedIn like I do — because this is exactly what's happening. No, well, I'm pretty much alone racking up those million views. But what I mean is that it came out publicly — was it a couple of days ago? — that Microsoft might be buying TikTok. So it hadn't actually happened yet, but it's been my thesis for years, or at least a year now, but, but
that's when you'd get an extremely powerful platform — Microsoft's LinkedIn, where you say things under your professional profile, that's kind of your true professional identity. And there — by the way, I notice — well, I don't have much of that at least — actually, there is a bit of color to it, you're still afraid of getting canceled there, because you haven't woken up to the fact that you can't get canceled there anymore either. That's actually the ultimate rite of awakening and liberation, when people realize that
you can't get canceled on LinkedIn either — as in, 'what did your organization think of that opinion of yours?' But once you combine that with TikTok, you get a pretty powerful platform of power, then, and for this kind of Forgotten Man, Bill Gates. Yeah. But better him than, at least, Zuckerberg, so we don't end up with one person having a monopoly with three of the biggest social media platforms, or even four.
Musk too, maybe, a little — maybe I don't want to see Twitter, or, well, TikTok, on the left-right issue — there was actually just a study that found more conservative people tend to be less, well, intellectually capable, cognitively capable — and here, left-wing conservatives especially — there's a certain, certain thread here that
well, that kind of left-wing thinking — and I actually count myself more as right-wing in my thinking — it's actually pretty complex, you have to take into account various human relationships, who's in a weaker position, and how abstract societal structures work. And then on the right there are maybe, maybe somewhat simpler values, I don't know, I mean, in my opinion,
'left-wing conservative' is a term that ought to be introduced, meaning specifically someone who reads it as — structures explain everything, and, in a way, the individual is never at fault. Marx said something like this already, at some point, and from Foucault's theory I've learned three sentences and I just repeat them because that makes me a good person over there. So, in my opinion, it's specifically intellectually really weak, and the left-wing-conservative attempt to hold on to this already-broken
structure tooth and nail. But isn't it also somehow — I agree, that whole 'everything is somehow the system's fault' thing is maybe a bit of a naive view, but isn't it also the case that everything comes down to the individual's mindset, and doesn't that also go a bit... no, it's actually quite simple — it's not just all about that, but everything comes down to resources — you can't just take all the resources from others, you can't live like a parasite, or whatever they'd call this
a 'slave-parasite' — I'm not a left-wing conservative, left... slave. I do dare to admit that I've started to reflect on this more and more, started to understand more the logic, and the emotional logic, that the left has, and they have a lot of things that are really, really right about them. And here's something we forget in our conversation — the brain is a categorization tool, it asks, is
this a cat or a dog — if it's a dog, then what kind of dog. It's constantly making these mutually exclusive, simple choices, and we have this need to think that this is bad and this is wrong, and this is right and this is good, and the in-between feels uncomfortable to us. And then, when you start looking at any conversation under a magnifying glass, nuances start showing up, which again requires processing power from our
brain, and we know it's limited, and that's when we end up making these kinds of quick, blunt decisions. But even here, we've been discussing — since we've talked so much about this current situation, what's happening right now — maybe we should look further out on the horizon, at what happens further ahead, five years out, how the world is changing in a bigger sense, since there's a lot of noise in our lives right now — Trump comes and
goes and governments change and the world changes — so how do we adapt? And now I'll come back to what you said — that in many senses, we've lost some of our basic needs. And you said that in the US, money replaces certain things — well, yeah, some kind of shift toward a simpler life is probably inevitable in some way, even if that's a left-leaning idea, that we
somehow move toward recycling, protecting nature, then optimizing resources so that each person isn't consuming huge amounts of natural resources. I don't even know if that's only a left-wing idea — I'd say it's actually a very conservative idea too, in some circles, that kind of, well, exactly. Or maybe even the idea that, you know, some farmer in the early 1900s who maybe had little money was still somehow a more whole human being — he had
stronger values, he was more rooted, more rooted in tradition. Yeah, but that's probably it — you and I haven't made these things with our own hands. Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of a modern, rootless liberal, even though I still value my country, value my family, I have a lot of things many would probably consider fairly traditional values, even though my worldview otherwise is pretty liberal and international, blah blah blah, that kind of thing. But I think that's also partly — I'll put my hands up, I admit that's also
probably why it's possible — I can still feel safe and somehow express myself while believing in these things. You can lean on that quite comfortably. Yeah, exactly, you have money, you have education, you have social networks, you have health, you have a wide range of opportunities open to you, and then you've got a sufficient amount of challenges, and also enough
pleasurable things too — you rest and sleep well, eat well, take care of yourself, you're basically part of the world's elite. Yeah, exactly. And, actually, I quoted this earlier when I talked about Patrick — I think he's a kind of right-leaning political scientist, whatever he is, a political scientist who wrote this book and cited this statistic about how religion and family and the
significance of those has declined in society, and the value placed on money has risen. So even though I quoted him, I do agree — there's something indisputable in it, that it affects us, and it feeds into a certain sense of rootlessness. And that's probably also why this is genuinely lacking on the left — maybe there's a good connection there. I'm going a bit into psychoanalyzing here, but if we're talking left- and right-wing-ness, it's not only
politics, it's in some way a lifestyle thing too, a life-philosophy thing. And I feel like this was well laid out on the Ezra Klein podcast, I think — that on the right, right-wing young people especially tend to think about the world, and about themselves, through this lens of self-improvement, empowerment, this kind of self-discipline, this individualistic mindset — 'I'm the blacksmith of my own life, I can do things, I can change my own life,' which is
really empowering, and probably genuinely a pretty useful mindset. I have to jump in here — I actually just finished reading up on the empowerment side, let me get through it quickly — yeah, because this is interesting — about self-discipline, remind me again. Yeah, I'll remind you. And then the left has more of this therapeutic, absolution-style mindset, meaning there's something you need to get rid of — that this natural human state is somehow sinful, and you become a good person if you somehow rise above it
and condemn others like it. About self-discipline — I read this article that referenced this scientific study, and I skimmed through the scientific study too. And it said that self-discipline in a child predicts, quite strongly, all the way into adulthood, regardless of socioeconomic background, certain
positive outcomes, and, conversely, protects against negative ones. And this ties into this. And now we get to that rootlessness, very briefly — it's maybe not so much about money, but that our lifestyle has changed; money, after all, is just an abstraction for how our life has changed. It's become easier, and my kids don't have to ski 12 kilometers with a lantern, with wolves howling somewhere out there in Kainuu,
just to get to school and learn, learning the alphabet off a pointer stick. That's how our lives have become easier — we move less, we eat processed junk food. I tell my son, when he eats some treats, that these are poisons — and then he even says himself, 'these are poisons,' but he eats them anyway. So our life has changed, and through that, what used to be our glue has
diminished — family, family, and togetherness, and things like that take up time; phones take time, technology takes time, work takes time, hobbies take time. So it is what it is, and it changes our thinking — maybe not directly through money, sure, money is just a tool for what happens, but our well-being has turned into a kind of ill-being as well. Good, maybe — well, to wrap this up, here at the media table we really do have Isak Rautio, Leevi Leivo, and
then here at the slightly older guys' table, Ali Omar and Sami Miettinen. So to finish up, pick one of these tech bros and tell an interesting fact about them — why one might want to chat with them. I'll start, say, with Jeff Bezos. So, he's the founder of Amazon, and he has a really interesting board-work format — he writes these really long, well-thought-out memos, and then, in a way, they actually get read, and
discussed. In a way, I think this is pretty unique — he really takes on a lot of cognitive load to actually understand things, because, being on boards myself, it kind of feels like people are just chasing that Siilasmaa-style good spirit and discussion, when there should be more of that intense memo style, where you actually understand the problems and look for real solutions to them. What about the other tech bros? Well, I've got Elon Musk. I'm interested — you took the easy one.
No, it is an easy one. Alright, I'll play the 'socks' card here at the end — one thing: in my estimation, Musk's personality has changed, and he's currently living in a state of hubris — this kind of omnipotence, hubris. And, well, it looks like he's admitted himself that he suffers from depression. Well, I'm not surprised at all, if he's playing video games, running,
a bunch of companies, and, well, he's now in politics too, and, well, he's got — is it 11 kids? — and he's making more with her. He's said that when he's with the kids, he does emails on his phone because it's easy to multitask. And now he's also been caught lying about, among other things, claiming to be ranked number one in Diablo, and then in Path of Exile
2 as well. And on top of that, he's got this kind of cognitive dissonance, a tension from — was it his daughter who transitioned to being a man, or was it the other way around? Yeah, son transitioned to being a woman — yes. And he's said he uses ketamine. He also uses Adderall, an ADHD medication, and he uses cannabis, and apparently microdoses LSD — all sorts of things — and,
when you look at how much he flies around in his private jet, in a single year, you can only imagine how much strain this person is under. You can't really rest there, in that jet, wherever it happens to be. And his speech has been getting slower and more slurred, and he's not sharp the way he used to be. Of course, he's an introvert, kind of a bit autistic in this way, and, well, it's clear that between these two — this bromance —
you kind of already know what's going to happen to it — one is like a Renaissance genius, and the other is, cognitively, already past his best — a person who isn't interested in national security, and who needs the facts explained to him in bullet points, told why the US wins, or the US loses, if we do this or that. So it's pretty simple, and — he has a narcissistic personality. Can
a narcissistic personality even appreciate a rock star like that, the world's richest man? Can a genius like that appreciate someone like this other one — or not another one, but a narcissist — I don't think he is a narcissist, but in terms of hubris, well — and we'll see how this bromance eventually changes. I can't decide, so I'll say three. Oops, but you have to leave Leevi something now — these are all a bit hazy
Okay, you take your time, if you've only got one, I'll keep these quick. Okay, well, I'll throw one out — I'll go outside the US scene this time, because I want to bring up Europe — so, Daniel Ek, the Spotify founder. Well, this is a bit like doing shelf-meters worth of Putin scholarship — I don't actually know this person, though I have read his book and so on. But regardless of how terribly high the tax rate is here in Europe, even out of Sweden, you can still get
a company the size of Spotify, which, by the way, at one point beat Steve Jobs and Apple Music in this race — Jobs has been seen by many as this almost mythical, unbeatable figure. And, well, I'd recommend it, there's a good book about how Spotify was built — I'd recommend that. And yeah, even here from Europe, we can get companies like this — isn't it already nearly 100 billion in valuation, or even more? Yeah. And Sweden really is, out of everywhere,
the country closest to Silicon Valley in Europe — they've got low taxes, no inheritance tax, or, it's a capital-gains tax, no gift tax, tax rates are several percentage points below Finland's, and, on the whole, Stockholm just feels like a proper big city. So, in a certain way, I'd argue that Sweden's — that sort of Americanness is partly behind its success. Yeah, I'll go back to the US — earth, by the way — joke for all the viewers, I'd
gladly talk more about Europe, it's a bit humbling. Yeah, let's talk — well, it's good to find something to be proud of about the US. But I have been thinking a bit about what it says about Trump and his campaign this year, who's close to him and who no longer is. Somehow, Marc Andreessen, who's been all over the media lately, has been really, really, really visible, truly
visible figures. He's probably one of the best of this whole tech-right, MAGA-adjacent tech-right intellectual crowd — the best at articulating things, in my opinion — and also very open about going out there — actually he just did a good interview on the New York Times podcast, where he really puts himself out there, articulates his views well. And then that maybe told us something — Marc is really, really, really
techno-optimistic. But then one person we've actually talked about today in this episode has been completely silent during this campaign — Peter Thiel. He's been completely absent, and, honestly, he was never all that visible to begin with. Well, he was — specifically, like I said, during Trump's first term, being gay, he went out to defend Trump, back at a time when that cost him a whole lot. There was a columnist — I don't remember which paper — I listened to an interview with someone who knows Thiel, who said Thiel didn't want to play that league,
the founder of Y Combinator, and he founded PayPal with Elon Musk.
building. But, well — he sort of gossiped a bit that this Thiel has become a bit more of a 'doomer' lately, that he no longer believes America can be saved, whether it's the debt or whatever else is going on — there's starting to be a bit of that spirit in that scene too. And if you want to jump straight into the deep end — again, I'm not in Silicon Valley myself, so I don't know exactly, exactly, exactly how big
an influence this guy has, but a name — Curtis Yarvin. Have you heard of him? Okay, look him up — Curtis with a C, and then Yarvin with a Y. He's seen — maybe a bit like how Dugin was talked about a couple of years ago — as Putin's inner-circle court intellectual, so Curtis Yarvin is seen in a pretty similar way for Silicon Valley, basically as a kind of ideological forefather
figure. I don't really know in practice how big an influence he's had, but word is, at least, that Curtis Yarvin has had a really, really big influence, and this Yarvin's philosophy and politics include the idea that democracy doesn't work — that it's basically a kind of scam, and that America should become more like a firm — he uses the word 'formalist' — a kind of monarchy, basically America needs a king,
this kind of technocratic king. And it's interesting to read this guy's views on what the modern age is like and where the world is heading, because I think if you find the right person that a lot of influential people are drawing their ideas from, then, at some point, those ideas will surface, and reality starts testing them in a completely different way once they become more topical, and through that,
it also becomes more okay to say out loud. A short comment on that pessimism — of course that pessimism starts coming because China is starting to approach, well, not quite equal footing, but approaching that parity — in trade, in the economy, in terms of the sheer size of the economy, and then in terms of that dynamic, and also militarily building up, and between all this, of course, some kind of conflict is fairly inevitable — indirectly, of course, nothing more. But if these pessimistic echoes start coming up, then it
comes from the fact that the United States' dominant position, which has lasted a long time — since the '90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it's been completely alone, meaning it wasn't multipolar, it's been fully unipolar — is now, in a way, under threat. And the focus has, since the Obama era, shifted over to Asia, so it's no wonder these pessimistic thoughts come up. But otherwise, the United States is still, honestly, one of the world's most powerful, most dynamic
nations. Alright, I'll wrap it up here. So, in Trump's own words, 'This is the Golden Age,' and, well, maybe he's just been reading too many of Palantir's secret reports. But yeah, we're going to see unprecedented American hegemony here, and we'll just be sitting here watching the glow coming off that palace. Thanks for the visit, and let's suggest heading over to the Insider side, and I'll throw out this impromptu topic — that opening quote about power was from my own
'Negotiation Mandate' book, whose subtitle is 'You don't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.' So I suggest we talk for a few more minutes about this idea, since it is, in a certain way, a pretty tough idea. Thank you.