Welcome to the show, greatest show on earth. Simo Lahtinen, from Kapteeni. Hey there.
Hey there. Hey there, and good day to you. And this is the best show in the world.
World's best host. You've just flown in from the promised land of late-night TV, America — and aren't those very shows under a bit of political pressure over there? Isn't it like every other day some show gets cancelled and then brought back? Well, yeah. I was actually in Los Angeles just last weekend — sorry, the weekend before last — and there too there were supposed to be all these kinds of incidents, or demonstrations, with people fighting and the National Guard showing up, and it's the same story in Boston,
but, but on the ground it doesn't actually feel all that visible.
It's probably more of a headline thing. And Jimmy Kimmel is honestly the most boring one — I never could really be bothered watching it — but the show went off the air and then back on the air, because Charlie Kirk had been brutally murdered, and then some false information, fake news, got put out about it, and jokes were made about it the wrong way, but then Disney stepped in and then backed off, and Disney itself is a bit lost on identity too. So aren't there several layers here — there's really the Trump supporters versus the Democrats,
and then there's also this woke-versus-Republicans thing, and the corporate world is kind of scrambling to figure out how to position itself on that spectrum. Yeah, under the previous administration, woke and cancel culture were praised and worshipped a lot more than they are in the US right now. The George Floyd case, among other things, basically got turned into a political weapon for the entire left side of the field, so that walls
of buildings got painted full of his image, and it became this kind of unifying factor used to drive political forces to the ballot box. Now, similarly — well, this morning [unclear] — but here's how it stands on the right at the moment: we're seeing a similar chain of events play out with Charlie Kirk. So the right wing intends to make use of his
martyrdom, and the fact that it lets you unify various stakeholder groups on the right. In the US we've got the midterms coming up next year, and most of the time, when there's been a Republican term — like we have right now — that means the House flips blue, to the Democrats. So right now the Republicans' biggest task — the MAGA crowd's biggest task — is trying to avoid the losses midterms usually bring.
So, related to that, this ugly, ugly situation — where a person was murdered in a public place — came, unfortunately, at a rather convenient time. By the way, it's worth remembering that Utah has been a politically very active, very red state for a long time now. Two months ago, one of our colleagues was there for the "No Kings" — if you remember the "No Kings" march that happened all over America, these anti-monarchy demonstrations. Then
or, well, this Trump-style authoritarianism — when Trump had his birthday parade, wasn't that kind of aimed at saying, 'come on, Trump, don't go playing king now.'
Yeah, he did take that a bit personally. Those protests happened all over America — in Utah, which is a red state, there were 30,000 people at that No Kings march. And the weekend before that, AOC and Chuck Schumer were there visiting, and there were over 10,000 people watching them. So, in other words, something's brewing under the surface in America right now — the Democrats are trying to race ahead on that
front, preparing to get into a strong position for the midterms — and if it goes the way it did last time, you'll probably see impeachment count one, impeachment count two, three, four, five. And then those get hashed out in the media for the next two years. So you get this whole herring salad of legal problems for the current
administration. On the other hand, they're now going after former administration figures, and someone from the MAGA camp hinted that, yeah, this special counsel too — what was his name, wasn't it... Trump went after him and had him charged, this special... was it Smith or something — ah, right, it was the latter one. Yeah, so those get floated around, and, well, on the whole here
you've got this kind of political lawfare being waged on both sides. But let me come back to that messiah topic — the martyr cults, so to speak. George Floyd was that Black Lives Matter — the Black man who was arrested by police, and an officer knelt on his neck, and he died from that, and that's what the anger behind the BLM marches grew out of at the time. Now then
Charlie Kirk was this kind of religious-conservative figure who ran — I have to admit I hadn't actually watched much of it, but I watched a couple of his debate shows, like "Charlie Kirk versus 20 Liberals" and so on, and he actually put on a pretty good debate, fairly clean in the sense that he let the other side argue their points and fought it out with words. But then it could be
that, in the current state of the world, Charlie Kirk is a better messiah for the MAGA side than an old George Floyd-type case, and the Democrats really need to rethink their game a bit. There's Gavin Newsom — I remember when I was talking about this with a Finnish researcher of American politics, they considered him a bit too soft, but now he's gone and started trolling in a Trump-style way,
writing these all-caps tweets, writing aggressively in kind of a Trump style, and I think that kind of trolling actually works better, and it's more relaxed than that uptight Black Lives Matter or woke stuff. Whatever, anyway. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see if this takes off — we talked about this last July, and even before that, before the election, about
who might step up, if and when Biden isn't running for president again — I didn't say it outright at the time, but I ended up saying that no one's currently steering that flagship, that someone needs to be at the helm. And that whole "signing pen" business — imagine some [unclear] or AOC, that would be entirely the wrong choice; what's really needed is a livelier character who dares to actually open their mouth in long-form settings. AOC and Sanna Marin actually have a lot in common here — if they run for president in their own countries,
they'd probably do quite well at that point, since they're very popular within their own political arena. So it'll be nice to see how that plays out, but I do believe Gavin Newsom will definitely be a candidate.
No question about that. He's currently doing all sorts of circus tricks left and right, and ask any Californian — this particular guy hasn't exactly earned a lot of thumbs-up, at least. There's of course the wildfires and so on, and, well, I don't know that many Democrats from there personally, so it could be — yeah, but basically, as a social-media campaign, that stiff, uptight woke approach just doesn't really work anymore. It really needs to move toward
a livelier dialogue with the other side, using a bit of the same playbook the MAGA crowd uses. But speaking of Chuck Schumer — at the time we're recording this, there's also this classic: the government shutdown. So apparently right now both sides are having a hard time deciding whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, whose fault it is, and what it's actually supposed to prevent, or that this
emergency budget, which would have prevented this shutdown of the administration's payroll, so to speak, didn't get passed. Yeah. Well, the Democrats — it's always the case, often when there's a Republican president, or conversely a Democratic one, these shutdowns come around roughly once a year, and not always — for instance, this last Trump bill was possibly let through fairly weakly by the Democratic camp. I remember, in 2013 I was at a Green Card interview in Iowa, and back then we had
a shutdown, so my interview day got pushed back by one weekend — that was the personal impact these shutdowns had on my life. But on the ground, from my perspective as someone living in America, working there, and paying taxes there, you don't really notice these things much outside of Washington DC. That's its own bubble, where all the Finnish correspondents report from, and then they write up these dispatches back home, and it gets covered in the news here. But then
in traditional America, the other 49 states, DC's influence doesn't really carry over much. Yeah. Of course, for federal workers who don't get paid, it's a disaster for their families, since their household cash flow probably isn't set up any better than anyone else's — if one earner ends up furloughed, that obviously doesn't do them any good. Then
there's this federal thing, the so-called Washington Monument Syndrome — where they specifically cut services and cleaning at the Washington Monument even though it gets lots of tourists, so things like litter in national parks and so on get highlighted. But those tend to be fairly minor inconveniences in this situation — things like not cleaning up as often, or fewer rangers directing people around. But the good side of Washington is that
it's currently a safe city. Big cities are being cleaned up of crime right now. That's worked really well. So this campaign promise of Trump's, which was actually pretty drastic, isn't really being questioned much anymore, and he has actually delivered on it.
So — close the borders, and get undocumented people out. Yeah. ICE has definitely been active in a lot of our areas too. Even out on the North Shore you see ICE raids happening now and then. That's worked really well — when it comes to illegal drugs coming into the country, they've really managed to cut down that logistics chain, sometimes by force and sometimes without. And then
there's the employment of illegal immigrants, which is completely ridiculous that it's even allowed in the first place. When I applied for my green card, you first get the green card, then you get a work permit, and then you can apply for a job once you have that permit. But if you cross the border illegally, you don't have those credentials, so you end up in jobs where you're paid cash, or in low-wage sectors — washing dishes, or working as a helper on a construction site or somewhere else. There's actually quite a lot of
that kind of gray-market economy built on exactly this. Now a lot of it has been rooted out, cut off. As an example, 26 people died in Chicago last weekend — and in Memphis, that's been a completely corrupt city since the 1950s. I've lived in both Chicago and Memphis. Neither of them is exactly a safe, ideal city where it's a good idea to just freely stroll around downtown — you have to look left and right when you're there, and there's
all kinds of gangs roaming around. Then you go to the grocery store and the milk's behind locked cabinets. So that's the problem America has today, which our president is trying to solve, and it's probably not exactly Elvis-looking guys you need to worry about here.
Hopefully not. It's like in that movie, [unclear: "Radio Games"].
Yeah, yeah. But back to ICE — there's been a lot written about this in Finland, about ICE, and the National Guard, and this "enemy within," and how the Trump administration renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War, and put the troops there listening, like: shave off the mustache, and yeah, you'd better watch out for this enemy within. So there's a bit of that going on. I watched that fairly mediocre movie, Civil War,
where — I think it was California and Texas — going to war, sort of a pretend war, against the rest of the country, and it depicted how that would play out fictionally in modern-day America. But there really is a bit of an echo of jackboots here, in that ICE agents and National Guard troops just happen to get sent into blue states. Yes, and into blue states specifically where a lot of undocumented people live,
where there's a lot of crime, a lot of illegal weapons, drug trafficking, human trafficking. Yeah. What about the troops — they seemed to be sort of standing around with nothing to do, so this new administration policy doesn't really inspire a lot of confidence.
Well, Trump has been military-friendly, pro-military, for a long time — our defense budget is bigger than ever, and force has been used this year, among other places, in Iran — bombs were dropped there, by the way, after which seven companies reached out to me saying they're moving to America. By the way — vote with your feet. Then another thing that's been done a lot is protecting the military's internal interests. So there have been policies put in place that
take woke issues and everything like that off the table. There's also been investment in immigration enforcement and preventing illegal immigration, and in sending federal troops to support local forces — because it depends on the state, and on the state's own laws and administration, how they want to handle it. Chicago's mayor is a good example — he doesn't want to send police into the area where there's rioting,
because that creates a conflict of interest with his supporters, or it's just not favorable to his supporters, to his voters,
in that area, so then police just don't get sent to where they're actually needed.
So that's one of the reasons America is such a large federation.
There are 50 states — three separate levels of decision-making, really: you've got the federal level, run by the House, the Senate, and the White House. Then you've got the local level, meaning the state level, and then the city has its own level on top of that, and there's even a county level in between. So there are many layers, which is why — for us Finns — well, we're roughly the size of Iowa. Yeah, yeah.
There are sheriffs at the county level, with the star badge on their chest, and they don't cross federal lines — and they get called... well, we've all learned that from American culture. Yes.
Yeah. But maybe, on that granularity of the federal system — or rather the state system — there's this phenomenon called gerrymandering.
So what is that? Gerrymandering — well, the Democrats, the Democrats do that all the time.
Obama actually did it — Barack Obama was made president partly with the help of gerrymandering, and it started back in 2006. So gerrymandering means shifting the boundaries of voting districts. So what Republicans have, for example, done in Texas, and what people want to do in California now, is shift the lines so that Democratic voters who currently get to vote in a certain district have that boundary moved so they no longer have the same candidates
they'd normally get to vote for. This has been standard practice for like 200 years. I've probably mentioned this to you before as well — that they try to target House seats specifically. They're drawn from the states' county-level areas — or is it sheriff districts they use.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and that can be a big area — for example, Broward County in Florida, the sheriff there has over 1,000 people working for him. So that's basically the size of a big Finnish listed company, and the sheriff decides everything. You'd better buy yourself some boots and a Stetson for that job.
Yeah, yeah, they're the chiefs. But gerrymandering has been done throughout history, and it's not going to disappear from American politics at all. And right now the Republicans are doing it, and afterward the Democrats will do it. It's a bit like here too — you make corrective moves, and then the SDP comes into the next elections and racks up debt again, and then you correct again, and so on. And in our regional elections now
the left-wing forces got — at the municipal level, which you could sort of call the county level here — there are 292 absurdly tiny micro-municipalities that nobody's bothered merging, kind of in that same gerrymandering spirit of liking to keep things separate. Sure, they have their own proud local town cultures — if you're some small town,
it's a shame to give up your coat of arms and your town's name and merge into some bigger area. Probably similar situations there too, where these areas try to build up some kind of identity for themselves within the state.
Yeah, but that game is being played, and indeed these elections are coming up now, so there's the lockdown. There's also the Senate, where each state elects — the seats are staggered on a different cycle — and the Republicans have, I think, 53 seats. But then there's this thing called the filibuster principle, where a simple majority of 50 isn't actually enough. So what is this filibuster thing in the American
electoral system? So you're referring here to the federal Senate, since each state also has its own House and Senate separately.
Yeah. The federal one. Yeah, yeah. Now I have to say, I don't really know the details on that one — no, as I understand it, it's basically that, well, back in the day Paavo Väyrynen tried to single-handedly block Finland's EU accession by holding massive filibuster-style speeches, and in America too there's an honorable history of holding these kinds of speeches, and people got tired of it, feeling life was being wasted if you had to sit here for 20 hours a day just to see which law passed, so it was agreed that
certain laws need a 60-senator majority, and 50 isn't enough. But this is really more of a gentlemen's agreement, not a legal thing at all — definitely not any constitutional structure — so both sides always float the idea of scrapping it whenever a topic is nasty enough, or important enough to their own base. Yeah, if I recall,
the most recent one of these marathon speeches was from Democratic Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey. He spoke, if I remember right, for 20 hours and 43 minutes.
Yeah, he wanted that record, but — yeah, but that's beside the point. Isn't it, I think — that would come easily to us [unclear]. Well, let's see. But there's a bit of tension here around the composition of the Supreme Court — it's currently sitting in the conservative camp, and for as long as those old-timers up there are alive, it sort of holds this supra-parliamentary power. And now it's started to
well, they overturned Roe v. Wade — the federal right to abortion — that ruling was struck down and handed back to the states. But it's starting to look like — I don't know, for example, whether the Supreme Court has yet ruled on the tariffs case, on whether Trump gets to unilaterally slap tariffs on like that, citing a national emergency or crisis, on whatever he wants, every day, and
that's probably still an open question. Yeah. This year has been interesting in that sense — I've followed it every single day, and honestly our whole team at Kapteeni has been tracking this tariff landscape and every development very closely. And the main headline right now is that there's nothing new. There's a general 15% rate currently on standard commodities from Europe. And metals, if I recall, are at 25% or something similar. So if we're talking about
an export timeframe — say you're exporting industrial machinery from Finland to America — you need to look at that export timeframe through a 20-year lens.
So you shouldn't look at it through a three-month lens, because no investment operates on a three-month basis — unless it's some sort of crypto scam. No real investment is skyrocketing, sustainable growth — meaning a genuinely productive, long-term investment — on as short a timeframe as all these tariffs have played out on this year. Mm.
So in other words, if we talk about currency-exchange fluctuations — one euro right now, or last night, was about 1.14 dollars if I recall — that alone basically eats up that 15% tariff. But if you look at the trend over the past 20 years in trade between Finland and the US, the EU and the dollar, the swings you see there — the euro-dollar exchange rate has
risen 30% and then dropped 30%. So we're talking about a 60% swing over 20 years. In other words, in the short term a tariff can look like some kind of threat or problem, but in the long term it doesn't matter at all. They come and go constantly. We're living through an era where we have a right-wing president who wants to protect national interests. Trump was already talking back in the 1980s about how the US should use force — this goes back to when he
first got interested in politics. Back then Roy Cohn was his mentor, and there were also political-operative types — Paul Manafort and Roger Stone — in his backroom team, who, by the way, were involved in his first campaign, the one he won in 2016. Even then, Trump was giving interviews saying force and tariffs should be used, because he understands that kind of simple use of force extremely well. That comes from his own history — he was born into what was then the seventh
richest family in the country, and from there, all the way to the White House. And then there were two attempts to kill him last year. Guess what — didn't work, so he came out clean. Trump has said this year, 'I'm the president now and you're gonna deal with it.' And whenever problems come up, these tariffs have been used as a kind of negotiating chip. They've also been used as leverage in peace talks, for example between India and Pakistan. Now, just this morning,
the Israel-Hamas situation. I won't comment on what happens next there, but right now it looks like there's a ceasefire.
Russia, Ukraine. I won't comment on what happens there next, or when, but there have been various attempts to use tariffs for more than just generating extra tax revenue for America — and quite a lot has come in so far, maybe hundreds of billions. The courts might at some point rule that they're illegal, or they might not, but either way, from a business standpoint, it ultimately matters relatively little.
Yeah. Well, there are two good levels here. At the US federal level there's no value-added tax, and Trump himself is annoyed that other countries — especially here in Europe — have quite high VAT rates, ours as bad as 25.5% at worst. Given that, he clearly has no interest in bringing that to the US — let the states set their own sales tax if they want to, wherever they choose. But it's not really the intention
to bring in that kind of VAT. So in a way, from the American point of view, a tariff is kind of a sneaky VAT — foreigners pay it, but we ourselves don't pay any VAT, so it still generates tax revenue, but you don't have to call it a tax, because you just claim it's the foreigners paying it.
Partly it's like that too — companies exporting into America eat into their own margins and absorb it. So it's a bit of a one-two punch. And then your other point, which is probably more important to Trump, is that it's a really handy club Trump can use to create very uncomfortable situations for pretty much every other world leader. Yeah, one of many, really,
in the end. For example, right now we have a Finnish machinery manufacturer as a client, and we've gone with them to Kentucky to sell Finnish machines, and it's the end customer who actually pays that tariff — and American end customers do have money, by the way, so it's just not a problem for them. Whereas here we're living through a bit of scarcity, tight times, especially in this current global climate, and I'm not at all surprised people are pushing exports right now. But in America it's not like that, so
in America people are out shopping for new toys, and if you've got a machine that costs 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 dollars, and you slap a tariff on top of that, so what if it adds a few thousand more — the end customer just isn't bothered by that. Consumers in the US have purchasing power. That's not going anywhere.
That's actually completely true, by the way. I've got a finance buddy who lives in the States, and he says — a good way to picture it is that when he hires someone to do his gardening, say, you get the guy, but for that same money you could also get the guy plus a ride-on mower thrown in. Whereas here we squeeze the value chain a whole lot harder, and you basically have to offer these huge, huge levels of service just for a small bit of
purchasing power in return, whereas Americans really do have that purchasing power to throw around, like, 'let's have someone else cut my lawn and fix up these hedges — I can't be bothered fixing this picket fence myself.'
Yeah, and that's basically it — the world's largest economy has taken a hit, there's been a small inflation shock, and at the very least these supply chains have been thrown into disarray, since companies now have to sort of guess whether they can still use Mexico and Canada as an internal market to the same extent as before. So there has been an economic impact, a shock, but it hasn't really shown up much in the general stock market, which you might think it
would. That roughly 15% hit has largely already been absorbed by year's end. Yeah, the forecasts back in early spring were actually pretty grim about how 2025 would look, but it turned out differently in the end. Although there's also this big megatrend running underneath — AI, and a bit of rising consumer anxiety, in the sense that people don't
really believe in stable long-term employment anymore, and that shows up pretty much everywhere, and especially badly here in Finland — people are, well, saving partly out of fear of losing their jobs. Yeah, that makes sense — it's a perfectly reasonable fear if things slow down around here. And then, of course, we've got a big, strong, aggressive neighbor to the east, and you
never know what the future will bring, so right now the best approach, if I have a company in Finland, is to think through risk-minimizing options for getting revenue from somewhere other than the domestic market. And what the best place for that is — well, that's a question for each company individually.
And then there was — I was at this Trans Corporate Finance event, and one of our TMT people there, a French guy, and I got to talking politics with him — apparently their last government negotiations dragged on for a full 14 hours, and things are actually even more tangled up over there than in Finland. So if you think about it from a Finnish exporter's perspective — should you go export to France, say — compared to that, America is just overwhelmingly more
interesting, and also a fairer place to do business, regardless of all these tariff antics. I've got one French client right now, and their lunches are absolutely incredible. There's wine flowing every single day. Yeah, I agreed with Mark that they can handle the wine side, and we'll split the software development side, say, half and half between Finland and France — so there's a kind of national, international division of labor here,
but take the Germans, for instance — they've got the auto cluster. Trump has actually spared them fairly lightly so far, but they're not exactly radiating happiness either — new-car orders, Mercedes orders, have dried up, and it may well be that the German production plants are feeling a bit anxious right now about what the Americans are going to do to that auto cluster. 'Nah, we've got Tesla, and America's full of them, we don't need you anymore.' On that note,
by the way, Elon Musk pulled off this strange U-turn — going from being this big DOGE guy, this big Republican idol, and then walking away from it all. So what's going on with this 'America Party' of his? As I understand it, it's still kind of up in the air — it's a bit like founding a new political party in Finland: unless you've already got a political machine behind you, it can be tough going. It's a bit the same in that
America has this two-party system, and then there are the independents — and they seem to have a bit of... well, RFK did manage to get in.
I have to say, RFK got into the cabinet as an independent. So in that sense it's possible, but founding your own party is a pretty, pretty difficult, if not impossible, task. That kind of flip — where you pull enough votes from the middle that you can basically compete your way into a cabinet post — that kind of platform can work. But Elon Musk, isn't he
the world's richest South African — or African, for that matter. So in that sense — well, on the other hand, Arnold Schwarzenegger did become governor of California, so that kind of thing is accepted, he's one of the guys in a way. But that kind of political opportunism-hopping doesn't work well. Even in Finland, the Blue Reform party didn't last long after splitting off from the Finns Party to try something new — so it's tough to invent a new
party in America. Now this is actually a rare situation in US politics if you think about Donald Trump — he's had roughly 12 years to prepare for this second term, and he was already a billionaire back then. So a billionaire celebrity who becomes president, who at some point also learns how to actually be president and learns to wield presidential power — or at least it looks that way at this stage — that's a rare situation in Western countries, because quite often
here you typically vote for someone from inside the political establishment, someone capable — like Finland's President Stubb, who, by the way, has done absolutely brilliant work today in Washington DC. Hopefully some deals come out of it. Good luck, Mr. President. So, that kind of person who's skilled at politics and good with stakeholders. But Trump came from outside, and then pretty quickly got himself into the game, and as a result
here we are now, and we'll see what happens next. But the presidential library is going to Miami. Yeah, and related to this No Kings movement — maybe what saves things is that Trump's genetic offspring are frankly untalented enough that you're probably not going to get a Kennedy-style dynasty out of them. In that sense — well, let's see. He's already accomplished quite a lot these past few years. Yeah, there's this one younger
Trump, who recommended the podcast strategy to his father — he might still have a face that isn't as worn out, so if he plays it right, he could... Barron, Barron. Yeah, I believe he'll become emperor — emperor of all — someday. Ouch. At this point I already have to say, okay, enough.
Yeah. What about the media landscape then — as I said, there's surprisingly a lot of talk in Finland too about this late-night show thing, but it's a bit of a tired concept by now. It would be fun to go catch someone like Stephen Colbert live sometime, before he walks off into the history books like some dinosaur. But in our scene, influence happens through YouTubers and podcasters and these kinds of virtual studios, rather than these kinds of
Disney-sponsored arena-pit type setups. I honestly do get where the MAGA camp is coming from on this — if you turn on pretty much any of these big late-night shows, like 80% of it is just ripping on Trump, mocking him through the show. And that's not necessarily bad for Trump, but it does get a bit tiresome. Well, I mean, if you think about their audience — that's a big audience, and within that big mass it's probably mostly Democrats
in the majority, so of course you have to cater to what the viewer wants to see. And it was fine at first — in 2016, I thought Alec Baldwin's Trump impression was fantastic, was that 2017? Alec Baldwin — Saturday Night Live has actually held up pretty fresh, genuinely great stuff. When I talk about the likes of Stephen Colbert and similar shows, I think the opening monologue these days is pretty political, whatever comes out of it — it's a bit forced, reaching for it. And of course you have to
understand that Trump is a very polarizing figure — it's easy to go after him through comedy like that, and he does it constantly himself too, everywhere. And there was that infamous White House Correspondents' Dinner where Obama made that joke about Trump and got the whole room laughing at him, and Trump didn't like that one bit. According to his own account, that's why he decided
to run for president, to beat Obama and show him. So the modern-day equivalent of that is — what's happening in the Democratic camp right now is so much attacking of Democrats, and then all these talk-show hosts more or less just throw jabs and jokes at Trump. But I don't think cancel culture will go so far that these shows actually start getting permanently cancelled. Jimmy Kimmel's been on so long, and had really good
material for decades, though it has gotten a bit tired lately, admittedly.
Yeah, I watch it, I like it — he's an ancient uncle by now, but hey, these guys keep going as long as their boots stay on. Bill Maher, I still can't quite get into — I think he's actually pretty funny, he pulls in both directions a bit, and he's got that pretty solid ten-minute 'New Rule' segment, which I think has stayed pretty fresh. In my book, he might actually be the most interesting of these. And speaking of some of these — take, for example, Louis C.K.,
and a few other stand-up comedians who've already been cancelled — some of them have made a quiet comeback and are back out on tour now, so apparently cancellation doesn't last forever. That's right. And this era of getting cancelled over a tasteless joke is, at least, over — especially in America, in the sense that — well, I don't want to go all the way into locker-room banter territory, but if you brush up against that edge a bit,
you'd instantly get thrown into the stocks, fired, forced into endless apologies, with advertisers pulling out — those days of cancel-culture madness really are over. Over, at least on that side — though if there's now a right-wing equivalent, this kind of right-wing cancel squad that gets someone fired if, say, they speak ill of Charlie Kirk — that's also
a bit questionable, honestly — I don't really want that either. I think everyone could grow a slightly thicker skin and tolerate a bit more good-natured guy humor, because at the end of the day it's still just humor. If you can't handle that — well, you can recognize a good person by their ability to laugh at themselves.
That's right. Yeah. Self-deprecation isn't a problem for us. Yeah. And I do think that small amount of guy humor, that bit of teasing — somehow that over-sensitivity is, in my opinion, the most annoying side of wokeness: do you really need to get offended about absolutely everything on other people's behalf, especially when it's not even your issue? Getting offended on someone else's
behalf about something dubious like that — that's somehow been the most unbearable part of woke culture, in my opinion.
It's this 'I'm so important that I get to be offended by this' attitude.
And getting offended specifically on other people's behalf, and against you, because actually I've got some political scores to settle — implying you wouldn't survive otherwise. So there's a pretty strong dynamic there. But anyway, we're living in this era where — maybe I should bring up ESG and DEI here, because for decades things basically kept ratcheting up on this idea of saving the world, and also improving people. So
ESG is basically environmental, social, governance — companies doing softer, gentler things on top of just making a profit. Sure, you should run things cleanly and not let the organization get messy internally — that part of ESG and good governance still holds. Nobody wants to go back to some stuffy old-boys'-club culture. But
then there's DEI — what's the state of DEI in America these days, by the way? Remind me what DEI stands for. It's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, if I recall — I'm dodging this a bit, I'm not entirely sure I've got the words exactly right, but it's a block built on top of ESG, a woke block, where the whole idea is this diversity thing — lifting people up out of their social class,
say equal opportunity, and championing Black representation, and then inclusion — bringing people in. In a way, it's a certain kind of influence vector, which the Trump administration has, in my opinion, brought down in a somewhat heavy-handed way too — because in my view, it's perfectly fine for people in the military to be gay or lesbian, or to have a mustache; one [__] shouldn't get in my
way as long as they're not doing it right in front of me — put cynically. I obviously can't speak for other companies, but for us, for instance, the majority of employees are women, we've got all kinds of minorities, all kinds of people, and if you're a capable worker, welcome — send in your application. It's not more complicated than that — though of course not everyone sees it that way. There
are places out there. For example, our family business's old licensee from Texas, back in the day, had three hiring questions: Do you play golf? Do you believe in God? Do you vote Republican? Yeah.
So there are different places where different opinions affect different things. Yeah, that's how it is — the owner's voice really shouldn't be over-neutered in this. It's also a fine principle that owners have the right to build their own communities with their own money and among their own people, without being forced, say, into changing on DEI's terms
into something else. But yeah, it's a bit [__] if you don't have those three qualities — that's honestly a bit annoying.
Then it's just not the job for you. If it were otherwise a pretty good job, you might think, well, what do I do now — do I go start a competitor?
Of course, in America things work a bit like this: you can get fed up and think, 'no more of this nonsense,' and go build your own company that flips those values around entirely.
Yeah. And this was in Houston, Texas, in the '90s. Of course, Houston hasn't changed all that much since, I have to say. So yeah, there's probably quite a lot of regional variation across America. I was actually talking a bit with a Swedish guy about this, since he's lived there — sort of an expert on American conservatism specifically, a knowledgeable guy. We should really invite him on the show sometime,
but there is that conservative Christian tradition, going to Sunday church and so on, and it's probably gained ground lately, in that this secular atheist culture has taken a bit of a hit here, and there's been a return to these kinds of
old cultural values. And then if you bring that into the business world, so that only 'church boys' get to do business, that's a bit stuffy too. Personally I'd like to see more of a color-blind approach in business, where people don't obsess so much over what you are — you just do business with whoever's good at business, without caring what kind of person they are. You could take a snapshot, for instance, of American gun-company boards and see what kind of people sit on them,
and draw your own conclusions about who's calling the shots here and about what. Yeah, and so on. But of course, Charlie Kirk's organization, Turning Point USA — the whole idea there was to go onto university campuses, and I'm in no way against him or his supporters, but that's simply what Turning Point did: they went to campuses, because campuses have on average been fairly liberal, left-leaning places, which then shape a young person's decision-making patterns, and then
there's groupthink there, and if someone votes a certain way, everyone else falls in line on the same principle. So this was a kind of counter-move, saying, okay, conservatives still have a voice too — sure, people get to be educated and pursue whatever job or path they want, but regardless, these values, and God, and other things like that, still matter to them and matter for their children. This was sort of a countermovement to that, and it's not really unhealthy in and of itself, as a reaction to wokeness, in that
sense — it's not good, either, though, and you see this in Finland too, where you're wearing a Hamas scarf at university, maybe adding a communist flag on top of that, and end up basically discovering yourself as some little anti-capitalist warrior. That's really unhealthy if it becomes the dominant mainstream campus culture, because it doesn't equip you very well for succeeding in working life afterward. Very true. Very true. One
good tip is: don't go attacking a country that's backed by the United States and that drinks a lot of espresso every day — you'll get a strong reaction, which hopefully has now been brought to a close.
Yeah. And likewise, sure, Israel can act pretty badly there too, and be a very brutal overlord in the Gaza area, but that still doesn't justify stirring up what's essentially neo-Nazism — antisemitism — in response, going off in the name of Palestinian brotherhood and attacking, say, the Jewish minority in America, that
yeah, and it's the same in England, by the way, because there's no protection there like there is here — this is actually a fairly influential community, and Jewish Americans have quite a lot of money, but in England that's not the case. I remember when I lived there, I actually considered Golders Green, which is this core Jewish neighborhood, because it just looked like such a nice place — I thought it'd be a lovely place to live — but they really don't have any protection there, so
because, in a way, this Labour government doesn't really sympathize much — over there. Whereas in America, the conservative crowd is still firmly aligned with Israel and Netanyahu, though even that's starting to show some cracks. But yeah — I had Atte Kaleva on as a guest, and we both were sort of of the opinion that this Trump Middle East plan might actually be pretty well put together.
Yeah, so there are just so many different opinions about Trump out there. Those who want to see nothing but bad in him will indeed see nothing but bad in him. And then those who want to stay neutral, stay neutral.
And then there's a real chance that peace might actually come out of this.
Mm. Whether that turns out to be a bigger deal, if it actually happens. Of course you have to remember there are counterforces out there which, egged on by Russia and China, are probably already planning their next moves — whatever those might turn out to be. But right now it looks like Gaza is going to start being rebuilt. I just listened to the morning news on Fox — the very early US morning broadcast on Fox this morning — and it sounds like there's a reconstruction plan that's going to be launched pretty soon. Then the question is whether
a golf club ends up on that strip or not. That's a separate matter, but the same thing was done in Iraq — those reconstruction projects back then ran into many, many billions, and there were contractors who went in to do the work, then subcontractors were brought in and deals were made. So maybe there's an opportunity there for companies from this country too, if projects come up. Yeah. Atte mentioned that before Israel withdrew from there, there were literally thousands of these greenhouses — actual greenhouses — and
in a way, it's really not a completely barren piece of land; you really could do other things there besides waging holy jihad against Israelis to the last Palestinian. In that sense, all the pieces really would be in place now. And then the regional bad actors — Iran has been hammered pretty much to its knees, so it's not going to bounce right back, and Hezbollah and the Houthis, these local troublemakers, are currently on their knees too. So then these
moderate Arab countries have a real chance to step up and take a bit of responsibility for that region — this would actually be a fairly opportune moment for that, in connection with Trump's plan. I'm actually fairly semi-optimistic about this, and on top of that I'm tired of the Finnish press running these fan pieces about Greta Thunberg's flotilla — it's really tiresome reading Helsingin Sanomat run two stories always from the same angle on Palestine, always the same angle. But Greta
is going to win the Nobel Peace Prize, as a Swede. Well, ahead of Trump, it could well go to — a Norwegian. By the way, it's actually the Norwegians who make that decision. Alfred Nobel set it up that way, apparently considering the Norwegian courts smarter than the Swedish ones. Sometimes, well, the Swedes — not exactly in ice hockey refereeing, at least — but otherwise tend to bring things home. Yeah, that could well be how it goes. Yeah, but that is, that's interesting
times, and it's really nice to hear these American updates straight from the ground, so to speak, and good to hear that people still believe in exporting to America — and it's probably worth getting in touch if that kind of Stubb-style American charm-offensive spirit interests you. Yeah, our situation is such that whatever sales and marketing action a client needs — that is, closing deals — that's the kind of thing you should reach out to us about. But if you want some
kind of political consulting or other paper-shuffling like that, I'd recommend reaching out to someone else. We only do things that make sense from a business standpoint.
Yeah, great stuff. My guest today has been Simo Lahtinen, and if you've watched or listened this far, go ahead and subscribe to the channel. I suggest we do a short bonus segment for Inner Circle. Didn't you go over to the States to play American football? Yeah, American football, not that damn soccer — yeah, I did go, so — let's save this one — I actually, I have to admit, even though I've lived in the States, I went and watched one game, and it
kind of remained a bit foreign to me, honestly. So I suggest — this'll be a short one, ten minutes from here. Alright, see you over in Inner Circle. Yes.