Davos debrief
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Summary
In this episode of The Andrey Lawton Show, Andrey talks about his time covering the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and answers some of your questions about what he saw, heard, and wrote about.
Transcript
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welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true
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north hello and welcome to you all this is a live edition of the andrew lawton show here on true
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north it is friday may 27 2022 and just like five seconds before the show started i saw in my little
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studio there's a fly going around and this is going to bother me for the entirety of my time
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on air so I just want to warn you now if you're watching this in the video form and you see my
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eyes darting around I'm not looking out for like you know Klaus Schwab's assassins not that they
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exist coming after me no no there's just a fly in my studio that apparently took over in my absence
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which if you've been following online and following True Norse coverage you know was
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over the past week in Davos, Switzerland, where the World Economic Forum annual meeting was taking
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place. And I should say, I mean, we had a tremendous, tremendous time covering this.
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There was a lot going on, a lot to get to. We had people working back in Canada to churn out the
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content that we were collecting. And then I was also solo on the ground in Davos, Switzerland,
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talking to people on the ground, talking about some of the oddities of Davos, of which there
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are a great many. So I literally just got back yesterday. I haven't even gotten like a full
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night's sleep yet, but I thought it would be great to do a Davos debrief, talking a little
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bit about my experience and recapping some of the coverage that we found really resonated with
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people. And I'll give some analysis on that. And also I wanted to take your questions because the
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whole reason I went over there was to demystify this thing, to demystify this organization,
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the World Economic Forum, and also the Davos Summit, which is shrouded, shrouded in a lot
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of questions, a lot of criticism, a lot of conspiracy theories, depending on who you ask.
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And because of that, you get people that just dismiss criticism of it when it's warranted and
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when it's justified. So I thought it would be great to just do a throw out the format and
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actually take your questions and do what we can to talk to all of you about what it is that you
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have as far as questions are concerned about what happened there and we'll try to do it because I
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was getting and I just want to put this in context here I was getting like my phone is a little bit
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better now I mean in the last five minutes I'm just looking and I've got you know a handful of
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notifications but my Twitter was just blowing up where here I'll see if I can show you so you know
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I guess it's going to be hard to demonstrate on camera but where you look at it you refresh it
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and then a second later you refresh it and there's a whole bunch more stuff so it was just non-stop
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because so many people were following especially the videos that we were putting out which I think
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were so important because this isn't some shadowy cabal of people that are in the mountains of
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Switzerland pulling the strings on the world it's a group of people that have influence and are very
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transparent about what their goals are they're very honest they're very proud of it the things
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that they were bragging about in the annual meeting in the public sessions the things that
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you could watch online the things they were bragging about were were things that i would
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be like why why should we be proud of that why are you oh why why are you telling us this and
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telling us this as though it's a good thing so if you're watching on facebook or you're watching on
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youtube uh post your questions and we'll try to get through as many of them as we can if you're
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listening to the podcast it means that this is no longer live so i can't take your questions
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unfortunately, but we will try to revisit some of these things in the future. In the meantime,
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though, I wanted to go over some of the highlights that took place from this thing, because the one
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clip that went absolutely viral in the truest sense of the word, millions and millions and
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millions of views, I think on Twitter alone, on my Twitter, it was up to over 3 million this morning.
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That was this guy, J. Michael Evans, who is the president of the Alibaba Group, which is a Chinese
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company very deep ties to the state and he is a canadian i mean that's the the part about it
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that's so insidious he's one of these westerners that chinese companies have bought up to do their
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work and he was talking about this technology that alibaba group is so excited about that
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will track your carbon footprint take a look developing through technology an ability for
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consumers to measure their own carbon footprint. What does that mean? That's where are they
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traveling? How are they traveling? What are they eating? What are they consuming on the platform?
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So individual carbon footprint tracker. Stay tuned. We don't have it operational yet,
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but this is something that we're working on. Now, I'm having a coffee right now that I made
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upstairs, which I'm told is good because I didn't go to the neighborhood Starbucks to get it. So I
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actually go up five carbon points in the social credit Alibaba system that they're developing.
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Although I did just fly home from Switzerland. So I lost like 500 points on the Alibaba carbon
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credit system. And some of the defenders came out on this and were saying, oh, but I mean,
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he's saying it's voluntary. It's for people that want to track their carbon footprint.
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And I'm like, you know, I remember when vaccination was mandatory.
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I remember when social distancing and wearing masks were voluntary, rather.
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I remember when, you know, all of these things were things that you chose to do.
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When you could choose to get vaccinated, you could choose to wear a mask, you could choose to do that.
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So when I hear some of the people talking about a climate emergency and a climate, you know, what do they want to do?
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climate lockdowns, I start to think maybe, just maybe, we should be very wary of anyone telling
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us that something like this is going to be voluntary and remain voluntary. So that's the
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whole point of this here is that, yeah, Alibaba Group is developing this thing. For starters,
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for the people of China, it may not be voluntary. We know the Chinese state has its tentacles in
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pretty much all data collected by Chinese companies for whatever reason. And that's
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true. Alibaba Group has not been immune from that in the past. And the other side of this is that
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it's literally a climate version of the social credit system. It's the climate version of social
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credit, of developing some mechanism of tracking your worth as a citizen vis-a-vis your so-called
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carbon footprint. And he's talking about this as though it's a great thing. And most people
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listening. It was interesting seeing the response to that on Twitter, because originally, I mean,
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my audience is very fairly conservative. So originally it was people on the right saying,
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see, I told you so, this is what they're planning. And then people on the left started to turn on it
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as well, because people on the left don't like the elites with their private jets either for
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different reasons. So then I had people on the left saying, why are you going after individuals
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when you should be going after the oil companies and going after this? And I don't agree with their
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output. I don't agree with their conclusion. But at a certain point, I'm like, you know, we've got
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the right and the left that all seem to hate this. And I'm like, who's for it? Who's for it?
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And this is one of the reasons when people have asked why it's so important, why people
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are paying attention to the World Economic Forum is because the axis has shifted in politics.
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And this goes back years. I mean, Donald Trump is a great example of this. In 2016, he didn't win
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And there's been an anti-elite pivot that has changed the axis of politics so much so
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that people on the left and people on the right in some areas tend to coalesce behind this idea
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that, you know, we've got some serious concerns with this. And I won't play the clip. You can
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find it on True North if you'd like. But one of the interesting people I spoke to was this older
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woman who's a climate protester from Switzerland. And, you know, normally the climate protesters
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and I don't see eye to eye on a lot of things, and we probably don't, but she was not a hypocrite
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because she and her little group of climate activists walked to Davos and they were just as
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unnerved by the private jet flying limo riding elites as I was. In their case, they thought,
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you know, these people aren't actually honest about what they want to do for the climate.
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My view on this was that I think they're honest about what they want to do. They may not be honest
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about their intentions and it becomes part of the control system so we've got lots more clips
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and highlights that we're going to be pointing to as the show progresses but as i said i want to
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take your questions here so if you're watching live on facebook or on youtube post them away
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and we'll try to get to as many as possible here lynn said did it feel scary i know that you know
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never never never did it feel scary i wasn't sure what the access situation would be like because
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as I said beforehand, I wasn't accredited. They denied my accreditation request. And when I got
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there, I knew that there was an open street. It's called the Promenade. It's where all the shops and
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booths and all that are. But I didn't know how much I'd be able to go in and out and go around.
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And no one gave me any grief at all. I shouldn't say that. I mean, some people didn't want to talk
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to me. Some people ran away from me, like Mark Carney. We'll play that clip in a moment. But no
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one gave me any issues. There was one point where I saw a group of police walking towards me and I'm
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like, oh, is the jig up? But then they just got to me, said hello and walked past. So I didn't feel
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any risk at all, but I appreciate your concern. I think that the one thing that is interesting
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though, is that Davos is very expensive and it's very difficult to get to. So had to fly to Zurich.
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I rented a car. You can also take the train. It's fairly expensive to stay in town. I couldn't stay
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in town because the World Economic Forum controls all of the accommodations there. So I stayed in
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another town over, which was a bit cheaper and was actually available. And as a result, if you were
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a group of protesters or scrappy independent media, it's difficult to get there. And I think
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that they've kind of enjoyed the World Economic Forum and the elites there, this idea of having
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a safe space that others can't get there, which is why so many of them were just walking around
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not really worried like you know I bumped into the president of Microsoft at one point and Mark
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Carney the former governor of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada and the head of the IMF I
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didn't have my camera running at the time but you know she was three feet away from me at a certain
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point so they're not used to having people there that aren't like them and I think that was it now
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maybe maybe that'll change now that I was there and you know next time around it'll be more
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challenging but I think that was why it was so easy to to get around let's see who else do we
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have here um another question from someone actually a lot of people have asked this who
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from canada attended so from the canadian government just one person and that was
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france philippe champagne who's the industry and innovation minister and he was the only canadian
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government delegate there was no trudeau no christian freeland no patty high do nothing like
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that and he was on this panel called it was something about the jobs of tomorrow and he
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talked about some stuff that really wasn't all that substantive. The one thing that I really
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found annoying that he was trying to say is that young people don't want jobs. They only want jobs
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that are green and jobs that are meaningful to them. And in order to be meaningful, they have
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to be green and we have to transition people away and all of that. But even then, it's just that
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regular old pablum that you get from some liberal ministers. And I would say it's hard to, I mean,
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young people don't seem to want jobs now, which is why we have a labor shortage. So I can't
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necessarily disagree with his premise. Although, again, I disagree wildly with the conclusion.
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As far as non-government Canadian delegates, though, there were a fair amount. And I didn't
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quite see, oh, I didn't see many of them. I did see some of them, like Michelle Romano, who's a
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tech investor. And I think she was or is on the show Dragon's Den. She was there.
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David Walmsley, who's the editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail, he was there.
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Apparently, I learned at the end, so I didn't get to actually look for any of them,
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there were some higher-ups from SNC-Lavalin that were there.
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We had some people from some tech companies that were there and Canadian offices.
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There was a Canadian journalist there from the Wall Street Journal, Elena Cherney.
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it. But again, I mean, most people, when they ask about the Canadian delegation, they're asking who
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from government was there. And as far as that, it was a very small, austere delegation. It was
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a delegation of one. And I have to wonder why that is. And I'm mixed on that. And I haven't
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gotten any official answer from the government. I think it may be that they're very aware of how
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more people are paying attention to the WEF right now. So I think because of the so-called
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conspiracy theories. They were nervous about the appearance of going. I also think that right now
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we have a cost of living crisis. We have an energy crisis. We have the world on the cusp of war with
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Russia, Ukraine. The idea of billionaires gallivanting with politicians in the Swiss Alps
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is not something that's easy to sell to an electorate right now. And I don't know in a
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cost of living crisis and energy crisis, all of these things, if we want Canadian officials
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on panels talking about the need to transition away from oil and gas when we can barely afford
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energy right now. And their solutions are somehow even more expensive or their so-called solutions.
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So I think that's what I would answer as that. But again, I mean, that's the question that keeps
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coming in. Who from Canada is there? I'm going to work on a list of the ones that I know of,
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and we'll publish that at some point. Someone says here, I understand the people at Davos feel
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they are elites or superior people? After being there, do you feel you're as good or better than
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the so-called elites? Well, unlike them, I don't view myself in terms of being better than or less
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than other people. I try to be me. I try to be a good person. I try to treat people I encounter
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with dignity unless they give me a reason to believe they shouldn't be treated in a dignified
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way, which fortunately is very rare. But here's something I have to tell you about. And I posted
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about this on Twitter. I should have told my producer, Sean, to get the graphic of it, but
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there's this really hilarious and pathetic cast system with badges at Davos, with badges. So
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everyone has to wear an ID badge. And normally at a conference, any conference I've ever been to,
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I could not take a badge off quickly enough. It's like, if you need to wear one to get into the
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room, you do it. But the second you can, you just rip it off because they always look tacky just
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wearing all of these these these name tags from conferences at Davos people love them they love
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the badges because the badges signify status and how important you are is reflected in the color
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of your badge so the the best thing you could have is a white badge with a blue line and a white badge
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with a blue line it has your name and big bold letters so what I was doing is when people walked
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by who looked important you could tell I'd like google them and then see like oh this is uh oh
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this is just the guy who works at Qualcomm or whatever. And then you say, oh, this is the head
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of climate for the World Economic Forum. Okay, let's talk to her. But the white badge with the
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blue line means you're one of the elites. You're one of the people that the WEF, the WEF as they
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call it, has invited. If you've got a white badge with no blue line, it means you're the spouse of
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someone who is invited. So you're kind of important, but not as important as them. If you're an orange
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badge, then you're a journalist that's there covering it. But some journalists had white
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badges because they were on like the WEF's handpicked list. So there were like New York
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Times and Wall Street Journal people that had white badges because they were part of the handpicked
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elites in the media that WEF wanted there. And then you've got like green badges were the
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entourages of people. I'm not making this up. Green badges were the entourages and staff of
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people with white badges. So the important white badge people would be surrounded by two or three
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green badge people. So you could tell who the white badge people were by looking at the green
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badges. But they love this. They all love the status that this signifies. And then there were
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other ones that I couldn't figure out. One of them, the police had a black badge. But if you
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were part of a security entourage that came from somewhere else, you'd have a purple badge with a
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red line. And then there was a hotel badge that said, you're only allowed to go to the hotels,
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but you can't go anywhere. Like it was just, it was this bizarre thing, but it shows how status
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obsessed they are. And people talk about this. Like I was chatting up one guy who was actually
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on my flight to Zurich and he was going to WEF, but he didn't have credentials or anything.
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And the way he talked about it, he's like, yeah, but that's not, I don't have a white badge or
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anything. So like, he was like so sad that he was going there and didn't have a wife, a white badge.
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and it looks like a number I know, but I'm on air.
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And I'm actually going to play two clips for you,
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because people saw just how out of touch it was making them feel like they were and just so
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disconnected from the reality of the people that their policies are governing. And this was a
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discussion on energy and climate, like 90% of the sessions. And it was a Norwegian, the CEO of a
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Norwegian finance company named Christian Brathen or Brathen. And she was talking about the transition
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away from oil and gas and just contextually here specifically its effect on small and medium-sized
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businesses who she was saying understandably so don't have the means to go go along with this the
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way they giant companies do giant companies they have the money they can go with these pie in the
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sky ideas but she was saying small and medium businesses is not as easy for them and did that
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mean we should hold back? Oh, not at all. We need to accept that there will be some pain in the
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process. The pace that we need will open up for missteps. It will open up for shortages of energy.
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It will create inflationary pressures. And maybe we need to start talking about that,
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that that pain is actually worth it. Because if we don't, there's no business case, there's no
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economy there's there's no welfare but but so far i think we are have been a little bit careful
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actually talking about the pain in the short term that is likely to come from from the from this
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very important change see it's all abstract to them it's all abstract to them oh yeah the pain
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the pain yeah it's going to be there but it's all worth it because if we don't have pain then
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there's going to be no climate and no economy and no world and we're all going to be dead so
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it's go along with the green agenda or die is basically the message and if you're a business
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owner that can't afford to pay your electricity bill or your heating bill a load of good this oh
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but it's all worth it it's all worth it it's all going to be good in the long run a load of good
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that message is and these people as we know don't even practice what they preach one great example
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of this and i'm glad the moderator did it was when they surveyed the room to ask about what
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they're doing to reduce their carbon footprint specifically with electric vehicles which of
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course are supposed to be this ascendant thing that we're all supposed to be on but uh well
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not the people of davos so i'm going to throw this immediately out to the audience and say
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how many of you are driving an electric vehicle at the moment
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one two three four so i would say that probably constitutes less than five percent of the persons
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and i don't know if that's what i mean she that might have been the point she was going for
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i don't think it was like it was i said it was a cell phone because i think it was a cell phone
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for the wef not a cell phone for her she's proving that all of these people are saying it but when
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push comes to shove they're not doing it and it's the the private jets it's the limos i mean this
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clip ended up being again not i i'd say the most exceptional journalism because it was just you
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know pointing my phone out the window of the car and documenting what was happening on the road
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but people loved it. People loved this video. So, I mean, again, 12 seconds. And I started
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filming late because at first I was just staring at it and it was a Beamer, Beamer, Beamer,
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Mercedes, Mercedes, Mercedes, Beamer, Mercedes, Audi, Mercedes. Like it was just this lineup
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up of limos waiting to get into Davos because the security checkpoint was slowing them down.
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And there were a couple of hybrids and electric cars in the mix as well.
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If you ordered an Uber in Davos, your two options were green or black. And black is like the limo
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and green is, you know, the eco one. And you better believe all the people were taking the
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limos, which were just lined up as people were trying to get through. So these things are sort
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of cliches now. We all know that that's what happens. We all know that's what these things
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are about. But seeing it firsthand that it's not just a cliche, it's not just a punchline,
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this is actually revealing the divide between the governors and the governed was, I think,
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interesting to see. And it was almost reaffirming in a way that, yes, this stereotype is not just
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a cheap laugh. It's genuinely, genuinely this font of hypocrisy that we see behind the world
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Economic Forum and a lot of the people going there. And I don't know if we have, let me check
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with my producer here. I don't know, do we have the video of going after the head of climate,
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that woman? We do. Okay. So this one is great. No, he says no now. Not the woman. Okay. Never
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mind on that one. But there's this one video where the head of climate for WEF was walking by and I
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asked her, you know, is, do you tell people not to travel by private jet? And she turned around and
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said, you know, I've got to go. And then she walked away. And I'm like, you know, that had
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more syllables than yes or no. But to his credit, I did speak later on to someone else who is also
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a higher up at WEF. And he said that they do actually tell people not to travel by private
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jet. He took a few moments and chatted and said they do tell people, but some do anyway. So
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perhaps there's a bit of internal strife within the World Economic Forum here. Anyway, getting
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back to your questions here, I go on tangents every now and then. Oh, on that note, Anita says,
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did you ever get an answer about the elite's carbon footprint to get to Davos? Short answer,
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no. But we did hear all about how they try to do things like offsets and green and sustainability
00:24:00.340
and all of that. But a lot of it, I think, is smoke and mirrors. If not for the organization,
00:24:05.940
certainly for the participants. Patty writes, did they have a lot of freedom protesters?
00:24:14.520
There was one group of climate protesters that I saw on the first day.
00:24:19.920
I met a couple of individual people that were locals that were not WEF fans at all,
00:24:26.140
And I don't know if that was because, as I said earlier, it's very difficult and expensive
00:24:30.820
to get there, or if it's just because people weren't doing it.
00:24:35.460
Or if, I mean, one example of this is that in order to protest in Davos, in the town,
00:24:41.480
you need a permit and the police say on the website that if you don't have one they will
00:24:48.060
use whatever means they have to to clear you out and i don't know how well they were enforcing that
00:24:53.220
like there were a couple of little demonstrations on climate and there was one on like ukraine
00:24:57.620
but i don't know if these people had permits and police were leaving them alone for that reason or
00:25:03.020
if they just didn't care but that's also something that could be off-putting maybe
00:25:06.800
they weren't issuing permits to people that were there to protest for freedom
00:25:10.760
And let's see what else we have here. Do you think they're going to completely stop the
00:25:18.000
independent press next year? So this is an interesting question. And I want to go back
00:25:25.080
a little bit because originally what I wanted to do was cover COP26 in Glasgow in November,
00:25:30.620
which was the big climate summit where all the heads of government were going to gather in
00:25:34.660
Scotland and they were going to get together and plan the sequel to the Paris Agreement.
00:25:39.000
And we went through a huge lengthy process with the United Nations to try to get accredited.
00:25:44.260
And at the end, the UN said, no, we're not accrediting you.
00:25:47.340
And we thought about going anyway and ultimately opted against it because we knew that the
00:25:52.960
UN would have the whole country controlled and we couldn't even get, I looked up where
00:26:00.080
I wouldn't have even been able to get on the street to interview people coming and going.
00:26:04.660
and then world economic forum came up and we said well you know this is outdoors it's an open city
00:26:11.040
it's a they can control the venue but they can't control the city so we thought even without being
00:26:16.160
accredited we'd be able to get somewhere where important people would be that we'd want to put
00:26:21.000
questions to and we did that and we still tried to get accredited and then as we reported a while
00:26:26.540
back they were only letting i mean to even request accreditation to even request accreditation you
00:26:33.760
had to be invited and we asked for the invitation we asked for the password to get to the accreditation
00:26:40.320
portal and no one responded no one responded so we said we're going anyway now i i will say
00:26:45.920
when i was there and i actually did get to speak to one person at weff he personally said uh you
00:26:52.160
know to reach out to him directly next time for the next one and he didn't make any offer he didn't
00:26:57.600
make any promises uh someone else said andrew did you drink the kool-aid no no i'm not like a west
00:27:02.080
chill now. But he had said to reach out to him directly, which I will do if we're going back.
00:27:07.320
And that's something that I will do to try to get accredited. Because even though I'm very happy
00:27:12.300
about the coverage that we were able to get from outside, I also think that to be in the room and
00:27:18.000
in the venue and to have that additional level of access is important. But let me just explain
00:27:23.480
the access situation here. Because there was the Davos Congress Center, which is where the actual
00:27:28.740
event is taking place. And there were the hotels, some of the hotels were restricted only to people
00:27:33.740
with the, you know, special status or whatever, but the streets were open. And on the street,
00:27:39.920
you had all of these different houses and shops and booths. And some of these, some of these were
00:27:44.400
very weird and they were all fake. Like that's the great thing for the people that are all about
00:27:48.340
renewability and sustainability. They're fake. Like, I think we have a picture of the SAP house,
00:27:53.200
which is one of these things. So you look at this building and this is not the way the building
00:27:58.160
looks normally they've put up that facade and that's one of the the more muted ones there was
00:28:03.180
another one as well i'll show you the saudi house uh and the saudi house has uh there i think we
00:28:08.540
have a close-up too where you can see the intricate woodwork that they'll not that one no the uh of
00:28:14.820
the building itself whatever it is but there's a where you see the intricate woodwork that they've
00:28:19.880
put up and it's all fake it's all phony and since we did put it up let's throw that saudi cafe up
00:28:25.060
again. So Saudi Arabia, you can just go into the Saudi cafe and you can get a coffee or a pastry,
00:28:31.860
or I had this delicious fig pudding or date pudding that had like a lime sorbet on it.
00:28:37.140
And it came with a Saudi coffee on the side. There it is promoting Saudi tourism. And this
00:28:43.080
is the thing. Now I did this for the comedy of it. I'm not like a Saudi shill now, but everyone
00:28:47.340
was going along with it. Everyone was happy. Everyone was hunky dory. We've all decided we
0.99
00:28:51.340
like saudi arabia now and we're going to go along with this lie that they're this hospitable tourist
00:28:57.480
destination and it wasn't just the saudi cafe muhammad bin salman al saad the crown prince of
00:29:04.480
saudi arabia he has a foundation the muhammad bin salman foundation and he was giving out free ice
00:29:10.260
cream and they had a little ice cream booth set up outside the muhammad bin salman foundation
00:29:14.860
and you could get uh as you see there's saffron cardamom or i forget what the other one is there's
00:29:21.080
the third one, whatever on the bottom is, you can get different types of ice cream. And oh,
00:29:24.420
they had sprinkles you could put on and it was so delicious and no one wearing hijabs or kneecaps
1.00
00:29:29.300
there. And we're all supposed to just forget that wasn't like the world outraged when
0.99
00:29:34.400
Mohammed bin Salman ordered that journalist Jamal Khashoggi killed. I guess not because
00:29:40.640
once they give you ice cream, it doesn't matter anymore. But that was the whole thing. So much
00:29:45.240
of it was just phony. Everyone just going along with it, fake buildings, fake Saudi hospitality.
00:29:51.080
and and all of this stuff was open i mean i i walked into the saudi cafe i walked into india
00:29:55.640
house i walked into great i didn't go to greece house but i walked by greece house and they had
00:30:00.360
poland house and ukraine house and all of these things and all of these companies had these uh
00:30:05.240
displays and parties and some of them were invite only like facebook and google wouldn't let you in
00:30:10.520
unless you had an invitation but others were all too happy to bring bring you in like intel was
00:30:15.400
every time i walked by there was this guy from the intel house that was telling me oh you should come
00:30:19.240
we've got snacks, we've got food. And I mean, he knew looking at me that I, the snacks would get
00:30:23.580
me in. Uh, and I never actually ended up making it, but, uh, uh, maybe I, I had the date pudding
00:30:28.440
from Saudi Arabia, but I didn't have the orders from Intel. So this is the type of stuff that in
00:30:33.080
Davos, your life is just constructed around. It's like, which party do I want to go to? Because
00:30:37.800
this is all they're doing. I mean, one protester called it corporate Disneyland, which I felt was
00:30:42.860
a very good way of describing it. Uh, Lynn writes again, uh, were you able to get into any of the
00:30:48.860
meeting. So as I said, not officially, a lot of them were live streamed, but I was able to get
00:30:53.240
into all of these other spots, which were more revealing that were not official to WEF, but were
00:30:58.520
adjacent to it. And they were targeting the audiences because what's happening is these
00:31:02.760
companies spend millions and millions of dollars. They literally take over businesses that exist
00:31:08.360
throughout the year. And for, you know, 51 weeks, they're, you know, a clothing store or a ski shop,
00:31:15.000
But for one week a year, they evict them, empty everything out, fill it in with stuff
00:31:20.760
And they host these parties there and they host displays and companies are trying to
00:31:25.800
bring in government officials to, you know, make relationships and get, you know, ease
00:31:31.240
And then governments will hold them like the Namibian government and the Greek government
00:31:36.440
And they all hold these because they want to start attracting capital.
00:31:41.220
You've got this fusion of public and private sector that is where things get very, very
00:31:47.080
dicey because you don't know what discussions are happening behind closed doors.
00:31:51.000
You don't know what these relationships are forging are.
00:31:55.460
And that's where I think people are very uncomfortable and why it starts to look like
00:31:59.560
a plutocracy or a kleptocracy of just governing by, you know, wheeling, dealing, corrupt elites
00:32:06.760
And that's why people are so, I think, justifiably skeptical of what's happening here.
00:32:15.260
Are we going to own nothing and be happy about it?
00:32:17.760
You know, for people that have previously talked about this idea of in the future, owning
00:32:22.840
nothing and being happy about it, they sure tend to own a lot of things.
00:32:36.500
a lot of their stuff is public. They have private panels, but a lot of their panels are public. And
00:32:41.660
I think we need to focus on what it is that they want to talk about. They're very proud of a lot
00:32:47.120
of these things. They're very proud of this idea of championing so many of these discussions. I
00:32:53.260
mean, just take a look at Klaus Schwab. This was the chairman and founder of WEF, who at the very
00:32:57.980
beginning was talking about how what's happening there is going to alter the future, the course of
00:33:02.100
human history let's also be clear the future is not just happening the future is built by us
00:33:13.940
by a powerful community as you here in this room we have the means to improve the states of the
00:33:23.900
But two conditions are necessary. The first one is that we act all as stakeholders of larger communities,
00:33:36.900
that we serve not only our self-interests, but we serve the community.
00:33:42.900
That's what we call stakeholder responsibility. And second, that we collaborate.
00:33:49.900
And this is the reason why you find many opportunities here during the meeting to engage into very action and impact-oriented initiatives to make progress related to specific issues on the global agenda.
00:34:16.180
And you have to wonder, I mean, the most charitable defense of this is that it's all bluster, is that it's all just phony and nonsense and that they're all just so pretending to be important and puffing their chest and all of that.
00:34:28.080
That's like the most charitable defense, which is weird in and of itself.
00:34:33.880
That's Klaus Schwab's pitch to companies, to countries, that if you come here, this is the place you get things done.
00:34:41.300
And I would look at this and say, well, people are spending millions of dollars.
00:34:46.760
Government officials, when they show up, make big policy announcements there.
00:34:57.440
Would they be doing this if the power wasn't in the room?
00:35:00.780
If the future wasn't being built by the people there?
00:35:07.160
And this idea that Schwab indicated near the end there, stakeholder capitalism, that's what they call it.
00:35:15.300
It's this idea that capitalism is no longer about shareholders.
00:35:20.280
It's about companies and capitalists that have to be beholden to government interest, to community interest, to social interest, to UN interest.
00:35:28.200
And it's about diluting this idea of property and this idea of capitalism.
00:35:33.400
And one thing, I should have taken a picture of it.
00:35:36.760
I didn't. But there are these things called Sustainable Development Goals, which are UN
00:35:41.080
initiatives that are about like gender equality and education and sanitation and climate.
00:35:48.340
And they're very big. And the SDGs are kind of like the backbone of government priorities.
00:35:52.540
And also a lot of companies have signed on to SDGs. And there's an SDG logo, which is like a
00:35:58.280
semicircle or a full circle with these little wedges that almost look like trivial pursuit
00:36:03.160
pieces and they're all different colors each one representing one of the sdgs one of the
00:36:08.600
sustainable development goals and you'd walk around and you'd see people wearing these sdg pins
00:36:14.360
and you'd look at them and say well that uh oh that must be a un employee so you'd walk up to
00:36:18.520
them and there was one guy i'm like oh this guy must be with the un and i walked up to him and
00:36:22.120
it was brad smith who's the president of microsoft and then someone else is wearing a an sdg pin and
00:36:27.720
you walk up and it's like oh it's the head of sales force and someone else is wearing an sdg
00:36:32.120
pin and it's like someone else who runs some company. And you're like, why are these corporations
00:36:36.800
and their leaders wearing United Nations pins? And it's because the line between public and
00:36:44.640
private simply doesn't exist in Davos. Someone says here, do you think Klaus Schwab is the head
00:36:53.500
of it all? No. Well, I mean, he's the head of the WEF, but no, I don't think he's sitting back
00:36:59.900
back in the mountains of the Swiss Alps and pulling the strings on Canada or the UK or
00:37:06.180
France or anything like that. And this is where I think going there was important because there
00:37:10.620
needed to be this nuanced discussion about what was happening. I think the problem is you've got
00:37:15.260
WEF is putting out this ideological framework that a lot of companies and countries want to buy into.
00:37:22.940
And I think that when you have people like Justin Trudeau that love this agenda,
00:37:34.780
the amendments to the international health regulations
00:37:37.120
that are being worked on in Geneva, Switzerland,
00:37:46.000
I mean, a country can voluntarily exit a treaty
00:37:50.800
The point is that when a country is part of a treaty,
00:37:57.540
I mean, in international law, nothing, nothing can prevent a country from withdrawing a treaty.
00:38:03.100
And even if a country is in a treaty and breaks the rules, it's technically illegal, but there's
00:38:08.500
no enforcement of it. There's no higher power that can make a country do something.
00:38:13.920
The problem is that these countries want to. And this is what people forget. My issue with WEF is
00:38:20.500
not that Klaus Schwab is running Canada. My issue with WEF is that they're talking about what I
00:38:24.880
think are very dangerous and radical ideas that in Canada, government officials seem to love
00:38:30.380
and want to go along with. That's the big risk here. And that's what we need to stop. And when
00:38:38.380
all of these people are brought together in one room, why do you think it's so important for them
00:38:42.600
to have an in-person conference? They could do it all by Zoom. They could do this all by video
00:38:47.620
conference. It's because they want these people all under one roof. They want Francois-Philippe
00:38:53.480
champagne, to be able to shake hands with the head of some tech company behind the scenes. And
00:38:57.800
maybe they're going to work on, hey, I want you to set up an office in Canada. Maybe they're going
00:39:01.980
to be talking about policy and it's taking place in this very untransparent way. So that I think
00:39:08.540
is the risk of WEF to Canada. It's not an intergovernmental organization. It's not a body
00:39:14.520
that's created by countries. It's a body that's created by the private sector, but almost exists
00:39:20.940
as this like shadow un organization i mean canada gave wef i think it was like three million dollars
00:39:27.180
we reported over the last several years but most of uh salesforce or actually there's a freudian
00:39:33.020
slip most of wef's money comes from the private sector salesforce uh which is a tech company is
00:39:38.300
a big backer of it microsoft is a big backer most of their company money comes from the private
00:39:43.180
sector and and the left should hate that the left should hate that that we have all these government
00:39:48.300
officials bowing at uh bowing before this private sector organization but it's because they're
00:39:54.060
trying to make it so murky and it's all about the elites against everyone else more than it's about
00:39:59.980
left versus right and i don't think this should be just a so-called conservative conspiracy theory
00:40:06.300
to take aim at what's happening here and again no one wants to talk about the obvious no one
00:40:11.100
wants to talk about the effect especially from an oil and gas producing nation like canada
00:40:15.180
of what these policies are going to mean i mean mark carney who's the former governor of the bank
00:40:19.980
of canada then he was the governor of the bank of england now he's the un's special envoy for
00:40:25.020
climate i asked him about it and he didn't have time because it was a spontaneous interview
00:40:32.780
hi mr carney i never do uh i never do uh spontaneous i understand my one question is
00:40:41.580
because the Canadian oil and gas sector survive the net zero approach that's being promoted here
00:40:47.660
I as I said I never do you want if you want an interview with me uh like everybody else
00:40:53.340
you make a request okay and will you accept that like everybody else okay
00:41:00.060
so I will take him up on that I am going to make a request because I would love to speak with him
00:41:04.540
and I should say just as a fun story Mark Carney was walking around non-stop I saw him the day after
00:41:11.580
And I said, you know, can we do an interview now?
00:41:14.640
And to his credit, he laughed and said, well, think of how much less spontaneous it'll be tomorrow.
00:41:27.360
Because, again, they're not used to being around people that are going to ask challenging questions.
00:41:33.120
And True North's coverage, I should say, did something that mattered internationally.
00:41:39.820
Abhi Yamini, who you actually saw in the frame with Mark Carney. And he spoke to Mark Carney
00:41:44.160
after me and didn't get anywhere either. But I mean, Rebel News did great work there. True North,
00:41:49.940
I'm very proud of the work that I did and our team back in Canada. And the one thing that I think
00:41:54.780
needs to be said here is that no one else was doing it. No one else was talking about it.
00:42:00.800
And the clips that went viral, the clips of the Alibaba guy or this woman from Australia who
00:42:07.860
was talking about a recalibration of freedom of speech. I won't play it, but you've seen the
00:42:11.840
clip now. I mean, these clips that were circulating were because we were monitoring them
00:42:16.360
and putting those out. And it was everyone taking our footage and sharing. And we're glad because
00:42:21.020
we wanted people to see this. We wanted people to know what was happening. But so much of this
00:42:27.220
takes place in the shadows. And one thing that I'm particularly proud of here is speaking to
00:42:34.820
the Indian Minister of Gas and Petroleum, who on the panel, on the discussion, was saying,
00:42:42.300
yeah, we need to accelerate our transition and move off of oil and gas and green energy.
00:42:46.500
And they did a survey on that panel. And in that survey, they talked about how all these people
00:42:51.800
around the table were wanting to prioritize the energy transition. And he had a very different
00:42:58.020
note when I caught up with him privately on the streets of Davos.
00:43:01.060
on a panel about oil and gas and energy this morning do you think phasing out of fossil fuels
00:43:08.880
is actually a realistic goal look uh i said what i had to but you know if you were to do that survey
00:43:15.460
in uh different parts of the world if you were to do it for instance in south ash south asia or
00:43:20.900
africa or in latin america you'd get results that might be a little different from the kind of
00:43:26.180
results you're getting here so so he just admits that yeah when all of a sudden done you know
00:43:32.360
everywhere else in the world they're going to view this a lot differently than they are around the
00:43:36.420
table here and i thought that was an obvious point but it was a very candid one and i'm thinking you
00:43:41.280
know why uh why didn't he mention it in the room why didn't he mention it in the room if it was
00:43:46.480
just so self-evident but that's the whole point they all sit around the table and sit on their
00:43:51.000
panels and they talk about the world and the people in it in abstractions without understanding
00:43:55.680
that they are real people with real challenges. And that was why it was so important to be there,
00:44:01.320
to have a voice and to call out the elites, to put questions to them. I didn't play every video
00:44:07.380
that we did. We published a lot online. I think we'll have some more in the days ahead. But I
00:44:12.040
wanted to stress the importance of actually having independent media on the ground there.
00:44:16.440
And again, I mean, Switzerland is not an inexpensive place. And I almost feel bad. I
00:44:20.480
almost feel like it's self-indulgent to ask for support to do this. But I guarantee you it wasn't
00:44:25.800
a vacation. This was something that was very difficult work, but I think it was very important
00:44:30.200
work. And I have a couple of questions. I mean, the first is if you can support this and cover
00:44:36.260
our costs to have been there and covered this, please do. You can head on over to donate.tnc.news.
00:44:42.980
And the other that I would ask you is, would you want us to go back? Because they're going to be
00:44:46.980
doing this in January. And by all accounts, it's going to be a much bigger ordeal, because this
00:44:52.940
time, a lot of leaders sat it out. Justin Trudeau wasn't there. Boris Johnson wasn't there. Emmanuel
00:44:58.280
Macron wasn't there. The only G7 leader they had was Olaf Scholz of Germany. And then they had like
00:45:04.900
Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission and all the global people. But even then, not a
00:45:09.980
lot of them. So if they're going to go back to full strength WEF in January, which is their regular
00:45:16.380
schedule, ski season in the Alps. Would you want us to be there and cover this again? Because right
00:45:22.840
now, I mean, anyone can just look at the comment sections of our videos over the last few weeks.
00:45:28.580
And everyone has been asking about WEF for months and months and months and months and all of the
00:45:36.140
questions and stories and the appetite for content. So I don't know how much of that's going to be
00:45:40.280
there in January. So let us know what you think in the comments here. Should we go back in January?
00:45:46.380
and basically try to put, again, these questions to these people that tend to speak in abstractions.
00:45:52.160
Now, the one thing I did for fun, the one thing I did for fun, I didn't do it for me, I did it for
00:45:57.420
all of you, because I try to be a self-sacrificing person, and I'll surrender my dignity on the altar
00:46:02.280
of comedy. There was this field, this field, oh no, we don't even have it. Oh, I was going to play
00:46:08.440
a clip for you to mock myself, and I'm just being told that we don't actually have it, so I don't
00:46:13.780
actually get to mock myself, but if you head to my Twitter, it's the pin tweet of, I decided,
00:46:19.540
I know Julie Andrews in Sound of Music was in the Austrian Alps rather than the Swiss Alps,
00:46:23.320
but it just looked so perfect. So I replicated a classic movie moment. And that is something that
00:46:29.600
I will, you can look that up yourself. That's like part of the after show. That's like the,
00:46:34.260
the bonus, the bonus video I did to, to appeal to the, the donors of this, but in all honesty,
00:46:40.420
I want to just thank all of you who shared our content.
00:46:43.280
I mean, we had a global, global audience for this.
00:46:54.540
People around the world were following True North coverage.
00:46:58.180
And that was only because of you that believed in this,
00:47:00.680
that wanted to make it happen and amplified it.
00:47:06.360
or Duncan Shen, as they say in the Swiss Alps, where I was anyway.
00:47:11.560
But we'll all have a lot more to say about this next week when the show returns.
00:47:17.920
This is Canada's most irreverent talk show on True North, The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:47:25.440
Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:47:27.940
Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.