Juno News - February 03, 2024


Is the WEF growing in power? (ft. Ezra Levant & Avi Yemini)


Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

204.26529

Word count

2,353

Sentence count

3

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the Andrey Lawton Show, I catch up with three journalists who have been covering the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos for the past two years to talk about why they're there, what it's like covering the event, and why they chose to stay.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 you're tuned in to the andrew lawton show
00:00:05.900 i i wanted to share this interview i was going to last week and then everything got kind of
00:00:12.540 sidelined when the federal court decision came in that found the emergencies act to be
00:00:16.920 unconstitutional and it is a bit of a holdover a leftover i should say from my time in davos
00:00:23.280 covering the world economic forum annual meeting which i believe we are going to go back and do
00:00:28.860 the next one of so i've had some people asking already i think we're still trying to figure out
00:00:32.660 the accommodation situation which as you know is always the most annoying part of that process but
00:00:37.860 i think we can make it work without having to do some like cross-country commute every day that will
00:00:42.340 you know have us in the cars on the mountain roads but anyway i've complained about the commute too
00:00:45.980 much already i wanted to go back to the basics here go back to first principles and talk about the why
00:00:51.920 and why we started covering the world economic forum in 2022 why we went back in 2023 and again
00:00:58.840 this year and are likely doing so next year as well and it's simply put because no one else is doing
00:01:06.840 it well and i know there's a bit of arrogance inherent in that to say oh well you know we're
00:01:11.220 doing something that no one else in the world is able to do i would say it's that no one else in the
00:01:16.060 world is willing to do there have been considerably few players that have decided to go up and you know
00:01:22.860 talk to the global elites to put a microphone in the face of the queen of the netherlands or the 0.99
00:01:27.000 cfo of google or mark carney or whatever and ask these questions that matter to people but often
00:01:33.160 are never asked because no one who's ever in the room with them wants to ask because they want to
00:01:37.680 just keep getting invited back into the room so there's something rather blissful in not being in
00:01:42.460 the room in the first place because you don't have anything to protect you have nothing to lose
00:01:46.600 except your integrity which is only going to be lost if you don't go and do the work that people
00:01:51.920 around the world i think need you to do so that's a bit of a wind up to why we went there and we have
00:01:57.040 been joined by some other independent journalists there was a lovely japanese youtuber last year
00:02:01.680 masaka ganaha that i met and actually appeared on her show talking about davos and also rebel news has
00:02:08.940 sent i think increasingly large crews every year so i caught up with abhi amini and ezra levant on the
00:02:15.320 streets of davos to talk about why it is they're there as well take a look well as i've been saying
00:02:20.880 throughout all of my content this week you never know who you were going to run into on the streets
00:02:24.840 of davos i've spent a great deal of time chasing after some of the big elites people from all walks
00:02:30.760 of life here including steve sedgwick from cnbz although he's been he's been friendly to us riff
00:02:34.900 rap out here on the streets uh but look at it look at rebel chumming around with the mainstream media
00:02:40.740 there well uh two of the guys that we've been in some foot races two of the guys that we have been
00:02:46.580 uh in foot races with chasing after some of these figures are right here with me abhi yamini from
00:02:51.140 rebel news and the rebel commander himself ezra levant this is i mean abhi and i you and i were here
00:02:56.860 in 2022 working for for different outlets but we had kind of a good uh camaraderie going on here
00:03:02.620 what's your read on kind of the experience then versus two years later i reckon uh it's a lot busier
00:03:09.740 i don't know if there's more vips but there's definitely a lot more people and that you can see that
00:03:14.520 on the street as well as in the car parks for example you just can't get parking so that's that's
00:03:19.300 the main difference uh the focus is is pretty similar uh maybe not on the signs you see the ai is
00:03:25.300 is is really dominating the the discussion on i guess the featuring on all the signs but the
00:03:30.860 discussions are still uh climate change and um sustainability is the buzzword in town which
00:03:37.160 always feels fun because it's a second word it's a second sentence it's a second word in every second
00:03:42.860 sentence here uh when they just don't get the irony of it do you think ezra that the influence
00:03:47.780 of the organization has gotten greater or lesser in the last couple of years and do you feel their
00:03:53.680 security the security they feel about their position has changed in that time well i think
00:03:59.420 the best thing that ever happened to the folks who come here was covet it gave a huge boost to
00:04:06.240 international companies which are the bread and butter here there's no small businesses here
00:04:10.320 this is transnational corporations this is amazon jeffrey bezos personal wealth doubled during the
00:04:16.680 lockdowns because everyone was at home they had to we interacted with each other through tech and a
00:04:23.820 lot there's a lot of tech here there's a lot of pharma here now there's a lot of ai which worries me
00:04:28.740 because there's a lot of censorship here too i mean i can tell you twitter is not here but meta and google
00:04:35.200 are and so i would say that the wef has been strengthened enormously in real measurable terms
00:04:43.420 financially they had enormous success in terms of political power i mean there are there's royalty
00:04:49.440 here there's prime ministers and presidents here this year president zelensky of ukraine
00:04:55.460 the israeli president the argentine president
00:04:58.400 in terms of public perception yes there's been more criticism in the world economic forum too
00:05:06.340 but what do they care avi scrummed and you were in that same scrum what am i saying the two years
00:05:11.820 scrummed dr tedros adenem uh the head of the world health organization really the globe's anthony fauci
00:05:20.220 and you guys landed a few punches on him verbally but what does he care he can't be fired he can't be
00:05:27.380 voted out to you it was like ants at a picnic i mean he looked down and you said oh ants i mean he
00:05:33.400 what does he care most of the people here are democratically immune they're a permanent class of 1.00
00:05:41.900 ruler that's how it is we are back part of the fun of davos that you never know who you're going to run
00:05:47.000 into as i said at the top and we took a moment because uh we thought uh well no we thought you
00:05:52.200 guys saw someone that you wanted to do a bit of a reprise on so you had to scurry away but we're
00:05:56.980 back we're as standing as close to original positions as possible but we're honest media
00:06:01.220 we wanted to acknowledge the cut and not fool you by throwing some b-roll over it not that we've ever
00:06:04.960 done that uh so before we broke away avi i was going to ask you about uh your sense here because
00:06:10.160 one thing that i found a little bit interesting is that a lot of these folks are not used to being
00:06:14.720 questioned here but this year they seem to be a lot more skeptical i'm seeing people hiding their
00:06:19.080 name tags i'm seeing people cross the street i don't want to say it's because of you and i i think
00:06:23.660 we may be contributing though do you agree i certainly am yeah you are and it's funny because
00:06:29.020 we have different styles which is fun you're polite i think if i wasn't here you'd probably get away with
00:06:33.860 it yeah because i like i think ted ross would have like spoken to me but then you like go in there
00:06:39.000 and like go for the jugular right away and he just shuts down but that's part of it and and these
00:06:44.200 people are not used to being surrounded by critical media are they no no and and you're
00:06:50.080 right like i think there is that you know i've seen even other people and and it should be mentioned
00:06:55.220 there's a lot of people that come in here that come up on the side and go oh amazing work we love
00:06:58.960 what you're doing good on you you know they're probably just opportunistic and using the the event
00:07:04.200 as a networking but you know people have seen us running up and down scrumming um political figures
00:07:11.220 or business figures or any any of these so i think the word certainly got out there and i think it
00:07:16.020 also got out there in past years wasn't it last year when you actually got accredited it had suddenly
00:07:21.100 listed the second year to um to actually hide your identification when you came out here and i think
00:07:26.660 that was from our first year of being here you and i yeah so ezra i'll ask you where you think the
00:07:32.020 future of this is because there are a lot of people that really i've not been able to get to answer
00:07:37.080 the question that has really been burning on my mind which is what do you get out of it i want to
00:07:41.020 hear some of the business figures say what is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to be here
00:07:45.880 and i want to hear the politicians say what it is now i have my own suspicions but i've yet to get an
00:07:50.580 answer from that i suspect whatever they've gotten out of it in the past they're still getting out of
00:07:54.620 it and in that sense it'll probably continue all of this won't it you know as you walk up and down
00:07:58.540 the streets you overhear a snippet of a conversation just a second or two let me give you two snippets that i
00:08:05.380 heard today hand to god we made 400 million off that 300 million dollar loan like just little snippets
00:08:15.700 i don't know who they were what they were talking about that's what i overheard you probably heard
00:08:20.180 similar things now some of the talk is just puffery and bs and people trying to climb up the greasy pole
00:08:27.840 but there is no denying that the net worth and the amount of assets controlled by the people here
00:08:35.060 is in the tens of trillions blackrock itself controls 10 trillion just one company that's
00:08:41.280 larry fink and like i say there's presidents and there's royalty so what do they get out of it
00:08:47.120 they have an elite gathering much of it hidden there's no transcript there's no hand service we call it
00:08:55.280 there's no question period there's no official opposition
00:08:57.960 um the media is tightly controlled what do they get out of it it's a private playground where they
00:09:03.960 can frolic and do their dirty deals in canada christia freeland came here met with mckinsey 0.99
00:09:09.040 ta-da they got a nine-figure contract from the canadian government that's what they do here and so i think
00:09:16.060 they would like to ban citizen journalists now i don't know if switzerland will go along with that
00:09:21.740 let me give you a quick anecdote um i scrummed someone from the rockefeller foundation which i
00:09:27.660 think is a very legitimate thing she's a public person who has been spending tens of millions of 1.00
00:09:32.020 dollars in canada to disrupt our oil and gas economy so she ducked into a pavilion and a security guard
00:09:37.820 came out say you out you go now move well i know a little bit about the law in switzerland not a lot
00:09:43.420 and i said no i said you go get the cop and he walked over to the cop across the street
00:09:47.880 i could see them talking talking talking talking talking and nothing just because some security
00:09:54.860 guard doesn't want me talking to a vvip the swiss police couldn't give a damn as long as and i and 0.81
00:10:01.460 i later walked over to the cop and say hey i just want to tell you my intentions he said as long as you
00:10:05.580 don't touch people actually he said it slightly differently but um i think that you might see the
00:10:13.840 world economic forum try to uh keep citizen journalists out i don't know how successful
00:10:20.140 they'll be all right well i think we're going to continue covering it because no one else is and
00:10:24.220 clearly the audience loves it i know that we are from different outlets but i think the more
00:10:28.180 independent journalists doing this the better so avi amini ezra levant thank you so much and
00:10:32.200 ofiderson that was avi and ezra on the streets of davos well it was also me on the streets of davos now
00:10:39.480 i'm on the streets of dc so another uh actually that's there's a weird question i wonder where the
00:10:44.380 people uh where who you'd rather spend time with the people of davos or the people of dc i would say
00:10:48.880 the people of dc because uh dc you can find some normal real people here davos there are very few of
00:10:55.740 those now i shouldn't say none i mean the the people that live that work in davos are are good but
00:10:59.980 they're not the ones who live in davos and they would never call themselves davos people like uh christopher
00:11:05.180 freeland and mark carney and all of them well but anyway uh that is it for today we'll be back
00:11:09.380 tomorrow with more of the andrew lawton show and another update from the great climate free speech
00:11:13.780 trial of the century here on true north thank you god bless and good day to you all thanks for
00:11:19.080 listening to the andrew lawton show support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news
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