1/13/26: Yanis Varoufakis On Trump, Venezuela, The Fed & MORE!

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2:14All right, guys, we are very lucky to be joined this morning by Yanis Varoufakis. He is an economist. He is a bestselling author. He is a podcast host of The Econoclast, and he is the former finance minister of Greece. Great to see you, sir. Good to see you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, of course. So let's start with this. first element, put this up on the screen. This is the president of the United States claiming to be the president, the acting president of Venezuela. I'm curious, just off the top here, how significant you think the kidnapping of Maduro and now Trump's claims that we run Venezuela and we're going to take their oil.

2:49How significant do you think this mode of U.S. operation and foreign policy is to the world and to our own politics? Well, the significant, there's no doubt, The question is what kind of significance are we detecting in this very confusing stage that we found ourselves in? Just seeing the picture that you put on your screen reminded me that this is not the first time he does it. Remember, only a few months ago, he declared himself to be the owner, the person who has actually annexed, personally, that has never happened in history before, Gaza. He declared himself to be the head of a company that is taking over Gaza.

3:28And then, of course, you know, before we had the chance to scratch our heads and see what that means for the people of Gaza, whose lives are devastated and, you know, whose genocide is continuing, he abducts Maduro and he declares himself to be the acting ruler or owner of Venezuela. And then on the same day, he talks about Greenland. I wouldn't be surprised if this confusion is strategic. And the whole point is to continue to build up a reputation for accumulating territories, accumulating companies, accumulating stable coins, accumulating different kinds of resources for himself and his clique in order to make it far more alluring for powerful people around the world, in the United States as well, to do deals with him, hoping to get some crumbs off his overladen table.

4:33One of the things that we've seen, backing up your point, we can put the next one up here on the screen. For example, ExxonMobil, one of the largest oil companies here in the United States, apparently told the president at a recent meeting on Friday that actually they weren't all that interested in investing in Venezuela, President Trump saying they're playing too cute, saying he may block them from some eventual deal. I do think that this bolsters your point, but I'm wondering if you see this as any bigger strategic play that may not just have Trump and his own personal interest or those around him, but a bigger kind of driving motivation for the United States.

5:07Well, there's no such thing as the United States. We should never talk in terms of national interest. There is no such thing. There are different cliques, there are different ruling classes, and they have different interests. The interests of some of the majority of the people in the United States never had anything to do with the agenda and the strategy of democratic presidents, of republican presidents. I'm just stating this so that you know where I'm coming from. But there is a strategic plan. And, you know, one of the great mistakes of the Democrats in the United States and of the centrists in Europe is they have dismissed Trump as a buffoon who has absolutely no strategic vision.

5:48You know, he's haphazard. He moves from one disaster to another. He's a fool who somehow has managed to defeat them so handsomely. I don't take that view. I consider him to be a political adversary, a political, if you want, even aesthetically speaking, enemy of mine. But I take very seriously his strategic plan. And you know what? He's put it on paper, not so much himself. But, you know, before his inauguration, second inauguration, I studied very, very carefully the texts that have come out of his team. Like, you know, things that Scott Besson had said and written.

6:31the famous Mar-a-Lago paper. It's clear what the strategy is. Trump looks at the last 60 years and what he sees is a period that some people refer to it as the period of globalization. Others refer to it as the neoliberal period or the globalist period. It's a period that started in 1971 with Richard Nixon, when Richard Nixon and his team, not himself personally, blew up the Bretton Woods system. So why did that happen? It happened because the United States ceased to be a surplus country. It slipped into a deficit position. And, you know, Henry Kissinger, who was part of Nixon's team then, even before he became foreign minister, before his move to the State Department, when he was still at the National Security Council, So he put a very simple question to his team and said, well, now we're a deficit country.

7:31How can we maintain our hegemony? And the answer is blow up the bread and wood system, use the dollar as a weapon, devalue the dollar while enhancing its reserve currency stages, its hegemonic stages. So, you know, Trump looks at that and says, I want to do this again because the Nixon shock is pettering out. After 2008, American hegemony is being seriously contested. I want to give it another 12. And I'm going to do it in a way that will make me and my mates lots of money as well. So, you know, the devaluation of the dollars is not a failure. It is an aim. The issue of stable coins and the legitimation of cryptocurrencies, the Genius Act that was passed recently by Congress or in Congress, through Congress, is an attempt to privatize fiat money, the dollar.

8:27The attack on the Federal Reserve is part of this plan. There is a clash between old money and new money. There is Wall Street on the one hand that is very coy about this whole thing, but then there are the tech brolicarcs. There is Tevers that are issuing stable coins at the expense of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve. So there is a strategy. There is a huge conflict within different oligarchic interests. And Trump is playing a very smart game in keeping all these people hating each other and, you know, competing for his graces. So I listen to a lot of your appearances and your speeches that you give.

9:13And I think it's really important to assume that your adversary is not just an idiot, that there is some sort of a strategy there. But sometimes I do have trouble holding that in my head with Trump. For example, when I think of his tariff policy, which, you know, from the jump, the percentages that were chosen were seemingly random or AI generated. You know, he'll go into these negotiations and come out of them basically rolling the tariffs back or going back to where we started. We now have an announcement yesterday that now anyone who does any sort of trade with Iran is going to have a 25 percent tariff.

9:47You've also had situations where his own personal emotions and grievances seem to be driving the tariff policy. Brazil being a key example here, where initially he was mad at Lula over their prosecution of Bolsonaro. Then, according to journalist Glenn Greenwald, Lula came in and charmed him and said, that Bolsonaro guy, you wouldn't like him. He's weak. He's always in the hospital. He's kind of a loser. Trump decides he likes Lula, rolls back the tariffs. So when I look at those sorts of things, I'm like, how can this be a grand strategy when it's so all over the place and so driven by his own emotions and personal grievances day to day.

10:21Look, I can't resist the temptation to agree with much of what you said. But at the same time, let me continue along the lines of my earlier position. I mentioned Richard Nixon before. Now, we all know what a flawed character he was, what a psychopath he was, really. I mean, he was moody, he was a very poor excuse for human nature. And yet, it was under his administration that the world changed. They blew up the post-war miracle system, the Bretton Woods system, and they replaced it with chaos. It was designer chaos. John Connolly, the Treasury Secretary of Richard Nixon, traveled to Europe and effectively did a trump on them.

11:12He said, you know, guys, you're on your own. The dollar is our currency, but from today, it's going to be your huge problem. Don't give a damn. You can go and jump. This is all about maintaining and enhancing American hegemony while at the same time increasing our deficits. And I'm going to divide the dollar. Now, you mentioned the use of tariffs by Donald Trump. Well, he's not the first one to have used tariffs as a ramming rod, as a weapon. Ronald Reagan in 1985. Remember the so-called Plaza Accords, the Plaza Debates? What did he do? He got the Japanese in one room and said, okay, you have grown your trade surplus with the United States immeasurably and I'm going to smack you over the head with a blunt instrument.

12:07And the blunt instrument is 150 % tariffs if you don't agree to revalue, to increase the value of the yen, effectively to devalue the American dollar vis-a-vis the Japanese currency. And, you know, they rolled over. And the result is that Japan is finished, kaput, ever since the Plaza Accords. So, you know, all this, I mean, in a sense, you're quite right. He's bringing a new intensity of chaotic behavior, and a lot of it is personal. But, you know, you said that there were AI or randomly chosen tariff rates. Look, by the way, there were not. There was a very simple deterministic formula. He simply computed his tariffs, the Liberation Day tariffs, in proportion to the trade deficit the United States had in particular countries.

13:05It was really very, there was nothing reciprocal about them. It was, you know, the greater your trade surplus towards the United States, the greater the tariff I'm going to slap on you. But he never meant to keep these. These were simply, you know, these blunt instruments that he used to batter people around, to hit them about the head, and then to say, okay, now come and negotiate with me, each one of you did it separately. Now, he has gone into a territory of personal self-celebration that we've never seen from any American president in the past. That's quite correct. I mean, I was astonished at the way he has behaved vis -à-vis Prime Minister Modi of India.

13:49One would have thought that the United States would be very eager to see India move away from China, move away from the BRICS, you know, go into bed with the Trump administration. He hasn't done that. And instead, he has chosen to make the issue of whether he was the one that stopped the recent skirmish war between India and Pakistan. determine whether he's going to increase the tariffs or not. So he does that. But, you know, the madman strategy, we have to remember, was devised by Rand Corporation in the 1950s as a rational, game-theoretical way of behaving because if you convince people that you are mad, then they will think twice before they confront you.

14:40Yeah. I am fairly convinced, so it has been effective enough. Yeah, there you go. No, you're absolutely right. Actually, you mentioned the Federal Reserve, given your expertise. I'm curious for what your view is here about Trump's current attack on the Federal Reserve. You're saying it's in a privatized manner. There's also some complaint about interest rates domestically here in the United States. I do also just curious for your take for kind of the global outcry of support that Powell now has. I mean multiple central bank leaders from around the world this morning signing a letter saying that they are supportive of Jerome Powell.

15:14How do you see that? You were talking about oligarchic interests, the Federal Reserve, obviously a key note in that. By the way, these central bankers will never learn. By signing that letter in support of Jerome Powell, they're handing a huge, huge gift over to Donald Trump. because Donald Trump's base hates all these people. So when they see that they are coalescing together in support of the Fed's chairman, you know, Trump is applauding all this. You know, it's amazing, you know, those centrist, the liberal establishment, how inane they are. Do you remember during the Brexit referendum in Britain when, you know, Mario Draghi from the Central Bank of Europe and various finance ministers and bankers and central bankers generally were warning the British people, don't you dare vote for Brexit because Armageddon is going to befall you.

16:14And I knew at that moment that Brexit would win because these kinds of letters of support for the liberal establishment don't help the liberal establishment at all. No, look, what's happening here is this. There are different discussions you could have. One is, is the interest rate policy of the Fed appropriate? I hate to say that. I really love to say that. But I think that Trump is right. The rate of interest is not going, if it's going to stay at such high levels, it's not going to do anything in order to reduce the cost of living, to reduce inflation. Inflation is not controlled by interest rates anymore.

16:53We have to understand that now we have what I call in a recent book of mine entitled Technofitalism. Sorry for plugging it, but it's important in order to make the point that if you go to groceries around the United States, not just Walmart or Amazon, but bricks and mortar groceries, many of them, thousands of them, are being controlled in terms of their pricing by Instacart, which is a techno-feudal company that effectively uses very sophisticated algorithmic systems for ensuring that you cannot compare prices between different stores. You cannot even compare prices you pay with the prices that others pay.

17:40It's intense first-degree price discrimination, which is algorithmic. And we know that Instacart on its own, along with Amazon.com, have contributed to an increase in the value of groceries by 30%. Now, there's nothing that the Federal Reserve can do that. Even if they put up interest rates to 10%, that kind of technological inflation, inflation created by what I call technologicalism, is not going to go away. So I fear, I hate saying that, that on the question of interest rates, I think that Trump is right. But there's a bigger question, the question about the so-called hypothesis or aspiration for central bank independence.

18:22The idea that the elected government shouldn't run monetary policy, monetary policy should be handed over to experts who, on behalf of the whole of society, make dispassionate apolitical decisions. Well, you know, that's rubbish. There's no such thing as an apolitical decision. Who sets interest rates is a political decision. And, you know, you have a class conflict. You have debtors and you have lenders. When you increase the interest rate, you favor one at the expense of the other. So it's a political decision. Now, the gist, however, of it is, remember, the Federal Reserve Bank is not, it's not even a state bank.

19:09it belongs to wall street uh formally and not just formally but in terms of you know uh when when they they speak of the independence of the central bank independence from whom independence from congress independence supposedly from the president but not independence from jp morgan or the bank of america so dependence on the bankers uh whom they're bailing out when the bankers' bets go ory. So, personally, I don't have much time for independence, the independence of the central bank. Once upon a time, there wasn't even this discussion. I'm old enough to remember a time when no central bank was independent.

19:51The Bank of England was bound by its relationship with the British government and so on. What we now have, however, is not that Donald Trump agreed with people like me and wants to democratize the federal reserve and take it away from the bankers no he is representing big tech he's representing the stable coin industry he's representing you know facebook zuckerberg and several upstarts that want to privatize the american dollar and they want to make use of the genius act in order to do this and you know wall street is represented through the fed so there's a clash between old banking money and new techno feudal money.

20:34And Trump is taking the side of the latter. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated. And Black America is out of breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's Almormata, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr.

21:15King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. and it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It seems like just yesterday that the Two Guys Five Rings podcast was in Paris for the Olympics. And now we're heading to Milan for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games. I'm Bowen Yang. And I'm Matt Rogers. And we'll join athletes from 93 countries as Two Guys Five Rings hits the Italian Alps for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games.

22:00Open your free iHeartRadio app. Did we mention it's free? Search Two Guys Five Rings and listen now. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology.

22:41Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. its crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to talk to you some about the ideas in your book, but first, if you could tell our audience a little bit about, you were one of the most deep faked men on the internet, which is, I mean, it sounds sort of impressive, but I don't think it's really a positive thing.

23:28There are so many videos that really, I mean, really look like you, really sound like you, really appear to be things that, you know, content that you would say or along the lines of things that you would say. Can you talk about how you discovered this and how difficult it is to parse through whether this is real Yanis Varoufakis or AI Yanis Varoufakis and also how the tech companies involved responded when you reached out to them and flagged for them that this was happening in a widespread manner? It's such a dubious honor to be one, probably the most deepfaked person on the internet. You know, I have no idea why this has happened.

24:07Absolutely none. Usually have theories about everything. But on this, I'm stumped. I have to confess that. The way I discovered this, I received a very flattering text message on WhatsApp from an American scholar, whose name I'm not going to mention, of high regard and somebody I really admire. And he was congratulating me on a video I had done on some economic matter. I can't remember exactly what it was. And he had included the link to the YouTube video and I clicked on it. to admire myself, to say, okay, well, this guy, whom I highly appreciate, liked that video. Let me remind myself of which this video was.

24:52And I started looking at it. And it took almost two minutes before I realized it wasn't me. And what's even worse is why I realized it wasn't me. Because I was wearing a blue shirt with this background here, but that blue shirt had never left my island home in Eginen. And I thought, how come I'm wearing that blue shirt against this backhand? That's when I started thinking, hang on a second, I don't remember saying these things. But the even eerier aspect of it was that they were things I could have said. But then, you know, interjected within that flow of arguments that I could have made, which I hadn't made, there were statements that I would never have made.

25:36And that's where the danger starts. part comes, especially for people who are politically exposed as I am. I have lots of enemies that would love to, you know, present me as somebody that said something, let's say, anti-Semitic in order to take the wind out of my criticism of Israel. Similarly with Russia, you know, I have made enemies everywhere because I believe that Putin is a war criminal. At the same time, I think NATO are war criminals still in the way they've been expanding and giving Putin the opportunity to do that which he's doing. But if you're standing against both NATO and Putin, it's very easy for somebody to use deepfake in order to insert a sentence in what you're saying that completely destroys your credibility.

26:25So I wrote to Google because the videos I saw were mostly on YouTube. They were on Instagram and on TikTok. So I wrote to Google and I didn't get an answer for days. And then they asked me to fill forms in and I filled them in. And then they asked me to fill some more forms in and I did that as well. And then it took, you know, seven, eight days before they brought down that particular channel. And then it reappeared 20 seconds later again in YouTube under a different name, different channel. And it's very clear that, you know, this is not incompetence on the part of big tech. It's their business model.

26:58You know, my fake versions have a lot more views than I have. So they make a lot of money out of that. And Google are simply not interested. And, you know, I talk to other people who are similarly deep faked, like John Milshheimer from Chicago University and my great friend Jeff Sachs from Columbia University. And we are in the same boat, you know. do I spend the rest of my life litigating against big tech? I mean, I don't have the resources. I certainly don't have the time. You know, I'm getting on in life. I'm not going to waste five years of my life doing that. Would I win? Would I remain solvent before the court case is finished?

27:43So it's one of the situations where you realize that supposedly here in the liberal West, we have rights. We have no rights. We do not even own our own audiovisual image. That is terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. I mean, the context of your book, which you mentioned earlier, techno-feudalism and your own experience, kind of bringing the thread of these together, how do you view the future that we're heading into where we see the rise of AI? We recently had Jensen Wong, the CEO of NVIDIA, on a podcast talking about this. We wanted to get your reaction. Guys, let's go ahead and play the clip. This is a technology that has the potential to automate many aspects of human labor very soon.

28:32And I'm curious the degree to which you feel a responsibility for making that transition go well. What AI will do is to make tasks that we do in our job more efficient. Our job is not to wrangle a spreadsheet. Our job is not to type into a keyboard. Our job is generally more meaningful than that. I'm fairly confident that AI will drive productivity, revenue growth, and therefore more hiring. There's a belief that the world's GDP is somehow limited at$100 trillion. Well, what's likely to happen is AI is going to cause that$100 trillion to become$200 trillion,$300 trillion,$500 trillion. dollars.

29:14There's no fundamental limit to the size of a GDP. And the number of people in the world that is participating in this GDP and the$100 trillion GDP is actually quite small. And so what if we brought the rest of the world, the rest of society, the rest of the world's population, empower them with AI, give them the opportunity to participate in the GDP, and cause this GDP to quintuple? So you're seeing the pitch that is made there, your reaction, sir? Well, I'm aghast at how such a very smart, clearly competent businessman has such a low level of understanding of what capitalism or what I call techno-fidalism is like.