The Life Raft for Billionaires: Why Tech Titans Are Buying New Zealand

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1:43David McWilliams: How are you doing there? It is time for the podcast. And today the podcast is coming from really what can be definitely regarded as the end of the earth. I am in the closest major urban conurbation to the Antarctic. That is how far away this place is. Good enough for you. I am in the South Island, John, of New Zealand. I have just done a gig in Christchurch last night, which is a lovely city I'll tell you about now. How'd the gig go? fully sold out wow one part of me was walking on I think this is great the other part of me thinks this is places so far away that if anyone turned up they'd come out to see it right so you'd have even local emos coming out to see economics last night you know a guy talking about turnips yeah I'll go to that no problem I'll go to the the turnip mania I'll go to talk I'll go listen to him some Irish bloke talking about turnips but it was rammed in this really really gorgeous theatre called the Piano really beautiful theatre new theatre and this is actually important for the discussion we're going to have.

2:46David McWilliams: Completely jammed, mainly Kiwis. There was obviously a good few expat Irish here, and I explained to you why they are down in this part of the world. Loads and loads of podcast supporters, John. In fact, I was given a, which I thought was a bag of jellies for you. Oh, fantastic. Bring them on home. Bring them on home. So it is... Have you just been eating them, Mac? Your mythology, no, I haven't. That's the other thing. Your mythology extends wide and far, Johnny Boyd. Wide and far. Thank you, New Zealand. Yeah, you'll love it. Exactly. So I'm in the South Island, right? So obviously New Zealand, two islands.

3:25David McWilliams: North Island, a little bit larger than Ireland. The South Island, about the size of the UK. It's absolutely huge and unbelievably, unbelievably sparsely populated. And as I said, Christchurch is the big, big city in the South Island. and yet it's amazingly British feeling. So the North Island, they just say Auckland is much more Asian, it's much more Maori, it's much more cosmopolitan, whereas here this place feels a little bit like, and I don't mean disparagingly, but it's the feel you get from, it's quiet, its architecture is unbelievably British of the Victorian age, particularly the central area.

4:06David McWilliams: Now you will know, John, from your love of all things geological, that there was a major, major earthquake here in 2011, 2012. And the city had to be rebuilt. And that is one of the reasons there's so many Irish tradesmen down here. Because when loads of fellows lost their job after the 2008 crash in Ireland, tradesmen, foremen, builders, whatever, New Zealand, but particularly Christchurch, had to rebuild the center of the city. So a whole host of Irish people came down here. There are now 17 ,816 Irish-born citizens of New Zealand, which is quite a few. But the figure is up 40 % since 2010. 40 % increase, right?

4:55And the draw in was not only the 2008 crash here, but the need for builders and tradesmen after the earthquake. Yeah, wow, that's amazing. Actually, I have to say, Mike, I started going through the motions of getting a New Zealand visa way back in. Didn't you? Yeah, it must have been about 94, 95.

5:17David McWilliams: I had no idea. Yeah, we ended up, it just didn't happen. It's very, I mean, what I want to talk about today is the very remoteness of it. So the podcast today is going to be about New Zealand, but it's going to be about how the billionaire class led by Peter Thiel, who you know is the man who financed J.D. Vance's campaign and is very, very proximate to the White House, how he has bought up just not about half an hour drive from where I am, 500 acres of land in a place called Lake Wanaka. Well, it's not about half an hour drive. In fact, look, when I actually looked at the drive, it's about eight hour drive.

5:57David McWilliams: Because that's... Let me... Details, shmeetels. Details, shmeetels. It looks like this in the map, okay? Hey, it's something across the way, right? Half an hour in a very, very fast... Geography was never your strong point. No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm very much the pin on the back of a donkey's tail geographer. But anyway, here we are. What I want to talk about is the remoteness. But first, let's talk about New Zealand. So I've just done an architecture, because you know I'm a bit odd in the morning. I get up early and I've just done an architectural walk. Yeah, I've just done an architectural walk.

6:29And I want to talk to you about what you see here.

6:32David McWilliams: The evidence in the architecture, why people came here in the first place, and what is happening to the tech refugee class who want to find a bolt hole out of what they believe is inevitable collapse of society. Peter Thiel being the main, main guy, and why they have bought huge amounts of land here in New Zealand as their, in effect, life raft for billionaires. So we're going all over the shop today in this podcast. We're going to start here at the University of Canterbury. John? The ironic thing, though, is that it's the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and Zuckerberg and all those guys. They're the architects of our modern technology society.

7:24This is the crazy thing, John.

7:26David McWilliams: And they're going, no, no, we're fucked, lads. This is the crazy thing. So the very architects of the technotopia that is running large parts of the world also believe that the thing is going to collapse because of the very technology that they are profiting from. This is the strange thing. So this podcast is going to be, I know they make the Lord of the Rings down here. This is going to be like Lord of the Rings for economics, John. All sorts of mad stuff, right? You've been gowned off. Exactly. Exactly. But I was walking around this morning. Gollum, maybe. I think I'm a much more Gollum-like character, John.

8:05David McWilliams: Sitting, festering in my own juices down here. Anyway, it's interesting that if you look, I always think that architecture is evidence. So architecture tells you something about the people who went before, what they were doing here, etc. So in a sense, what makes New Zealand very different from Australia is New Zealand was never a penal criminal colony. That's a huge difference between the Australian and New Zealand European experience. Of course, the main experience, and we're going to talk in subsequent podcasts about Australia, about Aboriginals, about indigenous people, about the Maori, etc.

8:44David McWilliams: But we have broadly the same sort of pattern of colonization, except for the fact that there were never any criminals in New Zealand. They were small crop holders. And this is the interesting thing, in the same way as our tech brethren who are now buying big tracts of New Zealand are evangelicals, kind of like a doomsday cult that believe that the world is going to end. There were also evangelical Christians who came down here, exactly like the Christians who went to America on the Mayflower, who believed the world was going to end and they had to create a new Jerusalem in the United States. okay yeah and there were those type of people who came largely from scotland to the south island who were evangelical presbyterian types and they of course some of them also believed in this sort of doomsday cult that they had to get away from the united kingdom from scotland from england because it had been corrupted by the industrial revolution it had been corrupted by capitalism they had to get back to some arcadian rural ideal and they found it here now of course the price was paid by the Maoris, who were fucked off their land, and one of the most outrageous treaties was the treaty between the Maoris and the English in 1848.

9:59What did they agree to?

10:01David McWilliams: To sell New Zealand for about tuppence hapenny. Yeah, exactly. And they, of course, most of the Maoris couldn't speak English, so they couldn't understand what they were agreeing to, all that sort of stuff. But, you know, that is what happened in the Victorian age, right? Yeah, I mean, that was the story of the world over. you know? Yeah, it was the story of Ireland too. I mean, don't forget, Ireland was the original blueprint for British colonialism. You rob the land, you shove the people off their land, you recreate things, you destroy the domestic Brethren law, the domestic language, the domestic institutions, you expel the leaders, the flight of the earls, and you basically emasculate the population so that you can colonize.

10:45David McWilliams: It was a really, it was a classic playbook and they did exactly the same thing down here right but this podcast isn't about saying who did what whatever these things happened this is history but when you look at the architecture here so christ church was planned on a grid system by english people anglicans with scottish farmers all around it was a very very protestant town and even now the memorials are all to the First World War. So it's got that feel. It's the same feel if you go to parts of rural England, sort of parochial, provincial England, where the most significant thing in the centre of the village is the memorial to the fallen dead, not of the Second World War, but of the First World War.

11:28Of the British or the New Zealanders?

11:31David McWilliams: Of the New Zealanders. 18 ,000 New Zealanders were killed in the First World War. It was a huge amount. The Anzac troops were killed in Gallipoli. And the fascinating thing was back then, there was no such thing as a New Zealand citizen. Everybody who was born here was a British citizen. Likewise, everybody who was born in Australia before 1951 was a British citizen. And they learned British geography, British history. They learned everything about British culture. And then when the war came in 1914, they volunteered in the same way as people did from Swansea, from Somerset, from Devon, from Dublin, from here in Christchurch.

12:10David McWilliams: So the regiments were all based out of these localities. And they signed up and they went to the war as if they were people from Liverpool and Manchester. In the same way as the Dublin Fusiliers, the Munster Fusiliers, they all went. Now, of course, the Irish guys, we now claim they went because it was a quid pro quo for home rule, but many of them would have just gone anyway because it was part of the culture. They've done it in the Napoleonic Wars. They've done various British colonial expeditions all around the world. And of course, the same thing happened here. So there's that echo which gives it a sense, in the South Island in particular, of being British.

12:49David McWilliams: And of course, all the architecture here is that sort of what I call pointy Gothic. You know, the Brits went in for Gothic architecture, like Hogwarts, you know. They went in for a Hogwarts look in the late Victorian age. What I'm here, you're reminded that the British Empire really was a global project. And therefore, the architecture you see here in New Zealand, it's very, very similar. Now, of course, the people who were kicked off the land were the Iwi tribe, who are the local Maori tribe. And what you see in the architectural evidence is something interesting, John. All the stuff up until around 1950 is very British.

13:31David McWilliams: so you've kind of a Munster Street, you've a Belfast Street, you've a you know an Oxford Street, you've a New Region Street right behind me here all those things so it looks as if they've kind of tried to cut and paste England into the middle of nowhere in New Zealand. Yeah yeah. But now what you realize is all the new architecture because I've been on my walking guide John of architectures to prepare you for this podcast John all the new architecture is quite interesting because all the new stuff is all Maori. The Puka building, the Matariki registry building, all this sort of stuff. And what you realize is that in the last 20 or 30 or maybe 40 years, New Zealand has changed.

14:17David McWilliams: The position of the Maori has become recognized. The First Nation people, they have now definitively become part of the New Zealand story, where it's clear from the architecture and the names of the streets and the way in which the city was set up that prior to this, you know, the Maori were forgotten about. And it's an interesting thing. It's an interesting way of looking at how the culture changes through the architecture, the naming of buildings, the fact the First Nation people are now recognized, the fact that last night when I spoke at the gig, it was introduced in Maori, not in English.

14:51David McWilliams: Okay. And did they start with a haka? They did two haka's. I did the one, John. I was the fellow down with my tongue sticking out screaming. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But, you know, you're saying that the architecture has changed. Has the politics changed and the economy changed? So interestingly, New Zealand is a very strange place from an economic perspective because New Zealand has, at the moment, quite a right-wing government. Prior to this, Jacinta Hearn was a left-wing government. Yeah, yeah. But interestingly, for students of economics, New Zealand has been like a laboratory. I've always felt that one of the dilemmas in Britain is they've used Britain as a sort of an ideological laboratory over the last 40 years since Thatcherism.

15:35David McWilliams: You know, we'll cut this, we'll cut back in this, we'll leave the EU, we'll manipulate the exchange rate, all that sort of stuff, right? Not a patch on what was done here. So there's two big phases of New Zealand deregulatory economics. One was called Rogernomics after a prime minister called Roger something or other. I can't remember what his second name was. Sounds really wrong, though. Yeah, I know. It does, doesn't it? Stop, John. And, John, after Rogernomics came Ruth in Asia. Jesus, that's worse. Exactly. Okay. And that was named after a finance minister called Ruth Richardson. And it was all heavy deregulation, massive Thatcherism, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

16:18David McWilliams: So there has been an experiment here. and so much so that, for example, the new government has fired 10 ,000 public servants in Wellington, the capital city up the road here. 10 ,000? Yeah, just fire them because they have very extreme targets for budget deficits here. It's incredibly rigid the way they run the economy. Was Elon Musk there? This is well before Elon. This is well before Elon, right? Jesus. So, I mean, and so people tell you that the city of Wellington used to be great crack because it used to be full of students and public servants going out at night. And now because all the public servants have been fired, the whole heart of the city has been ripped out, which is quite interesting, which actually stands to reason.

17:03So, I mean, what you have on the one hand

17:05David McWilliams: is a country like New Zealand, which is largely based on agriculture and tourism and, of course, the mother and father of all housing booms. right? Basically, the New Zealanders are trying to do what we did, which is buy and sell little bits of New Zealand to each other and call it an economic miracle. And the housing stock here and the housing problem here is an amplified version of ours, so much so that the average house now is 11 times income, which is up and around Irish levels, even worse than Irish levels. They are also having a little mini recession now. So house prices have fallen about 20 % in the last two and a half years.

17:51David McWilliams: But they are really fixated by house price inflation. And there is a massive property section here. And there's a supply problem then as well, just like here. There's a significant supply problem here. There is obviously very, very high levels of new immigration in the North Island around Auckland. And that, of course, is having the effect of increasing the demand. And what you're having is exactly like you have in Ireland. You have a construction sector that cannot respond quickly enough, a population that is rising. They also have a serious problem with emigration of New Zealanders. So 70 ,000 New Zealanders emigrated last year, went to what they call overseas, largely to Australia and the UK.

18:38David McWilliams: And so lots of people are saying... But that was always a New Zealand Aussie thing, though, to spend those couple of years at least. Gary Nama sees, mate. Gary Nama sees. Yeah, but it's always to London and to Earl's Court in particular. Pubs in Earl's Court. Pubs in Earl's Court where they usually are. But also, obviously a huge amount is moving to Australia, which is a much more dynamic country. So if you think of New Zealand, it is basically Australia without the minerals. So it's loads of sheep, loads of farmers, lots of wine, lots of agricultural products, all of which seem to go to China, particularly dairy products.

19:20David McWilliams: That was going to be my next question. Where are their main markets? Their main market is China. Their main market is China. The main influence is China. Like Australia, the New Zealanders have woken up in the last, let's say, quarter of a century realizing we're actually in Asia. Yes. Yeah. But up until then, they actually thought they were in Britain. And that's the fascinating thing about the architecture and the institutions and the feel of the place. It basically feels like you're in Scotland, right? Yeah. Only Scottish people would emigrate to somewhere so wet and windy. so but new zealand has the problems of a normal functioning democracy the problem is they seem to have elections about every 28 days here it's mad they have elections every three years so the governments can never really get their feet under the ground there are big race issues here between the maori and the let's say the brits the brits and the irish the maori and the white people tell me here that those those race relations aren't very good they're actually deteriorating so there's a lot of cultural issues here.

20:26David McWilliams: There's obviously a lot of poverty in Auckland, a lot more poverty than we'd imagine. And here, down here, it's kind of a rural hinterland, which is, again, slow, quiet, very, very beautiful, very rugged, very empty, and John, very, very far away, at the end of the earth. And that's exactly why the tech bros love it. And I want to talk about Peter Thiel and the other tech bros buying land here as their insurance policy against global Armageddon, which they themselves, and Peter Thiel is worth$22 billion, which they themselves are actually actively constructing. This is the bizarre thing, that the people who are making our technotopia world are betting not on the future, they're betting on Armageddon.

21:18So let's come back

21:19David McWilliams: after the break.

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23:00Mac, you're in the ends of the earth there in Christchurch in New Zealand. Is there much talk about the Ireland-New Zealand clash in Chicago?

23:11David McWilliams: You know the funny thing about it, right? is New Zealand is responsible for two very serious fashion faux pas. The brutal rugby mullets. They're everywhere. They have the worst hairstyles and the most elaborate tattoos. I feel that I'm naked without tattoos. Everybody here has married tattoos, right? Yeah. And they have got that rugby jock look of the brutal mullet and the shaved sides. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they explore to that around the world. Yeah, it's a shocking export. I mean, it's a really, really brutal look. The other thing is I've noticed is they do all wear black quite a lot. It's quite interesting.

23:52David McWilliams: There's a lot of people. They also have a weakness for baseball caps on with glasses over the baseball caps. Right. So it kind of feels a bit like Hick America. It kind of does like, if you could imagine a fusion of rugby and NASCAR, that's what it kind of looks like. Right, okay. Okay. Well, Kamir, I was telling you earlier that I started the process of the visa. But I wonder, you mentioned about Peter Thiel. What's his visa status like over there? Okay, Peter Thiel is a New Zealand citizen. Oh, okay. He's only spent 12 days here. He's a New Zealand citizen. He bought it. Right. He bought citizenship.

24:29David McWilliams: But I want to talk to you about what is going on here. So Peter Thiel, they believe that New Zealand now, In the same way as these evangelical Christians came to New Zealand in the 1850s as a sort of utopia. Yeah. As sort of an escape from Britain and the corruption of Britain. And they believed that Britain would inevitably collapse under this sort of corruption of the empire and the cosmopolitanism and the moral decay and all that sort of stuff, all that Victorian stuff, right? These tech bros think exactly the same, right? They believe that New Zealand is a life raft for billionaires. And they think the world is on the brink.

25:07David McWilliams: They think there's going to be massive economic chaos. They think AI is going to cause so much disruption to the workforce that only a tiny amount of people are going to be actively engaged in generating any income. They believe that the successful, the smart, the utopian, I mean, this is Aeon Rand. This is Aeon Rand for the TikTok age. If anybody has had the misfortune of reading The Fountainhead, This is the fountainhead for the TikTok age, right? They believe that there is going to be a collapse in the nation state because the tax base is going to collapse. They believe, of course, this is really, that cryptocurrencies are going to be the only currencies because as the nation state collapses, fiat money will collapse and cryptocurrency is the only way you can protect your wealth.

25:59David McWilliams: But also, it seems like it's a massive doomsday cult that only they will survive. They being the techno-brilliant tech bros. They're very clever. They regard themselves as economic nomads or sort of economic refugees. They think that freedom, individual freedom and democracy are inconsistent. That democracy consistently drags down the brilliant and spreads out the wealth to the useless and to a welfare class. and that over time, because technology allows people to work from anywhere, where they think brilliant people, not normal people, brilliant people to work from anywhere, that they don't have to pay taxes everywhere, that they can actually find a refuge away from taxation, find a refuge away from regulation, find a refuge away from the sweaty masses that constitutes the human race.

26:55David McWilliams: And this is what they're buying. They're buying these... They also believe that tax is a form of theft, don't they? Of course they do, because they're geniuses. They have a crazy idea of this, that it's all about the individual and not society. So I want to bring you to the core of the ideology. The core of the ideology is a book called The Sovereign Individual that was written by none other than Jacob Rees-Mogg's dad, William Rhys Moggs, and another fellow called James Dale Davidson. It was written in the late 90s. It's called The Sovereign Individual. And it is a manifesto, an absolute manifesto, for these rugged individuals to escape the constraints of democracies and nation states, supersede their obligation to nation states and democracies, and simply become these economic refugees and are nomads.

27:55David McWilliams: Their wealth will be in Bitcoin, so nobody can trace it. Because it's going to be in crypto, it can't be taxed. And in effect, they will choose where they want to live. And where they want to live is the country that gives them security from what? From the inevitable chaos that they believe that technology and technological improvement is going to actually usher in. So this is your idea of the paradox. The very tech bros who are actually foisting upon the world and backing AI, the San Altamans of this world, the Peter Thiels of this world, the Elon Musk of this world, actually have a countervailing parallel thing going on, which is they are buying properties in remote countries like New Zealand, so that when the whole thing goes to shit, they're going to be fine.

28:47David McWilliams: It's an extraordinary thing. Well, apart from Elon Musk is going a little bit further than New Zealand, though, he's heading to Mars. He's heading to Mars. But here's the other thing that I was kind of thinking about as you're talking there. They're talking about, you know, the collapse of the nation state and society and all the rest. But what actually drives their Bitcoin and their techno world is electricity. And if there is a collapse of nation states, there will be a collapse of power grids. And, you know, then what? Don't think they haven't thought about it. Don't think they haven't thought about it.

29:25David McWilliams: They've got bunkers. I mean, it's a really strange world. And again, listeners, I mean, this is not some sort of conspiracy, let's go down a rabbit hole. This is a whole swathe of very wealthy people and an enormous amount of online followers. You know, crypto and Bitcoin are just one representation. It's the whole libertarian movement. It's the whole rugged individual movement. It's the whole idea that we can be off the grid. We don't have to be part of society. we are individuals society is corrupted and what is fascinating is that they have a manifesto which is the sovereign individual in the same way as the commies and the left have those shite books by Marx das Kapital yeah and the communist manifesto were digging das Kapital totally as I've said before the book that got everything wrong and yet it's the most influential book I mean I've said it before the most consequential influential book ever written on economics was written by Marx and it got everything wrong.

30:25David McWilliams: Everything wrong. These guys now have the countervailing book to Marx and Das Kapital, which is called The Sovereign Individual. Peter Thiel writes the foreword to this book. He writes the foreword. He is the main proselytizer. And the whole thing is based on the idea that technology is going to erode government capability. Right? Yeah. Number one. It's going to empower this, what they describe as a cognitive elite. So this is the superhuman. These superhumans are going to be able to go wherever they want, right? The nation state, therefore, will be rendered obsolete because the taxation system, what they're saying is the top 5 % of people pay the most of the taxes, income tax, and therefore once they disappear, the tax base disappears, the welfare state disappears, and you have two things going on.

31:18David McWilliams: One, less welfare, And number two, AI destroying jobs by the hundreds of millions. So an entire middle class, middle management professional class is entirely eradicated by AI and they become a feral underclass. And that's what precipitates the end of the nation state and the collapse of what we would regard as Western civilization, right? Now, of course, against that background, these clever guys have to find a sort of a bolt hole. And that bolt hole would be sort of an enclave, which is miles away, John, from everywhere else. And New Zealand is the place. New Zealand is the place. And I'm sure the likes of Patagonia and Terra del Fuego will be kind of attractive as well.

32:04I mean, that's where I'd go. But let me ask you a question, though.

32:08David McWilliams: The fuckers can't speak Spanish. Well, that's true. That's true. But I know that Zuckerberg is building bunkers, and they're all, I'm sure, have their bunkers wherever they have them. But you talked about tax there. Elon Musk doesn't pay any tax. But the other thing is that if society collapses, they ain't going anywhere. Society will reform as something else. It always does. Of course it will. Of course it will. But I'm just saying is that what has intrigued me about being in New Zealand. Then they'll get their comeuppance. as I am. Well, I mean, this is the sans-culottes. They'll get the guillotine.

32:45David McWilliams: So they're worried about a French Revolution moment where they, the techno-aristocrats, the techno-aristocracy, get turned on by the masses who are put out of work and whose future is destroyed by the very technology that the crypto and the tech bros have actually foisted. So they understand the inherent paradox of their own innovations. So this is the sort of the Frankenstein moment that they've created the monster. The monster can't be controlled. The monster is AI. AI at smarts humanity. And suddenly what we get is a total societal collapse because the nation state has collapsed. The fiat currency system has collapsed.

33:28David McWilliams: The tax base has collapsed. Unemployment has gone through the roof, et cetera, et cetera. As a result of that, they're looking for their bolt hole here. And what does the bolt hole give? It gives them geographic security. So they are in New Zealand, which is three hours flight from the nearest place, which is Australia. And Australia is also 12 hours flight away from almost anywhere else that will suffer from this collapse. This is the first thing, right? We know Australia is 10 hours from Hong Kong. Like we forget, it's miles away. That's the first thing. The second thing is they want to go to places where they don't have to pay taxes.

34:07David McWilliams: So they're assuming the New Zealanders will actually allow them to live here without taxes, which I don't see happening. Okay. They're assuming that their wealth can be preserved in crypto on the blockchain and no one can get their hands on it. Right. They want no regulation. This is the Trumpian teal idea that regulation is actually, you know, the weak trying to emasculate it. It's the Lilliputians and Gulliver, John. Go back to Swiss. Yeah, yeah. tying the great Gulliver up, okay? They don't want democracy because they believe democracy is against freedom and they don't want any accountability.

34:46David McWilliams: And so in order for them to live this life that they envisage, they have to come down here. And the irony is, and we'll probably end, you know, is that who's going to suffer from their extraordinary benighted position is the average person. In the same way as who suffered from the colonialist attitude in the 1850s, that they were coming to a utopia here, the settler colonists, was the local Maori population. So it's the sort of cycle of life and ideas and ideologies, and it's all playing out again. So when you are looking at Ireland playing rugby against the All Blacks in the next couple of days, John, just realize the All Blacks represent New Zealand.

35:38David McWilliams: And for many, many people, New Zealand and the All Blacks are synonymous. But for a small micro minority of tech billionaires, New Zealand represents a bolt hole, a utopia, a place that they will be safe. A life raft. ironically it is the life raft for billionaires and now i'm going to go and see can i have a couple of scoops after all that carry on to take it all in look around for a bit of a plot exactly john it'd be a podcast plot exactly up in lake wanaka overlooking queenstown we'll be gone we'll be flying all right bosco i'll talk to you later good luck

36:35We'll be right back.

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