YouSaid · the spoken record

Atossa Abrahamian

lines on the record: 45
first: 2025-02-05
most recent: 2025-02-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Away his coal. And so, what it illustrates to me, and maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but like you got to hold on to something, is that you can get comments out of these capitalistic enterprises. They're not going to be perfect. They're not going to be, you know, in most respects, but it might at least open up a crack to create something new. And I think we're really in need of these types of structures these days. So I choose to read this positively.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To reward Norway for being good during the war and also because Norway had planted its own stakes and insinuated itself by creating telegraph poles. Basically Norway had been building some infrastructure there in parts of like lay its own claim Norway was given Svalbard. Its territory. But because of the lobbying, in part because of the lobbying on the part of these coal guys, The powers agreed that there would be this stipulation of non-discrimination because they were so worried that they would be expropriated. It didn't end up being relevant because they sold the business and moved on with their lives. But I think it's a really interesting case because there was nothing utopian or idealistic about this. This was just like greedy guts from Michigan worried that Norwegian communists were going to take.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They just kind of winged it. Pretty unheard of these days. So Longyear, while he was setting up his business, was being advised by his lawyer in DC on K-Street, believe it or not. And given the indeterminate kind of legality of all of this that was going on, the lawyer kept saying, well, you've got to document everything. And so they took a very good records. We put a stake here. We built a hut there. We have a mine here. you know, created this much in exports. This is how much coal we had. And so they had really good records of what they were doing. And that was because they were very worried that at some point Svalbard would no longer be in no man's land. It would be the jurisdiction of a state and the state would be hostile to them. So these were capitalists very anxious about their property rights. And after World War I, in part”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To open some coal mines. There had been some coal mines there before. This man was known to have a nose for coal. Apparently he could smell it in the air. So he wound up opening a bunch of coal mines there and making a fair amount of money. It wasn't like the greatest business in the world. And it's quite some time there. But then after World War I, there was a question, oh, sorry, I should go back. John Munro long here spent quite some time there. And at the time, before this treaty was signed, the first 15, 20 years of the 20th century, Svalbard was considered terranulias, so no country had any claim on it. There had been people from all kinds of countries living there, but they were, it was actually just the wild west. They were doing what they wanted. They marked their territory literally by planting stakes in the ground. And there wasn't really anyone to adjudicate whose land was whose.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's kind of, it has open borders to a point. It's hard to get to, you have to travel through Norwegian Airport to get there. So if you have a passport from, say, India or China or Russia, you have to get transit visa. So it's open in theory and practice a little bit stickier. What's remarkably interesting to me about Svalbard is that it's a sort of commons that grew out of a very capitalistic enterprise. So when I went there, I had these ideas in my head that, oh, this was like, what a lovely case of post-war internationalism all the countries got together and decided that there would be a free space. It couldn't be further from the truth. So what really happened is that at the beginning of the 20th century, a coal magnate named John Munro Longyear came from Michigan, northern Michigan, also really cold, to”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in 2019, I traveled to Svalbard, which is a place in the Arctic Circle. It's an archipelago, very cold, that belongs to Norway. And there's no question, this is Norwegian territory, but it's subject to a really interesting treaty agreement signed in the Treaty of part of the Treaty of Versailles that stipulates that Norway, the state, can't discriminate against anyone on this territory based on their nationality. What this means is that if you're a foreigner and you're there, they're not going to make you present a visa. They're not going to check your ID. You can open a business as easily as a Norwegian.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into space. And I think they pulled it off. They pulled it off. There was no space mining currently happening on a large commercial scale, but there is a mission planned. I think it's for early next year at this point by a company called Lunar Outpost based in Colorado, but they have a Luxembourg connection to. And in fact, NASA is going to pay this company peanuts of a dollar or something to collect some lunar regolith that's moon dust and to transfer it to NASA's ownership. And so we are actually on the brink of seeing this market for private property in space that is then going to be, in this case, become U.S. government property. And it's so fascinating. I mean, we're just about to watch history happen. And I feel like we should be talking about this more.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In our country. This is what Luxembourg said. If you have a company that's registered in Luxembourg and you go and land on an asteroid and get a bunch of platinum, we will recognize your right to that. And that's the first step to creating a market for these products, these space resources, right? You need one state to at least recognize it in order for you to trade it and transact with it and so on and so forth. Luxembourg wasn't the first nation to pass a law like this. The US had one that considered private property for US citizens only. But Luxembourg said, you know, we don't have a lot of citizens, so let's open it up to anyone who opens a firm here. And they also created incentives for the firms to come to Luxembourg proper. So there was a two-pronged approach. But the law was really the cornerstone of this project to launch Luxembourg and capitalism.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you are in a place where there are no countries, right? There's no national sovereignty in space, who's going to recognize your property in basically a vacuum, right? Who's going to recognize private property and what is supposed to be a commons per the UN? Turns out that the UN did not make particularly firm pronouncements on the status of private property in outer space. They should have. To be clear, some of the delegates in these conversations at the UN had anticipated this and there's some amazing speeches from the time. But there was no such clause in each treaties. And so this opens the door to states in the 21st century to pass their own commercial space laws. And the way that this works is that they're not claiming sovereignty over this asteroid or that piece of moon, but they are saying that if you have a company”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In an interesting scheme that they got into about maybe about seven or eight years ago, which is the business of outer space mining. Luxembourg realized that, well, two things were happening. Luxembourg was getting a lot of flack for its role in helping companies like Apple avoid European tax. So bad PR. And at the same time, a couple of people working with the Luxembourg government realized that there's money to be made in Silicon Valley because all of these small and medium space mining companies needed a home base. And what I mean by space mining is like literally mining asteroids to maybe strike gold and find precious minerals and maybe even water. So there's all these resources in outer space, much like on Earth. It's very difficult to mine them, but we'll get there someday. And what happens?”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Than just doubling down on the finance, they really started to diversify their offerings to international capital in these unbelievably creative ways. So around the mid-century, radio waves, which were sort of the air waves, the radio frequencies, were considered government like public goods. And then Luxembourg decided that it would privatize this. And so it would have commercial radio. Same for TV. It got into the satellite business, right, to support this industry. So it was always, Luxembourg always had an eye on the intangible and the very, very large. And Van managed to make money out of what seemed to be nothing, you know, satellite airways, like things you can't touch, things you can't put in a warehouse. And this all culminated.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Luxembourg, we spend quite a lot of time talking about Switzerland. Luxembourg is a close cousin, right? Same business model, small country, landlocked. They had actually a thriving steel industry, but that didn't hold. I mean, that eventually stopped generating enough revenues and they shut a lot of the steel mines. So Luxembourg in the early 20th century refashioned itself Alice Switzerland as a place where you could park money, have trusts that aren't subject to various taxation laws, kind of taking advantage of the growing movement in the rest of Europe to tax citizens and to levy taxes on corporations as well. So Luxembourg started off there, sort of same areas as the Swiss. And then they actually did something really interesting.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be a raging libertarian to get on board with that. And so could such a place offer these concessions? Could you have free zones not for goods or capital, but for people? I think it's possible. I don't think that these kinds of utopian zones are going to dominate the world and dismantle the nation state as we know it. But in this moment of intense xenophobia, border walls, reimagining of citizenship restrictions, I kind of think it might be the best we can do.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can also imagine a zone like this being open to all, right? A commons rather than have building walls and having more restrictions on immigration, for example. So, you know, there's a lot of intention here. It is both of the nation and outside it. It can be both positive and quite negative a lot of the time. What encourages me encourages and discourages I'm really preoccupied with immigration migration, where people are going to go. And it shocks me to this day, even though I spent decades thinking about this, that there's basically nowhere in the world that people can just show up and live. Like that's messed up, right? It's really weird. The world is huge. There's a lot of different places and types of places and there's nowhere besides a small place in the Arctic, which we could talk about later that anyone can just go to and make a life. And that just seems counter to so many of our ideas about what it means to have agency, what it means to be human, what it means to build a life. I don't think you have to.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, there's a lot going on here, and I'll try to be clear and concise. One of the reasons that I don't want to blanket denounce all of these what I call weird jurisdictions, even though many, many of them are nefarious and do not contribute to any kind of human flourishing, is that I don't think that we should be as precious as we are about territoriality and governance. Most of these places, if not all of them, are wholly endorsed by the nation state, but they do offer in their various ways a respite from its rules. That doesn't have to be bad, right? You can imagine a scenario where you would have a free zone where there are very strict environmental controls or no carbon or something that we would all consider broadly positive, like a nature reserve on stereotype.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On Manas Island, and through his advocacy and activism on the island, when it was very, very difficult to get the word out, right, because there is almost a media blackout of what was going on in these places. They were black holes in so many respects was able to connect with an Australian journalist who created a podcast series about life on Manus Island. Aziz was then nominated for Human Rights Award and somehow finagled the documents he needed to get to Geneva to receive this award. He was planning on going back and then he ended up staying and getting asylum in Geneva, where he remains. So it's all roads, in other words, all roads lead to Geneva.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From starting in Gitmo all the way to Australia, and now this is a defunct plan, but it's recent, so I'm going to bring it up, the UK had struck a deal with Rwanda to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. And now again, just a couple days ago, the incoming Trump administration transpired that they were trying to find other countries to send asylum seekers too. But Bahamas said no. I think that leaves us with Panama A couple of Caribbean states and sort of neighboring territories. I don't know if they're going to say yes, but it's a very appealing way of dealing with what countries perceive as an asylum seeker problem, right? Out of sight, out of mind. And Aziz, who you brought up, and sorry I didn't get to him sooner, was a remarkably brave young man at the time. He came from Sudan.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The pioneers of this offshoring of people were actually the US in the 90s. There were many, many asylum seekers coming from Haiti, which is quite unstable at the time and continues to be. And these people who are leaving on boats were detained in Guantanamo, a US naval base. But Gitmo isn't part of the US. It's leased against the Cuban government's will from Cuba. Again, a place that is neither here nor there. It's not American, but it's occupied by Americans. In fact, the American military. And in keeping people in Guantanamo, they were also able to say, well, you can't claim asylum here because it's not the United States. You aren't allowed, you know, you're not entitled to representation because this isn't the United States. The Constitution doesn't apply. And so this reasoning is being used around the world.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like the Cayman Islands, where there's no tax, this billionaire is coming from the US. This money is not subject to the rules of the IRS on land. The US, there's some nuances because they do require you to file if you are abroad. But for the sake of example, parking money abroad, stopping it from being subject to the laws of your nation, sending people abroad, right? Under this logic means that you do not have to offer them the due process and the rights that they would enjoy.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Countries to build camps and just detain people for, I mean, as long as there are people who were sitting there for eight eight years with no trial, with no, they didn't do anything wrong. They were just trying to claim asylum. And Australia took really, really, really drastic measures and just sort of banished them. Now, it's kind of ironic, right, that a place that was once full of people who were banished from England are now banishing people to yet another state. History repeats itself in strange ways. But the legal logic, I argue, is pretty similar to that of the tax haven, of the Freeport. It's trying to send things to a place where they no longer have to adhere to rules of the nation. This is abstract, right? But if you think of a billionaire parking money in a place,”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, the flip side of this deterritorialization of money and goods is the deterritorialization of people and entire populations. What I mean by this is that the offshore world includes tax havens and flags of convenience and all of these clever ways to hide money. You offshore wealth. We live in a time when countries, particularly Western countries, but I'm sure more will follow, are offshoring populations. So asylum seekers get sent to places that they really didn't sign up to go to. Aziz, Hamid, what is a character in this chapter that talks about Australia's decade-long initiative to send asylum seekers who arrived by boat in Australia to the islands of Noru, which is its own, which is a sovereign nation, and Manas Island, part of Papua New Guinea. Australia struck deals with these”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“High rises and hotels, and there's all kinds of things there, and there's even a court. So it's almost a state within a state within a state, right? If we think of the Emirates as the country, Dubai is the city-state that governs many of its own affairs. And then within it, the DIFC, which even has its own court, it's really an enclave within an enclave. And what's so interesting about this court, the cases themselves are contracts and HR and like not There's not a lot of like international intrigue in these court cases themselves but the judges are at this point I think around half of them are imported from abroad so they're not even trained by the Emirati courts assistant they're just you know Brits and Singaporeans and New Zealanders who a lot of the time don't even show up in person they don't even live there they just zoom in and this started before the pandemic right this isn't even a pandemic thing so it's”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then for its finance zone, which was trying to attract Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, all the big banks and trading companies, it added a level of enticement here. And it created a new court from scratch because the people that were doing the design and the marketing for this zone, known as the Dubai International Financial Center, realized that these banks and their lawyers in particular didn't want to have to worry about winding up in an Emirati court. They didn't know, maybe they didn't know Arabic, they weren't familiar with the legal system, which was a mix of Muslim laws and civil laws, not the common law system that multinationals are used to dealing with. And so what did they do? They just made a new court. They just put a new court in the free zone. It's like a big mall-esque development with...”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's not the case at all. So the example I used to illustrate this is in Dubai, which for alarms were under British rule, it did actually have multiple legal systems for different people. But then in the early 2000s, as wealth was the region, the Middle East was losing a lot of money and investment for geopolitical reasons, Dubai was positioning itself as a new Switzerland. This is a term that many newspapers have said that Dubai is the new Switzerland. It was trying to attract finance companies. It was trying to attract commodities. And successfully did, in part because it followed the free zone playbook. It carved out different zones with more permissive tax rules or immigration rules or in some cases nominally free or speech rules, a place called Media City, all of these cities and districts.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was what it was, and there was a neighborhood that was American, there was a neighborhood that was British, and so American and British citizens would not be subject to Shanghai's laws. They would be subject to their own laws, but in this place. And then if we look at the British legal system under colonialism, there was one set of laws for colonial subjects, for natives, and one set for the English who were working abroad and administering the colonial affairs. So it's actually more normal historically to have multiple levels of law in this way in a way that discriminates, right, based on nationality, race, privilege, like economic rights, wealth. And it was only recently that we sort of started thinking about law in a more territorial and democratic, I suppose, way.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ticket, right? Maybe at some point somebody was smoking some pot in an alleyway and the cop showed up and found out who the parents were and, you know, kind of walks away. So I don't want to make too much of this because diplomats do get into trouble. They do commit crimes. Most of the time, they're pretty well behaved. Maybe not in their cars. But this idea, right? that law isn't this flat universal thing that covers everyone on a piece of land this idea that you can carry law with you, that you can have pockets where it doesn't apply. I found this very powerful and interesting. And there's a long history of this, right? The imperialist legal systems created multiple levels of law. So for example, after the opium wars in Shanghai, foreign powers had these enclaves known as concessions. And, you know, Shanghai”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's go back to Geneva for a second. Geneva is a place full of diplomats and people who work at embassies and consulates and missions and whatnot. And not all of these workers, but a portion of them enjoy what's under this diplomatic immunity. Basically, if you're working for a foreign government on another country's land, you can benefit from certain rights and immunities and concessions under a very old treaty that considers you to be sort of an emissary. It's almost like an honorific. It's a Vienna convention. So more prosaically, as a teenager, sometimes a friend, boyfriend, would speed in their car and because these people were related to people with diplomatic immunity or a degree of it, right? Some kind of consular immunity, they wouldn't get a parking ticket or traffic.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something very clever here about Freeports and also about these special zones more broadly speaking. And that is that they are placeless, right? Because they're neither here nor there. But they are also timeless. Like the passage of time and the sort of legal status of time gets manipulated and reshaped to suit the purposes of the clientele.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a place where you can get away with things without fully saying, you know, this is a place you can launder money. And the Freeport actually became kind of a cultural phenomenon on a greater scale because I don't know if you've seen the movie, The Christopher Nolan movie Tenet, but everything in Tenet is set almost everything is set in this Freeport. And there's a really interesting twist, and I'm not going to get too deep into it, but so the conceit of tenant is that object in this warehouse, which is really a cut, cut and paste Freeport down to the marketing that they used to pitch it to clients. Things in this Freeport do not time does not move forward. It can move backwards. There's this manipulation of time that takes place within the walls of this free port, which is really astute because the whole point of the Freeport was to temporarily freeze time for the purposes of taxation, right? So I think Christopher Nolan seized on”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And somewhat notorious business that wound up bringing in no one can say for sure, but like millions, if not billions of dollars of really high-end artwork into the Geneva Freeport. And there was a loss of multiple lawsuits. He got into some conflict with a client of his who accused him of sort of wheeling and dealing. And we don't have to get into it because it's really complicated. But the upshot is that the Geneva Freeport became notorious for this reason. It was the site of this conflict between a Russian oligarch and a Swiss operator. And as this lawsuit, you know, I think they finally resolved things. And I think it's finally almost over. But Bouvier made a name for himself. He became known as the Freeboard King. A lot of what he was doing was marketing to rich people and making this place seem like, you know, cool and sexy and like a little dangerous.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To make the connection and say, well, there's this place, it's kind of a haven. I can put things there tax-free. And actually, I can just leave them there because no one's going to evict my gold bars or my picasso. And in that way, you can avoid certain taxes. You can avoid certain types of scrutiny. You can maybe avoid family members or ex-spouses from finding out the vastness of your wealth and your assets. And Yves Bovier is a Swiss. He works in the art world. There's been some debate over whether he's an art dealer or an art shipper. But let's just say he's a figure in the art world who saw this Freeport and really built it up and marketed it as a place for art. He had connections in the art world. He'd worked as a shipper and a mover before. And he built out of this really a thriving”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so as Geneva became more of a crossroads for other types of wealth, right, maybe it's a gold bar, or maybe it's even wartime supplies. The Red Cross used, I think it was the Red Cross, used the Freeport to store humanitarian supplies. And then later as the ultra-rich began to invest in things like wine and art, the contents of the Freeport changed. But the rules that bound them didn't. And so you end up with this loophole of you can leave something there temporarily. It will be considered for legal purposes in transit. But then no one's forcing it to leave.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way back to the 1800s, Geneva was historically a crossroads. It was a marketplace. Merchants would come from Germany, from France, from all over Europe, and stop and sell their wares and move on. And the free port emerged from this need for them to put their wares in a place and temporarily store them and then go on along their way. And to avoid what we would now refer to as bureaucracy and red tape, I don't know if that's how they call it, that's what they called it back then. This customs entrepot emerged at the time it was silos. It was for grain so that they could drop it off, you know, have a meal, have a sleep, and then move on. And the limits on how long these things could stick around in the Freeport were natural. I mean, grain will go bad. You can't just leave it there forever and expect it to hold on to its value.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yves Bouvier. I mean, he so let's back up a minute. We're talking about a place called the Geneva Freeport, and this is a warehouse that's in Geneva on Swiss soil, but for the purposes of customs, so that is tariffs and duties and things like that, is outside of it. It is exempt from certain laws that the rest of the Swiss territory is subject to. And so you find yourself in this strange kind of situation where you're both somewhere and not somewhere. You're in a place and not in the place. It's really placeless. This is like fun to think about, right? But the real impact of this is that if you put goods in this warehouse that is both in Geneva and not in Geneva for legal purposes, it does not incur the same taxes that it would otherwise if it was sitting in someone's apartment or even in a gallery or what have a normal kind of storage. So the origins of the Geneva Freeport go away.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So broadly, just to reiterate, the world is full of these exceptional spaces that are run by laws and institutions that are not quite national. There's endorsement on the national level, otherwise these places would not exist, right? But the masterminds are not necessarily heads of state or, you know, heads of international organizations even. They're kind of under the radar operators who see an opportunity and seize on it. And a lot of the time I found the people that were instrumental in creating and carving out the space, whether it's a warehouse for art that you alluded to or an industrial zone for manufacturing. These tend to be sort of outside consultants. And I cast them as, you know, in line with this mercenary model of going abroad and pitching something and being able to create a new sort of regime out of it.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Switzerland as a whole, and in particular in Geneva, which was late to join the cantons in the Confederation, but in Geneva that was a city-state, you know, with ties that was adjacent to the cantons for a very long time.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you can draw a line between this early Protestant movement in Geneva and what ended up being massive business of private banking, where the Swiss ended up hiding money for pretty much anybody who showed up at their doorstep. I should note people have argued about Weber's interpretation, about Calvinism, about Protestantism and all of its links to capitalist production. So I'm not going to weigh on in these debates, but I think we can say with some certainty that Calvin started a culture that the Swiss then perfected and capitalized on. And so as Switzerland became known as a place where you could make money and keep money and even hide money, the money would come from all corners of the earth. And I think that that has been a pretty consistent theme.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't want to overgeneralize it. I'm not a theologian, right? But Max Weber's interpretation of this is that it created a culture of accumulation of industriousness and of secrecy as well. And so wealth as it came into Geneva through organic means, shall we say coming from places where there are wars to places where there wasn't a war coming from places where people were persecuted to a place where Protestants were welcome. In fact, Genevieve opened its arms to Protestant exiles from neighboring countries, combined with this Calvinist focus on hard work created this very, according to Weberwig, capitalistic way of doing business and accumulating wealth. And the sort of Geneva's special sauce here was also that they were very private, right? This culture of secrecy emerged.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So Geneva is known these days for things like the UN and the Swiss banks and chocolate chops at the lake. But in the past, Geneva's kind of most famous. But as Calvinism took hold of parts of Europe,”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Perfected as early as the 1200s, leasing its own men to neighboring monarchs to fight in wars. This kind of became Switzerland's MO. They evolved doing versions of this, whether it was banking or in the modern day creating warehouses that are on its territory but outside of its legal rules to serve foreign wealth. And so All of these ideas kind of gel together into the book. It took a long time. It took a lot of thinking. But that's where it all started in Geneva.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not because the local population loves elves, but because there's a market for these novelties on the philately circuit. But then it can also be as big as access to laws or indeed a passport. And so after my first book about the passports, I just kept track of these different ways of selling oneself as a state. And it eventually kind of came together into a book. To bring this back to Geneva, though, which is really where it all started, at some point in my early 20s, I was at a bookstore and I was looking through old copies of the new left review magazine. And I happened upon an article by John Halliday called Switzerland Bourgeois Eldorado. And if the title doesn't tell you enough, it talked about how Switzerland was essentially the mercenary business, which Switzerland”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That these countries that were selling their passports, Malta, St. Kitts, Dominica, et cetera, were in some way selling their sovereignty and compromising it in the process, but selling this kind of mythical, untouchable thing. And that stuck with me too, because as time passed, I started thinking, well, if countries have a monopoly on citizenship, on granting it, if they can do this, what other things are unique to countries that they can sell as well? And it turned out that there are lots of these types of state goods for lack of a better term. It can be a small as a postage stamp. There are countries that create postage stamps just for collectors. I'm sure you can use them too. And the whole point is that these things are legitimate functional commodities. But you end up with, I think it's Burkina Faso putting Elvis Presley on a postage stamp.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Buying stuff completely above board, advertising it in the FT and airline magazines. And I got obsessed with this world. I started going to conferences that this passport industry was putting on to sort of hawk their wares. You know, you'd have prime ministers of small states get on stage and pitch their passport like it was like shoes or a timeshare. It was really quite, in a sense quite shocking, but for me validated this hunch that I had that there was something a little, I don't know, citizenship maybe didn't make sense in the way that it had at some point in history, that it had to become, you know, part of this cycle of commoditization and of buying and selling of everything, right? It was a victim of capitalism as well. And I wrote a book about this. And while I was working on the book, this theme kept coming up.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It certainly led me to write my first book, which was The Cosmopolites, about the global market for citizenship, that is the buying and selling of passports. And I came to that topic because, you know, I was 18 years in Geneva. Everyone was from everywhere. I had Iranian, Canadian, and Swiss citizenship through parents' birthplace and by virtue of living in Geneva for so long. But I didn't really identify with any of these passports or labels. They didn't really speak to me because of the way that I grew up. And this hunch that citizenship maybe isn't this, you know, monolithic character defining thing stuck with me. And when I started working as a reporter, I discovered that there were actually countries that sold their citizenship legally, like not, you know,”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, but not just Geneva. I grew up in a very particular enclave of Geneva, which is the international community. Both of my parents worked at the UN, international civil servants. I went mostly to international schools. I had mostly international friends. And so I grew up in this kind of bubble or enclave that Most of the time had very little to do with the place that we were physically. This isn't to say that we didn't benefit from the beautiful lake and the wonderful municipal services that Geneva has to offer. It's a pretty nice place to grow up. But there was something weird about it. There was something felt like we were displaced that we were always moving, even though we really, I'd never moved until I was 18 years old and I came to New York for college. And I think this really informed my sense of place and my sense of identity.”
2025-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT