YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Winter

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70
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2024-07-10
most recent
2024-07-10
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1
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  1. “Rio, in some ways, is a repeat of the story that I just told about Sao Paulo, but without the progress from a security standpoint, it remains very worthwhile to visit. It's also an economic center, a cultural center of the country. There's a lot more to these places besides just street crime. But the fact is it's a very complicated situation. You have these groups that Brazilians call militias, which sounds like militias, but they're really best thought of as paramilitary groups. These are groups that are often composed of police officers who control organized crime in vast areas of the city. And look, it's another area where Brazil has work to do. And these are challenges that are faced all across Latin America. I mean, one of the big stories happening in Latin America right now.”

    2024-07-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “That they have made on the homicide front. But when you talk to ordinary people, regular people in Sao Paulo, the perception is that violence has not gotten any better. And there's another issue here, which you made reference to, which is that the street population has, by some measures, tripled in the last 10 years. Now, some of that is the pandemic, but there seem to be other factors as well.”

    2024-07-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It is a city where you are still much more likely to be a victim of an armed robbery, of a carjacking, to have your cell phone taken from your hands. And so a lot of people, when they go there, either as visitors or members of the economic elite in Sao Paulo, choose to have armored cars, choose to not pull out their cell phone when they're out on the street. As a matter of fact, with the spread of payment apps and Brazil's digital currency, which is an amazing story in itself, it's called PIX. A lot of Brazilian friends I know have stopped taking their cell phone out of the house at all because they're afraid that either the phone will be stolen or they'll be the victims of a kidnapping and made to empty their account. So that's a reality. That's serious. I've been very interested in the progress.”

    2024-07-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “It's a really perceptive question, Tyler. Sao Paulo, the crime situation there is, it's a complex story. Their homicide rate has actually gone down more than 80% over the last 25 years. It's a tremendous achievement. It was one of the world's most violent in terms of homicide cities as recently as the late 90s. And then that rate now is only about five per 100,000, which is lower than the U.S. national average and quite a bit lower than many U.S. cities. And there is a but. There is a but.”

    2024-07-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Squid game. A lot of Brazilians saw that in the cultural moment of K pop and everything else and said that used to be us. What has happened to us that we're no longer in the main stage to the degree that we were in the past? You know, I think some of it is that others have caught up and then perhaps there's a cyclical element to this as well. I can tell you that Brazil remains a tremendously seductive place to visit. You spend time in places like Sao Paulo, Rio, Salvador, and you still see echoes of that Brazil that seduced the world once upon a time and continues to do so, not necessarily as part of pop culture, but certainly to people who visit.”

    2024-07-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “That's a good question, Tyler. And to be honest, I'm at a bit of a loss. And this is something that Brazilian commentators have also seized upon, this idea that the cool Brazil, the one that people of a certain age think of that comes to mind, the Samba, the beats of Bosa Nova, Black Orpheus to take the example you cited, that's not present today. And there's been a lot of soul searching within Brazil as to why that is. They watch, for example, the prominence that South Korea has taken on in shows like, oh gosh, what's the one on Netflix, the really violent one that everybody's doing?”

    2024-07-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Club soccer in Europe. And if you look back at the Golden Age, the age with Pele, these were players who played almost entirely on teams within Brazil who knew each other, and perhaps that was an advantage as well.”

    2024-07-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I think that Brazilians would probably tell you that actually the soccer team has not evolved enough because I would gently point out because I know that there are Brazilian listeners here who will recoil when I say this, but it has been 22 years since Brazil won the Last World Cup, which is quite serious for a country that has won five World Cups over the years more than any other country. And there is a real view that I hear from people in the country that actually part of the problem is that improvisation and talent are not enough anymore and that Brazilian soccer really needs to professionalize. Now, they continue to produce amazing players, Neymar, Vinicius Jr., and others, but they also have another disadvantage, which is that so many more of their players these days, they play.”

    2024-07-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Brazil too, but there's a joy in life that people manage to seize upon even when the economy is not doing well. Perhaps because they're accustomed to this kind of slow growth situation that we've been talking about.”

    2024-07-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I think you see it, and this may sound a bit hokey, Tyler, but you feel it when you talk to people. It's a country of smiles, of people who sometimes live just incredibly difficult lives, talking about people who live in the periphery of cities like South Paulo and Brazil who spend five hours a day on a bus commuting in and out of traffic in order to work minimum wage jobs. And these people enjoy life, sometimes more than, I would say often more than the people that I live among in Westchester County, just outside New York, who I look around sometimes on the commuter train, and nobody looks happy. And I don't want to romanticize things. I think that you find unhappy people.”

    2024-07-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Lessons of history. They're focused on the future. And if you grew up in a place like Dallas, like I did, which was built entirely for the most part in the 20th century, I think there's probably something of that that resonates with me.”

    2024-07-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Well, that's a really good question. I certainly makes me appreciate the cowboy culture and Chuhascu, which is the Brazilian barbecue culture as well. I think both places, in addition to being hot and green, are forward-looking. I came to Brazil from Argentina. I lived in Argentina first. Argentina is a country that is obsessively focused on its past. That's a country that 100 years ago famously was one of the ten richest countries in the world and today is slipped back well into the middle of the pact somewhere in the 60s, depending on what indicator you're looking at. And so, you know, Argentina is a tango. It's nostalgia. It's melancholy. And Brazil has always been about the future, sometimes to a fault. It's not a place where people remember precedent or they remember”

    2024-07-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Well, I have a guilty love for Sitan Ejo. Again, I've revealed myself as a Texan to your listeners who likes the classics like George Strait and Clinton Black and some of the big names from the 80s and 90s. Certanejo is a bit different. But if hip-hop is your thing, Anita 2Ts is the big artist of the moment. But it's not, to the despair of some that culture today, perhaps because it is somewhat derivative of country music in the United States, it is not taking over the world in the same way that Jean-Gilberto and Gilberto Gilles and some of the others did in the 1950s and 1960s.”

    2024-07-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “That's true. Most of the population in Brazil and the economic center for sure was in the southeast, and that means really Sao Paulo State, which is about a quarter of Brazil's population, but roughly a third of its GDP. Rio as well, the state of Minas Gerais, which has a name that tells its history that means general mines in Portuguese. That's the area where a lot of the gold came out of in the 18th and 19th centuries. That's gone now, so it's not as much of an economic pole. You're right, Tyler, though, that a lot of the real boom right now, the action, is in places like Matugrosso, which is in the region of Brazil called the centerwest. That's soy country. I'm from Texas, and Mato Grosso is virtually indistinguishable from Texas these days. It's hot, it's flat, the crop is, you know, like I said, is soy, there's cattle ranches.”

    2024-07-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, there's an old expression that thankfully is a bit out of date now that held that Brazil was the most efficient farming country in the world until goods left the farm, and what that was a reference to was the fact that the roads, infrastructure, rail, ports, and so on were not really up to par. But there has been an improvement, not enough, but again, this is another area where over the last 20 years, this soy that used to travel over, you know, two lane or even one lane mud roads, at least now it's paved in a lot of places. And some of these rail links are also improving. So this is another area where I think if you take that longer term perspective, things are getting a little bit better.”

    2024-07-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Well, you know, having a privileged location in the tropics and being able to have two harvests a year sometimes because of the climate and the soil, that helps.”

    2024-07-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Not a big receiver of immigrants today, although there are about five hundred thousand Venezuelans who've come there in recent years fleeing the collapse of the socialist dictatorship. There it has an equally sized population of people from Bolivia. So it still receives not as much as it otherwise might. I have to say that Portuguese as part of the challenge here, it's a language that not that many people know. And so, for example, even for the Venezuelans, that's out of a diaspora of 8 million. Most of them have gone to other Spanish speaking countries. But the ones that have gone to Brazil have been pretty happy with their decision.”

    2024-07-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “It's been, as you rightly point out, Tyler, it's been a long time since Brazil was, you know, a real destination for immigrants. I'm actually working on a book about Sao Paulo right now and revisiting a lot of this history when they had what they called the immigrants in, which received, it was in South Paulo and it received thousands of immigrants at a time, mostly from Italy, also from Spain, but Brazil also has the world's largest Japanese population outside Japan. So many people came there from the old Ottoman Empire today, Syria and Lebanon, that the mayors of Sao Paulo over the years have had names like Kassab, Haddad, Malouf. I mean, it does have that tradition of immigration. But that ended really with the Great Depression and the crash in coffee prices back when Brazil was producing as much as three-quarters of the world's coffee. It was a real blow to them and kind of changed everything. And you're right.”

    2024-07-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “We might all shrink, Tyler. This is not a question that Brazil alone is facing. We're seeing it across the Western world. But the danger here is real, and it's the same danger that faces China as well. It's the danger that these countries will get old before they get rich. And this is an issue we're seeing across much of the developing world.”

    2024-07-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Oh, my goodness I actually, you know, I take a longer view on Brazil. I've been following the country for almost twenty years now, and I've seen progress. This is a country that has its challenges, but it is one of the hemisphere's most solid democracies. It is a country that has lifted millions out of poverty over the last 20 years. It's more of a middle class country than it used to be. And I know what you mean by stuck. It's an economy that doesn't grow nearly enough. It has this political turmoil that makes headlines every now and then. But if you take that longer view, it's a better place than it was when I first started following it back in the 2000s.”

    2024-07-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source