YouSaid · the spoken record

Martin Wolf

lines on the record: 65
first: 2026-05-14
most recent: 2026-05-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Asimoff is another of my fans, my heroes, sorry, he wrote wonderfully, the laws of robotics, and nobody seemed to be thinking about those either.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“point in the past there was something called the Butlerian jihad in which at the end of which machines that think were banned I wouldn't be terribly surprised if 100 years from now people if there are people still around will say we should have done that”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we just have to say we are stepping into the unknown. We should do our best to work out what our big dangers are and focus on them with our current politics that's impossible, clearly impossible. I think it is a huge moment in human history, possibly the single most important invention, and there have been some very, very important ones. And humanity will change profoundly. Humanity was changed by writing profoundly. It was transformed by publishing by the ability to print. It was transformed by the internet. I think this is probably more important than all of these put together, but I'm not sure. But my instinct is I'm a great fan of Frank Herbert, the June books, particularly June itself, and his idea that at some point.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Armies which could control human population, all this is absolutely terrifying and we're dancing into this and Sucian Lee under the direction of four or five geniuses and their companies and that's what's happening my instinct, probably those of an old man with grandchildren is it should all be closed down. But of course it's not going to happen. I do think it's transformative. I think it's going to be transformative in business. It's pretty clear they're going to be powerful business models. I can perfectly well understand that 10 years from now there will be no Martin Wolf because the computer will do it so much better. There'll be less fun. But the...”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Order of magnitude different from anything that had come before. And in the short to medium run, a lot of this would seem very helpful, very encouraging. We will enjoy it. We will be able to do things we couldn't do otherwise. But if we do get to artificial general intelligence, and it's absolutely clear that the machine dominates humanity in terms of what it can do intellectually in every possible way, then there is an existential question, obviously, is what is humanity for? And will human beings think therefore? So when I thought about this, and I leave aside the other obvious dangers, the creation of pathogens we can't possibly manage, the creation of armies, AI run armies, which are completely bot.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I read about it three or four years ago that it was going to prove completely unregulatable. It would, the competition process and so forth. It would make institutions that used it unaccountable in some profound way because decisions were not being taken by anyone you can hold to account. It would create transformation in our society, in our economy, and in our sense of ourselves, which was in avoidably just”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we have been fantastically innovative and creative, and we have in the process made ourselves vastly wealthier and wiser in some obvious ways, but we're always skirting the brink of catastrophes as a result. And the last thing that really motivated people around those lines was nuclear weapons that created people like Einstein got terribly frightened about what they created. Well, I think of AI that way. We have made a Faustian bargain and we have created a servant, quote unquote, with the capacity to replace us or even in some way to dominate us. Where this will end up, I don't know, but it seems to me there are a number of absolutely terrifying dangers. I think, and I thought for the first time,”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think of this as the ultimate Faustian bargain, the devil promises infinite wealth and power to Faust in return for his immortal soul, which is in some sense his meaning. And he makes the bargain and it doesn't end well.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're not going to become go where you are because we tend to think where you're going could ultimately lead you to some very, very dark places.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's European history. Ecotombs. Now, the problem with that is if you carefully toleration is your dominant mode, you can accept everybody except the intolerant and you crowd them out. That doesn't last, as you rightly say. Sooner or later people start getting passionate beliefs again. And we may be moving in that direction. But I'm one of those people who thinks once you're in that mode, it's very difficult to find the off switch because sooner or later everyone around you starts looking like an enemy. And so I don't want to go that. And most Europeans of my generation or even somewhat younger don't want to go that because we bear the scarce. And I think in a different way, why do the Chinese in the end accept the current? Because it works and it doesn't kill them all, and they don't want a lunatic again.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is where it seems to go is very, very frightening. Now, the younger generation now may now have forgotten enough history to start it again. So it might happen. But that was a dominant part. Yes, we wanted to defend ourselves against communism because it was one of those ideologies, European ideologies, that had gone wrong pretty obviously. We had realized most of us Stalin's death camps meant in terms of deaths. So Europeans didn't want that. And we look at, when I say we, I look at these Americans now with the enthusiasm for ideology and for passionate belief and also all I see is people who want to come and kill their neighbors because they have the wrong views or they're the wrong color or they're the wrong whatever.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We wanted to stop that because when we think it was very widely shared, whenever we got one of these, we ended up with mass murder. And the truth is nothing bad has ever happened to the US except your idiotic civil war, which should never have been fought because the civil, because slavery should have just been abolished by then it wasn't justifiable. So the point is, but one of my favorite statistics, I can't remember exact figures, but if you compare the number of Americans who've died in war, I think it's somewhere over a million, including the Civil War, a million and a half. You can probably give me the exact figures. In Europe, it's many tens of millions. So the idea of really believing in things, really, really believing things to the point that you actually want to go and kill people who don't share those beliefs.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was many other things, but it was also a religious war. So that was the 17th century, everybody believed. The problem is when everybody really believes in something, they often find an excuse for killing people who don't. I won't even talk about what happens to Jews. And then, of course, the same thing happened with nationalism, which led to some pretty spectacular wars, and communism. That was more mass murder internally. So Europeans became, and this is part of, I think, European culture, civilization after the Second World War, became exhausted With that ideology.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that I think is very important in, which I didn't stress in the History of the last 200 years, particularly the 20th century, is Europe spawned a lot of ideologies. Spawned all of them. So obviously, every variety of Christianity you can imagine. Which they happily fought over. Much of their history, Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Protestantism, and so forth. And of course socialism, communism, fascism, the dominant ideologies of the world. And one of the things that happened as a result of the religious wars. Were devastating. Arguably, the most destructive single war in European history, though it's very in a particular place based in Germany, was the 30 years' war or the early 17th century.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first and best column by far I wrote about Donald Trump. It was in March 2016 when I said Donald Trump is how great Republics meet their end. That was the headline. And it compared him with the Caesars, Julius and Augustus, who, who basically ended the Roman Empire, but they were far cleverer.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incoherent movement of people full of resentments and hatreds, including amongst one another, but also amongst other Americans, the rest of the world, and Trump, who is sort of, you can make sense of him as long as you accept he doesn't operate in a way that one would normally think of as rational. So when I think of a ruler, I mean like him, I think of Nero.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that doesn't seem to me likely looking at it. So the honest truth, and someone lived in America for 10 years, I'm a foreigner, but I lived there, followed it closely, the place has become completely bewildering and a completely bewildering superpower is absolutely terrifying. Nobody likes China. Nobody really. But they know what it's about. It's predictable. You know how the regime works. You know how the system works. You know what she's trying to do? That one can live with. It's very difficult to live with a country with this power, which is as completely bewildering as this one has become. And I've tried to give you some sense of how I think about it. And in the end, what I do is see an increase.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You compare it with the Roman Empire, the United States is sort of in the second century. So, what's the problem? But this US is what I see now. It could change, presumably, though I have no idea whether it could change durably. And my last point was very much a part of my new postscript for my book. You won't restore confidence in the rest of the world that the US sort of knows what it's doing and what it's about, has a coherent sense of itself just by a defeat in one election. Because that's not it. That's not over. You have to think that this is become unthinkable.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not intellectually grounded, pretty ignorant. He will use a lot of power if he doesn't work, he will withdraw. Thank heavens. That's what I see. It doesn't seem to me that we're looking at the US under this regime and looking at the people around that has a coherent sense as a whole of what it wants to be and what it wants to do. That's terrifying because it is the most important country in the world. It is the guarantor of the system, which I like to point out worked sensationally well for the US. So one of the most astonishing things to me is that if you look at it from outside, the US, I mean, I think it makes incredible mess of its own policy and politics. It could do much better. But the US is a spectacular success. Why is everybody want to change everything? It seems very difficult to understand.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“him. The movement, I think, has multiple different objectives. Some of them would like the United States, which coincides with Trump, the United States to be a 19th century great power, like Britain in 1850. Palmerston in Britain, we have friends, no permanent enemies, we have permanent interests. That would be a more intellectual version of this. And obviously lots of them think that. But some of them pretty well, obviously Hexeth is a Christian crusade, a completely different set of ideological aims. Vance seems to be in isolationist. So there's nothing coherent there. And so in the end, when I look at this, I think this is Trump's party. And with Trump, what you will get is... Action”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lucatours would have understood this. I mean, he's perfectly understandable. This is how much of humanity was ruled since the agrarian age. Any Egyptian pharaoh would have understood this. So he wants that. He has no ideology really beyond that, except it is very, very important to make clear in every bilateral relations he thinks bilaterally that he's the boss and the others aren't. And so he will throw his weight around particularly against anybody who thinks is essentially not showing improper respect in various different ways. So Maduro, sow the mullets. And that's important. The only constraint is my own sense of morality. Well, you'll work out what that means. So that is what he wants, what he wants to be, and he will naturally respect people who are aligned.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This view, what they might share, and as long as somebody like Trump is there, Trump wants to be king. I think that's pretty clear. He wants to be a man who says, my word is law. It's pretty obvious. He wants to rule a state which is free to do anything, which is anything he wants, and is bound by no constraint or law or rules external or internal.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What it wants because I'm not saying that individuals, people don't, but they don't share anything that is completely for Trump. What? Other than their affinity for Trump. So if I understand...”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty obvious they want to go back to a theocratic state or theocratic state structures. They want to establish, re-establish patterns of behavior and relations between men and women, between races and so forth, which was sort of old-fashioned. So there's a blistering new and a crusted old, as it were, trying to work together here. There are intellectual elements and then relatively small numbers, I presume, and a huge mass of very dissatisfied people, particularly as far as I can see, men and old people. What do these people have in common? So to answer the question, what do I think America is about? I don't know because I don't think the MAGA movement broadly defined, if I can use that word.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm almost speechless in response to that very, very good question because it's very difficult. Part of the problem, I think, is I see a separation between Donald Trump as a person. Him, obviously charismatic and exciting and his views of the world from that of the various different elements of the coalition that he's put together, which is a pretty strange coalition, pretty intellectually, culturally. It includes obviously a very large number of spectacularly wealthy and powerful business people, some of whom have a religious belief in the future. And at the other hand, it includes intellectual elements and people who have a religious belief in the past.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leaving the EU hasn't suddenly given us an enormous number of new opportunities which allow Britain to transform itself, and certainly no British political leader, and I can say this with some confidence looking at the whole lot, have any fundamentally new ways of operating here which are going to transform the performance of the country. And that's become more and more obvious, and it will be even more obvious if Nigel Farage, Rosac, Polanski, becomes the next Prime Minister. Nobody offers a coherent strategy for solving the problems of Britain as they are now. And it's partly because they've actually genuinely become very, very difficult.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Transform ourselves and our relation to the world was a fantasy. Now that's one side. The other side of it is, of course, that a very large part of what we had in common with Europe Welfare state. We had a relatively undeveloped one, but we have it in common. The problems of our economy, deindustrialization, the difficulty of coping with Chinese competition, for example, become more obvious. There are weakness in technology. And so we share with Europe. Britain wasn't different from and therefore didn't have completely different options from European countries. We're very similar. The Germans and they're all different in a certain way, have different strength, but actually in the big picture, Britain is just another European country. How else could it be? Look at its history. The only difference is got these tiny little waterway between us. And that's preserved independence. I'm not saying it's nothing, but essentially the opportunities and the challenges for the British economy, essentially those of Europe.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a perfect example of a small country that didn't realize it was a small country. They thought the people who sold this sold this in part because they said this will stop all these immigrants. It turned out actually we could do a stupendous job of accepting immigrants from everywhere else in the world as soon as we stopped the Europeans. That was sort of they were sold a bill of goods on that. It was pretty obvious. They were told we would be able to do all sorts of wonderful deals on our own. And we've done a few minor deals. One of the deals we were promised was a free trade deal with America. That certainly didn't happen. The point is Britain on its own is a minor power. So the idea that liberating ourselves from the EU will mean that we would suddenly have huge choices today.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No doubt that America is helping. If it does develop an independent sense of itself with its own institutions, sense of destiny, sense of identity, very difficult in a multinational state like this, entity like this, then it will be because the Americans are saying you can't trust us. We're going to beat you around the head if you don't sort yourself out. Maybe that will count.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you honestly ask me how this will play out, I have no idea and I don't think anyone does. I know what I would like to see. I've indicated it, but that may not be what is possible. What you really need is a European Charmin or Napoleon, and that doesn't come out of this, because there isn't a European with that will, the last European at the will to make Europe was Hitler. That's what he wanted to do. It would have been a German Reich. And before that was Napoleon. And before that, Louis Cators briefly mentioned. So I think the question of what Europe's future is, what it can be given its history of fragmentation and the extraordinary life that came out of this fragmentation, I think it's just not at all clear. But there's no...”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are, but there aren't many. And in political will terms, then, you have this either mild centralizing desire to pull together, be a more effective club, which is what I would like to see, or it's, yes, we would like to be a great power game, but it's the nation. And as one famous European politician once said, in Europe, there are small countries and small countries that don't realize they're small.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rather mild desire to create an effective Europe which isn't really a state but is more of one than now. That's the center. And the other side of the right wing nationalists. But the right wing nationalists are nationalists. They're not European because when you start going back to who the nation is, you go back to France, less Germany, but it's going to happen. Italy is a peculiar history. I won't go into that. But in France, the French right is nationalist, protectionist. It doesn't see itself as Europe. There aren't any nationalists in the sense that Vance is a nationalist or Trump is a nationalist who are European nationalists. It doesn't, that's an exciting.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The enemies are just across the border everywhere. If we go back to that, the end of the world. So we left everything to Uncle Sam because he was a kind, generous uncle. Made a few odds stake. But basically we trust it. That's how we got to where we are. This is my 10-minute history of Europe. Now suddenly you're saying you want us to become a superpower You want us to be a great power with an army and a will and we don't trust any of that stuff the last time we tried to do that we blew up the world this is not nothing it's still there the desire the will to power the famous isn't really there so that gets to the answer to your question what do I think will happen and I think that's exactly the struggle now because you could see in a sense there are two forces in Europe today one is a centrist liberal”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was actually Europe itself that destroyed itself. In the end, by the way, that led to the direct liberation of all the empires because they didn't have the power anymore to do it. And America was very keen on breaking. Absolutely right, by the way. So anyway, Europe said after that we have to be something completely different. This is really important. We have to be something completely different. But the most important, we need to unite, but we're still states. We have different histories, languages, cultures, and so forth. We can't get rid of that. So we must cooperate. We want someone to look after us. That was the US. We don't trust ourselves. We've lost trust in ourselves. Very important. The British least, which covers this because they got through it. So they decided that they would feel we can be outside it. We're an island. But the others...”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Its confidence in itself and its values because look what happened in the death camps. So Europe triumph ended up in a catastrophe. And that's what Europeans, I'm old enough to remember all this. I was born in just after the war.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And correct. And China's unity held it back because it didn't allow for this competition. Europe was built around competition. Among the states, among the rulers, and within them as a result, partly because of this. I won't go through all that because it takes too long. So then at the end of this magnificent process, not surprisingly, when the modern states were emerging after the Industrial Revolution, nationalism became the way of mobilizing the people. For the first time, you really created mobilized societies. Before that, the armies were predominantly professional or class-based armies. The French really invented the universal conscription state. And this came culminated in the two world wars, which completely shattered Europe. It shattered its idea of...”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the European states evolved in conflict, and they became very, very, very good at it, extraordinarily good at it, so good at it, that once they really got going, they ended up by conquering so much of the world. It's still very shocking that they did. I still think, think of how few thousands of English people succeeded in conquering India in the middle of the 18th century. It's completely freakish. fragmentation was a core of it and the cultural development the scientific was also the core of that because when there was a problem with one state trying to suppress certain sorts of thinking people moved everywhere somewhere else or the ideas moved somewhere else so there is this idea which i think is right that the division of europe actually made it i think this is very very powerful idea”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Europe transformed the world. It's absolutely ambiguously the case, this peripheral, you can call it the continent, really just a promontory of Eurasia six or seven hundred years ago was pretty irrelevant. And it ended up conquering most of the world and completely transforming the world intellectually, culturally, scientifically, and politically by creating these vast empires. And one product of which was the United States. And how did this happen? Well, there are many arguments about this. There was a shared civilization and profound political rivalry. That the one core element of European history since the fall”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's one possibility, and it's a possibility that pretty well everyone who's a friend of mine who's European. And I suppose I'm one, would want to see. I think it's important to understand why it's so difficult. And this gets back to the sort of, if you like, the historical tragedy of Europe. How did it get to be where it is? I wrote one column on this, which I'm particularly proud of it, so I will repeat some of the argument. It was essentially that”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Comparing them with that. And so while I agree that there are important elements of the critique which are serious and we should take seriously, which I've mentioned, that the critique doesn't seem to me to be coming from an honorable place if the aim is to prefer, preserve Republics, if the aim is to preserve ethno-national dictatorships, which Mr. Putin would certainly agree with, then that's something else, but that's not my side.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you are elected, anything you do by definition is democratic. And that is absolutely incompatible, inconsistent with obviously the core premises of the Constitution, particularly what we would think of as the Madisonian principles, that there is such a thing as the tyranny of the majority. So even if somebody has a majority, very rare that they do, that doesn't entitle them to do whatever they want, constraining institutions are the core of a republic the Republican idea. And I am concerned that ideologies that reject that on the left and the right are being reborn over the last 20 or 30 years, perhaps a bit longer. And that's what the Second World War was fought against in a very extreme form. So I'm not.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is essentially in violation of the citizenship compact. And I wrote that at length. And I think it's perfectly understandable why many citizens would feel we don't want everybody in the world to come here. It would create some very, very big problems. And I think the view on the parts of the left, quote-unquote, progressive left, that borders should basically be abolished is not compatible with the survival of any form of democratic notion grounded citizenship. So I'm very clear that was a big mistake. What worries me more about the concept of democracy that is emerging, which you see in the Trump camp and you saw in some of the people he admired like Victor Orban, is the idea that”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I wrote this in my book that one of the things that define a state, and certainly a democratic state, is the possession of borders. A state and a citizenship which is associated with a state in a democratic context is exclusive by definition. It is the values may be universal, but citizenship is not by definition. And that we get that going all the way back to the beginning of these ideas in our ancient world. The Greeks and Roman view of what a republic or a democracy was. So I think that not controlling your borders and making sure that the people who come to live in it, particularly the people who come to live in it permanently, are people you've chosen. It's been a political process in which you've chosen them.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Germans on the import which is started in the most notorious start of this was Vance's speech in Munich last year in 2025. Well, the Germans feel that it really would have been a pretty good thing if they stopped Hitler saying some of the things he said. Indeed, if they'd removed him and put him in prison for a very long time, not instead of just letting him out when he was put in prison, so there are questions of how far you allow speech to be free. It's a fine doctrine, but it seems actually the administration too believes there are lots of things we really don't want people to say. So there's an issue there. But I think there's a critique there. On the civilizational thing, I think”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the administration is right, but I don't think they're honest in their critique, but that some governments, my own included, have gone too far in protecting people from what is called hate speech. And that there is a perfectly good argument that both in private institutions, universities, and so forth, and in public, you don't have a right not to be offended. That is clear. However, my view also is that there are some forms of speech that European history, we'll see where it goes with American history, suggests, are profoundly dangerous than the one I used in my example of this, is that if you're lecturing”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one of the problems we have is we don't feel looking at the whole range of what's going on in the United States that this administration really does believe in free speech.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“historical relations they don't trust one another very important point by the way not you know the European history is not so far beneath the surface so I think we are there at the stage of absolute intellectual moral confusion but they don't trust Trump”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that very much the relationship turns around and becomes a violent bully, you're sort of in shock. But worse, you don't know where to go and live. Who do you get to, who's your alternative? Do you want to become friendly with China? Not really. Do you want to become friendly with Putin? Absolutely not. And are we strong enough to survive on our own in all these different dimensions? Of course not. The vulnerability of Europe is staggering. Just think what would happen if the American administration decided, if it could decide that, to just close off our access to the American digital stack, as it were. Cloud computing, all the rest of it. So then the question is, well, what do you do? And I think they're still really and truly the Europeans at an early stage of deciding what they want to do and they find it difficult to agree. Very difficult. There are so many of them with different attitudes, values.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of every aspect of security, belief, trust. They were very, very content with this. So whether they were naive or not, very interesting question, it's all come as a colossal shock. Now, Trump won was when the first administration of Trump was a wake-up call, but in the end it wasn't so bad. They felt, oh, well, full of sound and fury, but didn't signify that much. In the end, he didn't do much, otherwise he didn't change. Trade policy didn't withdraw from NATO. He filled his administration with a sort of people we're familiar with, we like and trust, those sorts of Americans. This is a shock. I don't think it should have been a shock, but this is a shock. And in the first year, when suddenly your trusted spouse, as it were,”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grew so dependent on America for so long that pretty well all its structures, its defense system very obviously, but also the things it didn't bother to produce itself. For instance, the Holte array, the trade relations, the investment relations, and of course the underlying ideology, the sort of liberal democracy they imported. This all came from America. I mean, we would be wrong to say that it wasn't there a lot of this wasn't there before in different ways. The first and second together, it was so shatteringly demoralized as a continent and so damaged. We can go through the damage done to all the different major countries that the US became the core.”
2026-05-14 · Odd Lots · Martin Wolf on the 'Terrifying' Superpower That the US Wields · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source