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Yanis Varoufakis

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2026-05-03
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2026-05-03
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  1. “That's what they are trying to do, but thankfully, human nature is inimical to that, and you will always find a way of resisting”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And of humanity, because if we could have an AI machine that could find all the right answers to all the right questions, why do we need democracy?”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Economics, though, because that also hits a wall of analytical power that it can't get. And then, you know, you set all this aside, and at some point you use your judgment to make the call. And there is no way in which this call can be reduced to a scientific process. This is the beauty of democracy.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “The answer must be judgment, which is foundationally different from calculation. The whole point about judgment is that there is no formula to tell you what you should do. You should take all sorts of different types of information into consideration. You should talk to many different people, and then it's actually Keynes had a very good answer to that. He said that the economist has a duty to combine a philosophical predisposition, the analytical powers of a mathematician, the diplomatic skills of a foreign minister or an ambassador, and so on and so on and so forth, and then come to a conclusion, you see, I believe that all students of economics have to learn all these models, reject them, train their mind through understanding all the models and not just the neoclassical neoliberal models. I can say this as a left-wing about Marxism.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “You really cannot solve it in the same way if you have two equations in three unknowns, it cannot be solved. It doesn't matter how good you are. It's like squaring the circle. It just can't be done. It's not just difficult. So, you know, the question is, why did I spend decades with this kind of economics? And the answer is because it was aesthetically fascinating. And also it was ideologically and historically politically interesting to see how those models are being used by politicians, bankers, and opinion makers and policymakers in order to justify whatever it is that they want to be justified by means of manipulating and actually distorting the meaning of these models.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Because the moment you have space, you have local monopolies, and that throws, it's like putting sand in a petrol engine, and you can't have externalities. So, in other words, nothing that I do can influence you except through the market system, which is, of course, rubbish, because if I pollute your environment, this affects you outside the market system. So what good is an economic theory which cannot sustain time, space, externalities, or actually money and debt? Because if let me put it this way, if you are trying to mathematize the economy, you have to solve it in a deliberate tradition, in the neoclassical tradition, even in the Adam Smith tradition. Imagine you have N markets. You have N goods, you have N prices, P1 to PN. So you have N equations. You have N unknowns. Maybe you can solve it. But if you add an N plus 1 unknown, which is money,”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “That is a major understatement Major incident. It's not that it is not that relevant. It is that it's utterly and constitutionally irrelevant and cannot be anything other if it is going to be solved mathematically. So let me put it simply. The economics we teach, the best of the best students in the best universities. Some of you may have heard of the general equilibrium theories that have delivered great Nobel Prizes to people like Kenneth Arrow, Gerard Dubreux. My mentor at Cambridge Frank Hann never got a Nobel Prize because he was an obnoxious person. Nobody liked him except me. But he deserved it for his work. also called the great theorems of welfare economics, they are predicated on a certain absence. So in these models, you're not allowed to have time because the moment you have time, the mathematics cannot be solved. You can't have space.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Well, I'll tell you why it doesn't apply to real life. The mathematics is so complex That in order to solve the problem, you need to make assumptions which take you away from anything like real life. So, for instance, you need to assume that the player's beliefs are consistently aligned. In other words, that nobody expects that it is possible for anyone to think that it is possible that my beliefs and your beliefs are not aligned. Now, take the Ayatodla and Trump. Is there any chance that that axiom can ever hold? None whatsoever. So you have a mathematical model that cannot be solved under realistic conditions and can only be solved under conditions which are very interesting philosophically, but which are completely useless in the real world.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “To undermine everyone, and that's a game. So that got me into game theory. And I was astonished by the aesthetic beauty of the mathematics of game theory.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Let me just go right to the end of what I'm going to answer you with. Don't use game theory in real life. It is dangerous. It should be avoided. It's like, you know, trying to appoint as a field marshal somebody who's an excellent chess player. You know, chess is good for training our mind to think logically, but it's not a substitute for actually knowing how to conduct a war, right? The story starts with that master's thesis of mine. So in that master's thesis, there was no actual game being played because one side was optimizing and the other was resisting, whether it's the employers. And then, of course, clearly my critique of what I had done and what that professor had from MIT had done is that, look, both are smart and both are rational and both are trying to undermine the other, knowing that the other knows that they know, that the other knows that they know, that the other knows that everybody's trying to”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “No, but I didn't know why I didn't agree on this, because the mathematics looked really good and the statistics was splendid. So I thought, okay, I will look into it. So I started for a couple of weeks, three weeks, and then I rewrote the mathematical model. So I turned it on its head. In other words, I took the model, I reversed it, I reversed it, and I had the trade unions acting hyper-rationally and the employer acting stupidly. And then I took the data. The professor was very kind enough to send me a huge tape with the data that he had used. And so I spent three or four months writing this up and showing that, you know what, our science can't answer the question because he has proven that the unions are stupid. I've proven that the employers are stupid using the same data and the same mathematics. In other words, economics can't answer this question. And then you know what happened? I started getting job offers.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “was of interest to me, and which purported to prove mathematically and statistically that in negotiations between employers and trade unions, employers are super rational and trade unions are mechanistic idiots who resist stupidly until at some point they no longer resist. And the mathematics was splendid.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “By the time I went to university, it wasn't like that under Keynes, under, you know, economics went through a huge transformation, which is actually quite detrimental to the capacity of economists to understand capitalism. So I thought I had escaped economics until my years as a master's student of mathematics, of mathematical statistics. This is a cute story. I was looking for a thesis to complete my master's degree at the University of Birmingham, which was on mathematical statistics. And one night I made a mistake. It was too late at night. And I went to the wrong floor of the Birmingham University Library. I was looking for mathematical papers in order to be inspired to find something to write my thesis on. And I was on the floor where the economics journals were. So I picked up randomly in the middle of the night a copy of the American Economic Review and I opened it and lo and behold I fell on an article written by an MIT economics professor which was highly mathematical which”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Oh, no, no, it wasn't there. Actually, it was pretty good. I decided that economics is a religion with equations, whether it's taught at Essex, LSC, or Harvard for that matter. And this is why I decided that I'm going to study mathematics, because if I'm going to study mathematics, I might as well study first classroom mathematics other than the third class mathematics, which is what economics is.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Was that he had inherited in order to fund Marx in the British Library to Aidas Capital? So there is a long tradition of that. And as I said, it's the right that use one's upper class upbringing in order to bring one down when one happens to be of a leftist disposition.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Rory, speaking from personal experience, it's only the right that attack me, for instance, for being a bourgeois socialist champagne leftist. That criticism doesn't come to me from the left, from the working class. If you look at history, no rebellion, no deep transformation of society took place without some of the privileged classes or members of the privileged classes siding with the underprivileged from the Christian evolution under the Roman Empire all the way to the anti-slavery movement. It wasn't the slaves that led the anti-slavery movement. It was aute bourgeois people. And similarly, I mean, if you look at the stalwarts of radical leftism, people like Engels. I mean, he was an industrialist in Manchester and he was using surplus value extracted from the textile factories, whatever it was.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “So, my mother came from petit bourgeois Greek family. Her father was a cobbler. He was a typical centrist, Venezuelist in Greek terms, and she had a tip towards the left because at some point she was abducted totally at random by communist partisans. And she walked into the university with this anti-communist disposition, but then very soon after that when the right approached her and started asking her to spy on former communists on their behalf, they gave her her first mission to be protected. She had to accept that mission in order to be protected as the only woman in the school of chemistry. And her first mission was to keep dabs on a certain gentleman had just come out of a concentration camp who looked like death warmed up, as you can imagine. He was something less than 50 kilograms after that. Experience, who happened to be my dad”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Very politely in his usual French way, I mean, his first language was French. His Greek was not that good. So he goes there, he does that. On the way out, he's grabbed by secret police. He's taken to a cell. He's beaten up. Then the officer in charge apologizes and says, oh, this was just brutes doing horrible things. We're very sorry. Sign this and you're out. And he looked at the document and said it was a denunciation of communism. And he said, sir, I'm not Buddhist. I'm not Muslim. But if you ask me to denounce Islam or Buddhism, I wouldn't do it because it's none of your business. Similarly, I'm not a communist, but I'm not going to denounce communists. So they beat him up a bit more and threw him into a prison cell. And then he got really pivived with this. And he was refusing to sign. Until in the end, he became a communist because they put him in a...”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “And so he arrived at this interregnum, and he comes to Athens and enrolls at the chemistry department and the physics department of the University of Athens. And he was at the time when the British had directed the right to go into bed with the left as part of this rapprochement, lend between them. And the Communist Party had given instructions to the communist students also to go along with that. So one day a representative of the ultra-right and a communist came to him and they said to him, look, we decide you're going to be the president of the students' union. Why? Because he was a UFO. He had come from Cairo. Nobody knew him. He was anodyne to both. So he accepts that a couple of weeks later at a time of famine, including famished students, the situation was awful. The authorities double student fees. And he thought it was his job as the president of the student union to go to the rector and complain.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “My father had a Greek culture from his dad and from having gone to a Greek school in Cairo. So in 1945, he was 2021. He was working for a bank in Cairo. He was really very well off. He didn't have to do what he did, but he decided he wanted to be a scientist. And he decided he's going to study Athens because his way of finding his Greek roots. And that was the interregnum between the first civil war, which ended under, you remember the Western Churchill-inspired clash between the left and the right in the end of 1944. Because it's important to mention that, you know, the Cold War began in Greece. It did not begin in Berlin. It began in, you know, all terrible things beginning Greece, like the Euro crisis much later. For some reason, which I am not familiar with.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Absolutely, my mother was my political mentor, even though my father spent four years in a consultation camp for leftists.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Anywhere he ended up in Egypt. So there he met my grandmother who was a French orphan who had been put through a French school, but somehow, you know, they blended into this Greek community, British community, Italian community, Jewish community, this multi-ethnic white community of Egypt.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Will the Greek Egyptian community was quite multifaceted? I mean, originally it harks back to the Hellenistic era, to the Greek Macedonians who were there since Alexander the Great, then different waves of Greeks arrived. A significant wave arrived after 1922 when the Greeks lost to the Turks in Asia Minor, and a lot of them sort of traveled all over, migrated, a lot of them to Egypt. But my grandfather, that is my father's father, yes, he was quite different in the sense that he was a bit of a rascal who had been given the tar and feathers treatment by his father on a Dotteganesian island for having been sent to Los Angeles to study law. He didn't study anything because he had too much of fun time there. And he came back pretending that he had graduated. And when it was discovered that he had never graduated, he was put on a boat.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “To whom I have devoted a chapter in my latest book. Yeah, she was totally caught up between two worlds. The European expat community, who were effectively the ruling class of Egypt and who were having a wonderful time, you know, traveling first class to the various wonderful parts of Egypt and living a life of grandeur with servants and all that. But at the same time, I discovered more recently she was a member, a paid-up member of the Egyptian feminist union, working with Egyptian women against the expat community, against their employers, organizing strikes in textile factories and so on. And that was always a sort of civil war happening within the family. And she raised my dad as French Enlightenment figure. So, you know, since he was five, he had to listen to stories about Voltaire, a bunch of Jean-Jacques Crusoe, but want to scare about all that. And, you know, so...”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Surely, I suspect you are referring to my penultimate book, which was a long letter to my dad, because as a recovering academic, I need to write books as if I'm pretending that I'm writing, I'm addressing a human being in order to stop being an academic. You once addressed your daughter. Yes, that's right. So I use my family and my beloved ones, even if they don't want it, especially if they don't want to. Ask my daughter. She never forgave me for doing that. Anyway, my dad, my dad was born and raised in Cairo as part of the Greek community, the expert community, but also intimately linked to the British and to the French expat community. So his father was the director of Thomas Cook in Egypt. He was organizing these death on the Nile cruises for British aristocrats. And his mother was French, French-born, but also raised in Egypt. So they were part of the colonial, you know, the white settlers of colonial Egypt.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Absolutely not, because I never had anything to do with the Labour Party, even when Jeremy. So our friendship sustained his leadership of the Labour Party. It was not due to it.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Well, that was the last kind of compliment I would have expected. Look, Jeremy is a great friend. He's been a friend for many, many years. We did lots of things together, which I'm very proud of, including protesting against Saddam Hussein when Saddam Hussein was the blue-eyed boy of the West, protesting against Vladimir Putin when Vladimir Putin was highly liked by the British establishment, by the United States and so on. So, you know, we have a long history of common defeat.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Well, let me first put it in context, right? Okay. Ten years ago, we had booked one of the most wonderful theaters in Berlin, the Foxbunner Theatre, where we inaugurated Diem 25, our movement, Democracy and Europe movement, together with people who were there last night, like Brianino and quite a few others. And last night we... Celebrated the 10th anniversary of that movement, that failed movement, but very, you know, I think still significant movement at the Toxa Theatre in the eastern of London. And 2,000 people. But I suspect what you want me to talk, to Rory about, is the fact that I've managed, we've managed M25 to put on stage together. Zak Polanski and Jeremy Corbyn.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Absolutely, absolutely. You have a situation where the left failed and the liberal establishments failed that led to the fascist rising up through the woodwork.”

    2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source