The Western Bubble

This week we look at two stories that share a single underlying logic: the people running things have stopped pretending to care about the original purpose of the institutions they control, and are now just taking what they can before the music stops.

The first is FIFA. Gianni Infantino announced this week that FIFA, a nonprofit organisation founded to promote and regulate football around the world, will create a for-profit subsidiary and sell 20 percent of its stake to private investors, with Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared Kushner and son-in-law of Donald Trump, among those involved. We discuss why this is the logical endpoint of decades of slow institutional decay, and why UEFA, despite its own complicated record, finds it surprisingly easy to be the good guys here.

The second is the SpaceX IPO. Elon Musk bypassed the standard investor road show, set a valuation with no serious basis in the company's financials, ran a targeted marketing campaign at retail investors who worship him, and had SpaceX included in the Nasdaq composite index within 15 days of listing when the standard timeline is three months to a year. Index funds were then legally required to buy SpaceX shares, transferring wealth from ordinary pension holders to the richest man in the world and his Saudi co-investors.

We close with an announcement: we are going on our summer break. The deep dive series begins on August 10th and runs through August 31st, taking listeners from the Enlightenment through the 19th century institutionalisation of liberal democracy, through the 20th century peak, and into the 21st century collapse. Regular weekly episodes resume on September 7th.

This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at thewesternbubble@gmail.com.

In this week's Autopsy we react to an interview the Economist published with Elon Musk, conducted by Editor-in-Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes. We focus on the section where Musk talks about artificial intelligence, because it contains three logical steps in quick succession, none of which hold up to even basic scrutiny.

The tragedy is not Musk himself. It is that a man whose reasoning on these questions is this visibly incoherent is one of the most influential voices shaping how AI develops, and that so many people still take him seriously.

This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at thewesternbubble@gmail.com.

This week we start with the World Cup final. Spain beat Argentina, Argentina's players started fights during the game, declined to return the guard of honour as Spain lifted the trophy, and the internet went into overdrive. We are not a football podcast, but what happened afterwards is worth examining: within days, the anti-Argentina sentiment online had reached a scale that Argentinians themselves found bewildering and disproportionate. They are not entirely wrong about that. But their response, fighting back and dismissing it as manufactured conspiracy, is exactly the wrong one.

The concept that links Argentina, Israel, and a few other cases we discuss is siege mentality: the collective belief that the rest of the world has negative intentions towards your group, leading to a closing of ranks, a dismissal of outside criticism, and a retreat into tribal identity. It explains why Argentina cannot seem to understand why the world found its football team unlikeable this summer. It explains far more about Israel than any individual policy decision can. And it explains why, in both cases, the countries concerned are actively damaging their own long-term interests while convinced they are defending them.

We discuss how siege mentality develops, how it spreads from the most hardline members of a society to the reasonable centre under sufficient pressure, and why it is particularly tragic in Israel's case, given how much diplomatic capital was spent in the years before October 7th building exactly the international relationships that the subsequent reaction has now destroyed. The question is not whether the feeling is understandable. It usually is. The question is whether it is constructive. The answer, in every case we look at today, is no.

This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at thewesternbubble@gmail.com.

In this week's Autopsy we react to two travel influencers who responded to a UN General Assembly vote on slavery by advising their followers which countries are unsafe to travel to based on how those countries voted. The video is well-intentioned and the sensitivity behind it is entirely understandable. The analysis is not.

The resolution in question called the trafficking of enslaved Africans and the racialized chattel enslavement of Africans the gravest crime against humanity. The United States, Israel and Argentina voted against. Roughly 50 countries abstained, most of them European. The influencers interpreted this as a vote between countries that think slavery is bad and countries that think it is acceptable, and drew travel safety conclusions accordingly. That is not what happened.

We discuss why this matters. Not because the influencers are bad people, but because collapsing a complex diplomatic vote into a binary of good countries and bad countries actively blocks the serious conversations that the topic of slavery, reparations and European responsibility actually deserves.

This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at thewesternbubble@gmail.com.

This week we look at a pattern that has been building for years and is now accelerating: the establishment panicking, and the increasingly desperate measures it is reaching for in response. The AfD ban report in Germany, the EU Parliament procedure against the Europe of Sovereign Nations party, the removal of Hungary's president, and the Le Pen conviction all arrived within weeks of each other. They are not the same story, but they rhyme, do they?

We start with the deeper question of why the establishment finds itself here. The short answer is that it stopped having ideas. Neoliberal managerialism replaced political vision, triangulation replaced conviction, and the result is a political class that can tell you the inflation target but cannot tell you what kind of society it wants to build in twenty-five years. Into that vacuum, populists of the left and the right stepped with a simpler offer: here is your enemy, and we will fight them for you. Voters, being emotional rather than rational creatures, responded. And once anchored to that tribal identity, they do not let go when the populist fails to deliver. They simply find the next one.
We then work through the case studies. The EU procedure against ESN is philosophically incoherent: you cannot claim to defend liberal democracy by deciding which parties are allowed to participate in it.

The AfD ban report raises a genuinely harder question, since Germany's constitution explicitly anticipates this scenario, but the legal and political processes need to stay separate or the cure becomes the disease. Hungary under Magyar is the most complex: purging Orbán's system using some of Orbán's methods, restructuring public broadcasting by decree, removing the president through a tailor-made constitutional amendment. Some of it is defensible. Some of it sets precedents that will outlast Magyar's good intentions. And Le Pen, twice convicted, is running for president, because the electorate she is appealing to has long since stopped holding corruption against the people who tell them what they want to hear.

This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at thewesternbubble@gmail.com.