Friday Wrap-Up: A President's View on Global Power and Learning from Big Tech

Hi everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of Friday Wrap Up. I'm Stelin Martiskoye. Nikola Tangin. Where are you this week, Nikola? Well, I've been on the West Coast of The US, Seattle, San Francisco, so I had a very interesting time here. For sure. Okay, so we will come back to that in this episode. And then we will talk about this week's podcast guest, which was Alexander Stroeb, President of Finland. And this is extremely interesting episode. So first off, Stab has become a really influential voice in geopolitics. And I would say he surely punches above his weight. How has he achieved that? Well, is first of all because he's a very, you know, smart, educated, articulated and clever person. In Finland, they split the jobs so that the president is looking after the foreign policy and the defense policy and the prime minister is taking all internal kind of matters. So I guess as a president, you've got quite a bit of time to spend with the other foreign leaders. And then he has very close relationships with a lot of the other leaders, such as Kearny, the Norwegian Prime Minister and so on, and a lot of the other European leaders. So he's really been extremely good at fostering those relationships. He's also vocal about it, both media and in podcasts and so on. So it was really, really interesting to have him as a guest. Yeah, for sure. And also Finland, for those who are not that familiar with the geography of the Nordics, it then sits between Sweden and Russia on the side and quite recently became a NATO member. So if you go to his book and one of the things that he starts talking about in the podcast is his argument that we are on one of those really big turning points, like 1918, 1945, '89, and that he thinks that who decides what comes next is the global South. Yeah, what do you think listening to that? No, I think it makes a lot of sense. What we are seeing is, of course, that China is making very close relationships with countries in Africa, they are close to India, are close to countries in South America. So the whole scene here is changing. And I think what he's arguing is that the West has really ignored the whole African continent, a lot of these other countries, and we are not paying the price by being outside that development. Yeah, for sure. And looking at some of the solutions, think his own preference coming from a small nation, exactly like Norway, it's like a multiple natural system built around the UN, but only reforms, so with more security council seats for the global South. So he also says in a podcast that he would actually have renamed his book, he would call it the rectangle of power instead. And also he also talks about The US into this context. …