Yanis Varoufakis: Full Interview

This is the first of seven full interviews with the guests of our documentary Leviathan, which you can watch for free here. These interviews are available for all paid subscribers, and are packed with new ideas, provocations and insights.

There were a lot of ‘kill your darlings’ moments in creating Leviathan, with space for just a fraction of these interviews. I’ve been eager to share and discuss them for months as they’ve had an impact on my thinking. Each of our guests brings an important lens for making sense of the times we live in, from economics and tech to systems thinking and ecology.

The first interview we’re releasing is with Yanis Varoufakis, a heterodox economist and the former finance minister of Greece. Varoufakis describes himself as a ‘libertarian Marxist’, and while I don’t identify with either of those positions, I’ve always been inspired by his thinking.

I started following his work in 2015 when he made headlines around the world as the rebellious foreign minister of Greece during their sovereign debt crisis. More recently, I found his book Technofeudalism very on point, and drew on it to make sense of the Luigi Mangione case in my piece Best Served Cold.

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Yanis Varoufakis is an economist, political leader and the author of numerous bestselling books: Talking to My Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism; Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, which shows how the owners of big tech have become the world's feudal overlords; Adults in the Room, a memoir of his time as finance minister of Greece; an economic history of Europe, And The Weak Suffer What They Must?; and Another Now: Dispatches from An Alternative Present.

Born in Athens in 1961, he was a professor of economics in Britain, Australia and the USA before he entered politics. He became the foreign minister of Greece in 2015 during the sovereign debt crisis. He is co-founder of the international grassroots movement DiEM25 and a Professor of Economics at the University of Athens.