037 | Felix Marquardt | Manifesto for a new nomadism

Movement is core to the human experience and to the emancipation of ambitious young people all over the world. Leaving home – really leaving – is the final step of one's education, says Felix Marquardt, author of The New Nomads. But globetrotters must leave another place – La La Land, the magical world where their privilege isolates them from the world as it really is for most of humanity. And just as important as the moment we leave, is the moment we come home.

For the first episode of the new season, an in-depth conversation about belonging, climate, addiction, the lessons of indigenous cultures and why we've been thinking about nomadism all wrong, with author and recovering "global schmoozer" Felix Marquardt.

Show notes
00:15 Intro
02:07 Meet Felix Marquardt
03:37 Who are the New Nomads?
06:12 The two most important moments in one's life
08:37 The limits of digital nomadism
12:22 We've been thinking about nomadism all wrong
16:39 What indigenous cultures can teach us
18:41 (Ad) The genesis of Borderline
20:57 A civilization of addicts
27:13 How we resist despair
30:27 Leaving La La Land
38:51 Outro

📚 The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution is Making the World a Better Place, by Felix Marquardt. Simon & Schuster UK. 2021. Buy it here.
🐦 Follow @Feleaks on Twitter

Transcript

Transcripts are published for your convenience, but they are automated and not always cleaned up. Please excuses typos and occasional nonsense, and always check the audio before quoting.

[00:00:00] Felix Marquardt: There's a part of me that loves the premise of your podcast. Like this is me, you know, this is my story. This is my club. This is my tribe. But we're also living in La La Land.

[00:00:15] Intro

[00:00:15] Isabelle Roughol: Hello fellow residents of La La Land. Welcome back, or welcome if you're new to the podcast. I'm Isabelle Roughol and this is Borderline.

[00:00:27] Borderline is about lives that straddle borders. It's about who we are when we can't be summed up by the passport we hold. It's about immigration and geopolitics, identity, belonging and what home really means. It's about looking at current affairs through a truly global lens and understanding borders as the place where we meet others, not where we stop them. And yes, it holds a radical hope, a certain faith in humanity's capacity for growth that is not always borne by the facts. But as my hero Bernard Guetta often says, "what can you do with pessimism?"

[00:01:01] Borderline is supported by its readers and listeners. So go to borderlinepod.com/subscribe to join us. There's a podcast, but also a newsletter, a news site, a Discord channel and community... All members will get a shout out at the end, but for now, thank you and welcome to newcomers Lauren Razavi and John Abell.

[00:01:25] You don't need to be a globe trotter to explore these ideas with us. In fact, this season I'm really interested in exploring how we build community wherever we are and how we express our relationship to place. You have to hold the same curiosity for people down the street, as you do for people across an ocean. That's true global citizenship, and it is not rootless. We'll also make a lot of room for two current issues that are intimately linked with migration: inequality and the climate emergency. So big topics on our plate, which makes it all the more important to hold onto that hope, to that sense of wonder and adventure. We're going to celebrate the joy of the global life, of exploring and wondering... We're going to hold on to a bit of La La Land.

[00:02:07] Meet Felix Marquardt

[00:02:07] Isabelle Roughol: To start us off this autumn, I was thrilled to chat with Felix Marquardt. Felix is definitely of our tribe, technically Austrian American, but culturally, quite French. I fangirled a bit at first. See a decade ago, he and some friends launched a movement in France telling young people to scram. "Barrez-vous," they called it. Get out, leave the country. He wasn't saying that France was bad, he was saying it wasn't giving young people the opportunities they deserved and that it badly needed the fresh ideas and fresh energy that people bring back from living abroad. It's hard to express what it was like growing up in France then, it's changed quite a bit, but it was stale and stultifying as a teenager. Closed off, inward-looking and every synonym of navel-gazing you can think of. If you've grown up in the US or the UK, or any country with a sense of exceptionalism, you know what I mean. I couldn't wait to get out. And I did, but I was a freak. Friends thought I was wasting my time, delaying my degree. A professor said I was making the biggest mistake of my life. That's an actual quote. A few years later, sometime between returning from Cambodia and leaving for Australia, Felix Marquardt was the first grownup with any visibility in French media to validate my choices. And it meant a lot.

[00:03:23] Now he's come out with a book that continues and refines that conversation. It's called The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution is Making the World a Better Place. We talked about all the things I mentioned before, migration, climate, inequality and addiction too.

[00:03:37] Who are the New Nomads?

[00:03:37] Isabelle Roughol: Who are they, those people that are the title of your book, the new nomads?

[00:03:42] Felix Marquardt: Well, I , I guess that's the the main point I wanted to, or one of the main points I wanted to make is, they're very different people with very different situations, very different particulars. Um, but in many ways they, they have, uh, things in common and the fact that they've left home, the fact that they've moved means that they have, they have really many things in common.

[00:04:12] We tend to label migrants and people who move around the world differently depending on whether they have money or not, whether they are white or dark skinned, whether they are fleeing war or famine or both, depending on whether they are looking for something and they're not under duress, they're not refugees. And to some extent this labeling makes a lot of sense, and it's very helpful. We need to help refugees in a way that we don't need to help digital nomads. But at the same time we're missing something because of these labels about what we share and what in our experiences we have in common. And so the book is, it sort of chronicles trajectories of a variety of young people, who were born on one continent and for various reasons have ended up on a different one. Some of them are entrepreneurs. Some of them are refugees. Some of them are both. Some of them were trying to get out of a situation, whether it be professional or societal or a family situation that they didn't, that they didn't like, and that they wanted to flee from. Some of themleft their country behind because of war. Some of them left a country behind cause they couldn't make a living. But it's, but it also looks at how these very different people in the very different circumstances, what they have in common. It takes a broad approach to the phenomenon of migration and tries to look at what all of us have in common.

[00:06:04] Isabelle Roughol: What is it that we have in common then? That all these characters of yours have in common,do you think?

[00:06:12] The two most important moments in one's life

[00:06:12] Felix Marquardt: I think, um, to some extent people who are able to leave, are privileged. Um, but it's really important also to, to see that the privilege of nomads also comes from the fact that they've left. It's not because all of them were very wealthy or very fortunate at the beginning of their journeys.

[00:06:35] You could argue that the two moments, the two most important moments in our lives are the moment when we leave home, because it teaches us so much about who we are. It teaches us so much about the society that we've grown up in. It teaches us so much about others. It teaches us so much about the world. There's a kind of temporal perspective that we gain from geographical perspective. So when you move around the world, you actually, you don't just learn about other places, you learn to look at humanity from a broader temporal perspective. So that's a really important phenomenon.

[00:07:20] So that's one of the things that happens to all of them is that they shrink. When you leave home, you shrink, everything becomes bigger. The conversation outside you, everything takes on more importance. Your internal conversation becomes much richer. And so you grow faster.

[00:07:40] And at the same time, another thing that happens eventually to all these nomads is that when we migrate, when we roam, when we leave home, we're also actually looking for a home. one of the things , that we have in common and eventually at some point --that's the second, most important moment in one's life-- we have to settle down and grow roots and begin to not just wander, but actually become part of a place.

[00:08:19] And this is also a big thing that all of them have in common. It's the decisions that they made at some point, most of them, to settle down somewhere and what that decision has involved and what it's had in terms of consequences.

[00:08:37] The limits of digital nomadism

[00:08:37] Isabelle Roughol: So that's why you're not a big fan of the digital nomads, so to speak, that idea of being constantly on the move.

[00:08:44] You know, I don't, I I've, I've done my share of roaming. I don't want to cast judgments on people. I think, there's a moment in your journey where it's really exciting to get as much mileage as possible, you know, to move really fast and to see as much of the world as you can. And, you know, that's what youth is about. I don't think it would be fair on my part to say, well, no one should do that because I've done it so much in my life that, um, it would just be a bit absurd and hypocritical. But what I can say is that, first of all, we're learning things about the impact of high-speed mobility that I think was escaping people up until now. And it's becoming harder and harder to just ignore that. Environmental impact you mean?

[00:09:40] Felix Marquardt: Yeah. Environmental impact, but also like being a real nomad is about engaging with the people that you meet. Going very fast to a place somewhere else where you're going to meet many other people who have come from other places , very fast and mingling with them without really connecting to the place, without really engaging with your surroundings, without learning about the culture, without becoming a local expert, without becoming of that place, that's not really nomadism.

[00:10:21] And so I think actually in many ways, while I understand that moment in young people's trajectory when that seems very exciting, I think the term digital nomad is actually a bit of a, a bit of an oxymoron because is the nomad is connected to place and digital nomads, as we understand the term, are often there's a phase where they are just obsessed with just movement and connecting only with other digital nomads.

[00:10:52] So that doesn't, that doesn't really qualify as nomadism really. That said again, what I've found is that sooner or later, the people who identify as digital nomads see the limits of that kind of lifestyle. And that's also part of the trajectory. It's part of our journeys. It's part of growing up. It's understanding that some things don't actually work so well in the long-term and, and that it's really important to be immersed in the local culture.

[00:11:26] Felix Marquardt: So it's not so much that I have beef with digital nomads. It's just that I think, uh, sooner or later,they realize that some of the aspects that they are uber focused on, mobility, mobility, mobility, can't really be ends in themselves. And usually they end up feeling very empty.

[00:11:49] So yeah, it's just something to keep in mind, but you know, it's, it's a, it's a process and it's a journey and I am certainly not going to, uh, judge people because they are at the beginning of a journey where I am, I'm at a different part in my journey, so .

[00:12:09] Isabelle Roughol: Do you think that's something that the past year, a year and a half, has changed? That extreme mobility has been much, much harder and we've been forced to stay in place and contemplate where we are.

[00:12:22] We've been thinking about nomadism all wrong

[00:12:22] Felix Marquardt: Yeah, I think, we've discovered really, we've rediscovered the pasture.The term nomad comes from the Greek nomos, the pasture, and it's only by extension that it comes from the term, nomas, the act wandering on said pasture, and so we've become obsessed with the wandering aspect. But as I was just saying, if you forget the pasture, then you're not really a nomad.

[00:12:45] Rediscovering our surroundings, rediscovering slow mobility, walking to be very specific and maybe sound a bit trite, but actually rediscovering what it is to engage with a place by walking around it, that is, an aspect of nomadism that I think was not really considered relevant not that long ago. And now it is. Connecting with our surroundings, frugality, the value of community, the value of connection, relatedness with other people in our community, the value of or the importance of taking care of people around us, of,showing reference for the fauna, the flora that we're surrounded with, all those things have been made much more important by the pandemic because many of us couldn't move. And I think that's a great thing. I think the pandemic is an amazing opportunity to reassess everything.

[00:13:47] This is not directly related to the book itself, but I think what's dawned on us, on many of us during the course of this pandemic, is that what we've been calling normal until not that long ago was a form of civilizational suicide.

[00:14:04] And so the way in which this book engages with that notion is that something fundamental changed in us. As a species when we went from an overwhelmingly nomadic culture to an overwhelmingly sedentary one --and I'm not suggesting that we should go live in small groups of hundred people in the forest, but I, but I am suggesting that the way we started othering one another, the way we started othering ourselves, our lack of connection with ourselves, our lack of connection withthe rest of the metabolism that we so clumsily call nature, the way we built that separation is very much a hallmark of sedentism. And so I do think that our survival as a species is going to be intimately tied, it's going to hinge on our capacity to re-embrace what I would call nomadic metaphysics, a nomadic world view.

[00:15:24] Because when you think about it, we love to talk about ourselves as a rational science-based culture, civilization, but now it's been 30 years plus that the climate scientists at the IPCC and other scientists have been telling us that we're committing suicide. And they don't quite know what words to use anymore because we've just become so numb, the news is so horrendous, we just don't know how to process it anymore. But clearly we're not science-based. We don't use reason to make decisions about how to behave, we use reason to justify and rationalize the way we behave. And so we're going to have to look at this, more and more because you know, we pretend that we're not part of nature and that's why we're sort of okay with it going to shit, but we are part of nature. And if it goes down the drain, we go down the drain. So it's not sort a nice thing to do to try to re-embrace this nomadic world view, it's going to become a question of life and death for humans.

[00:16:39] What indigenous cultures can teach us

[00:16:39] Felix Marquardt: And in a way,the nomads that I left out from the book, are the 4% indigenous people, the 4% of the world population who are indigenous people. And in a way, because they're not the addicts to carbon, to growth, to extraction and consumption that most of the modern, so-called modern world is, they should be, these cultures, these indigenous cultures and their practices should be an inspiration for us, as we try to figure out how to live in a way that is less damaging to each other, to ourselves and to the rest of the metabolism. And these 4% of the world population because through genocide and genocide and genocide, and it's going on right now in Brazil,with some absolutely frightening attacks against, the peoples of the Amazons led by Bolsonaro, but also the agri business interests of Brazil, indigenous peoples represent 4% of the world's population, but they are the custodians, the guardians of 80% of our biodiversity.

[00:17:56] So it's not sort of romanticizing the indigenous than to say that we need to stop hoping that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are going to save us because their plan is for everyone to live with the footprint, the entropic carbon footprint, of an American. And if we all live that way, we'll be at plus 20 degrees by 2100, compared with pre-industrial temperatures.

[00:18:31] So we can't afford that. um, sorry, that was a long digression.

[00:18:38] Isabelle Roughol: We'll be right back.

[00:18:40]

[00:18:41] Isabelle Roughol: Hey, this is Isabelle. I want to tell you a little bit more about the genesis of Borderline and what you can do to support it.

[00:18:41] (Ad) The genesis of Borderline

[00:18:48] Isabelle Roughol: So at the start of 2020, I went on sabbatical. Obviously, we all know what happened in 2020. It didn't quite go as I had planned. And in one of the endless long days of lockdown, I came up with this idea.

[00:18:59] I've been listening to podcasts for 15 years. I really was keen to have one of my own. And because I've lived my life crossing borders, I've lived on four different continents, it's very much a part of my identity, I thought well there really is no media out there that speaks to this particular experience and explore the ideas that make this kind of life possible and different and that seeks to bridge those gaps with people who maybe do not have a similar experience, as well as help people who do belong and feel a place where they can talk to each other. So that's how Borderline was born.

[00:19:32] And I really thought it was going to be a fun lockdown project and eventually I'd look for a job because if nothing else, there are bills to pay. But I found that this work was so meaningful to me. And also it takes up a lot of time to do right. And so I've just kept doing it.

[00:19:47] This is a lot of work and this is work that I do entirely on my own. And in order to support it, to keep paying the rent and the software and the hosting and all of this, I've opened it up to membership and also to just have a community of people who would be invested in Borderline, would share some feedback, would talk to each other and not just listen to me blab along in this little blanket fort with a mic that I've made up.

[00:20:10] So if you want to join us, and members get early access to the podcast without these annoying ads, they get a community on Discord where we can chat to each other, they get just access and transparency on how the business is going. And we're just a little community of global citizens having fun. So if you want to join us, you can go to borderlinepod.com/subscribe and sign up. You can get the free newsletter, but you can also pitch in a fiver a month to just help me keep this going. If this resonates with you, if this podcast, if everything that comes with Borderline means to you even just a little bit of what it means to me, please consider joining. Go to borderlinepod.com/subscribe. Thank you so much. And now let's get back to the episode.

[00:20:57] A civilization of addicts

[00:20:57] Isabelle Roughol: your book, you, you chose to include your battle with addiction.What's the connectionwith what you're describing?

[00:21:06] Felix Marquardt: I'm still, I'm still, um, I'm still wrestling with this, but what I found is, um, so. I used to, I used to be a regular attendee of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in Davos. And, um, when I, when I was in the throes of addiction, I really couldn't believe that I was. It didn't even, it didn't even cross my mind becauseI was working for very important people, very powerful people, paid a lot of money. I thought I was really cool. Like I was this James Bond type running roaming around the world, living in fancy hotels, et cetera. And for me, addicts were people who lived in crack houses or who shot up on park benches, but I, I couldn't possibly be an addict.

[00:21:58] And then when I, when I, when I sort of, when things got so bad that I had to go into rehab and that I started the process of recovery, I thought, wow, that was really impressive how I managed to continue working for all these important people, despite. being in,slowly and in a very, scary position as a, as an active addict.

[00:22:21] Felix Marquardt: And eventually what dawned on me is that no, I was flourishing in circles of power, I was flourishing in Davos, I was flourishing working for heads of state and,for CEOs of big companies, not despite my addiction, but because I was an addict. The highs of working for really important people and being paid a lot of money, of, being in the news, hanging out with famous people, were very similar to the highs of doing drugs. Very similar.

[00:22:53] And so I realized that. in a way it might be relative to think, to use the prism of addiction to understand why we have all this data that it tells us you are committing suicide. Because right now we're still stuck in these ridiculous cons, I mean the whole sustainability blah, this whole world of, you know, all these ads that tell us, we're doing, eco pasture , or whatever it is like"ecopaturage" in French, I don't know how you translate this concept, but, just all this greenwashing that's happening is making us forget that essentially we don't know --and this has been made even clearer by the pandemic-- is we don't know how to do economic growth without doing environmental degradation. We don't know how to grow economically withoutan increase in carbon emissions. We just don't know how to do it. And we're nowhere near doing it.

[00:24:07] And so when you think about that, the whole oxymoronic dimension of, of the concept of green growth, then it's striking that maybe what we're dealing with here is addiction. Addiction to carbon, addiction to growth, addiction to extraction, addiction to consumption, addiction to more... You know, I, as an addict, I'm addicted to more. You give me chocolate, I want to eat 10, you know, 10 packages. My journey in recovery has been a long process, sort of a long unending game of whack-a-mole whereby I discover what's the next thing I can do or consume in an unhealthy way. , I can do work in an unhealthy way. I can do sugar in an unhealthy way. I can also do, you know, sex relationships, uh, buying stuff, um, watching Netflix...

[00:25:12] So if we have become a civilization of addicts and in particular if we are addicted to more stuff,if indeed the single most accurate measure of a country, a person, a household, a company's carbon footprint is how much money they spent, then When we hope that Jeff Bezos or the people in Davos or Bill Gates or Elon Musk are going to help us address these mammoth issues that we have to address, and indeed this issue which is that we've become a civilization of addicts, then what we're doing effectively is we're asking the people with the best heroin to lead, to convene and run the intervention we so direly require. It's crazy. It's crazy. It's not going to come from them.

[00:26:14] Felix Marquardt: And it's much more likely to come from the cultures, that I mentioned before, the cultures which have learned to live in a way that is not dependent on consumption, on more carbon always, onextraction, et cetera, et cetera. Those are the places where we can learn to behave in a way that is mature, that is sober, that is discerning, that is accountable. And I don't, again, I think it's really important, I don't mean to romanticize indigenous peoples. Indigenous people are like everyone else, they're flawed. But the practices, the ancestral practices and the cultures that they are embedded in are full of wisdom for us.

[00:27:13] How we resist despair

[00:27:13] So the nomadism you were talking about before, this idea of being more connected to the earth, to the environment, but also more open to finding solutions elsewhere and seeing, I think personally and I think that's, that's what you're expressing. what's amazing about travel and about mobility is that human problems are the same everywhere, but the solutions are very different. And so that's kind of what you, find when you travel. What worries me is that it's not the world that's coming. Is it? in the past year and a half, certainly, you know, borders have been closing everywhere. We've been erecting walls in Greece and in Turkey against Afghan refugees, walls around even the Kabul airport. So you know, this world that you're calling for, do you, are you hopeful that it's coming?

[00:28:03] Felix Marquardt: When I started tackling with the sheer magnitude of the shit show that we're dealing with, with the clusterfuck of crises that are brewing, I went through an intense, very intense period of real despair. Like the insanity of each one of these crises,the magnitude of it, the fact that it's so complex, the fact that all these phenomena are intertwined, completely entangled means that I just felt completely hopeless. And, and I went through a phase of really massive, like intense despair.

[00:28:49] What I've gained from that phase is a new kind of, serenity from, that has come from having gone through that despair and learning to live, to find solace and a degree of serenity from just merely not behaving like a self-centered jackass on a daily basis. I've come to a place where just trying to do the next right thing just in my daily life, is in itself, a reason to keep going.

[00:29:29] But I am not an optimist. I think that we are... or rather I'm an optimist in the sense that like my behavior is, I'm open to the emergence of whatever comes, but I also come from a place where I know that, if the nature of our issues, if the nature of our predicaments is not technological, but rather behavioral, I know as an addict in recovery, that the only thing that changes humans, that allows them to... to sort of show meaningful, sustained change is pain. So I think we're going to go through a shitload of pain before we get to a place where we start actually changing.

[00:30:27] Leaving La La Land...

[00:30:27] Felix Marquardt: And the problem that we have right now is that the people who are causing the most harm in terms of environmental degradation, but also in terms of inequality, in terms of the sixth extinction of species, the people who are causing most of the harm are not at all the people who are suffering.

[00:30:50] For someone in the horn of Africa or in the Sahel region or in Nicaragua or in Honduras or in the Philippines or in Bangladesh or in swaths of India, climate change is not sort of, uh, or collapse is not sort of this thing that that's hypothetical and that might happen one of these days, and we don't know when, and it's sort of still a question of if. It's in their face right now, and it's fricking horrible. What we, who live in London, New York and Paris, and who like me enjoy sipping expensive coffee, with other sort of hipster types or urban types,what we call collapse is the way the people who pick our coffee beans live.

[00:31:40] So when you talk about this world, when you talk about things right now, like borders or walls being erected right now,like I really am drawn to underscore the complexity of the phenomena behind the building up of walls, et cetera.

[00:32:05] We live in a world where the vast majority of people in the West, but also the people, you know, what we, what is called in academia the North of the South, so the people who live like Westerners in the South in, in countries that are not as rich or so-called developed,as Europe, America, Japan, Australia, Korea... um, What we think of as normal is not the way most humans live, you know. To be part of the 10% richest humans on earth in terms of income in 2015, so this is not very long ago, your annual salary needed to be equal or above 38,000 bucks. Think about that.

[00:33:06] Felix Marquardt: So, you know, there's a part of me that loves the premise of your podcast. I am the incarnation of your audience, of your ideas. Like this is me, you know. This is my story. This is my club. This is my tribe. But we're also living in La La Land. And it's really important to remember that for us. And I think, I think we often, we have this tendency and this is what I think the pandemic is so brilliant at showing: the story that we tell ourselves is modernity the global system, the global economy, reality is this relatively smooth sailing ship. And then there's these awful things that happen that rock the boat. Those things are Trump, the financial crisis. tornadoes, climate change, um, all these awful things. But we think of those things as external factors. The system works, but then there's naughty Trump or mean old Putin who comes to fuck up the system.

[00:34:24] But the truth is that's not how, th this is not the accurate story. The story is the way we make, the way we build the boat and the way we keep it moving, that is where the crisis come from. So we need to, in a way, what we need to, when we think about the Greeks or the Turks building camps and um, putting up walls, it's not suddenly like they're the bad guys and we in Sweden or in Iceland or in Canada, we would never do that. Um, they're doing it because essentially what we have, what we've come to accept as completely normal is a global system where what we call a normal human life is reserved to 10 to 15% of the global population.

[00:35:32] And so I think it's really important to understand that climate change, immigration, the vote for people like Trump, inequality, all those things are completely intertwined. And many of the people, and this is something I really tried to explore in the book, many people in my tribe, they, they hate building walls. and they hate Trump and they hate everyone who voted Brexit and they hate everyone who votes for Trump or Bolsonaro, et cetera, or Le Pen. But they don't want to look at the insanity of the inequality of the human experience. And they start with this premise that somehow we started with a level playing field and some of us got ahead and others were not so lucky, when actually the way the 15% are living is premised on keeping all the rest of the planet living in a state of quasi slavery.

[00:36:51] So for me, it's no longer acceptable to look at justthe raising of walls and saying, "let's all be open." Yeah let's be open, but let's understand that as long as we're in a world where some of us, where we disconnect the incredible, like what we see as the basic quality of our lifestyle and we disconnect it from the impact it has on most humans who don't live within the confines of our little Disneyland, we shouldn't be surprised that these things are happening. They're part of the system that we've built and we are living the way we are, this is directly connected to the way, the shitty way that the rest of the world lives in.

[00:37:55] Isabelle Roughol: Well, I think that's a great wake up call to leave on and let people chew and meditate. Thank you so much. This was, this is really powerful.

[00:38:05] Felix Marquardt: I'm glad that we, that, that it's good to be able to talk at length. It's good to be, to feel in safe territory, to talk about some of these things. I know that what I've said will make me sound like a bit of a Che Guevara or something, or like a radical. I, as you know, I, that's not where I come from. I was, a very happy camper, in Davos for many years. The status quo was, was second nature to me. Um, but you know, I think it's really time to wake up. W we have, there's been a lot of pain caused by this pandemic. The least that we can hope for is that it also allows us to wake the fuck up.

[00:38:51] Outro

[00:38:51] Isabelle Roughol: Felix Marquardt wrote "The New Nomads: How The Migration Revolution is Making the World a Better Place." It's available now from all good bookstores. Felix asked me to tell you that he's very keen to engage with Borderline listeners so please do check out my updates on Twitter and LinkedIn, where he does pop into the conversation and follow him on Twitter and on LinkedIn. On Twitter, he's @Feleaks, that's F E L E A K S like Wikileaks.

[00:39:18] Remember to go to borderlinepod.com/subscribe to sign up for the newsletter. It comes out every Thursday with a fresh episode of the podcast and it's totally free, but you can also opt to support Borderline, become a member and get a lot more. And it's all again at the same link, borderlinepod.com/subscribe.

[00:39:37] I'm your host, Isabelle Roughol. Music was by Aaron Kenny this week.

[00:39:42] Borderline is a One Lane Bridge production and it is supported by these founding members, funders, executive producers if you will: Lauren Razavi, Anne-Sophie Bolon, Lawrence Wood, Matt Hilton, John Crowley, Ana Milicevic, Lynn Chouman, Zan Variano, Gregory Nicolaïdis, Jeanne Lurie, Nicole Stephens, Lynne Everatt, Ron Sylvester, Jacqui Banaszynski, George Anders. Teodora Agarici, Marcus Whaley, Justin Jackson, Chip Cutter, Jacqui Lough, Patrick Robert-Nicoud, Jim Morrison, Jamie Pham, Lisa Wyler, Femi Agbabiaka, Ann Ryan Solomon, Alba Lucia, Ralph Cunningham, Lillie Dremeaux, Bérengère Parmly, Whitney Juckno, Karen Bacellar, Gianluca Marcellino, Wendy Kendall, Adam Pepper, Mark Oldoch, Bill Kempfer, Julia Giucibo, Selda Shamloo, Peter Feher, Guido Sorisio, Lain Burgos-Lovece, Mark Jerome, Zoe Noller, Adam Thomas, John Abell, Susan and three anonymous donors, D, W, and A, I don't know who you are, but you do. Thank you very much to all of them. And I hope you will join them. I'll talk to you next week.