#080 - Phil Lojacono - What Broken Democracies Can Learn from Switzerland
Mr Obnoxious
Peter McCormack
4.8 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 5 June 2025
⏱️ 95 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Phil Lojacono is a Swiss entrepreneur and political thinker with deep insights into how Switzerland has built one of the most stable, decentralised, and citizen-focused democracies in the world.
In this interview, we explore what broken democracies like the UK and US can learn from the Swiss model: from localism and tax competition to limited government, civic maturity, and referendums that actually hold power to account. Phil explains why decentralisation works, how Switzerland avoids political extremism, and why trust in government must be earned, not assumed.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Every day people, they create value, they create so much value in society. |
| 0:04.6 | And we should really come away from that image that we have some sort of political overlords |
| 0:11.0 | who know better because they clearly don't. They also, they just cook with water like everybody else. |
| 0:16.1 | It should be a relationship on eye level. It should be the case that people are on top and political system, |
| 0:24.6 | they serve the people and not the other way around. And that's how you should look, |
| 0:30.7 | how people should look at it in my opinion. And you can make that change locally. |
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| 1:19.9 | Morning, Phil. Good morning. Great to meet you. Likewise. It's a pleasure to be here finally. |
| 1:25.4 | Well, it's funny. When we get email sometimes for people, like, we get a lot where people are saying, you know, Pete, have you thought about this, if you read that? |
| 1:35.0 | And very occasionally, I'm like, you sound like someone I just want to fucking talk to. |
| 1:39.0 | And so I say, come over and here you are. So I appreciate that. I'm very excited about talking to you about this. My headspace at the moment is the UK is fucked. And my headspace is that every time a |
| 1:51.6 | country is fucked, it's fucked because of its politics and its government. I know there can be |
| 1:56.6 | other reasons, but fundamentally the problems we have in the UK because of poor governance, |
| 2:02.6 | poor politics. And I know people love Switzerland, and they always say it's got an amazing |
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