Are Russian Oligarchs Best Friends with Klaus Schwab? A Conversation with Riley Waggaman

Is my old homeland a 4IR lab?

This story is a conversation with Riley Waggaman, who writes about COVID Russia—and does so brilliantly. We recorded the interview for my podcast a week or two ago, before the war began. My scream about the war is here, I just sent it out.

I want to start by saying that Riley’s work is amazing. I was so happy to discover it!

Some time in 2020, I noticed that there was a strangely warm relationship between my birth homeland and the World Economic Forum. I was surprised to see that Russia was all over the Cyber Polygon 2020 simulation, represented at an unusually high rate.

(By the way, I just googled Cyber Polygon 2020, and saw Russian subtext on the page. I suspect the latter is sloppiness, they probably hired Russian programmers to create the webpage, and the programmers probably forgot to replace the text, or something like that… but it’s funny, and also so very high tech… vivat Fourth Industrial Revolution!)

The unusually tight relationship between Russian everything and the World Economic Forum puzzled me for some time, which is to say that when I discovered Riley’s work, I was thrilled to dig in.

In our interview, Riley went in great detail into the ties between the Russian elite and the WEF, as well as funny connections to various pharma companies.

Some highlights:

• The head of Sberbank (the central bank of Russia) Herman Gref is a WEF trustee (a very special designation).

• In February 2020, he announced his plans to develop a system of facial recognition in masks.

• He also claims that he took “Sputnik V” in April 2020—before the clinical trials even started—and that it saved him.

• On a side note: “Herman Gref exported a large portion of Sberbank's gold reserves. Why?”

• The Mayor of Moscow Sobyanin has a plan curiously called “Moscow 2030” (smart city, implantable devices to track people’s heart and determine insurance rates, and so on).

• One of the biggest long-standing thieves of the post-Soviet economy Chubais is… wait for it…. in charge of “sustainable development”—after he almost bankrupted the biggest Russian nanotechnology company (Riley’s article here).

• Same scammer—shifty eyes and all—almost impersonates Bill Gates (whom he allegedly loves) and says from the stage that influential scientists have predicted a major drop in population by the end of the century, from 7 billion to 1.5-2 billion (in Russian, the event took place in 2011). He says though that it would be horrible and we should try to prevent it.

Without further ado, here is the interview, hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

(Rumble link just in case)