The Phileas Club 100 – Special: The “Good Old Days”

 

On this episode we talk about:

  • The “good old days”… What was the world like in the 80s and 90s in France, the US, Saudi Arabia and South Africa?

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Comments

  1. Dmitry Cherednichenko says:

    Great Show, since I’m a man in my forties, it made me nostalgic too.

    On the other side of the iron curtain, in Russia, the feeling here was quite similar to what you and your guests described. When the Soviet Union collapsed in a bloodless “revolution”, I was a student. Me and most of my friends felt optimistic, if a little worried. At that time, we believed that capitalism and democracy will lead us to better future. The old system stopped functioning for some time already, in economy things were pretty grim, and we felt that from now on, it would only get better. What little we knew. 🙂 The following ten years of wild capitalism, corruption, organized crime and mass poverty were a sort of a wake up call from certain illusions. We grew more cynical, less trusting in ideals. And while we generally avoided poverty and succeded in our careers (being an IT specialist helps alot), that bitter aftertaste remained.

    But it’d take alot more time to tell what happened here. Hopefully, in some future episode on Russia, that you plan to do!

    • Hehe, as you know I’ve been looking for someone to talk about all of this for a while… If you know anyone from there and that would be comfortable talking about it, please feel free to let me know! (the contact form from the site is a great way to get in touch. 🙂

  2. Matthias Keller says:

    Congratulations on 100 episodes of the Phileas Club! That is quite a milestone! Here is to many hundreds more!

    I really enjoyed this “Nostalgia”/”History” episode. It had a very serious Turki, interesting insights from Paulo and I always enjoy hearing Tom talk about “the good old days”. (I would totally subscribe to a Tom Nostalgia podcast btw 😉 )

    I found it especially interesting how Paulo described the end of the cold war in South Africa and how little it seemed to be affected by these events in his experience. I doubt that is true for most African countries since the continent was also a staging ground for the two superpowers, but I guess the major social changes at the time overshadowed most other things. Still, I would be interested to hear more about this, maybe even how other African countries experienced the changes at the time.

    On a side note: Maybe you could make this format a “regular” thing? Kind of a recurring “Good old days” special every now and then with different people. I know that you already do that in certain specials when you talk about how it is to live/grow up in a certain country; but I imagine it to be a bit more focused on a small timeframe. Since I’m interested in history, I would really like to hear discussions like this with a changing panel, be it on a special historical topic or just a certain time period as the “theme” for each episode.

    • Thanks Matthias, I was thinking it might be an interesting idea to bring back indeed. I don’t think it should happen too often, but every once in a while it could work. The historical theme could be interesting too, but I think it would need to be HUGE events or with history buffs, otherwise we’d get very little out of it… But having past themes is indeed an area that could be explored!

      • Matthias Keller says:

        You are right, it would definitely have to be a major event since it had to be a topic in multiple countries at the same time if you want to include people from different countries. But you all instinctively went for something like that in this episode when you focused on the German Reunification / Downfall of the USSR / End of the Cold War. Out of the top of my head, I could think of a few such events that would work, but if you take something that is long past you would also need someone familiar with history since you probably can’t find someone who actually witnessed it. But that is nothing that a little research couldn’t fix 😉

  3. Olivier JGMNP says:

    I’m with Matthias i think it would be great to bring back this concept of the good old days ! Not regularly as you mention Patrick but from time to time. I really enjoyed listening to all these stories and to learn more about Turki’s life, really really interesting stuff. That’s what I love about this show. Congratulations on the 100th episode. It is always really great to hear multiples sides/feelings on the same stories.

    I was lucky enough to live abroad when I was younger (3 month in Canada in a host family and local high school at age 15, 1 year in Japan in a host family and local high school at age 17, 1 year in a US university at age 22 and 3 months in Tokyo in a langage school at age 24). This gave me the oppporutnity to live many cultures from the inside and change my perspective on the world. In a way the show accomplished something similar and hopefully will inspire its listeners to travel and meet local people.

    Thanks for your hard work Patrick.

    • Thanks! Yeah I’m very happy with how this turned out… Maybe for episode 200 we can have a discussion about how people see the future!! 😀

  4. Hi Patrick, love the whole Phileas podcast, and particularly enjoyed this one. A really interesting reminder that our personal frames of reference are influenced by what we’ve experienced along the way, and all those experiences can be so varied from one person/place/era/society to another – even amongst the podcast/digital literati 😉

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