Luka Jagor | The Deep Dive Podcast

Could the euro and US dollar ever become one currency?

This episode explores the hypothetical concept of EUSDRO — a potential fusion of the euro and US dollar into a single transatlantic currency.

At first glance, the idea appears simple: eliminate the EUR–USD exchange rate, simplify cross-Atlantic trade and investment, and combine two of the world's most important currencies into one enormous monetary area.

But creating a genuine currency union would be vastly more complicated than designing a new banknote. It would require a new legal framework, a new monetary institution, coordinated banking supervision, fiscal stabilization mechanisms and agreement over how monetary sovereignty would be shared.

The episode examines the major questions surrounding such a hypothetical union:

The episode also considers several possible models, ranging from enhanced Federal Reserve–ECB coordination and exchange-rate arrangements to dual-currency systems, a joint monetary council and, at the most ambitious end, a completely unified currency.

The central idea is that EUSDRO is not simply a currency-design problem. It is a thought experiment about whether two major political and economic systems could eventually share monetary sovereignty.

EUSDRO remains hypothetical. The discussion explores the concept, its potential mechanisms and its institutional challenges rather than presenting it as an existing monetary project or current policy roadmap.

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Canada’s Bid for EU Associate Membership — a Deep Dive companion to Luka Jagor's Podcaster Capital essay on a unique Canada–EU strategic alliance without EU membership. On 16 September 2026, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed making Canada the bloc's first "associate member," while Prime Minister Mark Carney is advocating a unique alliance that keeps Canadian sovereignty.

Canada–U.S. goods and services trade was about US$872 billion in 2025, versus about €130 billion with the EU. Replacing Washington with Brussels is not realistic. The essay's frame is Canada + Europe + United States: a North American country with a European economic and political option, using CETA, a Digital Trade Agreement, defence cooperation, and the Canada–UK relationship as a model of close partnership without subordination.

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The Price of Profit: Big Oil’s Climate Bill — a Deep Dive companion to Luka Jagor's Podcaster Capital essay Big Oil’s Billion-Dollar Profits — While the Planet Pays the Bill?. Saudi Aramco's FY2025 adjusted profit of about $104.7 billion dwarfs ExxonMobil, Shell, and China's giant state oil companies — while floods, heatwaves, disaster recovery, and household energy bills are paid by everyone else.

The essay ranks the world's most profitable oil companies on FY2025 results, then asks a climate-justice question rather than treating profit as illegitimate: is it fair for extraordinary fossil-fuel gains to stay private while the environmental bill is socialized? UN Secretary-General António Guterres argued in 2026 that windfall profits born from instability and fossil-fuel dependence should be taxed to fund a fast, fair clean-energy transition.

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Why Open Societies Fear the Trojan Horse — a Deep Dive companion to Luka Jagor's Podcaster Capital essay The Trojan Horse, the Dark Horse, and the Fear of Losing Control — From Ancient Greek Deception to Cybersecurity, Migration, and Crime. The Trojan-horse metaphor describes a fear that legitimate migration or humanitarian openness could be exploited by hostile actors — which is considerably different from saying migrants themselves are a threat.

The essay traces the horse from Homer's Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid (not the Iliad) to the NIST definition of a computer Trojan, then separates that hidden-threat metaphor from the dark horse, which historically means unexpected success, not crime. The strongest version of the idea is not really about migrants: it is about whether a prosperous open civilization can protect itself from criminals and hostile actors without turning openness itself into the enemy.

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Fighting Terrorism Without Destroying Democracy — a Deep Dive companion to Luka Jagor's Podcaster Capital essay How to Fight the War on Terror Without Compromising Freedom — Security Must Defend Democracy, Not Replace It. Terrorism aims not only to kill people but to frighten societies and undermine democratic institutions; the response should protect both security and the freedoms that security is supposed to defend.

The essay argues for targeted intelligence over mass surveillance, keeping terrorism inside ordinary law, making emergency powers genuinely exceptional, protecting speech and association, attacking terrorist financing and logistics, international cooperation, prevention without criminalizing identity, due process for suspects, oversight of security agencies, and measuring success by both security and freedom. The UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy treats human rights and the rule of law as complementary to effective counter-terrorism, not competing with it.

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The Shadow of 9/11: A Quarter-Century of Change — a Deep Dive companion to Luka Jagor's Podcaster Capital essay 9/11 Attacks — Twenty-Five Years After. September 11, 2026 marks 25 years since the attacks that killed 2,977 people and became a dividing line between the pre-9/11 and post-9/11 world.

The essay recounts the four hijacked flights, the 9/11 Commission findings on failures of imagination, policy, capabilities and information-sharing, and the consequences that followed: Afghanistan, Iraq (which was not responsible for 9/11), the War on Terror, airport security, and the Department of Homeland Security. Around 100 million Americans are now too young to have a personal memory of that morning. The challenge of the 25th anniversary is not only "Never Forget," but what exactly should be remembered — the victims, Flight 93, first responders, intelligence failures, and how easily fear can reshape societies.

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Humanity Is Not an Engineering Problem: Medicine Should Heal — a Deep Dive companion to Luka Jagor's Podcaster Capital essay: technology should serve human beings, not redefine what it means to be human. Medicine should restore health; it should not treat the person as an endlessly upgradeable project.

The essay is a humanist critique of transhumanism. It does not reject medicine, prosthetics, vaccines, computers, or AI. It questions treating enhancement as the primary route to improving people — and treating a person as a product to be continually optimized. Four pillars structure the argument: human dignity, natural limits, embodiment, and ethical caution. Who defines enhancement, and what happens to people who remain unenhanced?

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Coding a Radio Station Until Year 9999 — a Deep Dive companion to Luka Jagor's Podcaster Capital essay: Rave the World Radio has a schedule that already knows the next song, including the one that starts on the last second MySQL DATETIME will admit exists.

The station does not shuffle in the browser and hope for the best. Each channel — Main, Electro, Chill-out, Goa-Trance, Hardcore, Afrobeats — has a play log. Materialising every play from now until 31 December 9999, 23:59:59 UTC would mean roughly five to six billion rows. The lossless trick is a cycle: Electro's nine tracks loop every 1,747 seconds from a 27 February 2026 epoch. The public player only synthesises ten minutes back and twelve hours ahead — about 132 tracks on disk, not 132 million. DATETIME arithmetic, not UNIX_TIMESTAMP(), keeps year 9999 from falling off the 32-bit cliff of 19 January 2038.

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Finland's LUMI versus Croatia's Pantheon AI — a Deep Dive companion to Luka Jagor's Podcaster Capital essay: LUMI-AI and Croatia's planned Pantheon AI data centre are almost opposite approaches to the AI infrastructure race.

From Finland's research-driven AI supercomputer to Croatia's proposed gigawatt-scale computing campus, two very different visions reveal how Europe is building the infrastructure of the AI era. EuroHPC awarded Bull a €387.8 million contract for LUMI-AI in Kajaani — AMD accelerators, IBM storage, Nokia networking — expected in the second half of 2027. Pantheon is a hyperscale campus in Topusko: a proposed 1 GW facility with about 800 MW of IT load, NVIDIA GW-scale architecture, and public announcements ranging around €12bn–€50bn. LUMI is a specific procured machine with a research ecosystem. Pantheon is Croatia's proposed AI industrial megaproject.

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Renewables Finally Overtake Global Coal Power — a Deep Dive companion to Luka Jagor's Podcaster Capital essay: the green transition is no longer about using less energy. It is about rebuilding the economy around clean power until that becomes the new business as usual.

Ember's Global Electricity Review 2026 records the milestone: renewables overtook coal in global electricity generation in 2025. The IEA's Global Energy Review 2026 shows why that can coexist with rising demand — total energy use up 1.3%, electricity about 3%, energy-related CO₂ only 0.4%, with low-emissions sources supplying nearly 60% of demand growth. Capital is following: about $3.4 trillion of energy investment in 2026, $2.2 trillion of it into clean energy, grids, storage and electrification. The old fossil economy has not lost yet — implicit subsidies still tilt the field — but the win looks boring: solar roofs, EVs and heat pumps as the default, not a cause.

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