Pulitzer Historian: The Next Stage Is Collapse (And You Are Ignoring The Signs)

0:00 This was Trump's net worth when he went into office, $2.3 billion.

0:04 And this is his net worth now, just two years later.

0:07 $6.5 billion.

0:09 So, we've never had a president running businesses while in office.

0:13 And so, decisions are being made not based on what's good for Americans,

0:16 but what's good for his company.

0:18 For example, why did the Saudi government

0:20 invest $2 billion in Jared Kushner's fund?

0:23 It wasn't because they just like Jared Kushner.

0:25 It was because Kushner is Trump's son-in-law.

0:28 And so my biggest concern is the deterioration of American democracy.

0:32 I mean, it's already happening.

0:33 Most people think democracies end with tanks

0:36 in the street or somebody shooting up the presidential palace,

0:38 but actually in the modern world,

0:40 they mostly end because someone who is

0:42 legitimately elected begins to take apart the system.

0:46 Trump, he has never cared much one way or the other for American democracy.

0:50 He admires foreign leaders who have no constraints.

0:52 And I have a goal that is to remind people of why democracy is important

0:58 and to pay attention to the ways in which

1:00 it's declining so that we can fight back.

1:02 So we're just at the beginning of what could be quite a big change.

1:05 So there's five core tactics that autocratic

1:07 leaders use to dismantle a democracy.

1:09 Could you walk me through the five tactics?

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2:05 Let's get on with the show.

2:10 An Apple Bomb, what is it you spent

2:13 the last couple of decades of your life doing,

2:15 understanding, studying, and sharing with the world?

2:18 I started out as somebody who was fascinated by the Soviet Union.

2:22 I went there when it still existed as a as a student.

2:26 I was lucky enough to watch it fall apart.

2:28 I was a journalist based in Warsaw at the time the Warsaw pack came to an end.

2:32 Then I spent some years writing history books trying to explain how

2:39 control was maintained over such a large space uh by so few people.

2:43 But all that time, I thought that what I

2:45 was doing was writing stories about the distant past.

2:48 I was analyzing a system that didn't exist anymore.

2:52 What's happened to me in the last decade

2:54 is that I've discovered that a lot of what

2:56 I thought was over and done and belonged to some other era uh has come back.

3:01 Most people think democracies end with a coup d'eta or, you know,

3:05 tanks in the street or somebody shooting up the presidential palace.

3:08 that actually in the modern world they

3:11 mostly end because someone who is legitimately elected

3:15 begins to take apart the system and take

3:18 away the things that ensure free elections can

3:22 continue and I started watching that happen

3:24 in multiple countries at the same time and I

3:28 saw this authoritarian instinct started to come

3:31 back and that's what I write about now

3:34 are these just election cycles or is there something bigger

3:36 at play here because you know I spend a lot

3:38 time reading articles from decades ago or hundreds of years

3:42 ago and in all times in history it seems that there

3:45 were problems but it seems that the I don't know

3:48 the democratic system has a remarkable way every four years

3:50 of clearing out what people weren't happy with and putting

3:52 something new in is this time different to the past

3:56 what feels different to me is for the first time in several

4:00 established democracies most notably United States

4:02 but not only you have political parties

4:04 who come to power with the explicit idea that they will alter

4:09 the system in order to make sure that they can stay in forever.

4:13 The pioneer of this idea was Victor Orban in Hungary.

4:17 He was elected legitimately with a big margin and then

4:20 what he did was slowly seek to capture the state.

4:24 So what a democracy needs in order to survive,

4:27 in order to maintain its stability, it needs a few neutral institutions.

4:33 You know, it needs independent courts.

4:34 It needs an independent electoral commission.

4:37 It needs independent media.

4:39 In the modern world, it needs a meritocratic bureaucracy.

4:43 So, people are hired and fired to measure pollution or worry

4:47 about traffic and road construction who aren't cousins of the ruling party.

4:53 They aren't somebody's friend,

4:54 but they're actual experts who understand how to do things.

4:57 So you need those things to be in place

5:00 in order to ensure that each time there's an electoral cycle,

5:03 it's a fair election.

5:05 And you see people who are elected who who

5:08 once they had power decided to take those institutions apart.

5:13 You know, if you think about democracy,

5:14 it's actually a very strange system, right?

5:17 So you win an election and in a democracy you have to preserve the rules so

5:24 that four years from now your bitter enemies

5:28 can contest you and maybe beat you again.

5:31 You know you lose an election,

5:33 you have to say okay we're allowing our rivals to stay in power uh but we trust

5:39 that the system will remain fair so four

5:41 years from now we can also contest them again.

5:44 So it requires a certain level of agreement about the nature of the system

5:49 and when that begins to break down then you begin to have

5:52 imbalances and then you begin to have elections that seem unfair to people

5:56 and then you begin to have a completely different kind of national

5:59 conversation and we can see that has happened in several places

6:03 and of course most notably in the United States and because the United States

6:07 is the largest democracy because it's played

6:10 the role of leader of the democratic

6:12 world the influence uence of America on other countries is pretty profound.

6:16 Uh and so this this idea that democracies can possibly

6:20 break down is suddenly um both horrifying people but also

6:25 interesting to other people who say all right if you

6:27 can do it in America you can do it here.

6:29 There's a part of me that just thinks that could never happen in America.

6:35 And that's obviously a bias that I have being

6:37 33 years old and not knowing a ton about history.

6:39 But there's I'm sure there's lots of people

6:41 that think this is some sort of theoretical idea,

6:44 but it would never happen in America because we

6:45 would never allow America to not be a democracy.

6:49 We wouldn't allow a a Russia situation where you've

6:51 got Putin sitting in power for two decades or whatever.

6:54 Sure, but there are systems in between Russia and liberal democracy.

6:59 You can have democracies that aren't fair.

7:01 And actually, I'm afraid to tell you that in the United States,

7:04 there is a history of that.

7:05 So the in the American South before the civil rights movement,

7:09 you very often had in effect in in the southern states,

7:12 you had these one party states where, you know, the rules were pretty rigged.

7:16 Everybody knew who was going to win.

7:18 Not everybody was allowed to vote.

7:20 So black people weren't allowed to vote

7:21 or they were it was very heavily restricted.

7:23 It was hard for them to vote.

7:24 And that existed in the United States, you know,

7:26 between the Civil War and the and the 1960s,

7:29 you had very undemocratic parts of the United States.

7:32 And I think some of the people who are in Washington right now

7:36 in the Trump administration are working

7:38 from that history and from that historical memory.

7:41 What is your biggest concern in this regard?

7:45 Well, I have two concerns.

7:46 Uh, one is that inside the United States,

7:50 the deterioration of American democracy, I mean, it's already happening, right?

7:54 So, it's already creating a class of people who no longer feel

7:58 they have a stake in the political system and who won't vote,

8:02 may never vote and fe and and will be

8:05 outside of politics and outside of the national conversation.

8:08 That can lead in the direction of violence

8:09 that can lead in in all kinds of negative directions.

8:12 We see the development of new kinds of um

8:17 paramilitary in the United States that we never had before.

8:20 the development of ICE.

8:21 We've never before had a single national police force wearing combat uniforms,

8:26 wearing masks, not subject to the normal restrictions of local police forces.

8:32 We also have a rise in um high-end corruption.

8:36 The president, people around him, companies close to him seem to have access

8:41 to ways to make money and are making money

8:44 out of doing politics in a way that was

8:45 also not possible at that scale in America before.

8:48 And that's sort of one whole set of concerns

8:50 if you want to go down one of those roads.

8:52 There's this map in front of us on the table.

8:54 I realize some people can't see because they're listening,

8:56 but there's a map on the table in front of us.

8:58 Could you just explain what this map shows and why it's significant?

9:02 The map shows the level of of democracy around the world.

9:05 And of course, the thing that's immediately notable to me is that those who

9:09 made the map don't count the United States anymore as a liberal democracy.

9:12 Mhm.

9:13 So at a liberal democracy, meaning a state where,

9:16 as I said, the electoral rules are clear,

9:18 where the electoral system is set up not to favor one party or the next,

9:22 and instead it's described as an electoral democracy,

9:25 which is somewhat less free.

9:27 You see similar systems in South America.

9:30 In Europe, you mostly still have liberal democracies.

9:32 In Australia, Japan, South Korea, you still have liberal democracies.

9:36 And then most of the rest of the world are some form of autocracy.

9:41 Either very closed and very repressive like China or like

9:44 Russia or they are in a democratic gray zone.

9:48 So there are states that could really go in either direction.

9:50 I mean they're still they're still open.

9:52 But it's true that if you'd looked at a map

9:54 like this a decade ago or two decades ago,

9:57 it would have been a lot bluer than the the blue

9:59 being democracy and the red or reddish being autocracy.

10:03 So you do see a an absolute process of democratic decline that's

10:07 been written about um by many people over the last few years.

10:11 I I I think I believe very much that states influence one another.

10:15 People follow and imitate and copy their neighbors.

10:18 Do you think it's possible that in our lifetimes

10:21 the US might become an orth orcratic country?

10:28 So the US could become a what I think

10:32 on this map is described as an autocratic gray zone.

10:35 So you could imagine the US as in effect a one party state.

10:39 So a state where one political party has

10:43 control and the other just can't win national elections.

10:47 you already have this system of we

10:50 call it gerrymandering where electoral districts are

10:53 being written in such a way as to favor one party or the another.

10:57 The effect of that also is that once you

11:00 have people who don't really have to contest elections anymore,

11:03 then you have corruption.

11:04 Because if you're going to win anyway,

11:06 why do you have to worry about your constituents?

11:08 then you have worse government and worse services because if you don't have

11:12 to have a an electoral contest then you know you can pursue your own interests.

11:17 You can do favors for businessmen who help you in other ways.

11:20 And we see this decline of democracy already at the state level.

11:23 And of course there could be a danger at the national level

11:26 of a fixed system that made sure only one party ever wins.

11:32 And then you would get all these pathologies

11:34 that we already have at the state level.

11:35 We're beginning to have them uh even now.

11:38 And remember, we have right now a president who refused to accept the result

11:43 of an election in 2020 and who staged what was intended to be an electoral coup.

11:50 Uh it failed.

11:52 But, you know, the idea that he wouldn't do it again or nobody

11:55 would ever dare to do that or nobody would block an election,

11:58 I think it's pretty naive at this point.

12:00 I mean, it happened already.

12:03 Um, and so of course it can happen again.

12:05 Do you think he's going to try and get a third term in office?

12:09 I don't think so because I don't think he wants one.

12:12 Um, but I think it's possible that people around him will try to shape

12:18 and affect the elections in a way that makes sure that a Republican wins

12:23 or maybe his his children.

12:25 It's very possible that one of his children will run for president

12:28 because there's a way to kind of control power in America.

12:30 You know, when they they talk about MAGA,

12:32 which is, I guess, a collection of people now.

12:34 You know, you could say Jay Vance is part of MAGA and the kids and Trump.

12:38 So, maybe they'd want to keep it within MAGA.

12:41 Maybe that's the

12:42 they might or they might want to want to keep it within the family.

12:45 I mean, look, what is MAGA now?

12:47 You know, what what what is different

12:49 about Trump's second term from Trump's first term.

12:53 So, one of the things that happened after January the 6 after the attack

12:57 on the Congress was that many of the people who'd been around Trump,

13:02 Republicans, people who do foreign policy, people who do domestic policy, left.

13:08 They said, "Right, this is too much for us.

13:10 You know, we're we're American patriots.

13:13 You know, we can't support this kind of attack

13:15 on our political system." And they departed his presence.

13:19 But that exactly that moment that attack

13:21 on the electoral system attracted other people.

13:24 So for different reasons,

13:26 people who disliked the American political system, who don't like democracy,

13:30 don't like liberal democracy,

13:31 thought it was leading America in a leftwing direction.

13:34 Some of them have political reasons.

13:35 They were attracted to Donald Trump because they said, "Right,

13:37 this is somebody who has the nerve to try and overthrow the system,

13:41 and we like that." And they're they're they're not all the same.

13:43 They have different views.

13:44 So there's a tech authoritarian group who want influence over

13:49 the American political system because it's good for their businesses

13:51 and because they don't get the point of democracy

13:53 anyway and they think they should be in charge.

13:56 There's a a kind of Christian nationalist group who

13:59 think the United States should not be a secular state.

14:01 It should be a Christian state and they want to they

14:04 are interested in taking over the system um with that.

14:07 And and then there's a traditional MAGA group who think the United

14:10 States should be run by the people who used to run it.

14:12 you know, kind of white Christian people of a certain kind

14:16 and they want to bring the United States back in that direction.

14:18 So, they're they're different views.

14:20 Um, and they don't all agree with each other,

14:22 but they they do agree that the system requires radical

14:25 change and that's the difference between the first and second term.

14:29 So, Trump's first term,

14:31 I think he has never cared much one way or the other for American democracy.

14:35 He personally sees himself as someone who should

14:38 be allowed to act in any way he wants.

14:40 He doesn't like any kind of constraint.

14:42 Um he admires foreign leaders who have no constraints,

14:45 but he was one way or another constrained in in in his first term by the system

14:50 and now he's surrounded himself by people who

14:52 are seeking to help him avoid those constraints.

14:55 And that's that's new.

14:56 I think when we have these conversations,

14:58 we assume that everybody agrees that democracy is the better path.

15:03 Sure.

15:02 And that they understand the downsides of an autocracy.

15:05 So there are different kinds of autocracies to be

15:07 clear and some are some are more repressive than others.

15:11 The the main thing that you would notice the first thing

15:14 that you would notice would be the absence of the rule of law.

15:17 Rule of law means that judges and courts and the legal

15:22 system make decisions based on the constitution or on the laws.

15:27 And in an autocracy you have rule by law.

15:30 And that means that the law is what the person in power says it is.

15:35 Mhm.

15:35 And so if you did a program for example and someone

15:39 on your program said something that was offensive to the leader of the country,

15:43 you could be arrested and you could be put on trial.

15:47 And instead of the court saying, "Right,

15:50 we we've looked at this case and according to the law,

15:52 we have in the law it says we have

15:54 freedom of speech and you can do whatever you want,"

15:56 they could somebody could could ring up from the Kremlin

15:59 or from the White House or from, you know,

16:01 whatever is the leadership of your country and say, "No, actually,

16:03 we want this guy in jail and we don't care what the courts think." Um,

16:07 and that's the big difference here.

16:09 I'll tell you a real story that happened in Hungary when Hungary

16:11 was going down the road in the direction of a one party state.

16:15 You can be the CEO of a company and people

16:17 can come and knock on your door and they can say,

16:19 "We would like you to sell us a majority share in your company and you say,

16:24 'N no, why should I let you do that?

16:26 I I my company, I built it.

16:28 I invested in it.

16:29 I don't want to sell it." And then, okay, so what happens the next day?

16:33 Somebody breaks the windows of your house.

16:35 A few days later, your children are harassed on the way to school.

16:39 People who work for you start having legal problems.

16:42 this or that, you know, some kind of mortgage issue or some,

16:45 you know, and you suddenly your company encounters regulatory issues.

16:50 There's a tax inspection and one by one, the state finds a way to harass you,

16:54 to harass your company, your workers,

16:56 so that eventually you say, "Okay, I give up.

16:58 I sell and I'm leaving the country." And this happened to somebody I know.

17:01 Sounds like um anthropic in the United

17:04 States recently where an anthropic the AI company

17:07 refused to give the United States access

17:09 to its AI under certain conditions and then very

17:13 quickly Pete Pete Hegsth did a a post I think and Donald Trump did a post

17:17 basically saying that they were going to restrict

17:20 their ability to work with the government.

17:23 We aren't used to the idea that the government

17:25 decides which companies thrive and which ones die, you know.

17:29 So once you have an an autocratic state that can do what it wants legally,

17:34 then it can decide which companies succeed.

17:37 It can base government contracts which are very important in every country not

17:41 on who's the best company or not on some kind of blind procurement process

17:46 but on who's your friend you know or or who's donated to your political

17:51 party or who's in the case of the United States who's invested in your company.

17:55 So one of the things that we have in the United

17:56 States for the first time ever I think is a president

18:00 who is actively doing business in countries and in areas

18:05 that are of interest to the people he's doing business with.

18:08 So for example the Trump family does business in Saudi Arabia.

18:11 It has a it has a deal with a a Saudi company called um Dar Alakan which

18:16 is a sort of development company and it

18:18 that company has close relations to the Saudi leadership.

18:22 The Saudi leadership is interested in deals with the United States,

18:27 but I mean political arrangement with the United

18:29 States and the money is going into the Trump

18:32 family coffers in order to make a better

18:35 arrangement for the country of Saudi Arabia.

18:37 So it's a way in which because we have a declining democracy

18:41 and because we have a increasingly kleptocratic system decisions are being made

18:46 by the president of the United States by the white house not

18:48 based on what's good for Americans but on what's good for his company

18:52 and that's and that if you look at Russia that's exactly how

18:55 the political system works there if you look at China is more

18:58 complicated it's a bigger country it's more sophisticated but even there you

19:02 have again decisions made not for the welfare of the Chinese people,

19:09 but for the ruling party, for the Communist Party.

19:12 And we have two uh jars of money here.

19:14 This was uh Trump's net worth when he went into office, $2.3 billion reportedly.

19:21 And this is his net worth now, just 2 years later.

19:25 $6.5 billion.

19:27 Looks like being a president is a profitable job.

19:30 So that has never happened before.

19:32 This is completely new in American history.

19:35 There have been presidents who there have been whiffs of corruption around them.

19:38 There's been, you know,

19:39 presidential relatives who've tried to trade off the president's name.

19:43 But we've never had a president running businesses while in office.

19:48 And as I said, in such a way that the people with whom he's

19:51 doing business are are hoping to benefit politically or or or in other ways.

19:57 And that's that's completely brand new.

19:58 And if you just back to your original question,

20:00 which is why is democracy better?

20:02 Churchill was the person who said that democracy is

20:05 the worst system of government except for all the others.

20:07 So it's a multi-reasons why it's flawed.

20:11 You know democracies have require an immense amount of tolerance.

20:14 There's always a lot of cacaphony.

20:16 There's a constant flux and change that that people find innervating.

20:21 But at the very least what democracies can do is

20:23 they can force issues like this into the public sphere.

20:27 you know, you're allowed at least in a democracy

20:30 to question whether uh this decisions are being made

20:33 in on the basis that they're good for everybody

20:35 or they're being made for the benefit of the president.

20:37 I guess supporters would say, you know,

20:39 Trump's not running the businesses himself.

20:41 It's just his kids activity that is generating this net worth.

20:48 Yeah.

20:48 But I mean, everybody knows that they're his kids and you you wouldn't do it.

20:52 You know, why why did the Saudi

20:54 government invest $2 billion in Jared Kushner's fund?

20:58 It wasn't because they just like Jared Kushner.

21:01 It was because Kushner is Trump's son-in-law.

21:04 And now, of course, Kushner is

21:06 the Trump administration's negotiator in the Middle East.

21:09 Um, so he's negotiating with his business partners.

21:12 The appearance of conflict of interest is overwhelming.

21:17 And as I said, we've never had in American

21:19 history or I think in recent British history,

21:22 we've never had that kind of conflict of interest

21:24 so clear at that at that high a level.

21:27 Do you spend much time thinking about what's going on in the Middle East,

21:31 the wars in Iran and what in Venezuela and the bigger picture here of what's

21:35 happening and how this might link back

21:36 to what you were saying about authoritarian regimes.

21:39 It's all very confusing.

21:41 I I feel like we went through a period of relative peace through the Biden

21:45 era and Trump obviously ran on this promise

21:47 that he wasn't going to start new wars.

21:49 Um and we seem to be having a lot of wars.

21:52 Russia and Ukraine still raging on doesn't seem to be nearer to any conclusion

21:56 and now there's this war in Iran that threatens to be a neverending war.

22:01 What is what what what there are several things going on.

22:06 One of them is that in declining

22:08 democracies and in historically in autocracies is you

22:12 have leaders who conduct wars as a way

22:16 of consolidating their base and consolidating their support.

22:19 Uh and so one of the things that Trump likes to do is if he declares a war,

22:23 I believe he had a different expectation of the Iran war.

22:26 He's using foreign policy.

22:28 He's using these fighting of wars in order to consolidate his support at home.

22:31 So that's that's a part of what's happening.

22:33 But some of this is nothing to do with Trump.

22:35 You know, we are now living in a world where the historical political system,

22:40 um, the one that was built after 1945,

22:43 some people call it the liberal world order,

22:44 I don't really like that term because it sounds kind of mushy,

22:47 but the the order that has existed since 1945,

22:51 the one that was somewhat based on the UN,

22:54 that was based on a set of rules and treaties,

22:56 that order has begun to break down.

22:59 And it's breaking down for several reasons.

23:01 one we've started to discuss already which is changes

23:04 inside the United States and the United States was

23:06 an really important pillar of that order but it's

23:09 also breaking down because the autocratic powers uh Russia,

23:13 China, Iran, Venezuela until recently uh and and others

23:18 have been challenging that order for a while themselves.

23:22 They didn't like the American dominance of you

23:26 know of international politics in the conversation.

23:28 they were competing with America at a at a strategic

23:31 level but also in what is really a war of ideas.

23:35 So let's go back to autocracy and democracy.

23:38 You know if you are the leader of Russia or you're the leader of China,

23:42 what is the thing that is most threatening to you?

23:45 And the answer is the language of liberal democracy.

23:49 So all this stuff that we find boring and we're used to and you

23:53 know this idea of freedom of speech and separation of powers and rule

23:57 of law all those things that we have come to take for granted

24:01 in our societies are a huge challenge

24:05 to the political system in Russia or China.

24:07 You know what is Putin most afraid of?

24:09 He's most afraid of a street revolution of the kind we had in Ukraine in 2014.

24:15 So when people are standing on the street

24:16 and they have signs saying we're against corruption,

24:19 you know, we want democracy, we want to be in the European Union,

24:22 we want to be integrated with Europe,

24:24 he's afraid of that happening in Russia because if you live

24:27 in an autocratic state where you don't have freedom of speech,

24:30 where there is no justice, where the government decides what all the rules are,

24:36 then those ideas are explosive and exciting,

24:38 the same way they were in the 18th century

24:40 when when they first appeared in the Declaration of Independence.

24:43 And people can be motivated by them.

24:45 People will go into the street for them.

24:46 People will risk their lives for them.

24:48 And the autocrats know that.

24:50 And so really for the past decade since 2013, 2014,

24:56 you see them seeking to spread those ideas to promote them.

25:01 I mean, we all know now about Russian propaganda campaigns.

25:03 We know what Russian disinformation looks like.

25:06 There's a Chinese version, too, which we don't see that much in English,

25:08 but it appears in in other countries.

25:11 We see them seeking to undermine democracy,

25:14 trying to spread the influence of a different set of ideas.

25:18 So the war in Ukraine is exactly that war.

25:22 The Russians are firstly trying to destroy Ukraine as a nation.

25:26 They want it to disappear.

25:27 This is they're they're an empire.

25:29 They want Ukraine to be their colony.

25:31 And they understood perfectly well that by challenging Ukraine,

25:36 by invading Ukraine, they were defying this liberal world order.

25:39 They were defying the rules of post-war Europe because in post-war Europe,

25:43 there was a decision made after 1945.

25:45 We're not going to invade each other anymore.

25:47 We're not going to have wars.

25:48 Instead, we're going to decide everything by by diplomacy.

25:51 Borders will not be changed by force.

25:53 And the Russians understood that they were breaking that that norm.

25:57 And they invaded Ukraine.

25:58 They also invaded Ukraine because the Ukrainians were using that language,

26:01 that powerful democratic language that we take for granted.

26:05 And Putin said, "If they can do it in Ukraine,

26:07 then people could do it in Russia.

26:08 and so I need to crush this Ukrainian democracy movement.

26:12 And so that war really is a fault

26:14 line between the democratic world and the autocratic world.

26:17 So I think what what you're seeing is the breakdown of an older

26:21 system that was more or less organized around by American rules.

26:27 Through history, which lasts longer, democracy or autocracy?

26:32 Oh, autocracies.

26:33 They last longer.

26:33 Well, look, if you look back in history,

26:35 most human societies in most times have been

26:38 what you would we would now call autotocracy, but they were whatever.

26:40 They were monarchies.

26:41 They were led by tribal leaders, by warlords.

26:45 There have been very, very few liberal democracies.

26:48 And most of them have not lasted.

26:50 And I should also say the people who wrote the American Constitution knew that.

26:54 And when they wrote it, they were reading the history of ancient Rome.

26:58 There was a Roman Republic and it fell when it was taken over by Julius Caesar.

27:01 So, they all knew that story.

27:03 They were reading about the Greek democracies, Athens, which also fell.

27:07 And when they wrote the US Constitution,

27:09 they were thinking, how do we make this last?

27:11 What can we put in it to make it last?

27:13 It's a longer story whether you think they were successful or not.

27:16 But everybody who created democracies,

27:19 whether it was after World War II in Europe,

27:20 whether it was America in the 18th century,

27:23 everybody understood that this was a fragile system.

27:25 And they tried to put checks and balances,

27:30 you know, judicial, legislative, and executive power.

27:33 They tried to create systems that would ward off the impulse towards autocracy.

27:39 I don't know if you have the answer to this question,

27:40 but where are people happier on average in a democracy or in autocracy?

27:44 So, I have to tell you, I know a little bit about happiness surveys,

27:47 and over and over and over again, the happiest place in the world is Finland.

27:52 Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Scandinavia is very happy.

27:57 The reasons for that may not be anything to do

27:59 with the nature of the political system might have other sources,

28:02 but the happiness is certainly connected to democracy.

28:05 It's connected to stability and of course connected to wealth.

28:08 Just looking at some research here.

28:09 It says, "While wealth and economic stability are critical for happiness,

28:12 regardless of the government type,

28:13 democracy provides additional structural benefits like participation, security,

28:17 and lower corruption that tend to lift a society's overall life satisfaction.

28:22 Well, democracies by definition are at least in theory,

28:26 the state is structured in a way to benefit everybody, right?

28:30 At least that's how it's supposed to work.

28:31 Mhm.

28:32 So whether it's a national health care system or whether

28:35 it's a system of roads and railroads, you know,

28:39 the state is building things that are designed

28:40 to serve everybody in an autocracy that doesn't necessarily happen.

28:44 So in Russia, ordinary Russians have no influence on that decision.

28:48 They have no way of expressing their views.

28:50 They can't say what they think.

28:51 They have no ability to influence the state.

28:54 They can't say, "Well, actually, hey,

28:55 we'd like to build a hospital instead of bombing

28:57 another city in Ukraine." And so they have

28:59 very little ability to change the system

29:01 and that and that of course creates frustration and unhappiness.

29:04 If that is true and this is why I

29:05 asked the question if it's better for the people

29:08 and at some degree I think if informed people would choose it which I think is

29:13 and I say the word informed because I

29:15 I understand in a lot of these countries where

29:17 they don't have democracy I'm now using don't have

29:19 democracy instead of having to say that word again.

29:21 They limit the access to information so that people

29:24 don't know what they're missing out on, I guess,

29:26 or don't have those potentially disruptive ideas.

29:30 They're not exposed to them on their on their phones or devices.

29:33 I I would think a person would choose to live

29:35 in a democracy if given the choice and the information.

29:38 I would think so.

29:39 Although you know there are other you know there there's a deep human

29:44 need for a sense of stability and security and hierarchy for some people

29:53 and it's true that authoritarians seem to offer that.

29:57 You know in a democracy you do have this constant change of leaders.

30:00 You know there's more demands on citizens.

30:03 You know you have to participate if you care about your country.

30:06 It's not just enough to vote.

30:07 you need to be involved in politics in some way.

30:09 And autocracies, I mean, I think falsely offer stability.

30:13 And so the the argument of the Russians and Chinese

30:16 governments and the argument they make on in those social

30:19 media campaigns that they run inside the US

30:21 or the UK or Europe is exactly that, authoritarianism,

30:24 stability, safety, traditional values, hierarchy.

30:28 And there are people for whom that's deeply appealing.

30:30 So I I wouldn't discount that instinct.

30:33 And when people like that are also able to control information,

30:36 when they control the security services,

30:38 when they monopolize the use of violence, they can be very hard to undo even

30:43 if the majority of the country wants something different.

30:45 It's almost hard for me to understand how the people in Russia are okay

30:50 with the fact that their the leader has

30:51 been there for several decades and isn't moving.

30:55 But it's hard for us to understand because in the UK or in America,

30:58 we there would be people on the streets.

31:00 It doesn't matter what they think

31:01 really.

31:02 Well, because they have no way of expressing what they think.

31:05 There's no such thing as public opinion or public debate.

31:09 There's no there's no forum you can join where you can say

31:12 what you you could express your views in a way that's fair.

31:15 And and if you do say, I think Putin should be,

31:18 you know, it's time for him to retire, you could be arrested.

31:22 And so people begin to adjust what they think and they begin

31:25 to change their behavior because they know that it's dangerous to say things.

31:29 I mean, this is something this is a phenomenon I found

31:31 in the work I did years ago on the Soviet Union.

31:33 The propagandist said how successful we are and how much hay we've grown

31:38 this year and how many bits of steel we've made and it was always fake.

31:42 And so the question was always, well, did people really believe that?

31:44 Did people believe in the system?

31:45 Do they believe in the propaganda?

31:47 And the answer was a little weird.

31:49 It was convenient for them to believe it.

31:51 In other words, in order to get on in life,

31:54 you had to believe it or you had to say you believed it.

31:57 And at a certain point, what they really thought,

32:00 like deep in the back of their mind,

32:01 didn't matter because there was no way to say what you think.

32:06 And that's what you have in Russia.

32:08 Again, now it's for me very tragic because there

32:09 was a period in Russia in the 90s and 2000s

32:12 when there was open debate and people were speaking

32:14 freely and clearly about about the state of the country.

32:18 But right now it's it's once again

32:19 a situation where expressing your views is dangerous

32:23 and so people just don't do it and they try to stay out of politics altogether.

32:27 You know, politics is dangerous and ugly and nasty.

32:29 Like just stay home.

32:31 And remember that this is something that's developed over years.

32:34 It didn't happen from one day to the next.

32:37 It was a decline that's been happening since the year 2000.

32:40 I've heard you say that there's five core

32:42 tactics that autocratic leaders use to dismantle a democracy.

32:46 Could you walk me through the five tactics

32:48 and maybe also link them to things that are

32:50 happening now in in the West which might

32:52 be warning signs of the dismantling of one's democracy?

32:56 Well, corruption, we've done that one already.

33:01 Mhm.

33:01 Corruption you have in any political system,

33:03 and you often have it in democracies, too.

33:05 But in an autocratic society,

33:08 you have more corruption because the the legal system is controlled.

33:13 And so what you have for example in the United States

33:15 the fact that Donald Trump has taken over our department of justice

33:20 and has installed loyalists who are looking among other things

33:24 for example to pro prosecute his enemies just because they're his enemies.

33:28 That means you have a check and balance.

33:30 So normally if there was high level corruption

33:33 in the White House or in the administration

33:35 you would have people inside the Department

33:37 of Justice and the FBI who would investigate it.

33:39 But now we don't have that happening.

33:41 Is that different from the past?

33:42 It's different.

33:43 It's different.

33:44 I mean, we didn't have anybody try to use

33:46 the White House to make money in this way before.

33:48 So, hard for me to say what would have happened in like,

33:51 I don't know, the Clinton administration,

33:53 but we didn't have a completely politicized civil service,

33:58 completely politicized FBI who would avoid,

34:01 you know, any any kind of investigation.

34:04 Um, and so corruption is a particular symptom of authoritarianism,

34:08 and it's also a tool.

34:09 you know, it's something that the president can offer people.

34:12 You get along with me, you don't criticize me, your business will prosper.

34:16 You know, you will get government contracts.

34:19 Is that what we're seeing with all these big tech

34:20 CEOs that seem to be going frequently to the White

34:23 House and saying wonderful things about him and his support

34:26 and having dinner with him and none of them speaking out?

34:28 But if you look at their Twitter feeds a couple years ago,

34:30 they were all saying the most horrific things about Trump.

34:34 Yes.

34:34 I mean I mean they they've understood that, you know,

34:36 if this is going to be a an American

34:38 administration that you have to genulect the president,

34:42 you have to be sickantic to the president in order to get business deals,

34:46 um then they'll do it.

34:47 If you have to donate to his White House reconstruction fund,

34:51 which many of them have done, then you'll do it.

34:54 If you have to donate to his inauguration, you'll you'll do it.

34:57 It's a question of who is supposed

34:59 to be the beneficiary of government regulation.

35:01 It's supposed to be Americans.

35:03 I mean, ordinary people, we're supposed to become more pro prosperous.

35:07 The beneficiary is not supposed to be, as I said,

35:10 the president and his family and his entourage.

35:13 And that is a big shift in in in American politics.

35:17 When I look back at someone like like the CEO of OpenAI's statements on Trump,

35:20 if you go back to 2016, he said he was an unprecedented threat to America

35:24 and called him a potential disaster for the American economy.

35:28 He said he was irresponsible in the way dictators are and compared

35:31 his rhetoric to the big lie

35:32 tactics used by historical authoritarians like Hitler.

35:35 He described him as erratic, abusive, and prone to fits of rage.

35:38 And then I see him side by side at the White

35:41 House saying nice things about him and saying nothing critical at all.

35:46 It's one of the most bizarre things actually about this whole administration.

35:50 you know, if I were that rich,

35:53 like what's the point of being rich unless if you can't say what you think?

35:58 Mhm.

35:58 You know, I don't I don't understand the value of it.

36:00 Can I hazard a guess as to why the like incentive structure they're trapped in?

36:04 What's your guess?

36:05 I think that being rich for these people is actually just a proxy of status.

36:09 And I think the thing that risks their status,

36:11 which is what they care about more than

36:12 anything else in the games that they're playing,

36:14 is losing to their direct competition.

36:16 And it's quite clear to me that if someone

36:18 like Sam Alman was to say anything negative about Trump,

36:20 it would of course hurt his business,

36:21 but actually it would hurt something more, which is his status.

36:24 He would lose to anthropic and XAI and Gemini.

36:28 To lose in your category of peers,

36:30 which the all these sort of tech oligarchs are

36:32 in like category of peers would hurt more than anything.

36:35 I think it would hurt more than losing

36:36 a gazillion dollars is just like losing the the game.

36:40 Yeah.

36:40 There are two things about it.

36:41 One is it's very shortsighted

36:43 because ultimately who will suffer if there is a decline

36:47 in in in the American political system in the American legal system?

36:51 I mean it's them.

36:53 Maybe they've gotten used to paying to play in a way.

36:56 They they have but it's a it's a it's a mug's game.

36:59 I mean it's fine as long as you're one of the people who are winning,

37:01 but what if what if the rules change?

37:04 Oh yeah.

37:04 Like like in Russia with the oligarchs put That's right.

37:06 I'm sick of these oligarchs.

37:07 I want different oligarchs.

37:08 And that happened in China, too.

37:09 So it's a so that's one um argument against it.

37:12 The second argument is and I think anthropic might have figured

37:15 this out already and some of the law firms have figured it out.

37:18 There's also a game to be made by saying no I'm independent.

37:21 We have our own corporate rules.

37:23 We have our own legal code of ethics and we're

37:25 going to behave as patriotic Americans and then you attract business

37:30 and they and they may be doing all of it.

37:31 And as I said there's a there's

37:32 a parallel thing that happened with US law firms.

37:34 there were some frivolous lawsuits and they settled

37:37 them and then there were some who said no

37:38 we won't settle we won't do that and the ones who didn't do it have all won

37:43 you know and they're all thriving I mean so there is also a benefit to be gained

37:48 both commercially and financially and I would think even

37:50 in that weird world of status by standing up

37:54 for what you believe in and by remembering

37:56 the bigger picture and the bigger picture is what

37:58 happens to the United States I mean the United

38:00 States is your main market it's where your employees

38:01 come from it's the place where you're doing business

38:04 and if if the United States begins to suffer

38:07 then you suffer too and so thinking a little

38:09 bit like that would might help some of them.

38:11 Is this just another 3 years of this sort of you know

38:14 unusual behavior before we resume business as usual in in in our democracies.

38:19 I'm I'm asked this by Europeans all the time and my sense is that a lot

38:22 of things will not ever be quite normal

38:25 again either inside the US or around the world.

38:28 I mean, I I would advise, for example, I mean,

38:30 if you're doing business with the US or you're a security partner of the US,

38:34 I would strongly recommend that you have plan B.

38:37 You know, it's really time for NATO to have

38:41 a plan in case the United States flakes out,

38:45 to have a different security option.

38:47 You know, what happens to the US after Trump isn't clear?

38:49 First of all, the next president could be JD Vance,

38:51 who I think is even more committed to the project

38:53 of making America into a one party state.

38:56 Or the next president could be a Democrat we haven't heard of yet,

39:00 who decides to use the broken system in order

39:04 to take advantage of it in a different way.

39:06 I mean, I hope that won't happen, but you can't count it out.

39:08 I mean, once the norms are broken and once the laws have changed,

39:12 then it can be anybody can take advantage of it.

39:14 I mean, if if Trump can use the federal bureaucracy to threaten media companies,

39:19 then why can't the next president?

39:22 And so, you know, you certain things

39:24 don't necessarily get fixed once they're broken.

39:26 On that point of global partners of the US

39:29 now thinking about their own defense and themselves more.

39:32 Is that a pattern that you're seeing?

39:34 just from my observations of you know we're we're

39:36 sat here in London at the moment but my observations

39:38 of the UK the UK used to consider ourselves

39:41 to be the great alliance sort of partner of America

39:44 special relationship

39:45 that we had the special relationship which I never knew what it

39:47 meant but I always liked it seems like that's gone out the window

39:50 and the UK are now speaking a lot to like President Mccron

39:53 in France and it seems like we're having our own little European meetings

39:56 but around the world it seems that that's happening Canada don't seem to be

39:59 a great ally of the US anymore after they threaten to invade them.

40:02 What it what is happening from that perspective?

40:05 Are we are we becoming more individualistic and breaking

40:08 into our own little groups because of Trump's rhetoric?

40:11 What you're watching is everybody all over the world hedging.

40:15 Everybody is looking for alternatives.

40:18 So you now have an EU India trade agreement which

40:21 nobody would have bothered to do a few years ago.

40:23 You have Canada in initiating a security relationship with the EU.

40:29 you have conversations inside NATO about, you know,

40:33 realistically if the United States weren't to help us

40:36 in case of a Russian attack, what would we do?

40:38 So that's those aren't really public conversations,

40:40 but privately lots of people are having them.

40:43 Everywhere you go, you see these so-called middle powers.

40:45 This is a term that Mark Carney of Canada first started using.

40:48 You know, Brazil, India, the EU countries begin, Japan,

40:52 you see them beginning to make new relationships with one another.

40:56 You know, if the United States flakes out and we can't trade with them

40:59 in a normal way anymore because the president

41:01 changes the trading rules every 5 minutes,

41:04 then at least we'll have a decent trading relationship with somebody else.

41:07 I I travel a lot.

41:08 I've traveled a lot in the last three months and everywhere I go,

41:11 that's the main topic of conversation.

41:13 Canada was completely integrated with the United States.

41:17 I mean, it didn't almost didn't have an independent economy.

41:19 And now that Canadians are thinking,

41:21 how do we benefit from our oil and gas wealth to protect our sovereignty?

41:25 Who else do we do deals with?

41:26 Carney's been to China.

41:28 He's, you know, also talking to India.

41:29 With whom will we share potentially share nuclear technology?

41:33 There are these conversations between France and Poland and France

41:36 and Germany about a different kind of nuclear umbrella.

41:39 It's all pretty tentative,

41:40 but it's it's moved much faster than I would ever expected.

41:43 I think the breaking point for a lot of people in Europe was Greenland.

41:48 And I don't know if people have really focused on what exactly happened there,

41:52 but you had the president of the United

41:54 States saying he was going to invade Denmark.

41:58 All right, there we go.

42:00 So, the United States was saying it was going to invade Greenland.

42:04 So, Trump was kind of hinting it in public and behind the scenes

42:07 there were other signs that maybe they were really preparing to do it.

42:10 And so, what did that mean in Denmark?

42:12 That meant that the Danes said, "Okay,

42:16 we're preparing for a US invasion." And this is a very,

42:19 this is a country that's very pro-American.

42:22 Lots of big Danish companies in the United States,

42:25 including the ones who create the the weight loss drugs.

42:28 Lots of Danish American travel, friendship, everything,

42:32 security relationship going back to to the Second World War.

42:36 Okay, the Americans are invading.

42:37 What do we do?

42:38 Do we blow up the airports in Greenland?

42:42 And they did start planning that.

42:44 Do we plan to shoot down American planes?

42:46 Are we going to shoot at American soldiers?

42:48 You know, are they going to shoot at us?

42:51 And they had to suddenly imagine a real war with their closest ally

42:58 and how that would impact them and impact trade and impact NATO and so on.

43:02 And not only did they have to do it, their close allies in Europe did it, too.

43:05 So the Germans were consulting with the Danes all through this period.

43:09 You know, what if the Danes shoot down an American plane?

43:11 like how does that affect us?

43:13 And everybody went through this kind of traumatic experience

43:15 of imagining a US invasion of a NATO ally.

43:19 And then Trump made a speech at Davos where he somehow changed the subject

43:23 and confused Greenland and Iceland a few times and you know and it got put off.

43:29 But no one has recovered.

43:30 Everybody remembers that moment and said, "Okay,

43:34 this is a this is an unstable power.

43:36 They could do real damage to us.

43:39 they can't be relied on.

43:41 We need alternatives.

43:42 And so really since then, and that was in January, since then,

43:45 this is when you've seen this the stuff you were talking about,

43:48 you know, the visits to China,

43:49 the visits to Canada, um the back and forth with India,

43:52 and you see you see everybody hedging

43:55 and rearranging the way they think about the world.

43:57 If you're an American,

43:58 is this good news or bad news that the rest of the world is hedging?

44:02 It's very bad news.

44:04 Why?

44:04 because a lot of America's prosperity in the post-war

44:08 period has been based on the fact

44:10 that America was dominant in global trade and you

44:13 know we make money out of our European relationships.

44:16 Um you know we produce things that we sell all over the world and actually

44:20 you know we import things from all over the world and that's good too.

44:22 You know the the root of American post-war prosperity is is are

44:26 these relationships especially with Europe um

44:28 and also the root of America's security dominance.

44:31 I mean why are there NATO bases in Europe?

44:34 It's not just to protect Europe.

44:35 It's also because from there the US can project power into the Middle East.

44:40 It has it can you know into Africa.

44:42 It has it has a sort of window on the world from there.

44:46 And once those bases are gone then the US is suddenly cut

44:50 off and far away in a way that it wasn't it wasn't before.

44:53 And there are all kinds of other risks.

44:54 You know will the US dollar go on being so dominant?

44:57 US makes money out of that.

44:58 Um, will US goods go on being so valued?

45:01 You know, in Canada, they boycott US products now.

45:03 And actually, this was when I was in Denmark uh in February.

45:07 I was shown an app.

45:08 You can take a picture of a thing you see in the supermarket

45:11 and it will tell you whether it's made in the United States.

45:13 And if it's made in the United States,

45:15 you don't buy it because they were so angry.

45:18 Even the dominance of American tech,

45:20 which a lot of Europeans have belatedly woken up to as a problem,

45:24 could be in question.

45:25 So Europeans are looking to do cloud storage in Europe and payment

45:29 systems in Europe because you know maybe the US is unreliable

45:33 and so all all it's it's we're just at the beginning of what

45:36 could be quite a big change and yes Americans would feel that.

45:40 Coming back to this point about the war in Iran

45:42 you said that Trump sort of misestimated what would happen here.

45:46 Yes.

45:46 Obviously flew into Versa and took Madura out of bed

45:49 and that seemed to go fairly well um from what he might have been expecting.

45:53 Um but then he attacked Iran and this war seems to know no end now.

45:59 I mean here's another feature of dictatorships is

46:02 that nobody questions your decisions and nobody offers you alternatives.

46:06 So the people around you the people around you.

46:08 So when he was planning the war in Iran you

46:11 from the reporting that we know people did say well you know Mr.

46:15 President you know the Iranians are not like the Venezuelans.

46:18 It's a it's a very embedded regime and the Iranians had

46:21 a plan already for what would happen if their leadership was killed.

46:24 They just they had a sort of decentralized system,

46:26 you know, that will kick into place.

46:28 You know, they have allies all over the Middle East.

46:30 They have these proxy groups in different parts of the Middle

46:32 East and famously the control over the straight of Hormuz possibly.

46:37 And he was told that, but it seems he wasn't told it in a very definitive way.

46:42 Like some people said, well, maybe this might be the case,

46:45 but nobody said to him, "Mr.

46:47 president, this is a bad idea because he's known if you said, "Mr.

46:50 President, this is a bad idea," he might have said, "Well, get out of my sight."

46:55 Mh.

46:54 Because he's not somebody who listens to other

46:56 people's views or or takes them into into consideration.

46:59 The thing that bothers me the most about Iran,

47:01 I have friends and I've been involved

47:03 with organizations that do Iranian human rights.

47:05 The thing that bothered me the most was

47:06 his utter failure even to talk to or about Iranians.

47:12 I mean, there it is an unpopular regime.

47:13 It's one of the worst regimes, ugliest on the planet.

47:16 And yet there seems to have been no

47:18 communication with the you know democratic opposition in Iran.

47:22 No communication even with Paly the son of the sha the monarchists in Iran.

47:25 I mean there are alternative governments.

47:27 There are alternative people who you could speak to.

47:30 And he never did that because his real interest isn't

47:34 democracy you know or making Iran into a better place.

47:37 His real interest was in somehow dominating Iran and getting them to give

47:40 him a share of the oil revenues which is what happened in Venezuela.

47:44 you know, so he he he's also not

47:46 even thinking the way previous Democratic presidents thought.

47:50 So even George W.

47:51 Bush also somebody who made huge mistakes, you know, and so on.

47:56 You never heard George W.

47:58 Bush say, "What I want is to run Iraq and steal its oil.

48:03 They wanted to make Iraq into a democracy." Okay, that you know,

48:05 which by the way it is now, but it's it was it was a long bloody pathway.

48:10 Trump doesn't even think like that.

48:13 He thinks my idea is to do some deal with one of the dictators and and move on.

48:19 And actually that's what's happened in Venezuela.

48:20 So Venezuela is still a dictatorship and it's run

48:23 by the same regime as before just led by a different person.

48:27 And he's been quite vocal about the fact that they're getting all the oil.

48:30 Yes.

48:30 Which is it's crazy thing to hear

48:31 that you'd snatch up you'd snatch a world leader

48:33 and then the same day you talk about

48:35 how you've got the boats stealing the country's oil.

48:38 I say the word stealing but taking the country's oil and proudly saying it.

48:41 And it's not even clear what he means by that and so on, but it

48:43 was not the action of a of a of a 20th or 21st century president.

48:49 The midterms are coming up and um I was

48:52 reading that Trump's approval ratings are at an all-time low.

48:54 It's the first time I've seen people that were sort of devoted supporters

48:58 of his like Tucker Carlson coming out and saying apologizing for supporting him.

49:02 So this this war in Iran seems to have really backfired

49:04 in a way that I don't think he was he was intending.

49:07 And you can kind of tell by how

49:08 Trump's feeling because you just watch him in interviews.

49:11 And the line that he repeats 75 times is probably

49:15 like in some respects the exact opposite of what's going on.

49:18 So when I when I watched him in an interview this week

49:21 and he was repeatedly saying obviously he says how great the war is going.

49:25 So that makes me feel like it's not going well.

49:27 Yeah.

49:27 It was that was the main narrative was just like how well the war is going.

49:30 He keeps saying we've won, we've won, it's over.

49:32 One of the problems of having a president who lies all the time is that you,

49:35 you know, you just stop believing.

49:36 I mean, even if the war was over,

49:38 you wouldn't believe it because he's his his his track record is not good.

49:42 Um, I mean, look, I think the important thing to understand

49:43 about Trump is that he's somebody who has no strategy.

49:48 He doesn't care that much about what happened before he was president.

49:52 He doesn't know the history of Iran, you know, um,

49:55 he doesn't understand much about the history of the region,

49:57 and he doesn't really care about what's going to happen later.

50:00 He's interested in what is happening now

50:03 and is he winning in the current moment.

50:07 What does winning mean?

50:08 Whatever it means to him.

50:09 So I'm I'm winning the contest with this journalist

50:12 or I'm winning the argument about Iran or like

50:15 we're winning the war or we're I'm you

50:17 know the opinion polls are all in my favor.

50:19 So whatever is the situation, he has to emerge as the winner.

50:23 That's his narcissistic mentality.

50:27 That's not very good for strategic thinking because sometimes you

50:29 don't win immediately like you have to have a plan,

50:32 you know, and you have to have a long-term aim

50:34 and you have to have a strategy on how to get there.

50:37 But he he doesn't think like that.

50:39 If you watch him if you watch him perform on television,

50:42 whatever is the happening, he will convert it into that, you know, I'm winning.

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52:53 When you begin to see attempts to corrupt and shape elections,

52:58 this is when you know your democracy is in trouble.

53:01 When the rules of the election are challenged.

53:04 when um there there begin to be arguments

53:07 about who can vote and and attempts to make

53:10 some people not be allowed to vote when you try to alter the result in some way.

53:14 I mean any an attack on elections is

53:17 a classic way in which democratically elected leaders undermine democracy.

53:23 So an example of this okay Victor Orban who just lost

53:25 an election in Hungary after 16 years he had twothirds control

53:30 of in Hungary if you have twothirds of the parliament then

53:34 you can change the constitution so

53:35 he continually altered the Hungarian constitution

53:39 in order to give himself electoral

53:40 advantages so changing constituencies and rebalancing

53:44 the way votes were counted in the United States I think

53:46 we already talked about gerrymandering

53:48 um gerrymandering is unbelievably anti-democratic

53:51 and the fact that we of a kind of gerrymandering contest right now.

53:55 What's gerrymandering?

53:56 Jerrymandering is a great word actually.

53:58 It comes from a congressman named Jerry in the early 19th century

54:02 who drew a map of an electoral map which looked like a salamander.

54:07 And a gerrymandered map in in US terms is a electoral

54:12 map that has been altered to favor one political party.

54:15 you know, the city of Nashville,

54:16 instead of having a single Democratic representative,

54:19 instead of having a sensible constituency around the city, um,

54:22 that would vote for one member of Congress,

54:24 has been divided into several constituencies that are

54:28 designed in such a way that only Republicans win.

54:31 And once you have maps that are designed to favor one party or the other,

54:37 then you begin to get real democratic decline.

54:41 But there are other things happening in the US too.

54:43 So there are fears that ICE which

54:45 is the paramilitary organization created by the president

54:50 supposedly to go after immigrants that what if what if ICE troops are put

54:54 on the street dur on election day you know would some people be intimidated

54:58 from voting so there are fears that he will do that uh in some states

55:03 there's something called voter ID he talks about a lot

55:05 yes well this is also very strange so of course

55:07 in the US you have voter ID and most people have

55:09 driver's licenses um they want to change the law so

55:12 that either have to use a passport or a birth certificate.

55:16 And most Americans don't have passports.

55:19 I think 60% don't.

55:20 I I don't remember the number, but it's it's very low.

55:23 Many people have lost or never had their birth certificates.

55:27 If you passed a law like that, it would

55:29 make it much more difficult for some people to vote,

55:31 especially certain kinds of people.

55:33 So married women would have to show a passport, a birth certificate,

55:36 and a marriage license because you'd have to show that because

55:39 your birth certificate name is different from your married name.

55:43 Okay.

55:43 Yeah.

55:43 So you'd have and so many people believe this is a way

55:46 to get fewer women to vote and women are more likely to vote Democrat.

55:50 It's also part of a narrative.

55:53 So, the administration is trying to argue

55:56 that lots and lots of illegal immigrants are voting,

56:01 which is a conspiracy theory.

56:03 There's no evidence of it.

56:04 There's no evidence of really of almost any illegal immigrants ever voting.

56:08 And if you think about it,

56:08 if you were an illegal immigrant, why would you want to vote?

56:11 Because it would just be a way of attracting attention to yourself.

56:14 But they seek to establish this narrative

56:17 as a way of disqualifying Democratic votes.

56:21 They want to say that votes in Trump did this during the last election.

56:24 Votes in cities are too high.

56:27 If they need to call for a voter recount,

56:29 they want to say that this is the explanation for why they've lost.

56:33 Um, and so the part of the reason why they're talking about voter ID is that

56:37 so just looking at some of the data, it says young voters between 18 and 29,

56:41 roughly 24% of them lack the documents that would qualify them to vote.

56:46 Um, in minority voters, 11% of citizens of color lack these documents.

56:49 um compared to a smaller percentage in white citizens.

56:52 In lowincome America,

56:54 only one in five households earning under $50,000 has a passport.

56:58 And as you said, married women, 69 million women have birth certificates that do

57:02 not match their current legal name due to marriage, right?

57:07 So, okay.

57:07 I mean, it's it's risky because I

57:09 imagine lots of Republicans don't have passports.

57:12 Yeah.

57:12 But I think they've calculated that it would suit them better.

57:15 So, they're looking to shape the voting

57:16 population in a way that will benefit them.

57:19 M

57:19 so they're looking to find ways to massage the outcome.

57:23 And that's you know that that's a kind of classic when you're

57:26 in a country which is declining democratically

57:29 one of the classic things that happens

57:30 is the ruling party seeks to alter or change who is able

57:35 to vote and how votes are weighted as a way of altering the outcome.

57:39 What's the third one?

57:41 Personnel.

57:41 Well, we talked about this one a little bit already.

57:43 Oh, the civil servants.

57:44 This is civil service in a modern democracy.

57:48 So in a 21st century democracy, government does a lot of things.

57:51 It manages the road system.

57:53 It it sometimes organizes health care.

57:55 It organizes regulates the insurance markets.

57:58 It does all kinds of governance pollution

58:01 and all those people who do those jobs.

58:04 Um it's very important that they be people who know how to do them.

58:07 So you want the person who's measuring air pollution,

58:09 you want that person to be an expert in air pollution.

58:12 Mhm.

58:12 You don't want them to be, you know, the president's cousin

58:17 or the person who is regulating the insurance market.

58:21 You want that to be someone who knows about insurance markets.

58:23 And you don't want it to be the best friend of the vice president

58:28 in corrupt autocracies.

58:30 That is who gets those jobs.

58:32 Seeing this a little bit with the Fed.

58:33 No, he doesn't like Jerome Pal in the Fed, right?

58:36 And so he's tried to undermine Jerome Powell.

58:38 He's sued Jerome Powell or he was investigating him rather for some kind

58:43 of fake um financial scandal and he tried to put pressure on him to resign.

58:48 He tried to put pressure on him to change his policy.

58:50 And I you know honestly I don't I

58:52 don't know whether the person who who will come

58:54 in next will be will be more susceptible

58:56 but he's certainly been chosen because Trump thinks he is.

58:59 And so what Trump wants is to have civil servants who

59:02 are historically independent and that includes the chairman of the Fed.

59:06 Um it includes actually department of justice

59:08 the attorney general usually has some independence.

59:11 What you want is people who are acting

59:12 in the interests of everybody and in a in a functional

59:15 democracy in the happy Scandinavian countries then at least

59:19 most of the time that's what they're doing.

59:21 And in a corrupt democracy or in a failing democracy,

59:25 then you have people whose interests are not everybody in the country,

59:28 but their interests are the president,

59:31 his family, his party, anyway, not not American.

59:35 And so that's the danger of undermining the civil service.

59:40 The fourth one is information.

59:44 Okay, all dictatorships seek to control information.

59:47 You know, in China, the entire internet since the 1990s

59:51 has been constructed so that the government can control it.

59:54 There is no outside internet.

59:56 There is there's nobody who's active on the Chinese internet

59:59 who isn't somehow known or accounted for somehow by the authorities.

1:00:02 And the internet is also connected to a whole

1:00:05 system of surveillance cameras and other kinds

1:00:07 of databases so that people can be tracked

1:00:09 all through the system and all through the country.

1:00:11 People do have VPNs in China and they and they do get out,

1:00:14 but the majority of people are inside the that's probably the China is

1:00:17 the most extreme form of that and Russia

1:00:20 is actually now heading in that direction.

1:00:21 So Putin has now cut off Russian access

1:00:24 to most forms of Western social media, you know,

1:00:27 Instagram and there were some amazing videos of really sad Russian

1:00:33 Instagram influencers who were losing

1:00:35 their audiences because of Putin's Putin's changes.

1:00:40 So he's now he's now heading in that direction.

1:00:42 But even inside the United States,

1:00:44 which is maybe the loudest and most open democracy in the world,

1:00:48 you can see the Trump administration seeking

1:00:50 to shape the information space in new ways.

1:00:53 So we have federal regulators who are now willing to put

1:00:58 pressure on television stations if the president asks them to.

1:01:01 We have the president putting his thumb

1:01:03 on the scale of people who are acquiring new

1:01:06 media companies in order to make sure

1:01:08 that the new owners are somehow friendly to him.

1:01:10 What about Tik Tok?

1:01:12 Tik Tok, CBS, uh CNN,

1:01:14 these are all media companies where the president is trying

1:01:18 to get people who are sympathetic to him in charge.

1:01:21 And this is, by the way, you know,

1:01:22 we all have this idea about censorship that it's like there's a guy

1:01:25 in a room and he's crossing sentences out of a newspaper article.

1:01:28 You know, that's what censorship is.

1:01:30 But actually nowadays that's not how media control works.

1:01:33 So in Orban's Hungary in Erdogan's Turkey what happens is that the leadership

1:01:41 encourages or helps business people or groups

1:01:44 close to them to acquire media properties.

1:01:47 So they do it through the level of media ownership.

1:01:50 So who owns the media becomes the most

1:01:53 important question and then the person who's who's

1:01:55 in charge of the media can then influence in some ways what it's able to say.

1:01:59 So it doesn't give you complete control.

1:02:00 So actually in Hungary you still had a couple of very small but still

1:02:06 existing independent websites who turned out to be

1:02:09 very important but you had an attempt to control for most of the television

1:02:12 was controlled either directly or indirectly uh

1:02:16 by Orban and it looks to me like Trump is trying to achieve something like that.

1:02:20 There's a a piece of that that also involves culture and universities as well.

1:02:26 um pressure on universities so that they

1:02:29 don't produce people who are too critical.

1:02:31 In the US, you've had the Trump administration took over the Kennedy Center,

1:02:34 which is the most prestigious arts venue in Washington,

1:02:39 and tried to change its nature and tried to change its,

1:02:42 you know, who who was who could play there and who couldn't.

1:02:45 Um and the result is actually that it's now been shut down for two years.

1:02:48 You see this on both sides of the political aisle,

1:02:51 both on the Democratic side in different ways.

1:02:53 But I but I think that both parties when they're in for long enough,

1:02:57 what we're allowed to say changes.

1:03:00 Yes.

1:03:01 Although the mechanisms have been different.

1:03:02 I mean, I was involved in the argument,

1:03:04 you know, some years back about this, you know,

1:03:07 we I think it was incorrectly called cancel culture, but whatever.

1:03:10 The the the argument that was happening inside universities and some

1:03:13 press and other institutions about what you could and couldn't say.

1:03:17 And I thought it was um you know that that there was

1:03:20 this peer pressure and sometimes institutional

1:03:22 pressure on people and people were

1:03:24 cancelled that means they lost their jobs or they were kicked out

1:03:27 of whatever group they were in because they'd said something the wrong way.

1:03:31 You know I I I argued against that and wrote about it and so on.

1:03:34 What you have now is a little different.

1:03:36 You now have the president just, you know,

1:03:39 attempting to change media ownership and you have you you're beginning

1:03:44 to see what happens when the administration goes into university and said,

1:03:47 "You can't teach this course.

1:03:49 You can't hire that teacher." That was the deal that was given to Harvard,

1:03:52 I don't know, um, you know, some months back.

1:03:54 The reason why Harvard wound up refusing to deal

1:03:57 with the Trump administration and when it started

1:03:58 to sue them was because the administration was trying

1:04:01 to actually decide who would teach what courses at Harvard.

1:04:04 I don't believe there's a precedent for that.

1:04:06 But I agree with you that it is an illiberal instinct to try to control speech.

1:04:12 And there's a left-wing version of it and there's a right-wing version of it.

1:04:16 And the people who are really in favor of free speech,

1:04:20 and they're vanishingly few,

1:04:21 are the people who are willing to call it out on both sides.

1:04:24 And one of the things you often hear now

1:04:26 from these sort of so-called free speech warriors is

1:04:29 that they're perfectly happy to shout about the left

1:04:33 cancelling people or left-wing rhetoric that they don't like,

1:04:36 but then they keep quiet when it comes from the other side.

1:04:40 Yes.

1:04:41 I was looking back through the history of this happening on both

1:04:43 sides of the aisle and in Mark Zuckerberg's testimony I think in front

1:04:46 of Congress he said that he was repeatedly pressured um for months

1:04:51 by the Biden Harris administration to remove certain content and then there's

1:04:55 the whole Hunter Biden lap laptop

1:04:57 story where Zuckerberg confirmed that Meta were

1:05:01 asked to demote a New York Post story by the FBI and then

1:05:06 there's various other stories here about

1:05:08 PE Twitter executives being emailed by White

1:05:11 House officials um and being asked to change things on their platform.

1:05:15 So there is a difference between someone sending you

1:05:17 an email and saying you know look we this has been

1:05:20 flagged by a monitoring group as maybe fake or as maybe

1:05:24 Russian disinformation or as you know coming from some kind

1:05:27 of foreign influence campaign and so you know it would

1:05:30 be great if you took it down or demoted it

1:05:32 and there's a difference between that and taking over the company

1:05:35 in order that the president gets to dictate what's on it.

1:05:39 Nobody coerced Meta into doing anything or Twitter.

1:05:45 You nobody said, you know, Twitter will be will pay a fine if you don't do X

1:05:48 or Y in the context of people looking for foreign influence campaigns.

1:05:54 There were conversations about what was appropriate to print and what wasn't.

1:05:59 I think from what from what I've observed,

1:06:00 it happens on both sides, but in different ways.

1:06:03 I remember was it was it Elizabeth Warren

1:06:05 talking a lot about um the section 230?

1:06:09 M which I think protects some of the big

1:06:11 social media companies from being sued for users posts.

1:06:14 And I think she would repeatedly reference section 230

1:06:17 and other democratic lawmakers as a way to get

1:06:20 the platforms to take a more aggressive stance on what

1:06:22 they called like hate speech and speech and disinformation.

1:06:26 So section 230 essentially allows the platforms to be to escape

1:06:31 the rules that newspapers for example have to abide by.

1:06:34 So so actually we do have regulations.

1:06:37 We have liable laws.

1:06:39 We have laws about terrorist content, for example.

1:06:42 So, there are laws that regulate some parts of speech

1:06:44 that we've agreed are good in order to, you know, maintain peace and so on.

1:06:48 And the platforms are exempt um because of section 230.

1:06:53 And so, the platforms have argued that we don't control what's put

1:06:57 up on our platforms and we don't bear any responsibility for it.

1:07:00 I'm not sure that removing section 230 is

1:07:02 the best way to deal with this, but making

1:07:04 the online world conform to the same laws

1:07:08 as the offline world seems to me kind of very basic.

1:07:13 I mean, it's it seems obvious to me that child pornography that's illegal if

1:07:18 you have it in your house should also be illegal if it's published online.

1:07:23 Um it seems to me that um people recruiting for ISIS that's illegal to do

1:07:30 you know down the street from here then it should also be illegal to do online.

1:07:34 Um and the tech companies have been trying in recent years

1:07:37 in this is an argument that's taking place both in Europe

1:07:39 and the US and elsewhere to get out of responsibility for just

1:07:43 for conforming to the law in the countries where they're active.

1:07:46 And in one or two places there have been big clashes.

1:07:48 I was just in Brazil which is one of the places where that happened.

1:07:51 um where the Brazilian law said something that was published

1:07:54 on Twitter was illegal and they fined the company for publishing it.

1:07:59 Twitter didn't want to pay the fine and there was an argument

1:08:01 back and forth and for a while Twitter was shut down in Brazil.

1:08:03 But it does seem to me that any given country whether it's

1:08:06 Brazil or Nepal or you know Ethiopia and particularly democracies I should say

1:08:13 you know democracies have the right to say these are our laws

1:08:16 for example these are our electoral laws we have laws on election spending

1:08:20 and if the platforms violate those laws they're in breach of the law

1:08:24 you know and so election is a very important one because if

1:08:28 you're spending a million dollars on Tik Tok illegally that can be much

1:08:34 harder to see than it would be if you were buying television ads.

1:08:38 And so finding a way to bring the the social

1:08:41 media companies into the legal system seems to be completely legitimate.

1:08:46 Mhm.

1:08:46 And in fact, I would even go farther than that.

1:08:48 I would say that if European countries in particular don't do this, then

1:08:53 I'm not sure European countries will be able to maintain their sovereignty.

1:08:57 Like will you be able to run an election in Germany or England?

1:09:04 If if your electoral rules can be easily defied

1:09:06 by platforms that are based in the US or China,

1:09:11 what such electoral rules might be defied by?

1:09:13 Well, laws about spending, laws about advertising.

1:09:15 Yeah, fine.

1:09:16 Everything is a trade-off, right?

1:09:17 And this is what I've learned from being a podcaster

1:09:19 and interviewing so many people about so many things.

1:09:20 So, I often just think all the time with every

1:09:22 idea that I'm exposed to about what the trade is.

1:09:25 So as you were speaking I was thinking about what like how does

1:09:27 this become a slippery slope or what's the the the downside of this trade?

1:09:32 So what do you think that

1:09:33 I'm sure there's a you know of course there's a downside.

1:09:35 I mean the the downside is you know I don't know country X

1:09:38 has bad laws and then the platforms have to conform to the bad laws.

1:09:42 Questions about speech are particularly sensitive.

1:09:44 You know what one one person's terrorist

1:09:46 speech is another person's free speech right?

1:09:48 So but somebody has to make that decision about what the rules are.

1:09:52 And I think the person who should make the decision is the are

1:09:55 the people who should make the decision

1:09:56 are the elected representatives of that country.

1:09:59 Yeah.

1:09:58 And the decision should not be taken by Elon Musk.

1:10:01 It's funny because or Mark Zuckerberg

1:10:03 to some degree it sounded like what Elon Musk says.

1:10:06 I remember watching him him in an interview.

1:10:07 I can't remember who it was with but he basically said exactly that.

1:10:10 He said we'll abide by the laws of every country that we operate in.

1:10:13 And some and oh it was his interview with um

1:10:17 the CNN guy that used to be on CNN, Don Lemon.

1:10:20 Mhm.

1:10:21 and Don Lemon is pushing is saying look there's hate speech

1:10:23 on your platform and then he asks him what the hate speech

1:10:26 is and I don't think he can say but he Elon's

1:10:29 response to him is we abide by the laws and pushing push

1:10:33 there's but there's a record of them not doing that but so

1:10:35 you know so that that's just disingenuous I mean it's true hate

1:10:38 speech is a you know it's a longer conversation I mean what

1:10:41 you how you define it what you say it is is different

1:10:43 but some countries do have hate speech Germany has them so Germany

1:10:47 decided after World War II you know to ban Nazi symbols I

1:10:51 think Germany is a very very successful electoral democracy and if they

1:10:54 want to ban Nazi symbols I think they should be allowed to.

1:10:57 I mean, in America that wouldn't work, you know,

1:10:59 and it was you you can't ban Nazi symbols in the United States.

1:11:02 But I don't see why America should impose its rules on Germany.

1:11:06 Like, doesn't Germany have sovereignty?

1:11:08 Doesn't Germany get to decide, you know,

1:11:10 what the rules of its national conversation are?

1:11:13 Because in the US, racism is not illegal on the internet

1:11:16 in the United States due to the First Amendment, right?

1:11:19 So, I could be racist on X.

1:11:22 Yes.

1:11:22 And that is fine.

1:11:23 And many people are.

1:11:24 If you spend any time on X, you will see it.

1:11:26 It's very hard to miss according to the laws because it's not it's not legal.

1:11:30 But I think most people a lot of people would say

1:11:33 that the platform would have an obligation to take down that racism.

1:11:37 Someone starts being racist to me.

1:11:40 Yeah.

1:11:39 Me me on the internet.

1:11:40 A lot I understand why a lot of people would say like okay

1:11:43 that kind of behavior should be taken down but it's within the country's laws.

1:11:46 So do you think it's f like this is a bit of a I don't

1:11:48 want to be got your question but it's like do you know what I mean?

1:11:51 I guess this is where the clash comes

1:11:52 in because something can feel deeply immoral but be illegal.

1:11:56 Sure, there's a difference between illegality and immortal.

1:11:58 And some, you know, historically newspapers and other media have decided

1:12:03 not to print racist material because it's immoral or because it's offensive.

1:12:07 Even social media platforms,

1:12:09 I I think have a debate about how much ugly stuff they want

1:12:12 to appear on their sites because if people see too much of it,

1:12:14 they'll stop going on it.

1:12:15 I mean, I, you know,

1:12:16 reduced my usage of of Twitter because there was too much anti-semitism

1:12:20 and too much racism and I didn't want to watch it anymore.

1:12:23 So, um, and I think many people, others have made the same decision.

1:12:26 You know, speech is a constant negotiation.

1:12:28 You know, what's acceptable, what's unacceptable,

1:12:31 and the norms do change over time.

1:12:32 I will agree to that.

1:12:33 What the autocrats try to do is something a little bit different.

1:12:36 It's not in this gray area of hate speech and free speech.

1:12:40 It's controlling the system itself.

1:12:43 you know, what what are the boundaries of what people can see,

1:12:46 what platforms they have access to.

1:12:48 So, the Chinese don't really, you know,

1:12:50 what they're what they're interested in is

1:12:52 are you criticizing the Chinese Communist Party?

1:12:54 That's the fundamental thing that they're controlling for.

1:12:58 I was wondering, as you were speaking about this earlier,

1:12:59 if I'm in China, can I just get up and go?

1:13:02 Can I just leave?

1:13:04 Where would you go?

1:13:05 And could you get a visa to go there?

1:13:07 Good question.

1:13:08 I mean, the Chinese do leave.

1:13:10 I was I just wondering if it's easy to leave China if you're

1:13:13 a citizen of China or do they restrict you from going somewhere else?

1:13:16 I don't know.

1:13:16 I'll go to Bali.

1:13:19 Um could I not just go move to Bali if I

1:13:20 think about think about it if I mean this is this was a you

1:13:22 know this used to be a problem for people in the Soviet Union.

1:13:24 I mean okay theoretically you could leave you could get an exit passport.

1:13:28 I mean I'm sure there are some restrictions

1:13:29 on who's able to get passports and who isn't.

1:13:31 I mean I'm um but say you were able to go.

1:13:33 you you'd need to go somewhere where you could get a visa, where you could work,

1:13:39 where you could set up a life, where you speak the language,

1:13:42 where it's reasonable to imagine you could stay there for a long time.

1:13:45 I mean, immigration, I mean,

1:13:47 especially given languages and and and professional qualifications.

1:13:50 So, it is not always easy.

1:13:52 It's not always practical for everybody.

1:13:54 I mean, I have friends who are still I have many friends who left Russia,

1:13:56 but I have one or two friends who are

1:13:58 still there and that's because they have aging relatives

1:14:01 or because they don't speak any other languages

1:14:04 and they don't feel they'd be at home anywhere else.

1:14:07 I mean, there are there are many reasons why people can't leave even

1:14:11 if they don't like their state or they don't like their political system.

1:14:16 So, what's number five on our numbers?

1:14:19 Uh, you've you've used the word power.

1:14:22 Okay.

1:14:24 control over power ministries and the use of violence.

1:14:28 Most autocracies sooner or later want to create

1:14:32 some kind of repressive system that's also physical.

1:14:35 So it's not just control of the information space.

1:14:37 There's also some element of coercion.

1:14:40 So people who don't go along with the system don't get to just float around.

1:14:45 There's some way of threatening them physically like ice.

1:14:50 So, ICE is not supposed to be that.

1:14:53 ICE is supposed to be an immigration enforcement institution.

1:14:57 Um, but the way it's been used is well beyond

1:15:01 the way any immigration institution was used before in the United States.

1:15:06 So, look at what ICE looks like.

1:15:09 They are masked.

1:15:11 They are wearing military uniforms.

1:15:14 They are often driving unmarked cars.

1:15:17 They drive in vans.

1:15:18 They're not driving in police vans and they're

1:15:20 not following the rules of local police.

1:15:23 They're not accountable to anybody.

1:15:25 They're not accountable to the mayor, you know,

1:15:27 or to the governor of the state where they are.

1:15:29 And that gives them a kind of impunity and a kind of ability to behave badly

1:15:35 and they seem to be accountable directly

1:15:37 to the Homeland Security Department and to the president.

1:15:40 And we've already seen how this can affect the behavior of ICE.

1:15:44 that we saw during the during the protests

1:15:46 and the arrests and the protests in Minnesota.

1:15:48 We saw two people were killed.

1:15:50 And what was really horrifying to me wasn't just that they were killed.

1:15:54 It was how the administration reacted.

1:15:57 You know, it was Vance and Gnome and several other people

1:16:01 immediately said of the people who were killed, they were guilty.

1:16:05 So instead of saying this is horrible,

1:16:08 you know that an American police force killed a these were both US citizens.

1:16:11 I mean, there have been other people killed, too, by the way,

1:16:12 but these two were were notable because

1:16:14 they were US citizens and they weren't immigrants.

1:16:17 Two, instead of saying two people were killed, this is horrible.

1:16:20 We need to have an investigation.

1:16:21 This must not be allowed to happen again.

1:16:23 The immediate instinct was to give them impunity.

1:16:27 Like, you know, we're not going to investigate this.

1:16:31 It's not a real problem.

1:16:33 You know, the the the instinct was to put them above the law.

1:16:37 And when you have a military force, and as I said,

1:16:39 especially one that's militarized and looks like, you know,

1:16:42 they they're dressed like they're in Fallujah, you know,

1:16:45 when you have a military force that's above the law,

1:16:48 then it's really a paramilitary.

1:16:50 If you have a police force that can harm ordinary

1:16:52 citizens and not pay any price for it and isn't accountable,

1:16:55 then you're not serving Americans.

1:16:57 You're serving the interests of of the of the ruling party.

1:17:01 This is super interesting to me.

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1:17:30 Let's get on with the show.

1:17:32 Do you think this is um potentially the decline

1:17:35 of the what one might call the American empire?

1:17:39 I was um I was looking at how long empires tend to last and I

1:17:42 was before you came and there's this 2000

1:17:45 250 year figure which is famously popularized

1:17:47 by a British historian called Sir John Gub in his essay the fate of empires

1:17:52 and the search for survival after analyzing

1:17:54 empires from the I can't say that wordians Assyrians

1:18:00 exactly what I said Assyrians to the British um club found that despite

1:18:04 differences in technology geography religion and surprisingly

1:18:07 shared a similar lifespan standard life cycle.

1:18:10 Glob argued that empires typically go through

1:18:12 a predictable sequence of stages over those 250 years.

1:18:16 The first one being the age of pioneers, outburst and conquest.

1:18:19 The age of conquest which is the military dominance.

1:18:22 The age of commerce which is vast wealth creation.

1:18:24 The age of affluence, comfort and a shift from duty to selfishness.

1:18:28 The age of intellect focus on philosophy and education over defense.

1:18:31 The age of descendence, internal division, massive inequality and collapse.

1:18:37 So if you view the United States

1:18:38 as an expansionist project from its very inception,

1:18:42 pushing westward across the North American continent through its power,

1:18:46 then the math says if you take it from 1776 to now to 2026,

1:18:50 it's exactly 250 years old.

1:18:53 So if you use Gub's 2000 250ear life cycle model from 1776 to now,

1:19:00 political scientists argue that we are

1:19:02 in the age of descendants of the American Empire.

1:19:05 This stage is typically characterized by deep internal political division,

1:19:08 vast wealth inequality, massive national debt,

1:19:10 and a cultural shift away from a shared sense of civic duty.

1:19:15 So, first of all, that's a pretty accurate

1:19:17 description of what's happening in the United States.

1:19:19 However, you have just touched on something that I feel very strongly about,

1:19:23 which is that I don't believe in historical inevitability.

1:19:28 Interesting.

1:19:27 And I I think is very dangerous.

1:19:30 So the idea that we are on a slippery slope downhill and we

1:19:35 can't stop it because that's the way history is going or alternative

1:19:38 the idea that everything is fine and it will continue to be fine

1:19:42 because liberal democracy has triumphed which is what we thought in the 1990s.

1:19:45 Anytime you think that something is inevitable

1:19:48 that takes away your willingness to act.

1:19:52 Yeah.

1:19:52 What happens tomorrow and next year is completely dependent on what we do today.

1:19:59 Whether the United States survives as a democracy

1:20:02 or not depends on choices Americans make, things they say,

1:20:06 the arguments they have, you know, the degree of civic participation,

1:20:10 not some historical rule that some very brilliant political scientist invented.

1:20:16 And as I said, I think this has happened before.

1:20:18 I think we had this moment of complacency after

1:20:21 the fall of the Soviet Union in the '90s.

1:20:24 Americans and Europeans became convinced that everything was best

1:20:27 in the best of all possible worlds and we

1:20:30 didn't have to do anything in particular to maintain

1:20:33 our democracies because democracy was the best system

1:20:35 and we just won the Cold War and it was all going to be fine and we lost

1:20:39 sight of the ways in which democracy was beginning

1:20:42 to slip and we were beginning to lose things.

1:20:46 And I think it was sense of complacency

1:20:48 and above all it was a sense of inevitability.

1:20:50 It's inevitable.

1:20:52 We've won the war of ideas.

1:20:53 the war of ideas is over.

1:20:54 And that's why we we missed the rise of Russia.

1:20:57 We missed the the significance of China.

1:21:00 And we missed a lot of those things because

1:21:01 we were so sure that we were just winning.

1:21:03 Isn't that in and of itself a cycle?

1:21:06 It's a cycle.

1:21:06 But my point is that the cycles aren't predictable.

1:21:09 I mean, you can stop the cycle.

1:21:11 You can reverse the cycle.

1:21:12 Countries can and do change their trajectory.

1:21:14 I say I've I've lived a lot of my life in Poland.

1:21:16 First went there in the 1980s.

1:21:18 My husband is Polish.

1:21:19 So on Poland is a completely different country from what it was 30 years ago.

1:21:22 And it's a country that has really changed

1:21:25 itself in ways that weren't necessarily predictable in 1990.

1:21:29 And so I I do think countries change.

1:21:32 Is all of this downstream from something that doesn't change,

1:21:36 which is human nature.

1:21:37 And therefore, if we understand human nature as the constant,

1:21:40 then one can almost predict these dare I say the word again,

1:21:43 cycles of how humans will go from there to d human nature is a constant.

1:21:48 But there is so much accident in history and so many

1:21:52 random things happen that you can sometimes predict how people will react,

1:21:57 but you can't necessarily predict exactly what's coming.

1:22:00 You know, when Boris Yeltson was drunk and sick

1:22:05 and had to choose the next leader of Russia,

1:22:08 there were a number of choices he had.

1:22:09 And the person he chose was Vladimir Putin,

1:22:11 who at the time was a very low ranking.

1:22:14 I mean, he was a he was a FSB.

1:22:15 He came from the KGB and he was someone they chose because they

1:22:19 thought he would be loyal to the Yeltson family and he wouldn't prosecute them.

1:22:22 Nobody imagined him as a dictator or an imperial leader

1:22:26 who would be seeking to reconquer the former Soviet Union.

1:22:30 And what if they'd chosen, for example, Boris Nimsov,

1:22:32 who was another leading Russian politician at the time.

1:22:34 You know, I don't know that he was a perfect Democrat,

1:22:36 but he was very open-minded and he would

1:22:38 have been interested in integrating Russia with Europe.

1:22:40 Okay.

1:22:40 What if he'd become the leader of Russia?

1:22:42 We would be in a completely different world.

1:22:45 And why was there was nothing inevitable about that decision.

1:22:48 There are many random completely out of the blue things that happen in history.

1:22:55 You can always say there's always some

1:22:56 percentage of any population that's instinctively authoritarian

1:23:00 for example and there's always some percentage

1:23:02 of any population that's instinctively liberal or extinctly libertarian

1:23:06 because of egos and power because of just the way people the human

1:23:08 nature have the people have different but what is the balance of that group how

1:23:13 the leadership of the country encourages or discourages

1:23:15 one set of values or the other you know that that affects h you know

1:23:20 who who's winning the arguments um and so

1:23:22 I I I don't believe in inevitable cycles.

1:23:25 Have you heard of Ray Dalio talking about

1:23:27 the sort of boom and bust cycles through history

1:23:30 and when like a population becomes very comfortable you

1:23:33 have this sort of inversion goes the other way.

1:23:35 Do you believe in those kinds of cycles?

1:23:37 You know, I suppose there is a phenomenon whereby yes,

1:23:39 as people become comfortable,

1:23:40 then if Frank Fukiyama actually had in his famous book about the end of history,

1:23:44 he had a description of well, what happens if we have two, you know,

1:23:48 if everybody becomes a liberal democracy and everybody's pretty prosperous,

1:23:51 then the next thing that will happen is some people will get bored

1:23:54 and out of their boredom and out of their desire for change,

1:23:57 they'll attack the system and and want to undermine it.

1:24:00 It's kind of what happened.

1:24:01 So there's I suppose there's some there's a there's some human

1:24:04 element like that you know that the there will always be some

1:24:07 part of the population that feels left out or feels discriminated against

1:24:12 and and wants a bigger voice or wants to run the country.

1:24:14 I mean so you can you can see that I

1:24:17 just don't think it's something that scientists can predict.

1:24:20 Is there a link between democracies and sort of rampant capitalism?

1:24:25 So, in a democracy, I don't know much about this stuff,

1:24:27 so I'm just asking the question.

1:24:28 But in a democracy, does it tend to be the case

1:24:30 that you end up with wealth inequality because you let everybody,

1:24:32 you let free markets play out and then you're going to have

1:24:34 these like tech oligarchs up here that have all gazillions of dollars,

1:24:37 a trillion dollars, and lots of people at the bottom of the rung.

1:24:39 Whereas in I don't know, in China, I guess they somewhat defend.

1:24:42 I don't know.

1:24:43 Do they defend against?

1:24:44 No, I would say almost the opposite.

1:24:46 So, historically, democracies have I mean,

1:24:49 there have been different phases, right?

1:24:50 So I don't want to overgeneralize but certainly in the 20 second half

1:24:53 of the 20th century the the democracies

1:24:56 since the second world war have tended towards

1:24:58 equality and including in the United States

1:25:00 and at their most successful and prosperous

1:25:03 moments people there was if there was

1:25:05 much less wealth equality than inequality than

1:25:08 there is now and the countries we were talking about earlier the happy

1:25:11 countries those are relatively equal countries

1:25:13 and those are countries with big welfare states

1:25:16 and a lot of redistribution of wealth

1:25:18 and those are countries where people feel invested

1:25:20 in the system partly because they don't

1:25:23 feel completely outclassed by a group of oligarchs.

1:25:25 If you look at the United States in the 1950s,

1:25:27 that was a period of also huge social mobility when lower middle class,

1:25:32 middle- class people began to get wealthier and there's this enormous

1:25:35 wave of prosperity and that's a period when everybody is becoming wealthier.

1:25:39 And that was also a period when you have the, you know,

1:25:42 very successful American democracy.

1:25:43 You have the civil rights movement.

1:25:44 You have democracy beginning to spread to new

1:25:47 populations or to people who'd been excluded before.

1:25:49 So you have a a connection between equality and democracy,

1:25:53 wealth, even wealth equality.

1:25:55 And one of the things that gives critics of the United

1:25:59 States most anxiety now is precisely what you just said, you know,

1:26:04 the emergence of tech oligarchs who have so much more power than any

1:26:09 one politician and who even have the power to to organize information space.

1:26:14 How long will that group of people want to live in a democracy

1:26:18 where everybody gets a vote and wealth

1:26:20 is supposed to be distributed more evenly?

1:26:22 There are some members of that community who

1:26:23 have become illiberal or anti-democratic for exactly that reason.

1:26:27 If we don't believe in inevitabilities,

1:26:29 then what is it we have to look out for as those living in a democracy?

1:26:33 We talked about the five things there,

1:26:34 but are there anything is there anything coming

1:26:36 up where you're worried that as a society we

1:26:39 might overlook it or allow it which results

1:26:42 in us falling back down into an autocratic society?

1:26:46 And is there anything we can do proactively now to defend our democracy?

1:26:51 We are lucky in that we live in societies where we can vote.

1:26:54 Mhm.

1:26:54 Um, and so it's really important that we vote,

1:26:58 that we know who we're voting for, that we vote in all elections,

1:27:03 including local ones.

1:27:04 When people become nihilistic, when they say, "They're all the same.

1:27:08 I don't care who wins the election.

1:27:10 It's not worth voting because, you know,

1:27:12 they're all corrupt." This is what autocrats try to create.

1:27:16 So, what does Putin want Russians to do?

1:27:18 Does he want them to be political?

1:27:19 No.

1:27:20 He wants them to stay out of politics.

1:27:22 You know, what do the Chinese want?

1:27:23 they want their people out of politics.

1:27:25 And so whenever you see too many people who

1:27:27 are have responded to that kind of negative inspiration,

1:27:32 that's when you should worry.

1:27:34 And I worry a lot about the United States on exactly those grounds.

1:27:37 Actually, look at how the leader of your country talks about the press,

1:27:42 how he or she talks about the judges, the judiciary,

1:27:46 how he or she talks about the civil service.

1:27:50 A real Democrat respects those institutions and wants

1:27:54 them to stay in place precisely so that democracy can remain so that at the next

1:27:58 election there will be a fair election.

1:28:00 Do you think the the mainstream media are politicized?

1:28:03 Do you think there's political bias in the mainstream media like the big titles?

1:28:08 You know, some of them have business models that are that are biased.

1:28:10 So Fox's business model is to appeal to the right-leaning

1:28:15 part of the American population and to, you know,

1:28:17 to encourage them in their biases and get them to watch TV.

1:28:21 There's some media that are now dependent

1:28:23 on on polarization and kind of live off it.

1:28:26 There are some who try to be neutral, but you know,

1:28:28 even neutrality is hard to achieve now

1:28:31 because a neutral investigation that turns up

1:28:35 something bad about the Trump administration will

1:28:38 immediately incur the reaction on the part, you know, you're biased.

1:28:42 You we've lost our our assumption that that press are operating in good faith.

1:28:47 So, it's become much more difficult.

1:28:48 This is so interesting for me as a podcaster

1:28:50 who I guess now is considered to be media.

1:28:52 the like the inherent incentives of media mean that like if say I'm running X

1:28:58 newspaper and I write a story and I've built up a base of people for whatever

1:29:02 reason right that want me to say

1:29:05 something negative about Trump I have an economic

1:29:07 model and an incentive structure that means

1:29:09 that if I write that article it's going

1:29:11 to get 10 times the reach 10 times the engagement 10 times the subscribers if

1:29:14 I write the exact opposite article I know I'm going to get so if I

1:29:17 say Trump is amazing even though I've built up a base that I think a certain

1:29:21 way the article is going to get

1:29:22 a fraction of the the reached engagement subscribers.

1:29:25 So, as a as a CEO of such such a company,

1:29:27 you're going to have to hire more and more people,

1:29:29 create more and more output to receive the same um

1:29:33 rewards versus just writing something bad about that particular person.

1:29:36 So, you become incentivized.

1:29:37 But then the other factor is that geographically Democrats

1:29:40 and Republicans in the United States exist in certain areas.

1:29:43 So if I open my office in New York or LA,

1:29:46 most of the people I'm going to be able to hire

1:29:48 come with a certain like statistically come with a certain political view.

1:29:51 So I I do wonder if eventually like the fate of most

1:29:54 media organizations is they do get politically captured one way or the other.

1:29:58 You have to fight it.

1:29:59 You have to fight.

1:30:00 And as a podcaster, yeah, cuz now I'm I'm part of the media.

1:30:03 I I now understand because I feel it.

1:30:07 So I feel that I sit here with Kamala Harris, I'm attacked.

1:30:11 I sit here with Ivanka Trump, I'm attacked.

1:30:12 I see it with Michelle Obama attacked.

1:30:14 Gavin Newsome attacked.

1:30:16 And I understand there's this great quote which I favored the other day.

1:30:19 It was like, "You have to join a tribe or you

1:30:21 get killed by one." Or something words to that effect.

1:30:23 And I I get it.

1:30:24 I get why some of my peers

1:30:25 in podcasting have sought defense behind a particular tribe

1:30:30 because just taking the arrows from both sides

1:30:33 is not the nicest feeling in the world.

1:30:35 No, but No.

1:30:36 I mean, it's funny when you said mainstream media.

1:30:38 I don't even know who that is anymore.

1:30:40 It's not so much about hearing from both sides.

1:30:42 It's about trying to establish what's true.

1:30:47 Yeah.

1:30:46 And so the job of what what you do

1:30:48 is a little bit different from what journalists do.

1:30:50 So journalists go into the world and they

1:30:52 gather information and they if they're good journalists,

1:30:56 they try to figure out what actually happened

1:30:58 and then they bring it back and they write it down or they make a video about it

1:31:02 and they try and make sure that it's accurate, right?

1:31:04 And so if you're devoted to that project,

1:31:07 then you you seek to avoid political bias, but you know,

1:31:10 inevitably you might wind up saying the president is

1:31:14 lying or the leader of the opposition is lying.

1:31:17 And then you're immediately, you know,

1:31:18 in the world of people shouting at you and saying you're biased.

1:31:22 Um, but I I do feel that it's

1:31:23 really important that this particular profession of the people

1:31:26 who go into the world and try and establish reality that it continues to exist.

1:31:31 I agree.

1:31:32 You know, there needs to be a business model for that.

1:31:33 I mean, for democracy to exist,

1:31:36 for an accurate and meaningful national conversation to exist,

1:31:39 we need to have some people who are trying to figure out what's real.

1:31:42 I agree.

1:31:43 And I think those people are incredibly important,

1:31:44 which I think people think podcasters won't say

1:31:46 cuz I think sometimes we're positioned as being

1:31:48 like the rebels or radicals or whatever

1:31:50 that are like doing it from their kitchen.

1:31:51 This did actually used to be my kitchen.

1:31:52 But um but I very much agree.

1:31:55 I very much agree that there are

1:31:56 incredibly um rigorous truth seeeking journalists out

1:32:02 there that have this very unique skill which is not one that I possess

1:32:05 or or test to possess at all that they go deep for long periods of time

1:32:10 without bias in search of the truth and then they deliver it to the world.

1:32:14 And I'm well aware that if we lose that, then I lose so many

1:32:16 of the things that I fundamentally care about

1:32:18 and that I've built my entire life and career

1:32:20 on, especially as like a young black man

1:32:22 in business who understands that there's lots of people

1:32:25 that came before me that revealed things about

1:32:27 the way society functioned that have benefited me.

1:32:29 And so that I should my way of sort of paying

1:32:32 that forward is protecting the same privileges as a um as a podcaster.

1:32:36 is I mean there is a danger that we go down a road in which especially as AI

1:32:40 develops and we get more and more

1:32:42 of our information online that we lose touch with reality.

1:32:45 Mhm.

1:32:46 You know, if if AI is only accessing what's available to the, you know,

1:32:51 to the model online,

1:32:53 there's still a whole world out there where things are happening, you know,

1:32:56 that that's not online and and the making sure that we're

1:33:00 constantly in touch with what's what's reality on the ground,

1:33:03 what's really happening in Ukraine, you know, what's really happening in Iran,

1:33:07 and not living on just what's available to us on our phones.

1:33:10 It's really important.

1:33:10 One of my fears is that the the algorithms

1:33:12 with AI are becoming better at knowing what

1:33:14 to serve me in order to make me dwell

1:33:16 and therefore it creates more ad dollars for the companies.

1:33:18 And so I might not just be living in a fake reality.

1:33:21 I might be living in a completely personalized one that's completely different

1:33:24 from your own because as I went on my phone this morning,

1:33:27 one of the things the sections on my phone is suggested for you.

1:33:30 Now this is obviously showing me things

1:33:32 that are based on my past viewing consumption.

1:33:35 So if I viewed this person having a fight in the street,

1:33:37 I'm getting more people having fights in the street.

1:33:39 So now my perception is that everyone's having fights in the street

1:33:42 and and that means it's harder to connect to each other.

1:33:44 We are very much I mean I think this has really happened already that we we

1:33:48 live in our own algorithms when you're asking

1:33:50 the more fundamental question about the breakdown of democracy.

1:33:53 I mean, there's nothing more toxic to democracy than polarization.

1:33:57 Because if you live in a world where

1:33:59 the people on the other side of the political

1:34:01 divide aren't just your rivals and you don't

1:34:03 just disagree with them about taxes, you know,

1:34:05 but they are your existential enemies and if they're in charge,

1:34:09 then you know, the world ends,

1:34:12 then it's very hard to have a normal democratic debate or create a normal,

1:34:17 you know, have a normal election.

1:34:20 Mhm.

1:34:21 Do you know what this is?

1:34:22 It looks like a very old newspaper.

1:34:24 Very old newspaper from a long time ago.

1:34:28 And you're in it.

1:34:34 Gosh.

1:34:32 Oh, it's Wow.

1:34:35 Uh, that's a um that was that took a lot of research.

1:34:39 Yeah.

1:34:40 What is that?

1:34:41 That is I don't they don't even have these anymore.

1:34:43 That was a New York Times wedding announcement from 1992.

1:34:47 I think 1992.

1:34:48 married since 1992.

1:34:50 I'm still married to the person who it was announced

1:34:52 that I was marrying a Polish He was then a journalist

1:34:57 and now he's the Polish foreign minister.

1:35:00 We got married in Washington,

1:35:01 but he was born in Poland and it's a long story, but anyway,

1:35:06 lots of photos of you here.

1:35:09 Interesting.

1:35:09 Oh, there's a nice one as well.

1:35:10 You're looking very presidential there.

1:35:12 That was a long time ago.

1:35:13 And I've got another one of him and Hillary Clinton.

1:35:17 Right.

1:35:16 Politics has been a big part of your family's life in various ways.

1:35:22 I mean, it would be hard to deny that.

1:35:23 Yeah.

1:35:25 Is it stressful?

1:35:27 Cuz it's constant and it's and it's and it's more polarizing than

1:35:30 ever before and it's divisive and it's it's a lot of energy.

1:35:33 Even talking about these things I find to be quite um energy draining.

1:35:41 Yes.

1:35:41 I mean, actually, it became more stressful in more recent years.

1:35:44 I mean, social media made it more stressful than it used to be.

1:35:47 The stressful part is um living a part of your life in public.

1:35:52 We try to not live all of our lives in public.

1:35:55 This has been very useful to me as a journalist.

1:35:57 Actually, you begin to understand the difference between what you

1:35:59 look like in public and what your reality is, you know.

1:36:03 So, people react to you in all kinds of ways depending on how where

1:36:06 they've seen you on TV or where they've what stories they've read about you,

1:36:10 some of which might not be true.

1:36:11 And there's often a kind of, you know,

1:36:13 that the way you're perceived is not necessarily the way you are.

1:36:16 And so I I try to keep that in mind when I meet public figures, you know,

1:36:21 that I have a set of perceptions of them based on what I've read about them,

1:36:25 which I wouldn't have if I met, I don't know,

1:36:27 somebody introduces me to the next door neighbor.

1:36:28 I wouldn't have that in my head when I met them.

1:36:30 But when you meet a politician or somebody who's um who's who's wellknown,

1:36:35 you come with you come with stuff.

1:36:37 And I try when I meet people to drop it as much as I can

1:36:41 because you've seen that at home.

1:36:42 Because I've seen it at home.

1:36:44 So yes, I mean we have compatible lives that are somewhat different.

1:36:48 I mean I have stayed well away from Polish politics.

1:36:51 I don't play any role in it.

1:36:54 I have a different name from my husband which

1:36:56 you know I didn't change my name and that was

1:36:58 also has led us allowed us to be separate

1:37:01 and we share a lot of views but not all.

1:37:05 Um, and so we, you know, we have kind of different trajectories, but as I said,

1:37:10 I find mostly knowing what it's like

1:37:12 to be a politician helps me understand them.

1:37:16 Have you ever thought about going into politics yourself?

1:37:20 No.

1:37:20 You can't have two politicians, one family.

1:37:23 You know, a lot of what I do

1:37:24 is journalism or it's something or journalist adjacent.

1:37:27 You know, I go in and try and find things.

1:37:29 I try and explain them.

1:37:30 I try and say what what I think is happening.

1:37:33 And the job of a politician is quite different from that.

1:37:36 You know, it's to you arrive with a set of views.

1:37:40 You need to explain them to people.

1:37:42 You need to convince them.

1:37:44 It's just it's a different it's a different

1:37:45 way of thinking about approaching the public.

1:37:47 So, I'm not I'm not campaigning for a for a cause.

1:37:51 Is there a particular outcome you're seeking with the work that you do,

1:37:54 with the books that you write, and the conversations you have?

1:37:56 Is there one particular outcome above all others that you're aiming at?

1:38:02 There's an outcome that's general but not specific.

1:38:04 In other words, I'm not trying to elect any particular person to be president.

1:38:08 I do have a goal that is to remind people of why democracy is important,

1:38:14 why we need to maintain it and to pay attention

1:38:18 to the ways in which it's declining so that we can fight back.

1:38:21 I mean, I have a I have a I have a broad

1:38:23 goal in that sense and that's not only inside the United States.

1:38:26 Why is this so personal to you?

1:38:30 It it's the thing I've been fascinated by since I was in my 20s.

1:38:37 Why?

1:38:37 Because I think it's I saw the Soviet Union when it was still the Soviet Union.

1:38:41 I was a student in Lennengrad when it was still Lengrad.

1:38:45 I felt what it was like to live in a heavily autocratic society even briefly.

1:38:50 And I had really spent the rest of my life trying to understand what it was,

1:38:55 how it worked, why people went along with it.

1:38:59 And I've also spent a lot of time

1:39:02 more recently trying to warn people against it, against going in that direction.

1:39:07 You know, it's also not the thing I thought I would be doing.

1:39:10 I changed um you know, if you if you're looking at my books,

1:39:13 you know, I wrote three history books.

1:39:15 I wrote the Gulad book.

1:39:16 I wrote a history of the Ukrainian famine.

1:39:19 I wrote a book this is this is a book

1:39:20 about how the Soviet Union took over Eastern Europe.

1:39:23 How they sort of did regime change in Eastern Europe after the war.

1:39:25 You know, they're about things that happened, you know, in the distant past.

1:39:29 But I had a realization in about 2014 2015

1:39:34 that I was living through a period of history myself.

1:39:38 In other words, there was a historical shift happening around me and I

1:39:43 felt the need to start recording it as a kind of eyewitness.

1:39:46 And so that book Twilight of Democracy was

1:39:49 a description I mean it starts with a description

1:39:51 of a party I gave and then the book is about how people I knew had changed.

1:39:56 I knew a lot of people who had been very radicalized.

1:39:59 I knew lots of people on the center right, you know, we were anti-communists,

1:40:03 we were, you know, whatever, Thatcherites, Reganites,

1:40:05 and I saw many of them become more radical.

1:40:08 And I thought, this is a really important moment of change,

1:40:10 and so I should record it as a witness.

1:40:13 And so that book is the first book that I

1:40:14 wrote in the first person about something I'd seen.

1:40:18 And that was just me being affected by the world I live in.

1:40:22 Maybe it did matter that I was married to a politician because some

1:40:25 things that you would have noticed in a more distant way affected me personally.

1:40:30 Mhm.

1:40:30 Maybe it was the particular circumstances of being both American and Polish

1:40:36 and you know seeing a similar pattern of things happening in both places.

1:40:40 Either way, I I felt that something important was happening and I've really been

1:40:43 motivated for the last decade to explain it to people and try and understand it.

1:40:47 In that regard, what is the most important thing

1:40:49 we haven't talked about that we should have talked about?

1:40:50 Um, what would regime change really look like in our countries?

1:40:57 Oh, in the west?

1:41:00 Yes.

1:41:00 Isn't it just electing a new person?

1:41:02 What would it feel like to live in a very different kind of society?

1:41:07 How would you feel living in a place where suddenly the values shifted?

1:41:10 They were different for better or for less.

1:41:13 For the, you know, the the, you know, we think, for example,

1:41:16 free speech is is a value and we've been arguing about it here.

1:41:19 What does it mean?

1:41:20 what's hate speech, you know, how do we measure it and so on.

1:41:22 What if you suddenly found yourself waking up one

1:41:25 morning in a society where free speech was bad, you know, where it wasn't?

1:41:29 You didn't automatically assume that it was good.

1:41:31 We also have an assumption that there is

1:41:34 some kind of meritocracy in our societies, right?

1:41:36 That if you try hard and work hard and maybe you're lucky and study,

1:41:39 then you can be successful.

1:41:41 What if you found yourself suddenly

1:41:43 in a society where that wasn't true and actually

1:41:45 the only way to get ahead was to have a cousin in the ruling party?

1:41:48 Being able to imagine that and think about it um

1:41:51 is important for understanding this bigger issue of democratic decline like

1:41:56 what's the change of our system that we're trying to avoid

1:41:59 and what does it feel like to people who experience that.

1:42:02 So this has been a subject of a lot of my books.

1:42:04 So that book Iron Curtain is about it.

1:42:06 I've written a lot about Ukraine and what

1:42:10 happened when the Russians occupied eastern Ukraine.

1:42:14 They did this thing.

1:42:15 They did regime change.

1:42:16 They change the rules of the society.

1:42:18 I think we don't reflect enough about what what are the what are the deep

1:42:23 rules of the societies we live in and what we would lose if we lost them.

1:42:28 Hm.

1:42:30 it seems unimaginable and it seems quite far

1:42:32 away and that is I guess a privilege of having lived in a democratic society

1:42:36 for my whole life that it's almost just seem like as I said like it seems like

1:42:40 a theoretical concept but you know history they

1:42:45 say it doesn't repeat but it rhymes and um I guess there's you know I I believe

1:42:49 that even if we don't know the time frames I do believe that there are certain

1:42:53 cycles in history that are um accelerate

1:42:56 or come about because of human nature and so

1:42:58 But I'm also well aware that there are things that we can do or not do

1:43:03 that could lead us to go down the uh the slope of a bad a bad slope.

1:43:09 So then you don't believe in inevitability.

1:43:11 Well, it's interesting.

1:43:12 I kind of believe in both,

1:43:13 which is I think that there's this fundamental human nature

1:43:15 which drives us which um causes these cycles to occur.

1:43:18 And actually, one could even argue that it's inevitable that eventually

1:43:22 we miss the signs and we go down the slope.

1:43:24 But the time frames of that occurring or if it

1:43:27 occurs there we still have agency and control over that.

1:43:30 Does that make sense or is that does

1:43:31 that sound like a total contradiction to believe in both

1:43:34 human nature does cause these cycles

1:43:36 but but at the same time today we have a choice.

1:43:38 We have agency over whether we go in that direction.

1:43:42 Yeah.

1:43:42 Hum I mean human nature is like we know how

1:43:44 it works and so it offers us some warnings right.

1:43:46 It it's you know we we know what we should be trying to avoid.

1:43:50 Mhm.

1:43:51 As I said, if you if you focus hard on what it is that you don't want to happen,

1:43:56 I mean, that's what strategy is, right?

1:43:57 And then you work backwards and you think,

1:43:59 how do I how do I make sure to prevent that from happening, you know?

1:44:02 Then you you begin to get a pretty

1:44:04 clear idea of what's useful behavior in the present.

1:44:09 We have a closing tradition and where the last

1:44:10 guest leaves a question for the next guest,

1:44:12 not knowing who they're leaving it for.

1:44:15 And the question left for you,

1:44:18 what is the most challenging setback you've experienced and what's

1:44:21 the lesson you want to pass on to others?

1:44:28 I suppose the most I mean the most challenging

1:44:31 things I've experienced have been political shifts where I

1:44:35 when I saw radicalization I saw the rise

1:44:40 of illiberal groups and movements including among people I knew

1:44:45 close closely and very well and figuring out both

1:44:50 how to cope with them and how to trying

1:44:53 to under you know shift my thinking in order

1:44:55 understand how to explain it and deal with it.

1:44:58 That was probably the most important.

1:45:00 That was probably the most important.

1:45:02 How do you cope with them?

1:45:04 Someone in your life has a sort of bad at it.

1:45:07 Really interesting.

1:45:08 I um I mean lots of people think that um you know you should be

1:45:12 able to you know be friends with everybody and talk to everybody and I see that.

1:45:16 I see some people are able to do that.

1:45:19 I find that I care too much.

1:45:22 Interesting.

1:45:22 It becomes hard for me.

1:45:23 Do you think you could interview as a journalist?

1:45:25 Do you think you could interview anybody?

1:45:29 Probably could interview anybody.

1:45:31 I mean, there would be some people who are hard to interview because they lie,

1:45:34 you know, for example, and then I don't know how to deal with that.

1:45:37 Then you don't want to have an interview

1:45:38 where you're correcting somebody the whole time.

1:45:40 I would certainly talk to anybody as a journalist.

1:45:42 Would you interview Trump?

1:45:45 Yeah.

1:45:45 I mean, he he would have he would pose exactly that problem because

1:45:48 how would you deal with the fact that he's saying something that's not true?

1:45:51 Would you then say, "But Mr.

1:45:52 the president that's not true and then go down that road of arguing

1:45:54 with him or would you um or would you just listen and write it down?

1:45:59 So you're worried it wouldn't be productive?

1:46:00 I'm worried it wouldn't be productive.

1:46:02 That that's also my line to be honest with um

1:46:04 with people is there's certain people that are really consequential so

1:46:07 you feel you should interview them but part of me worries

1:46:09 that some of them wouldn't be it wouldn't be productive anyway.

1:46:13 So I wouldn't get anything out of them that is new or useful or productive.

1:46:16 So, right.

1:46:17 I mean, I would I would talk to anybody who is

1:46:20 who with whom you can have an argument and who's reality based.

1:46:24 Mhm.

1:46:24 And my other thing is just people that don't take things

1:46:26 off the record because sometimes when we ask to interview people,

1:46:28 they'll say, "Yes, but as long as you don't

1:46:29 talk about this and for me that's a no-go."

1:46:32 Well, I didn't take anything off the record.

1:46:33 You didn't?

1:46:34 Thank you.

1:46:34 I appreciate that.

1:46:35 Um, well, you have so many wonderful books.

1:46:37 I heard there's also a cookbook which I didn't manage to locate

1:46:40 which is a bit of a diversion from from your subject

1:46:42 matter but um they are brilliant books and the reason why I

1:46:45 I was very keen for my team to reach out to you

1:46:47 and ask you to come today was because not because just you

1:46:50 write great books but you're a real demystifying force in a world

1:46:52 that's becoming incredibly misty for many of us in part because

1:46:55 there's just so much information accessible to all of us now.

1:46:58 But I highly recommend people go check out these wonderful books.

1:47:00 I'm going to link them all below and many of them are a continuation

1:47:04 of the themes and subjects we've talked about or adjacent stories from history.

1:47:07 But you're a remarkable storyteller an and that's why

1:47:10 I think people love listening to you so much.

1:47:12 So I really appreciate you taking the time today

1:47:13 to um help demystify all of this for me.

1:47:15 I actually have never had a conversation that is

1:47:17 so centered on the the subject of democracy.

1:47:19 I've heard people talking about it for the last

1:47:21 10 years as this sort of this thing that matters.

1:47:23 But this conversation has really opened my eyes to both the value of it,

1:47:27 but also the risks and the slippery slope that causes societies to lose it.

1:47:31 So, thank you so much for doing what you do because it's incredibly important.

1:47:34 And as a as a 33-year-old that's lived most of my life in the West,

1:47:37 um it's very easy to take democracy as a subject for granted.

1:47:41 I think I have, to be honest.

1:47:43 Yes.

1:47:43 Well, it's it's it's normal.

1:47:45 It's it's it's the it's the water we swim in.

1:47:47 We're the fish, you know,

1:47:48 and the idea that there would someday not be water is unimaginable.

1:47:52 But thank you for asking such um such penetrating questions.

1:47:56 Thank you.

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