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This was Trump's net worth when he went into office, $2.3 billion, and this is his net worth now,

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just two years later. $6.5 billion. So we've never had a president running businesses

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while in office, and so decisions are being made not based on what's good for Americans,

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but what's good for his company. For example, why did the Saudi government invest $2 billion

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in Jared Kushner's fund? It wasn't because they just liked Jared Kushner. It was because

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Kushner is Trump's son-in-law. And so my biggest concern is the deterioration of American

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democracy. I mean, it's already happening. Most people think democracies end with tanks in

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the street or somebody shooting up the presidential palace, but actually in the modern world,

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they mostly end because someone who is legitimately elected begins to take apart the system.

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Trump, he has never cared much one way or the other for American democracy. He admires foreign

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leaders who have no constraints, and I have a goal that is to remind people of why democracy is

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important, and to pay attention to the ways in which it's declining so that we can fight back.

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So we're just at the beginning of what could be quite a big change. So there's five core tactics

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that democratic leaders used to dismantle democracy. Did you walk me through the five tactics? So,

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first of all... Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm,

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if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently

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the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that

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is to hit that follow button, but also it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help

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us make this show better. I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're

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listening to this one right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much.

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And Applebum. What is it you've spent the last couple of decades of your life doing

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understanding, studying, and sharing with the world? I started out as somebody who was fascinated

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by the Soviet Union. I went there when it still existed as a student. I was lucky enough to

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watch it fall apart. I was a journalist based in Warsaw at the time the Warsaw Pat came to an end.

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Then I spent some years writing history books trying to explain how control was maintained over

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such a large space by so few people. But all that time, I thought that what I was doing was writing

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stories about the distant past. I was analyzing a system that didn't exist anymore. What's happened

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to me in the last decade is that I've discovered that a lot of what I thought was over and done and

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belonged to some other era has come back. Most people think democracies end with a coup d'etat

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or, you know, tanks in the street or somebody shooting up the presidential palace, but actually

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in the modern world, they mostly end because someone who is legitimately elected begins to take

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apart the system and take away the things that ensure free elections can continue. I started

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watching that happen in multiple countries at the same time. I saw this authoritarian instinct

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started to come back. That's what I write about now. Are these just election cycles or is there

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something bigger at play here? You know, I spend a lot of time reading articles from decades ago

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or hundreds of years ago. And in all times in history, it seems that there were problems,

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but it seems that the, I don't know, the democratic system has a remarkable way every four years of

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clearing out what people weren't happy with and putting something new in. Is this time different

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to the past? What feels different to me is for the first time in several established democracies,

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most notably United States, but not only, you have political parties who come to power with the

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explicit idea that they will alter the system in order to make sure that they can stay in forever.

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The pioneer of this idea was Viktor Orbán and Hungary. He was elected legitimately with a big

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margin, and then what he did was slowly seek to capture the state. So what a democracy needs in

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order to survive in order to maintain its stability, it needs a few neutral institutions.

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You know, it needs independent courts. It needs an independent electoral commission.

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It needs independent media. In the modern world, it needs a meritocratic bureaucracy. So people

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are hired and fired to measure pollution or worry about traffic and road construction,

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who aren't cousins of the ruling party. They aren't somebody's friend, but they're actually experts

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who understand how to do things. So you need those things to be in place in order to ensure that

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each time there's an electoral cycle, it's a fair election. And you see people who are elected

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who once they had power decided to take those institutions apart. You know, if you think about

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democracy, it's actually a very strange system, right? So you win an election, and in a democracy,

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you have to preserve the rules so that four years from now, your bitter enemies can contest you

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and maybe beat you again. You know, you lose an election, you have to say, okay, we're allowing

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our rivals to stay in power, but we trust that the system will remain fair. So four years from now,

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we can also contest them again. So it requires a certain level of agreement about the nature of the

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system. And when that begins to break down, then you begin to have imbalances, and then you begin

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to have elections that seem unfair to people, and then you begin to have a completely different

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kind of national conversation. And we can see that has happened in several places, and of course,

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most notably in the United States. And because the United States is the largest democracy, because

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it's played the role of leader of the democratic world, the influence of America on other countries

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is pretty profound. And so this idea that democracies can possibly break down is suddenly both horrifying

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people, but also interesting to other people who say, all right, if you can do it in America,

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you can do it here. There's a part of me that just thinks

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that could never happen in America. And that's obviously a bias that I have been 33 years old,

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in not knowing a ton about history. But there's, I'm sure there's lots of people that I think this

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is some sort of theoretical idea, but it would never happen in America, because we would never allow

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America to not be a democracy. We wouldn't allow a Russia situation where you've got Putin sitting

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in pop two decades, whatever. Sure, but there are systems in between Russia and liberal democracy.

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You could have democracies that aren't fair. And actually, I'm afraid to tell you that in the United

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States, there is a history of that. So the, in the American South, before the civil rights movement,

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you very often had an effect in the Southern States. You had these one-party states where

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the rules were pretty rigged. Everybody knew who was going to win. Not everybody was allowed to vote.

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So black people were allowed to vote. Or they were, it was very heavily restricted. It was hard

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for them to vote. And that existed in the United States, between the Civil War and the 1960s.

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You had very undemocratic parts of the United States. And I think some of the people who are

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in Washington right now in the Trump administration are working from that history and from that

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historical memory. What is your biggest concern in this regard?

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Well, I have two concerns. One is that inside the United States, the deterioration of American

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democracy, I mean, it's already happening, right? So it's already creating a class of people who

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no longer feel they have a stake in the political system, and who won't vote, may never vote, and

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will be outside of politics and outside of the national conversation that can lead in the direction

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of violence that can lead in all kinds of negative directions. We see the development of new kinds of

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paramilitary in the United States that we never had before, the development of ICE. We've never

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before had a single national police force wearing combat uniforms, wearing masks,

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not subject to the normal restrictions of local police forces. We also have a rise in

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high-end corruption. The president, people around him, companies close to him seem to have access to

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ways to make money and are making money out of doing politics in a way that was also not possible

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at that scale in America before. And that's sort of one whole set of concerns if you want to

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go down one of those roads. This map in front of us on the table, I

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realized some people can't see because they're listening, but there's a map on the table in front

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of us. Could you just explain what this map shows and why it's significant?

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The map shows the level of democracy around the world. And of course, the thing that's immediately

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notable to me is that those who made the map don't count the United States anymore as a liberal

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democracy. So at a liberal democracy, meaning a state where, as I said, the electoral rules are

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clear where the electoral system is set up not to favor one party or the next. And instead,

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it's described as an electoral democracy, which is somewhat less free. You see similar systems

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in South America. In Europe, you mostly still have liberal democracies in Australia, Japan,

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South Korea. You still have liberal democracies. And then most of the rest of the world are some

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form of autocracy, either very closed and very repressive, like China or like Russia, or they are

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in a democratic gray zone. So there are states that could really go in either direction. I mean,

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they're still open. But it's true that if you'd looked at a map like this a decade ago or two

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decades ago, it would have been a lot bluer. The the blue being democracy and the red or reddish

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being autocracy. So you do see an absolute process of democratic decline that's been written about

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by many people over the last years. I think I believe very much that states influence one

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another. People follow and imitate and copy their neighbors. Do you think it's possible that in

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our lifetimes, the US might become an orthocratic country? So the US could become a what I think

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on this map is described as an autocratic gray zone. So you could imagine the US as in effect a one

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party state. So a state where one political party has control and the other just can't win national

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elections. You already have this system of we call it gerrymandering where electoral districts are

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being written in such a way as to favor one party or the another. The effect of that also is that

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once you have people who don't really have to contest elections anymore, then you have corruption

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because if you're going to win anyway, why do you have to worry about your constituents?

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Then you have worse government and worse services because if you don't have to have a

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electoral contest, then you can pursue your own interests. You can do favors for businessmen

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who help you in other ways. And we see this decline of democracy already at the state level.

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And of course, there could be a danger at the national level of a fixed system that made sure

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only one party ever wins. And then you would get all these pathologies that we already have at

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the state level. And we're beginning to have them even now. And remember, we have right now

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a president who refused to accept the result of an election in 2020 and who staged what was

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intended to be an electoral coup. It failed. But you know, the idea that he wouldn't do it again or

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nobody would ever dare to do that or nobody would block an election, I think it's pretty naive at

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this point. I mean, it happened already. And so of course, it can happen again.

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

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I don't think so because I don't think he wants one. But I think it's possible that people around him

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will try to shape and affect the elections in a way that makes sure that Republican wins.

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Or maybe his children? It's very possible that one of his children will run for president.

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Because there's a way to kind of control power in America when they talk about MAGA, which is

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I guess a collection of people now. You know, you could say JD Vance is part of MAGA and

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the kids and Trump. So maybe they'd want to keep it within MAGA. Maybe that's the...

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They might or they might want to want to keep it within the family. I mean, look, what is MAGA now?

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You know, what is different about Trump's second term from Trump's first term?

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So one of the things that happened after January the 6th, after the attack on the Congress,

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was that many of the people who'd been around Trump, Republicans, people who do foreign policy,

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people who do domestic policy, left. They said, right, this is too much for us. You know,

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we're American patriots. You know, we can't support this kind of attack on our political system

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and they departed his presence. But that exactly that moment that attack on the electoral system

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attracted other people. So for different reasons, people who disliked the American political system,

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who don't like democracy, don't like liberal democracy, thought it was leading American

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left wing direction. Some of them have political reasons. They were attracted to Donald Trump

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because they said, right, this is somebody who has the nerve to try and overthrow the system

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and we like that. And they're not all the same. They have different views. So there's a tech

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authoritarian group who want influence over the American political system because it's good for

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their businesses and because they don't get the point of democracy anyway and they think they

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should be in charge, there's a kind of Christian nationalist group who think the United States should

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not be a secular state. It should be a Christian state and they want to, they're interested in

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taking out of the system with that. And then there's a traditional MAGA group who think the United

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States should be run by the people who used to run it, you know, the kind of white Christian

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people of a certain kind and they want to bring the United States back in that direction. So they're

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different views and they don't all agree with each other, but they do agree that the system

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requires radical change. And that's the difference between the first and second term. So Trump's first

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term, I think he has never cared much one way or the other for American democracy. He personally

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sees himself as someone who should be allowed to act in any way he wants. He doesn't like any kind

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of constraint. He admires foreign leaders who have no constraints. But he was one way or another

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constrained in his first term by the system. And now he's surrounded himself by people who are

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seeking to help him avoid those constraints. And that's new. I think when we have these

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conversations, we assume that everybody agrees that democracy is the better path. Sure.

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And that they understand the downsides of an autocracy. So there are different kinds of autocracies

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to be clear and some are more repressive than others. The main thing that you would notice,

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the first thing that you would notice, would be the absence of the rule of law. Rule of law means

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that judges and courts in the legal system make decisions based on the constitution or on the laws.

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And in an autocracy, you have rule by law. And that means that the law is what the person in power

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says it is. And so if you did a program, for example, and someone on your program said something

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that was offensive to the leader of the country, you could be arrested and you could be put on trial.

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And instead of the court saying, right, we've looked at this case and according to the law,

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we have in the law, it says we have freedom of speech and you can do whatever you want.

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They could, somebody could ring up from the Kremlin or from the White House or from, you know,

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whatever's the leadership of your country and say, no, actually, we want this guy in jail.

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And we don't care what the courts think. And that's the big difference. Here, I'll tell you

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a real story that happened in Hungary when Hungary was going down the road in the direction of

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a one-party state. You can be the CEO of a company and people can come and knock on your door

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and they can say, we would like you to sell us a majority share in your company.

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And you say, no, why should I let you do that? I, my company, I built it. I invested in it.

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I don't want to sell it. And then, okay, so what happens the next day? Somebody breaks the windows

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of your house. A few days later, your children are harassed on the way to school. People who work

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for you start having legal problems. This or that, you know, some kind of mortgage issue or some,

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you know, and suddenly your company encounters regulatory issues. There's a tax inspection.

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And one by one, the state finds a way to harass you, to harass your company, your workers,

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so that eventually you say, okay, I give up, I sell and I'm leaving the country. This happened

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to somebody I know. Sounds like an anthropic in the United States recently. An anthropic AI

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company refused to give the United States access to its AI under certain conditions. And then

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very quickly, Pete, Pete Higgseth did a post, I think, and Donald Trump did a post basically saying

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that they were going to restrict their ability to work with the government.

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We aren't used to the idea that the government decides which companies thrive and which ones die.

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You know, so once you have an autocratic state that can do what it wants legally,

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then it can decide which companies succeed. It can base government contracts, which are very

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important in every country, not on who's the best company or not on some kind of blind procurement

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process, but on who's your friend, you know, or who's donated to your political party, or who's

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in the case of the United States, who's invested in your company. So one of the things that we have

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in the United States for the first time ever, I think, is a president who is actively doing business

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in countries and in areas that are of interest to the people who's doing business. So for example,

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the Trump family does business in Saudi Arabia. It has a deal with a Saudi company called Dar Al-Khan,

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which is a development company, and that company has close relations to the Saudi leadership.

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The Saudi leadership is interested in deals with the United States, but I mean political

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arranged with the United States, and the money is going into the Trump family coffers

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in order to make a better arrangement for the country of Saudi Arabia. So that's a way in which

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because we have a declining democracy and because we have an increasingly kleptocratic system,

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decisions are being made by the President of the United States, by the White House, not based on

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what's good for Americans, but on what's good for his company. And that's, and that if you look at

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Russia, that's exactly how the political system works there. If you look at China, China's more

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complicated. It's a bigger country. It's more sophisticated. But even there, you have, again,

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decisions made not for the welfare of the Chinese people, but for the ruling party, for the communist party.

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And we have two jars of money here. This was Trump's net worth when he went into office,

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$2.3 billion reportedly. And this is his net worth now, just two years later.

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$6.5 billion looks like being a President is a profitable job.

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So that has never happened before. This is completely new in American history.

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There have been presidents who, there have been whiffs of corruption around them. There's been,

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you know, presidential relatives who've tried to trade off the president's name. But we've never had

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a president running businesses while in office. And as I said, in such a way that the people with

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whom he's doing business are hoping to benefit politically or in other ways. And that's completely

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brand new. And you've just backed your original question, which is why is democracy better?

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Churchill was the person who said that democracy is the worst system of government, except for all the

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others. So it's a multi-reasons why it's flawed. You know, democracies have require an immense

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amount of tolerance. There's always a lot of cacophony. There's a constant flux and change

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that people find innovating. But at the very least, what democracies can do is they can force

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issues like this into the public sphere. You know, you're allowed at least in a democratic

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question whether this decisions are being made on the basis that they're good for everybody or

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they're being made for the benefit of the president. I guess supporters would say, you know, Trump's

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not running the businesses himself. It's just his kids activity that is generating this net worth.

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Yeah, but I mean, everybody knows that they're his kids. And you wouldn't do it. You know, why

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did the Saudi government invest $2 billion in Jared Kushner's fund? It wasn't because they just

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liked Jared Kushner. It was because Kushner is Trump's son-in-law. And now, of course, Kushner is

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the Trump administration's negotiator in the Middle East. So he's negotiating with his business

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partners. The appearance of conflict of interest is overwhelming. And as I said, we've never had

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in American history, or I think in recent British history, we've never had that kind of conflict

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of interest so clear at that, at that higher level. Do you spend much time thinking about what's

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going on in the Middle East, the wars and around and what, you know, Venezuela and the bigger picture

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here of what's happening and how this might link back to what you were saying about authoritarian

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regimes? It's all very confusing. As I feel like we went through a period of relative peace

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through the Biden era and Trump obviously ran on this promise that he wasn't going to start new

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wars. And we seem to be having a lot of wars. Russia and Ukraine still raging on doesn't seem

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to be nearer to any conclusion. And now there's this wall in around that, there ends to be a

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never-ending war. What's going on? There are several things going on. One of them is that in declining

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democracies and historically in autocracies is you have leaders who conduct wars as a way of

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consolidating their base and consolidating their support. And so one of the things that Trump

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likes to do is if he declares a war, I believe he had a different expectation of the Iran war,

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he's using foreign policy, he's using these fighting of wars in order to consolidate his supported

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homes. That's a part of what's happening. But some of this is nothing to do with Trump. You know,

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we are now living in a world where the historical political system, the one that was built after

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1945. Some people call it the liberal world order. I don't really like that term because it

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sounds kind of mushy. But the order that has existed since 1945, the one that was somewhat based

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on the UN, that was based on a set of rules and treaties, that order has begun to break down.

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And it's breaking down for several reasons. One, we've started to discuss already, which is

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changes inside the United States and the United States was a really important pillar of that order.

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But it's also breaking down because the autocratic powers, Russia, China, Iran,

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Venezuela until recently and others have been challenging that order for a while themselves.

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They didn't like the American dominance of international politics in the conversation.

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They were competing with America at a strategic level, but also in what is really a war of ideas.

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So let's go back to autocracy and democracy. You know, if you are the leader of Russia or you're

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the leader of China, what is the thing that is most threatening to you? And the answer is

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the language of liberal democracy. So all this stuff that we find boring and we're used to and,

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you know, this idea of freedom of speech and separation of powers and rule of law, all those

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things that we have come to take for granted in our societies are a huge challenge to the

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political system in Russia or China. You know, what is Putin most afraid of? He's most afraid of

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a street revolution of the kind we had in Ukraine in 2014. So when people are standing on the street

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and they have signs saying we're against corruption, you know, we want democracy, we want to be in

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the European Union, we want to be integrated with Europe, he's afraid of that happening in Russia

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because if you live in an autocratic state where you don't have freedom of speech, where there is no

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justice, where the government decides what all the rules are, then those ideas are explosive and

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exciting the same way they were in the 18th century when when they first appeared in the Declaration

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of Independence. And people can be motivated by them, people will go into the street for them, people

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risk their lives for them. And the autocrats know that. And so really for the past decade since 2013,

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2014, you see them seeking to spread those ideas to promote them. I mean, we all know now about

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Russian propaganda campaigns. We know what Russian disinformation looks like. There's a Chinese

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version too, which we don't see that much in English, but it appears in other countries.

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We see them seeking to undermine democracy, trying to spread the influence of a different set of

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ideas. So the war in Ukraine is exactly that war. The Russians are firstly trying to destroy Ukraine

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as a nation. They want it to disappear. This is their their empire. They want Ukraine to be their

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colony. And they understood perfectly well that by challenging Ukraine, by invading Ukraine, they

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were defying this liberal world order. They were defying the rules of post-war Europe because in

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post-war Europe, there was a decision made after 1945. We're not going to invade each other anymore.

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We're not going to have wars. Instead, we're going to decide everything by diplomacy. Borders will

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not be changed by force. And the Russians understood that they were breaking that that norm. And they

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invaded Ukraine. They also invaded Ukraine because the Ukrainians were using that language, that powerful

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democratic language that we take for granted. And Putin said, if they can do it in Ukraine, then people

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could do it in Russia. And so I need to crush this Ukrainian democracy movement. And so that war

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really is a fault line between the democratic world and the autocratic world. So I think what

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what you're seeing is the breakdown of an older system that was more or less organized around

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by American rules. Three history, which lasts longer? Democracy or autocracy? Oh autocracies.

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Although if you look back in history, most human societies in most times have been what you would

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we would now call autocracy, but they were whatever. They were monarchies. They were led by tribal

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leaders by warlords. There have been very, very few liberal democracies and most of them have not

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lasted. And I should also say the people who wrote the American Constitution knew that. And when they

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wrote it, they were reading history of ancient Rome. There was a Roman Republic and it fell when

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it was taken over by Julius Caesar. So they all knew that story. They were reading about the Greek

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democracies, Athens, which also fell. And when they wrote the US Constitution, they were thinking,

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how do we make this last? What can we put in it to make it last? That's a longer story, whether you

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think they were successful or not. But everybody who created democracies, whether it was after World

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War II in Europe, whether it was America in the 18th century, everybody understood that this was

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a fragile system. And they tried to put checks and balances, judicial legislative and executive

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power. They tried to create systems that would ward off the impulse towards autocracy.

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I don't know if you have the answer to this question, but where are people happier on average

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in a democracy or an autocracy? So I have to tell you, I know a little bit about happiness surveys

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and over and over and over again, the happiest place in the world is Finland. Finland, Sweden,

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Denmark, Norway, Scandinavia is very happy. The reasons for that may not be anything to do with

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the nature of the political system might have other sources, but the happiness is certainly connected

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to democracy, it's connected to stability, and of course connected to wealth.

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I was just looking at some research here. It says, well, wealth and economic stability are

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critical for happiness, regardless of the government type. Democracy provides additional structural

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benefits like participation, security and lower corruption that tend to lift a society's overall

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life satisfaction. Well, democracies by definition are at least in theory the state is structured

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in a way to benefit everybody, right? At least that's how it's supposed to work. So whether it's

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a national health care system or whether it's a system of roads and railroads, you know, the state

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is building things that are designed to serve everybody. In an autocracy, that doesn't necessarily

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happen. So in Russia, ordinary Russians have no influence on that decision. They have no way

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of expressing their views. They can't say what they think. They have no ability to influence the

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state. They can't say, well, actually, hey, we'd like to build a hospital instead of bombing

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another city in Ukraine. And so they have very little ability to change the system. And that,

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and that of course creates frustration and happiness. If that is true, and this is why I ask the

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question, if it's better for the people, and at some degree, I think if informed people would

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choose it, to think is, and I say the word informed, because I understand a lot of these

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countries where they don't have democracy that I'm now using don't have democracy instead of

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having to say that word again. They limit the access to information so that people don't know what

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they're missing out on, I guess, or don't have those potentially disruptive ideas. They're not

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exposed to them on their phones or devices. I would think a person would choose to live in a

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democracy, given the choice and the information. I would think so. Although, you know, there are other,

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you know, there's a deep human need for a sense of stability and security and hierarchy for some

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people. And it's true that authoritarian seemed to offer that. You know, in a democracy, you do

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have this constant change of leaders. You know, there's more demands on citizens. You know,

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you have to participate if you care about your country. It's not just enough to vote. You need to

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be involved in politics in some way. And autocracies, I mean, I think, falsely offers stability.

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And so the argument of the Russians and Chinese governments and the argument they make on in

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those social media campaigns that they run inside the US or the UK or Europe is exactly that

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authoritarianism, stability, safety, traditional values, hierarchy. And there are people for whom that's

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deeply appealing. So I wouldn't just count that instinct. And when people like that are also able

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to control information, when they control the security services, when they monopolize the use of

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violence, they can be very hard to undo even if the majority of the country wants something different.

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It's almost high for me to understand how people in Russia are okay with the fact that the leader

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has been there for several decades and isn't moving. But it's high for us to understand,

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because in the UK or in America, there would be people on the streets. It doesn't matter what they

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think. Really? Well, because they have no way of expressing what they think. There's no such thing as

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public opinion or public debate. There's no forum you can join where you can say what you could

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express your views in a way that's fair. And if you do say, I think Putin should be, you know,

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it's time for him to retire, you could be arrested. And so people begin to adjust what they think.

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And they begin to change their behavior because they know that it's dangerous to say thing. I mean,

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this is something, this is a phenomenon I found in the work I did years ago in the Soviet Union.

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The propaganda said how successful we are and how much, hey, we've grown this year and how many

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bits of steel we've made and it was always fake. And so the question was always, well, did people

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really believe that? Did people believe in the system? They believe in the propaganda. And the answer

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was a little weird. It was convenient for them to believe it. In other words, in order to get on in

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life, you had to believe it or you had to say you believed it. And at a certain point, what they

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really thought like deep in the back of their mind didn't matter because there was no way to say

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what you think. And that's what you have in Russia again now. It's for me very tragic because

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there was a period in Russia in the 90s and 2000s when there was open debate. And people were

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speaking freely and clearly about about the state of the country. But right now, it's once again

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a situation where expressing your views is dangerous. And so people just don't do it. And they try

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to stay out of politics altogether. You know, politics is dangerous and ugly and nasty. Like,

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just stay home. And remember that this is something that's developed over years. It didn't happen

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from one day to the next. It was a decline that's been happening since the year 2000.

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I've heard you say that there's five core tactics that autocratic leaders used to dismantle a

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democracy. Could you walk me through the five tactics and maybe also link them to things that

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are happening now in the West, which might be warning signs of the dismantling of one's democracy?

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Well, corruption. We've done that one already. Corruption you have in any political system and

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you often have it in democracies too. But in an autocratic society, you have more corruption

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because the legal system is controlled. And so what you have, for example, in the United States,

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the fact that Donald Trump has taken over our Department of Justice and has installed loyalists

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who are looking among other things, for example, to prosecute his enemies just because they're his

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enemies. That means you have a check in balance. So normally if there was high level corruption in

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the White House or in the administration, you would have people inside the Department of Justice

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and the FBI who would investigate it. But now we don't have that happening.

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Is that different from the past? It's different. It's different. I mean, we didn't have anybody

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try to use the White House to make money in this way before. So hard for me to say what would

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have happened in like, I don't know, the Clinton administration. But we didn't have a completely

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politicized civil service, completely politicized FBI who would avoid any kind of investigation.

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And so corruption is a particular symptom of authoritarianism and it's also a tool. It's

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something that the president can offer people. You get along with me. You don't criticize me.

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Your business will prosper. You know, you will get government contracts.

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Is that what we're seeing with all these big tech CEOs that seem to be going frequently to the

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White House and saying wonderful things about him and his support and having dinner with him and

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knew them speaking out? But if you look at their Twitter feeds a couple of years ago, they're all

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saying the most horrific things about Trump. Yes. I mean, they've understood that, you know,

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if this is going to be an American administration that you have to genuflect the president,

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you have to be sycophantic to the president in order to get business deals, then they'll do it.

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If you have to donate to his White House Reconstruction Fund, which many of them have done,

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then you'll do it. If you have to donate to his inauguration, you'll do it. It's a question of

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who is supposed to be the beneficiary of government regulation. It's supposed to be Americans.

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I mean, ordinary people were supposed to become more prosperous. The beneficiary is not supposed

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to be the president and his family and his entourage. And that is a big shift in American politics.

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When I look back at someone like the CEO of OpenAI's statements on Trump, if you go back to 2016,

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he said he was an unprecedented threat to America and called him a potential disaster for the

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American economy. He said he was irresponsible in the way dictator's iron compared his rhetoric

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to the big lie tactics used by historical authoritarians like Hitler. He described him as erratic

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abusive and prone to fits of rage. And then I see him side by side at the White House saying

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my things about him and saying nothing critical at all. It's one of the most bizarre things actually

386
00:35:28.320 --> 00:35:36.000
about this whole administration. If I were that rich, what's the point of being rich unless if

387
00:35:36.000 --> 00:35:40.640
you can't say what you think? I don't understand the value of it.

388
00:35:40.640 --> 00:35:44.560
Can I hazard a guess as to why the like incentive structure they're trapped in?

389
00:35:44.560 --> 00:35:49.440
What's your guess? I think that being rich for these people is actually just a proxy of status.

390
00:35:49.440 --> 00:35:52.720
And I think the thing that risks their status, which is what they care about more than anything

391
00:35:52.720 --> 00:35:57.280
else in the games that they're playing, is losing to their direct competition. And it's quite clear

392
00:35:57.280 --> 00:36:01.200
to me that if someone like Sam Altman was to say anything negative about Trump, it would of course

393
00:36:01.200 --> 00:36:05.520
hurt his business, but actually it would help something more, which is his status. He would lose to

394
00:36:05.600 --> 00:36:11.200
anthropic and XAI and Gemini to lose in your category of peers, which all these sort of

395
00:36:11.200 --> 00:36:15.520
tech oligarchs for instance, like category of peers would hurt more than anything. I think it

396
00:36:15.520 --> 00:36:19.680
would hurt more than losing a gazillion dollars is just like losing the game.

397
00:36:19.680 --> 00:36:22.240
Yeah, although there are two things about it. One is it's very short-sighted,

398
00:36:22.880 --> 00:36:30.080
because ultimately who will suffer if there is a decline in the American political system and

399
00:36:30.080 --> 00:36:33.200
the American legal system, I mean, it's them.

400
00:36:33.200 --> 00:36:36.160
Maybe they've gotten used to paying to play in a way.

401
00:36:36.160 --> 00:36:41.200
They have, but it's a mugs game. I mean, it's fine as long as you're one of the people

402
00:36:41.200 --> 00:36:44.000
who are winning, but what if what if the rules change?

403
00:36:44.000 --> 00:36:46.000
Yeah, like in Russia with the oligarchs, it's puning.

404
00:36:46.000 --> 00:36:48.560
That's right, I'm sick of these oligarchs, I want different oligarchs.

405
00:36:48.560 --> 00:36:53.840
That happened in China too. So that's one argument against it. The second argument is,

406
00:36:53.840 --> 00:36:57.840
and I think anthropic might have figured this out already, and some of the law firms have figured it

407
00:36:58.080 --> 00:37:03.280
out. There's also a gain to be made by saying, no, I'm independent. We have our own corporate rules,

408
00:37:03.280 --> 00:37:08.080
we have our own legal code of ethics, and we're going to behave as patriotic Americans,

409
00:37:08.080 --> 00:37:11.920
and then you attract business. And they may be doing well at it. And as I said,

410
00:37:11.920 --> 00:37:16.320
there's a parallel thing that happened with US law firms. There were some frivolous lawsuits,

411
00:37:16.320 --> 00:37:20.320
and they settled them. And then there were some who said, no, we won't settle. We won't do that.

412
00:37:20.320 --> 00:37:25.040
And the ones who didn't do it have all won, you know, and they're all thriving. I mean,

413
00:37:25.040 --> 00:37:30.800
so there is also a benefit to be gained both commercially and financially. And I would think even

414
00:37:30.800 --> 00:37:36.560
in that weird world of status by standing up for what you believe in, and by remembering the

415
00:37:36.560 --> 00:37:39.920
bigger picture, and the bigger picture is what happens to the United States. I mean, the United

416
00:37:39.920 --> 00:37:43.840
States is your main market. It's where your employees come from. It's the place where you're

417
00:37:43.840 --> 00:37:48.960
doing business. And if the United States begins to suffer, then you suffer too. And so thinking

418
00:37:48.960 --> 00:37:53.600
a little bit like that might help some of them. Is this just another three years of this sort of,

419
00:37:53.600 --> 00:37:59.360
you know, unusual behavior before we resume business as usual in our democracies?

420
00:37:59.360 --> 00:38:04.800
I'm asked by Europeans all the time. And my sense is that a lot of things will not ever be

421
00:38:04.800 --> 00:38:10.000
quite normal again. Either inside the US or around the world. I mean, I would advise, for example,

422
00:38:10.000 --> 00:38:15.120
I mean, if you're doing business with the US or you're a security partner of the US, I would

423
00:38:15.120 --> 00:38:19.760
strongly recommend that you have plan B. You know, it's really time for NATO to

424
00:38:20.080 --> 00:38:27.040
have a plan in case the United States flakes out to have a different security option.

425
00:38:27.040 --> 00:38:30.560
You know, what happens to US after Trump is, and clearly, first of all, the next president could

426
00:38:30.560 --> 00:38:36.560
be JD Vance, who I think is even more committed to the project of making America into a one-party state.

427
00:38:36.560 --> 00:38:43.200
Or the next president could be a Democrat we haven't heard of yet, who decides to use the broken

428
00:38:43.200 --> 00:38:47.600
system in order to take advantage of it in a different way. I mean, I hope that won't happen,

429
00:38:47.600 --> 00:38:52.240
but you can't count it out. I mean, once the norms are broken and once the laws have changed,

430
00:38:52.240 --> 00:38:57.840
then it can be anybody can take advantage of it. I mean, if Trump can use the federal bureaucracy

431
00:38:57.840 --> 00:39:04.000
to threaten media companies, then why can't the next president? And so, you know, certain things

432
00:39:04.000 --> 00:39:09.520
don't necessarily get fixed once they're broken. On that point of global partners of the US now

433
00:39:09.520 --> 00:39:14.000
thinking about their own defense and themselves more, is that a pattern that you're seeing?

434
00:39:14.400 --> 00:39:18.880
Just from my observations of, you know, we're sat here in London at the moment, but my observations

435
00:39:18.880 --> 00:39:24.400
of the UK, the UK used to consider ourselves to be the great alliance, a sort of partner of America,

436
00:39:24.400 --> 00:39:27.200
the special relationship. We had the special relationship, which I never knew what it meant,

437
00:39:27.200 --> 00:39:32.000
but I always liked it. It seems like that's gone out the window. And the UK are now speaking

438
00:39:32.000 --> 00:39:35.840
a lot to like President Macron in France, and it seems like we're having our own little European

439
00:39:35.840 --> 00:39:39.920
meetings, but around the world, it seems that that's happening. Canada doesn't seem to be a great

440
00:39:39.920 --> 00:39:45.840
ally of the US anymore after they threatened to invade them. What is happening from that perspective?

441
00:39:45.840 --> 00:39:51.360
Are we becoming more individualistic and breaking into our own little groups because of Trump's rhetoric?

442
00:39:51.360 --> 00:39:58.160
What you're watching is everybody all over the world hedging. Everybody is looking for alternatives.

443
00:39:58.160 --> 00:40:03.200
So you now have an EU India trade agreement, which nobody would have bothered to do a few years ago.

444
00:40:03.200 --> 00:40:11.040
You have Canada initiating a security relationship with the EU. You have conversations

445
00:40:11.040 --> 00:40:17.840
inside NATO about realistically, if the United States weren't to help us in case of a Russian attack,

446
00:40:17.840 --> 00:40:22.240
what would we do? So those aren't really public conversations, but privately lots of people are

447
00:40:22.240 --> 00:40:26.320
having them. Everywhere you go, you see these so-called middle powers. This is a term that Mark

448
00:40:26.320 --> 00:40:33.520
Carney of Canada first started using. Brazil, India, the EU countries, Japan, you see them beginning

449
00:40:33.520 --> 00:40:39.360
to make new relationships with one another. If the United States flakes out and we can't trade

450
00:40:39.360 --> 00:40:44.160
with them in a normal way anymore because the President changes the trading rules every five minutes,

451
00:40:44.160 --> 00:40:47.840
then at least we'll have a decent trading relationship with somebody else.

452
00:40:47.840 --> 00:40:51.760
I travel a lot. I've traveled a lot in less three months and everywhere I go, that's the main

453
00:40:51.760 --> 00:40:58.000
topic of conversation. Canada was completely integrated with the United States. Almost

454
00:40:58.000 --> 00:41:02.800
didn't have an independent economy. Now that Canadians are thinking, how do we benefit from our oil

455
00:41:02.800 --> 00:41:08.080
and gas wealth to protect our sovereignty? Who else do we do deals with? Carney has been to China.

456
00:41:08.080 --> 00:41:13.440
He's also talking to India with whom will we share potentially share nuclear technology?

457
00:41:13.440 --> 00:41:17.840
There are these conversations between France and Poland and France and Germany about a different

458
00:41:17.840 --> 00:41:22.960
kind of nuclear umbrella. It's all pretty tentative, but it's moved much faster than I would have

459
00:41:22.960 --> 00:41:29.360
expected. I think the breaking point for a lot of people in Europe was Greenland. I don't know if

460
00:41:29.360 --> 00:41:34.640
people have really focused on what exactly happened there, but you had the President of the United

461
00:41:34.640 --> 00:41:42.480
States saying he was going to invade Denmark. There we go. The United States was saying it was

462
00:41:42.480 --> 00:41:48.320
going to invade Greenland. Trump was hinting it in public and behind the scenes there were other

463
00:41:48.320 --> 00:41:53.680
signs that maybe they were really preparing to do it. What did that mean in Denmark? That meant

464
00:41:53.680 --> 00:42:02.400
that the Danes said, okay, we're preparing for US invasion. This is a country that's very pro-American,

465
00:42:02.400 --> 00:42:07.520
lots of big Danish companies in the United States, including the ones who create the weight loss

466
00:42:07.600 --> 00:42:14.800
drugs, lots of Danish, American travel, friendship, everything, security relationship going back to

467
00:42:14.800 --> 00:42:21.360
the Second World War. Okay, the Americans are invading. What do we do? Do we blow up the airports

468
00:42:21.360 --> 00:42:25.920
in Greenland and they did start planning that? Do we plan to shoot down American planes?

469
00:42:26.720 --> 00:42:32.640
Are we going to shoot at American soldiers? Are they going to shoot at us? They had to suddenly

470
00:42:33.360 --> 00:42:41.520
imagine a real war with their closest ally and how that would impact them and impact trade and

471
00:42:41.520 --> 00:42:45.680
impact NATO and so on. And not only did they have to do it, their close allies in Europe did it too.

472
00:42:45.680 --> 00:42:50.320
So the Germans were consulting with the Danes all through this period. What if the Danes

473
00:42:50.320 --> 00:42:54.880
shoot down an American plane? How does that affect us? And everybody went through this kind of

474
00:42:54.880 --> 00:43:01.600
traumatic experience of imagining a US invasion of a NATO ally and then Trump made a speech at Davos

475
00:43:01.600 --> 00:43:08.000
where he somehow changed the subject and confused Greenland and Iceland a few times and it got put

476
00:43:08.000 --> 00:43:15.760
off. But no one has recovered. Everybody remembers that moment and said, okay, this is an unstable

477
00:43:15.760 --> 00:43:22.800
power. They could do real damage to us. They can't be relied on. We need alternatives. And so really

478
00:43:22.800 --> 00:43:27.440
since then, and that was in January, since then, this is when you've seen this stuff you were

479
00:43:27.440 --> 00:43:32.880
talking about, you know, the visits to China, the visits to Canada, the back and forth with India.

480
00:43:32.880 --> 00:43:37.360
And you see everybody hedging and rearranging the way they think about the world.

481
00:43:37.360 --> 00:43:42.640
If you're an American, is this good news or bad news that the rest of the world is hedging?

482
00:43:42.640 --> 00:43:49.040
It's very bad news. Why? Because a lot of America's prosperity in the post-war period has been

483
00:43:49.040 --> 00:43:55.120
based on the fact that America was dominant in global trade. And, you know, we make money out of our

484
00:43:55.120 --> 00:44:00.240
European relationships. You know, we produce things that we sell all over the world. And actually,

485
00:44:00.240 --> 00:44:04.240
you know, we import things from all over the world and that's good too. You know, the root of American

486
00:44:04.240 --> 00:44:10.320
post-war prosperity is, are these relations of especially with Europe. And also the root of America's

487
00:44:10.320 --> 00:44:15.360
security dominance. I mean, why are there NATO bases in Europe? It's not just to protect Europe.

488
00:44:15.360 --> 00:44:22.400
It's also because from there, the US can project power into the least. It has, you know, into Africa,

489
00:44:22.400 --> 00:44:28.800
it has a sort of window on the world from there. And once those bases are gone, then the US is

490
00:44:28.800 --> 00:44:34.240
suddenly cut off and far away in a way that it wasn't before. And there are all kinds of other

491
00:44:34.240 --> 00:44:38.320
risks. You know, will the US dollar go on being so dominant? US makes money out of that?

492
00:44:39.360 --> 00:44:43.920
Will US goods go on being so valued? You know, Canada, they boycott US products now. And actually,

493
00:44:43.920 --> 00:44:50.480
this is when I was in Denmark in February, I was shown an app. You can take a picture of a thing

494
00:44:50.480 --> 00:44:54.160
you see in the supermarket. And it will tell you whether it's made in the United States. And it

495
00:44:54.160 --> 00:44:59.280
was made in the United States. You don't buy it because they were so angry. Even the dominance of

496
00:44:59.280 --> 00:45:05.280
American tech, which a lot of Europeans have belatedly woken up to as a problem, could be in

497
00:45:05.280 --> 00:45:10.960
question. So Europeans are looking to do cloud storage in Europe and payment systems in Europe

498
00:45:10.960 --> 00:45:16.080
because, you know, maybe the US is unreliable. And so it's, we're just at the beginning of what could

499
00:45:16.800 --> 00:45:21.840
be quite a big change. And yes, Americans would feel it. Coming back to this point about the war

500
00:45:21.840 --> 00:45:26.400
in Iran, you said that Trump sort of misestimated what would happen here. Yes.

501
00:45:26.400 --> 00:45:30.800
Obviously flew into Venezuela and took Maduro out of bed. And that seemed to go fairly well

502
00:45:31.520 --> 00:45:38.480
from what he might have been expecting. But then he attacked Iran. And this war seems to know

503
00:45:38.480 --> 00:45:43.680
no end now. I mean, here's another feature of dictatorships. Is that nobody questions your

504
00:45:43.680 --> 00:45:48.480
decisions and nobody offers you alternatives? So the people around you, the people around you.

505
00:45:48.480 --> 00:45:55.120
So when he was planning the war in Iran, from the reporting that we know, people did say, well,

506
00:45:55.120 --> 00:45:59.680
you know, Mr. President, you know, the Iranians are not like the Venezuelans. It's a very embedded

507
00:45:59.680 --> 00:46:04.000
regime. And the Iranians had a plan already for what would happen if their leadership was killed.

508
00:46:04.000 --> 00:46:08.800
They just, they had a sort of decentralized system. You know, that will kick into place. You

509
00:46:08.800 --> 00:46:12.240
know, they have allies all over the Middle East. They have these proxy groups in different parts

510
00:46:12.240 --> 00:46:16.160
of the Middle East. And famously, the control over the straight-up war moves, possibly.

511
00:46:16.880 --> 00:46:23.600
And he was told that, but it seems he wasn't told it in a very definitive way. Like some people

512
00:46:23.600 --> 00:46:29.440
said, well, maybe this might be the case. But nobody said to him, Mr. President, this is a bad idea.

513
00:46:29.440 --> 00:46:32.800
Because he's known if you said Mr. President, this is a bad idea. He might have said, well,

514
00:46:32.800 --> 00:46:38.720
get out of my sight. Because he's not somebody who listens to other people's views or takes them into

515
00:46:38.720 --> 00:46:43.120
consideration. I think that bothers me the most about Iran. I have friends and I've been involved

516
00:46:43.120 --> 00:46:47.040
with organizations that do Iranian human rights. I think that bothered me the most was his

517
00:46:47.680 --> 00:46:54.000
utter failure even to talk to or about Iranians. I mean, it is an unpopular regime. It's one of

518
00:46:54.000 --> 00:46:59.200
the worst regimes ugliest on the planet. And yet, there seems to have been no communication with the

519
00:47:00.000 --> 00:47:05.520
democratic opposition in Iran, no communication, even with polyby the son of the Shah, the monarchist

520
00:47:05.520 --> 00:47:10.240
in Iran. I mean, there are alternative governments, there are alternative people who you could speak

521
00:47:10.240 --> 00:47:16.880
to. And he never did that because his real interest isn't democracy. You know, we're making Iran

522
00:47:16.880 --> 00:47:21.040
into a better place. His real interest was in somehow dominating Iran and getting them to give him

523
00:47:21.040 --> 00:47:27.200
a share of the oil revenues, which is what happened in Venezuela. So he's also not even thinking the

524
00:47:27.200 --> 00:47:33.840
way previous democratic presidents thought. So even George W. Bush also, somebody who made huge

525
00:47:33.840 --> 00:47:40.960
mistakes, you know, and so on, you never heard George W. Bush say, what I want is to run Iraq and

526
00:47:40.960 --> 00:47:46.560
steal its oil. They wanted to make Iraq into a democracy. Okay, that, you know, which, by the way,

527
00:47:46.560 --> 00:47:53.920
it is now, but it was it was a long bloody pathway. Trump doesn't even think like that. He thinks

528
00:47:53.920 --> 00:47:59.920
my idea is to do some deal with one of the dictators and move on. And actually, that's what's happened

529
00:47:59.920 --> 00:48:05.360
in Venezuela. So Venezuela is still dictatorship. And it's run by the same regime as before, just

530
00:48:05.360 --> 00:48:10.400
led by a different person. And he's been quite vocal about the fact that they're getting all the oil.

531
00:48:10.400 --> 00:48:14.320
Yes, it's crazy thing to hear that you'd snatch up a you'd snatch a world leader. And then the

532
00:48:14.320 --> 00:48:18.480
same day you talk about how you've got the boats stealing the country's oil. But I say the

533
00:48:18.480 --> 00:48:22.720
word stealing, but taking the country's oil. Yeah. And it's not even clear what he means by that

534
00:48:22.720 --> 00:48:28.880
and so on. But it was not the action of a 20th or 21st century president.

535
00:48:29.520 --> 00:48:34.320
The midterms are coming up and I was reading that Trump's approval ratings are at an all-time

536
00:48:34.320 --> 00:48:39.120
low. It's first time I've seen people that were devoted supporters of his like Tucker Carlson

537
00:48:39.120 --> 00:48:44.400
coming out and saying apologizing for supporting him. So this war in Iran seems to have really

538
00:48:44.400 --> 00:48:49.200
backfired in a way that I do think he was he was intending. And you can kind of tell by how Trump's

539
00:48:49.200 --> 00:48:54.080
feeling because you just watch him in interviews. And the line that he repeats 75 times is

540
00:48:54.800 --> 00:49:00.000
probably like in some respects the exact opposite of what's going on. So when I watched a

541
00:49:00.000 --> 00:49:05.040
million interview this week and he was repeatedly saying obviously he says how great the war's

542
00:49:05.040 --> 00:49:08.560
going. So that makes me feel like it's not going well. Yeah, it was that was the main narrative

543
00:49:08.560 --> 00:49:12.640
with just like how well the war is going. If you keep saying we've won we've won it's over.

544
00:49:12.640 --> 00:49:16.400
One of the problems of having a president who lies all the time is that you you know you just

545
00:49:16.400 --> 00:49:21.040
stop believing. Even if the war was over you wouldn't believe it because his his his track record

546
00:49:21.040 --> 00:49:25.040
is not good. I mean look I think the important thing to understand about Trump is that he's somebody

547
00:49:25.040 --> 00:49:32.160
who has no strategy. He doesn't care that much about what happened before he was president. He

548
00:49:32.160 --> 00:49:36.960
doesn't know the history of Iran you know he doesn't understand much about the history of the reason

549
00:49:36.960 --> 00:49:42.720
and he doesn't really care about what's going to happen later. He's interested in what is happening

550
00:49:42.720 --> 00:49:49.280
now and is he winning in the current moment? What does winning mean? Whatever it means to him.

551
00:49:49.280 --> 00:49:55.040
So I'm I'm winning the contest with this journalist or I'm winning the argument about Iran

552
00:49:55.040 --> 00:50:00.080
or like we're winning the war or where I'm you know the opinion polls are all in my favor. So

553
00:50:00.080 --> 00:50:06.640
whatever is the situation he has to emerge as the winner that's his narcissistic mentality.

554
00:50:07.200 --> 00:50:10.960
That's not very good for strategic thinking because sometimes you don't win immediately like

555
00:50:10.960 --> 00:50:15.680
you have to have a plan you know and you have to have a long term aim and you have to have a

556
00:50:15.680 --> 00:50:20.400
strategy on how to get there but he he doesn't think like that. If you watch him if you watch him

557
00:50:20.400 --> 00:50:27.120
perform on television. Whatever is this happening he will convert it into that you know I'm winning.

558
00:50:29.040 --> 00:50:35.120
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579
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581
00:52:29.120 --> 00:52:39.360
now to get started. When you begin to see attempts to corrupt and shape elections this is when

582
00:52:39.440 --> 00:52:44.160
you know your democracy is in trouble. When the rules of the election are challenged,

583
00:52:44.880 --> 00:52:50.960
when there, there begin to be arguments about who can vote and an attempt to make some people not

584
00:52:50.960 --> 00:52:57.040
be allowed to vote. When you try to alter the result in some way, I mean any an attack on elections

585
00:52:57.040 --> 00:53:04.000
is a classic way in which democratically elected leaders undermine democracy. So an example of

586
00:53:04.400 --> 00:53:10.640
Victor Orban who just lost an election in Hungary after 16 years. He had two-thirds control

587
00:53:10.640 --> 00:53:15.600
of in Hungary if you have two-thirds of the parliament then you can change the constitution.

588
00:53:15.600 --> 00:53:21.680
So he continually altered the Hungarian constitution in order to give himself electoral advantages.

589
00:53:21.680 --> 00:53:26.720
So changing situancies and rebalancing the way votes were counted in the United States. I think

590
00:53:26.720 --> 00:53:32.080
we already talked about Jerry Mandering. Jerry Mandering is unbelievably anti-democratic and the

591
00:53:32.080 --> 00:53:36.480
fact that we have a kind of Jerry Mandering contest right now. What's Jerry Mandering?

592
00:53:36.480 --> 00:53:41.600
Jerry Mandering is a great word actually it comes from a congressman named Jerry in the early 19th

593
00:53:41.600 --> 00:53:48.480
century who drew a map of an electoral map which looked like a salamander. And a Jerry

594
00:53:48.480 --> 00:53:55.600
Mandered map in US terms is a electoral map that has been altered to favor one political party.

595
00:53:55.600 --> 00:53:59.520
You know the city of Nashville instead of having a single democratic representative instead of

596
00:53:59.520 --> 00:54:04.720
having a sensible constituency around the city that would vote for one member of Congress has

597
00:54:04.720 --> 00:54:10.320
been divided into several constituencies that are designed in such a way that were only Republicans

598
00:54:10.320 --> 00:54:18.320
went. And once you have maps that are designed to favor one party or the other then you begin to get

599
00:54:19.280 --> 00:54:24.880
real democratic decline. But there are other things happening in the US too so there are fears that

600
00:54:24.880 --> 00:54:32.240
ICE which is the paramilitary organization created by the president supposedly to go after immigrants

601
00:54:32.240 --> 00:54:36.960
that what if what if ICE troops are put on the street during on election day you know would some

602
00:54:36.960 --> 00:54:42.800
people be intimidated from voting. So there are fears that he will do that in some states.

603
00:54:43.360 --> 00:54:47.360
Is something called voter ID he talks about a lot? Yes well this is also very strange so of course

604
00:54:47.360 --> 00:54:52.320
in the US you have voter ID and most people have drivers licenses. They want to change the law so

605
00:54:52.320 --> 00:54:58.480
that you either have to use a passport or a birth certificate. And most Americans don't have

606
00:54:58.480 --> 00:55:04.320
passports I think 60 percent don't I don't remember the number but it's it's very low. Many people

607
00:55:04.320 --> 00:55:09.360
have lost or never had their birth certificates. If you passed a law like that it would make it

608
00:55:09.360 --> 00:55:14.800
much more difficult for some people to vote especially certain kinds of people. So married women

609
00:55:14.800 --> 00:55:18.880
would have to show a passport a birth certificate and a marriage license because you'd have to show

610
00:55:19.120 --> 00:55:24.160
because your birth certificate name is different from your married name. I tell you. So you'd have to

611
00:55:24.160 --> 00:55:29.120
and so many people believe this is a way to get fewer women to vote and women are more like a vote

612
00:55:29.120 --> 00:55:37.840
Democrat. It's also part of a narrative so the administration is trying to argue that lots and

613
00:55:37.840 --> 00:55:44.480
lots of illegal immigrants are voting which is a conspiracy theory there's no evidence of it.

614
00:55:44.560 --> 00:55:48.720
There's no evidence really of almost any illegal immigrants ever voting and if you think about it

615
00:55:48.720 --> 00:55:53.120
if you were an illegal immigrant why would you want to vote because it would just be a way of

616
00:55:53.120 --> 00:55:58.160
attracting attention to yourself but they seek to establish this narrative is a way of

617
00:55:58.880 --> 00:56:04.000
disqualifying democratic votes they want to say that votes and Trump did this during the last

618
00:56:04.000 --> 00:56:10.480
election votes in cities are too high if they need to call for a voter recount they want to say

619
00:56:10.560 --> 00:56:16.080
that this is the explanation for why they've lost and so the part of the reason why they're talking

620
00:56:16.080 --> 00:56:21.600
about voter ID is that. Just looking at some of the data it says young voters between 18 and 29

621
00:56:21.600 --> 00:56:27.440
roughly 24% of them lack the documents that would qualify them to vote in minority voters 11

622
00:56:27.440 --> 00:56:31.600
percent of citizens of color lack these documents and compared to a smaller percentage of white

623
00:56:31.600 --> 00:56:38.320
citizens in low income America only one in five households earning under $50,000 has a passport and

624
00:56:38.400 --> 00:56:43.440
as you said married women 69 million women have birth certificates that do not match their

625
00:56:43.440 --> 00:56:50.000
current legal name due to marriage right so I can I mean it's it's risky because I imagine

626
00:56:50.000 --> 00:56:54.560
lots of Republicans don't have passwords yeah but I think they've calculated that it would suit

627
00:56:54.560 --> 00:56:58.720
them better so they're looking to shape the voting population in a way that will benefit them

628
00:56:59.440 --> 00:57:05.600
so they're looking to find ways to massage the outcome and that's you know that that's a kind of

629
00:57:05.600 --> 00:57:10.400
classic when you're in a country which is declining democratically one of the classic things that

630
00:57:10.400 --> 00:57:17.280
happens is the ruling party seeks to alter a change who is able to vote and how votes are weighted

631
00:57:17.280 --> 00:57:22.400
the way of altering the outcome what's the third one personnel well we talked about this one

632
00:57:22.400 --> 00:57:29.040
we're already oh the civil servants this is civil service in a modern democracy so in a 21st

633
00:57:29.040 --> 00:57:34.320
century democracy government does a lot of things it manages the road system it sometimes

634
00:57:34.400 --> 00:57:40.160
organizes health care it organizes it regulates the insurance markets it does all kinds of governance

635
00:57:40.160 --> 00:57:46.880
pollution and all those people who do those jobs it's very important that they be people who know

636
00:57:46.880 --> 00:57:50.800
how to do them so you want the person who's measuring air pollution you want that person to be an

637
00:57:50.800 --> 00:57:58.000
expert in air pollution you don't want them to be you know the president's cousin or the person

638
00:57:58.000 --> 00:58:02.880
who is regulating the insurance market you want that to be someone who knows about insurance

639
00:58:02.880 --> 00:58:10.480
markets and you don't want it to be the best friend of the vice president in corrupt autocracies

640
00:58:10.480 --> 00:58:14.720
that is who gets those jobs seeing this a little bit with the Fed now it doesn't like your own

641
00:58:14.720 --> 00:58:20.160
palate in the Fed right and so he's tried to undermine Jerome Powell he's sued Jerome Powell

642
00:58:20.160 --> 00:58:26.560
or he's investigating him rather for it's a kind of fake financial scandal and he tried to put

643
00:58:26.560 --> 00:58:31.360
pressure on him to resign he tried to put pressure on him to change his policy and I you know

644
00:58:31.360 --> 00:58:36.320
honestly I don't I don't know whether the person who who will come in next will be will be more

645
00:58:36.320 --> 00:58:41.120
susceptible but he's certainly been chosen because Trump thinks he is and so what Trump wants is

646
00:58:41.120 --> 00:58:45.600
to have civil servants who are historically independent and that includes the chairman of the Fed

647
00:58:46.400 --> 00:58:50.320
it includes actually Department of Justice the Attorney General usually has some independence

648
00:58:50.960 --> 00:58:55.280
what you want is people who are acting in the interests of everybody and in a functional

649
00:58:55.280 --> 00:59:01.040
democracy in the happy Scandinavian countries then at least most of the time that's what they're

650
00:59:01.040 --> 00:59:07.040
doing and in a corrupt democracy or in a failing democracy then you have people whose interests are

651
00:59:07.040 --> 00:59:12.640
not everybody in the country but their interests are the president his family his party

652
00:59:14.000 --> 00:59:18.720
anyway not not American and so that's the danger of undermining civil service

653
00:59:19.680 --> 00:59:26.880
the fourth one is information okay all dictatorships seek to control information

654
00:59:26.880 --> 00:59:32.960
you know in China the entire internet since the 1990s has been constructed so that the government

655
00:59:32.960 --> 00:59:38.800
can control it there is no outside internet there is there is nobody who's active on the Chinese

656
00:59:38.800 --> 00:59:43.520
internet who isn't somehow known or accounted for somehow by the authorities and the internet is

657
00:59:43.520 --> 00:59:49.120
also connected to a whole system of surveillance cameras and other kinds of databases so that people

658
00:59:49.120 --> 00:59:53.520
can be tracked all through the system and all through the country people do have VPNs in China and

659
00:59:53.520 --> 00:59:57.360
they and they do get out but the majority of people are inside this and that's probably the

660
00:59:57.360 --> 01:00:02.320
China's the most extreme form of that and Russia is actually now heading in that direction so Putin

661
01:00:02.320 --> 01:00:08.320
is now cut off Russian access to most forms of Western social media you know Instagram and there

662
01:00:08.320 --> 01:00:16.000
were some amazing videos of really sad Russian Instagram influencers who were losing their

663
01:00:16.000 --> 01:00:23.760
audiences because Putin's changes so he's now he's now heading in that direction but even inside

664
01:00:23.760 --> 01:00:28.560
the United States which is maybe the loudest and most open democracy in the world you can see

665
01:00:28.560 --> 01:00:35.680
the Trump administration seeking to shape the information space in new ways so we have federal

666
01:00:35.680 --> 01:00:41.520
regulators who are now willing to put pressure on television stations if the president asks them to

667
01:00:41.520 --> 01:00:47.200
we have the president putting his thumb on the scale of people who are acquiring new media companies

668
01:00:47.200 --> 01:00:52.720
in order to make sure that the new owners are somehow friendly to him to not tick tock tick tock

669
01:00:52.720 --> 01:00:59.680
CBS CNN these are all media companies where the president is trying to get people who are

670
01:00:59.680 --> 01:01:04.400
sympathetic to him in charge and this is by the way you know we all have this idea about censorship

671
01:01:04.400 --> 01:01:08.160
that it's like there's a guy in a room and he's crossing sentences out of a newspaper article

672
01:01:08.160 --> 01:01:13.680
you know that's what censorship is but actually nowadays that's not how media control works so

673
01:01:13.680 --> 01:01:22.480
in Orban's Hungary in Erdogan's Turkey what happens is that the leadership encourages or helps

674
01:01:23.120 --> 01:01:28.320
business people or groups close to them to acquire media properties so they do it through the level

675
01:01:28.320 --> 01:01:34.480
of media ownership so who owns the media becomes the most important question and then the person

676
01:01:34.480 --> 01:01:39.360
who's who's in charge of the media can then influence in some ways what it's able to say so

677
01:01:39.360 --> 01:01:45.440
it doesn't give you complete control so actually in Hungary you still had a couple of very small

678
01:01:45.440 --> 01:01:51.200
but still existing independent websites who turned out to be very important but you had an attempt

679
01:01:51.200 --> 01:01:56.880
to control for some most of the television was controlled either directly or indirectly by Orban

680
01:01:57.040 --> 01:02:02.320
it looks to me like Trump is trying to achieve something like that there's a piece of that that

681
01:02:02.320 --> 01:02:09.920
also involves culture and universities as well pressure on universities so that they don't produce

682
01:02:09.920 --> 01:02:14.320
people who are too critical in the US you've had the Trump industry took over the Kennedy Center which

683
01:02:14.320 --> 01:02:21.920
is the most prestigious arts venue in Washington and tried to change its nature and tried to change

684
01:02:22.880 --> 01:02:27.360
who could play there and who couldn't and the result is actually that it's now been shut down

685
01:02:27.360 --> 01:02:32.960
for two years you see this on both sides of the political aisle both on the democratic side in

686
01:02:32.960 --> 01:02:38.160
different ways but I think that both parties when they're in for long enough what were allowed

687
01:02:38.160 --> 01:02:44.480
to say changes yes although the mechanisms have been different I mean I was involved in the argument

688
01:02:44.480 --> 01:02:49.680
you know some years back about this you know we I think it was incorrectly called cancel culture

689
01:02:49.680 --> 01:02:54.400
but whatever the the the argument that was happening inside universities and some press and other

690
01:02:54.400 --> 01:03:00.800
institutions about what you couldn't couldn't say and I thought it was you know that there was this

691
01:03:00.800 --> 01:03:04.720
peer pressure and sometimes institutional pressure on people and people were canceled that means

692
01:03:04.720 --> 01:03:10.160
they lost their jobs or they were kicked out of whatever group they were in because they said

693
01:03:10.160 --> 01:03:14.960
something the wrong way you know I argued against that and wrote about it and so on what you have

694
01:03:14.960 --> 01:03:21.520
now is a little different you now have the president just you know attempting to change media

695
01:03:21.520 --> 01:03:26.800
ownership and you have you you're beginning to see what happens when the administration goes into

696
01:03:26.800 --> 01:03:31.520
universities and you can't teach this course you can't hire that teacher that was the deal that was

697
01:03:31.520 --> 01:03:36.720
given to Harvard I don't know yeah you know some months back the reason why Harvard wound up refusing

698
01:03:36.720 --> 01:03:41.040
to deal with the Trump administration and when it started to sue them was because the administration

699
01:03:41.040 --> 01:03:45.520
was trying to actually decide who would teach what courses at Harvard I don't believe there's a

700
01:03:45.520 --> 01:03:51.920
precedent for that but I agree with you that it is an illiberal instinct to try to control speech

701
01:03:52.640 --> 01:03:57.280
and there's a left wing version of it and there's a right wing version of it and the people who are

702
01:03:58.080 --> 01:04:03.120
really in favor of free speech and they're vanishingly few are the people who are willing to call

703
01:04:03.120 --> 01:04:08.720
it out on both sides and one of the things you often hear now from these so-called free speech

704
01:04:09.680 --> 01:04:15.440
is that they're perfectly happy to shout about the left canceling people or left wing rhetoric that

705
01:04:15.440 --> 01:04:21.680
they don't like but then they keep quiet when it comes from the other side yes I was looking

706
01:04:21.680 --> 01:04:25.760
back through the history of this happening on both sides of the aisle and in Mark Zuckerberg's

707
01:04:25.760 --> 01:04:31.280
testimony I think in front of Congress he said that he was repeatedly pressured and for months by

708
01:04:31.280 --> 01:04:36.800
the Biden Harris administration to remove certain content and then there's the whole Hunter Biden

709
01:04:37.280 --> 01:04:44.640
laptop story where Zuckerberg confirmed that Meta were asked to demote a New York post story by

710
01:04:44.640 --> 01:04:50.080
the FBI and then there's various other stories here about people tweeted executives being emailed by

711
01:04:50.720 --> 01:04:55.760
White House officials and being asked to change things on their platform so there is a

712
01:04:55.760 --> 01:05:01.360
difference between someone sending you an email and saying you know look we with this has been flagged

713
01:05:01.440 --> 01:05:07.520
by a monitoring group as maybe fake or as maybe Russian disinformation or as you know coming from

714
01:05:07.520 --> 01:05:11.680
some kind of foreign influence campaign and so you know it would be great if you took it down or

715
01:05:11.680 --> 01:05:17.520
demoted it and there's just been that and taking over the company in order that the president gets

716
01:05:17.520 --> 01:05:26.240
to dictate what's on it nobody coerced Meta into doing anything or Twitter nobody said you know

717
01:05:26.320 --> 01:05:33.200
Twitter will be will pay a fine if you don't do XY in the context of people looking for foreign

718
01:05:33.200 --> 01:05:37.600
influence campaigns there were conversations about what was appropriate to print and what wasn't

719
01:05:38.880 --> 01:05:43.760
I think from what I've observed it happens on both sides but in different ways I remember

720
01:05:43.760 --> 01:05:51.040
was Elizabeth Warren talking a lot about this section 230 which I think protects some of the big

721
01:05:51.040 --> 01:05:56.080
social media companies from being sued from what users posts and I think she would repeatedly

722
01:05:56.080 --> 01:06:01.040
reference section 230 and other democratic lawmakers as a way to get the platforms to take a more

723
01:06:01.040 --> 01:06:07.680
aggressive stance on what they called like hate speech and speech and disinformation so section 230

724
01:06:07.680 --> 01:06:14.560
essentially allows the platforms to be to escape the rules that newspapers for example have to abide by

725
01:06:14.640 --> 01:06:21.200
so so actually we do have regulations we have liable laws we have laws about terrorist content

726
01:06:21.200 --> 01:06:26.320
for example so there are laws that regulate some parts of speech that we've agreed are good in

727
01:06:26.320 --> 01:06:33.600
order to you know maintain peace and so on and the platforms are exempt because of section 230

728
01:06:33.600 --> 01:06:38.400
and so the platforms have argued that we don't control what's put up on our platforms and we don't

729
01:06:38.400 --> 01:06:43.120
bear any responsibility for it I'm not sure that removing section 230 is the best way to deal with

730
01:06:43.120 --> 01:06:51.520
this but making the online world conform to the same laws as the offline world seems to me kind of

731
01:06:52.400 --> 01:06:58.800
very basic I mean it's it seems obvious to me that child pornography that's illegal if you have it

732
01:06:58.800 --> 01:07:07.200
in your house should also be illegal if it's published online it seems to me that people recruiting

733
01:07:07.200 --> 01:07:13.040
for ISIS that's illegal to do you know down the street from here then it should also be illegal to

734
01:07:13.040 --> 01:07:18.720
do online and the tech companies have been trying in recent years in this is argument that's taking

735
01:07:18.720 --> 01:07:24.000
place both in Europe and the US and elsewhere to get out of responsibility for just for conforming

736
01:07:24.000 --> 01:07:28.160
to the law in the countries where they're active and in one or two places there've been big clashes

737
01:07:28.160 --> 01:07:33.920
I was just in Brazil which is one of the places where that happened where the Brazilian law said

738
01:07:33.920 --> 01:07:38.960
something that was published on twitter was illegal and they find the company for publishing it

739
01:07:38.960 --> 01:07:42.080
twitter didn't want to pay the fine and there was an argument back and forth and for a while twitter

740
01:07:42.080 --> 01:07:48.640
was shut down in Brazil but it does seem to me that any given country whether it's Brazil or Nepal

741
01:07:48.640 --> 01:07:54.880
or you know Ethiopia and particularly democracies I should say you know democracies have the right to

742
01:07:54.880 --> 01:08:00.240
say these are our laws for example these are our electoral laws we have laws in election spending

743
01:08:00.240 --> 01:08:05.840
and if the platforms violate those laws they're in breach of the law you know so elective

744
01:08:05.840 --> 01:08:12.480
pen is a very important one because if you're spending a million dollars on tiktok illegally

745
01:08:13.520 --> 01:08:19.440
that can be much harder to see then it would be if you were buying television ads and so finding a

746
01:08:19.440 --> 01:08:24.720
way to bring the the social media companies into the legal system seems to be completely legitimate

747
01:08:25.680 --> 01:08:31.440
and in fact I would even go farther than that I would say that if European countries in particular

748
01:08:31.440 --> 01:08:37.280
don't do this then I'm not sure European countries will be able to maintain their sovereignty

749
01:08:37.840 --> 01:08:45.600
and will you be able to run an election in Germany or England if if your electoral rules can be

750
01:08:45.600 --> 01:08:52.320
easily defied by platforms that are based in the US or China what such electoral rules might

751
01:08:52.320 --> 01:08:58.000
be defied by laws about spending laws about advertising everything is a trade off right and this is

752
01:08:58.000 --> 01:09:01.200
what I've learned from being a podcaster and into being so many people about so many things so I

753
01:09:01.200 --> 01:09:05.600
often just think all the time with every idea that I'm exposed to about what the trade is so as you

754
01:09:05.600 --> 01:09:08.960
were speaking I was thinking about what like how does this become a slippery slope or what's the

755
01:09:08.960 --> 01:09:14.400
the the downside of this trade so what do you think that would be I'm sure there's a you know

756
01:09:14.400 --> 01:09:18.960
of course there's a downside I mean the the downside is you know I don't know country X has bad

757
01:09:19.440 --> 01:09:23.040
laws and then the platforms have to conform to the bad law it's questions about speech are

758
01:09:23.040 --> 01:09:28.560
particularly sensitive you know what one one person's terrorist speech is another person's free speech

759
01:09:28.560 --> 01:09:33.200
right yeah but somebody has to make that decision about what the rules are and I think the person

760
01:09:33.200 --> 01:09:36.800
who should make the decision is the are the people who should make the decision are the elected

761
01:09:36.800 --> 01:09:42.160
representatives of that country yeah and the decision should not be taken by Elon Musk it's funny

762
01:09:42.160 --> 01:09:46.960
because Mark Zuckerberg to some degree it sounded like what Elon Musk says I remember watching him

763
01:09:46.960 --> 01:09:50.800
in an interview I can't remember who it was with but he basically said exactly that he said

764
01:09:50.800 --> 01:09:56.320
we'll abide by the laws of every country that we operate in and some and oh it was his interview with

765
01:09:56.320 --> 01:10:02.800
um the CNN guy that used to be on CNN Don Lemon and Don Lemon is pushing is saying

766
01:10:02.800 --> 01:10:06.800
there's hate speech on your platform and then he asks him what the hate speech is and I don't

767
01:10:06.800 --> 01:10:12.880
think he can say but Elon's response to him is we abide by the laws and don't let's pushing

768
01:10:12.960 --> 01:10:17.440
but there's a record of them not doing that so you know so that that's just disingenuous

769
01:10:17.440 --> 01:10:21.520
I mean it's true hate speech is a you know it's a longer conversation I mean what you how you

770
01:10:21.520 --> 01:10:26.160
define it what you say it is is different but some countries do have hate speech a Germany has

771
01:10:26.160 --> 01:10:32.080
them so Germany decided after World War II you know to ban Nazi symbols yeah I think Germany is a

772
01:10:32.080 --> 01:10:36.320
very very successful electoral democracy and if they want to ban Nazi symbols I think they should

773
01:10:36.320 --> 01:10:41.360
be allowed to I mean in America that wouldn't work you know and it was you're you can't ban Nazi

774
01:10:41.360 --> 01:10:46.640
symbols the United States but I don't see why America should impose its rules on Germany

775
01:10:46.640 --> 01:10:51.280
like doesn't Germany have sovereignty doesn't Germany get to decide you know what the rules of

776
01:10:51.280 --> 01:10:56.720
its national conversation are because in the US racism is not illegal on the internet in the United

777
01:10:56.720 --> 01:11:03.840
States due to the first amendment right so I could be racist on X yes and that is fine and many

778
01:11:03.840 --> 01:11:08.720
people are if you spend any time on X you will see it is very hard to miss according to the laws

779
01:11:08.720 --> 01:11:14.240
because it's not it's not illegal but I think most people a lot of people would say that the

780
01:11:14.240 --> 01:11:19.120
platform would have an obligation to take down that racism someone starts being racist to me yeah

781
01:11:19.120 --> 01:11:23.680
yeah me really internet a lot I understand why a lot of people would say like okay that kind of

782
01:11:23.680 --> 01:11:27.760
behavior should be taken down but it's within the country's laws so do you think it's fun like

783
01:11:27.760 --> 01:11:31.920
this is a bit of a I don't want to be got your question but it's like do you know what I mean I guess

784
01:11:31.920 --> 01:11:36.720
this is where the clash comes in because something can feel deeply immoral but be illegal sure there's

785
01:11:36.720 --> 01:11:41.600
a difference between illegality and immortality and some you know historically newspapers and other

786
01:11:41.600 --> 01:11:48.080
media have decided not to print racist material because it's immoral or because it's offensive even

787
01:11:48.080 --> 01:11:52.800
social media platforms I think have a debate about how much ugly stuff they want to appear on their

788
01:11:52.800 --> 01:11:57.040
sites because if people see too much of it they'll stop going on it I mean I you know reduced my

789
01:11:57.040 --> 01:12:02.480
usage of Twitter because there was too much anti-semitism and too much racism and I didn't want

790
01:12:02.480 --> 01:12:07.280
to watch it anymore so and I think many people others have made the same decision you know speech

791
01:12:07.280 --> 01:12:12.640
is a constant negotiation you know what's acceptable what's unacceptable and the norms do change over

792
01:12:12.640 --> 01:12:16.960
time I will agree to that what the autocrats try to do is something a little bit different it's not

793
01:12:16.960 --> 01:12:24.160
in this gray area of hate speech and free speech it's controlling the system itself you know what

794
01:12:24.160 --> 01:12:29.200
what are the boundaries of what people can see what platforms they have access to so the Chinese

795
01:12:29.200 --> 01:12:33.440
don't really you know what they're what they're interested in is are you criticizing the Chinese

796
01:12:33.440 --> 01:12:38.880
Communist Party that's the fundamental thing that they're controlling for I was wondering as you

797
01:12:38.880 --> 01:12:43.360
were speaking about this earlier if I'm in China can I just get up and go can I just leave

798
01:12:44.160 --> 01:12:50.320
where would you go and could you get a visa to go there good question the Chinese do leave I was

799
01:12:50.320 --> 01:12:55.280
just wondering if it's easy to leave China if you're a citizen of China or do they restrict you

800
01:12:55.360 --> 01:12:59.840
from going somewhere else I don't know I'll go to Bali um could I not just go with to Bali

801
01:12:59.840 --> 01:13:03.360
well think about think about it if I mean this is this was a you know this used to be a problem

802
01:13:03.360 --> 01:13:07.360
for people in the Soviet Union I mean okay theoretically you could leave you could get an exit

803
01:13:07.360 --> 01:13:11.360
passport I mean I'm sure there are some restrictions on who's able to get passports and who isn't

804
01:13:11.360 --> 01:13:17.280
I mean I'm but it say you were able to you'd you'd need to go somewhere where you could get a visa

805
01:13:17.280 --> 01:13:22.880
where you could work where you could set up a life where you speak the language where it's

806
01:13:22.880 --> 01:13:28.160
reasonable to imagine you could stay there for a long time I mean immigration especially given

807
01:13:28.160 --> 01:13:33.200
languages and and professional qualifications so it does not always easy it's not always practical

808
01:13:33.200 --> 01:13:37.280
for everybody I mean I have friends who are still I have many friends who left Russia but I have

809
01:13:37.280 --> 01:13:42.640
one or two friends who are still there and that's because they have aging relatives or because

810
01:13:43.520 --> 01:13:47.520
they don't speak any other languages and they don't feel they'd be at home anywhere else I mean

811
01:13:47.520 --> 01:13:52.880
there are there are many reasons why people can't leave even if they don't like their state or

812
01:13:52.880 --> 01:13:59.600
they don't like their political system so what's number five on number five blocks if you've

813
01:13:59.600 --> 01:14:10.560
used the word power okay control over power ministries and the use of violence most autocracies

814
01:14:10.560 --> 01:14:15.600
sooner or later want to create some kind of repressive system that's also physical so it's

815
01:14:15.600 --> 01:14:21.600
not just control of the information space there's also some element of coercion so people who

816
01:14:21.600 --> 01:14:27.440
don't go along with the system don't get to just float around there's some way of threatening them

817
01:14:27.440 --> 01:14:34.960
physically like ice so ice is not supposed to be that ice is supposed to be an immigration

818
01:14:34.960 --> 01:14:44.400
enforcement institution but the way it's been used is well beyond the way any immigration

819
01:14:44.400 --> 01:14:49.680
institution was used before in the United States so look at what ice looks like they are

820
01:14:50.560 --> 01:14:57.760
masked they are wearing military uniforms they are often driving unmarked cars so they drive in

821
01:14:57.760 --> 01:15:03.680
vans they're not driving in police vans and they're not following the rules of local police they're

822
01:15:03.680 --> 01:15:08.480
not accountable to anybody they're not accountable to the mayor you know or to the governor of the

823
01:15:08.480 --> 01:15:15.040
state where they are and that gives them a kind of impunity and a kind of ability to behave badly

824
01:15:15.040 --> 01:15:20.640
and they seem to be accountable directly to the Homeland Security Department and to the president

825
01:15:20.640 --> 01:15:26.080
and we've already seen how this can affect the behavior of ice so we saw during the during the

826
01:15:26.080 --> 01:15:30.720
protests and the arrests and the protests in Minnesota we saw two people were killed and what

827
01:15:30.720 --> 01:15:36.720
was really horrifying to me wasn't just that they were killed it was how the administration reacted

828
01:15:37.360 --> 01:15:42.880
you know it was vans and gnome and several other people immediately said of the people who

829
01:15:42.880 --> 01:15:49.360
were killed they were guilty so instead of saying this is horrible you know that an American police

830
01:15:49.360 --> 01:15:52.560
force killed are you these were both US citizens I mean there have been other people killed

831
01:15:52.560 --> 01:15:57.040
by the way but these two were were notable because they were US citizens and they were in immigrants

832
01:15:58.000 --> 01:16:01.680
instead of saying two people were killed this is horrible we need to have an investigation this

833
01:16:01.680 --> 01:16:08.000
must not be allowed to happen again the immediate instinct was to give them impunity like you

834
01:16:08.000 --> 01:16:15.280
know we're not going to investigate this it's not a real problem you know the the the instinct was

835
01:16:15.280 --> 01:16:20.640
to put them above the law and when you have a military force and as I said especially one that's

836
01:16:20.640 --> 01:16:26.480
militarized and looks like you know they they're dressed like they're in fluja you know when you have

837
01:16:26.480 --> 01:16:31.440
a military force that's above the law then it's really a paramilitary if you have a police force

838
01:16:31.440 --> 01:16:35.840
that can harm ordinary citizens and not pay any price for it and isn't accountable then you're not

839
01:16:35.840 --> 01:16:42.240
serving Americans you're serving the interests of of the ruling party this is something that I've

840
01:16:42.240 --> 01:16:47.120
made for you I've realized that the diaries here audience are strivers whether it's in business

841
01:16:47.120 --> 01:16:51.920
or health we all have big goals that we want to accomplish and one of the things I've learned

842
01:16:51.920 --> 01:16:58.640
is that when you aim at the big big big goal it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable

843
01:16:58.640 --> 01:17:02.640
because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards the way

844
01:17:02.640 --> 01:17:08.000
to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny small steps and we call this an

845
01:17:08.000 --> 01:17:14.080
R team the 1% and actually this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here so

846
01:17:14.080 --> 01:17:19.360
what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these

847
01:17:19.360 --> 01:17:25.040
1% diaries and we released these last year and they all sold out so I asked my team over and over

848
01:17:25.040 --> 01:17:28.800
again to bring the diaries back but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor

849
01:17:28.800 --> 01:17:36.000
tweaks to the diaries so now we have a better range for you so if you have a big goal in mind

850
01:17:36.000 --> 01:17:40.960
and you need a framework and a process and some motivation then I highly recommend you get one of

851
01:17:40.960 --> 01:17:47.040
these diaries before they all sell out once again and you can get yours at the diary dot com and if

852
01:17:47.040 --> 01:17:52.560
you want the link the link is in the description below do you think this is um potentially the decline

853
01:17:52.720 --> 01:17:58.720
of the what one might call the American Empire I was um I was looking at how long Empire's

854
01:17:58.720 --> 01:18:04.960
attempt to last and I was before you came and there's this 250 year figure which is famously popularized

855
01:18:04.960 --> 01:18:10.480
by a British historian called Sir John Glob in his essay The Fate of Empires and The Search for

856
01:18:10.480 --> 01:18:17.520
Survival after analyzing empires from the I can't say that word as a serians a serians exactly

857
01:18:18.320 --> 01:18:23.920
a serians to the British um Glob found that despite differences in technology geography religion

858
01:18:23.920 --> 01:18:29.440
and surprisingly shared a similar lifespan and life cycle Glob argued that empires typically go

859
01:18:29.440 --> 01:18:35.440
through a predictable sequence of stages over those 250 years the first one being the age of pioneers

860
01:18:35.440 --> 01:18:40.320
outbursts in conquest the age of conquest which is the military dominance the age of commerce which

861
01:18:40.320 --> 01:18:45.760
is vast wealth creation the age of affluence comfort and a shift from duty to selfishness

862
01:18:45.840 --> 01:18:50.720
the age of intellect focused on philosophy and education of a defense the age of descendants

863
01:18:50.720 --> 01:18:57.040
internal division massive inequality and collapse so if you view the United States as an expansion

864
01:18:57.040 --> 01:19:02.320
is project from its very inception pushing westward across the North American continent through

865
01:19:02.320 --> 01:19:10.080
its power then the masses if you take it from 1776 to now to 2026 it's exactly 250 years old

866
01:19:10.720 --> 01:19:18.640
so if you use Glob's 2250 year life cycle model from 1776 to now political scientists argue

867
01:19:18.640 --> 01:19:23.920
that we are in the age of descendants of the American Empire this stage is typically characterized

868
01:19:23.920 --> 01:19:28.000
by deep internal political division vast wealth inequality massive national debt and a cultural

869
01:19:28.000 --> 01:19:34.640
shift away from a shared sense of civic duty so first of all that's a pretty accurate description

870
01:19:34.640 --> 01:19:39.120
of what's happening in the United States however you have just touched on something that I feel

871
01:19:39.200 --> 01:19:45.600
very strongly about which is that I don't believe in historical inevitability interesting and I

872
01:19:45.600 --> 01:19:53.040
I think is very dangerous so the idea that we are on a slippery slope downhill and we can't stop it

873
01:19:53.040 --> 01:19:57.920
because that's the way history is going or alternatively the idea that everything is fine and

874
01:19:57.920 --> 01:20:01.840
it will continue to be fine because liberal democracy has triumphed which is what we thought in the

875
01:20:01.840 --> 01:20:08.800
1990s anytime you think that something is inevitable that takes away your willingness to act

876
01:20:09.520 --> 01:20:17.760
what happens tomorrow and next year is completely dependent on what we do today whether the United

877
01:20:17.760 --> 01:20:24.000
States survives as a democracy or not depends on choices Americans make things they say the arguments

878
01:20:24.000 --> 01:20:31.520
they have you know the degree of civic participation not some historical rule that some very brilliant

879
01:20:31.520 --> 01:20:36.160
political scientist invented and as I said I think this has happened before I think we had this

880
01:20:36.160 --> 01:20:42.480
moment of complacency after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 90s Americans and Europeans

881
01:20:42.480 --> 01:20:48.080
became convinced that everything was best in the best of all possible worlds and we didn't have

882
01:20:48.080 --> 01:20:52.800
to do anything in particular to maintain our democracies because democracy was the best system

883
01:20:52.800 --> 01:20:59.040
and we just won the Cold War and it was all going to be fine and we lost sight of the ways in which

884
01:20:59.040 --> 01:21:04.000
democracy was beginning to slip and we were beginning to lose things and I think it was just

885
01:21:04.000 --> 01:21:09.600
sense of complacency and above all it was a sense of inevitability it's inevitable we've won

886
01:21:09.600 --> 01:21:15.360
the war of ideas the war of ideas is over and that's why we missed the rise of Russia we missed the

887
01:21:15.360 --> 01:21:20.000
the significance of China and we missed a lot of those things because we were so sure that we were

888
01:21:20.000 --> 01:21:25.520
just winning isn't that in and of itself a cycle it's a cycle but my point is that the cycles aren't

889
01:21:25.520 --> 01:21:31.200
predictable I mean you can stop the cycle you can reverse the cycle countries can and do change

890
01:21:31.200 --> 01:21:35.520
their trajectory I say I've lived a lot of my life in Poland first went there in the 1980s my

891
01:21:35.520 --> 01:21:40.000
husband is Polish so on Poland is a completely different country from what it was 30 years ago

892
01:21:40.000 --> 01:21:45.760
and it's a country that has really changed itself in ways that weren't necessarily predictable in

893
01:21:45.760 --> 01:21:53.520
1990 and so I do think countries change is all of this downstream from something that doesn't change

894
01:21:53.520 --> 01:21:57.600
which is human nature and therefore if we understand human nature as the constant then one can

895
01:21:57.680 --> 01:22:02.720
almost predict these there I say the word again cycles of how humans will go from there to

896
01:22:04.720 --> 01:22:10.720
nature as a constant but there's so much accident in history and so many random things happen

897
01:22:10.720 --> 01:22:17.120
that you can sometimes predict how people will react but you can't necessarily predict exactly

898
01:22:17.120 --> 01:22:24.080
what's coming you know when Boris Yeltsin was drunk and sick and had to choose the next leader of

899
01:22:25.040 --> 01:22:29.520
there were a number of choices he had and the person he chose was Vladimir Putin who at the time

900
01:22:29.520 --> 01:22:35.760
was a very low ranking I mean he was he was a FSB came from the KGB and he was someone they chose

901
01:22:35.760 --> 01:22:40.320
because they thought he would be loyal to the Yeltsin family and he wouldn't prosecute them nobody

902
01:22:40.320 --> 01:22:46.320
imagined him as a dictator or an imperial leader who would be seeking to reconquer the former Soviet

903
01:22:46.320 --> 01:22:51.440
Union and what if they'd chosen for example Boris Nemsoft was another leading Russian politician at

904
01:22:51.440 --> 01:22:55.120
the time you know I don't know that he was a perfect Democrat but he was very open-minded and he

905
01:22:55.120 --> 01:22:59.120
would have been interested in integrating Russia with Europe okay what if he'd become the leader

906
01:22:59.120 --> 01:23:04.320
of Russia we would be in a completely different world and why there was nothing inevitable about

907
01:23:04.320 --> 01:23:12.400
that decision there are many random completely out of the blue things that happen in history you

908
01:23:12.400 --> 01:23:17.600
can always say there's always some percentage of any population that's instinctively authoritarian

909
01:23:17.680 --> 01:23:21.840
for example and there's always some percentage of any population that's instinctively liberal

910
01:23:21.840 --> 01:23:25.840
or instinctively libertarian because of egos and power because I've just the way the human

911
01:23:25.840 --> 01:23:31.200
nature have the people have to but what is the balance of that group how the leadership of the

912
01:23:31.200 --> 01:23:37.280
country encourages or discourages one set of values or the other you know that that affects how

913
01:23:37.280 --> 01:23:42.880
you know who who's winning the arguments and so I I don't believe in inevitable cycles yeah

914
01:23:42.880 --> 01:23:47.920
you had a radalea talking about the sort of Berman bus cycles through history and when like a

915
01:23:47.920 --> 01:23:52.640
population becomes very comfortable you have this sort of inversion goes the other way do you believe

916
01:23:52.640 --> 01:23:57.280
in those kinds of cycles you know I suppose there is a phenomenon whereby yes as people become

917
01:23:57.280 --> 01:24:01.760
comfortable then Frank Fukuyama actually had in his famous book about the end of history he had

918
01:24:01.760 --> 01:24:06.560
a description of well what happens if we have to you know if everybody becomes a liberal democracy

919
01:24:06.560 --> 01:24:10.640
and everybody's pretty prosperous then the next thing that will happen is some people will get bored

920
01:24:11.600 --> 01:24:16.400
and out of their boredom and out of their desire for change they'll attack the system and

921
01:24:16.400 --> 01:24:20.720
want to undermine it kind of what happened so there's I suppose there's some there's a there's

922
01:24:20.720 --> 01:24:26.000
some human element like that you know that the there will always be some part of the population that

923
01:24:26.000 --> 01:24:31.760
feels left out or feels discriminated against and and wants a bigger voice or wants to run the

924
01:24:31.760 --> 01:24:36.320
country I mean so you can you can see that I just don't think it's something that scientists

925
01:24:36.320 --> 01:24:43.680
can predict is there a link between democracies and sort of rampant capitalism so in a democracy

926
01:24:43.680 --> 01:24:46.800
I don't know much about this stuff so I'm just asking a question but in a democracy does it

927
01:24:46.800 --> 01:24:50.000
tend to be the case that you end up with wealth inequality because you let everybody you let

928
01:24:50.000 --> 01:24:53.840
free markets play out and then you're going to have these like tech oligarchs up here that have all

929
01:24:53.840 --> 01:24:57.520
gazillions of dollars a trillion dollars and lots of people at the bottom of the wrong whereas in

930
01:24:57.520 --> 01:25:01.680
I don't know in China I guess they somewhat defend it I don't know do they defend against

931
01:25:01.680 --> 01:25:07.120
no I would say almost the opposite so historically democracies have I mean there've been different

932
01:25:07.120 --> 01:25:11.520
phases right so I don't want to over generalize but certainly in the 20 second half of the 20th

933
01:25:11.520 --> 01:25:16.880
century the democracies since the second world war have tended towards equality including in the

934
01:25:16.880 --> 01:25:22.240
United States and at their most successful and prosperous moments people there was if there was

935
01:25:22.240 --> 01:25:27.600
much less wealth equality than inequality than there is now and the countries we were talking

936
01:25:27.680 --> 01:25:31.920
about earlier the happy countries those are relatively equal countries and those are countries with

937
01:25:31.920 --> 01:25:37.600
big welfare states and a lot of redistribution of wealth and those are countries where people feel

938
01:25:37.600 --> 01:25:42.480
invested in the system partly because they don't feel completely outclassed by a group of oligarchs

939
01:25:42.480 --> 01:25:48.960
if you look at the United States in the 1950s that was a period of also huge social mobility when

940
01:25:48.960 --> 01:25:53.120
lower middle class middle class people began to get wealthier and there's this enormous wave of

941
01:25:53.120 --> 01:25:58.000
prosperity and that's a period when everybody is becoming wealthier and that was also a period when

942
01:25:58.000 --> 01:26:02.080
you have the you know very successful American democracy you have the civil rights movement you

943
01:26:02.080 --> 01:26:06.960
have democracy beginning to spread to new populations or to people who've been excluded before

944
01:26:06.960 --> 01:26:13.120
so you have a connection between equality and democracy a wealth even wealth equality and one

945
01:26:13.120 --> 01:26:20.720
of the things that gives critics of the United States most anxiety now is precisely what you just

946
01:26:20.720 --> 01:26:27.520
said you know the emergence of tech oligarchs who have so much more power than any one politician

947
01:26:27.520 --> 01:26:33.680
and who even have the power to to organize information space how long will that group of people

948
01:26:33.680 --> 01:26:38.480
want to live in a democracy where everybody gets a vote and well to supposed to be distributed

949
01:26:38.480 --> 01:26:42.960
more evenly there are some members that community who have become illiberal or anti-democratic for

950
01:26:42.960 --> 01:26:49.200
exactly that reason if we don't believe in inevitabilities then what is it we have to look out for

951
01:26:49.200 --> 01:26:52.960
as those living in a democracy we talked about the five things there but are there anything is

952
01:26:52.960 --> 01:26:58.800
anything coming up where you're worried that as a society we might overlook it or allow it

953
01:26:58.800 --> 01:27:04.880
which results in us falling back down into an autocratic society and is there anything we can do

954
01:27:04.880 --> 01:27:11.200
proactively now to defend our democracy we are lucky in that we live in societies where we can vote

955
01:27:12.160 --> 01:27:19.360
and so it's really important that we vote that we know who we're voting for that we vote in

956
01:27:19.360 --> 01:27:25.680
all elections including local ones when people become nihilistic when they say they're all the same

957
01:27:25.680 --> 01:27:30.560
I don't care who wins the election it's not worth voting because you know they're all corrupt

958
01:27:30.560 --> 01:27:35.920
this is what autocrats tried to create so what does Putin want Russians to do does he want

959
01:27:35.920 --> 01:27:40.560
them to be political no he wants them to stay out of politics you know what are the Chinese want

960
01:27:40.560 --> 01:27:45.600
they want their people out of politics and so whenever you see too many people who are have

961
01:27:45.600 --> 01:27:51.920
responded to that kind of negative inspiration that's when you should worry and I worry a lot

962
01:27:51.920 --> 01:27:57.280
about the United States on exactly those grounds actually look at how the leader of your country

963
01:27:57.920 --> 01:28:05.520
talks about the press how he or she talks about the judges the judiciary how he or she talks about

964
01:28:06.320 --> 01:28:12.640
civil service a real democrat respects those institutions and wants them to stay in place

965
01:28:12.640 --> 01:28:17.680
precisely so that democracy can remain so that at the next election there will be a fair election

966
01:28:17.680 --> 01:28:22.400
do you think the the mainstream media are politicized do you think there's political bias in the

967
01:28:22.400 --> 01:28:27.520
mainstream media like the big titles you know some of them had business models that are that are

968
01:28:27.520 --> 01:28:33.680
biased so Fox's business model is to appeal to the right-leaning part of the American population

969
01:28:34.560 --> 01:28:39.760
you know to encourage them in their biases and get them to watch TV there's some media that are

970
01:28:39.760 --> 01:28:45.440
now dependent on on polarization and kind of live off it there's some who try to be neutral but

971
01:28:45.440 --> 01:28:52.400
you know even neutrality is hard to achieve now because a neutral investigation that turns up

972
01:28:52.400 --> 01:28:57.760
something bad about the Trump administration will immediately incur the reaction on the part you

973
01:28:57.840 --> 01:29:03.760
know you're biased you we've lost our our assumption that that press are operating in good faith

974
01:29:03.760 --> 01:29:07.600
so it's become much more difficult this is so interesting for me as a podcaster who I guess

975
01:29:07.600 --> 01:29:15.680
now is considered to be media the inherent incentives of media mean that like if I say I'm running

976
01:29:15.680 --> 01:29:21.520
X newspaper and I write a story and I built up a base of people for whatever reason right that

977
01:29:21.520 --> 01:29:26.320
want me to say something negative about Trump I have an economic model an incentive structure

978
01:29:26.400 --> 01:29:30.160
that means that if I write that article it's going to get 10 times the reach 10 times the

979
01:29:30.160 --> 01:29:34.720
engagement 10 times the subscribers if I write the exact opposite article I know I'm going to get

980
01:29:34.720 --> 01:29:38.720
so if I say Trump is amazing even though I've built up a base that I think of a certain way

981
01:29:38.720 --> 01:29:43.440
the article is going to get a fraction of the the reached engagement subscribers so as a

982
01:29:43.440 --> 01:29:47.520
CEO of such such a company you're going to have to hire more and more people create more and more

983
01:29:47.520 --> 01:29:53.760
output to receive the same rewards versus just writing something bad about that particular person

984
01:29:53.840 --> 01:29:58.720
so you become incentives but the other factor is that geographically Democrats and Republicans

985
01:29:58.720 --> 01:30:03.920
in the United States exist in certain areas so if I open my office in New York or LA most of the

986
01:30:03.920 --> 01:30:07.520
people I'm going to be able to hire come with a certain like statistically come with a certain

987
01:30:07.520 --> 01:30:13.200
political view so I do wonder if eventually like the fate of most media organizations is they do

988
01:30:13.200 --> 01:30:18.080
get politically captured one way or the other you have to fight it you have to fight and as a podcast

989
01:30:18.560 --> 01:30:25.760
because now I'm part of the media I now understand because I feel it so I feel that I see

990
01:30:25.760 --> 01:30:30.400
here with Kamala Harris I'm attacked I see here with Ivanka Trump I'm attacked I see with Michelle

991
01:30:30.400 --> 01:30:35.600
Obama attacked Gavin Newsom attacked and I understand there's this great quote which I

992
01:30:35.600 --> 01:30:38.960
favor it the other day it was like you have to join a tribe where you get killed by one with

993
01:30:38.960 --> 01:30:44.560
something words to that effect and I get it I get why some of my peers and podcasting have

994
01:30:45.280 --> 01:30:50.800
sought defense behind a particular tribe because just taking the arrows from both sides is not the

995
01:30:50.800 --> 01:30:56.240
nicest feeling in the world no no I mean it's funny when you said mainstream media I don't even

996
01:30:56.240 --> 01:31:00.400
know who that is anymore yeah it's not so much about hearing from both sides it's about

997
01:31:01.520 --> 01:31:06.080
trying to establish what's true yeah and so the job of what what you do is a little bit different

998
01:31:06.080 --> 01:31:11.520
from what journalists do yeah so journalists go into the world and they gather information

999
01:31:11.520 --> 01:31:15.200
and they if they're good journalists they try to figure out what actually happened

1000
01:31:15.680 --> 01:31:19.760
and then they bring it back and they write it down or they make a video about it and they try

1001
01:31:19.760 --> 01:31:25.360
make sure that it's accurate right and so if you're devoted to that project then you you seek to

1002
01:31:25.360 --> 01:31:32.000
avoid political bias but you know inevitably you might wind up saying the president is lying

1003
01:31:32.000 --> 01:31:36.960
or the leader the opposition is lying and then you're immediately you know in the world of people

1004
01:31:36.960 --> 01:31:42.160
shouting at you and saying you're biased but I do feel that it's really important that this particular

1005
01:31:42.160 --> 01:31:47.680
profession of the people who go into the world and try and establish reality that it continues to

1006
01:31:47.680 --> 01:31:54.400
exist I agree there needs to be a business model for that I mean for democracy to exist for an

1007
01:31:54.400 --> 01:31:58.640
accurate and meaningful national conversation to exist we need to have some people who are trying

1008
01:31:58.640 --> 01:32:02.160
to figure out what's real I agree and I think those people are incredibly important which I think

1009
01:32:02.160 --> 01:32:05.760
people think podcasts is won't say because I think sometimes we're positioned as being like the

1010
01:32:05.760 --> 01:32:09.680
rebels or radicals or whatever but I like doing it from their kitchen this used to be my kitchen

1011
01:32:09.680 --> 01:32:18.800
but I very much agree I very much agree that there are incredibly rigorous truth-seeking

1012
01:32:18.800 --> 01:32:22.960
journalists out there that have this very unique skill which is not one that I possess or

1013
01:32:22.960 --> 01:32:28.720
or test to possess at all that they go deep for long periods of time without bias in search of

1014
01:32:29.280 --> 01:32:33.440
the truth and then they deliver it to the world and I'm well aware that if we lose that then I

1015
01:32:33.440 --> 01:32:37.600
lose so many of the things that I fundamentally care about and that I've built my entire life and

1016
01:32:37.600 --> 01:32:42.000
career on especially as like a young black man in business who understands that there's lots of

1017
01:32:42.000 --> 01:32:47.040
people that came before me that revealed things about the way society function that have benefited me

1018
01:32:47.040 --> 01:32:50.880
and so that I should my way of sort of paying that forward is protecting the same privileges

1019
01:32:51.600 --> 01:32:56.720
as a as a podocaster because I mean there is a danger that we go down a road in which especially

1020
01:32:56.720 --> 01:33:02.480
as AI develops and we get more and more of our information online that we lose touch with reality

1021
01:33:04.000 --> 01:33:11.840
if AI is only accessing what's available to the model online there's still a whole world out there

1022
01:33:11.840 --> 01:33:18.880
where things are happening you know that's not online and making sure that we're constantly in touch

1023
01:33:18.880 --> 01:33:23.040
with what's what's reality on the ground what's really happening in Ukraine you know what's really

1024
01:33:23.040 --> 01:33:27.840
happening in Iran and not living on just what's available to us on our phones it's really important

1025
01:33:27.840 --> 01:33:32.400
one of my fears is that the algorithms with AI becoming better at knowing what to serve me in order

1026
01:33:32.400 --> 01:33:36.880
to make me dwell and therefore it creates more ad dollars for the companies and so I might not

1027
01:33:36.880 --> 01:33:41.200
just be living in a fake reality I might be living in a completely personalized one that's completely

1028
01:33:41.200 --> 01:33:45.280
different from your own because as I want on my phone this morning one of the things with the

1029
01:33:45.280 --> 01:33:50.720
sections on my phone is suggested for you now this is obviously showing me things that are based

1030
01:33:50.720 --> 01:33:55.040
on my past viewing consumption so if I viewed this person having a fight in the street I'm getting

1031
01:33:55.040 --> 01:33:58.000
more people having fights in the street so now my perception is that everyone's having fights in

1032
01:33:58.000 --> 01:34:03.120
the street and that means it's harder to connect to each other we are very much I mean I think

1033
01:34:03.120 --> 01:34:07.760
this has really happened already that we we live in our own algorithms when you're asking with

1034
01:34:07.760 --> 01:34:12.240
the more fundamental question about the breakdown of democracy I mean there's nothing more toxic

1035
01:34:12.240 --> 01:34:17.920
to democracy than polarization because if you live in a world where the people on the other

1036
01:34:17.920 --> 01:34:21.840
side of the political divide aren't just your rivals and you don't just disagree with them of

1037
01:34:22.000 --> 01:34:27.680
taxes you know but they are your existential enemies and if they're in charge then you know the

1038
01:34:27.680 --> 01:34:34.560
world ends then it's very hard to have a normal democratic debate or create a normal you know have

1039
01:34:34.560 --> 01:34:42.240
a normal election do you want to see this it looks like a very old newspaper very old newspaper

1040
01:34:43.200 --> 01:34:56.240
from a long time ago and you're in it oh it's wow that's a that was that took a lot of research

1041
01:34:56.240 --> 01:35:01.760
yeah what is that that is I don't they don't even have these anymore that was in New York times

1042
01:35:01.760 --> 01:35:10.240
a wedding announcement from 1992 1992 I'm still married to the person who it was announced that I

1043
01:35:10.240 --> 01:35:16.400
was married a Polish he was then a journalist and now he's the Polish foreign minister

1044
01:35:17.360 --> 01:35:23.040
we got married in Washington but he was born in Poland and it's a long story but anyway

1045
01:35:23.040 --> 01:35:28.000
what's the photos of you here hmm interesting oh there's a nice one is all you looking very

1046
01:35:28.000 --> 01:35:32.960
presidential then that was a long time ago and I've got another one of him in Hillary Clinton right

1047
01:35:33.840 --> 01:35:40.160
politics is a bit a big part of your family's life in various ways I mean it would be hard

1048
01:35:40.160 --> 01:35:46.960
to deny that you know is it stressful because it's constant and it's and it's and it's more

1049
01:35:46.960 --> 01:35:51.680
polarizing than ever before and it's divisive and it's it's a lot of energy even talking about these

1050
01:35:51.680 --> 01:36:01.200
things I find to be quite energy training yes I mean actually became more stressful in more recent

1051
01:36:01.200 --> 01:36:07.360
years I mean social media made it more stressful than it used to be the stressful part is living

1052
01:36:07.360 --> 01:36:13.360
a part of your life in public we try to not live all of our lives in public this has been very useful

1053
01:36:13.360 --> 01:36:17.280
to me as a journalist actually you begin to understand the difference between what you look like in

1054
01:36:17.280 --> 01:36:23.280
public and what your reality is you know so people react to you in all kinds of ways depending on

1055
01:36:23.280 --> 01:36:27.360
how where they've seen you on TV or where they've what stories they've read about you some which

1056
01:36:27.360 --> 01:36:32.640
might not be true and there's often a kind of you know that the way you're perceived is not

1057
01:36:32.640 --> 01:36:38.800
necessarily the way you are and so I try to keep that in mind when I meet public figures you know

1058
01:36:38.800 --> 01:36:43.440
that I have a set of perceptions of them based on what I've read about them which I wouldn't have if

1059
01:36:43.440 --> 01:36:46.720
I met I don't know somebody introduces me to the next door neighbor I wouldn't have that in my

1060
01:36:46.720 --> 01:36:52.640
head when I met them but when you meet a politician or somebody who's who's well known you come

1061
01:36:53.200 --> 01:36:59.280
you come with stuff and I try when I meet people to drop it as much as I can because you've seen

1062
01:36:59.280 --> 01:37:05.520
that at home because I've seen it at home so yes I mean we have compatible lives that are somewhat

1063
01:37:05.520 --> 01:37:12.160
different I mean I have stayed will away from Polish politics I don't play any role in it I have a

1064
01:37:12.160 --> 01:37:16.240
different name from my husband which you know I didn't change my name and that was also has

1065
01:37:16.240 --> 01:37:24.400
let us allowed us to be separate and we share a lot of views but not all and so we you know we have

1066
01:37:24.400 --> 01:37:31.040
kind of different trajectories but as I said I find mostly knowing what it's like to be a politician

1067
01:37:31.040 --> 01:37:38.000
helps me understand them have you ever thought about going into politics yourself no you can't have

1068
01:37:38.000 --> 01:37:43.680
two politicians one family you know a lot of what I do is journalism or it's something our journalist

1069
01:37:43.680 --> 01:37:49.280
adjacent you know I go and try and find things I try and explain them I try and say what what I

1070
01:37:49.280 --> 01:37:54.960
think is happening and the job of help politician is quite different from that you know it's to you

1071
01:37:54.960 --> 01:38:01.600
arrive with a set of views you need to explain them to people you need to convince them it's just

1072
01:38:01.600 --> 01:38:05.440
it's a different it's a different way of thinking about approaching the public yeah so I'm not

1073
01:38:05.440 --> 01:38:10.880
I'm not campaigning for for a cause is there a particular outcome you're seeking with the work

1074
01:38:10.880 --> 01:38:14.880
that you do with the books that you write and the conversations you have is there one particular

1075
01:38:14.880 --> 01:38:21.120
outcome above all others that you're aiming at there's an outcome that's general but not

1076
01:38:21.120 --> 01:38:26.240
specific in other words I'm not trying to elect any particular person to be president I do have a

1077
01:38:26.240 --> 01:38:34.720
goal that is to remind people of why democracy is important why we need to maintain it and to pay

1078
01:38:34.720 --> 01:38:40.080
attention to the ways in which it's declining so that we can fight back I mean I have a I have a

1079
01:38:40.320 --> 01:38:45.440
broad goal in that sense and that's not only inside the United States why is this so personal to you

1080
01:38:47.760 --> 01:38:55.920
it's the thing I've been fascinated by since I was in my 20s why because I think it's I saw

1081
01:38:55.920 --> 01:39:00.880
the Soviet Union when it was still the Soviet Union I was a student in Leningrad when it was still

1082
01:39:00.880 --> 01:39:08.320
Leningrad I felt what it was like to live in a heavily autocratic society even briefly and I

1083
01:39:08.400 --> 01:39:15.040
have really spent the rest of my life trying to understand what it was how it worked why people

1084
01:39:15.040 --> 01:39:21.200
went along with it and I've also spent a lot of time more recently trying to warn people against

1085
01:39:21.200 --> 01:39:26.800
it against going in that direction you know it's also not the thing I thought I would be doing

1086
01:39:27.600 --> 01:39:32.560
I changed you know if you if you're looking at my books you know I wrote three history books

1087
01:39:32.560 --> 01:39:37.440
yeah I wrote the Gulag book I wrote a history in the Ukrainian famine I wrote a book of this is

1088
01:39:37.440 --> 01:39:41.520
a book about how the Soviet Union took over Eastern Europe how they sort of did regime change in

1089
01:39:41.520 --> 01:39:46.240
Eastern Europe for the war you know they're about things that happened you know in the distant past

1090
01:39:46.240 --> 01:39:55.520
but I had a realization in about 2014 2015 that I was living through a period of history myself

1091
01:39:55.520 --> 01:40:01.760
in other words there was a historical shift happening around me and I felt the need to start

1092
01:40:01.840 --> 01:40:07.680
recording it as a kind of eyewitness and so that book Twilight of Democracy was a description I

1093
01:40:07.680 --> 01:40:13.440
mean it starts with a description of a party I gave and then the book is about how people I knew

1094
01:40:13.440 --> 01:40:17.680
had changed I knew a lot of people who had been very radicalized I knew lots of people on the center

1095
01:40:17.680 --> 01:40:23.360
right you know we were anti-communists we were you know whatever thatcherites reignites and I

1096
01:40:23.360 --> 01:40:28.000
saw many of them become more radical and I thought this is a really important moment of change

1097
01:40:28.000 --> 01:40:32.480
and so I should record it as a witness and so that because the first book that I wrote in the first

1098
01:40:32.480 --> 01:40:40.000
person about something I'd seen and that was just me being affected by the world I live and maybe

1099
01:40:40.000 --> 01:40:44.640
it did matter that I was married to a politician because some things that you would have noticed in a

1100
01:40:44.640 --> 01:40:52.000
more distant way affected me personally maybe it was the particular circumstances of being both

1101
01:40:52.000 --> 01:40:57.440
American and Polish and you know seeing a similar pattern of things happening in both places either

1102
01:40:57.440 --> 01:41:02.080
way I felt that something important was happening and I've really been motivated for the last decade to

1103
01:41:02.080 --> 01:41:06.400
explain it to people and try and understand it in that regard what is the most important thing we

1104
01:41:06.400 --> 01:41:11.760
haven't talked about that we should have talked about and what would regime change really look like

1105
01:41:12.960 --> 01:41:21.760
in our country oh in the west yes isn't it just electing a new person what would it feel like to live

1106
01:41:21.760 --> 01:41:26.960
in a very different kind of society well how would you feel living in a place where suddenly the

1107
01:41:26.960 --> 01:41:33.200
values shifted they were different for better for us for the you know the the you know we think for

1108
01:41:33.200 --> 01:41:37.840
example free speech is a value and we've been arguing about it here what does it mean what's hate

1109
01:41:37.840 --> 01:41:42.160
speech you know how do we measure it and so on what if you suddenly found yourself waking up one

1110
01:41:42.160 --> 01:41:47.200
morning in a society where free speech was bad you know where it wasn't you didn't automatically

1111
01:41:47.200 --> 01:41:52.480
assume that it was good we also have an assumption that there is some kind of meritocracy in our

1112
01:41:52.480 --> 01:41:57.120
societies right that if you try hard and work hard and maybe you're lucky and study then you

1113
01:41:57.120 --> 01:42:02.080
can be successful what if you found yourself suddenly in a society where that wasn't true and

1114
01:42:02.080 --> 01:42:06.560
actually the only way to get ahead was to have a cousin in the ruling party being able to imagine

1115
01:42:06.560 --> 01:42:13.360
that and think about it is important for understanding this bigger issue of democratic decline like

1116
01:42:13.360 --> 01:42:18.080
what's the change of our system that we're trying to avoid and what does it feel like to people who

1117
01:42:18.080 --> 01:42:23.840
experience that this has been a subject of a lot of my book so that book iron curtain is about it

1118
01:42:23.840 --> 01:42:30.480
I've written a lot about Ukraine and what happened when the Russians occupied eastern Ukraine

1119
01:42:31.200 --> 01:42:36.400
they did this thing they did regime change they changed the rules of the society I think we don't

1120
01:42:36.400 --> 01:42:42.000
reflect enough about what what are the what are the deep rules of the societies we live in and what

1121
01:42:42.000 --> 01:42:51.680
we would lose if we lost it seems unimaginable and it seems quite far away and that is I guess a

1122
01:42:51.680 --> 01:42:56.320
privilege of having lived in a democratic society for my whole life that it's almost just seem I

1123
01:42:56.320 --> 01:43:03.120
guess I said like it seems like a theoretical concept but you know history they say it doesn't

1124
01:43:03.120 --> 01:43:08.080
repeat but it rhymes and I guess there's you know I believe that even if we don't know the time

1125
01:43:08.080 --> 01:43:14.160
frames I do believe that there are certain cycles in history that are accelerate or come about

1126
01:43:14.160 --> 01:43:20.480
because of human nature and so I'm also well aware that there are things that we can do or not do

1127
01:43:20.480 --> 01:43:27.600
that could lead us to go down the the slope of a bad a bad slope so then you don't believe in

1128
01:43:27.600 --> 01:43:31.280
another building well it's interesting I kind of believe in both which is I think that there's

1129
01:43:31.280 --> 01:43:36.320
this fundamental human nature which drives us which causes these cycles to occur and actually

1130
01:43:36.320 --> 01:43:41.360
won't even argue that it's inevitable that eventually we miss the signs and we go down the

1131
01:43:41.360 --> 01:43:46.480
slope but the time frames of that occurring or if it occurs that we still have agency and control

1132
01:43:46.480 --> 01:43:50.960
over that doesn't make sense or is that that's on a good total contradiction to believe in both

1133
01:43:50.960 --> 01:43:56.080
human nature it does cause these cycles but but at the same time today we have a choice we have

1134
01:43:56.080 --> 01:44:01.760
agency over whether we go in that direction yeah human I mean human nature is like we know how it

1135
01:44:01.760 --> 01:44:06.800
works and so it offers us some warnings right it's you know we we know what we should be trying

1136
01:44:06.800 --> 01:44:13.520
to avoid as I said if you if you focus hard on what it is that you don't want to happen I mean that's

1137
01:44:13.520 --> 01:44:18.160
what strategy is right and then you work backwards and you think how do I how do I make sure to

1138
01:44:18.160 --> 01:44:22.640
prevent that from happening you know then you you begin to get a pretty clear idea of what's

1139
01:44:22.640 --> 01:44:28.560
useful behavior in the present we have a closing tradition and whether last guest use a question

1140
01:44:28.560 --> 01:44:35.840
to next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for and the question after you what is the

1141
01:44:35.840 --> 01:44:39.840
most challenging setback you experienced and what's the lesson you want to pass on to others

1142
01:44:45.120 --> 01:44:51.280
I suppose the most I mean the most challenging things I've experienced have been political shifts

1143
01:44:52.000 --> 01:45:00.720
where I when I saw radicalization I saw the rise of illiberal groups and movements including

1144
01:45:01.520 --> 01:45:10.160
among people I knew closely and very well and figuring out both how to cope with them and how to

1145
01:45:10.160 --> 01:45:15.360
trying to you know shift my thinking in order to understand how to explain it and deal with it that

1146
01:45:15.360 --> 01:45:20.400
was probably the most important that was probably the most important how do you cope with them

1147
01:45:21.120 --> 01:45:27.280
someone in your life has a sort of a rather bad at it really interesting I am I mean lots of people

1148
01:45:27.280 --> 01:45:32.800
think that you know you should be able to you know be friends with everybody and talk to everybody

1149
01:45:32.800 --> 01:45:39.200
and I see that I see some people are able to do that I find that I care too much interesting

1150
01:45:39.200 --> 01:45:43.440
becomes hard for me do you think you could interview as a journalist do you think you could

1151
01:45:43.440 --> 01:45:50.000
interview anybody probably could interview anybody I mean there would be some people who are hard

1152
01:45:50.000 --> 01:45:54.160
to interview because they lie you know for example and then I don't know how to deal with that

1153
01:45:54.160 --> 01:45:57.520
yeah and you don't want to have an interview where you're correcting somebody the whole time

1154
01:45:57.520 --> 01:46:03.040
I was really talked to anybody as a journalist would you interview Trump yeah I mean he would

1155
01:46:03.040 --> 01:46:07.280
have he would pose exactly that problem because how would you deal with the fact that he's saying

1156
01:46:07.280 --> 01:46:11.120
something that's not true would you then say but Mr. President that's not true and then go down

1157
01:46:11.120 --> 01:46:16.720
that road of arguing with them or would you or would you just listen and write it down so you

1158
01:46:16.720 --> 01:46:20.480
worried it wouldn't be productive I'm worried it wouldn't be productive that that's also in my line

1159
01:46:20.480 --> 01:46:24.400
to be honest with them if people is there's some people that are really consequential so you feel

1160
01:46:24.400 --> 01:46:28.160
you should interview them but part of me worries that some of them wouldn't be it wouldn't be

1161
01:46:28.160 --> 01:46:33.920
productive anyway I wouldn't get anything out of them that is new or useful or productive so

1162
01:46:34.320 --> 01:46:39.200
right I mean I would I would talk to anybody who is who with whom you can have an argument and

1163
01:46:39.200 --> 01:46:43.920
who's reality-based and another thing is just people that don't take things off the record

1164
01:46:43.920 --> 01:46:47.040
because sometimes when we ask to interview people they'll say yes but as long as you don't talk

1165
01:46:47.040 --> 01:46:51.840
about this and for me that's a no go well I didn't take anything off you didn't thank you appreciate

1166
01:46:51.840 --> 01:46:56.400
that well you have so many wonderful books I had this also a cookbook which I didn't manage to

1167
01:46:56.400 --> 01:47:01.920
locate which is a bit of a diversion from from your subject manner but they are brilliant books

1168
01:47:01.920 --> 01:47:05.920
and the reason why I was very keen for my team to reach out to you and ask you to come today was

1169
01:47:06.560 --> 01:47:09.920
not because you write great books but you're a real demystifying force in the world that's

1170
01:47:09.920 --> 01:47:15.040
becoming incredibly misty for many of us in part because there's just so much information accessible

1171
01:47:15.040 --> 01:47:18.480
to all of us now but I highly recommend people go check out these wonderful books I'm going to

1172
01:47:18.480 --> 01:47:22.720
link them all below and many of them are a continuation of the themes and subjects we've talked

1173
01:47:22.720 --> 01:47:27.280
about or adjacent stories from history but you're a remarkable storyteller and and that's why I think

1174
01:47:27.280 --> 01:47:31.840
people love listening to you so much so I really appreciate you taking the time today to help

1175
01:47:31.920 --> 01:47:35.760
demystify all of this for me I actually have never had a conversation that is so centred on the

1176
01:47:35.760 --> 01:47:39.600
subject of democracy I've heard people talking about it for the last 10 years is this sort of

1177
01:47:39.600 --> 01:47:44.240
this thing that matters but this conversation has really opened my eyes to both the value of it

1178
01:47:44.240 --> 01:47:49.680
but also the risks and the slippery slope that causes societies to lose it so thank you so much

1179
01:47:49.680 --> 01:47:53.440
for doing what you do because it's incredibly important and as a as a 33 old that's lived most

1180
01:47:53.440 --> 01:47:59.120
in my life in the west and it's very easy to take democracy as a subject for granted I think I

1181
01:47:59.120 --> 01:48:04.800
have to be honest yes well it's it's normal it's it's it's the it's the water we swim in we're the

1182
01:48:04.800 --> 01:48:10.400
fish you know and the idea that there would someday not be waters unimaginable but thank you for

1183
01:48:10.400 --> 01:48:37.040
asking such such penetrating questions thank you