00:00:00
This was Trump's net worth when he went into office, $2.3 billion. And this is
00:00:04
his net worth now, just two years later. $6.5 billion. >> So, we've never had a president running
00:00:11
businesses while in office. And so, decisions are being made not based on what's good for Americans, but what's
00:00:17
good for his company. For example, why did the Saudi government invest $2 billion in Jared Kushner's fund? It
00:00:23
wasn't because they just like Jared Kushner. It was because Kushner is Trump's son-in-law. And so my biggest
00:00:29
concern is the deterioration of American democracy. I mean, it's already happening. Most people think democracies
00:00:35
end with tanks in the street or somebody shooting up the presidential palace, but
00:00:38
actually in the modern world, they mostly end because someone who is legitimately elected begins to take
00:00:44
apart the system. Trump, he has never cared much one way or the other for American democracy. He admires foreign
00:00:51
leaders who have no constraints. And I have a goal that is to remind people of why democracy is important and to pay
00:00:58
attention to the ways in which it's declining so that we can fight back. So we're just at the beginning of what
00:01:04
could be quite a big change. >> So there's five core tactics that autocratic leaders use to dismantle a
00:01:09
democracy. Could you walk me through the five tactics? >> So first of all,
00:01:16
>> this is super interesting to me. My team given me this report to show me how many
00:01:19
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00:01:24
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00:01:29
if you are a regular viewer of the show and you like what we do here. We're approaching quite a significant landmark
00:01:34
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00:01:39
team, everyone here to keep this show free, to keep it improving year over year and week over week, it is just to
00:01:45
hit that subscribe button and to double check if you've hit it. Only thing I'll
00:01:48
ever ask of you. Do we have a deal? If you do it, I'll tell you what I'll do.
00:01:52
I'll make sure every single week, every single month, we fight harder and harder
00:01:56
and harder and harder to bring you the guests and conversations that you want to hear. I've stayed true to that
00:01:59
promise since the very beginning of the D of Sio, and I will not let you down. Please help us. Really appreciate it.
00:02:05
Let's get on with the show. >> An Apple Bomb, what is it you spent the
00:02:13
last couple of decades of your life doing, understanding, studying, and sharing with the world? I started out as
00:02:19
somebody who was fascinated by the Soviet Union. I went there when it still existed as a as a student. I was lucky
00:02:26
enough to watch it fall apart. I was a journalist based in Warsaw at the time the Warsaw pack came to an end. Then I
00:02:33
spent some years writing history books trying to explain how control was maintained
00:02:40
over such a large space uh by so few people. But all that time, I thought that what I was doing was writing
00:02:46
stories about the distant past. I was analyzing a system that didn't exist anymore.
00:02:52
What's happened to me in the last decade is that I've discovered that a lot of
00:02:56
what I thought was over and done and belonged to some other era uh has come back. Most people think democracies end
00:03:03
with a coup d'eta or, you know, tanks in the street or somebody shooting up the
00:03:07
presidential palace. that actually in the modern world they mostly end because someone who is legitimately elected
00:03:15
begins to take apart the system and take away the things that ensure free elections can continue and I started
00:03:24
watching that happen in multiple countries at the same time and I saw this authoritarian instinct started to
00:03:31
come back and that's what I write about now >> are these just election cycles or is
00:03:36
there something bigger at play here because you know I spend a lot time reading articles from decades ago or
00:03:41
hundreds of years ago and in all times in history it seems that there were problems but it seems that the I don't
00:03:47
know the democratic system has a remarkable way every four years of clearing out what people weren't happy
00:03:52
with and putting something new in is this time different to the past >> what feels different to me is for the
00:03:58
first time in several established democracies most notably United States but not only you have political parties
00:04:04
who come to power with the explicit idea that they will alter the system in order
00:04:10
to make sure that they can stay in forever. The pioneer of this idea was Victor Orban in Hungary. He was elected
00:04:17
legitimately with a big margin and then what he did was slowly seek to capture the state. So what a democracy needs in
00:04:26
order to survive, in order to maintain its stability, it needs a few neutral institutions. You know, it needs
00:04:33
independent courts. It needs an independent electoral commission. It needs independent media. In the modern
00:04:40
world, it needs a meritocratic bureaucracy. So, people are hired and fired to measure pollution or worry
00:04:47
about traffic and road construction who aren't cousins of the ruling party. They
00:04:53
aren't somebody's friend, but they're actual experts who understand how to do
00:04:56
things. So you need those things to be in place in order to ensure that each time there's an electoral cycle, it's a
00:05:03
fair election. And you see people who are elected who who once they had power decided to take those institutions
00:05:12
apart. You know, if you think about democracy, it's actually a very strange system, right? So you win an election
00:05:20
and in a democracy you have to preserve the rules so that four years from now your bitter enemies can contest you and
00:05:29
maybe beat you again. You know you lose an election, you have to say okay we're
00:05:34
allowing our rivals to stay in power uh but we trust that the system will remain
00:05:40
fair so four years from now we can also contest them again. So it requires a certain level of agreement about the
00:05:47
nature of the system and when that begins to break down then you begin to have imbalances and then you begin to
00:05:54
have elections that seem unfair to people and then you begin to have a completely different kind of national
00:05:59
conversation and we can see that has happened in several places and of course most notably in the United States and
00:06:06
because the United States is the largest democracy because it's played the role
00:06:10
of leader of the democratic world the influence uence of America on other countries is pretty profound. Uh and so
00:06:17
this this idea that democracies can possibly break down is suddenly um both horrifying people but also interesting
00:06:25
to other people who say all right if you can do it in America you can do it here.
00:06:29
>> There's a part of me that just thinks that could never happen in America. And
00:06:36
that's obviously a bias that I have being 33 years old and not knowing a ton
00:06:39
about history. But there's I'm sure there's lots of people that think this
00:06:41
is some sort of theoretical idea, but it would never happen in America because we
00:06:45
would never allow America to not be a democracy. We wouldn't allow a a Russia
00:06:50
situation where you've got Putin sitting in power for two decades or whatever.
00:06:54
>> Sure, but there are systems in between Russia and liberal democracy. You can
00:06:59
have democracies that aren't fair. And actually, I'm afraid to tell you that in
00:07:03
the United States, there is a history of that. So the in the American South before the civil rights movement, you
00:07:09
very often had in effect in in the southern states, you had these one party states where, you know, the rules were
00:07:15
pretty rigged. Everybody knew who was going to win. Not everybody was allowed to vote. So black people weren't allowed
00:07:21
to vote or they were it was very heavily restricted. It was hard for them to vote. And that existed in the United
00:07:26
States, you know, between the Civil War and the and the 1960s, you had very undemocratic parts of the United States.
00:07:32
And I think some of the people who are in Washington right now in the Trump administration are working from that
00:07:39
history and from that historical memory. >> What is your biggest concern in this
00:07:43
regard? >> Well, I have two concerns. Uh, one is that inside the United States, the
00:07:50
deterioration of American democracy, I mean, it's already happening, right? So,
00:07:54
it's already creating a class of people who no longer feel they have a stake in
00:07:59
the political system and who won't vote, may never vote and fe and and will be
00:08:05
outside of politics and outside of the national conversation. That can lead in the direction of violence that can lead
00:08:10
in in all kinds of negative directions. We see the development of new kinds of um paramilitary in the United States
00:08:18
that we never had before. the development of ICE. We've never before had a single national police force
00:08:25
wearing combat uniforms, wearing masks, not subject to the normal restrictions of local police forces. We also have a
00:08:32
rise in um high-end corruption. The president, people around him, companies close to him seem to have access to ways
00:08:42
to make money and are making money out of doing politics in a way that was also not possible at that scale in America
00:08:48
before. And that's sort of one whole set of concerns if you want to go down one
00:08:51
of those roads. >> There's this map in front of us on the table. I realize some people can't see
00:08:55
because they're listening, but there's a map on the table in front of us. Could
00:08:58
you just explain what this map shows and why it's significant? >> The map shows the level of of democracy
00:09:04
around the world. And of course, the thing that's immediately notable to me is that those who made the map don't
00:09:09
count the United States anymore as a liberal democracy. Mhm. >> So at a liberal democracy, meaning a
00:09:15
state where, as I said, the electoral rules are clear, where the electoral system is set up not to favor one party
00:09:21
or the next, and instead it's described as an electoral democracy, which is somewhat less free. You see similar
00:09:28
systems in South America. In Europe, you mostly still have liberal democracies. In Australia, Japan, South Korea, you
00:09:34
still have liberal democracies. And then most of the rest of the world are some form of autocracy. Either very closed
00:09:42
and very repressive like China or like Russia or they are in a democratic gray zone. So there are states that could
00:09:49
really go in either direction. I mean they're still they're still open. But
00:09:52
it's true that if you'd looked at a map like this a decade ago or two decades
00:09:56
ago, it would have been a lot bluer than the the blue being democracy and the red
00:10:01
or reddish being autocracy. So you do see a an absolute process of democratic decline that's been written about um by
00:10:09
many people over the last few years. I I I think I believe very much that states
00:10:14
influence one another. People follow and imitate and copy their neighbors. >> Do you think it's possible that in our
00:10:20
lifetimes the US might become an orth orcratic country? So the US could become a what I think on
00:10:32
this map is described as an autocratic gray zone. So you could imagine the US as in effect a one party state. So a
00:10:40
state where one political party has control and the other just can't win national elections. you already have
00:10:49
this system of we call it gerrymandering where electoral districts are being written in such a way as to favor one
00:10:56
party or the another. The effect of that also is that once you have people who don't really have to contest elections
00:11:02
anymore, then you have corruption. Because if you're going to win anyway, why do you have to worry about your
00:11:07
constituents? then you have worse government and worse services because if you don't have to have a an electoral
00:11:14
contest then you know you can pursue your own interests. You can do favors for businessmen who help you in other
00:11:20
ways. And we see this decline of democracy already at the state level. And of course there could be a danger at
00:11:25
the national level of a fixed system that made sure only one party ever wins. And then you would get all these
00:11:33
pathologies that we already have at the state level. We're beginning to have
00:11:36
them uh even now. And remember, we have right now a president who refused to accept the result of an election in 2020
00:11:45
and who staged what was intended to be an electoral coup. Uh it failed. But, you know, the idea that he wouldn't do
00:11:54
it again or nobody would ever dare to do that or nobody would block an election,
00:11:58
I think it's pretty naive at this point. I mean, it happened already. Um, and so
00:12:04
of course it can happen again. >> Do you think he's going to try and get a
00:12:07
third term in office? >> I don't think so because I don't think he wants one.
00:12:12
>> Um, but I think it's possible that people around him will try to shape and
00:12:18
affect the elections in a way that makes sure that a Republican wins >> or maybe his his children.
00:12:25
>> It's very possible that one of his children will run for president >> because there's a way to kind of control
00:12:30
power in America. You know, when they they talk about MAGA, which is, I guess, a collection of people now. You know,
00:12:35
you could say Jay Vance is part of MAGA and the kids and Trump. So, maybe they'd
00:12:40
want to keep it within MAGA. Maybe that's the >> they might or they might want to want to
00:12:44
keep it within the family. I mean, look, what is MAGA now? You know, what what what is different about Trump's second
00:12:50
term from Trump's first term. So, one of the things that happened after January
00:12:55
the 6 after the attack on the Congress was that many of the people who'd been
00:13:01
around Trump, Republicans, people who do foreign policy, people who do domestic policy,
00:13:08
left. They said, "Right, this is too much for us. You know, we're we're
00:13:11
American patriots. You know, we can't support this kind of attack on our political system." And they departed his
00:13:17
presence. But that exactly that moment that attack on the electoral system attracted other
00:13:23
people. >> So for different reasons, people who disliked the American political system,
00:13:28
who don't like democracy, don't like liberal democracy, thought it was leading America in a leftwing direction.
00:13:34
Some of them have political reasons. They were attracted to Donald Trump because they said, "Right, this is
00:13:38
somebody who has the nerve to try and overthrow the system, and we like that."
00:13:42
And they're they're they're not all the same. They have different views. So
00:13:45
there's a tech authoritarian group who want influence over the American political system because it's good for
00:13:51
their businesses and because they don't get the point of democracy anyway and
00:13:54
they think they should be in charge. There's a a kind of Christian nationalist group who think the United
00:14:00
States should not be a secular state. It should be a Christian state and they want to they are interested in taking
00:14:05
over the system um with that. And and then there's a traditional MAGA group who think the United States should be
00:14:10
run by the people who used to run it. you know, kind of white Christian people of a certain kind and they want to bring
00:14:16
the United States back in that direction. So, they're they're different views. Um, and they don't all agree with
00:14:22
each other, but they they do agree that the system requires radical change and that's the difference between the first
00:14:28
and second term. So, Trump's first term, I think he has never cared much one way
00:14:34
or the other for American democracy. He personally sees himself as someone who should be allowed to act in any way he
00:14:40
wants. He doesn't like any kind of constraint. Um he admires foreign leaders who have no constraints, but he
00:14:46
was one way or another constrained in in in his first term by the system and now
00:14:50
he's surrounded himself by people who are seeking to help him avoid those constraints. And that's that's new.
00:14:56
>> I think when we have these conversations, we assume that everybody agrees that democracy is the better
00:15:01
path. >> Sure. >> And that they understand the downsides of an autocracy. So there are different
00:15:06
kinds of autocracies to be clear and some are some are more repressive than others. The the main thing that you
00:15:13
would notice the first thing that you would notice would be the absence of the rule of law. Rule of law means that
00:15:20
judges and courts and the legal system make decisions based on the constitution or on the laws. And in an autocracy you
00:15:29
have rule by law. And that means that the law is what the person in power says it is.
00:15:34
>> Mhm. And so if you did a program for example and someone on your program said
00:15:40
something that was offensive to the leader of the country, you could be arrested and you could be put on trial.
00:15:47
And instead of the court saying, "Right, we we've looked at this case and
00:15:51
according to the law, we have in the law it says we have freedom of speech and you can do whatever you want," they
00:15:56
could somebody could could ring up from the Kremlin or from the White House or from, you know, whatever is the
00:16:02
leadership of your country and say, "No, actually, we want this guy in jail and
00:16:05
we don't care what the courts think." Um, and that's the big difference here.
00:16:09
I'll tell you a real story that happened in Hungary when Hungary was going down
00:16:12
the road in the direction of a one party state. You can be the CEO of a company and people can come and knock on your
00:16:18
door and they can say, "We would like you to sell us a majority share in your
00:16:23
company and you say, 'N no, why should I let you do that? I I my company, I built
00:16:28
it. I invested in it. I don't want to sell it." And then, okay, so what
00:16:32
happens the next day? Somebody breaks the windows of your house. A few days later, your children are harassed on the
00:16:38
way to school. People who work for you start having legal problems. this or that, you know, some kind of mortgage
00:16:44
issue or some, you know, and you suddenly your company encounters regulatory issues. There's a tax
00:16:50
inspection and one by one, the state finds a way to harass you, to harass your company, your workers, so that
00:16:57
eventually you say, "Okay, I give up. I sell and I'm leaving the country." And
00:17:00
this happened to somebody I know. Sounds like um anthropic in the United States recently where an anthropic the AI
00:17:06
company refused to give the United States access to its AI under certain conditions and then very quickly Pete
00:17:14
Pete Hegsth did a a post I think and Donald Trump did a post basically saying that they were going to restrict their
00:17:20
ability to work with the government. >> We aren't used to the idea that the
00:17:25
government decides which companies thrive and which ones die, you know. So once you have an an autocratic state
00:17:32
that can do what it wants legally, then it can decide which companies succeed. It can base government contracts which
00:17:39
are very important in every country not on who's the best company or not on some
00:17:44
kind of blind procurement process but on who's your friend you know or or who's
00:17:49
donated to your political party or who's in the case of the United States who's
00:17:53
invested in your company. So one of the things that we have in the United States
00:17:56
for the first time ever I think is a president who is actively doing business in countries and in areas that are of
00:18:06
interest to the people he's doing business with. So for example the Trump family does business in Saudi Arabia. It
00:18:12
has a it has a deal with a a Saudi company called um Dar Alakan which is a sort of development company and it that
00:18:19
company has close relations to the Saudi leadership. The Saudi leadership is interested in deals with the United
00:18:27
States, but I mean political arrangement with the United States and the money is
00:18:31
going into the Trump family coffers in order to make a better arrangement for the country of Saudi Arabia. So it's a
00:18:38
way in which because we have a declining democracy and because we have a increasingly kleptocratic system
00:18:44
decisions are being made by the president of the United States by the white house not based on what's good for
00:18:49
Americans but on what's good for his company and that's and that if you look
00:18:53
at Russia that's exactly how the political system works there if you look at China is more complicated it's a
00:18:59
bigger country it's more sophisticated but even there you have again decisions
00:19:04
made not for the welfare of the Chinese people, but for the ruling party, for the Communist Party.
00:19:12
>> And we have two uh jars of money here. This was uh Trump's net worth when he
00:19:17
went into office, $2.3 billion reportedly. And this is his net worth now, just 2 years later.
00:19:25
$6.5 billion. Looks like being a president is a profitable job. >> So that has never happened before. This
00:19:32
is completely new in American history. There have been presidents who there have been whiffs of corruption around
00:19:37
them. There's been, you know, presidential relatives who've tried to trade off the president's name. But
00:19:43
we've never had a president running businesses while in office. And as I said, in such a way that the people with
00:19:51
whom he's doing business are are hoping to benefit politically or or or in other
00:19:56
ways. And that's that's completely brand new. And if you just back to your
00:20:00
original question, which is why is democracy better? Churchill was the person who said that democracy is the
00:20:05
worst system of government except for all the others. So it's a multi-reasons
00:20:09
why it's flawed. You know democracies have require an immense amount of tolerance. There's always a lot of
00:20:15
cacaphony. There's a constant flux and change that that people find innervating. But at the very least what
00:20:22
democracies can do is they can force issues like this into the public sphere. you know, you're allowed at least in a
00:20:29
democracy to question whether uh this decisions are being made in on the basis that they're good for everybody or
00:20:35
they're being made for the benefit of the president. >> I guess supporters would say, you know,
00:20:39
Trump's not running the businesses himself. It's just his kids activity that is generating this net worth.
00:20:47
>> Yeah. But I mean, everybody knows that they're his kids and you you wouldn't do
00:20:52
it. You know, why why did the Saudi government invest $2 billion in Jared Kushner's fund? It wasn't because they
00:20:59
just like Jared Kushner. It was because Kushner is Trump's son-in-law. And now,
00:21:04
of course, Kushner is the Trump administration's negotiator in the Middle East. Um, so he's negotiating
00:21:11
with his business partners. The appearance of conflict of interest is overwhelming. And as I said, we've never
00:21:18
had in American history or I think in recent British history, we've never had
00:21:22
that kind of conflict of interest so clear at that at that high a level. >> Do you spend much time thinking about
00:21:29
what's going on in the Middle East, the wars in Iran and what in Venezuela and
00:21:33
the bigger picture here of what's happening and how this might link back to what you were saying about
00:21:38
authoritarian regimes. It's all very confusing. I I feel like we went through
00:21:42
a period of relative peace through the Biden era and Trump obviously ran on this promise that he wasn't going to
00:21:48
start new wars. Um and we seem to be having a lot of wars. Russia and Ukraine still raging on doesn't seem to be
00:21:54
nearer to any conclusion and now there's this war in Iran that threatens to be a
00:22:00
neverending war. What is what what what >> there are several things going on. One
00:22:06
of them is that in declining democracies and in historically in autocracies is you have leaders who conduct wars as a
00:22:16
way of consolidating their base and consolidating their support. Uh and so one of the things that Trump likes to do
00:22:22
is if he declares a war, I believe he had a different expectation of the Iran war. He's using foreign policy. He's
00:22:28
using these fighting of wars in order to consolidate his support at home. So that's that's a part of what's
00:22:32
happening. But some of this is nothing to do with Trump. You know, we are now living in a world where the historical
00:22:39
political system, um, the one that was built after 1945, some people call it the liberal world order, I don't really
00:22:45
like that term because it sounds kind of mushy, but the the order that has existed since 1945, the one that was
00:22:52
somewhat based on the UN, that was based on a set of rules and treaties, that order has begun to break down. And it's
00:22:59
breaking down for several reasons. one we've started to discuss already which
00:23:03
is changes inside the United States and the United States was an really important pillar of that order but it's
00:23:09
also breaking down because the autocratic powers uh Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela until recently uh and
00:23:17
and others have been challenging that order for a while themselves. They didn't like the American dominance of
00:23:26
you know of international politics in the conversation. they were competing with America at a at a strategic level
00:23:32
but also in what is really a war of ideas. So let's go back to autocracy and
00:23:37
democracy. You know if you are the leader of Russia or you're the leader of China, what is the thing that is most
00:23:43
threatening to you? And the answer is the language of liberal democracy. So all this stuff that we find boring and
00:23:52
we're used to and you know this idea of freedom of speech and separation of powers and rule of law all those things
00:23:59
that we have come to take for granted in our societies are a huge challenge to the political system in Russia or China.
00:24:07
You know what is Putin most afraid of? He's most afraid of a street revolution
00:24:12
of the kind we had in Ukraine in 2014. So when people are standing on the street and they have signs saying we're
00:24:18
against corruption, you know, we want democracy, we want to be in the European Union, we want to be integrated with
00:24:23
Europe, he's afraid of that happening in Russia because if you live in an autocratic state where you don't have
00:24:29
freedom of speech, where there is no justice, where the government decides what all the rules are, then those ideas
00:24:37
are explosive and exciting, the same way they were in the 18th century when when
00:24:40
they first appeared in the Declaration of Independence. And people can be motivated by them. People will go into
00:24:45
the street for them. People will risk their lives for them. And the autocrats know that. And so really for the past
00:24:52
decade since 2013, 2014, you see them seeking to spread those ideas to promote them. I mean, we all know now about
00:25:02
Russian propaganda campaigns. We know what Russian disinformation looks like. There's a Chinese version, too, which we
00:25:07
don't see that much in English, but it appears in in other countries. We see
00:25:11
them seeking to undermine democracy, trying to spread the influence of a different set of ideas. So the war in
00:25:19
Ukraine is exactly that war. The Russians are firstly trying to destroy Ukraine as a nation. They want it to
00:25:27
disappear. This is they're they're an empire. They want Ukraine to be their
00:25:30
colony. And they understood perfectly well that by challenging Ukraine, by invading Ukraine, they were defying this
00:25:38
liberal world order. They were defying the rules of post-war Europe because in post-war Europe, there was a decision
00:25:44
made after 1945. We're not going to invade each other anymore. We're not
00:25:47
going to have wars. Instead, we're going to decide everything by by diplomacy.
00:25:51
Borders will not be changed by force. And the Russians understood that they were breaking that that norm. And they
00:25:57
invaded Ukraine. They also invaded Ukraine because the Ukrainians were using that language, that powerful
00:26:03
democratic language that we take for granted. And Putin said, "If they can do
00:26:07
it in Ukraine, then people could do it in Russia. and so I need to crush this Ukrainian democracy movement. And so
00:26:12
that war really is a fault line between the democratic world and the autocratic world. So I think what what you're
00:26:18
seeing is the breakdown of an older system that was more or less organized around by American rules.
00:26:27
>> Through history, which lasts longer, democracy or autocracy? >> Oh, autocracies.
00:26:33
>> They last longer. Well, look, if you look back in history, most human societies in most times have been what
00:26:38
you would we would now call autotocracy, but they were whatever. They were monarchies. They were led by tribal
00:26:43
leaders, by warlords. There have been very, very few liberal democracies. And most of them have not lasted. And I
00:26:50
should also say the people who wrote the American Constitution knew that. And when they wrote it, they were reading
00:26:56
the history of ancient Rome. There was a Roman Republic and it fell when it was taken over by Julius Caesar. So, they
00:27:01
all knew that story. They were reading about the Greek democracies, Athens, which also fell. And when they wrote the
00:27:08
US Constitution, they were thinking, how do we make this last? What can we put in
00:27:12
it to make it last? It's a longer story whether you think they were successful
00:27:16
or not. But everybody who created democracies, whether it was after World War II in Europe, whether it was America
00:27:21
in the 18th century, everybody understood that this was a fragile system. And they tried to put checks and
00:27:28
balances, you know, judicial, legislative, and executive power. They tried to create
00:27:34
systems that would ward off the impulse towards autocracy. >> I don't know if you have the answer to
00:27:39
this question, but where are people happier on average in a democracy or in autocracy?
00:27:44
>> So, I have to tell you, I know a little bit about happiness surveys, and over
00:27:48
and over and over again, the happiest place in the world is Finland. Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Scandinavia is
00:27:56
very happy. >> The reasons for that may not be anything to do with the nature of the political
00:28:01
system might have other sources, but the happiness is certainly connected to democracy. It's connected to stability
00:28:06
and of course connected to wealth. Just looking at some research here. It says, "While wealth and economic stability are
00:28:11
critical for happiness, regardless of the government type, democracy provides additional structural benefits like
00:28:15
participation, security, and lower corruption that tend to lift a society's overall life satisfaction.
00:28:22
>> Well, democracies by definition are at least in theory, the state is structured
00:28:27
in a way to benefit everybody, right? At least that's how it's supposed to work.
00:28:31
Mhm. >> So whether it's a national health care system or whether it's a system of roads
00:28:37
and railroads, you know, the state is building things that are designed to serve everybody in an autocracy that
00:28:43
doesn't necessarily happen. So in Russia, ordinary Russians have no influence on that decision. They have no
00:28:48
way of expressing their views. They can't say what they think. They have no ability to influence the state. They
00:28:54
can't say, "Well, actually, hey, we'd like to build a hospital instead of
00:28:57
bombing another city in Ukraine." And so they have very little ability to change
00:29:00
the system and that and that of course creates frustration and unhappiness. >> If that is true and this is why I asked
00:29:05
the question if it's better for the people and at some degree I think if informed people would choose it which I
00:29:13
think is and I say the word informed because I I understand in a lot of these countries where they don't have
00:29:17
democracy I'm now using don't have democracy instead of having to say that
00:29:20
word again. They limit the access to information so that people don't know what they're missing out on, I guess, or
00:29:26
don't have those potentially disruptive ideas. They're not exposed to them on
00:29:31
their on their phones or devices. I I would think a person would choose to live in a democracy if given the choice
00:29:36
and the information. >> I would think so. Although you know there are other you know there
00:29:43
there's a deep human need for a sense of stability and security and hierarchy for
00:29:51
some people >> and it's true that authoritarians seem to offer that. You know in a democracy
00:29:58
you do have this constant change of leaders. You know there's more demands on citizens. You know you have to
00:30:03
participate if you care about your country. It's not just enough to vote. you need to be involved in politics in
00:30:08
some way. And autocracies, I mean, I think falsely offer stability. And so the the argument of the Russians and
00:30:16
Chinese governments and the argument they make on in those social media campaigns that they run inside the US or
00:30:21
the UK or Europe is exactly that, authoritarianism, stability, safety, traditional values, hierarchy. And there
00:30:28
are people for whom that's deeply appealing. So I I wouldn't discount that
00:30:32
instinct. And when people like that are also able to control information, when they control the security services, when
00:30:38
they monopolize the use of violence, they can be very hard to undo even if the majority of the country wants
00:30:44
something different. >> It's almost hard for me to understand how the people in Russia are okay with
00:30:50
the fact that their the leader has been there for several decades and isn't moving.
00:30:55
But it's hard for us to understand because in the UK or in America, we there would be people on the streets.
00:30:59
>> It doesn't matter what they think >> really. Well, because they have no way
00:31:03
of expressing what they think. There's no such thing as public opinion or public debate. There's no there's no
00:31:10
forum you can join where you can say what you you could express your views in a way that's fair. And and if you do
00:31:16
say, I think Putin should be, you know, it's time for him to retire, you could
00:31:20
be arrested. And so people begin to adjust what they think and they begin to change their behavior because they know
00:31:28
that it's dangerous to say things. I mean, this is something this is a phenomenon I found in the work I did
00:31:32
years ago on the Soviet Union. The propagandist said how successful we are and how much hay we've grown this year
00:31:38
and how many bits of steel we've made and it was always fake. And so the question was always, well, did people
00:31:43
really believe that? Did people believe in the system? Do they believe in the propaganda? And the answer was a little
00:31:49
weird. It was convenient for them to believe it. In other words, in order to get on in life, you had to believe it or
00:31:55
you had to say you believed it. And at a certain point, what they really thought,
00:32:00
like deep in the back of their mind, didn't matter because there was no way to say what you think. And that's what
00:32:07
you have in Russia. Again, now it's for me very tragic because there was a period in Russia in the 90s and 2000s
00:32:12
when there was open debate and people were speaking freely and clearly about about the state of the country. But
00:32:18
right now it's it's once again a situation where expressing your views is dangerous and
00:32:23
so people just don't do it and they try to stay out of politics altogether. You
00:32:27
know, politics is dangerous and ugly and nasty. Like just stay home. And remember
00:32:32
that this is something that's developed over years. It didn't happen from one
00:32:36
day to the next. It was a decline that's been happening since the year 2000.
00:32:40
>> I've heard you say that there's five core tactics that autocratic leaders use
00:32:44
to dismantle a democracy. Could you walk me through the five tactics and maybe also link them to things that are
00:32:50
happening now in in the West which might be warning signs of the dismantling of one's democracy?
00:32:56
>> Well, corruption, we've done that one already. >> Mhm. >> Corruption you have in any political
00:33:02
system, and you often have it in democracies, too. But in an autocratic society, you have more corruption
00:33:10
because the the legal system is controlled. And so what you have for example in the United States the fact
00:33:15
that Donald Trump has taken over our department of justice and has installed loyalists who are looking among other
00:33:23
things for example to pro prosecute his enemies just because they're his enemies. That means you have a check and
00:33:30
balance. So normally if there was high level corruption in the White House or in the administration you would have
00:33:36
people inside the Department of Justice and the FBI who would investigate it. But now we don't have that happening.
00:33:41
>> Is that different from the past? It's different. It's different. I mean, we
00:33:44
didn't have anybody try to use the White House to make money in this way before.
00:33:48
So, hard for me to say what would have happened in like, I don't know, the Clinton administration, but we didn't
00:33:54
have a completely politicized civil service, completely politicized FBI who would avoid, you know, any any kind of
00:34:02
investigation. Um, and so corruption is a particular symptom of authoritarianism, and it's also a tool.
00:34:09
you know, it's something that the president can offer people. You get along with me, you don't criticize me,
00:34:15
your business will prosper. You know, you will get government contracts. >> Is that what we're seeing with all these
00:34:20
big tech CEOs that seem to be going frequently to the White House and saying wonderful things about him and his
00:34:25
support and having dinner with him and none of them speaking out? But if you look at their Twitter feeds a couple
00:34:30
years ago, they were all saying the most horrific things about Trump. >> Yes. I mean I mean they they've
00:34:35
understood that, you know, if this is going to be a an American administration that you have to genulect the president,
00:34:42
you have to be sickantic to the president in order to get business deals, um then they'll do it. If you
00:34:48
have to donate to his White House reconstruction fund, which many of them have done, then you'll do it. If you
00:34:54
have to donate to his inauguration, you'll you'll do it. It's a question of
00:34:58
who is supposed to be the beneficiary of government regulation. It's supposed to
00:35:02
be Americans. I mean, ordinary people, we're supposed to become more pro prosperous. The beneficiary is not
00:35:09
supposed to be, as I said, the president and his family and his entourage. And that is a big shift in in in American
00:35:16
politics. >> When I look back at someone like like the CEO of OpenAI's statements on Trump,
00:35:20
if you go back to 2016, he said he was an unprecedented threat to America and called him a potential disaster for the
00:35:26
American economy. He said he was irresponsible in the way dictators are and compared his rhetoric to the big lie
00:35:32
tactics used by historical authoritarians like Hitler. He described him as erratic, abusive, and prone to
00:35:37
fits of rage. And then I see him side by side at the White House saying nice things about him and saying nothing
00:35:45
critical at all. >> It's one of the most bizarre things actually about this whole
00:35:49
administration. you know, if I were that rich, like what's the point of being
00:35:54
rich unless if you can't say what you think? >> Mhm. >> You know, I don't I don't understand the
00:36:00
value of it. >> Can I hazard a guess as to why the like incentive structure they're trapped in?
00:36:04
>> What's your guess? >> I think that being rich for these people
00:36:07
is actually just a proxy of status. And I think the thing that risks their status, which is what they care about
00:36:12
more than anything else in the games that they're playing, is losing to their
00:36:15
direct competition. And it's quite clear to me that if someone like Sam Alman was
00:36:18
to say anything negative about Trump, it would of course hurt his business, but actually it would hurt something more,
00:36:23
which is his status. He would lose to anthropic and XAI and Gemini. To lose in your category of peers, which the all
00:36:30
these sort of tech oligarchs are in like category of peers would hurt more than anything. I think it would hurt more
00:36:36
than losing a gazillion dollars is just like losing the the game. >> Yeah. There are two things about it. One
00:36:41
is it's very shortsighted >> because ultimately who will suffer if there is a decline in in in the American
00:36:49
political system in the American legal system? I mean it's them. >> Maybe they've gotten used to paying to
00:36:54
play >> in a way. >> They they have but it's a it's a it's a
00:36:58
mug's game. I mean it's fine as long as you're one of the people who are
00:37:01
winning, but what if what if the rules change? >> Oh yeah. Like like in Russia with the
00:37:05
oligarchs put >> That's right. I'm sick of these oligarchs. I want different oligarchs.
00:37:08
And that happened in China, too. So it's a so that's one um argument against it.
00:37:12
The second argument is and I think anthropic might have figured this out already and some of the law firms have
00:37:17
figured it out. There's also a game to be made by saying no I'm independent. We
00:37:22
have our own corporate rules. We have our own legal code of ethics and we're
00:37:25
going to behave as patriotic Americans and then you attract business >> and they and they may be doing all of
00:37:31
it. And as I said there's a there's a parallel thing that happened with US law
00:37:33
firms. there were some frivolous lawsuits and they settled them and then there were some who said no we won't
00:37:38
settle we won't do that and the ones who didn't do it have all won you know and
00:37:43
they're all thriving I mean so there is also a benefit to be gained both commercially and financially and I would
00:37:50
think even in that weird world of status by standing up for what you believe in and by remembering the bigger picture
00:37:57
and the bigger picture is what happens to the United States I mean the United States is your main market it's where
00:38:01
your employees come from it's the place where you're doing business and if if
00:38:05
the United States begins to suffer then you suffer too and so thinking a little bit like that would might help some of
00:38:10
them. >> Is this just another 3 years of this sort of you know unusual behavior before
00:38:15
we resume business as usual in in in our democracies. >> I'm I'm asked this by Europeans all the
00:38:21
time and my sense is that a lot of things will not ever be quite normal again either inside the US or around the
00:38:27
world. I mean, I I would advise, for example, I mean, if you're doing business with the US or you're a
00:38:33
security partner of the US, I would strongly recommend that you have plan B. You know, it's really time for NATO to
00:38:41
have a plan in case the United States flakes out, to have a different security option. You know, what happens to the US
00:38:48
after Trump isn't clear? First of all, the next president could be JD Vance,
00:38:51
who I think is even more committed to the project of making America into a one party state. Or the next president could
00:38:58
be a Democrat we haven't heard of yet, who decides to use the broken system in
00:39:04
order to take advantage of it in a different way. I mean, I hope that won't happen, but you can't count it out. I
00:39:09
mean, once the norms are broken and once the laws have changed, then it can be anybody can take advantage of it. I
00:39:14
mean, if if Trump can use the federal bureaucracy to threaten media companies, then why can't the next president? And
00:39:22
so, you know, you certain things don't necessarily get fixed once they're
00:39:26
broken. >> On that point of global partners of the US now thinking about their own defense
00:39:30
and themselves more. Is that a pattern that you're seeing? just from my observations of you know we're we're sat
00:39:36
here in London at the moment but my observations of the UK the UK used to consider ourselves to be the great
00:39:42
alliance sort of partner of America >> special relationship >> that we had the special relationship
00:39:46
which I never knew what it meant but I always liked it seems like that's gone
00:39:49
out the window >> and the UK are now speaking a lot to like President Mccron in France and it
00:39:54
seems like we're having our own little European meetings but around the world
00:39:57
it seems that that's happening Canada don't seem to be a great ally of the US
00:40:00
anymore after they threaten to invade them. What it what is happening from that perspective? Are we are we becoming
00:40:06
more individualistic and breaking into our own little groups because of Trump's
00:40:10
rhetoric? >> What you're watching is everybody all over the world hedging. Everybody is
00:40:16
looking for alternatives. So you now have an EU India trade agreement which nobody would have bothered to do a few
00:40:22
years ago. You have Canada in initiating a security relationship with the EU. you have conversations
00:40:31
inside NATO about, you know, realistically if the United States weren't to help us in case of a Russian
00:40:37
attack, what would we do? So that's those aren't really public conversations, but privately lots of
00:40:41
people are having them. Everywhere you go, you see these so-called middle powers. This is a term that Mark Carney
00:40:46
of Canada first started using. You know, Brazil, India, the EU countries begin, Japan, you see them beginning to make
00:40:54
new relationships with one another. You know, if the United States flakes out and we can't trade with them in a normal
00:41:00
way anymore because the president changes the trading rules every 5 minutes, then at least we'll have a
00:41:05
decent trading relationship with somebody else. I I travel a lot. I've traveled a lot in the last three months
00:41:10
and everywhere I go, that's the main topic of conversation. Canada was completely integrated with the United
00:41:16
States. I mean, it didn't almost didn't have an independent economy. And now
00:41:20
that Canadians are thinking, how do we benefit from our oil and gas wealth to protect our sovereignty? Who else do we
00:41:26
do deals with? Carney's been to China. He's, you know, also talking to India.
00:41:29
With whom will we share potentially share nuclear technology? There are these conversations between France and
00:41:35
Poland and France and Germany about a different kind of nuclear umbrella. It's
00:41:39
all pretty tentative, but it's it's moved much faster than I would ever expected. I think the breaking point for
00:41:44
a lot of people in Europe was Greenland. And I don't know if people have really
00:41:50
focused on what exactly happened there, but you had the president of the United States saying he was going to invade
00:41:57
Denmark. All right, there we go. So, the United States was saying it was going to
00:42:02
invade Greenland. So, Trump was kind of hinting it in public and behind the scenes there were other signs that maybe
00:42:09
they were really preparing to do it. And so, what did that mean in Denmark? That
00:42:13
meant that the Danes said, "Okay, we're preparing for a US invasion." And this
00:42:19
is a very, this is a country that's very pro-American. Lots of big Danish companies in the United States,
00:42:25
including the ones who create the the weight loss drugs. Lots of Danish American travel, friendship, everything,
00:42:32
security relationship going back to to the Second World War. Okay, the Americans are invading. What do we do?
00:42:38
Do we blow up the airports in Greenland? And they did start planning that. Do we
00:42:44
plan to shoot down American planes? Are we going to shoot at American soldiers? You know, are they going to shoot at us?
00:42:51
And they had to suddenly imagine a real war with their closest ally and how that
00:42:59
would impact them and impact trade and impact NATO and so on. And not only did they have to do it, their close allies
00:43:04
in Europe did it, too. So the Germans were consulting with the Danes all through this period. You know, what if
00:43:09
the Danes shoot down an American plane? like how does that affect us? And everybody went through this kind of
00:43:14
traumatic experience of imagining a US invasion of a NATO ally. And then Trump made a speech at Davos where he somehow
00:43:22
changed the subject and confused Greenland and Iceland a few times and you know and it got put off. But no one
00:43:29
has recovered. Everybody remembers that moment and said, "Okay, this is a this
00:43:34
is an unstable power. They could do real damage to us. they can't be relied on.
00:43:41
We need alternatives. And so really since then, and that was in January, since then, this is when you've seen
00:43:46
this the stuff you were talking about, you know, the visits to China, the visits to Canada, um the back and forth
00:43:52
with India, and you see you see everybody hedging and rearranging the way they think about the world.
00:43:57
>> If you're an American, is this good news or bad news that the rest of the world
00:44:01
is hedging? >> It's very bad news. >> Why? because a lot of America's
00:44:06
prosperity in the post-war period has been based on the fact that America was dominant in global trade and you know we
00:44:14
make money out of our European relationships. Um you know we produce things that we sell all over the world
00:44:19
and actually you know we import things from all over the world and that's good
00:44:22
too. You know the the root of American post-war prosperity is is are these relationships especially with Europe um
00:44:28
and also the root of America's security dominance. I mean why are there NATO
00:44:33
bases in Europe? It's not just to protect Europe. It's also because from
00:44:36
there the US can project power into the Middle East. It has it can you know into
00:44:41
Africa. It has it has a sort of window on the world from there. And once those bases are gone then the US is suddenly
00:44:49
cut off and far away in a way that it wasn't it wasn't before. And there are
00:44:53
all kinds of other risks. You know will the US dollar go on being so dominant? US makes money out of that. Um, will US
00:44:59
goods go on being so valued? You know, in Canada, they boycott US products now. And actually, this was when I was in
00:45:04
Denmark uh in February. I was shown an app. You can take a picture of a thing you see in the supermarket and it will
00:45:11
tell you whether it's made in the United States. And if it's made in the United
00:45:14
States, you don't buy it because they were so angry. Even the dominance of American tech, which a lot of Europeans
00:45:21
have belatedly woken up to as a problem, could be in question. So Europeans are looking to do cloud storage in Europe
00:45:28
and payment systems in Europe because you know maybe the US is unreliable and so all all it's it's we're just at the
00:45:35
beginning of what could be quite a big change and yes Americans would feel that.
00:45:40
>> Coming back to this point about the war in Iran you said that Trump sort of
00:45:44
misestimated what would happen here. Yes. Obviously flew into Versa and took Madura out of bed
00:45:49
>> and that seemed to go fairly well um from what he might have been expecting.
00:45:53
Um but then he attacked Iran and this war seems to know no end now. >> I mean here's another feature of
00:46:01
dictatorships is that nobody questions your decisions and nobody offers you alternatives. So
00:46:06
>> the people around you >> the people around you. So when he was planning the war in Iran you from the
00:46:11
reporting that we know people did say well you know Mr. President you know the Iranians are not like the Venezuelans.
00:46:18
It's a it's a very embedded regime and the Iranians had a plan already for what
00:46:22
would happen if their leadership was killed. They just they had a sort of decentralized system, you know, that
00:46:27
will kick into place. You know, they have allies all over the Middle East. They have these proxy groups in
00:46:31
different parts of the Middle East and famously the control over the straight of Hormuz possibly. And he was told
00:46:38
that, but it seems he wasn't told it in a very definitive way. Like some people
00:46:43
said, well, maybe this might be the case, but nobody said to him, "Mr. president, this is a bad idea because
00:46:49
he's known if you said, "Mr. President, this is a bad idea," he might have said,
00:46:52
"Well, get out of my sight." >> Mh. >> Because he's not somebody who listens to
00:46:56
other people's views or or takes them into into consideration. The thing that
00:47:00
bothers me the most about Iran, I have friends and I've been involved with organizations that do Iranian human
00:47:05
rights. The thing that bothered me the most was his utter failure even to talk to or about Iranians. I mean, there it
00:47:12
is an unpopular regime. It's one of the worst regimes, ugliest on the planet.
00:47:16
And yet there seems to have been no communication with the you know democratic opposition in Iran. No
00:47:22
communication even with Paly the son of the sha the monarchists in Iran. I mean there are alternative governments. There
00:47:27
are alternative people who you could speak to. And he never did that because his real interest isn't democracy you
00:47:35
know or making Iran into a better place. His real interest was in somehow dominating Iran and getting them to give
00:47:40
him a share of the oil revenues which is what happened in Venezuela. you know, so he he he's also not even
00:47:46
thinking the way previous Democratic presidents thought. So even George W. Bush also somebody who made huge
00:47:53
mistakes, you know, and so on. You never heard George W. Bush say, "What I want
00:47:59
is to run Iraq and steal its oil. >> They wanted to make Iraq into a democracy." Okay, that you know, which
00:48:06
by the way it is now, but it's it was it was a long bloody pathway. Trump doesn't
00:48:11
even think like that. He thinks my idea is to do some deal with one of the dictators and and move on. And actually
00:48:19
that's what's happened in Venezuela. So Venezuela is still a dictatorship and
00:48:22
it's run by the same regime as before just led by a different person. >> And he's been quite vocal about the fact
00:48:29
that they're getting all the oil. Yes. Which is it's crazy thing to hear that
00:48:32
you'd snatch up you'd snatch a world leader and then the same day you talk
00:48:35
about how you've got the boats stealing the country's oil. I say the word
00:48:38
stealing but taking the country's oil and proudly saying it. And it's not even
00:48:41
clear what he means by that and so on, but it was not the action of a of a of a 20th or 21st century president.
00:48:49
>> The midterms are coming up and um I was reading that Trump's approval ratings
00:48:53
are at an all-time low. It's the first time I've seen people that were sort of
00:48:57
devoted supporters of his like Tucker Carlson coming out and saying apologizing for supporting him.
00:49:02
>> So this this war in Iran seems to have really backfired in a way that I don't
00:49:05
think he was he was intending. And you can kind of tell by how Trump's feeling
00:49:09
because you just watch him in interviews. And the line that he repeats 75 times is probably like in some
00:49:16
respects the exact opposite of what's going on. So when I when I watched him
00:49:20
in an interview this week and he was repeatedly saying obviously he says how great the war is going. So that makes me
00:49:26
feel like it's not going well. Yeah. It was that was the main narrative was just
00:49:28
like how well the war is going. >> He keeps saying we've won, we've won,
00:49:32
it's over. One of the problems of having a president who lies all the time is
00:49:35
that you, you know, you just stop believing. I mean, even if the war was over, you wouldn't believe it because
00:49:39
he's his his his track record is not good. Um, I mean, look, I think the important thing to understand about
00:49:44
Trump is that he's somebody who has no strategy. He doesn't care that much
00:49:49
about what happened before he was president. He doesn't know the history of Iran, you know, um, he doesn't
00:49:55
understand much about the history of the region, and he doesn't really care about
00:49:59
what's going to happen later. He's interested in what is happening now and
00:50:04
is he winning in the current moment. >> What does winning mean? >> Whatever it means to him. So I'm I'm
00:50:10
winning the contest with this journalist or I'm winning the argument about Iran
00:50:15
or like we're winning the war or we're I'm you know the opinion polls are all
00:50:18
in my favor. So whatever is the situation, he has to emerge as the winner. That's his narcissistic
00:50:26
mentality. That's not very good for strategic thinking because sometimes you
00:50:29
don't win immediately like you have to have a plan, you know, and you have to
00:50:32
have a long-term aim and you have to have a strategy on how to get there. But he he doesn't think like that. If you
00:50:39
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now to get started. When you begin to see attempts to corrupt and shape elections, this is
00:52:59
when you know your democracy is in trouble. When the rules of the election are challenged. when um there there
00:53:06
begin to be arguments about who can vote and and attempts to make some people not
00:53:11
be allowed to vote when you try to alter the result in some way. I mean any an attack on elections is a classic way in
00:53:19
which democratically elected leaders undermine democracy. So an example of this okay Victor Orban who just lost an
00:53:25
election in Hungary after 16 years he had twothirds control of in Hungary if you have twothirds of the parliament
00:53:34
then you can change the constitution so he continually altered the Hungarian constitution in order to give himself
00:53:40
electoral advantages so changing constituencies and rebalancing the way votes were counted in the United States
00:53:46
I think we already talked about gerrymandering um gerrymandering is unbelievably anti-democratic and the
00:53:52
fact that we of a kind of gerrymandering contest right now. >> What's gerrymandering?
00:53:56
>> Jerrymandering is a great word actually. It comes from a congressman named Jerry
00:54:00
in the early 19th century who drew a map of an electoral map which looked like a
00:54:06
salamander. And a gerrymandered map in in US terms is a electoral map that has been altered to favor one political
00:54:15
party. you know, the city of Nashville, instead of having a single Democratic representative, instead of having a
00:54:19
sensible constituency around the city, um, that would vote for one member of Congress, has been divided into several
00:54:26
constituencies that are designed in such a way that only Republicans win. And once you have maps that are designed to
00:54:35
favor one party or the other, then you begin to get real democratic decline. >> But there are other things happening in
00:54:42
the US too. So there are fears that ICE which is the paramilitary organization created by the president supposedly to
00:54:51
go after immigrants that what if what if ICE troops are put on the street dur on
00:54:55
election day you know would some people be intimidated from voting so there are fears that he will do that uh in some
00:55:02
states >> there's something called voter ID he talks about a lot >> yes well this is also very strange so of
00:55:07
course in the US you have voter ID and most people have driver's licenses um
00:55:10
they want to change the law so that either have to use a passport or a birth certificate. And most Americans don't
00:55:18
have passports. I think 60% don't. I I don't remember the number, but it's it's
00:55:22
very low. Many people have lost or never had their birth certificates. If you passed a law like that, it would make it
00:55:29
much more difficult for some people to vote, especially certain kinds of people. So married women would have to
00:55:35
show a passport, a birth certificate, and a marriage license because you'd have to show that because your birth
00:55:39
certificate name is different from your married name. >> Okay. Yeah. >> So you'd have and so many people believe
00:55:46
this is a way to get fewer women to vote and women are more likely to vote Democrat. It's also part of a narrative.
00:55:53
So, the administration is trying to argue that lots and lots of illegal immigrants are voting,
00:56:01
which is a conspiracy theory. There's no evidence of it. There's no evidence of
00:56:05
really of almost any illegal immigrants ever voting. And if you think about it, if you were an illegal immigrant, why
00:56:10
would you want to vote? >> Because it would just be a way of attracting attention to yourself. But
00:56:15
they seek to establish this narrative as a way of disqualifying Democratic votes.
00:56:21
They want to say that votes in Trump did this during the last election. Votes in
00:56:25
cities are too high. If they need to call for a voter recount, they want to say that this is the explanation for why
00:56:32
they've lost. Um, and so the part of the reason why they're talking about voter
00:56:36
ID is that >> so just looking at some of the data, it says young voters between 18 and 29,
00:56:41
roughly 24% of them lack the documents that would qualify them to vote. Um, in minority voters, 11% of citizens of
00:56:48
color lack these documents. um compared to a smaller percentage in white citizens. In lowincome America, only one
00:56:54
in five households earning under $50,000 has a passport. And as you said, married
00:56:59
women, 69 million women have birth certificates that do not match their current legal name due to marriage,
00:57:06
>> right? >> So, okay. >> I mean, it's it's risky because I
00:57:09
imagine lots of Republicans don't have passports. >> Yeah. >> But I think they've calculated that it
00:57:14
would suit them better. So, they're looking to shape the voting population in a way that will benefit them. M
00:57:19
>> so they're looking to find ways to massage the outcome. >> And that's you know that that's a kind
00:57:25
of classic when you're in a country which is declining democratically one of
00:57:29
the classic things that happens is the ruling party seeks to alter or change who is able to vote and how votes are
00:57:36
weighted as a way of altering the outcome. >> What's the third one? >> Personnel. Well, we talked about this
00:57:42
one a little bit already. >> Oh, the civil servants. >> This is civil service in a modern
00:57:47
democracy. So in a 21st century democracy, government does a lot of things. It manages the road system. It
00:57:53
it sometimes organizes health care. It organizes regulates the insurance markets. It does all kinds of governance
00:58:00
pollution and all those people who do those jobs. Um it's very important that
00:58:05
they be people who know how to do them. So you want the person who's measuring
00:58:09
air pollution, you want that person to be an expert in air pollution. Mhm. >> You don't want them to be, you know, the
00:58:15
president's cousin >> or the person who is regulating the insurance market. You want that to be
00:58:21
someone who knows about insurance markets. And you don't want it to be the best friend of the vice president
00:58:28
>> in corrupt autocracies. That is who gets those jobs. >> Seeing this a little bit with the Fed.
00:58:33
No, he doesn't like Jerome Pal in the Fed, >> right? And so he's tried to undermine
00:58:37
Jerome Powell. He's sued Jerome Powell or he was investigating him rather for
00:58:42
some kind of fake um financial scandal and he tried to put pressure on him to resign. He tried to put pressure on him
00:58:49
to change his policy. And I you know honestly I don't I don't know whether
00:58:53
the person who who will come in next will be will be more susceptible but he's certainly been chosen because Trump
00:58:58
thinks he is. And so what Trump wants is to have civil servants who are historically independent and that
00:59:04
includes the chairman of the Fed. Um it includes actually department of justice the attorney general usually has some
00:59:09
independence. What you want is people who are acting in the interests of everybody and in a in a functional
00:59:15
democracy in the happy Scandinavian countries then at least most of the time that's what they're doing. And in a
00:59:22
corrupt democracy or in a failing democracy, then you have people whose interests are not everybody in the
00:59:28
country, but their interests are the president, his family, his party, anyway, not not American. And so that's
00:59:36
the danger of undermining the civil service. >> The fourth one is >> information.
00:59:43
>> Okay, >> all dictatorships seek to control information. You know, in China, the
00:59:49
entire internet since the 1990s has been constructed so that the government can control it. There is no outside
00:59:56
internet. There is there's nobody who's active on the Chinese internet who isn't
00:59:59
somehow known or accounted for somehow by the authorities. And the internet is also connected to a whole system of
01:00:06
surveillance cameras and other kinds of databases so that people can be tracked all through the system and all through
01:00:11
the country. People do have VPNs in China and they and they do get out, but the majority of people are inside the
01:00:16
that's probably the China is the most extreme form of that and Russia is actually now heading in that direction.
01:00:21
So Putin has now cut off Russian access to most forms of Western social media, you know, Instagram and there were some
01:00:29
amazing videos of really sad Russian Instagram influencers who were losing their audiences because of Putin's
01:00:39
Putin's changes. So he's now he's now heading in that direction. But even
01:00:43
inside the United States, which is maybe the loudest and most open democracy in the world, you can see the Trump
01:00:49
administration seeking to shape the information space in new ways. So we have federal regulators who are now
01:00:57
willing to put pressure on television stations if the president asks them to. We have the president putting his thumb
01:01:03
on the scale of people who are acquiring new media companies in order to make sure that the new owners are somehow
01:01:09
friendly to him. >> What about Tik Tok? >> Tik Tok, CBS, uh CNN, these are all
01:01:15
media companies where the president is trying to get people who are sympathetic to him in charge. And this is, by the
01:01:21
way, you know, we all have this idea about censorship that it's like there's
01:01:25
a guy in a room and he's crossing sentences out of a newspaper article. You know, that's what censorship is. But
01:01:30
actually nowadays that's not how media control works. So in Orban's Hungary in
01:01:36
Erdogan's Turkey what happens is that the leadership encourages or helps business people or
01:01:44
groups close to them to acquire media properties. So they do it through the level of media ownership.
01:01:49
>> So who owns the media becomes the most important question and then the person
01:01:54
who's who's in charge of the media can then influence in some ways what it's
01:01:58
able to say. So it doesn't give you complete control. So actually in Hungary
01:02:01
you still had a couple of very small but still existing independent websites who
01:02:08
turned out to be very important but you had an attempt to control for most of the television was controlled either
01:02:14
directly or indirectly uh by Orban and it looks to me like Trump is trying to achieve something like that. There's a a
01:02:21
piece of that that also involves culture and universities as well. um pressure on
01:02:27
universities so that they don't produce people who are too critical. In the US,
01:02:31
you've had the Trump administration took over the Kennedy Center, which is the
01:02:35
most prestigious arts venue in Washington, and tried to change its nature and tried to change its, you
01:02:42
know, who who was who could play there and who couldn't. Um and the result is
01:02:46
actually that it's now been shut down for two years. You see this on both sides of the political aisle, both on
01:02:52
the Democratic side in different ways. But I but I think that both parties when they're in for long enough, what we're
01:02:58
allowed to say changes. >> Yes. Although the mechanisms have been different. I mean, I was involved in the
01:03:04
argument, you know, some years back about this, you know, we I think it was incorrectly called cancel culture, but
01:03:09
whatever. The the the argument that was happening inside universities and some press and other institutions about what
01:03:15
you could and couldn't say. And I thought it was um you know that that there was this peer pressure and
01:03:21
sometimes institutional pressure on people and people were cancelled that means they lost their jobs or they were
01:03:26
kicked out of whatever group they were in because they'd said something the wrong way. You know I I I argued against
01:03:32
that and wrote about it and so on. What you have now is a little different. You now have the president just, you know,
01:03:39
attempting to change media ownership and you have you you're beginning to see
01:03:44
what happens when the administration goes into university and said, "You can't teach this course. You can't hire
01:03:49
that teacher." That was the deal that was given to Harvard, I don't know, um,
01:03:53
you know, some months back. The reason why Harvard wound up refusing to deal with the Trump administration and when
01:03:58
it started to sue them was because the administration was trying to actually decide who would teach what courses at
01:04:04
Harvard. I don't believe there's a precedent for that. But I agree with you
01:04:07
that it is an illiberal instinct to try to control speech. And there's a left-wing version of it and there's a
01:04:14
right-wing version of it. And the people who are really in favor of free speech,
01:04:20
and they're vanishingly few, are the people who are willing to call it out on
01:04:23
both sides. And one of the things you often hear now from these sort of so-called free speech warriors is that
01:04:30
they're perfectly happy to shout about the left cancelling people or left-wing
01:04:35
rhetoric that they don't like, but then they keep quiet when it comes from the
01:04:38
other side. >> Yes. I was looking back through the history of this happening on both sides
01:04:43
of the aisle and in Mark Zuckerberg's testimony I think in front of Congress
01:04:47
he said that he was repeatedly pressured um for months by the Biden Harris administration to remove certain content
01:04:55
and then there's the whole Hunter Biden lap laptop story where Zuckerberg confirmed that Meta were asked to demote
01:05:02
a New York Post story by the FBI and then there's various other stories here
01:05:07
about PE Twitter executives being emailed by White House officials um and being asked to change things on their
01:05:14
platform. >> So there is a difference between someone sending you an email and saying you know
01:05:19
look we this has been flagged by a monitoring group as maybe fake or as maybe Russian disinformation or as you
01:05:26
know coming from some kind of foreign influence campaign and so you know it would be great if you took it down or
01:05:31
demoted it and there's a difference between that and taking over the company
01:05:35
in order that the president gets to dictate what's on it. Nobody coerced Meta into doing anything
01:05:43
or Twitter. You nobody said, you know, Twitter will be will pay a fine if you don't do X or Y in the context of people
01:05:51
looking for foreign influence campaigns. There were conversations about what was
01:05:56
appropriate to print and what wasn't. >> I think from what from what I've
01:06:00
observed, it happens on both sides, but in different ways. I remember was it was
01:06:04
it Elizabeth Warren talking a lot about um the section 230? M which I think protects some of the big social media
01:06:11
companies from being sued for users posts. And I think she would repeatedly reference section 230 and other
01:06:17
democratic lawmakers as a way to get the platforms to take a more aggressive stance on what they called like hate
01:06:23
speech and speech and disinformation. >> So section 230 essentially allows the
01:06:29
platforms to be to escape the rules that newspapers for example have to abide by.
01:06:34
So >> so actually we do have regulations. We have liable laws. We have laws about
01:06:40
terrorist content, for example. So, there are laws that regulate some parts of speech that we've agreed are good in
01:06:46
order to, you know, maintain peace and so on. And the platforms are exempt >> um because of section 230. And so, the
01:06:54
platforms have argued that we don't control what's put up on our platforms
01:06:58
and we don't bear any responsibility for it. I'm not sure that removing section
01:07:02
230 is the best way to deal with this, but making the online world conform to the same laws as the offline world seems
01:07:10
to me kind of very basic. I mean, it's it seems obvious to me that child pornography that's illegal if you have
01:07:18
it in your house should also be illegal if it's published online. Um it seems to
01:07:24
me that um people recruiting for ISIS that's illegal to do you know down the
01:07:31
street from here then it should also be illegal to do online. Um and the tech companies have been trying in recent
01:07:37
years in this is an argument that's taking place both in Europe and the US and elsewhere to get out of
01:07:42
responsibility for just for conforming to the law in the countries where they're active. And in one or two places
01:07:47
there have been big clashes. I was just in Brazil which is one of the places where that happened. um where the
01:07:52
Brazilian law said something that was published on Twitter was illegal and they fined the company for publishing
01:07:58
it. Twitter didn't want to pay the fine and there was an argument back and forth
01:08:01
and for a while Twitter was shut down in Brazil. But it does seem to me that any
01:08:05
given country whether it's Brazil or Nepal or you know Ethiopia and particularly democracies I should say
01:08:13
you know democracies have the right to say these are our laws for example these are our electoral laws we have laws on
01:08:18
election spending and if the platforms violate those laws they're in breach of
01:08:23
the law you know and so election is a very important one because if you're spending a million dollars on Tik Tok
01:08:32
illegally that can be much harder to see than it would be if you were buying television
01:08:38
ads. And so finding a way to bring the the social media companies into the legal system seems to be completely
01:08:44
legitimate. >> Mhm. >> And in fact, I would even go farther than that. I would say that if European
01:08:50
countries in particular don't do this, then I'm not sure European countries
01:08:55
will be able to maintain their sovereignty. Like will you be able to run an election in Germany or England?
01:09:02
>> If >> if your electoral rules can be easily defied by platforms that are based in
01:09:08
the US or China, >> what such electoral rules might be defied by? >> Well, laws about spending, laws about
01:09:14
advertising. >> Yeah, fine. Everything is a trade-off, right? And this is what I've learned
01:09:18
from being a podcaster and interviewing so many people about so many things. So,
01:09:21
I often just think all the time with every idea that I'm exposed to about what the trade is. So as you were
01:09:25
speaking I was thinking about what like how does this become a slippery slope or
01:09:28
what's the the the downside of this trade? So what do you think that >> I'm sure there's a you know of course
01:09:34
there's a downside. I mean the the downside is you know I don't know country X has bad laws and then the
01:09:40
platforms have to conform to the bad laws. Questions about speech are particularly sensitive. You know what
01:09:44
one one person's terrorist speech is another person's free speech right? So
01:09:49
>> but somebody has to make that decision about what the rules are. And I think
01:09:52
the person who should make the decision is the are the people who should make the decision are the elected
01:09:56
representatives of that country. >> Yeah. >> And the decision should not be taken by
01:10:00
Elon Musk. >> It's funny because >> or Mark Zuckerberg >> to some degree it sounded like what Elon
01:10:05
Musk says. I remember watching him him in an interview. I can't remember who it
01:10:08
was with but he basically said exactly that. He said we'll abide by the laws of
01:10:11
every country that we operate in. And some and oh it was his interview with um the CNN guy that used to be on CNN, Don
01:10:19
Lemon. >> Mhm. and Don Lemon is pushing is saying look there's hate speech on your
01:10:24
platform and then he asks him what the hate speech is and I don't think he can
01:10:27
say but he Elon's response to him is we abide by the laws and pushing push >> there's but there's a record of them not
01:10:34
doing that but so you know so that that's just disingenuous I mean it's true hate speech is a you know it's a
01:10:39
longer conversation I mean what you how you define it what you say it is is different but some countries do have
01:10:44
hate speech Germany has them so Germany decided after World War II you know to ban Nazi symbols I think Germany is a
01:10:52
very very successful electoral democracy and if they want to ban Nazi symbols I think they should be allowed to. I mean,
01:10:57
in America that wouldn't work, you know, and it was you you can't ban Nazi
01:11:01
symbols in the United States. But I don't see why America should impose its rules on Germany. Like, doesn't Germany
01:11:07
have sovereignty? Doesn't Germany get to decide, you know, what the rules of its
01:11:11
national conversation are? >> Because in the US, racism is not illegal on the internet in the United States due
01:11:17
to the First Amendment, >> right? >> So, I could be racist on X. >> Yes.
01:11:22
>> And that is fine. >> And many people are. If you spend any time on X, you will see it. It's very
01:11:26
hard to miss >> according to the laws because it's not it's not legal. But I think most people
01:11:32
a lot of people would say that the platform would have an obligation to take down that racism. Someone starts
01:11:38
being racist to me. >> Yeah. >> Me me on the internet. A lot I understand why a lot of people would say
01:11:42
like okay that kind of behavior should be taken down but it's within the country's laws. So do you think it's f
01:11:47
like this is a bit of a I don't want to be got your question but it's like do
01:11:50
you know what I mean? I guess this is where the clash comes in because something can feel deeply immoral but be
01:11:55
illegal. >> Sure, there's a difference between illegality and immortal. And some, you
01:11:59
know, historically newspapers and other media have decided not to print racist material because it's immoral or because
01:12:06
it's offensive. Even social media platforms, I I think have a debate about how much ugly stuff they want to appear
01:12:12
on their sites because if people see too much of it, they'll stop going on it. I
01:12:15
mean, I, you know, reduced my usage of of Twitter because there was too much anti-semitism and too much racism and I
01:12:22
didn't want to watch it anymore. So, um, and I think many people, others have
01:12:25
made the same decision. You know, speech is a constant negotiation. You know, what's acceptable, what's unacceptable,
01:12:31
and the norms do change over time. I will agree to that. What the autocrats try to do is something a little bit
01:12:36
different. It's not in this gray area of hate speech and free speech. It's
01:12:40
controlling the system itself. you know, what what are the boundaries of what people can see, what platforms they have
01:12:47
access to. So, the Chinese don't really, you know, what they're what they're
01:12:51
interested in is are you criticizing the Chinese Communist Party? >> That's the fundamental thing that
01:12:56
they're controlling for. >> I was wondering, as you were speaking about this earlier, if I'm in China, can
01:13:00
I just get up and go? >> Can I just leave? >> Where would you go? And could you get a
01:13:05
visa to go there? >> Good question. >> I mean, the Chinese do leave. I was I
01:13:10
just wondering if it's easy to leave China if you're a citizen of China or do
01:13:14
they restrict you from going somewhere else? I don't know. I'll go to Bali.
01:13:17
>> Um >> could I not just go move to Bali if I >> think about think about it if I mean
01:13:21
this is this was a you know this used to be a problem for people in the Soviet Union. I mean okay theoretically you
01:13:26
could leave you could get an exit passport. I mean I'm sure there are some restrictions on who's able to get
01:13:30
passports and who isn't. I mean I'm um but say you were able to go. you you'd
01:13:34
need to go somewhere where you could get a visa, where you could work, >> where you could set up a life, where you
01:13:41
speak the language, where it's reasonable to imagine you could stay there for a long time. I mean,
01:13:46
immigration, I mean, especially given languages and and and professional qualifications. So, it is not always
01:13:52
easy. It's not always practical for everybody. I mean, I have friends who are still I have many friends who left
01:13:56
Russia, but I have one or two friends who are still there and that's because
01:14:00
they have aging relatives or because they don't speak any other languages and
01:14:05
they don't feel they'd be at home anywhere else. I mean, there are there
01:14:08
are many reasons why people can't leave even if they don't like their state or
01:14:12
they don't like their political system. >> So, what's number five on our numbers?
01:14:18
>> Uh, you've you've used the word power. >> Okay. control over power ministries and the
01:14:27
use of violence. Most autocracies sooner or later want to create some kind of repressive system that's also physical.
01:14:35
So it's not just control of the information space. There's also some element of coercion. So people who don't
01:14:41
go along with the system don't get to just float around. There's some way of
01:14:46
threatening them physically >> like ice. So, ICE is not supposed to be that. ICE
01:14:53
is supposed to be an immigration enforcement institution. Um, but the way it's been
01:14:59
used is well beyond the way any immigration institution was used before in the United States. So, look at what
01:15:08
ICE looks like. They are masked. They are wearing military uniforms. They are often driving unmarked cars. They drive
01:15:17
in vans. They're not driving in police vans and they're not following the rules
01:15:22
of local police. They're not accountable to anybody. They're not accountable to
01:15:26
the mayor, you know, or to the governor of the state where they are. And that gives them a kind of impunity and a kind
01:15:33
of ability to behave badly and they seem to be accountable directly to the Homeland Security Department and to the
01:15:39
president. And we've already seen how this can affect the behavior of ICE. that we saw during the during the
01:15:46
protests and the arrests and the protests in Minnesota. We saw two people were killed. And what was really
01:15:51
horrifying to me wasn't just that they were killed. It was how the administration reacted. You know, it was
01:15:58
Vance and Gnome and several other people immediately said of the people who were
01:16:03
killed, they were guilty. So instead of saying this is horrible, >> you know that an American police force
01:16:09
killed a these were both US citizens. I mean, there have been other people killed, too, by the way, but these two
01:16:13
were were notable because they were US citizens and they weren't immigrants.
01:16:17
Two, instead of saying two people were killed, this is horrible. We need to have an investigation. This must not be
01:16:22
allowed to happen again. The immediate instinct was to give them impunity. Like, you know, we're not going to
01:16:29
investigate this. It's not a real problem. You know, the the the instinct was to put them above the law. And when
01:16:37
you have a military force, and as I said, especially one that's militarized and looks like, you know, they they're
01:16:43
dressed like they're in Fallujah, you know, when you have a military force that's above the law, then it's really a
01:16:49
paramilitary. If you have a police force that can harm ordinary citizens and not
01:16:53
pay any price for it and isn't accountable, then you're not serving Americans. You're serving the interests
01:16:58
of of the of the ruling party. >> This is super interesting to me. My team
01:17:03
gave me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe. So, favor to ask all of you. Please
01:17:07
could you check right now if you've hit the subscribe button if you are a regular viewer of the show and you like
01:17:11
what we do here. We're approaching quite a significant landmark on this show in
01:17:15
terms of a subscriber number. So, if there was one simple free thing that you could do to help us, my team, everyone
01:17:20
here to keep this show free, to keep it improving year over year and week over week, it is just to hit that subscribe
01:17:26
button and to double check if you've hit it. Only thing I'll ever ask of you. Do
01:17:29
we have a deal? Let's get on with the show. Do you think this is um potentially the
01:17:35
decline of the what one might call the American empire? I was um I was looking at how long empires tend to last and I
01:17:42
was before you came and there's this 2000 250 year figure which is famously popularized by a British historian
01:17:48
called Sir John Gub in his essay the fate of empires and the search for survival after analyzing empires from
01:17:55
the I can't say that wordians >> Assyrians >> exactly what I said Assyrians to the
01:18:02
British um club found that despite differences in technology geography religion and surprisingly shared a
01:18:08
similar lifespan standard life cycle. Glob argued that empires typically go through a predictable sequence of stages
01:18:14
over those 250 years. The first one being the age of pioneers, outburst and conquest. The age of conquest which is
01:18:20
the military dominance. The age of commerce which is vast wealth creation. The age of affluence, comfort and a
01:18:26
shift from duty to selfishness. The age of intellect focus on philosophy and education over defense. The age of
01:18:32
descendence, internal division, massive inequality and collapse. So if you view the United States as an expansionist
01:18:40
project from its very inception, pushing westward across the North American continent through its power, then the
01:18:47
math says if you take it from 1776 to now to 2026, it's exactly 250 years old.
01:18:53
So if you use Gub's 2000 250ear life cycle model from 1776 to now, political
01:19:00
scientists argue that we are in the age of descendants of the American Empire. This stage is typically characterized by
01:19:07
deep internal political division, vast wealth inequality, massive national debt, and a cultural shift away from a
01:19:12
shared sense of civic duty. So, first of all, that's a pretty accurate description of what's happening in the
01:19:18
United States. However, you have just touched on something that I feel very strongly about, which is that I don't
01:19:24
believe in historical inevitability. >> Interesting. >> And I I think is very dangerous. So the
01:19:30
idea that we are on a slippery slope downhill and we can't stop it because that's the way history is going or
01:19:38
alternative the idea that everything is fine and it will continue to be fine because liberal democracy has triumphed
01:19:43
which is what we thought in the 1990s. Anytime you think that something is inevitable that takes away your
01:19:50
willingness to act. Yeah. >> What happens tomorrow and next year is completely dependent on what we do
01:19:59
today. Whether the United States survives as a democracy or not depends on choices Americans make, things they
01:20:05
say, the arguments they have, you know, the degree of civic participation, not some historical rule that some very
01:20:14
brilliant political scientist invented. And as I said, I think this has happened
01:20:17
before. I think we had this moment of complacency after the fall of the Soviet Union in the '90s. Americans and
01:20:24
Europeans became convinced that everything was best in the best of all possible worlds and we didn't have to do
01:20:31
anything in particular to maintain our democracies because democracy was the best system and we just won the Cold War
01:20:36
and it was all going to be fine and we lost sight of the ways in which democracy was beginning to slip and we
01:20:44
were beginning to lose things. >> And I think it was sense of complacency and above all it was a sense of
01:20:49
inevitability. It's inevitable. We've won the war of ideas. the war of ideas
01:20:54
is over. And that's why we we missed the rise of Russia. We missed the the significance of China. And we missed a
01:21:00
lot of those things because we were so sure that we were just winning. >> Isn't that in and of itself a cycle?
01:21:06
>> It's a cycle. But my point is that the cycles aren't predictable. I mean, you
01:21:10
can stop the cycle. You can reverse the cycle. Countries can and do change their
01:21:14
trajectory. I say I've I've lived a lot of my life in Poland. First went there
01:21:17
in the 1980s. My husband is Polish. So on Poland is a completely different country from what it was 30 years ago.
01:21:22
And it's a country that has really changed itself in ways that weren't necessarily predictable in 1990. And so
01:21:30
I I do think countries change. Is all of this downstream from something that doesn't change,
01:21:36
which is human nature. And therefore, if we understand human nature as the constant, then one can almost predict
01:21:41
these dare I say the word again, cycles of how humans will go from there to d >> human nature is a constant. But there is
01:21:49
so much accident in history and so many random things happen that you can sometimes predict how people will react,
01:21:57
but you can't necessarily predict exactly what's coming. You know, when Boris Yeltson was drunk and sick
01:22:05
and had to choose the next leader of Russia, there were a number of choices he had. And the person he chose was
01:22:10
Vladimir Putin, who at the time was a very low ranking. I mean, he was a he was a FSB. He came from the KGB and he
01:22:17
was someone they chose because they thought he would be loyal to the Yeltson family and he wouldn't prosecute them.
01:22:22
Nobody imagined him as a dictator or an imperial leader who would be seeking to reconquer the former Soviet Union. And
01:22:30
what if they'd chosen, for example, Boris Nimsov, who was another leading Russian politician at the time. You
01:22:34
know, I don't know that he was a perfect Democrat, but he was very open-minded
01:22:37
and he would have been interested in integrating Russia with Europe. Okay. What if he'd become the leader of
01:22:42
Russia? We would be in a completely different world. And why was there was nothing inevitable about that decision.
01:22:48
There are many random completely out of the blue things that happen in history. You can always say there's always some
01:22:56
percentage of any population that's instinctively authoritarian for example and there's always some percentage of
01:23:02
any population that's instinctively liberal or extinctly libertarian >> because of egos and power
01:23:07
>> because of just the way people the human nature have the people have different
01:23:10
but what is the balance of that group how the leadership of the country encourages or discourages one set of
01:23:16
values or the other you know that that affects h you know who who's winning the
01:23:21
arguments um and so I I I don't believe in inevitable cycles. >> Have you heard of Ray Dalio talking
01:23:27
about the sort of boom and bust cycles through history and when like a population becomes very comfortable you
01:23:33
have this sort of inversion goes the other way. Do you believe in those kinds of cycles? You know, I suppose there is
01:23:38
a phenomenon whereby yes, as people become comfortable, then if Frank Fukiyama actually had in his famous book
01:23:43
about the end of history, he had a description of well, what happens if we have two, you know, if everybody becomes
01:23:48
a liberal democracy and everybody's pretty prosperous, then the next thing that will happen is some people will get
01:23:53
bored >> and out of their boredom and out of their desire for change, they'll attack
01:23:58
the system and and want to undermine it. It's kind of what happened. So there's I
01:24:02
suppose there's some there's a there's some human element like that you know
01:24:05
that the there will always be some part of the population that feels left out or
01:24:10
feels discriminated against and and wants a bigger voice or wants to run the country. I mean so you can you can see
01:24:16
that I just don't think it's something that scientists can predict. >> Is there a link between democracies and
01:24:22
sort of rampant capitalism? So, in a democracy, I don't know much about this
01:24:27
stuff, so I'm just asking the question. But in a democracy, does it tend to be
01:24:30
the case that you end up with wealth inequality because you let everybody, you let free markets play out and then
01:24:34
you're going to have these like tech oligarchs up here that have all gazillions of dollars, a trillion
01:24:37
dollars, and lots of people at the bottom of the rung. Whereas in I don't know, in China, I guess they somewhat
01:24:42
defend. I don't know. Do they defend against? >> No, I would say almost the opposite. So,
01:24:46
historically, democracies have I mean, there have been different phases, right? So I don't want to overgeneralize but
01:24:52
certainly in the 20 second half of the 20th century the the democracies since the second world war have tended towards
01:24:58
equality and including in the United States and at their most successful and prosperous moments people there was if
01:25:04
there was much less wealth equality than inequality than there is now and the countries we were talking about earlier
01:25:10
the happy countries those are relatively equal countries and those are countries
01:25:14
with big welfare states and a lot of redistribution of wealth and those are countries where people feel invested in
01:25:21
the system partly because they don't feel completely outclassed by a group of
01:25:25
oligarchs. If you look at the United States in the 1950s, that was a period of also huge social mobility when lower
01:25:32
middle class, middle- class people began to get wealthier and there's this enormous wave of prosperity and that's a
01:25:37
period when everybody is becoming wealthier. And that was also a period when you have the, you know, very
01:25:42
successful American democracy. You have the civil rights movement. You have democracy beginning to spread to new
01:25:47
populations or to people who'd been excluded before. So you have a a connection between equality and
01:25:52
democracy, wealth, even wealth equality. And one of the things that gives critics
01:25:58
of the United States most anxiety now is precisely what you just said, you know,
01:26:04
the emergence of tech oligarchs who have so much more power than any one politician and who even have the power
01:26:11
to to organize information space. How long will that group of people want to live in a democracy where everybody gets
01:26:19
a vote and wealth is supposed to be distributed more evenly? There are some members of that community who have
01:26:23
become illiberal or anti-democratic for exactly that reason. >> If we don't believe in inevitabilities,
01:26:29
then what is it we have to look out for as those living in a democracy? We talked about the five things there, but
01:26:34
are there anything is there anything coming up where you're worried that as a
01:26:38
society we might overlook it or allow it which results in us falling back down into an autocratic society? And is there
01:26:46
anything we can do proactively now to defend our democracy? >> We are lucky in that we live in
01:26:52
societies where we can vote. >> Mhm. Um, and so it's really important that we vote, that we know who we're
01:27:00
voting for, that we vote in all elections, including local ones. When people become nihilistic, when they say,
01:27:07
"They're all the same. I don't care who wins the election. It's not worth voting
01:27:11
because, you know, they're all corrupt." This is what autocrats try to create.
01:27:16
So, what does Putin want Russians to do? Does he want them to be political? No. He wants them to stay out of politics.
01:27:22
You know, what do the Chinese want? they want their people out of politics. And so whenever you see too many people who
01:27:27
are have responded to that kind of negative inspiration, that's when you should worry. And I worry a lot about
01:27:35
the United States on exactly those grounds. Actually, look at how the leader of your country talks about the
01:27:41
press, how he or she talks about the judges, the judiciary, how he or she talks about the civil service. A real
01:27:50
Democrat respects those institutions and wants them to stay in place precisely so
01:27:56
that democracy can remain so that at the next election there will be a fair election.
01:28:00
>> Do you think the the mainstream media are politicized? Do you think there's
01:28:04
political bias in the mainstream media like the big titles? >> You know, some of them have business
01:28:09
models that are that are biased. So Fox's business model is to appeal to the
01:28:14
right-leaning part of the American population and to, you know, to encourage them in their biases and get
01:28:19
them to watch TV. There's some media that are now dependent on on polarization and kind of live off it.
01:28:26
There are some who try to be neutral, but you know, even neutrality is hard to achieve now because a neutral
01:28:33
investigation that turns up something bad about the Trump administration will immediately incur the reaction on the
01:28:40
part, you know, you're biased. You we've lost our our assumption that that press
01:28:45
are operating in good faith. >> So, it's become much more difficult. >> This is so interesting for me as a
01:28:49
podcaster who I guess now is considered to be media. the like the inherent incentives of media mean that like if
01:28:58
say I'm running X newspaper and I write a story and I've built up a base of
01:29:02
people for whatever reason right that want me to say something negative about Trump I have an economic model and an
01:29:08
incentive structure that means that if I write that article it's going to get 10
01:29:11
times the reach 10 times the engagement 10 times the subscribers if I write the exact opposite article I know I'm going
01:29:17
to get so if I say Trump is amazing even though I've built up a base that I think
01:29:20
a certain way the article is going to get a fraction of the the reached engagement subscribers. So, as a as a
01:29:26
CEO of such such a company, you're going to have to hire more and more people,
01:29:29
create more and more output to receive the same um rewards versus just writing something bad about that particular
01:29:36
person. So, you become incentivized. But then the other factor is that geographically Democrats and Republicans
01:29:41
in the United States exist in certain areas. So if I open my office in New York or LA, most of the people I'm going
01:29:47
to be able to hire come with a certain like statistically come with a certain political view. So I I do wonder if
01:29:52
eventually like the fate of most media organizations is they do get politically captured one way or the other.
01:29:58
>> You have to fight it. >> You have to fight. And as a podcaster, yeah, cuz now I'm I'm part of the media.
01:30:03
I I now understand because I feel it. >> So I feel that I sit here with Kamala
01:30:09
Harris, I'm attacked. I sit here with Ivanka Trump, I'm attacked. I see it
01:30:13
with Michelle Obama attacked. Gavin Newsome attacked. And I understand there's this great
01:30:18
quote which I favored the other day. It was like, "You have to join a tribe or
01:30:21
you get killed by one." Or something words to that effect. And I I get it. I
01:30:24
get why some of my peers in podcasting have sought defense behind a particular tribe because just taking the arrows
01:30:32
from both sides is not the nicest feeling in the world. >> No, but >> No. I mean, it's funny when you said
01:30:38
mainstream media. I don't even know who that is anymore. It's not so much about
01:30:40
hearing from both sides. It's about trying to establish what's true. >> Yeah.
01:30:46
>> And so the job of what what you do is a little bit different from what journalists do. So journalists go into
01:30:51
the world and they gather information and they if they're good journalists, they try to figure out what actually
01:30:57
happened and then they bring it back and they write it down or they make a video
01:31:01
about it and they try and make sure that it's accurate, right? And so if you're
01:31:05
devoted to that project, then you you seek to avoid political bias, but you know, inevitably
01:31:12
you might wind up saying the president is lying or the leader of the opposition is lying. And then you're immediately,
01:31:18
you know, in the world of people shouting at you and saying you're biased. >> Um, but I I do feel that it's really
01:31:23
important that this particular profession of the people who go into the world and try and establish reality that
01:31:30
it continues to exist. >> I agree. You know, >> there needs to be a business model for
01:31:33
that. I mean, for democracy to exist, for an accurate and meaningful national conversation to exist, we need to have
01:31:40
some people who are trying to figure out what's real. >> I agree. And I think those people are
01:31:44
incredibly important, which I think people think podcasters won't say cuz I think sometimes we're positioned as
01:31:47
being like the rebels or radicals or whatever that are like doing it from their kitchen. This did actually used to
01:31:52
be my kitchen. But um but I very much agree. I very much agree that there are incredibly
01:31:58
um rigorous truth seeeking journalists out there that have this very unique skill which is not one that I possess or
01:32:05
or test to possess at all that they go deep for long periods of time without bias in search of the truth and then
01:32:13
they deliver it to the world. And I'm well aware that if we lose that, then I
01:32:16
lose so many of the things that I fundamentally care about and that I've built my entire life and career on,
01:32:21
especially as like a young black man in business who understands that there's
01:32:24
lots of people that came before me that revealed things about the way society functioned that have benefited me. And
01:32:30
so that I should my way of sort of paying that forward is protecting the same privileges as a um as a podcaster.
01:32:36
is I mean there is a danger that we go down a road in which especially as AI develops and we get more and more of our
01:32:42
information online that we lose touch with reality. Mhm. >> You know, if if AI is only accessing
01:32:49
what's available to the, you know, to the model online, >> there's still a whole world out there
01:32:54
where things are happening, you know, that that's not online and and the making sure that we're constantly in
01:33:01
touch with what's what's reality on the ground, what's really happening in
01:33:04
Ukraine, you know, what's really happening in Iran, and not living on just what's available to us on our
01:33:09
phones. It's really important. One of my fears is that the the algorithms with AI
01:33:12
are becoming better at knowing what to serve me in order to make me dwell and therefore it creates more ad dollars for
01:33:18
the companies. And so I might not just be living in a fake reality. I might be living in a completely personalized one
01:33:23
that's completely different from your own because as I went on my phone this
01:33:26
morning, one of the things the sections on my phone is suggested for you. Now this is obviously showing me things that
01:33:32
are based on my past viewing consumption. So if I viewed this person having a fight in the street, I'm
01:33:37
getting more people having fights in the street. So now my perception is that everyone's having fights in the street
01:33:42
and and that means it's harder to connect to each other. >> We are very much I mean I think this has
01:33:46
really happened already that we we live in our own algorithms when you're asking
01:33:50
the more fundamental question about the breakdown of democracy. I mean, there's
01:33:53
nothing more toxic to democracy than polarization. Because if you live in a world where the people on the other side
01:34:01
of the political divide aren't just your rivals and you don't just disagree with
01:34:04
them about taxes, you know, but they are your existential enemies and if they're
01:34:08
in charge, then you know, the world ends, then it's very hard to have a normal democratic debate or create a
01:34:15
normal, you know, have a normal election. >> Mhm. Do you know what this is?
01:34:22
>> It looks like a very old newspaper. >> Very old newspaper from a long time ago.
01:34:28
And you're in it. >> Gosh. Oh, it's Wow. Uh, that's a um that was
01:34:37
that took a lot of research. >> Yeah. What is that? >> That is I don't they don't even have
01:34:43
these anymore. That was a New York Times wedding announcement >> from 1992. I think
01:34:47
>> 1992. married since 1992. I'm still married to the person who it was
01:34:52
announced that I was marrying a Polish He was then a journalist >> and now he's the Polish foreign
01:34:58
minister. We got married in Washington, but he was born in Poland and it's a
01:35:04
long story, but anyway, >> lots of photos of you here. >> Interesting. Oh, there's a nice one as
01:35:10
well. You're looking very presidential there. >> That was a long time ago.
01:35:13
>> And I've got another one of him and Hillary Clinton. >> Right.
01:35:16
Politics has been a big part of your family's life in various ways. >> I mean, it would be hard to deny that.
01:35:23
Yeah. >> Is it stressful? Cuz it's constant and it's and it's and
01:35:29
it's more polarizing than ever before and it's divisive and it's it's a lot of
01:35:33
energy. Even talking about these things I find to be quite um energy draining. >> Yes. I mean, actually, it became more
01:35:42
stressful in more recent years. I mean, social media made it more stressful than
01:35:46
it used to be. >> The stressful part is um living a part of your life in public. We try to not
01:35:54
live all of our lives in public. This has been very useful to me as a journalist. Actually, you begin to
01:35:57
understand the difference between what you look like in public and what your reality is, you know. So, people react
01:36:04
to you in all kinds of ways depending on how where they've seen you on TV or
01:36:08
where they've what stories they've read about you, some of which might not be
01:36:10
true. And there's often a kind of, you know, that the way you're perceived is
01:36:15
not necessarily the way you are. And so I I try to keep that in mind when I meet
01:36:19
public figures, you know, that I have a set of perceptions of them based on what
01:36:24
I've read about them, >> which I wouldn't have if I met, I don't
01:36:26
know, somebody introduces me to the next door neighbor. I wouldn't have that in
01:36:29
my head when I met them. But when you meet a politician or somebody who's um
01:36:33
who's who's wellknown, you come with you come with stuff. And I try when I meet
01:36:39
people to drop it as much as I can >> because you've seen that at home.
01:36:42
>> Because I've seen it at home. So yes, I mean we have compatible lives that are
01:36:48
somewhat different. I mean I have stayed well away from Polish politics. I don't
01:36:52
play any role in it. I have a different name from my husband which you know I didn't change my name and that was also
01:36:59
has led us allowed us to be separate and we share a lot of views but not all. Um,
01:37:06
and so we, you know, we have kind of different trajectories, but as I said, I find mostly knowing what it's like to be
01:37:13
a politician helps me understand them. >> Have you ever thought about going into
01:37:17
politics yourself? >> No. >> You can't have two politicians, one
01:37:21
family. >> You know, a lot of what I do is journalism or it's something or
01:37:26
journalist adjacent. You know, I go in and try and find things. I try and explain them. I try and say what what I
01:37:32
think is happening. And the job of a politician is quite different from that. You know, it's to you arrive with a set
01:37:40
of views. You need to explain them to people. You need to convince them. It's
01:37:44
just it's a different it's a different way of thinking about approaching the
01:37:46
public. So, I'm not I'm not campaigning for a for a cause. >> Is there a particular outcome you're
01:37:53
seeking with the work that you do, with the books that you write, and the conversations you have? Is there one
01:37:57
particular outcome above all others that you're aiming at? There's an outcome that's general but
01:38:03
not specific. In other words, I'm not trying to elect any particular person to
01:38:07
be president. I do have a goal that is to remind people of why democracy is important, why we need to maintain it
01:38:16
and to pay attention to the ways in which it's declining so that we can fight back. I mean, I have a I have a I
01:38:23
have a broad goal in that sense and that's not only inside the United States.
01:38:26
>> Why is this so personal to you? It it's the thing I've been fascinated
01:38:32
by since I was in my 20s. >> Why? >> Because I think it's I saw the Soviet
01:38:39
Union when it was still the Soviet Union. I was a student in Lennengrad when it was still Lengrad. I felt what
01:38:45
it was like to live in a heavily autocratic society even briefly. And I had really spent the rest of my life
01:38:52
trying to understand what it was, how it worked, why people went along with it. And I've also spent a lot of time more
01:39:02
recently trying to warn people against it, against going in that direction. You know, it's also not the thing I thought
01:39:08
I would be doing. I changed um you know, if you if you're looking at my books,
01:39:13
you know, I wrote three history books. I wrote the Gulad book. I wrote a history
01:39:18
of the Ukrainian famine. I wrote a book this is this is a book about how the Soviet Union took over Eastern Europe.
01:39:23
How they sort of did regime change in Eastern Europe after the war. You know, they're about things that happened, you
01:39:27
know, in the distant past. But I had a realization in about 2014 2015 that I was living through a period of history
01:39:37
myself. In other words, there was a historical shift happening around me and I felt the need to start recording it as
01:39:45
a kind of eyewitness. And so that book Twilight of Democracy was a description I mean it starts with a description of a
01:39:51
party I gave and then the book is about how people I knew had changed. I knew a lot of people who had been very
01:39:58
radicalized. I knew lots of people on the center right, you know, we were anti-communists, we were, you know,
01:40:03
whatever, Thatcherites, Reganites, and I saw many of them become more radical. And I thought, this is a really
01:40:09
important moment of change, and so I should record it as a witness. And so that book is the first book that I wrote
01:40:14
in the first person about something I'd seen. And that was just me being affected by the world I live in. Maybe
01:40:22
it did matter that I was married to a politician because some things that you would have noticed in a more distant way
01:40:28
affected me personally. >> Mhm. >> Maybe it was the particular circumstances of being
01:40:34
both American and Polish and you know seeing a similar pattern of things happening in both places. Either way, I
01:40:40
I felt that something important was happening and I've really been motivated
01:40:43
for the last decade to explain it to people and try and understand it. >> In that regard, what is the most
01:40:48
important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about? Um,
01:40:52
>> what would regime change really look like >> in our countries? >> Oh, in the west?
01:40:58
>> Yes. >> Isn't it just electing a new person? >> What would it feel like to live in a
01:41:05
very different kind of society? How would you feel living in a place where suddenly the values shifted? They were
01:41:11
different >> for better or for less. >> For the, you know, the the, you know, we
01:41:15
think, for example, free speech is is a value and we've been arguing about it
01:41:19
here. What does it mean? what's hate speech, you know, how do we measure it and so on. What if you suddenly found
01:41:24
yourself waking up one morning in a society where free speech was bad, >> you know, where it wasn't? You didn't
01:41:29
automatically assume that it was good. We also have an assumption that there is some kind of meritocracy in our
01:41:35
societies, right? That if you try hard and work hard and maybe you're lucky and
01:41:39
study, then you can be successful. What if you found yourself suddenly in a society where that wasn't true and
01:41:45
actually the only way to get ahead was to have a cousin in the ruling party? Being able to imagine that and think
01:41:50
about it um is important for understanding this bigger issue of democratic decline like what's the
01:41:56
change of our system that we're trying to avoid and what does it feel like to
01:42:00
people who experience that. So this has been a subject of a lot of my books. So that book Iron Curtain is about it. I've
01:42:07
written a lot about Ukraine and what happened when the Russians occupied eastern Ukraine. They did this thing.
01:42:15
They did regime change. They change the rules of the society. I think we don't
01:42:19
reflect enough about what what are the what are the deep rules of the societies we live in and what we would lose if we
01:42:26
lost them. Hm. it seems unimaginable and it seems quite far away and that is I guess a privilege
01:42:34
of having lived in a democratic society for my whole life that it's almost just
01:42:38
seem like as I said like it seems like a theoretical concept but you know history
01:42:45
they say it doesn't repeat but it rhymes and um I guess there's you know I I
01:42:49
believe that even if we don't know the time frames I do believe that there are
01:42:52
certain cycles in history that are um accelerate or come about because of human nature and so But I'm also well
01:42:59
aware that there are things that we can do or not do that could lead us to go down the uh the slope of
01:43:08
a bad a bad slope. >> So then you don't believe in inevitability. >> Well, it's interesting. I kind of
01:43:12
believe in both, which is I think that there's this fundamental human nature
01:43:15
which drives us which um causes these cycles to occur. And actually, one could even argue that it's inevitable that
01:43:22
eventually we miss the signs and we go down the slope. But the time frames of that occurring or if it occurs there we
01:43:28
still have agency and control over that. Does that make sense or is that does that sound like a total contradiction to
01:43:33
believe in both human nature does cause these cycles but but at the same time today we have a choice. We have agency
01:43:39
over whether we go in that direction. >> Yeah. Hum I mean human nature is like we
01:43:44
know how it works and so it offers us some warnings right. It it's you know we
01:43:48
we know what we should be trying to avoid. Mhm. >> As I said, if you if you focus hard on
01:43:53
what it is that you don't want to happen, I mean, that's what strategy is,
01:43:57
right? And then you work backwards and you think, how do I how do I make sure to prevent that from happening, you
01:44:02
know? Then you you begin to get a pretty clear idea of what's useful behavior in
01:44:07
the present. >> We have a closing tradition and where the last guest leaves a question for the
01:44:11
next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you,
01:44:18
what is the most challenging setback you've experienced and what's the lesson
01:44:21
you want to pass on to others? I suppose the most I mean the most challenging things I've experienced have
01:44:32
been political shifts where I when I saw radicalization I saw the rise of illiberal groups and movements including
01:44:44
among people I knew close closely and very well and figuring out both how to cope with them and how to trying to
01:44:53
under you know shift my thinking in order understand how to explain it and deal with it. That was probably the most
01:44:59
important. That was probably the most important. >> How do you cope with them?
01:45:04
>> Someone in your life has a sort of >> bad at it. >> Really >> interesting.
01:45:08
>> I um I mean lots of people think that um you know you should be able to you know
01:45:13
be friends with everybody and talk to everybody and I see that. I see some people are able to do that. I find that
01:45:19
I care too much. >> Interesting. >> It becomes hard for me. Do you think you
01:45:24
could interview as a journalist? Do you think you could interview anybody? >> Probably could interview anybody. I
01:45:31
mean, there would be some people who are hard to interview because they lie, you
01:45:34
know, for example, and then I don't know how to deal with that. Then you don't
01:45:37
want to have an interview where you're correcting somebody the whole time. >> I would certainly talk to anybody as a
01:45:42
journalist. >> Would you interview Trump? >> Yeah. I mean, he he would have he would
01:45:46
pose exactly that problem because how would you deal with the fact that he's
01:45:50
saying something that's not true? Would you then say, "But Mr. the president
01:45:52
that's not true and then go down that road of arguing with him or would you um
01:45:57
or would you just listen and write it down? >> So you're worried it wouldn't be
01:46:00
productive? >> I'm worried it wouldn't be productive. >> That that's also my line to be honest
01:46:03
with um with people is there's certain people that are really consequential so
01:46:07
you feel you should interview them but part of me worries that some of them wouldn't be it wouldn't be productive
01:46:11
anyway. >> So I wouldn't get anything out of them that is new or useful or productive. So,
01:46:17
>> right. I mean, I would I would talk to anybody who is who with whom you can
01:46:21
have an argument and who's reality based. >> Mhm. And my other thing is just people
01:46:25
that don't take things off the record because sometimes when we ask to interview people, they'll say, "Yes, but
01:46:29
as long as you don't talk about this and for me that's a no-go." >> Well, I didn't take anything off the
01:46:33
record. >> You didn't? Thank you. I appreciate that. Um, well, you have so many
01:46:36
wonderful books. I heard there's also a cookbook which I didn't manage to locate
01:46:40
which is a bit of a diversion from from your subject matter but um they are brilliant books and the reason why I I
01:46:46
was very keen for my team to reach out to you and ask you to come today was because not because just you write great
01:46:50
books but you're a real demystifying force in a world that's becoming incredibly misty for many of us in part
01:46:55
because there's just so much information accessible to all of us now. But I highly recommend people go check out
01:46:59
these wonderful books. I'm going to link them all below and many of them are a
01:47:03
continuation of the themes and subjects we've talked about or adjacent stories
01:47:06
from history. But you're a remarkable storyteller an and that's why I think
01:47:10
people love listening to you so much. So I really appreciate you taking the time
01:47:13
today to um help demystify all of this for me. I actually have never had a conversation that is so centered on the
01:47:18
the subject of democracy. I've heard people talking about it for the last 10
01:47:21
years as this sort of this thing that matters. But this conversation has really opened my eyes to both the value
01:47:26
of it, but also the risks and the slippery slope that causes societies to lose it. So, thank you so much for doing
01:47:32
what you do because it's incredibly important. And as a as a 33-year-old that's lived most of my life in the
01:47:37
West, um it's very easy to take democracy as a subject for granted. >> I think I have, to be honest.
01:47:43
>> Yes. Well, it's it's it's normal. It's it's it's the it's the water we swim in.
01:47:47
We're the fish, you know, and the idea that there would someday not be water is
01:47:50
unimaginable. >> But thank you for asking such um such penetrating questions. Thank you.
01:47:57
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