Transcript of Pulitzer Prize Historian: You Won't Notice Until It's Too Late! New

This was Trump's net worth when he went into office, $2.3 billion. And this is his net worth now, just 2 years later, $6.5 billion.

So we've never had a president running businesses while in office. And so decisions are being made not based on what's good for Americans, but what's good for his company. For example, why did the Saudi government invest $2 billion in Jared Kushner's fund? It wasn't because they just liked Jared Kushner. It was because Kushner is Trump's son-in-law. And so my biggest concern is the deterioration of American democracy. I mean, it's already happening. Most people think democracies end with tanks in the street or somebody shooting up the presidential palace. But actually, in the modern world, they mostly end because someone who is legitimately elected begins to take apart the system. Trump, he has never cared much one way or the other for American democracy. He admires foreign leaders who have no constraints. And I have a goal that is to remind people of why democracy is important. Important and to pay attention to the ways in which it's declining so that we can fight back. So we're just at the beginning of what could be quite a big change.

So there's 5 core tactics that autocratic leaders use to dismantle a democracy. Could you walk me through the 5 tactics?

So first of all—

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I started out as somebody who was fascinated by the Soviet Union. I went there when it still existed as a, as a student. I was lucky enough to watch it fall apart. I was a journalist based in Warsaw at the time the Warsaw Pact came to an end. Then I spent some years writing history books, trying to explain how control was maintained over such a large space by so few people. But all that time, I thought that what I was doing was writing stories about the distant past. I was analyzing a system that didn't exist anymore. What's happened to me in the last decade is that I've discovered that a lot of what I thought was over and done and belonged to some other era has come back. Most people think democracies end with a coup d'état, or, you know, tanks in the street, or somebody shooting up the presidential palace. But actually, in the modern world, they mostly end because someone who is legitimately elected begins to take apart the system and take away the things that ensure free elections can continue. And I started watching that happen in multiple countries at the same time, and I saw this authoritarian instinct start to come back.

And that's what I write about now.

Are these just election cycles, or is there something bigger at play here? Because, you know, I spend a lot of time reading articles from decades ago or hundreds of years ago. And in all times in history, it seems that there were problems, but it seems that the, I don't know, the democratic system has a remarkable way every 4 years of clearing out what people weren't happy with and putting something new in. Is this time different to the past?

What feels different to me is for the first time in several established democracies, most notably the United States, but not only, you have political parties who come to power with the explicit idea that they will alter the system in order to make sure that they can stay in forever. The pioneer of this idea was Viktor Orbán in Hungary. He was elected legitimately with a big margin, and then what he did was slowly seek to capture the state. So what a democracy needs in order to survive, in order to maintain its stability, it needs a few neutral institutions. You know, it needs independent courts, it needs an independent electoral commission, It needs independent media. In the modern world, it needs a meritocratic bureaucracy, so people are hired and fired to measure pollution or worry about traffic and road construction who aren't cousins of the ruling party. They aren't somebody's friend, but they're actual experts who understand how to do 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 fair election. And you see people who are elected who, who once they had power decided to take those institutions apart.

You know, if you think about democracy, it's actually a very strange system, right? So you win an election, and in a democracy you have to preserve the rules so that 4 years from now your bitter enemies can contest you and maybe beat you again. You know, you lose an election, you have to say, okay, we're allowing our rivals to stay in power, but we trust that the system will remain fair. So 4 years from now, we can also contest them again. So it requires a certain level of agreement about the nature of the system. And when that begins to break down, then you begin to have imbalances, and then you begin to have elections that seem unfair to people, and then you begin to have a completely different kind of national conversation. And we can see that has happened in in several places, and of course most notably in the United States. And because the United States is the largest democracy, because it's played the role of leader of the democratic world, the influence of America on other countries is pretty profound. And so this, this idea that democracies can possibly break down is suddenly both horrifying people but also interesting to other people who say, all right, if you can do it in America, you can do it here.

There's a part of me that just thinks that could never happen in America. And that's obviously a bias that I have being 33 years old and not knowing a ton about history. But there's— I'm sure there's lots of people that think this is some sort of theoretical idea, but it would never happen in America because we would never allow America to not be a democracy. We wouldn't allow a Russia situation where you've got Putin sitting in power for two decades or whatever.

Sure, but there are systems in between Russia and liberal democracy. You can have democracies that aren't fair. And actually, I'm afraid to tell you that in the United States there is a history of that. So the— in the American South before the Civil Rights Movement, you very often had, in effect, in, in the southern states, you had these one-party states where, you know, the rules were pretty rigged. Everybody knew who was going to win. Not everybody was allowed to vote. So Black people weren't allowed to vote, or they were— it was very heavily restricted. It was hard for them to vote. And that existed in the United States, you know, between the Civil War and the and the 1960s, you had very undemocratic parts of the United States. And I think some of the people who are in Washington right now in the Trump administration are working from that history and from that historical memory.

What is your biggest concern in this regard?

Well, I have two concerns. Uh, one is that inside the United States, the deterioration of American democracy— I mean, it's already happening, right? So it's already creating a class of people who no longer feel they have a stake in the political system. And who won't vote, may never vote, and, and will be outside of politics and outside of the national conversation. That can lead in the direction of violence, that can lead in all kinds of negative directions. We see the development of new kinds of paramilitary in the United States that we never had before, the development of ICE. We never before had a single national police force wearing combat uniforms, wearing masks, not subject to the normal restrictions of local police forces. We also have a rise in high-end corruption. The president, people around him, companies close to him seem to have access to ways to make money and are making money out of doing politics in a way that was also not possible at that scale in America before. And that's sort of one whole set of concerns if you want to go down one of those roads.

[Speaker:WILLIAM GREEN] There's this map in front of us on the table. I realize some people can't see because they're listening, but there's a map on the table in front of us. Could you just explain what this map shows and why it's significant?

The map shows the level of, of democracy around the world. And of course, the thing that's immediately notable to me is that those who made the map don't count the United States anymore as a liberal democracy. So, a liberal democracy meaning a state where, as I said, the electoral rules are clear, where the electoral system is set up not to favor one party or the next. And instead, it's described as an electoral democracy, which is somewhat less free. You see similar systems in South America. In Europe, you mostly still have liberal democracies. In Australia, Japan, South Korea, you still have liberal democracies. And then most of the rest of the world are some form of autocracy, either very closed and very repressive like China or like Russia, or they are in a democratic gray zone. So there are states that could really go in either direction. I mean, they're still, they're still open. But it's true that if you'd looked at a map like this a decade ago or two decades ago, it would have been a lot bluer. The, the blue being democracy and the red or reddish being autocracy. So you do see an absolute process of democratic decline that's been written about, um, by many people over the last years.

I, I think— I believe very much that states influence one another. People follow and imitate and copy their neighbors.

Do you think it's possible that in our lifetimes the US might become an —authocratic country.

So the U.S. could become a— what I think on this map is described as an autocratic gray zone. So you could imagine the U.S. as, in effect, a one-party state. So a state where one political party has control and the other just can't win national elections. You already have this system of— we call it gerrymandering. Where electoral districts are being written in such a way as to favor one party or another. The effect of that also is that once you have people who don't really have to contest elections anymore, then you have corruption. Because if you're going to win anyway, why do you have to worry about your constituents? Then you have worse government and worse services, because if you don't have to have an electoral contest, then, you know, you can pursue your own interests. You can do favors for businessmen who help you in other ways. And we see this decline of democracy already at the state level. And of course, there could be a danger at the national level of a fixed system that made sure only one party ever wins. And then you would get all these pathologies that we already have at the state level, and we're beginning to have them, uh, even now.

And remember, we have right now a president who refused to accept the result of an election in 2020 and who staged what was intended to be an electoral coup. It failed. But, you know, the idea that he wouldn't do it again, or nobody would ever dare to do that, or nobody would block an election, I think it's pretty naive at this point. I mean, it happened already, and so of course it can happen again.

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

I don't think so, because I don't think he wants one. Um, but I think it's possible that people around him will try to shape and affect the elections in a way that makes sure that a Republican wins. Or maybe his, his children.

It's very possible that one of his children will run for president because there's a way to kind of control power in America. You know, when they talk about MAGA, which is, I guess, a collection of people now, you know, you could say JD Vance is part of MAGA and the kids and Trump. So maybe they'd want to keep it within MAGA. Maybe that's the—

they might, or they might want to, want to keep it within the family. I mean, look, what is MAGA now? You know, what, what is different about Trump's second term from Trump's first term? So one of the things that happened after January 6th, after the attack on the Congress, was that many of the people who'd been around Trump— Republicans, people who do foreign policy, people who do domestic policy— left. They said, right, this is too much for us, you know, we're, we're American patriots, you know, we can't support this kind of attack on our political system. And they departed his presence. But that exactly that moment, that attack on the electoral system attracted other people. So for different reasons, people who disliked the American political system, who don't like democracy, don't like liberal democracy, thought it was leading America in a left-wing direction— some of them have political reasons— they were attracted to Donald Trump because they said, right, this is somebody who has the nerve to try and overthrow the system, and we like that. And they're, they're, they're not all the same. They have different views. So there's a tech authoritarian group who want influence over the American political system because it's good for their businesses and because they don't get the point of democracy anyway, and they think they should be in charge.

There's a, a kind of Christian nationalist group who think the United States should not be a secular state, it should be a Christian state, and they want to— they are interested in taking over the system, um, with that end. And then there's a traditional MAGA group who think the United States should be run by the people who used to run it, you know, the kind of white Christian people of a certain kind, and they want to bring the United States back in that direction. So there, there are different views, um, and they don't all agree with each other, but they, they do agree that the system requires radical change. And that's the difference between the first and second term. So Trump's first term, I think he has never cared much one way or the other for American democracy. He personally sees himself as someone who should be allowed to act in any way he wants. He doesn't like any kind of constraint. He He admires foreign leaders who have no constraints, but he was one way or another constrained in his first term by the system, and now he's surrounded himself by people who are seeking to help him avoid those constraints, and that's new.

I think when we have these conversations, we assume that everybody agrees that democracy is the better path. Sure. And that they understand the downsides of an autocracy.

So there are different kinds of autocracies, to be clear, and some are more repressive than others. The, the main thing that you would notice, the first thing you would notice, would be the absence of the rule of law. Rule of law means that judges and courts in the legal system make decisions based on the Constitution or on the laws. And in an autocracy, you have rule by law, and that means that the law is what the person in power says it is. And so if you did a program, for example, and someone on your program said something that was offensive to the leader of the country, you could be arrested and you could be put on trial. And instead of the court saying, right, we've looked at this case and according to the law we have— in the law it says we have freedom of speech and you can do whatever you want— they could— somebody could, could ring up from the Kremlin or from the White House or from, you know, whatever is the leadership of your country and say, no, actually we want this guy in jail. And we don't care what the courts think.

And that's the big difference here. I'll tell you a real story that happened in Hungary when Hungary was going down 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 door and they can say, we would like you to sell us a majority share in your company. And you say, no, why should I let you do that? I, I, my company, I built it, I invested in it, I don't want to sell it. And then, okay, so what happens the next day? Somebody breaks the windows of your house. A few days later, your children are harassed on the way to school. People who work for you start having legal problems, this or that, you know, some kind of mortgage issue or some, you know. And suddenly your company encounters regulatory issues. There's a tax inspection. And one by one, the state finds a way to harass you, to harass your company, your workers, so that eventually you say, okay, I give up, I sell, and I'm leaving the country. And this happened to somebody I know.

Sounds like, um, Anthropic in the United States recently, where Anthropic, the AI company, refused to give the United States access to its AI under certain conditions. And then very quickly, Pete Hegseth did a post, I think, and Donald Trump did a post basically saying that they were going to restrict their ability to work with the government.

We aren't used to the idea that the government decides which companies thrive and which ones die. You know, so once you have an autocratic state that can do what it wants legally, then it can decide which companies succeed. It can base government contracts, which are very important in every country, not on who's the best company, or not on some kind of blind procurement process, but on who's your friend, you know, or, or who's donated to your political party, or who's— in the case of the United States— who's invested in your company. So one of the things that we have in the United States for the first time ever, I think, is a president who is actively doing business in countries and in areas that are of interest to the people he's doing business with. So for example, the Trump family does business in Saudi Arabia. It has a, it has a deal with a Saudi company called, um, Dar Al-Akhan, which is a sort of development company. And that company has close relations to the Saudi Saudi leadership is interested in deals with the United States, but I mean political arrangement with the United States, and the money is going into the Trump family coffers in order to make a better arrangement for the country of Saudi Arabia.

So it's a way in which, because we have a declining democracy and because we have an increasingly kleptocratic system, decisions are being made by the president of the United States, by the White House, not based on what's good for Americans, but on what's good for Saudi Arabia. His company. And that's— and that, if you look at Russia, that's exactly how the political system works there. If you look at China— China is more complicated, it's a bigger country, it's more sophisticated— but even there you have, again, decisions made not for the welfare of the Chinese people but for the ruling party, for the Communist Party.

And we have two, uh, jars of money here. This was, uh, Trump's net worth when he went into office, $2.3 billion reportedly. And this is his net worth now, just 2 years later, $6.5 billion. Looks like being a president is a profitable job.

So that has never happened before. This is completely new in American history. There have been presidents who— there have been whiffs of corruption around them. There's been, you know, presidential relatives who've tried to trade off the president's name, but we've never had a president running businesses while in office. And as I said, in such a way that the people with whom he's doing business are, are hoping to benefit politically or, or, or in other ways. And that's, that's completely brand new. And if you just— back to your original question, which is why is democracy better? Churchill was the person who said that democracy is the worst system of government except for all the others. So it's multi-reasons why it's flawed. Uh, you know, democracies have— require an immense amount of tolerance. There's always a lot of cacophony. There's a constant flux and change that people find enervating. But at the very least, what democracies can do is they can force issues like this into the public sphere. You know, you're allowed, at least in a democracy, to question whether this— decisions are being made on the basis that they're good for everybody or they're being made for the benefit of the president.

I guess supporters would say, you know, Trump's not running the businesses himself. It's just his kids' activity that is generating this net worth.

Yeah, but I mean, everybody knows that they're his kids, and you, you wouldn't do it, you know. Why, why did the Saudi government invest $2 billion in Jared Kushner's fund? It wasn't because they just liked Jared Kushner. It was because Kushner is Trump's son-in-law. And now, of course, Kushner is the Trump administration's negotiator in the Middle East. Um, so he's negotiating with his business partners. The appearance of conflict of interest is overwhelming. And as I said, we've never had in American history, or I think in recent British history, we've never had that kind of conflict of interest so clear at that, at that higher level.

Do you spend much time thinking about what's going on in the Middle East, the wars in Iran, and Venezuela and the bigger picture here of what's happening and how this might link back to what you were saying about authoritarian regimes. It's all very confusing. I feel like we went through a period of relative peace through the Biden era, and Trump obviously ran on this promise that he wasn't going to 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 nearer to any conclusion. And now there's this war in Iran that threatens to be a never-ending war. Well, what is— what, what, why? What's going on? There are several things going on.

One of them is that in declining democracies and in historically in autocracies is you have leaders who conduct wars as a way of consolidating their base and consolidating their support. And so one of the things that Trump likes to do is if he declares a war— I believe he had different expectation of the Iran War. He's using foreign policy, he's using these fighting of wars in order to consolidate his support at home. So that's, that's a part of what's happening. But some of this has nothing to do with Trump. You know, we are now living in a world where the historical political system, um, the one that was built after 1945— some people call it the liberal world order. I don't really like that term because it sounds kind of mushy— but the, the order that has existed since 1945, the one that was 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 breaking down for several reasons. One we've started to discuss already, which is changes inside the United States, and the United States was a really important pillar of that order.

But it's also breaking down because the autocratic powers— Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela until recently, uh, and, and others have been challenging that order for a while themselves. They didn't like the American dominance of, you know, of international politics in the conversation. They were competing with America at a, at a strategic level, but also in what is really a war of ideas. So let's go back to autocracy and democracy. You know, if you are the leader of Russia or you're the leader of China, what is the thing that is most threatening to you? And the answer is the language of liberal democracy. So all this stuff that we find boring and we're used to, and, you know, this idea of freedom of speech and separation of powers and rule of law, all those things that we have come to take for granted in our societies are a huge challenge to the political system in Russia or China. You know, what is Putin most afraid of? He's most afraid of a street revolution of the kind we had in Ukraine in 2014. So when people are standing on the street and they have signs saying, "We're against corruption," you know, "We want democracy, we want to be in the European Union, we want to be integrated with Europe," he's afraid of that happening in Russia.

Because if you live in an autocratic state where you don't have freedom of speech, where there is no justice, where the government decides what all the rules are, then those ideas are explosive and exciting, the same way they were in the 18th century when they first appeared in the Declaration of Independence. And people can be motivated by them, people will go into the street for them, people will their lives for them. And the autocrats know that. And so really, for the past decade, since 2013, 2014, you see them seeking to spread those ideas, to promote them. I mean, we all know now about Russian propaganda campaigns. We know what Russian disinformation looks like. There's a Chinese version too, which we don't see that much in English, but it appears in, in other countries. We see them seeking to undermine democracy, trying to spread the influence of a different set of ideas. So the war in Ukraine is exactly that war. The Russians are firstly trying to destroy Ukraine as a nation. They want it to disappear. This is their— they're an empire. They want Ukraine to be their colony. And they understood perfectly well that by challenging Ukraine, by invading Ukraine, they were defying this liberal world order.

They were defying the rules of post-war Europe. Because in post-war Europe there was a decision made after 1945: we're not going to invade each other anymore, we're not going to have wars. Instead, we're going to decide everything by, by diplomacy. Borders will not be changed by force. And the Russians understood that they were breaking that, that norm, and they invaded Ukraine. They also invaded Ukraine because the Ukrainians were using that language, that powerful democratic language that we take for granted. And Putin said, if they can do it in Ukraine, then people could do it in Russia. And so I need to crush this Ukrainian democracy movement. And so that war really is a fault line between the democratic world and the autocratic world. So I think what, what you're seeing is the breakdown of an older system that was more or less organized around— by American rules.

Through history, which lasts longer, democracy or autocracy?

Oh, autocracies, they last longer. Well, look, if you look back in history, most human societies in most times have been what you would— we would now call autocracy, but they were whatever. They were monarchies. They were led by tribal leaders, by warlords. There have been very, very few liberal democracies, and most of them have not lasted. And I should also say, the people who wrote the American Constitution knew that. And when they wrote it, they were reading the history of ancient Rome. There was a Roman Republic, and it fell when it was taken over by Julius Caesar. So they all knew that story. They were reading about the Greek democracies, Athens, which also fell. And when they wrote the US Constitution, they were thinking, how do we make this last? What can we put in it to make it last? It's a longer story whether you think they were successful or not, but everybody who've created democracies, whether it was after World War II in Europe, whether it was America in the 18th century, everybody understood that this was a fragile system, and they tried to put checks and balances you know, judicial, legislative, and executive power.

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

I don't know if you have the answer to this question, but where are people happier on average, in a democracy or in an autocracy?

So I have to tell you, I know a little bit about happiness surveys, and over and over and over again, the happiest place in the world is Finland. Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway. Scandinavia is very happy. The reasons for that may not be anything to do with the nature of the political system, might have other sources, but the happiness is certainly connected to democracy, it's connected to stability, and of course connected to wealth.

Just looking at some research here, it says while wealth and economic stability are critical for happiness regardless of the government type, democracy provides additional structural benefits like participation, security, and lower corruption that tend to lift a society's overall life satisfaction.

Well, democracies by definition are, at least in theory, the state is structured in a way to benefit everybody, right? At least that's how it's supposed to work. So whether it's a national healthcare system or whether it's a system of roads and railroads, you know, the state is building things that are designed to serve everybody. In an autocracy, that doesn't necessarily happen. So in Russia, ordinary Russians have no influence on that decision. They have no way of expressing their views. They can't say what they think. They have no ability to influence the state. They can't say, well, actually, hey, we'd like to build a hospital instead of bombing another city in Ukraine. And so they have very little ability to change the system. And that, of course, creates frustration and unhappiness.

If that is true, and this is why I asked the question, if it's better for the people, and at some degree, I think if informed people would choose it, which I think is— and I say the word informed because I understand in a lot of these countries where they don't have democracy, that I'm now using don't have democracy instead of having to say that word again, they limit the access to information so that people don't know what they're missing out on, I guess, or don't have those potentially disruptive ideas they're not exposed to them on their phones or devices. I would think a person would choose to live in a democracy if given the choice and the information.

I would think so. Although, you know, there are other, you know, there's a deep human need for a sense of stability and security. Hierarchy. Hierarchy for some people. And it's true that authoritarians seem to offer that. You know, in a democracy, you do have this constant change of leaders. You know, there's more demands on citizens. You know, you have to participate if you care about your country. It's not just enough to vote. You need to be involved in politics in some way. And autocracies, I mean, I think falsely offer stability. And so the, the argument of the Russians and Chinese governments, and the argument they make on in those social media campaigns that they run inside the U.S. or the UK or Europe, is exactly that. Authoritarianism, stability, safety, traditional values, hierarchy. And there are people for whom that's deeply appealing. So I wouldn't discount that instinct. And when people like that are also able to control information, when they control the security services, when they monopolize the use of violence, they can be very hard to undo, even if the majority of the country wants something different.

It's almost hard for me to understand how the people in Russia, are okay with the fact that the leader has been there for several decades and isn't moving. I— it's hard for us to understand because in the UK or in America, there'll be people on the streets.

It doesn't matter what they think, really. Well, because they have no way of expressing what they think. There's no such thing as public opinion or public debate. There's no— there's no 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 say, I think Putin should be, you know, it's time for him to retire, you could be arrested. And so people begin to adjust what they think, and they begin to change their behavior because they know that it's dangerous to say things. I mean, this is something, this is a phenomenon I found in the work I did years ago on the Soviet Union. The propaganda said how successful we are and how much hay we've grown this year and how many bits of steel we've made, and it was always fake. And so the question was always, well, did people really believe that? Did people believe in the system? Do they believe in the propaganda? And the answer was a little 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 you had to say you believed it.

And at a certain point, what they really thought, 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 you have in Russia again now. It's, for me, very tragic because there was a period in Russia in the '90s and 2000s when there was open debate. And people were speaking freely and clearly about, about the state of the country. But right now, it's, it's once again a situation where expressing your views is dangerous, and so people just don't do it, and they try to stay out of politics altogether. You know, politics is dangerous and ugly and nasty, like, just stay home. And remember that this is something that's developed over years. It didn't happen from one day to the next. It was a decline that's been happening since the year 2000.

I've heard you say that there's 5 core tactics that autocratic leaders use to dismantle a democracy. Could you walk me through the 5 tactics and maybe also link them to things that are happening now in, in the West, which might be warning signs of the dismantling of one's democracy?

Well, corruption. We've done that one already. Corruption you have in any political system, and you often have it in democracies too, but in an autocratic society, you have more corruption because the, the legal system is controlled. And so what you have, for example, in the United States, the fact that Donald Trump has taken over our Department of Justice and has installed loyalists who are looking, among other things, for example, to prosecute his enemies just because they're his enemies, that means you have a check and balance. So normally, if there was high-level corruption in the White House or in the administration, you would have people inside the Department of Justice and the FBI who would investigate it. But now we don't have that happening. Is that different from the past? It's different. It's different. I mean, we didn't have anybody try to use the White House to make money in this way before, so hard for me to say what would have happened in, like, I don't know, the Clinton administration. But we didn't have a completely politicized civil service, completely politicized FBI. Who would avoid, you know, any kind of investigation. And so corruption is a particular symptom of authoritarianism, and it's also a tool.

You know, it's something that the president can offer people. You get along with me, you don't criticize me, your business will prosper. You know, you will get government contracts.

Is that what we're seeing with all these big tech CEOs that seem to be going frequently to the White House and saying wonderful things about him and his support and having dinner with him and none of them speaking out. But if you looked at their Twitter feeds a couple of years ago, they were all saying the most horrific things about Trump. Yes.

I mean, they've understood that, you know, if this is going to be an American administration that you have to genuflect to the president, you have to be sycophantic to the president in order to get business deals, then they'll do it. If you have to donate to his White House reconstruction fund, which many of them have done, then you'll do it. If you have to donate to his inauguration, you'll, you'll do it. It's a question of who is supposed to be the beneficiary of government regulation. It's supposed to be Americans. I mean, ordinary people. We're supposed to become more prosperous. The beneficiary is not supposed to be, as I said, the president and his family and his entourage. And that is a big shift in, in American politics.

When I look back at someone like, like the CEO of OpenAI's statements on Trump, if you go back to 2016, he said he was an unprecedented threat to America and called a potential disaster for the American economy. He said he was irresponsible in the way dictators are and compared his rhetoric to the big lie tactics used by historical authoritarians like Hitler. He described him as erratic, abusive, and prone to fits of rage. And then I see him side by side at the White House saying nice things about him and saying nothing critical at all.

It's one of the most bizarre things actually about this whole administration. You know, if I were that rich. Like, what's the point of being rich unless if you can't say what you think? You know, I don't understand the value of it.

Can I hazard a guess as to why the, like, incentive structure they're trapped in? What's your guess? I think that being rich for these people is actually just a proxy of status. And I think the thing that risks their status, which is what they care about more than anything else in the games that they're playing, is losing to their direct competition. And it's quite clear to me that if someone like Sam Altman was to say anything negative about It would, of course, hurt his business, but actually it would hurt something more, which is his status. He would lose to Anthropic and xAI and Gemini. To lose in your category of peers, which all these little tech oligarchs are in this, like, category of peers, would hurt more than anything. I think it would hurt more than losing a gazillion dollars. It's just like losing the game.

Yeah, though there are two things about it. One is it's very short-sighted because ultimately, who will suffer if there is a decline in, in the American political system, in the American legal system, I mean, it's them.

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

They have, but it's a mug's game. I mean, it's fine as long as you're one of the people who are winning, but what if the rules change?

Oh yeah, like in Russia with the oligarchs. That's right.

I'm sick of these oligarchs. I want different oligarchs. That happened in China too. So that's one argument against it. The second argument is, and I think Anthropic might have figured this out already, and some of the law firms have figured out. There's also a gain to be made by saying, no, I'm independent, we have our own corporate rules, we have our own legal code of ethics, and we're going to behave as patriotic Americans. And then you attract business, and they, and they may be doing all of it. And as I said, there's a, there's a parallel thing that happened with U.S. law firms. There were some frivolous lawsuits and they settled them, and then there were some who said, no, we won't settle, we won't do that. And the ones who didn't do it have all won, you know, and they're all thriving. I mean, so there is also a benefit to be gained both commercially and financially, and I would think even in that weird world of status, by standing up for what you believe in and by remembering the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is what happens to the United States. I mean, the United States is your main market.

It's where your employees come from. It's the place where you're doing business. And if, if the United States begins to suffer, then you suffer too. And so thinking a little bit like that would— might help some of them.

Is this just another 3 years of this sort of unusual behavior before we resume business as usual in our democracies?

I'm asked this by Europeans all the time, and my sense is that a lot of things will not ever be quite normal again, either inside the US or around the world. I mean, I would advise, for example, I mean, if you're doing business with the US or you're a security partner of the US, I would strongly recommend that you have Plan B. You know, it's really time for NATO to have a plan in case the United States flakes out, to have a different security option. You know, what happens to the US after Trump isn't clear. First of all, the next president could be JD Vance, who I think is even more committed to the project of making America into a one-party state. Or the next president could be a Democrat we haven't heard of yet who decides to use the broken system in 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 mean, once the norms are broken and once the laws have changed, then it can be— anybody can take advantage of it. I mean, if Trump can use the federal bureaucracy to threaten media companies, then why can't the next president?

And so, you know, certain things don't necessarily get fixed once they're broken.

On that point of global partners of the US now thinking about their own defense and themselves more, Is that a pattern that you're seeing? I just, from my observations of, you know, we're sat here in London at the moment, but my observations of the UK— the UK used to consider ourselves to be the great alliance, uh, sort of partner of America. Special relation. We had the special relationship, which I never knew what it meant, but I always liked it. It seems like that's gone out the window, and the UK are now speaking a lot to like President Macron in France, and it seems like we're having our own little European meetings. But around the world, it that that's happening. Canada don't seem to be a great ally of the US anymore after they threatened to invade them. What is happening from that perspective? Are we becoming more individualistic and breaking into our own little groups because of Trump's rhetoric?

What you're watching is everybody all over the world hedging. Everybody is looking for alternatives. So you now have an EU-India trade agreement, which nobody would have bothered to do a few years ago. You have Canada initiating a security relationship with the EU. You have conversations inside NATO about, you know, realistically, if the United States weren't to help us in case of a Russian attack, what would we do? So that's— those aren't really public conversations, but privately lots of people are having them. Everywhere you go, you see these so-called middle powers. This is a term that Mark Carney of Canada first started using, you know, Brazil, India, The EU countries begin— Japan, you see them beginning to make new relationships with one another. You know, if the United States flakes out and we can't trade with them in a normal way anymore because the president changes the trading rules every 5 minutes, then at least we'll have a decent trading relationship with somebody else. I, I travel a lot. I've traveled a lot in the last 3 months, and everywhere I go, that's the main topic of conversation. Canada, Canada was completely integrated with the United States.

I mean, they almost didn't have an independent economy. And now the Canadians are thinking, how do we benefit from our oil and gas wealth to protect our sovereignty? Who else do we do deals with? Carney's been to China. He's, you know, also talking to India. With whom will we share, potentially share nuclear technology? There are these conversations between France and Poland and France and Germany about a different kind of nuclear umbrella. It's all pretty tentative, but it's moved much faster than I would ever expected. I think the breaking point for a lot of people in Europe was Greenland. And I don't know if people have really focused on what exactly happened there, but you had the president of the United States saying he was going to invade Denmark. All right, but there we go. So the United States was saying it was going to invade Greenland. So Trump was kind of hinting it in public, and behind the scenes there were other signs that maybe they were really preparing to do it. And so what did that mean in Denmark? That meant that the Danes said, okay, we're preparing for a U.S. invasion. And this is a very— this is a country that's very pro-American.

Lots of big Danish companies in the United States, including the ones who create the, the weight loss drugs. Lots of Danish-American travel, friendship, everything, security relationship going back to, to the Second World War. Okay, the Americans are invading, what do we do? Do we blow up the airports in Greenland? And they did start planning that. Do we plan to shoot down American planes? Are we going to shoot at American soldiers? You know, are they going to shoot at us? And they had to suddenly imagine a real war with their closest ally and how that would impact them and impact trade and impact NATO and so on. And not only did they have to do it, their close allies in Europe did it too. So the Germans We're consulting with the Danes all through this period. You know, what if the Danes shoot down an American plane? Like, how does that affect us? And everybody went through this kind of traumatic experience of imagining a U.S. invasion of a NATO ally. And then Trump made a speech at Davos where he somehow changed the subject and confused Greenland and Iceland a few times. And, you know, and it got put off.

But no one has recovered. Everybody remembers that moment and said, okay, this is a— this is an unstable power. They could do real damage to us. They can't be relied on. We need alternatives. And so really since then, and that was in January, since then, this is when you've seen this, the stuff you were talking about, you know, the visits to China, the visits to Canada, um, the back and forth with India. And you see, you see everybody hedging and rearranging the way they think about the world.

If you're an American, is this good news or bad news that the rest of the world is hedging? It's very bad news.

Why? Because a lot of America's prosperity in the post-war period has been based on the fact that America was dominant in global trade. And, you know, we make money out of our European relationships. Um, you know, we produce things that we sell all over the world, and actually, you know, we import things from all over the world, and that's good too. You know, the, the root of American post-war prosperity is, is, are these relationships, especially with Europe. And also the root of America's security dominance. I mean, why are there NATO bases in Europe? It's not just to protect Europe. It's also because from there, the US can project power into the Middle East. It has, it can, you know, into Africa. It has a sort of window on the world from there. And once those bases are gone, then the US is suddenly cut off and far away in a way that it wasn't before. And there are all kinds of other risks. You know, will the US dollar go on being so dominant? The US makes money out of that. Um, will US goods go on being so valued? You know, in Canada they boycott US products now.

And actually, this is when I was in 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 tell you whether it's made in the United States. And if it's made in the United States, you don't buy it because they were so angry. Even the dominance of American tech, which a lot of Europeans have belatedly woken up to as a problem could be in question. So Europeans are looking to do cloud storage in Europe and payment systems in Europe because, you know, maybe the US is unreliable. And so all— it's— we're just at the beginning of what could be quite a big change. And yes, Americans would feel that.

Coming back to this point about the war in Iran, you said that Trump sort of misestimated what would happen here. Yes. Obviously flew into Venezuela and took Maduro out of bed, and that seemed to go fairly well. From what he might have been expecting. But then he attacked Iran, and this war seems to know no end now.

I mean, here's another feature of dictatorships is that nobody questions your decisions and nobody offers you alternatives. So the people around you, the people around you. So when he was planning the war in Iran, from the reporting that we know, people did say, well, you know, Mr. President, you know, the Iranians are not like the Venezuelans. It's a very embedded regime. And the Iranians had a plan already for what would happen if there their leadership was killed. They just— they had a sort of decentralized system, you know, that will kick into place. You know, they have allies all over the Middle East. They have these proxy groups in different parts of the Middle East, and famously the control over the Strait of Hormuz, possibly. And he was told that, but it seems he wasn't told it in a very definitive way. Like, some people said, well, maybe this might be the case, but nobody said to him, Mr. President, this is a bad idea. Because he's known if you said, Mr. President, this is a bad idea, he might have said, well, get out of my sight, because he's not somebody who listens to other people's views or, or takes them into, into consideration.

I think that bothers me the most about Iran. I have friends and I've been involved with organizations that do Iranian human rights. The thing that bothered me the most was his utter failure even to talk to or about Iranians. I mean, it is an unpopular regime. It's one of the worst regimes, ugliest on the planet. And yet there seems to have been no communication with the, you know, democratic opposition in Iran, no communication even with Pahlavi, the son of the Shah, the monarchists in Iran. I mean, there are alternative governments, there are alternative people who you could speak to, and he never did that because his real interest isn't democracy, you know, or making Iran into a better place. His real interest was in somehow dominating Iran and getting them to give him a share of the oil revenues, which is what happened in Venezuela, you know. So he, he's also not even thinking the way previous Democratic presidents thought. So even George W. Bush, also somebody who made huge mistakes, you know, and so on— you never heard George W. Bush say, what I want is to run Iraq and steal its oil. They wanted to make Iraq into a democracy, okay, that, you know, which by the way it is now, but it's— it was, it was a long bloody pathway.

Trump doesn't even think like that. He thinks, my idea is to do some deal with one of the dictators and move on. And actually, that's what's happened in Venezuela. So Venezuela is still a dictatorship and it's run by the same regime as before, just led by a different person.

And he's been quite vocal about the fact that they're getting all the oil. Yes. It's a crazy thing to hear that you'd snatch up a— you'd snatch a world leader and then the same day you talk about how you've got the boats stealing the country's oil. I say the word stealing, but taking the country's oil. Yeah.

And it's not even clear what he means by that and so on. But it was not the action of a 20th or 21st century president.

The midterms are coming up, and I was reading that Trump's approval ratings are at an all-time low. It's the first time I've seen people that were sort of devoted supporters of his, like Tucker Carlson, coming out and saying, apologizing for supporting him. So this war in Iran seems to have really backfired in a way that I don't think he was intending. And you can kind of tell by how Trump's feeling because you just watch him in interviews. And the line that he repeats 75 times is probably, like, in some respects, the exact opposite of what's going on. So when I watched him in an interview this week and he was repeatedly saying— obviously he says how great the war is going, so that makes me feel like it's not going well. Yeah, that was the main narrative, which is like how well the war is going.

He keeps saying, we've won, we've won, it's over. One of the problems of having a president who lies all the time is that you, you know, you just stop believing. I mean, even if the war was over, you wouldn't believe it because he's— his, his track record is not good. Um, I mean, look, I think the important thing to understand about Trump is that he's somebody who has no strategy. He doesn't care that much about what happened before he was president. He doesn't know the history of Iran, you know. Um, he doesn't understand much about the history of the region, and he doesn't really care about what's going to happen later. He's interested in what is happening now, and is he winning in the current moment? What does winning mean? Whatever it means to him. Which is, I'm, I'm winning the contest with this journalist, or I'm winning the argument about Iran, or like, we're winning the war, or we're— I'm, you know, the opinion polls are all in my favor. So whatever is the situation, he has to emerge as the winner. That's his this narcissistic mentality. That's not very good for strategic thinking because sometimes you don't win immediately.

Like, you have to have a plan, you know, and you have to 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 watch him, if you watch him perform on television, whatever is happening, he will convert it into that, you know, I'm winning.

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When you begin to see attempts to corrupt and shape elections, this is when you know your democracy is in trouble. When the rules of the election are challenged, when, um, there, there begin to be arguments about who can vote and attempts to make some people not 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 which democratically elected leaders undermine democracy. So an example of this, okay, Viktor Orbán, who just lost an election in Hungary after 16 years, he had two-thirds control of— in Hungary, if you have two-thirds of the parliament, then you can change the constitution. So he continually altered the Hungarian constitution in order to give himself electoral advantages. So changing constituencies and rebalancing the way votes were counted. In the United States, I think we already talked about gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is unbelievably anti-democratic, and the fact that we have a kind of gerrymandering contest right now— what's gerrymandering? Gerrymandering, it's a great word actually. It comes from a congressman named Gerry in the early 19th century who drew a map, an electoral map, which looked like a salamander.

And a gerrymandered map in, you know, in U.S. terms is an electoral map that has been altered to favor one political party. You know, the city of Nashville, instead of having a single Democratic representative, instead of having a sensible constituency around the city that would vote for one member of Congress, has been divided into several constituencies that are designed in such a way that only Republicans win. And once you have maps that are designed to favor one party or the other, then you begin to get real democratic decline. But there are other things happening in the US too. So there are fears that ICE, which is the paramilitary organization created by the president supposedly to go after immigrants, that what if ICE troops are put on the street on Election Day? You know, would some people be intimidated from voting? So there are fears that he will do that in some states.

Something called voter ID he talks about a lot. Yes.

Well, this is also very strange. So of course, in the US you have voter ID and most people have driver's licenses. Licenses. Um, they want to change the law so that you either have to use a passport or a birth certificate. And most Americans don't have passports. I think 60% don't. I don't remember the number, but it's, it's very low. Many people have lost or never had their birth certificates. If you passed a law like that, it would make it much more difficult for some people to vote, especially certain kinds of people. So married women would have to show a passport, a birth certificate, and a marriage license. Because you'd have to show that— because your birth certificate name is different from your married name. Okay. Yeah. So you'd have to— and so many people believe 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. So the administration is trying to argue that lots and lots of illegal immigrants are voting, which is a conspiracy theory. There's no evidence of there's no evidence really of almost any illegal immigrants ever voting.

And if you think about it, if you were an illegal immigrant, why would you want to vote? Because it would just be a way of attracting attention to yourself. But they seek to establish this narrative as a way of disqualifying Democratic votes. They want to say that votes— and Trump did this during the last election— votes in cities are too high. If they need to call for a voter recount, they want to say that this is the explanation for why they've lost. Um, and so the part of the reason why they're talking about voter ID is that—

so just looking at some of the data, it says young voters between 18 and 29, roughly 24% of them lack the documents that would qualify them to vote. Um, in minority voters, 11% of citizens of color lack these documents, and compared to a smaller percentage in white citizens. In low-income America, only 1 in 5 households earning under $50,000 has a passport, and as you said, married women. 69 million women have birth certificates that do not match their current legal name due to marriage, right?

So, okay, I mean, it's, it's risky because I imagine lots of Republicans don't have passports. Yeah, but I think they've calculated that it would suit them better. So they're looking to shape the voting population in a way that will benefit them. So they're looking to find ways to massage the outcome, and that's, you know, that, that's a kind of classic When you're in a country which is declining democratically, one of the classic things that happens is the ruling party seeks to alter or change who is able to vote and how votes are weighted as a way of altering the outcome. What's the third one? Personnel. Well, we talked about this one a little bit already.

Oh, the civil servants.

This is civil service in a modern democracy. So in a 21st century democracy, government does a lot of things. It manages the road system, it, it sometimes organizes healthcare, it organizes It regulates the insurance markets. It does all kinds of governance, pollution. And all those people who do those jobs, um, it's very important that they be people who know how to do them. So you want the person who's measuring air pollution, you want that person to be an expert in air pollution. You don't want them to be, you know, the president's cousin. Or the person who is regulating the insurance market, you want that to be someone who knows about insurance markets, and you don't want it to be the best friend of the vice president. In corrupt autocracies, that is who gets those jobs.

Seeing this a little bit with the Fed now, he doesn't like Jerome Powell in the Fed, right?

And so he's tried to undermine Jerome Powell. He's sued Jerome Powell— or he's investigating him, rather— for some kind of fake, um, financial scandal. And he tried to put pressure on him to resign. He tried to put pressure on him to change his policy. And I, you know, honestly, I don't, I don't know whether the person who, who will come in next will be, will be more susceptible, but he's certainly been chosen because Trump thinks he is. And so what Trump wants is to have civil servants who are historically independent, and that includes the chairman of the Fed, it includes actually Department of Justice. The Attorney General usually has some independence. What you want is people who are acting in the interests of everybody, and in a, in a functional democracy in the happy Scandinavian countries, then at least most of the time that's what they're doing. And in a corrupt democracy or in a failing democracy, then you have people whose interests are not everybody in the country, but their interests are the president, his family, his party— anyway, not, not American. And so that's the danger of undermining the civil service.

The fourth one is information.

Okay, all dictatorships seek to control information. You know, in China, the entire internet since the 1990s has been constructed so that the government can control it. There is no outside internet. There isn't— there is nobody who's active on the Chinese internet who isn't somehow known or accounted for somehow by the authorities. And the internet is also connected to a whole system of surveillance cameras and other kinds of databases so that people can be tracked all through the system and all through the country. People do have VPNs in China, and they, and they do get out, but the majority of people are inside this. And that's probably— China is the most extreme form of that. And Russia is actually now heading in that direction. So Putin has now cut off Russian access to most forms of Western social media, you know, Instagram. And there were some amazing videos of really sad Russian Instagram influencers who were losing their audiences because of Putin Putin's changes. So he's now— he's now heading in that direction. But even inside the United States, which is maybe the loudest and most open democracy in the world, you can see the Trump administration seeking to shape the information space in new ways.

So we have federal regulators who are now willing to put pressure on television stations if the president asks them to. We have the president putting his thumb on the scale of people who are acquiring new media companies in order to make sure that the new owners are somehow friendly to him. Talking about TikTok, TikTok, CBS, CNN, these are all media companies where the president is trying to get people who are sympathetic to him in charge. And this is, by the way, you know, we all have this idea about censorship that it's like there's a guy in a room and he's crossing sentences out of a newspaper article, you know, that's what censorship is. But actually nowadays, that's not how media control works. So in Orbán's Hungary, in Erdogan's Turkey, what happens is that the leadership encourages or helps business people or groups close to them to acquire media properties. So they do it through the level of media ownership. So who owns the media becomes the most important question, and then the person who's, who's in charge of the media can then influence in some ways what it's able to say. So it doesn't give you complete control.

So actually, in Hungary, you still had had a couple of very small but still existing independent websites who turned out to be very important, but you had an attempt to control— for some, most of the television was controlled either directly or indirectly, uh, by Orbán. And it looks to me like Trump is trying to achieve something like that. There's a, a piece of that that also involves culture and universities as well, um, pressure on universities so that they don't produce people who are too critical. In the U.S., you've had the Trump administration took over the Kennedy Center, which is the most prestigious arts venue in Washington, and tried to change its nature and tried to change its, you know, who, who is, who could play there and who couldn't. And the result is actually that it's now been shut down for 2 years.

You see this on both sides of the political aisle, both on the Democratic side in different ways, but I, but I think both parties, when they're in for long enough, what we're allowed to say changes.

Yes, although the mechanisms have been different. I mean, I was involved in the argument, you know, some years back about this, you know, we— I think it was incorrectly called cancel culture, but whatever, the, the argument that was happening inside universities and some press and other institutions about what you could and couldn't say. And I thought it was, um, you know, that, that there was this peer pressure and sometimes institutional pressure on people, and people were canceled. That means they lost their jobs or were kicked out of whatever group they were in because they'd said something the wrong way. You know, I, I argued against that and wrote about it and so on. What you have now is a little different. You now have the president just, you know, attempting to change media ownership. And you have— you're beginning to see what happens when the administration goes into universities and you can't teach this course, you can't hire that teacher. That was the deal that was given to Harvard, I don't know, um, yeah, you know, some months back. The reason why Harvard wound up refusing to deal with the Trump administration and when it started to sue them was because the administration was trying to actually decide who would teach what courses at Harvard.

I don't believe there's a precedent for that, but I agree with you that it is an illiberal instinct to try to control speech, and there's a left-wing version of it and there's a right-wing version of it. And the people who are are really in favor of free speech, and they're vanishingly few, are the people who are willing to call it out on both sides. And one of the things you often hear now from these so-called free speech warriors is that they're perfectly happy to shout about the left canceling people or left-wing rhetoric that they don't like, but then they keep quiet when it comes from the other side.

Yes, I was looking back through the history of this happening on both sides of the aisle, and in Mark Zuckerberg's testimony, I think, in front of Congress, he said that he was repeatedly pressured for months by the Biden-Harris administration to remove certain content. And then there's the whole Hunter Biden laptop story where Zuckerberg confirmed that Meta were asked to demote a New York Post story by the FBI. And then there's various other stories here about Twitter executives being emailed by White House officials and being asked to change things on their platform.

So there is a difference between someone sending you an email and and saying, you know, look, we— this has been flagged by a monitoring group as maybe fake, or as maybe Russian disinformation, or as, you know, coming from some kind of foreign influence campaign. And so, you know, it would be great if you took it down or demoted it. And there's a difference between that and taking over the company in order that the president gets to dictate what's on it. Nobody coerced Meta into doing anything, or Twitter. Nobody said, you know, Twitter will be— will pay a fine if you don't do X or Y. In the context of people looking for foreign influence campaigns, there were conversations about what was appropriate to print and what wasn't.

Yeah, I think from what I've observed, it happens on both sides but in different ways. I remember, was it Elizabeth Warren talking a lot about, um, the Section 230, which I think protects some of the big social media companies from being sued from users' posts. And I think she would repeatedly reference Section 230 and other Democratic lawmakers as a way to get the platforms to take a more aggressive stance on what they called, like, hate speech and disinformation.

So Section 230 essentially allows the platforms to be— to escape the rules that newspapers, for example, have to abide by. So, so actually, we do have regulations. We have libel laws. We have laws about terrorist content, for example. So there are laws that regulate some parts of speech that we've agreed are good in order to, you know, maintain peace and so on. And the platforms are exempt, um, because of Section 230. And so the platforms have argued that we don't control what's put up on our platforms and we don't bear any responsibility for it. I'm not sure that removing Section 230 is the best way to deal with this, but making the online world conform to the same laws as the offline world seems to me kind of very basic. I mean, it's— it seems obvious to me that child pornography that's illegal if you have it in your house should also be illegal if it's published online. It seems to me that, um, people recruiting for ISIS, that's illegal to do, you know, down the street from here, then it should also be illegal to do online. And Tech companies have been trying in recent years— and this is an argument that's taking place both in Europe and the US and elsewhere— to get out of responsibility for just for conforming to the law in the countries where they're active.

And in one or two places, there have been big clashes. I was just in Brazil, which is one of the places where that happened, um, where the Brazilian law said something that was published on Twitter was illegal, and they fined the company for publishing it. Twitter didn't want to pay the fine, and there was an argument back and forth, and for a while, Twitter was shut down in Brazil. But it does seem to me that any given country, whether it's Brazil or Nepal or, you know, Ethiopia, and particularly democracies, I should say, you know, democracies have the right to say, "These are our laws." For example, "These are our electoral laws. We have laws on election spending." And if the platforms violate those laws, they're in breach of the law, you know? So election spending is a very important one because if you're spending $1 million on TikTok, illegally, that can be much harder to see than it would be if you were buying television ads. And so finding a way to bring the, the social media companies into the legal system seems to be completely legitimate. And in fact, I would even go farther than that.

I would say that if European countries in particular don't do this, then I'm not sure European countries will be able to maintain their sovereignty. Democracy. Will you be able to run an election in Germany or England if your electoral rules can be easily defied by platforms that are based in the US or China?

What such electoral rules might be defied by?

Well, laws about spending, laws about advertising. Everything is a trade-off, right?

And this is what I've learned from being a podcaster and interviewing so many people about so many things. So I often just think all the time with every idea that I'm exposed to about what the trade is. So as you were speaking, I was thinking about what, like, how does this become a slippery slope? What's the downside of this trade? So what do you think?

I'm sure there's a, you know, of course there's a downside. I mean, the downside is, you know, I don't know, Country X has bad laws and then the platforms have to conform to the bad law. Or questions about speech are particularly sensitive. You know, what one person's terrorist speech is another person's free speech, right? Yeah. But somebody has to make decision about what the rules are. And I think the person who should make the decision is the— are the people who should make the decision are the elected representatives of that country. Yeah. And the decision should not be taken by Elon Musk.

It's funny because Mark Zuckerberg, to some degree, it sounded like what Elon Musk says. I remember watching him in an interview. I can't remember who it was with, but he basically said exactly that. He said, we'll abide by the laws of every country that we operate in. And some— and oh, it was his interview with, um, CNN guy that used to be on CNN, Don Lemon. And Don Lemon is pushing, is saying, look, there's hate speech on your platform. And then he asks him what the hate speech is. And I don't think he can say, but Elon's response to him is, we abide by the laws. And Don Lemon's pushing.

But there's a record of them not doing that. So that's just disingenuous. I mean, it's true. Hate speech is a longer conversation. I mean, how you define it, what you say it is. Is, is different. But some countries do have hate speech. Germany has them. So Germany decided after World War II, you know, to ban Nazi symbols. I think Germany is a very, very successful electoral democracy, and if they want to ban Nazi symbols, I think they should be allowed to. I mean, in America that wouldn't work, you know, and it's— you can't ban Nazi symbols in the United States. But I don't see why America should impose its rules on Germany. Like, doesn't Germany have sovereignty? Doesn't Germany get to decide, you know, what the rules of its national conversation are?

Because in the US, racism is not illegal on the internet in the United States due to the First Amendment. Right. So I could be racist on X. Yes. And that is fine.

And many people are. If you spend any time on X, you will see it.

It's very hard to miss. According to the laws, because it's not illegal. But I think most people, a lot of people would say that the platform would have an obligation to take down that racism. Someone starts being racist to me. Me on the internet. I understand why a lot of people would say like, okay, that kind of behavior should be taken down, but it's within the country's laws. So do you think it's fun? Like, this is a bit of a— I don't want to be a gotcha question, but it's like, do you know what I mean? I guess this is where the clash comes in because something can feel deeply immoral but be illegal. Sure, there's a difference between illegality and immorality.

And some, you know, historically newspapers and other media have decided not to print racist material because it's immoral or because it's offensive. Even social media platforms, I think, have a debate about how much ugly stuff they want to appear on their sites, because if people see too much of it, they'll stop going on it. I mean, I, you know, reduced my usage of, of Twitter because there was too much anti-Semitism and too much racism, and I didn't want to watch it anymore. So, um, and I think many people, others have made the same decision. You know, speech is a constant negotiation, you know, what's acceptable, what's unacceptable, and the norms do change over time. I will agree to that. What the autocrats try to do is something a little bit different. It's not in this gray area of hate speech and free speech. It's controlling the system itself, you know, what, what are the boundaries of what people can see, what platforms they have access to. So the Chinese don't really, you know, what they're, what they're interested in is, are you criticizing the Chinese Communist Party? That's the fundamental thing that they're controlling for.

I was wondering, as you were speaking about this earlier, if I'm in China, can I just get up and go?

Can I just leave? Where would you go, and could you get a visa to go Good question. The Chinese do leave.

I was just wondering if it's easy to leave China if you're a citizen of China, or do they restrict you from going somewhere else? I don't know, go to Bali. Um, could I not just go move to Bali?

Well, think about it. I mean, this is— this was a, you know, this used to be a problem for people in the Soviet Union. I mean, okay, theoretically you could leave, you could get an exit passport. I mean, I'm sure there are some restrictions on who's able to get passports and who isn't. I mean, I'm But say you were able to, you'd need to go somewhere where you could get a visa, where you could work, where you could set up a life, where you speak the language, where it's reasonable to imagine you could stay there for a long time. I mean, immigration, I mean, especially given languages and professional qualifications, so it is not always easy. It's not always practical for everybody. I mean, I have friends who are still, I have many friends who left Russia, but I have one or two friends who are still there. And that's because they have aging relatives or because they don't speak any other languages and they don't feel they'd be at home anywhere else. I mean, there, there are many reasons why people can't leave, even if they don't like their state or they don't like their political system.

So what's number 5 on our number 5 blocks?

If, uh, you've, you've used the word power. Okay, control over power ministries and the use of violence. Most autocracies sooner or later want to create some kind of repressive system that's also physical. So it's not just control of the information space, there's also some element of coercion. So people who don't go along with the system don't get to just float around. There's some way of threatening them physically, like ICE. So ICE is not supposed to be that, ICE is supposed to be an immigration enforcement institution, um, but the way it's been used is well beyond the way any immigration institution was used before in the United States. So look at what ICE looks like. They are masked, they are wearing military uniforms, they are often driving unmarked cars. So they drive in vans, they're not driving in police vans. And they're not following the rules of local police. They're not accountable to anybody. They're not accountable to 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 of ability to behave badly. And they seem to be accountable directly to the Homeland Security Department and to the president.

And we've already seen how this can affect the behavior of ICE. So we saw during the— during the protests and the arrests and the protests in Minnesota, we saw 2 people were killed. And what was really horrifying to me wasn't just that they were killed, it was how the administration reacted. You know, it was Vance and Noam and several other people immediately said, of the people who were killed, they were guilty. So instead of saying, "This is horrible," you know, that an American police force killed a U.S.— These were both U.S. citizens. I mean, there have been other people killed too, by the way, but these two were notable because they were U.S. citizens. Citizens, and they weren't immigrants. Instead of saying, 2 people were killed, this is horrible, we need to have an investigation, this must not be allowed to happen again, the immediate instinct was to give them impunity. Like, you know, we're not going to investigate this, it's not a real problem. You know, the, the instinct was to put them above the law. And when you have a military force, and as I said, especially one that's militarized and looks like, you know, they're dressed like they're in Fallujah, you know.

When you have a military force that's above the law, then it's really a paramilitary. If you have a police force that can harm ordinary citizens and not pay any price for it and isn't accountable, then you're not serving Americans. You're serving the interests of, of the, of the ruling party.

This is something that I've made for you. I realize that the Diary of a CEO audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health. We all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learned is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny small steps, and we call this in our team the 1%. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1% Diaries, and we released these last year and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have a better range for you. So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly I recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again.

And you can get yours at thediary.com. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below. Do you think this is, um, potentially the 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 was, before you came, and there's this 2,000, 250-year figure which is famously popularized by a British historian called Sir Gloob in his essay, The Fate of Empires and the Search for Survival. After analyzing empires from the— I can't say that word— Assessorians? Assyrians. Exactly what I said. Assyrians to the British. Gloob found that despite differences in technology, geography, religion, and surprisingly shared a similar lifespan and life cycle. Gloob argued that empires typically go through a predictable sequence of stages over those 250 years ages. The first one being the Age of Pioneers, outburst and conquest. The Age of Conquest, which is the military dominance. The Age of Commerce, which is vast wealth creation. The Age of Affluence, comfort and a shift from duty to selfishness. The Age of Intellect, focus on philosophy and education over defense. The Age of Descendants, internal division, massive inequality and collapse.

So if you view the United States as an expansionist project from its very inception, pushing westward across the North American continent through its power, then the math says if you take it from 1776 to now, to 2026, it's exactly 250 years old. So if you use Glubb's 2,250-year life cycle model from 1776 to now, political scientists argue that we are in the age of descendants of the American Empire. This stage is typically characterized by deep internal political division, vast wealth inequality, massive national debt, in a cultural shift away from a shared sense of civic duty.

So first of all, that's a pretty accurate description of what's happening in the United States. However, you have just touched on something that I feel very strongly about, which is that I don't believe in historical inevitability. Interesting. And I, I think is very dangerous. So the idea that we are on a slippery slope downhill and we can't stop it because that's the way history is going, or alternatively, the idea everything is fine and it will continue to be fine because liberal democracy has triumphed, which is what we thought in the 1990s. Anytime you think that something is inevitable, that takes away your willingness to act. What happens tomorrow and next year is completely dependent on what we do today. Whether the United States survives as a democracy or not depends on choices Americans make, things they say, the arguments they have, of, you know, the degree of civic participation, not some historical rule that some very brilliant political scientist invented. And as I said, I think this has happened before. I think we had this moment of complacency after the fall of the Soviet Union in the '90s. Americans and Europeans became convinced that everything was best in the best of all possible worlds, and we didn't have to do anything in particular to maintain our democracies because democracy was the best system and we just won the Cold War.

And it was all gonna be fine. And we lost sight of the ways in which democracy was beginning to slip and we were beginning to lose things. It's not in nature. And I think it was just sense of complacency, and above all, it was a sense of inevitability. It's inevitable. We've won the war of ideas. The war of ideas is over. And that's why we missed the rise of Russia. We missed the significance of China. And we missed a lot of those things because we were so sure that we were just winning.

Isn't that in and of itself a cycle?

It's a cycle, but my point is that the cycles aren't predictable. I mean, you can stop the cycle, you can reverse the cycle. Countries can and do change their trajectory. I say I've lived a lot of my life in Poland. First went there in the 1980s. My husband is Polish, so on. Poland is a completely different country from what it was 30 years ago, and it's a country that has really changed itself in ways that weren't necessarily predictable in 1990. And so I do think countries change.

Is all of this downstream from something that doesn't change, which is human nature? And therefore, if we understand human nature as the constant, then one can almost predict these, dare I say the word again, cycles of how humans will go from there to there to there to there to there to there to there.

Human nature is a constant, but there's so much accident in history and so many random things happen that You can sometimes predict how people will react, but you can't necessarily predict exactly what's coming. You know, when Boris Yeltsin was drunk and sick and had to choose the next leader of Russia, there were a number of choices he had. And the person he chose was Vladimir Putin, who at the time was a very low-ranking— I mean, he was a— he was an FSB. He came from the KGB, and he was someone they chose because they thought he would be loyal to the Yeltsin family. And he wouldn't prosecute them. Nobody imagined him as a dictator or an imperial leader who would be seeking to reconquer the former Soviet Union. And what if they'd chosen, for example, Boris Nemtsov, who was another leading Russian politician at the time? You know, I don't know that he was a perfect democrat, but he was very open-minded, and he would have been interested in integrating Russia with Europe. Okay, what if he'd become the leader of Russia? We would be in a completely different world. And why was— and there was nothing inevitable about that decision.

There are many random, completely out of the blue things that happen in history. You can always say there's always some percentage of any population that's instinctively authoritarian, for example, and there's always some percentage of any population that's instinctively liberal or extremely libertarian because of egos and power, because of just the way people— the human nature have— the people have different— but what is the balance of that group? How the leadership of the country encourages or discourages one one set of values or the other, you know, that, that affects how, you know, who, who's winning the arguments. Um, and so I, I don't believe in inevitable cycles.

Have you heard of Ray Dalio talking about the sort of boom and bust cycles through history? And when like a population becomes very comfortable, you have this sort of inversion, goes the other way. Do you believe in those kinds of cycles?

You know, I suppose there is a phenomenon whereby, yes, as people become comfortable, then if Frank Fukuyama actually had in his famous book about the end of history, he had a description of, well, what happens if we have to, you know, if everybody becomes a liberal democracy and everybody's pretty prosperous, then the next thing that will happen is some people will get bored. And out of their boredom and out of their desire for change, they'll attack the system and want to undermine it. It's kind of what happened. So there's, I suppose there's some, there's a, there's some human element like that, you know, that the, there will always be some part of the population that feels left out or feels discriminated against and wants a bigger voice or wants to run the country. I mean, so you can see that. I just don't think it's something that scientists can predict.

Is there a link between democracies and sort of rampant capitalism? So in a democracy, I don't know much about this stuff, so I'm just asking a question, but in a democracy, does it tend to be the case that you end up with wealth inequality because you let everybody, you let free markets play out and then you're gonna have these like tech oligarchs up here that have all gazillions of dollars or trillion dollars and lots of people at the bottom of the rung. Whereas in, I don't know, in China, I guess they somewhat defend Do they defend against—

No, I would say almost the opposite. Oh, really? So historically, democracies have— I mean, there have been different phases, right? So I don't want to overgeneralize, but certainly in the 20th— second half of the 20th century, the democracies since the Second World War have tended towards equality, including in the United States. And at their most successful and prosperous moments, people— there was much less wealth equality than inequality than there is now. And the countries we were talking about earlier, the happy countries, those are relatively equal countries, and those are countries with big welfare states and a lot of redistribution of wealth. And those are countries where people feel invested in the system, partly because they don't feel completely outclassed by a group of oligarchs. If you look at the United States in the 1950s, that was a period of also huge social mobility, when lower middle class, middle class people began to get wealthier, and there's this enormous wave of prosperity. And that's a period when everybody is becoming wealthier. And that was also a period when you have the, you know, very successful American democracy. You have the civil rights movement, you have democracy beginning to spread to new populations or to people who'd been excluded before.

So you have a connection between equality and democracy, wealth, even wealth equality. And one of the things that gives critics of the United States most anxiety now is precisely what you just said, you know, the emergence of tech oligarchs who have so much more power than any one politician and who even have the power to, to organize information space. How long will that group of people want to live in a democracy where everybody gets a vote and wealth is supposed to be distributed more evenly? There are some members of that community who have become illiberal or anti-democratic for exactly that reason.

If we don't believe in inevitabilities, then what is it we have to look out for as those living in a democracy? We talked about the 5 things there, but are there anything— is there anything coming where you're worried that as a society, we might overlook it or allow it, which results in us falling back down into an autocratic society? And is there anything we can do proactively now to defend our democracy?

We are lucky in that we live in societies where we can vote. Mm-hmm. And so, it's really important that we vote, that we know who we're voting for, that we vote in all elections, including local ones. When people become nihilistic, when they say, "They're all the same. I don't care who wins the election. It's not worth voting because, you know, they're all corrupt," this is what autocrats try to create. So what does Putin want Russians to do? Does he want them to be political? No, he wants them to stay out of politics. You know, what do the Chinese want? They want their people out of politics. And so whenever you see too many people who are— have responded to that kind of negative inspiration, that's when you should worry. And I worry a lot about the United States on exactly those grounds, actually. Look at how the leader of your country talks about the press, how he or she talks about the judges, the judiciary, how he or she talks about the civil service. A real democrat respects those institutions and wants them to stay in place precisely so that democracy can remain so that at the next election there will be a fair election.

Do you think the mainstream media are politicized? Do you think there's political bias in the mainstream media, like the big titles?

You know, some of them have business models that are biased. So Fox's business model is to appeal to the right-leaning part of the American population and to, you know, to encourage them in their biases and get them to watch TV. There's some media that are now dependent on on polarization and kind of live off it. There are some who try to be neutral, but, you know, even neutrality is hard to achieve now because a neutral investigation that turns up something bad about the Trump administration will immediately incur the reaction on the part, you know, you're biased. We've lost our assumption that press are operating in good faith. So it's become much more difficult.

This is so interesting for me as a podcaster who I guess now is considered to be media. The inherent incentives of media mean that, like, if say I'm running X newspaper and I write a story and I've built up a base of people for whatever reason, right, that want me to say something negative about Trump, I have an economic model and an incentive structure that means that if I write that article, it's going to get 10 times the reach, 10 times the engagement, 10 times the subscribers. If I write the exact opposite article, I know I'm gonna get— so if I say Trump is amazing, even though I've built up a base that I think a certain way, the article is going to get a fraction of the, the reach, the engagement subscribers. So as a CEO of such a company, you're going to have to hire more and more people, create more and more output to receive the same rewards versus just writing something bad about that particular person. So you become incentivized. But then the other factor is that geographically, Democrats and Republicans in the United States exist in certain areas. So if I open my offices in New York or LA, most of the people I'm gonna be able to hire come with a certain, like statistically come with a certain political view.

So I do wonder if eventually like the fate of most media organizations is they do get politically captured one way or the other.

You have to fight it.

You have to fight. And as a podcaster, yeah, 'cause now I'm part of the media, I now understand because I feel it. So I feel that I sit here with Kamala Harris, I'm attacked. I sit here with Ivanka Trump, I'm attacked. I sit with Michelle Obama, attacked. Gavin Newsom, attacked. And I understand there's this great quote which I favorited the other day. It was like, you have to join a tribe or you get killed by one or something, words to that effect. And I thought, oh, I get it. I get why some of my peers in podcasting have sought defense behind a particular tribe because just taking the arrows from both sides is not the nicest feeling in the world. No, no.

It's funny, when you said mainstream media, I don't even know who that is anymore. Yeah, it's not so much about hearing from both sides, it's about trying to establish what's true. Yeah. And so the job of what you do is a little bit different from what journalists do. So journalists go into the world and they gather information, and they— if they're good journalists, they try to figure out what actually happened, and then they bring it back and they write it down, or they make a video about it, and they try and make sure that it's accurate. Right? And so if you're devoted to that project, then you, you seek to avoid political bias. But, you know, inevitably you might wind up saying the president is lying or the leader of the opposition is lying, and then you're immediately, 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 important that this particular profession of the people who go into the world and try and establish reality, that it continues to exist. I There needs to be a business model for that. I mean, for democracy to exist, for an accurate and meaningful national conversation to exist, we need to have some people who are trying to figure out what's real.

I agree. And I think those people are incredibly important, which I think people think podcasters won't say because I think sometimes we're positioned as being like the rebels or radicals or whatever that are like doing it from their kitchen. This used to actually be my kitchen, but I very much agree. I very much agree that there are incredibly um, rigorous, truth-seeking journalists out there that have this very unique skill, which is not one that I possess or attest to possess at all, that they go deep for long periods of time without bias in search of the truth, and then they deliver it to the world. And I'm well aware that if we lose that, then I lose so many of the things that I fundamentally care about and that I've built my entire life and career on, especially as like a young Black man in business. Who understands that there's lots of people that came before me that revealed things about the way society functioned that have benefited me. And so that I should— my way of sort of paying that forward is protecting the same privileges as a podcaster.

Because 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 information online, that we lose touch with reality. You know, if AI is only accessing what's available to to the model online. There's still a whole world out there where things are happening, you know, that's not online. And making sure that we're constantly in touch with what's reality on the ground, what's really happening in Ukraine, you know, what's really happening in Iran, and not living on just what's available to us on our phones. It's really important.

One of my fears is that the algorithms with AI are becoming better at knowing what to serve me in order to make me dwell, and therefore, more— it creates more ad dollars for the companies. And so I might not just be living in a fake reality, I might be living in a completely personalized one that's completely different from your own. Because as I went on my phone this morning, one of the things— the sections on my phone is suggested for you. Now this is obviously showing me things that are based on my past viewing consumption. So if I viewed this person having a fight in the street, I'm getting more people having fights in the street. So now my perception is that everyone's having fights in the street, and, and means it's harder to connect to each other.

We are very much— I mean, I think this has really happened already, that we, we live in our own algorithms. When you're asking the more fundamental question about the breakdown of democracy, I mean, there is nothing more toxic to democracy than polarization. Because if you live in a world where the people on the other side of the political divide aren't just your rivals and you don't just disagree with them about taxes, you know, but they are your existential enemies, and if they're in charge, then and, you know, the world ends, then it's very hard to have a normal democratic debate or create a normal, you know, have a normal election. Do you know what this is? It looks like a very old newspaper.

Very old newspaper from a long time ago, and you're in it. Oh gosh.

Oh, it's— wow, uh, that's a Um, that was— that took a lot of research. Yeah, what is that? That is— I don't— they don't even have these anymore. That was a New York Times wedding announcement from 1992. 1992. I'm still married to the person who it was announced that I was marrying, a Polish— he was then a journalist and now he's the Polish foreign minister. We got married in Washington, but he was born in Poland and it's a long story. But anyway, lots of photos of you here.

Interesting. Oh, there's a nice one as well. You're looking very presidential there.

That was a long time ago.

And I've got another one of him and Hillary Clinton. Right. Politics has been a big part of your family's life in various ways.

I mean, it would be hard to deny that. Yeah. Is it stressful?

Because it's constant and it's, and And it's more polarizing than ever before, and it's divisive, and it's a lot of energy. Even talking about these things I find to be quite energy-draining.

Yes. I mean, actually, it became more stressful in more recent years. I mean, social media made it more stressful than it used to be. The stressful part is living a part of your life in public. We try to not live all of our lives in public. This has been very useful to me as a journalist, actually. You begin to understand the difference between what you look like in public and what your reality is. You know, so people react to you in all kinds of ways depending on how— where they've seen you on TV or where they've— what stories they've read about you, some of which might not be true. And there's often a kind of, you know, that the way you're perceived is not necessarily the way you are. And so I, I try to keep that in mind when I meet public figures, you know, that I have a set of perceptions of them based on what I've read about them, which I wouldn't have if I met— I don't know, somebody introduces me to the next-door neighbor, I wouldn't have had that in my head when I met them. But when you meet a politician or somebody who's, um, who's, who's well known, you come, you come with stuff.

And I try when I meet people to drop it as much as I can because you've seen that at home.

Because I've seen it at home.

So yes, I mean, we have compatible lives that are somewhat different. I mean, I have stayed well away from Polish politics. I don't play any role in it. I have I have a different name from my husband, which, you know, I didn't change my name, and that also has allowed us to be separate. And we share a lot of views, but not all. 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 a politician helps me understand them.

Have you ever thought about going into politics yourself? No.

You can't have two politicians in one family. You know, a lot of what I do is journalism, or it's something— or journalist adjacent. And, you know, I go and try and find things, I try and explain them, I try and say what, what I think is happening. And the job of a politician is quite different from that, you know. It's to— you arrive with a set of views, you need to explain them to people, you need to convince them. It's just, it's a different, it's a different way of thinking about approaching the public. Yeah, so I'm not, I'm not campaigning for a, for a cause.

Is there a particular outcome you're seeking with the work that you do? With the books that you write and the conversations you have? Is there one particular outcome above all others that you're aiming at?

There's an outcome that's general but not specific. In other words, I'm not trying to elect any particular person to be president. I do have a goal that is to remind people of why democracy is important, why we need to maintain it, 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 have a broad goal in that sense, and that's not only inside the United States.

Why is this so personal to you?

It, it's the thing I've been fascinated by since I was in my 20s. Why? Because I think it's— I saw the Soviet Union when it was still the Soviet Union. I was a student in Leningrad when it was still Leningrad. I felt what it was like to live in a heavily autocratic society. Even briefly. And I have really spent the rest of my life 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 recently trying to warn people against it, against going in that direction. You know, it's also not the thing I thought I would be doing. I changed, uh, you know, if you, if you're looking at my books, you know, I wrote 3 history books. I I wrote the Gulag book. I wrote a history of the Ukrainian famine. I wrote a book— this is a book about how the Soviet Union took over Eastern Europe, how they sort of did regime change in Eastern Europe after the war. You know, they're about things that happened, you know, in the distant past. But I had a realization in about 2014, 2015 that I was living through a period of history myself.

In other words, there was a historical shift happening around me And I felt the need to start recording it as a kind of eyewitness. And so that book, Twilight of Democracy, was a description— I mean, it starts with a description of a 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 radicalized. I knew lots of people on the center-right, you know, we were anti-communists, we were, you know, whatever, Thatcherites, Reaganites. And I saw many of them become more radical, and I thought this is a really important moment of change, and so I should record it as a witness. And so that book is the first book that I wrote in the first person about something I'd seen. And that was just me being affected by the world I live in. Maybe it did matter that I was married to a politician because some things that you would have noticed in a more distant way affected me personally. Mm-hmm. Maybe it was the particular circumstances of being both American and Polish and, you know, seeing a similar pattern of things happening in both places.

Either way, I felt that something important was happening, and I've really been motivated for the last decade to explain it to people and try and understand it.

In that regard, what is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about, Anne?

What would regime change really look like? Regime change?

Oh, in the West? Yes. Isn't it just electing a new person?

What would it feel like to live in a very different kind of society? How would you feel living in a place where suddenly the values shifted, they were different? For better or for worse. For the, you know, the, the, you know, we think, for example, free speech is a value, and we've been arguing about it here. What does it mean? What's hate speech? You know, how do we measure it? And so on. What if you suddenly found yourself waking up one morning in a society where free speech was bad? You know, where it wasn't— you didn't automatically assume that it was good. We also have an assumption that there is some kind of meritocracy in our societies, right? That if you try hard and work hard and maybe you're lucky and study, then you can be successful. What if you found yourself suddenly in a society where that wasn't true, and actually the only way to get ahead was to have a cousin in the ruling party? Being able to imagine that and think about it, um, is important for understanding this bigger issue of democratic decline. Like, what's the change of our system that we're trying to avoid, and what does it feel like to people who experience that?

This has been a subject of a lot of my books. So that book, Iron Curtain, is about it. I've written a lot about Ukraine And what happened when the Russians occupied eastern Ukraine? They did this thing, they did regime change, they changed the rules of the society. I think we don't 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 lost them.

Hmm. It seems unimaginable and it seems quite far away, and that is, I guess, a privilege of having lived a democratic society for my whole life, that it's almost just seemed like, as I said, like it seems like a theoretical concept. But, you know, history, they say it doesn't repeat but it rhymes. And, um, I guess there's, you know, I, I believe that even if we don't know the time frames, I do believe that there are certain cycles in history that are, um, accelerate or come about because of human nature. And so I'm also well aware that there are things that we can do or not do that could lead us to go down the slope of a bad slope.

So then you don't believe in inevitability. Well, it's interesting.

I kind of believe in both, which is I think that there's this fundamental human nature which drives us, which causes these cycles to occur. And actually one could even argue that it's inevitable that eventually we miss the signs and we go down the slope, but the timeframes of that occurring, or if it occurs, we still have agency and control over that. Does that make sense? Or is that, does that sound like a total contradiction? To believe in both human nature, it does cause these cycles, but at the same time, today we have a choice. We have agency over whether we go in that direction.

Yeah, I mean, human nature is like, we know how it works. And so it offers us some warnings, right? It's, you know, we know what we should be trying to avoid. As I said, if you focus hard on what it is that you don't want to happen, I mean, that's what strategy is, right? And then you work backwards and you think, how do I make sure to prevent that from happening? You know, then you begin to get a pretty clear idea of what's useful behavior in the present.

We have a closing tradition, Anne, where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you, what is the most challenging setback you've experienced? And what's the lesson you want to pass on to others I suppose the most—

I mean, the most challenging things I've experienced have been political shifts where I— when I saw radicalization, I saw the rise of illiberal groups and movements, including among people I knew close— closely and very well, and figuring out both how to cope with them and how to try to, you know, shift my thinking in order to understand how to explain it and deal with it. That was probably the most important. That was probably the most important.

How do you cope with them? Someone in your life has a sort of a radical shift?

Really bad at it. Really? Interesting. I am. I mean, lots of people think that, um, you know, you should be able to, you know, be friends with everybody and talk to everybody. And I see that— I see some people are able to do that. I find that I care too much. Interesting. It becomes hard for me.

Do you think you could interview, as a journalist, do you think you could interview anybody?

Probably could interview anybody. I mean, there would be some people who are hard to interview because they lie, you know, for example. And then I don't know how to deal with that. Yeah. And you don't want to have an interview where you're correcting somebody the whole time. I would certainly talk to anybody as a journalist.

Would you interview Trump? Yeah, I mean, he would have—

he would pose exactly that problem because how would you deal with the fact that he's saying something that's not true? Would you then say, but Mr. President, that's not true, and then go down that road of arguing with him? Or would you just listen and write it down? So you're worried it wouldn't be productive?

I'm worried it wouldn't be productive. That's also my line, to be honest, with people, is there's certain people that are really consequential, so you feel you should interview them. Them. But part of me worries that some of them wouldn't be— it wouldn't be productive anyway. So I wouldn't get anything out of them that is new or useful or productive. So, right.

I mean, I would, I would talk to anybody who is— who— with whom you can have an argument and who's reality-based.

And my other thing is just people that don't take things off the record, because sometimes when we ask to interview people, they'll say, yes, but as long as you don't talk about this. And for me, that's a no-go.

Well, I didn't take anything off. You didn't.

Thank I appreciate that. Um, you have so many wonderful books. I heard there's also a cookbook which I didn't manage to locate, which is a bit of a diversion from, from your subject matter. But, um, they are brilliant books. And the reason why I, I 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 books, but you're a real demystifying force in a world that's becoming incredibly misty for many of us, in part because there's just so much information accessible to all of us now. But I highly recommend people go check out these wonderful books. I'm going to link them all below, and many of them are a continuation of the themes and subjects we've talked about, or adjacent stories from history. But you're a remarkable storyteller, Anne, and that's why I think people love listening to you so much. So I really appreciate you taking the time today to help demystify all of this for me. I actually have never had a conversation that is so centered on the subject of democracy. I've heard people talking about it for the last 10 years as this sort of, this thing that matters, but this conversation has really opened my eyes to both the value of it, but also the risks and the slippery slope that causes societies to lose it.

So thank you so much for doing what you do, because it's incredibly important. And as a 33-year-old that's lived most of my life in the West, it's very easy to take democracy as a subject for granted. I think I have, to be honest.

Yes, well, it's normal. It's the water we swim in. We're the fish, you know, and the idea that there would someday not be water is unimaginable. But thank you for asking such such penetrating questions. Thank you.