The Ben Mulroney Show - Are drones the future of Canada's military? And how fascism and tyranny are present today

Episode Date: November 20, 2025

GUEST:   ALEX WILNER is an associate professor at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute GUEST: Prof. Timothy Snyder is the Chair in Modern European History at the University of Toronto and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Tools that make it possible to go from tax question to client comms in minutes. Get better answers to tough questions. BlueJ. AI for tax experts. Welcome to the Ben Mulruni show. It is Tuesday, November 20th. And what a day yesterday was where, oh, listen, a few, I guess it was a couple of months ago.

This guy, Ryan Wedding, appeared on everybody's news feeds. I'd never heard of them before, unless you were, like, knew every single Olympian who has ever been in the Olympics. You would not have remembered Ryan Wedding. But Ryan Wedding is a former Canadian Olympian who, was accused of importing 60 tons of cocaine per year into Los Angeles, laundering money, intimidating witnesses, and orchestrating the murder of key federal witness Jonathan Acevedo Garcia, whose location was exposed via a now deleted website called The Dirty News.

And now that the biggest names in law enforcement are marshaling their resources against this guy. U.S. Attorney General, U.S. Attorney General Pan Bondi and FBI Director Cash Patel announced new charges against the fugitive, alleging he leads one of the world's most violent and prolific drug trafficking networks.

Let's listen to Cash Patel. Most importantly, you do not get to be a drug kingpin and evade the law. Make no mistake about it. Ryan Wedding is a modern day iteration of Pablo Escobar. He's a modern-day iteration of El Chapo Guzman. This Justice Department and this FBI will work with our Canadian counterparts and the government officials across the world to bring him to justice. He is responsible for engineering a narco-trafficking and narco-terrorism

program that we have not seen in a long time. He will not evade justice. We are here today because this Department of Justice behind Attorney General's brilliant leadership and the Deputy Attorney General have made it clear to the American people with the indictments they have brought that law enforcement and agencies like this FBI will lead the effort to go out there and make sure these animals are brought to justice. And that's exactly what we will do. I mean, this was a bananas press conference. He's the modern day El Chapo. He's the modern day, what's the guy's name? Escobar, Pablo Escobar, modern day Escobar, this Olympian. Pam Bondi was also at the press conference. She, as I said, she's the attorney general. Listen to her description as to how much

cocaine Ryan Wedding was responsible for trafficking. 60 metric tons of cocaine a year into Los Angeles via semi-trucks from Mexico. To put that in perspective, 60 metric tons is approximately 40, the weight of 40 standard cars. Imagine that. That's how much cocaine, the weight of 40 cars,

he is bringing into our country a year. Yeah, and he was doing it for a really long time, allegedly. And so, yeah, authority seized large quantities of cocaine weapons, millions of dollars in assets. As you just heard, he's likened to Pablo Escobar and El Chapo, and he's on the FBI's 10 most wanted list. There is a bounty.

There's a reward of $10 to $15 million. No, it's gone up to $215 million. Oh, 10 to $15 million. And the Canadian authorities, meanwhile, arrested seven Canadians, including alleged hitman Atnaona and his lawyer, a Deepak Parodkar, known as the cocaine lawyer. Yeah, when you're known as, when that's your nickname.

When that's your nickname, you might have, your career might have gone down the wrong path. Yeah, they're alleging that he sent a message saying to telling Wedding to get rid of a witness. Yeah, and apparently they've got, according to Cash Patelor, it sounds like he's saying they got him dead to rights on this.

Well, of course, they're going to say that, but they are also, they've been chasing him for a long time for years now. Yeah, they were chasing him but I had not heard of him until just a few months ago. Really?

Yeah, I think a lot of Canadians heard about him. He popped up on a lot of people's radar about a couple of months ago. Yeah, no, but I mean, his story has been out for a couple of years now. Yeah, sure. They've been looking for him for years. And there have been a variety of stories

over that time about how he's changed appearance and where you might be and all that stuff. So it's interesting. Well, listen, here's what all say. If you are an Olympian, then you're used to working, you're used to competing at the highest level. And to be a drug dealer, to become a drug dealer, a drug kingpin, you need to be able to be better than everybody else. And you need to be able to be working at a higher level than everybody else.

The grind is real. And hopefully, hopefully the FBI is working harder than Ryan Wedding. And they will catch him in short order because this guy's a bad dude. All right, we're going to move on to another story. Global News has learned this is a shocker. This is a shocker. If anyone read this, there's no way they were prepared for it. Great reporting by Stuart Bell and Jeff Semple. Yes, they've learned of an alleged Canadian links, a number of links, to the operations

of Hamas. And among them, a Canadian is alleged to be part of the Hamas executive team and runs the group's Investments Office, which funds. operations. So let me just, let's say that again. There is a Canadian whose job it is to make money for Hamas and that money goes into their operations. What operations? Oh, I don't know, October 7th maybe. Like that's the type of operation that they deal with. Let's listen to a little bit of this story. Before launching its attack on Israel on October 7th, Hamas had deep pockets, billions of dollars in revenue and assets.

According to U.S. officials, those investments were and are allegedly overseen by this man, Usama Ali, a Canadian. It doesn't surprise having a foreign passport, especially a Western passport, is a ticket to travel. Ali is believed to be living in Turkey, where since 2017 he's allegedly run the Hamas Investment Office. According to U.S. officials, it oversees up to a billion dollars in assets through a network of businesses and real estate holdings across several countries. So it's very important you are living off the income that the companies are generating. U.S. officials say a significant portion of those funds then flowed to Hamas's military wing.

Yeah, so that's exactly what we were saying. There are Canadians allegedly working to make money for Hamas so that Hamas can keep their bloodthirsty terror range. alive. And they've uncovered 450 people. 450 people in this country. Global news uncovered them. Not the government. Global news.

I don't know how many more times I have to say it. On issues that should be taken very seriously this government, hopefully this is still a hangover from the Trudeau years. Hopefully this is not who Mark the ship Mark Carney's running. Justin Trudeau

and his team proved very unsurious. Well, there was that clip that came out yesterday, which we were trying to, we were possibly going to be talking about later, where the representative from the government says, oh yeah, people who come here, they can just want asylum,

it's through an app, and you just have to check in that way. And then you're in. And there's no double check. They're not, the information's not checked. There's no interview. It's just, hey, Here's an app. Boom, I'm here. But what about the interview we did yesterday about the fact that Canada is losing our best and brightest immigrants at an alarming rate? One out of five.

And our guest told us that there is no, at Immigration Canada, there's no plan, there's no policy, and there's no one working on keeping them once they're here. They don't even have the numbers. They don't even know how many leave. That's the Canadian way. Right? It is the Canadian way. Like, we don't get our ducks in a row on this. We don't have the ability to follow anybody who stayed in Canada too long after a visa.

We don't, so we don't have the Border Patrol agents to do that. We don't have the technology, even if we had the people. And, I mean, you could list as long as my arm. Look at British Columbia trying to do the Portuguese model of drug legalization or decriminalization without building out the mental health network required to divert them to that. Instead, they're like, oh, it'll be fine. It'll be fine. That's what we do in this country.

We make a big fanfare about a big change. And then we don't take the requisite steps to make sure that the program will be a success. All right, Canada is investing big bucks into the military. But hold on. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. I think we're going to start this segment with the concept of you don't know what you don't know. And when it comes to military procurement, I don't know what I don't know. I don't know what options are out there for our brave men and women who suit up to protect us and to promote Canadian values and the priorities of our government.

I don't know what's out there, but I had a front row seat, as everyone has, to the war in Ukraine. And I was blown away by the stories of Ukraine being able to fight Russia in the air without having an air force. And they did so by employing drones made in Ukraine. and they were able to fly deep, deep into Russian territory. And so it begs the question, is that the future, our drones the future of our military, and if they're the future, is there a role for a traditional air force as well? So to join us to discuss this is Alex Wilner,

he's an associate professor at the Norman Patterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, and a senior fellow at the McDonald-Loreau Institute. Professor, thank you so much for being here. Thanks a lot. Now, you've written an article that says drone warfare is here, Canada must prepare. So I guess the question I have for you is, what, how much preparation do we have to do? Are we not in the game yet?

Well, there's a revolution going on, Ben, in the way that states and their militaries think about, procure and manufacture, and then ultimately use drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles. And that use of drones is upending traditional notions of warfare. And so the future warfare is robotic in nature. And as your intro suggests, we're seeing that from Ukraine, but we're also learning lessons from Israel, from its war in Iran, and we're seeing other innovations from Russia. And so it's not that we're not ready, but there are still a number of different lessons to be learned from contemporary warfare

for the way that we want to plan for future warfare. But I guess it's not a zero-sum game. Is it a professor? I mean, it's not like you got to go all in on drones or all in on planes. You can go all in on both if you wanted to, right? You could, but to put this into perspective, Ben, Ukraine loses 100,000 drones a month, right? That is a remarkable statement. Wait, wait, say that again?

A hundred thousand drones a month. They would like to produce millions and millions of drones a year. And so really what's happened here is that Ukraine is offsetting. what it can't muster in personnel because it has a smaller population base, right? It's offsetting some of that with drone warfare. But drones themselves have been around for decades. So you and your listeners will remember the wars against ISIS and Al-Qaeda in places like Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, right?

Highly sophisticated million-dollar drones flying high above the sky and providing sophisticated militaries, namely NATO allies, with the means to combat these non-state actors. But that's not where we're at now, because at the same time with the development of those kinds of drones, we've had an explosion of hobby drones, right? The drones that fit in your hands. And so you'll remember the past decade, people were recording weddings with these drones. They're surveying crops, right? They're doing architectural designs with them. They're like a toy.

Yeah, well, people are using them for, they're using them in movies as well to get shots. I remember back in the day, if you wanted an exterior shot of a house, you stuck a jib out there, you would take a crane shot, and that was your shot of the house. And now, with drones, you can do whatever you want. Exactly. So what's happened is that those hobby drones, fast forward to today, have been really integrated into military warfare. And so there's a kind of a speciation happening, right? There are drones in Ukraine that just capture footage for propaganda purposes.

There are drones that are decoys, kind of suck up anti-aircraft weapons. There are drones that are targeted directly into physical. positions, people, weapon systems. There are drones that spit fire. There are drones, you know, that function as, you know, flying live artillery. So we see this future written, and it's a little off-putting because I think it's happening relatively quickly

while we're having these conversations in this country and elsewhere about what we expect to face and how we want to face that with our armed forces. Okay, so what would you want the Canadian government to know? about the choices that are in front of us because I guess in a lot of ways we are rebuilding our military from scratch and there are some real positives to that, right? There's, with the exception of a few planes

that probably don't fly anymore and choppers that should be in museums, we really have to get them brand new equipment from soup to nuts. And so what would you want them to know the people who are going to be doing the requisitioning for this sort of? of thing, the procurement for. What would you want them to know? I think that we need the right

calibrated mixture of legacy weapon systems, right? Aircrafts, destroyers, all that stuff, heavy, big weapon systems augmented with the indigenous capability, the homemade domestic capability to develop and innovate drones at will. That's how we're going to survive the future of warfare. Because Ukraine, you think about Ukraine, but also Israel, Taiwan, other countries like this, they would like to be able to manufacture the drone that they need entirely 100% domestically, from engines to explosions, that every explosives, et cetera. That will then allow us to learn the lessons from these wars so that we innovate with new types of models, new types of technology. We're trying to figure out how to use AI to leverage drones more appropriately,

right? So the future is being written today, but we can't just take our eye off, was legacy systems, F-35s or whatever airplane we're going to buy next, there needs to be a set of integration. And so, yeah, I was really surprised when I saw that first drone story coming out of Ukraine to learn that they were all built in Ukraine. And are you saying that we don't do that in Canada yet? Like, we could be building our own drones, but we're not? The vast majority of hobby drones are currently being manufactured and sold by China.

Right. Right. So again, let's let that sit in for a bit, right? Yeah. Okay. Now, those hobby drones, as we've explained, are popular for a number of reasons. But the technology that they lead us to, that's, those capabilities, Ukraine has developed the indigenous capability to manufacture from engines to, you know, other types of energy systems. Yeah. So you're saying, look, if we got good at making those drones, then we would send them into war and we would see what went wrong. And the next, the next iteration would be,

be a better version of the drone and it would it would be a quite a driver for the economy as well so i i i can't see any fault in in in that theory my friend that's right and ben the flip side is we need counter drone technology as well so it's not enough to send drone what's counter drone technology well think like your your your listeners will recall right that the last couple of weeks and months there have been a number dozens of cases of drones flying over sensitive sites in european cities from airports the military bases the other infrastructure Now, we assume, right, this is the important part. We assume that those drones are being operated by Russian forces or special forces or somebody linked to Russia.

But we don't know because there's an attribution problem, right? It's hard to tell who's flying the drone. And what's happened, so what's happened here is that Europe is basically like a sitting duck. They know that they have a problem. The NATO response isn't there yet because this type of warfare is hybrid. Below the threshold that would trigger a NATO response. And so they're looking at lasers. They're looking at microwave energy systems.

They're looking at other counter-dron measures from explosives to nets. They're trying to figure out how to stop 100,000 drones, right? Think about the numbers, penetrating into our civilian space. And so Canada, I think, needs to do both. We need offensive weapons systems for drones and defensive measures. And that's what's going to happen in Ottawa next week when there's a major counter-measure test in downtown Ottawa. Yeah, so when you save drones and then the counter-drone technology, it reminds me of the phone. company when they came out with Star 69 so that you could find out who called.

And then everyone paid two bucks additionally on their phone bill. And then a couple of years later, they rolled out Star 6-7, and I'm not doing the thing with the 6-7, but they did Star 6-7, which would then allow you to hide your number. And people pay two bucks a month for that one, too. So you're essentially giving people a service that did nothing. you're just adding $4 to their bill. But that's, I'm sure that's not what you're talking about. But hey, the point is, if we see a drone flying around the Ottawa airport, right, what is our response?

I think right now there is an expectation that that won't happen. I think that is a false assumption. That is going to happen. The holiday season is full of choices, cranberry sauce or gravy, red wrapping paper or green, squeeze your child into last year's coat or layer them up, buy your family dinner or buy your daughter medicine, find child care or find a new job, skip rent or skip Christmas. I'm Lieutenant Colonel John Murray of the Salvation Army. When poverty gives someone an impossible choice, your donation is their answer. Donate now at Salvation Army. With most Subaru models, all-wheel drive come standard. Heated front seats, high ground clearance, Apple car play, standard. Eye-sight driver assists to help when you're distracted by fall foliage, standard.

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In the 70s, four young women were found dead. For nearly 50 years, their cases went cold. I'm Nancy Hixed, a senior crime reporter for global news. In the season finale of Crime Beat, I share how investigators uncovered shocking evidence of a serial killer, and hear exclusive interviews with the killer's family. Listen to the full season of Crime Beat early and ad-free on Amazon music by asking Alexa to play the podcast Crime Beat.

Welcome back to the show to quote Forrest Gump. I'm not a smart man. And I messed up. I thought I was keeping my former, my last guest, longer. I should have said goodbye to him, but I thank him very much. Instead, I'm looking forward now. We're looking ahead to these next two segments with Professor Timothy Snyder, Currently the chair in modern European history at the University of Toronto and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

And I want to welcome you to the show. Thank you so much for being here. Glad to be with you. So you decided a little while ago to make Toronto your home. Where did you move from and why did you pick Toronto? New Haven, Connecticut is where I move from. And I don't know. Like I've got to say this is one of the things that surprised me about Canada.

that. I'm always trying to figure out, which, in what ways you're like us, in what ways you're not like us. And one of the ways that you're definitely like us is that you'll just like start off a conversation by saying, hey, tell me like intimate things about your life, which you just did. And you like, you do it in a slightly politer way, but it is something that unites North Americans, I think. I mean, I don't know. I wanted to have a positive midlife crisis. I was a little little bit bored. I was thinking, do I want to spend the rest of my life in New Haven? I mean, I loved Yale. I had no reason to leave Yale. I loved Yale. I mean, I still love Yale, and I love being back there. But I was thinking about my family, and I was thinking about the future

of my family, and I was thinking about my kids and my wife. And I was also thinking about going to a city and a university and the monk school inside the University of Toronto, which would support me and be interested in a kind of combination of outreach work and academics, which is what I do. So that was, I mean, that's, that's part of it. Well, we'll come back to the personal stuff in a little bit. But the reason, one of the, one of the reasons that we wanted to talk to you today is that we, we're going to have a long conversation here, but we want to talk to you about the fact that there is so much, as I like to call it when I was College. Conversational Nazism. People just throw in the word Nazi into conversation without

necessarily knowing what it means. Throwing the word communist, fascist, socialist. We hear it if I don't hear it once an hour when I'm paying attention to the news, then I'm not hearing it at all. And you've been teaching a course called Hitler and Stalin today for first year university students. And we're going to talk about your books as well in a moment. But what do you want students to get out of this class. Okay, that's a great question. Yeah, I'm often confronted with the thing that you just said, like, oh, we talk about Hitler and we talk about Stalin all the time. I'm a historian of Hitler, and I'm a historian of Stalin, so I can't really not talk about them. It's sort of like

asking the plumber to not talk about water or whatever. Like, it's, it is precisely my line of work to talk about these things? And I have ideas about, you know, what fascism is and what Nazism is and what it is and it isn't. But I guess the main thing to answer your question would be the recognition that history is alive and that history matters and that you can learn from history, not that it repeats,

but you can recognize patterns from it and that if you're not recognizing patterns, other people are recognizing patterns and taking advantage of that. And, you know, that it's not that the things that happened in 1930s will happen again exactly, but that those things did happen and that means that things like that are possible,

including if you live in a nice country like Canada. Yeah. So those are, those are some of the things. I think you're absolutely right. I mean, I've been, I'm a proud ally of the Jewish people and of Israel. I'm going on my first trip to Israel in a couple of days. The food is, the food is really good. That's what I've been told. That's what I've been told. Yes. But, and I studied history and political science as well, certainly not to the level that you have. But, and I, and I, and my focus was on, first, World War through the Cold War. And I never thought that we would come, we would get back to a time that had echoes or shades of that time. But now I'm seeing it. And I wish I'd been paying a little closer attention a closer attention a little bit earlier. What do you, it's, it's an interesting

time to be in academia, isn't it? Yeah, for sure. Because the kinds of, I mean, the kinds of observations that you're making are asking me to make, like that a hundred years ago, things happened that are relevant to the present. It's exactly that kind of academics, which is on the chopping block. Yeah. So, you know, it's exactly the history, the literature, the philosophy, which, like, times get tough and people think, oh, those are the things we can toss away. But those are actually the things that you need to recognize where you are and to have the concepts to think about how things could be better. I mean, I remember, Professor, the very first independent thought I ever had in school.

And it was when I was in high school, it was early high school, and I was in a history class. I was being taught French history from a very proud teacher. And he was talking about how the French were preparing for the Second World War, and they thought it was going to be a war of the trenches, just like the First World War. So they created a super trench called La Ling Maginot and had power and had water and all this stuff. But all the power was coming from Germany.

And so they just turned the power off. and one by one, they just, all the soldiers that were in there came out. And I thought to myself, he was trying to position this as a very proud moment for France. And I said, I don't, I don't see that. And we went back and forth for about five or six minutes on his perspective versus mine. And that's when I decided I wanted to study history. But the idea that you can push back, the idea that you can have an independent thought, the idea that you can be, you can be that guy in class who's a contrary.

I actually worry that my kids who are 15 right now are going to go to school armed with their, you know, their contrarian views or whatever they are, and they are not going to have the same experience that fulfilling experience I had, that instead they're going to be othered and they are going to be marginalized and perhaps even worse. What have you noticed over the past few years from your vantage point? Well, I love where you're going with this because, first of all, it's like if you're going to have a contrarian view, it should be based on something that you've learned, right? So, like, you, so you read about the Maginot Line, I guess, in class, and then you thought about it, right? And then

you had your own interpretation of it. But you can't interpret nothing. So I'm going to say a very old-fashioned conservative thing here, which is that to have a contrarian view, you have to know what the other view is. Right. And to have a contrarian view, which is worth listening to, it has to be based on some kind of factual knowledge as opposed to, like, I feel very strongly that what you have just said is not true and let me express my feelings and so a contrarian view like a view has to be from somewhere they have to stand somewhere in order to have a view and in order to get to that place like you couldn't have had the contrarian view without the teacher right you disagree with the teacher but if the teacher there wasn't a class if there wasn't a structure right and the other

thing is them that i would say is uh is is listening so like teaching a lot of a lot of teaching like a lot of things is listening and uh and and that is a skill which i think as a society as society's we're losing, you can't really have a good argument unless you know how to listen because just saying the thing that you think is not actually an argument. It's just saying the thing you think. And like what I see a lot of is people saying the thing that they think. And then their whole body language says, okay, now I've shut down because as far as I'm concerned, this encounter is over. Yeah. Yeah. Have you noticed a change in student body in comportment, temperament in students today than, say, 10 years ago?

I mean, the main thing that I've noticed, and again, I'm going to be very, very stodgy here, the main thing that I've noticed is that they're not as capable of reading as they used to be. And like going back to what I just said, the contrarian view has to be based on something. So I'm happy to have people interpret things very differently in my seminars. I try to interpret things differently every year myself, but you've got to be interpreting something. Yeah. Like, we got to be able to assign reading so that the kids have something that they have in common so that then they can have agreements or disagreements about it.

And so like that, like attention span is the main thing, which has changed. But to be fair, it's not just among the kids. The attention span of the old people has also crashed. Yeah. No, I agree with that. My attention span is not what it used to be. Although I'm trying to get. I was wondering if you were listening to that long answer.

I'm trying to get, one of my sons is falling a little bit behind in school. And so I think what I'm trying to do is get him to be able to focus a little more. And I said, we're going to find you, we're going to find a book that you're going to read. I'm going to read it too. And we're going to do it together. And he turns out the one thing he's really good at at school is history. And they've been studying World War II and they're into the Cold War now. So I said, all right, we're going to read Eric Larson's devil in the white city.

I said I said I read that and it sparked a whole thing in me where I went around read about all the different worlds fairs and so we're starting that and I'm really glad I'm doing this because I haven't been able to sit down and read a book for an extended period of time in a long time don't go anywhere professor we're going to come back with more from you and more with the Ben Mulroney show after the break welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show professor Timothy Snyder is our guest for two segments here on the show. We're talking about all sorts of stuff. I won't label it, and we're just going to see where it goes. But what I do want to say,

professors, I'd like to talk about your books because you have a number of them. And I think each one of them could take us into all sorts of different places. The Road to Unfreedom, Russia, Europe, and America, an exploration of Russian efforts to influence Western democracies and the philosophical underpinnings of Vladimir Putin's regime. I didn't know. I didn't of this book, I'm going to buy this book, because I've only been to Russia once, professor. I went after my dad resigned from office, we were invited by Boris Yeltsin. And we spent time there after the fall of the Soviet Union and before Vladimir Putin took over. So so much of the country was still Soviet-era stuff. There was no refrigeration and

everything was pickled. But it felt to me as a kid, the time that I was witnessing people doing the hard work to build democracy. And that's clearly not what happened. Yeah. I mean, I think democracy is a word that's easy to say. And I think back then we had the idea that if you just don't do anything, democracy will kind of naturally follow, right? So you just break up the central planning system. You let everything fall to pieces. And then there'll be capitalism. And then from capitalism will be democracy. And I think we've learned our lesson from that that like the kind of capitalism you want doesn't come from nowhere it has to have rules it has to have institutions and practices and also democracy doesn't come automatically from

capitalism capitalism leaves people too much alone um you need other institutions like health care um public schools newspapers you need things that bring people together and make them feel like they're actually together because if it's just a matter of voting every so often right like in russia today you vote every so often but it doesn't mean anything because there's no behind it and there's no responsive government. And I think a lot of people, and people who knew Vladimir Putin knew what he was capable of and knew the type of guy or the kind of country he wanted to build. But I was always shocked with how he managed to stay in power.

There was that short period of time where he became the prime minister and then he flipped with the president. But the willingness to export sort of his vision and his vision and his, his views and his influence and maintaining that sphere of influence that the Soviet Union had or maintaining it as best they can, I was always quite surprised by quite surprised that he could do it, had the ability to do it. Yeah. I mean, it's nice if you had to mention the book, Road Dunn Freedom, because I'm after that puzzle, but I'm also after what it teaches us, because many of the things that he pioneered then become practices in countries further to the

West. So one thing is that you have an oligarchy and you tame the oligarchs. So the wealth is all concentrated. And then you use the state to tame the rich people, right? And then relatedly, the media, you let the local media die. You take control over the television. You exercise de facto monopoly control over the media. There's just one message and it's about us and them, right? And so like these are things which are, and then, you know, you don't have to have a vision to the future. You you really have to have an ideology. You just have to have that toolkit. And then you see how that toolkit can be used in other places too. Yeah. The other book I want to talk about was on freedom. And I'd love for you to lay out your definition or your thoughts on rights,

responsibilities, and freedom. Because I think everyone clamors about their rights all the time. People are always shouting about their rights being abused. Nobody ever talks about their responsibilities that I think are linked directly to those rights. Yeah, but I agree with that 100%, but also the way that rights and responsibilities flow together can only be done by way of some kind of decent politics. So it's true that you have rights and responsibilities. It's true I have rights and responsibilities. But unless there's some kind of matrix, like unless there are politics, unless they're institutions,

well, I mean, you and I as individuals, right? Right. Like we could be pals. You know, we could like exchange favors back and forth. I can have responsibilities to you. But for me to have responsibilities to Canada or America or Toronto or whatever it might be, there has to be institutions, right? Like I can't be a good citizen of Toronto unless there are sidewalks and buses and all kinds of in schools and stuff that I can't do on my own, right? So you're right that rights can become empty talk, but responsibilities can also become empty talk too unless we have the stuff that holds it together. So like my way, my answer the question of what freedom is, is that freedom is something that we can only do

together. In order for us to be individuals, going back to the first segment, who have our own ideas, who are contrarians, who can, like, have our own vision that maybe we can implement. In order to become that contrarian, interesting, eccentric individual, there has to be a whole lot of stuff that we first do together to make that possible. Yeah, I can see that. I can see that. Because we talk about, you know, 150 years ago, we were still, we were in the process of building all this stuff. And the contrarians were, we're busy helping to build that stuff. So I get that. You have a critique of what's what you call negative freedom. What's negative freedom? Yeah, negative freedom is the idea that, I mean, in a way, it's maybe similar

what you're saying, that it's just about being free of stuff. Yeah. So freedom just means that nobody is stopping me from doing what I want. The government's not stopping me from doing what I want. And of course, that's important. But it's not the whole picture because to become the person who has the of what I want, I actually needed a lot of help along the way. And so if I'm just negative and say, everything which is in my way, I'm going to destroy. And then in politics, that becomes I'm going to make the government smaller and less functional. Well, then the result of that is that you're then raising the next generation of kids who are going to be a lot less free because they're not going to have the stuff they needed to grow up and become that interesting eccentric person. In our last couple of minutes, I want to take this back to the first book because you wrote of freedom, which is sort of a compendium.

to the first book of tyranny, 20 lessons from the 20th century. You wrote that in 2017. How are we doing in 2025, push them back against tyranny and authoritarianly? Badly. We're doing badly, my friend. We're doing, we're doing badly. I mean, I think, I think Canada's treading, you know, the Americans are doing terribly, although a lot of us are working hard and there are good people doing good things. But all in all, right, the trends are bad. Canada's treading water. The world in general is trending towards authoritarian regimes.

That's how it's going. And I think the only way you turn this around is by way of the sorts of things we've been talking about, individual courage, some ideas, good institutions, but also just recognizing that you're in fact facing a real problem. I mean, I remember years ago, I think the New York Times wrote an article that said the American Dream is alive and well and living in Canada. And they point out on the freedom index, Canada was a more free country than the states. I don't know if that's the case anymore. And I could, but I think regardless, the UK is lapping everybody these days in terms of being less free. Are those the things that we should be worried about, the sort of the police coming in and arresting you for a tweet? Because I think we're, I think we're flirting with legislation, similar legislation here in Canada.

I mean, you guys, so, okay, a lot of stuff going on on that question. Sorry. No, it's so you should worry. That's bad, right? Like, you should be worried about that. But on the other hand, and that shouldn't happen, right? We should be able to see what we want. On the other hand, the reason why Canada is, in my view, and actually the number hold this up, there are lots of indexes, is in my view, a more free place to live, has to do with stuff that you guys haven't let collapse, like boring stuff, like the CBC, like infrastructure, like local news. When you let stuff like that collapse, Then people become lonely and angry. And then at the end of that, people are, then everybody votes against health care, like, I don't care about anybody else. And then everybody else is,

then you end up being less free. So, you know, we've got like five seconds. Well, so what I, Jimmy Carr, the stand-up comedian, said that communism is a great thing. It just can't scale. Everybody's a communist in their house. When you're looking at your kids, you want to make sure that they're all set up for success

and that everyone gets the same thing. And then beyond your house, you might be a little socialist. You know, you're going to make sure you take care of your neighbors and help them out. And then once you get past that, it's every person for themselves. I want to thank you, Professor, for joining us. I hope this is the beginning of many conversations that we have in the future. I want to be able to.

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