The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century by Sergei Guriev, Daniel Treisman

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century by Sergei Guriev, Daniel Treisman How a new breed of dictators holds power by manipulating information and faking democracy Hitler, Stalin, and Mao ruled through violence, fear, and ideology. But in recent decades a new breed of media-savvy strongmen has been redesigning authoritarian rule for a more sophisticated, globally connected world. In place of overt, mass repression, rulers such as Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Viktor Orbán control their citizens by distorting information and simulating democratic procedures. Like spin doctors in democracies, they spin the news to engineer support. Uncovering this new brand of authoritarianism, Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman explain the rise of such “spin dictators,” describing how they emerge and operate, the new threats they pose, and how democracies should respond. Spin Dictators traces how leaders such as Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and Peru’s Alberto Fujimori pioneered less violent, more covert, and more effective methods of monopolizing power. They cultivated an image of competence, concealed censorship, and used democratic institutions to undermine democracy, all while increasing international engagement for financial and reputational benefits. The book reveals why most of today’s authoritarians are spin dictators―and how they differ from the remaining “fear dictators” such as Kim Jong-un and Bashar al-Assad, as well as from masters of high-tech repression like Xi Jinping. Offering incisive portraits of today’s authoritarian leaders, Spin Dictators explains some of the great political puzzles of our time―from how dictators can survive in an age of growing modernity to the disturbing convergence and mutual sympathy between dictators and populists like Donald Trump.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss wait am i the host oh it's me oh it's me oh crap hey uh hi guys chris voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show dot com i forgot i was the host there for a second. No, I didn't. It's a play. I'm not really that absent-minded. The audience right now is going, he's going to magic.

Welcome to the show, folks. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, 4Chance Chris Voss. Go to YouTube.com, 4Chance Chris Voss. Tell all your friends and relatives to subscribe to the show. The family that loves you but doesn't judge you, the Chris Voss Show. The best kind of family there is out here. You know, you can just move over here and get adopted.

You can leave that other one behind. Anyway, guys, just fake your death. That's usually how you get away with it. That's what I read in the papers. Anyway, judge says they can't do that. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far.

We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcasting, corporate stuff. With over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as a CEO, I think I can offer a wonderful breadth of information and knowledge to you or anyone that you want to invite me to for your company.

Thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you listening to the show. And be sure to check out chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com. Now back to the show. So we have another amazing author on the show. He's going to be talking to us about his brilliant new book that came out April 5th, 2022. The title of it is called Spin Dictators, the Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. For those of you who are parents, that's probably what your teenagers call you, your tyrannical spin dictators. It's the book.

It's by authors Daniel Treisman and Sergei Gureyev. I'm not just getting that right, am I? Am I getting that right, Daniel? That was right. That was pretty good. Okay, Gureyev. I knew I had to put more emphasis on the thing. And we have Daniel on the show with us.

He's a co-author of the book. We're going to be talking to him about his amazing research that went into it. He is a professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, in case you didn't know where California was, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 2022 to 2021, going back a year, he is a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He's a graduate of Oxford University, BA with honors, and Harvard University, PhD, 1995. He's published five books and numerous articles on leading political science and economic

journals. Welcome to the show, Daniel. How are you? Great. Great to be with you. Great to have you as well. Congratulations on the new book. These are always fun. Give us your dot coms, your plugs, where people can find you on the interwebs. I'm at danieltriesman.org and at DSTriesman on Twitter. There you go. And what motivated you guys to get together and write this book? Well, it struck us. We both had been following Russia very closely. Sergei was in Russia. He was head of economics university there and sometimes advising government.

I have studied Russia all my life, basically. I've written a number of books about Russian politics. And we noticed something very interesting that was happening there, really from the start of the Putin regime. And that was that a new kind of authoritarian government seemed to be emerging. And as we looked around the world, we saw it wasn't just in Russia. It wasn't just the early Putin that was operating in a new way. A lot of the techniques that he was using to control the population and to consolidate power were really similar to things that other authoritarian

leaders were using in other places like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela or a bit later, Viktor Orban in Hungary. And it struck us that there was a really new model of dictatorship that was emerging, which didn't at first look like the classic dictatorships of the past. I mean, we think of people like Mao or Hitler or Stalin, who killed millions of people, who put millions of people into labor camps or prisons. The new dictators, they wear expensive suits rather than military uniforms. They go to international conferences. They pretend to be democratic, but somehow they always seem to win the elections. They don't completely censor all independent media. They allow some independent media just so long as the audience remains small. And they're much more open to the

outside world. And in fact, they use that openness to try to get advantages, to co-opt international institutions, to exploit international institutions, to create networks of helpers in the West and in other countries to covertly serve their interests. So it's a different style of manipulating, first of all, manipulating their own public so that they would continue to support what was essentially a monopolistic government and also manipulating internationally to serve their interests in a way that was more kind of insidious than obviously belligerent. Yeah. With the opposite of, you know, these, what you call these suit, you know, Harvard-looking dictators, would the opposite of that be the head of North Korea right now sort of thing?

You know, where it's a cut-off country, he's isolated, he doesn't really leave and stuff. Exactly. So we distinguish between what we call fear dictators, and that was sort of the classic model from the 20th century. So not just the totalitarian dictators like Hitler or Stalin, but also, you know, pretty violent military dictators like Pinochet or, you know, in Africa, Idi Amin or various others. And Kim Jong-un in North Korea is one of the remaining fear dictators. There certainly are some. It's not that they completely disappeared.

I know there's Bashar al-Assad in Syria. So that still exists, but we've seen a real shift in the balance to what we call spin dictators, which are people like Hugo Chavez or Viktor Orban or the early Putin. Putin now has reverted back to a much more violent repression he started out with. But in the early days, he was very much kind of a pioneer of this model of spin dictatorship. And otherwise, he grew Kazakhstan, Nazarbayev there. And we see as some of the early pioneers, the leaders of Singapore, starting with Lee Kuan Yew, who really developed a lot of these techniques of top-down, quite authoritarian control

while pretending to be democratic. Open to the world. Is there, I guess you study why they do that or why this sort of new dictator evolved? Yeah. Well, our argument about that is that uh you know a particular style of dictatorship uh a different style fits different times and what's happened in the last 50 years is that countries have modernized dramatically. There's been a huge increase in globalization. We've all witnessed that. And that creates a setting in which the old techniques, just overt violent repression and terrorizing the population, are less effective, in part because the society

is just much more developed. People are more educated. They have more communication skills, organizational resources. They're better at fighting back. And in part, it's because in a modern knowledge economy, if you use heavy hand, overt repression, it makes it really hard for the economy to succeed. It's hard to have innovation if you're scaring people all the time. So the new style, we argue, is just much better adapted to a world that's much more modern, focused on information technology, more globally interconnected. So that's why we think they have started using this technique.

Is it better for them as robber barons? I don't know if robber barons is the right word, but, you know, I mean, Putin's probably the richest person in the world if you put all this money that's housed some of the people together. I don't know. Yeah, I think it is. It's a way to combine kleptocracy, massive wealth, with a more respected international image.

The old style of dictators can amass wealth. And we look at people like Mobutu in Africa, who multibillionaire all this property in Paris. So the old style can certainly get their hands on wealth. But if you want to have this kind of globally respectable image, then doing it more subtle is, you know, it's going to work better. Is the other reason to make it easier to, I mean, boil the frog, basically, to have people that think they're in a democratic country, you know, like Turkey and Hungary,

where we're democracies and we've seen, you know, those two, Erdogan and the what's-his-face, bring those two to downfall. Is it so they can get away with the slow cooking of, you know, losing all that democracy? Yeah, I think it is because, well, that's right. A lot of these spin dictators take power in an ostensibly democratic system. Also, Hugo Chavez comes in through elections. Putin comes in through elections, and then they gradually consolidate Panor, but they do it in a way which is not so visible. And they continue to claim that the system is still democratic.

So yeah, it's given the fact that most people in the world these days want to live in a democracy. And the opinion polls, international opinion polls are clear on this. Even in the dictatorships where they poll, vast majorities want to live in democracies. camouflage it and if you tell people that they're living in a democracy and you make them feel that they're voting in elections and that their decision counts but at the same time of course these guys manipulate behind the scenes so that in fact the outcome is the one that they choose yeah the trap slowly changes and and i slowly tightens and and you know you know you don't notice until it's too late and then you're like oh crap we you know and then there's, you know, you don't notice until it's too late.

And then you're like, oh, crap. You know, and then there's the, you know, trains run on time concept where they make sure the economy runs. And so everyone's like, well, you know, the trains are running until it has a little authoritarianism. As long as, you know, our ability is full and we got paychecks in the bank. Is that some of it? Well, yeah. I mean, of course, if the trains are running on time, then they take credit for it, of course. But, you know, a lot of them aren't very good economic managers.

So you have to be prepared for when the trains don't run on time. They have no idea how to make them run on time. So in that case, they have to use these informational manipulation techniques. Ah, the spin. Flect, divert, discredit your opposition, and blame others for whatever goes wrong, including people outside the country. That's the thing. It's always those Zionist Americans

and those capitalists, whatever's that are up to no good. Yeah, and the other thing is, if things aren't going very well at home make people think they're going even worse elsewhere so you know constant stuff on the media about you know race riots in the u.s collapse of society in europe moral degradation all this so their public relations aims at convincing people first first of all, that they're doing a great job. But if people aren't ready to buy that, convincing them that they're doing as well as anybody else

could and better than those idiots in the next country over. Yeah. We're not as bad as them. So it sounds like Tucker Carlson every night. Similarity. Where does the Jinping of China land in all of this? Is he a spin dictator or a fear dictator? That's a fascinating case, because when we talk to China specialists about our argument, they say, oh, well, yeah, so China must be, you must

consider China a spin dictatorship. But when we talk to non-China specialists, they say, well, you know, look at what they do in Xinjiang and Tibet and Hong Kong. So this is a fear dictatorship. We come down on the side that China under Xi Jinping is a fear dictatorship that just uses a lot of modern tools. It's this sophisticated surveillance technology and Internet censorship technology and, you know, various other tools for controlling the population.

But basically, it's still making sure that people are at least somewhat afraid. So the rhetoric about Hong Kong is pretty violent. They have forced confessions. Dissidents have to go on TV and confess to their sins against the party. So still, there's a clear undertone of fear, which we think is central. But Xi Jinping, it's a bit of a reversal of the previous trend. and Hu Jintao, you could even have argued that they were heading towards the dictatorship, that they were starting to, well, of course, and they remain, they were and they remain very open internationally. People can travel, there's a lot of trade, but also they were starting to allow some investigative reporting and they were getting a bit more sophisticated about media messages. But under Xi Jinping, it's really gone back the other direction,

much more towards, you know, traditional model of the strong leader and a message of really intimidation, somebody who wants to stand out. And so you guys researched, you know, the pathway of these guys, how they come to power, how they get power, how they keep power. Are we seeing that with Donald Trump? Well, that's a good question. So how did these spin dictators in countries that are recognized as authoritarian differ from opportunistic populist politicians in democracies who seem to be using a lot of the same techniques.

And so, for instance, there's, yeah, I mean, besides Donald Trump, there's Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, who, when he was a prime minister there, he controlled six out of the seven main TV channels. So three of them were part of his media empire, and three of them were state channels. So basically, he could So basically he could control the media environment and control the messages people were getting. Trump uses or used some of the techniques of spin dictators. He established this kind of direct link to his base. He denounced the media as fake media or fake news and all this. We think that the big distinguishing feature of countries like the US, countries like other developed democracies, is that when they

face a politician or even an elected leader who wants to, in effect, become a spin dictator, they're constrained by a large and sophisticated part of society with high education, with a lot of experience in communications with, and so on, who can form the networks and organize resistance to that and push back against it and really make the institutions, which are kind of inert unless people embody them, make those institutions constrain the populist leader. And we saw that happening in the U.S. under Trump. I mean, of course, it was deeply alarming at how great the threat became to our democracy. But democracy is quite resilient, and it fought back. And the story is not over, of course. We have to look to the future and hope that those resources and strengths of American democracy will continue to operate effectively. But that's what distinguishes, I would say, the cases of populists and modern democracies from the spin dictators in experienced democracies or simply authoritarian states. In those cases, the society is less equipped to fight effectively

against these attempts, hegemonic power at monopolizing control over everything. Was our, was, you know, the breadth of our and depth of our free press and, of course, our constitutional thing, is that another big factor that that helps protect us in the us i know a lot of these other countries had judiciaries in supreme courts very often a spin dictator will find a way to control the judiciary through packing the courts i mean partly many countries in many in many systems it's a lot easier to amend the constitution than it is in the u.s yeah we see eventually vladimir putin erdogan and turkey hugo chavez they all amended they were they all got big majorities and were able in in the in the parliament in the legislature

and were able to use that to amend the constitution in ways that consolidated their power, including, you know, changes in the judiciary. Yeah, that's always a problem. And free press is crucial. Independent judges who fight back against political pressures. That's very important. Journalists who provide the news. And it's partly a matter of just resources and, experience of providing free media. It's easy to ban something. It's harder to take away the knowledge of how to do it covertly and how to organize. So all of that, some people call this civil society. All of that is really, we think, what constrains a leader from simply grabbing control before people are able to stop them yeah i remember when the great washington post we've had a few of their co-editors on and stuff coined the term i think it was right after the election of donald trump democracy dies in

darkness and uh sometimes i was reading the news man i look up at that little motto and be like, keep the light on. There you go. Yes, you need journalists. You need journalists to fight the fight and, you know, make people, you know, sadly everyone seems to turn away from a lot of news, and hopefully people tune in this week. What are some other standout aspects of the book that you think people will find interesting? So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership,

Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book where refined books are sold.

Well, so we present a lot of evidence that there has been this shift in the balance between these types of dictators. And then we end by trying to think about what the West should do against this type of dictator, the more sophisticated information manipulating type, but also the old type as well. And I think we need to really grapple with that problem at the moment, because we're in a new era now where we face very assertive, potentially dangerous dictatorships from various places. And some people have this idea that we can simply decouple from the authoritarian world, that the democracies can kind of trade with them. We can

cut ourselves off and isolate. And that's the best strategy. In fact, we can't do that, right? The world is interlinked now in multiple ways. And even if we decide we're not going to trade with China or other authoritarian countries, pathogens, environmental threats, technologies, they're going to be crossing borders. And authoritarian countries have votes on the UN Security Council. So we can't just decide to stay in our corner. We have to engage. And I think that that's very important. We have to engage, but we have to engage in a smarter way than we have in the past. We have to build into that engagement a lot of strategic thinking. First of all, we need to be much more aware. We need to monitor more closely the ways in which we're interacting, because in a sense, after the fall of communism in the 1990s, we opened up and we anticipated that ideas as well as capital would flow from the West to the East.

And that's true to some extent, but also something flows back. And unfortunately, that's corruption. And we've seen the growth of a kind of industry of enablers of authoritarian regimes, dictators, lawyers, bankers, lobbyists who set up the shell companies, who lobby on behalf of a foreign state and who basically serve the interests of these dictators and make it very hard to resist them because they build up networks of friends throughout the world, including in the West. And at the same time, these dictators participate in international institutions. So Viktor Orban, for instance, Hungary is a member of NATO in the EU, Erdogan is, Turkey is a member of NATO. And we see that they use the rules of those organizations. So in both, there's a tradition of making decisions by consensus. They use those rules to blackmail the West, to extract more benefits for themselves, to resist any kind of efforts to make them behave

in a more democratic or law-based way. And so we need to reorganize our international institutions in a way that, you know, doesn't make us vulnerable to that kind of exploitation or blackmail. And we need to, you know, be more sophisticated in these interactions but not stop them because the only, first of all, it's impossible, as I said, to completely decouple.

And secondly, the long-term hope for evolution in authoritarian governments is that they'll continue to modernize and that they'll continue to be influenced by the surrounding world and in particular by the West.

And that'll only happen through continued engagement. Yeah, it was interesting to me how, you know, even I was guilty of walking around saying it, you know, there'll never be another war because we're all too integrated with our economies and our trade and interaction, coronavirus, et cetera, et cetera. And that was wrong. And now we're seeing, like you mentioned, how even when bad things are happening, how the people would do in response to it or whether they would do it in alliances. But even then, you see how Germany is struggling with its leadership at deciding to cut off its arm with its energy stuff. I don't know what resources it has otherwise to replace those. But, you know, you see a couple of countries that are struggling to, you know, they can't get away from the gas. They bought into the trap and, you know,

now they're stuck with Putin funding this war. So, yeah, so that's part of it. The West has to be, it has to monitor closely, you know, things like supply chains to make sure that there isn't great vulnerability on our side, trade relations. We need to know that other authoritarian countries can't influence us in ways that divide us at critical moments and that work against our interests. Is your book a warning to the citizenry too that needs to be aware of the dangers needs to be aware of

the spin doctors that are out there it's amazing to me how many people i meet and they just don't even understand spin and what's being spun at them you know especially people watch fox news like i can sit and watch fox news and i can i can we can just pause every five seconds and i go here's a keyword here's a keyword here here's a keyword, here's the program, here's the spin. And do you talk about any of that where news sources or journalists are used to support and keep someone in power? I mean, imagine there's those guys in Russia, they're always on TV that you see all the time nowadays. Right. Yeah, absolutely. So that's a big part of the playbook of the spin

dictators. The most effective thing is for them not to directly control the media, but to do it indirectly, so co-opt them in some way. So in Russia, the best graduates from universities were going into the state media, very well-paid jobs. And they were coming up with very sophisticated shows that appealed to people in quite subtle ways sometimes, but always in a way that ultimately made them feel better about their country, better about their government, and more loyal to it so you saw this with the ukraine thing where you know you had people calling that calling their relatives in ukraine soldiers and people that you know had friends in ukraine and they're like hey they're they're attacking us and bombing us like no it's not they're just cleaning up some you know you saw how pervasive the the news agencies were there and how programming it was like it was like fox it was like if you

flipped the you know the small portion of fox and all the other news outlets and flipped them to where they were all the thing so this is really interesting anything more you want to tease out of the book before we go well i think we've covered we've covered most of it i mean i just on that point it is absolutely amazing how people in russia are resisting or have been resisting even from family members these reports about what's really going on in Ukraine. This goes to show how, I mean, I underestimated how effective this was being, this was in fact, but it shows how much, you know, repetition and kind of sophisticated propaganda that, like a conspiracy theory,

it provides some true details about something. And, you know, that gives it the feeling of, I don't know, truthiness, right? But then they build a theory around it, which is supported by the desire to believe, right? People want to believe that their country is good and doing the right thing and that their army is, you know, saving people rather than just bombing indiscriminately so you put together that desire to believe good things about yourself and your friends with you know these kind of compelling details that the media has provided and at constant repetition and you get this bob that is really surprisingly effective at isolating people from the truth. So, yeah, it's a warning to to us all that, first of all, we need to know that this is going on in authoritarian countries. And secondly, we need to be aware of the danger of those kind of closed informational ecosystems, even in democracies yes all of us need to be aware of it i mean if if people study history realize how easily democracies can die and they and they do it while

people are easy to sleep everyone's fat and happy and i i would i would push back on that a little bit i think we've got a bit carried away on this democracies are dying theme i we haven't seen a lot of democracies die. What happens is democracies get a little bit more unfair. They get more polarized. They work less well, but they don't collapse like a house of cards, at least not developed democracies,

the new democracies. But so, yeah, I think you're absolutely right. We have to be conscious. We have to be concerned about the weaknesses and the threats. But at the same time, we can't for what's right in the public sphere. So, you know, it's not that democracy can suddenly just fall apart just like that without anybody noticing. I think we're scaring ourselves a little bit too much in that regard. But we do need to be conscious and we do need to keep doing all these things.

We need to keep pushing back. I would agree, totally. And although we need to scare some people awake, basically. I think that's why we use that. But no, you're right. I mean, technically, I think Viktor Orban's Hungary is still a democracy technically, isn't it? We started classifying it as a

non-democracy a few years ago on the basis that it's not impossible, but it's pretty hard to imagine that anybody else could win the elections. In elections, they're given the extent of control he's established over the media over

the courts over the electoral administration yeah um so yeah there's but there's always a gray area around the the border where people could classify it in different ways i mean is it weird that he gets 120 percent of the vote that seems doesn't seem suspicious at all. Anyway, but this has been very insightful and people need to recognize this. As Americans, you know, there's the famous line from Ben Franklin, it's a republic as long as you can keep it. And democracies are fragile. We have to be the stewards of it in our time.

And, you know, I've told people that, you know, when you choose the president or people that go into government, you need to look at the people and go, is this going to be somebody who's going to carry the baton to the next leader in the next four years and have that peaceful transfer of power? Is this going to be a person who's going to be a good steward of democracy? And, you know, we don't always have to agree on policy and, you know, all the things that people fight about.

But we do have to agree that this, you know, 240 some odd year experiment needs to continue another 240 years. And that baton needs to keep being passed and no one needs to stop it. And I think we're going to find out how close we came within inches i mean we really we really came close to losing i think the the breadth of our democracy than we hear uh recently i well i'm ready to be convinced of that i okay you know i i think what we faced was you know if we if we're talking about january 6th i think what we face a riot by people who wanted to interfere and express their their disgust and distaste for for american politics and and for the democrats i i don't see a path that would have i mean that there are other dangers to do with the republicans

manipulating the certification of the vote but in in terms of just the riot, I don't see a path leading from that to a change in the election results, and definitely not to a collapse of democracy. But, you know, it's going to be very interesting to see what comes out of the January 6th committee hearings and follow that. I would argue that there's three key moments. One key moment is when that wacko in the attorney general's office drafted that thing where he could seize power, and the two attorney generals that were stand-ins after Barr wouldn't sign off on it,

and they were going to seize the electoral machines. That would have been, that's one moment. The next moment is when Mike Pence, of all people, refuses to step into that car. If he would have stepped into that car in that basement, wouldn't game over, they would have sent him to Siberia. And there would have been no one to count the votes or change over the votes in our normal thing.

And to me, that was the seminal moment. And weirdly enough, doing the count and coming back, but they would have shut down that whole process that day. And their intent was to do a secret service for Trump to shut down Pence and stop him by all means possible. That's my argument.

I hear you, but there's always a morning after. And the question is, what happens then? Do we suddenly declare Donald Trump has another term because mike pence has gone to some safe location i mean i think the procedures would have continued to follow their course and the election would have been certified the next day if not if not that night but you have to have the vice president is certified so if if he had been, you know, we're getting into the scenarios, but yeah, you're supposed to have the vice president. So the Constitution.

So, yeah. So people would have had to get him over there the next day. I mean, I don't think the Secret Service was, God forbid, the Secret Service was part of a conspiracy to mike pence i i think they were going to take him somewhere safe and that would definitely have delayed the the final certification and maybe the republicans would have come up with something meanwhile they would have made a stronger bid to have new slates of electors or something for some of the states so i i do agree that we need to worry about the Electoral Count Act. And that needs to be changed. And the fact that it hasn't been, you know, replaced by

something clearer is a real problem. But I think when we talk about breakdown of democracy, I mean, what we're really looking at is just an incredibly messy conflict prone aftermath of an election and that gets resolved in some way not in a way which makes everybody feel happy but it's not like we just cancel all elections from then on yeah it's like we we then we go on to the next election and it's a question of the quality right i mean the quality of the elections goes down yeah and then people start winning 120 percent of the vote yeah and maybe people are maybe there's a high level of violence which is in itself extremely worrying yeah but i think we should talk about it as you know problems in our democracy and think about the concrete measures we could take to deal with those individual

problems rather than you know worrying in this kind of apocalyptic way about democracy ending because there's nothing else there's no other system that anybody is in favor of yeah it's just whether we have a better democracy or a worse democracy there you go well daniel it's been wonderful to have you on and learn so much from you and uh hopefully insightful for our audience to take and learn. Pick up the book. It is, the book is called The Spin Dictators, The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. You can get it April 5th, 2022.

It came out. And thank you very much, Dan, for being on the show with us. We really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Thank you. And thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisfaw. Hit the bell notification button. Tell your friends and your relatives to do it. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Thank you. And thanks to Moniz for tuning in. Go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss.

Hit the bell notification button. Tell your friends and your relatives to do it. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.