Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast, this is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.

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So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Anne Applebaum.

Anne was a columnist for the Washington Post for 17 years,

and now she's been a staff writer at the Atlantic since 2020.

She's the author of five critically acclaimed books, Twilight of Democracy, Red Famine,

Iron Curtain,

between East and West, and Gulag,

for which she won the Pulitzer Prize.

She divides her time between Poland,

where her husband is Foreign Minister and Washington, D.C.

And her newest book out this coming Tuesday, but available for pre-order now, is Autocracy Inc. I do recommend that you order the book now. It's quite good and not too long a read, very accessible. As many of you know, Anne is one of the most knowledgeable people about

autocracy and with a specific focus on Eastern Europe and Russia. She's also an

expert on propaganda. on one of the great looming questions of our time,

which is how democracies can fail, which is the topic of today's conversation. We discuss the nature of modern autocracies and the

vulnerabilities of democracies. We discuss the power of ideas, why autocracies seek to undermine democracies, cooperation among dictators, how Western

financial experts and investors have enabled autocracies, how Putin came to power, the failure of engagement and investment to create political

change, what's at stake in the war in Ukraine, and then we pivot to the question at hand, certainly for Americans, which is Trump and the prospects of a second Trump term.

We talk about Trump's charisma, the current symptoms of American Democratic decline,

...