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I am here with Neil Ferguson. Neil, thanks for joining me. It is a pleasure to be back with you, Sam. It's been too long.

Yeah, yeah, and it has not been boring, as we were just

remarking on. It's an immense pleasure to be able to reach out to you at a moment like this,

because there's just so much going on. This is obviously your wheelhouse as a historian,

and as a commentator on current events. We're going to do this. There's just so much to talk about.

And I know you have a heart out here because you're going to a talk.

So I'm going to be more operational than is normal.

How is the first month of Trump's second term struck you thus far?

I think it's a bit like being in 1933, but I don't mean in Germany in 1933, I mean in the

United States in 1933, because there hasn't been a presidency that has started with this

much of a bang since Franklin Roosevelt's first term. The difference is, it's like the new deal with

the sign reversed. You've got this frenetic activity, executive orders coming at us like bullets

out of a gun. And that was very much the pattern with the beginning of Roosevelt's

presidency. There was also a barrage of legislation, which we're not yet seeing, because Trump

does not have the great majorities that Roosevelt had in the Senate and House. But in terms of activity, it's comparable. Roosevelt still holds the record

for a number of executive orders per year of any president. Trump could beat it at this rate.

But the signs reverse, because the goal of the New Deal in 1933 was to expand the federal government

...