Steven Bartlett

You know, the emergence of tech oligarchs who have so much more power than any one politician and who even have the power 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.

We are lucky in that we live in societies where we can vote.

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, right?

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 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.

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 encourage them in their biases and get them to watch TV.

There's some media that are now dependent on polarization and kind of live off it.