Steven Bartlett

What you want is people who are acting in the interests of everybody.

And in a functional democracy, in the happy Scandinavian countries, then at least most of the time, that's what they're doing.

And in a corrupt democracy or in a failing democracy, then you have people whose interests are not –

Everybody in the country, but their interests are the president, his family, his party.

Anyway, not American.

And so that's the danger of undermining civil service.

Information.

Okay.

All dictatorships seek to control information.

In China, the entire internet since the 1990s has been constructed so that the government can control it.

There is no outside internet.

There is nobody who's active on the Chinese internet who isn't somehow known or accounted for somehow by the authorities.

And the Internet is also connected to a whole system of surveillance cameras and other kinds of databases so that people can be tracked all through the system and all through the country.

People do have VPNs in China, and they do get out.

But the majority of people are inside.

And that's probably—China is the most extreme form of that.

And Russia is actually now heading in that direction.

So Putin has now cut off Russian access to most forms of Western social media, you know, Instagram.

And there were some amazing—

videos of really sad Russian Instagram influencers who were losing their audiences because of Putin's changes.