Steven Bartlett

And the job of a politician is quite different from that.

You know, it's to, you arrive...

With a set of views, you need to explain them to people, you need to convince them.

It's just, it's a different way of thinking about approaching the public.

So I'm not campaigning for a cause.

There's an outcome that's general but not specific.

In other words, I'm not trying to elect any particular person to be president.

I do have a goal that is to remind people of why democracy is important, why we need to maintain it, and to pay attention to the ways in which it's declining so that we can fight back.

I mean, I have a broad goal in that sense.

And that's not only inside the United States.

It's the thing I've been fascinated by since I was in my 20s.

Why?

Because I think it's – I saw the Soviet Union when it was still the Soviet Union.

I was a student in Leningrad when it was still Leningrad.

I felt what it was like to live in a heavily autocratic society, even briefly.

And I have really spent the rest of my life trying to understand what it was, how it worked, why people went along with it.

And I've also spent a lot of time more recently trying to warn people against it, against going in that direction.

You know, it's also not the thing I thought I would be doing.

I changed – you know, if you're looking at my books, you know, I wrote three history books.

I wrote the Gulag book.