Steven Bartlett

So that book, Iron Curtain, is about it.

I've written a lot about Ukraine and what happened when the Russians occupied eastern Ukraine.

They did this thing.

They did regime change.

They changed the rules of the society.

I think we don't reflect enough about what are the deep rules of the societies we live in and what we would lose if we lost them.

So then you don't believe in inevitability.

Yeah.

I mean, human nature is like we know how it works.

And so it offers us some warnings, right?

It's, you know, we know what we should be trying to avoid.

As I said, if you focus hard on what it is that you don't want to happen, I mean, that's what strategy is, right?

And then you work backwards and you think, how do I make sure to prevent that from happening?

You know, then you begin to get a pretty clear idea of what's useful behavior in the present.

I suppose the most, I mean, the most challenging things I've experienced have been political shifts.

where when I saw radicalization, I saw the rise of illiberal groups and movements, including among people I knew closely and very well, and figuring out both how to cope with them and how to try to shift my thinking in order to understand how to explain it and deal with it.

That was probably the most important.

I'm very bad at it.

I mean, lots of people think that, you know, you should be able to, you know, be friends with everybody and talk to everybody.

And I see that.