1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
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What can countries do to shake off dictators?
That's, you know, sort of a different thing. They ban haircuts. They kill people with anti-aircraft cannons. They ban hot dogs. A lot of that stuff might not even be true. Who knows what is in the mind of a dictator? But it's not just their crazy. It's their violence. It's their evil, really, that keeps them at the top of the game. But it's a precarious position to be in. We're going to talk about how dictators fall today on this episode. And here we go with Dr. Marcel Durzis. Let's talk about dictators, shall we? Sure. First of all, thank you for joining me. I appreciate your forthcoming expertise here. Yeah, thank you very much for having me. I've always been fascinated by dictators. Your pitch was something like, I wrote a book about dictators, and I was like, I don't need to read the rest of this. I'm sold. Because they're just so weird. Dictators are just almost universally weird as hell. And I want to know... What's up with that? You got Gaddafi, right? He had all this plastic surgery. He looked like an old Persian woman from L.A. by the time he'd gone out.
He had all female bodyguards that ride on horses. He seemed legitimately mentally ill, talks for hours at the U.N. about nothing slash himself, was a terrorist domestically, a terrorist abroad, seemingly just didn't even realize how much his own people hate him. And then you got Kim Jong-un and Kim Jong-il, who bought like a million dollars a year in Hennessy. Crazy North Korea stuff. We've done entire episodes on this. You can search the site for it. And then Turkmenistan, which we'll get to later. The dude renames the months after himself, and his mother tells all the women to rip their gold teeth out, builds an ice palace in the desert. Why are all these guys seemingly just totally off their rocker, out of their tree, and yet they're in charge of an entire country?
How does this happen?
That's a good question. And it's one I have actually also asked myself. I think there's probably two elements to that. The first one is a lot of these people are deeply weird. So even at the moment where they take power, they are already extremely damaged. So if you take somebody like Kim Jong-un, generals were saluting him when he was a child. He started carrying a gun when he was a child. He could summon people to the palace when he had an issue with his toys, right? And like engineers would be forced to come during the middle of the night. So obviously that type of environment is not conducive to a healthy mind. And then the other problem is not only are these people deeply weird, but they have all this power.
And when you look at dictators, you can clearly see that it's not a good idea to give one person, in most cases one man, this much power because they're going to act on their weirdest ideas and things are going to go tragically wrong and things are going to get very weird.
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