1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive

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Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today we're talking with Dr.
Marcel Derzis. We are diving deep into dictators.
Who are these guys? Why are they always so crazy? How do they stay in power? What kind of crazy dictators are out there right now? There's so many weird quirks these guys have. They rename them months after themselves.
They kill a bunch of their own people. Okay, that's not a quirk.
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 Derses.
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 LA, right? And 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 UN 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. You mentioned one man.
I wonder, has there ever been a female dictator? Surely in history, there's been one or two, but there's none right now currently, correct? Depending on the way you look at it, you've had some tyrants, right? There have been queens that have been exceedingly cruel to their own people and to others. So in the book, for example, I write about a queen from Madagascar, right, who is known for forcing her people into an ordeal as part of which it would be revealed whether they are guilty of something or not.
And the ordeal was essentially eating something that had a very high likelihood of killing you. So either you took it and you died, in which case you were guilty, or if you didn't happen to die, then it's like, okay, you're innocent, right? So she was super, super cruel, but she was a queen.
So right now, no, no female dictators. Although, of course, that could change depending on the way that succession goes in North Korea.
Yeah. The way they look at North Korea, the only insight we have is like, is this person in photos a lot now? And if they are in state photos a lot now, there's a reason for that.
It's not just because that person happened to be around. And so you see Kim Jong-un's daughter, who I think is like nine or 10, and then you see one of his sisters around a lot.
So it's like, maybe she's the next one. We don't know.
Is that kind of the rule here? Yeah, I think that's part of the trouble of studying these regimes, right? Comparatively speaking, democracies tend to be quite open. So obviously, there's backroom deals.
A lot of it is about power and so forth. But in dictatorships, it's really to the extreme.
And once you arrive at a place like North Korea, it's incredibly difficult to tell what is going on, how stable the regime is. And it's really like winning tea leaves.
What a strange setup that has to be, not knowing who's going to be in charge next. And I know one of the reasons Kim Jong-un was in charge is his older brother, Kim Jong-nam, who he murdered.
But before that, didn't he get busted going to Disneyland or something in Japan and it was embarrassing? So they were like, ah, this guy's not going to be the leader of the country. It's too weird.
Yeah. So weirdly enough, these family dynamics are really important in a lot of these dictatorships.
Partly that's because dictatorships tend to be very bad at organizing succession. So if you have a political system in which so much power is concentrated in the hands of just one man or a very small group at the top, when that man is no longer around because he's been killed or because he died in his sleep, things tend to go very wrong very quickly.
So you can risk up ending having like a civil war or something like that. So oftentimes the power of least resistance for the regime insiders that want to keep the system as such alive is to pick a family member.
So oftentimes they agree to people, even though that might not be ideal, but they think that's the best option that's on offer. We'll get into why that's the case in a little bit.
Let's back up and talk more about Gaddafi because the guy is so weird. Tell me about the golden gun paradox.
Ironically, wasn't he killed with his own gold-plated gun? Yeah. So the thing about dictators is that a lot of their power rests on this idea of them having power, right? So it's a perception of strength rather than an actual brute strength that they personally have.
When you look at Gaddafi, he took this to an extreme. He had these palaces, he had all these extravagances that you were talking about, right? He would travel to faraway lands, you know, set up his Bedouin tents, and it was completely nuts.
And one of the things that he had was a golden gun, right? So that the gun itself was made of gold and was intricately engraved and all the rest of it. And really, it was a symbol of his power because who has that? It's a deeply weird thing to have.
But at the moment when he would have actually needed it, which is when rebels caught him, that gun couldn't save him because that perception of his power was gone. And in the end, the rebels took the gun off him and he had a horrible end.
Last footage that we have of him alive is him basically being beaten. He was sodomized.
He's begging for mercy, his head bloody. So it was a really terrible end.
Yeah. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
I really have no sympathy for him at all. Although maybe I'm the weirdo in this case.
No, I mean, I have no sympathy for Gaddafi, obviously, but I think when these kinds of things happen, they also shift the perception of a lot of these other rulers, right? Because they see Gaddafi's end and it makes them scared that something like that could happen to them. And that influences their calculus.
Yeah, that's interesting. And it should, right? It should be like, oh, he didn't get flown to Russia and live out his days in Moscow like Assad.
He ended up getting a bayonet or whatever up his keister. I got to like mental note, avoid this.
And didn't they display his mangled body in a shopping mall or something like that? Is it weird that I wished I'd seen that? That's weird. I'll admit that.
Yeah. So they put him basically in a freezer and a shopping mall.
The sort of custom would have been to bury him pretty quickly in that part of the world, but that's not what they did. So they put him up for all to see.
And when a local was asked about it, right, about this sort of undignified fate, he basically said if he had been a better man, this wouldn't have happened to him. And of course, it probably wouldn't have.
Right. Yeah, that's true.
So most dictators, you say, end up dead or in exile. And you contrast

that with democratic leaders who end up golfing or whatever.

I choose exile over golf if that's an option.

But how come these guys can't just retire?

Yeah, the statistics are really stark on this, right?

So the vast majority of Democratic leaders are perfectly fine, like you say, after they

lose office, right?

Like somebody like Merkel or whatever, right?

They're going to enjoy tranquil retirement.

They're going to write some books, give some speeches, enjoy time with their family, right?

When you look at personalist dictators, 69% of them are imprisoned, forced into exile or killed. And obviously these people might not read the papers, so they're not going to know the statistics, but they know that losing power can mean losing their freedom or losing their life.

So they are forced to spend much of their day basically thinking about how do they not lose power. And stepping down voluntarily is extremely difficult too.
So I call this the dictator's

treadmill. So at the moment that you assume power, you risk getting stuck because in order to be in

power as a dictator, you have to do horrible things regularly, right? You have to harass people, you put them in prison, you might have people killed, you steal from your people and so forth. And at the moment where you want to step down, there's a massive risk of that catching up with you.
Doing so is inevitably a risk. And part of the problem is that you would have to find somebody to replace you who would be powerful enough to protect you, but not so powerful that they can get rid of you.
Yeah, that's tricky. You mentioned transparency.
Democracies are relatively transparent, as you said before. Dictatorships, not really.
I guess what you're talking about here is in dictatorships, journalists vanish. There's no real opposition.
Like North Korea, I doubt there's some sort of like pro-America party in the parliament, right? There's no real opposition. He always gets reelected by like 99% of the vote.
And I can't even imagine that there's actually anybody who votes against him. It's probably just like, oh, someone abstained because we have to make it look like it's not 100%.
Whatever. I mean, it's just a farce.
And you mentioned in the book that the bodyguard may have more power than the prime minister of a dictatorship because he's the one who's driving around with the dictator all day, and they're kind of maybe best friends, if you can call it that. So that's insane, right? Some guy who's just like an ex-Special Forces dude who's around him 24-7 has more power than the person who's supposedly also running the country with him.
And part of the reason these guys seem to go nuts, right, has to be that they're surrounded by yes men versus actual critical thinkers. You don't want to tell Kim Jong-un, hey, man, this looks like a really bad idea.
I think you're going to regret this. You're just going to go, oh, yeah, love the idea of launching a missile at Japan today.
And then you turn around to your guys and you're like, how do we stop him from doing this? Yeah, you're absolutely right. You're looking at a guy who has reportedly had somebody blown up with an anti-aircraft gun for falling asleep in a meeting.
This is the type of regime that we're talking about. And as you say, this type of transparency, at first, it sounds good from the perspective of the dictator because like, well, nobody can criticize you really.
And if they do, you can put them in a gulag or you can have them killed or whatever. But ultimately, a lot of these dictators fall into a trap because the system is set up this way.
So as they promote for loyalty and not for competence and people who speak the truth get perched over and over again, you do end up with these yes men. Obviously, if everybody constantly agrees with you because they don't want to be sent to a gulag, that's not conducive to good policymaking.
And again,, it's not great for a healthy mind. We've seen a lot of the times in history that this leads dictators to basically detach from reality.
Like they don't really know what's going on anymore. And as a result, they can make mistakes because they become overly confident.
It sort of boggles the mind a little bit. You see a guy like Putin, who is reportedly not very smart, but let's admit he's smart enough to run Russia.
He was smart enough to get to the top. Yes, he's probably surrounded by yes men, but the dude can read the Wall Street Journal and figure out, oh, this Ukraine thing is not going well.
At some point, these guys have to also realize, huh, I did kill the last few people that told me something I didn't like. Maybe I'm getting bad information, but it just doesn't seem to occur to them or are they just stuck and they can't get off that treadmill, like you said? Yeah, I think Putin is a really interesting case.
I talked to a lot of Russia experts while writing this, right? And what some of them argued is that essentially as Putin came in, he would listen to a lot of people that were technocrats. So these might've been people that previously ran a bank or they were like managers.
They cared a lot about the economy. They wanted things to work, right? If only because they wanted to make sure that the people who were at the top got more money.
But as time went on, Prudence started listening more and more to people that were more like him, intelligence officers in particular, but also people from the military. And obviously, these people have a certain mindset, right? I mean, if you spent three decades in the KGB and you constantly see threats lurking everywhere, you have a certain way of looking at the world and you transfer that to the people that you're advising, in a sense.
When he was making decisions, for example, with regard to Ukraine, these were the people that he was listening to. And they were telling him, no, look, the Americans are aggressive.
They're encroaching on our territory. We have to do something now.
And then he would. And over time, he would become more and more belligerent.
And then there would be a Western reaction. And then that Western reaction would seemingly confirm what the hawks from the intelligence service had been telling him.
So they got even more powerful. So gradually, you just detach.
I see. What are those people called again? Like Siloviki or something? You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, Siloviki.
Yeah. So men at arms almost.
The intelligence services, basically, right? The people sort of working in the shadows. You're right.
30 years in the KGB probably trains you to just be uber paranoid. Whereas like the oligarchs since the 90s Russia, they were like, how do we just make a ton of money and then get it out to the Cayman Islands, which is also not good for people, which set up the whole sort of stage for Putin to take power in the first place.
Okay. Dictators are on the hamster wheel or the treadmill.
They can't step off safely. They have to keep running.
If it's so bad on the wheel, why do you get on there in the first place? You just want a bunch of money. Is that it? I think there's a bunch of advantages, right? So first of all, a lot of the people that take power are not in countries like the US or in modern Germany, right? So oftentimes you're looking at poorer countries where there might not be a lot of opportunity or where the political system might already be disastrous.
So it's not as if you are coming into power and creating a dictatorship, but there's already some sort of dictator. And if there's already somebody like that, it might as well be you.
But also the opportunities for enrichment are absolutely endless. Some of these people are literally embezzling billions, right? Money doesn't even go into the state budget.
You don't even have to steal from the budget. You just divert it to your Swiss bank account straight away.
So a lot of it is really attractive. Can you explain in brief, of course, How do dictators pilfer things? Because if you're Putin, you're not the one counting stacks of money or messing around with bank wires at whatever their equivalent of the Federal Reserve is.
They've got a crony in charge who's like, oh, we have a $200 million tax deposit from Gazprom. We should put that in this account.
It's like, actually, why don't you deposit it in these eight accounts? A bunch of them are my kids, a bunch of my friends, one of them is yours. And they're like, okay.
And then everyone just goes along with that because they don't want to get thrown into jail or get killed. You can do all kinds of things, right? The easiest thing to imagine is something that is state owned, right? Let's say you're coming out of an economic system where the state basically almost owned everything.
And then you sell that off. Maybe there's some sort of kickback because you sell it to them at a much lower price than its real value.
Or perhaps somebody has an issue with the tax authorities and they want to make it go away. So they pay a little fee, but that fee is 200 million.
So there are all types of ways. And then obviously you don't take the money yourself, but make sure it's a friend or it's a relative or it's in a bank account that can't be found and all the rest of it.
And the best of these people, I don't want to sound as if I'm admiring them, right? Let's say the most effective at this sort of quote unquote out of dictatorship, they don't have to explicitly tell people what to do because they do it out of their own accord because they want to please the leader or they want to avoid something bad happening to them. So things run on autopilot almost at some point.
Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that.
Hey, check one of your Swiss bank accounts or I made the Swiss bank account for you. And look, it's got $300 million in it.
Thanks for letting me drill in Siberia. I suppose there's something to that.
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Now, back to Marcel Derses. You mentioned that these dictators, let's say Putin, for example, pilfer left and right, but they don't take the money.
I read these stories about Putin where it's like his friend who he grew up with, who's the conductor of the orchestra, is worth $400 million, but his salary is like $15,000 a year, whatever, 25. Why bother? No one's going to arrest Vladimir Putin.
You don't have journalists keeping him to account. Why do I have to spread it out and be like, it's not my money.
Who cares if everyone knows I'm filthy rich? I'm Vladimir Putin. What are you going to freaking do about it? Why bother? Yeah.
Well, from the dictator's perspective, being completely cynical and just thinking in terms of cost benefit, the question is, is that worth it? Because obviously you can put down people and you can repress them to an extent. But if you retain some sort of plausible deniability, you will have to beat down fewer people.
And beating people is a risky proposition oftentimes. So you want to avoid it if you can.
And really, realistically, to Putin, it doesn't make a difference. He's got his properties.
He's got his money. He will never need more money again in his life.
There's no point. It's just not worth taking the risk.
Why not stop pilfering when you have more money than you can spend in your entire life? Why continue to loot the state if you don't need it at all? I think, honestly, I mean, first of all, I would say that even in democratic societies, you have this phenomenon, right? Although not with political leaders necessarily, but I mean, I ask myself that about billionaires sometimes. It's like, come on, man, you have 50 billion.
What more do you need? So I think part of it is not specific to dictatorships, but it's just about humans being humans. And then I think the other element of that is that a lot about these systems is about status and it's about perceived power and perceived potence almost.
So not only do you want to be rich, you want to be the richest because you want to send a signal to the others that, you know, actually I'm the man. I am that guy and you are not.
Okay. If it keeps you in power and it has this sort of survival purpose, right? If he stops pilfering at a billion, but then an oligarch has 10 billion, people might say, why don't we just follow that guy? Look at how well he's doing compared to Putin.
We should put that guy in charge. He clearly knows more about what he's doing.
I guess if you pilfer 100 billion, you can spread it out as you need it. So if somebody like the military says, look, that other guy has more money he's offering us something, you can say, well, I can top that because I have more resources.
So I suppose there is a survival element there too. One of the big differences between democracies and dictatorships is the amount of people that you need to keep on your side in order to take power and maintain it.
So if you imagine a democracy where you actually need to win free and fair elections, you need to convince a relatively large share of the population to support you. And there's going to be another election, and if you lose them, you're going to lose power.
But the less democratic your system becomes, the fewer and fewer people you need to maintain on your side. So if you look at something like Kim Jong-un's North Korea, he might only need 200 families in order to maintain power.
And in a way, again, this sounds great because you can ignore just about everybody else. And in many cases, they have.
But the problem is the flip side of that, because democratic leaders can afford to lose a lot of people, but dictators cannot. So if Kim Jong-un loses 50 families, you might be done.
So you are in this constant situation where the people closest to you are your biggest threat, and losing even a few of them can become a massive issue. So that's why it's so important that you take money and you steal it from the masses, essentially, even if it might be indirect, and you give it to the people that keep you in power.
So your oligarchs, your generals, your intelligence officers. And that's part of the reason why it can never stop.
It has to keep moving. Yeah, this would make a dictatorship less stable, right? If you can only lose 50 families, if somebody loses 50 votes, even in a swing state, you're not going to notice that.
It's never going to come down to that. If you lose 50 families, 50 votes in your group of 200, you're getting replaced by somebody else suddenly or whatever.
That's got to keep you up at night if you're Kim Jong-un or a dictator anywhere. You mentioned before that a tyrant needs somebody strong and cunning enough to protect them when they're no longer in power.
But someone that's smart like that maybe doesn't want to play second fiddle. Maybe they want to seize assets and resources, which I guess explains why a lot of these guys say they just give it to their kids, because maybe your son won't have you murdered in a brutal way because he's your son.
You know, maybe. Also no guarantees, I suppose.
Yeah, I got really obsessed with the topic of succession because I think it's really one of the defining weaknesses of dictatorships, non-democratic systems of government in general, right? And we don't talk about it enough. And one of the things that I looked at was the European Middle Ages, around the year 1000.
The way that succession worked is that you were the king, and if you lost power, it would go to your brother. And for many reasons, that was quite a bad system.
And the primary weakness that is inherent to this system is that the age difference between the king and his brother tends to be quite small. So if the brother wants

to be king, as a lot of them did want, they would have a massive incentive to kill that brother,

the king. And they did.
So a lot of those kings got killed. And one alternative that they thought

about in the Middle Ages was to basically give money from the king to the youngest child of the king. Because if you do that, you maximize that age difference, right? If you have a five-year-old and you're 50, that five-year-old can afford to wait.
There's no reason why the five-year-old or the 15-year-old would have to take you out. So they thought, okay, that might offer some degree of stability.
But it doesn't. Because the problem with that is that when the successor is too young, that successor cannot credibly signal to the other regime elites, so the people at the court or nowadays the oligarchs or the generals and so forth, that they're going to keep the system itself stable.
No. My son is five.
I don't trust him with a pair of scissors. They're not going to do that.
So they have no allies. They have no alliance.
They can't make that promise credibly. And of course, the regime elites, they don't necessarily care about the king or they don't care necessarily about the dictator.
They care about the system as such, because the system is what gives them money and what gives them power.

So the sweet spot that they ultimately settled on was to take the eldest son, because the eldest son still had a big age gap, but was more likely to be able to signal credibly

that the system would be kept alive, let's say like a 20-year-old.

And this massively increased the survival rate of monarchs that switched to the system of granting power to the eldest son. Massive, massive limit, twice as likely to survive in power.
And now you say, okay, that's kings, queens, whatever, that's the Middle Ages. But that same mechanism is still at play.

Regime elites still care about the continuation of the regime.

So if you look at something like Syria, and you look at the way that succession worked

with the Assads, you have the same mechanism at play, right?

So you had Bashar al-Assad's father, who came to power many decades ago.

And when he was no longer around, Syrian regime elites had to ask themselves, okay, what's next? And in the end, what they decided on was Bashar al-Assad. Not because Bashar al-Assad was seen as this great leader who was perfect for the job, but because they thought that if they agreed to him, they could avoid a costly sort of war between each other, like within the regime.
And ultimately, that's what they wanted to avoid. They wanted to avoid a war within the regime.
They just wanted the regime to keep surviving because that's how you get the money. That's how you get the power.
So the same mechanism is still at play in the variance that it was hundreds and hundreds of years ago. I'm sure some people are thinking as I was, okay, dictators are on this treadmill.
These guys must see the writing on the wall at some point. Why don't they turn the country into a democracy? Hey, look, all right, I've lived a great life.
My kids all have a billion dollars and they live in London. What's going to happen now is I'm going to retire and you're going to vote on who's next.
And I've picked the following five people who aren't going to murder everyone. Like, why not try something like that? Yeah, it can work.
And sometimes it has worked. And if it does, it reduces the chance that you're going to end up being killed or being imprisoned.
But the problem is that none of these leaders have absolute power. So this idea that this is a decision that they could make themselves is absurd, right? So even though they might want to turn the country into a democracy, they might not be able to do so because let's say the generals might say, you know what, I would rather serve a dictatorship because this is what guarantees be money than turn the country into a democracy.
A, they can't necessarily decide it themselves because they're relying on these other people. And a lot of these other people might want to make sure that the regime survives.
And the other problem is that if the country does actually turn into a democracy, how are voters going to feel about these leaders going unpunished? So if you have a dictatorship and they've been harassing people, they've been imprisoning people, they've been torturing people, and the dictator says, you know what, I'm done. I'm going to turn the country into democracy.
I just want to retire. Let me go to my home village.
I'm going to just enjoy retirement. It's probably not going to fly.
You can try, but it's an incredibly risky decision to make. So for that reason, they mostly try to stay in power for as long as they humanly can.
Yeah, you're really holding the wolf by the ears, as I think Abraham Lincoln said about slavery, right? How do you let it go at that point? So many people want you dead. There's other people that are near you that are thinking, no, thanks.
I'm making a billion dollars every year from you being around or somebody like you being around. I don't really feel like dealing with that.
I don't feel like getting my assets expropriated because there's a democracy now. It's impossible.
You almost have no choice. I'm not saying I feel bad for these guys because they made their bed and they're living a crazy, opulent life, but I wouldn't want to be any one of these guys.
I'll tell you that. The other thing is also how do you pick the right moment in time? Because to be in power in these types of systems, you have to believe that you are going to survive that crisis.
You have to. You absolutely have to.
Because if you don't, given that so much is based on the confidence of others and these perceptions of strength, you're definitely done. And in a way, it's not irrational either, right? Some of these people have lived completely unreal lives.
They started out as peasants, and then they built themselves these giant palaces, and they became rulers of countries. So many of them have survived a great deal of crises before they've almost gotten killed and they've always survived.
In a way, it almost makes sense that they would assume that they will survive the final crisis as well. That was what Ceausescu's major issue was.
Him and his wife were in charge of communist Romania, I guess you would say, during the Soviet times. Didn't he just not make a backup plan? Him and his wife got shot against a wall.
It was pretty unceremonious, I think. It was just kind of like, all right, you guys are guilty.
Trial's going to take a few hours. Line him up.
Yeah. I think the mistake that he made is he was way too confident.
And I think he lived one of those unreal lives. I don't know whether you've ever been to Bucharest, but they kind of palace that he built himself.
Yeah, it's nice. He was one of these leaders who thought that, you know what, I'm going to get through this.
I've gotten through stuff before. And he didn't have a good plan to get out.
And eventually what happened is that the military changed sides. And when that happened, he was done, right? And he had nowhere to flee.
He had no escape plan, nothing that he could do in terms of exile. And yeah, him and his wife were executed together unceremoniously, as you said, after a very brief show trial.
So a gruesome end once again. You're right about these people having really know where to go.
I guess you wouldn't necessarily want, let's say, a Ceausescu or a Kim Jong-un in a democracy in the United States, for example. We got human rights groups.
We got voters who are like, I don't think so. We are not harboring these bastards in Miami.
We got enough bastards in Miami. We're not doing this.
In other autocracies, it seems like, okay, why don't you just flee to, if you're Assad, why don't you just flee to Russia like you did? But maybe if you're not Assad, if you're not Kim Jong-un, or even if you are Kim Jong-un, I don't know how his standing is with Putin, maybe you just don't need to give this guy safe passage. Or maybe other people who take over after you have a little bit more clout with Russia.
And it's like, hey, if you give us back the old guy so he can tell us where all the gold is buried and all the others, we'll give you, I don't know, a bunch of weapons systems. And it's like, hope you enjoyed your weekend in Moscow, but we're sending you back home, pal.
That's not so safe either. Yeah, and that's the risk, right? So it's extremely difficult now to find the right place for exile.
Because really, let's take somebody like Assad, right? Assad is still a comparatively young guy. So he doesn't just need safety now.
He's going to need it potentially for multiple decades. And he needs to find a country that is strong enough, first of all, to physically protect him.
Because Assad has probably made more enemies than just about anyone on earth. So now that he's left the country, his enemies didn't just disappear into thin air.
There's still plenty of people that want him dead. So the first question is just physical protection.
The second question is, you need to find a country that is strong enough to withstand pressure to give you up. Because like you say, people will come and they will say, look, give us this guy and return you get this or whatever.
And the other thing is, like I said, you need it for an extended period of time. And I think this could be what ultimately might be the end of Assad.
Because what you're betting on is that Russia is going to be stable for two decades, maybe three decades, depending on how long he has to live. Now, would I bet that, knowing what we know about Russian history, knowing what we know about the Russian political system? I'm not sure.
Obviously, now it seems that Putin is firmly in power. He's not going to leave.
The country's not going to turn into a democracy. There's not going to be some sort of civil conflict.
But we don't know, right? So it could be that in five years, Putin dies, the country turns into a democracy. It could be that in five years, Putin dies, and there's a conflict within the regime, and the next person didn't make that promise, and they might prioritize the relationship to Damascus over this guy that really doesn't really hold any chips anymore.
So it's always been super challenging, and the problem for dictators now is that democracies are much less likely to agree to exile. So during the Cold War, it used to be that if you were France's dictator, or if you were America's dictator, you'd be able to flee to Hawaii or the Mediterranean coast.
But as you said, that's now much less likely. I think there are trade-offs everywhere, right? So just as dictators have to make trade-offs in order to stay in power, we have to make trade-offs in dealing with them.
And one of these trade-offs is this question of exile. So obviously, you don't want somebody like Assad to go free.
You want them to be held accountable for all the terrible things he's done. I was hoping we would get a Gaddafi out of that situation.
I wanted to see that dude strung up in Damascus swinging from a lamppost with a bunch of, I don't know, daggers in him or something. I know that's a gross visual and I sound like a psychopath, but this is a bad guy, right? Absolutely a bad guy.
And I can totally understand that impulse. The trade-off that you make here though is the more difficult you make it for these types of leaders to flee, the more of an incentive you give them to try to stay in power.
Right, at all costs, yeah. Right? So if you go your back against the wall and you think you have to torture, you have to kill, you drop those barrel bombs in order to maintain power, because there's no way out, that is exactly what you will do.
Honestly, it's difficult. You know, in German, we call this a choice between the plague and cholera, right? You can only choose between something

bad or something worse. Is that like a famous German expression? Yeah.
Wealthusenpastoncholera. Ah, okay.
I'm going to have to bank that. It happens a lot in life.
Yeah, it sure does. Yeah, I'm going to bank that next time my family asked me to go on a vacation.
All right, give us an example of this. I know Assad, he flew to Russia.
We don't really know the ins and outs of that. But Ferdinand Marcos, for example, The United States took this bastard in.

His official salary is, what, 13 grand a year, and he stole 10 billion plus dollars from the Philippines. And when I hear that we're harboring this guy, I just get angry.
It's so un-American somehow, yet maybe it's the lesser of two evils that we let this guy out without him, I don't know, blasting half of the Philippines or shelling his own people with the Navy. I don't know.
Yes. When you look at Marcos, who was the dictator of the Philippines during the Cold War, first, the United States effectively helped him to stay in power.
And then when his own people were trying to get rid of him, then America basically flew him out. And not only did they fly him out, but they also helped him to seal yet more.
And we know about all of the things that he stole because of American customs. So you have to imagine this completely absurd scenario where the American Air Force is flying out this dictator that had done a lot of terrible things to Hawaii, and he would arrive with, you know, sort of diamond cufflinks or a golden statue of Jesus.
You know, millions and millions in cash. Completely, completely, completely insane.
And we know about it. It's not a secret.
And then he just lived on Hawaii. And that was it.
His son is running again for election in the Philippines. One of my flatmates from law school, he is a government official in the Philippines.
And I talked to him occasionally and he's like, can't believe this guy's kid is running and that people actually support him. You'd think everyone would go, boo, don't even think about putting your name on that ballot.
But he has a chunk of support. And it's just like, how on earth does it happen? The answer, by the way, is Facebook.
That's how it happens. Crazy social media propaganda.
But you would think somebody who killed all those people and stole all that money, their kid would never have a chance. And yet here we are.
Yeah, I talk about a little bit in the book. So this is Bong Bong Marcos.
And when he was taking power, he told people that he essentially wants them to focus not on the past, but on the future. Isn't that convenient? Yeah.
Please don't remember all of the terrible things both of my parents are mostly known for in this country. Think about all of the terrible things that I might do once I'm in charge.
Jeez. How would we get rid of someone like Kim Jong-un, though, for example? Do we have to have Russia or China give them the Assad treatment where they roll out the red carpet and let them live out their days there? Is that kind of the trade we might get? Yeah, I think the case of Kim Jong-un in particular is super difficult.
Generally speaking, the question is really, what do you want to achieve? Because most of the time, people don't just want to get rid of dictators. They also want some sort of sustainable outcome, right? Usually a democracy, because oftentimes, what good is it toppling one dictator if that dictator is then replaced by another one? So we know that your best chance of a good outcome happens when you top people through nonviolent protest.
So if you can topple these types of tyrants through nonviolent protest, then that tends to work out very well. But there's two problems with that.
The first one is, A, the type of leaders that can be toppled through nonviolent protest don't tend to be the worst of the worst. So somebody like Kim Jong-un is not going to be brought down by peaceful protesters because peaceful protest is essentially impossible in North Korea.
There's no free media. You can't access the internet, really.
There's punishments across generations for people that oppose the regime. And the regime can just use brute force in order to suppress protests.
So that's the first problem. So we're stuck in a situation, essentially, where the people closest to power tend to have most of an influence on these leaders, as we discussed.
So if you were looking for somebody to bring down Kim Jong-un, that person would probably not sit in the White House and also wouldn't be on the streets of Pyongyang, but it'd be one of his generals. It would be his sister or it would be a child.
And clearly, that is not the most desirable scenario that we might want. So I think when it comes to the most difficult cases like Kim Jong-un, where something like non-violent protest is unlikely to work, sanctions are unlikely to work, outsiders are really forced really forced into making some very difficult decisions because oftentimes there are things that we could do, but they are much more risky and they would exact a much larger price, both in terms of blood and in treasure.
And even if outsiders decide to use these means, the outcome is often terrible. So the track record of foreign and post-regime change, for example, is abysmal.
It's not just Iraq. The overall track record is absolutely tragic.
Yeah. People always blame the United States for this, and rightfully so, because we've tried regime change in several places, and it's probably never worked well in the long run or in the short run.
I mean, us, right? The Germans. Yeah.
Are you kind of the only example of that actually working out? No, there's other examples. So when researchers looked at this, they looked at dozens and dozens of American regime change operations.
They found that just above one in 10 of them led to the creation of a democracy. Japan, Germany, there are a couple of others.
So it's not like it never works, but it rarely works. And there's a bit of a paradox here.
All things equal. It is easiest, quote unquote, easiest to bring democracies to countries that are functioning institutions and that have a history of democracy.
And conversely, it is most difficult to bring democracy to countries that don't have that history and that don't have functioning institutions. But if you are, let's say, an American president and you make that decision on whether you go to war or not, the problem is that those same institutions that make democratization more likely also generate military effectiveness.
So if you're Germany during World War II, for example, part of the reasons why the German military was so powerful is because Germany functioned. Obviously, it did absolutely terrible things.
Nobody thinks you're a Nazi for saying that German economy was functioning. Yeah, don't worry.
You see what I mean, right? I do. If you are an outsider in this situation, you can either invade a strong country that might actually turn into a democracy, or you can invade a weak country that is unlikely to really turn into a democracy.
And given that these sort of strong countries can lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths, you're probably not going to do it unless national security is at stake. Even though presidents say, yeah, we're doing this for democracy, we're doing this for the good of humanity or whatever, they rarely do because it's usually not worth it.
I see. That is interesting.
The only reason we invaded Germany is because Hitler kind of forced everybody's hand at that point. It wasn't like, let's just do this.
I need to distract from getting a BJ from an intern. This is like a serious global conflict.

By the way, I know people are going to email me about this. You say that at the end of World War II, the regime change was Germany became a democracy, asterisk because East Germany was famously not a democratic state.
But we're talking about West Germany and then eventually after reunification, Germany, and then Japan. Was that immediately a democracy after Hirohito abdicated? I don't know how that worked.
I think both countries were initially occupied, right? So they couldn't really decide much because in the case of Germany, the other allies were in charge. Even in that case, right? So even once you've beaten these adversaries, it's really difficult to actually go through then creating a democracy.
So let me give you one example and one difficulty that is universal to all of this. So let's say you go in militarily for whatever reason, and you get rid of that old regime.
Now you have to make a decision what you're going to do with the remnants of that regime, right? Are you going to purge them? Are you going to get rid of them? Or are you going to say, maybe, okay, we'll purge people at the top, but everybody else we're going to keep. So this is Operation Paperclip, right? Where we took all the Nazi rocket scientists and we said, hey, stop with all the Jew stuff, but come away, live in Florida and launch rockets.
It's a little bit separate, right? Okay. So let's take Iraq, right? So the Americans, when they went into Iraq, they had the same decision to make, right? They could either prioritize the functioning of Iraqi society.
And if they were going to do that, they would purge very few people. Because again, if you purge tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people, society is going to cease functioning effectively, or you're going to do the opposite.
And again, there's a trade-off here, right? And this is also what they saw in Germany. So in Germany, they decided to let a lot of Nazis just keep working.
So Germany still had judges, policemen, teachers that were Nazis. And the allies did that because they cared more about a functioning Germany than they cared about getting rid of all the Nazis.
And in Iraq, they almost went the opposite approach where they purged a lot of people. But that ultimately led to a situation where the country was just not able to function.
Some guy who worked at an electricity station was previously affiliated with the regime. So now he was jobless.
The military was disbanded. So all of a sudden you have hundreds of thousands of people with military training who no longer have a job.
And these decisions are incredibly difficult. And once again, there's not really a good choice here.
And you're always going to be forced into this. It was the bath party, right? That we just said, hey, none of these people can work.
And it's like, cool, but you do know who runs the water treatment plant, right? And it's everybody who works there as a member of this. Hopefully the guys who worked there that weren't part of that can figure it out.
And it's spoiler alert, they did not do a good job of that. Tell me about the International Criminal Court.
You say in the book that it actually helps, or I should say, makes dictators want to stay in power. Why is that the case? What's going on there? Yeah, I think over the last couple of decades, we've had a big push for international justice and holding these types of leaders accountable.
And that's a great thing because it can be deterrent. So if you haven't yet committed the worst of the worst, if you haven't yet committed these types of atrocities, using child soldiers or committing crimes against humanity, then you might think twice about doing it because you know that you may not just have to deal with people in your own country, but you might be looking at an extended trip to The Hague or the UK or whatever.
Yeah, you might have to go to The Hague or worse, you got to live in Essex. No! Yeah.
So the court actually makes it harder for them to retire because they're going to get pursued by the ICC. Yeah.
So two sides to this. On the one hand, it can be deterrent, right? Not just the ICC, but all of the other systems of international justice as well.
And that may make it less likely that dictators or other leaders commit atrocities. But the flip side of that is that once you have committed those atrocities, you now have an even stronger incentive to try to maintain power.
So there's no winning here, really. I promised we'd talk about Turkmenistan.
So before I lose that thread again, let's do this. This place is so kooky.

The people are poor.

The country is rich.

But the leader is just a bizarro guy.

I don't know if he's still the head honcho in charge.

But didn't he make everyone learn everything from his memoirs?

And he said something like, women don't look good with gold teeth.

So they all pulled out their gold teeth.

And he renames the days of the week and the months. And this is just like absolutely bonkers 1984, but like the Saturday Night Live version of 1984.
It's just ridiculous. Yeah, it's almost a caricature of what you would tell people if you told them about a dictator.
The whole thing is completely crazy. He wrote this philosophical treatise that then everybody had to study.
There were regular study sessions at the ministries. He renamed the days of the week.
He put up a statue that rotated with the sun, right? So clever. Just completely not.
And once again, the reason that he could is because it was a dictatorship. And who's going to resist if resisting means imprisonment or death? There's even more goofy crap about everyone's car had to be white, I think.
You had to get it washed before you drove into the main city

so that there were no dirty cars.

There's all this weird stuff like this.

It's like running an entire country

on the personal whims of a five-year-old on any given day.

It's like, okay, I'm not allowed to do this anymore.

Nobody is allowed to do this.

So for example, there are stories about him

not being allowed to smoke anymore

because of some health issue,

and then he moved to ban smoking for everybody.

So it's completely insane.

And I mean, he's not alone in this, right? I mean, there are a bunch of dictatorships that seem crazy. Although what I would say, and I think this is an important point to make, even though a lot of these people might seem crazy, ultimately then my argument is that they're not.
Because if they actually were crazy, they would lose power pretty quickly. So in the book, I looked at a dictator that actually lost his mind, like fully lost his mind and became completely delusional.
And what happened is, so this was in the Equatorial Guinea during the Cold War. He would walk around his compound crying out the names of the people that he had killed.
And in one episode, he would ask his servants to lay the table for eight guests. And when those guests didn't arrive, he just talked to them as if they were there, but he was completely alone.
The dude has brain worms or something. That's really bizarre.
Yeah. And the problem was that even if he had wanted to get it treated, he couldn't because literally every single psychiatrist in the country had either fled or been killed.
So you had a situation where the guy in charge with all this power had completely lost his mind and all connection to reality. And as a result, he lost power very quickly because the people around him decided, look, if we could get killed, whether we oppose this guy or not, we might as well start opposing him because there's no advantage to staying in line.
And he was just killing at random. So you need the capacity for rational thought and for weighing risks in order to stay in power.
And if you lose that, you will inevitably lose power. And now for some mass murderously good deals on the fine products and services that support this show.
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It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Marcel Derzis.
Shifting back briefly to Turkmenistan, this country is super rich, but the people are very poor. I think they have something like 10% of the world's natural gas.
Maybe there's some other resources there. Maybe I'm just wrong.
Maybe this is just selection bias. Why does it seem like most dictatorships sit on top of some sort of vast natural resources? No, you're right.
Natural resources are really great for dictators. And the reason for that is that you can generate a lot of money without being reliant on a lot of people and without necessarily being reliant on competence.
So if you go back to Gaddafi, for example, Gaddafi was extremely worried about universities because he thought that as people become more educated, these universities could become a hotbed for opposing the regime. So he was critical of education as such.
And if you have, let's say, oil or if you have, let's say, diamonds, you don't need to educate people, which in the mind of these dictators is either a waste of money because that money could also go to their cronies or is actively dangerous. And the other good thing about it is that you don't need a lot of competent people.
As a dictator, you want to promote for loyalty. If you're choosing your ministers, you don't want to pick people that are actually good at their job at creating good outcomes for the population.
You want to pick people that are fiercely loyal to you, or at least pretending to be, and you want to pick people that are not a threat to you. But obviously, if you do that over

and over again, if you don't want to educate your people, and if you don't want to promote competent

people, things go bad. But that doesn't really matter if you have oil or if you have diamonds.

So that's part of the reason why a lot of these dictatorships have natural resources.

I guess it's also easier to drill holes in the ground or have other countries come in that can do this already and drill for oil than it is to say, I don't know, building a thriving startup tech industry that leverages AI or whatever. You're not going to do that if you can just start ripping things out of the ground using forced slave labor in the case of diamond mining or coal tan mining and things like that.
It makes sense. You mentioned in the book that malignant narcissism is a common trait among dictators.
No surprise there. Something fascinating you said, and I'm paraphrasing here, which is a certain amount of mental illness is healthy in a dictator, but there's a limit.
You also mentioned this crazy guy from Equatorial Guinea. Where's the healthy, crazy person? Can we get an example of that and tell us where the line is? I think all of these dictators are mentally ill in a way, right? Because these are people who do absolutely terrible things regularly.
One day you'd be looking at somebody, you'd be talking to them totally normally. And as they walk out of the office, you would order their death.
You have families thrown into jail. You have masses of people killed.
If you're somebody like Vladimir Putin, for example, you would agree to help a regime in Syria that was literally barrel bombing hospitals. So if you do this, and if you can still sleep somehow, you are obviously abnormal.
And if you can maintain power in these systems, you need to be paranoid. You cannot be a quote-unquote normal person who just goes about their day relatively carelessly, because if you were, you would die.
So you need that paranoia, and you need that ability to make all of these horrible decisions and basically go on with your life. So if you don't have it, you are not suitable for this job.
What about the military? It seems like you need a strong one to protect your country from outside threats or internal threats or whatever. But if I'm running a military for a dictator and I'm the general, why do I need the dictator? Why don't I just run the place? You don't, which is why, you know, coup d'etat are a major problem for just about every dictator.
So if you're a dictator, you usually don't want a military that is actually good at doing the job of a military, which is to fight an external enemy, to protect the country, maybe even fight rebels. But what you do want is a military that is not going to topple you.
So usually dictators do something that is often called coup-proofing. There are multiple elements to this.
You want to promote for loyalty. You want to make sure that generals are not too competent and so forth.
But the other thing that you want to do is look at the structure of your security services. Democracies often have a unified chain of command.
They have one military and that military is designed to fight wars. In dictatorships, what you want to do is you want to split those security services into multiple smaller parts.
So you don't just want to have your regular military, but you also want to have some sort of parallel military. Perhaps you also have a military's palace guard.
Perhaps you have a large militia as well. And the reason why you want to do this is because you want to make it impossible for that one general that you just mentioned to decide that he should rather be in charge.
You want that general to think, if I try, I'm going to have to go through this parallel military organization. I'm going to have to go through these militias.
And you're hoping that this makes it less likely that they will actually try over and over again. Let's take, for example, Russia, right? In the case of Russia, when Pregosian was marching the wrong way towards Moscow, this is an example of that, right? So in the Russian system, you had these mercenaries because they were a counterweight to the regular military.
But it also shows the trade-off because as you structure your security forces this way, they become less effective at actually fighting war, which is their core job. And you may also create a monster that can come back to buy you.
And in the case of Russia, you know, both have happened. They've been less effective than they could have been.
And Putin could have easily lost power. Yeah, that was confusing for a lot of us, I think, when we saw Wagner, who Prigozhin was in charge of this military group in Ukraine.
And then suddenly he's saying that one of the heads of the military in Russia, he's saying, hey, you're not giving me enough ammunition and your guys are incompetent. And it's just so bizarre for us over here in the West to see this mercenary group publicly throwing shade and dragging the head of the military in Russia.
And what's going on here is Putin set up multiple chess pieces to bash against each other so that they didn't turn on him. And in this case, the fighting just got a little out of hand and Purgosian had a mechanical failure of his airplane when he was leaving Moscow and died.
And now I think Wagner is severely weakened, although from what I understand, they're operating in Africa, yada, yada. So generals do decide sometimes they want to be in charge.
The problem is there's different generals and they're in different military. Isn't this also what happened with Sudan? Wasn't one of the original belligerents that's now fighting against the government, weren't they also started by the government as a counterbalance to the actual military? Yeah.
And I think Sudan actually shows perfectly the sort of succession problem that we were talking about earlier. People thought that when the last dictator was toppled, okay, now, you know, the way is clear, the country's going to transition towards a democracy.
But the problem that you had is that now there wasn't one man that was a problem, but now you had multiple men in camouflage wanting to become the leader. And this type of fighting has escalated to such a degree that you're now looking at a civil war where millions and millions of people have fled.
This stands in contrast, obviously a lot of things have gone wrong in Sudan, but this stands in contrast to democracies, right? When somebody like Keir Starmer loses power in the UK, or when Angela Merkel stepped down in Germany, there's a process, there are institutions, there are courts, there are ways to go about things. But in a personalized dictatorship, you don't have any of this.
So every time a leader is changed, you have this massive risk of things going completely up in flames. It's funny to hear you say Angela Merkel, even Americans, I think, say Angela.
You have to do that in media, I guess, say it wrong. We say a lot of things wrong.
We say Volkswagen instead of Volkswagen. Oh, that's weird.
That is weird. That is unusual.
In the East, they definitely say Volkswagen. Yeah, I've never heard him say Volkswagen when I lived over there.

That's very weird to hear coming out of a German.

You mentioned coup-proofing and picking different leaders, different militaries, creating a

Republican Guard, for example.

You also, in the book, you mentioned something called ethnic stacking.

Tell us about this, because this is what Assad did, right?

He put his minority in charge of everything.

You basically have to think about how you're going to make sure that your security forces are going to stay loyal. And there's a bunch of ways that you can do that.
So most obviously, you can give them opportunities for corruption, or you can give them toys, right? Like new weapons, new kit, that sort of thing. But one of the ways that you can also do it is to make any potential for change less attractive.
So a lot of dictators in the past have done that by promoting a certain ethnicity, either their own ethnicity or some ethnicity that is somewhat allied to them, and basically made sure that they are in all the key positions in the military, in the police, in the intelligence services. And what that meant was, is that those people then had a massive incentive to defend the status quo, because if the regime were to fall, they would probably also lose their livelihood, and they would also lose their positions.
And this was particularly prominent after the end of colonization in Africa, where a lot of African leaders, a lot of African independence leaders, had no idea what to really do with their militaries, because the colonial powers had deliberately set up the security forces of these territories in a way that meant that they were not loyal to these new independence leaders. So it was very widespread.
But the problem like this is that you have to get there. So once you have this politicized military in which certain ethnicities allied with you are in these powerful positions, okay, it can work out very well.
But as you try to get there, as you keep promoting people from a certain ethnicity, you are inevitably going to run into opposition. And that's a problem with all of these measures of coup-proofing.
And I think during my research, I think the most depressing thing that I came across was an alternative to this, whereby a dictator was trying to make change less appealing by having his security forces deliberately commit human rights abuses. So this was Saddam Hussein.
And essentially what he would do is use his security forces in order to commit horrible atrocities against the people of Iraq. And the reason for that was that once they had done all these terrible things, they knew that they effectively had to defend the regime to the death because they were hated.
So if Saddam was going to lose power, they were going to be toast. So there are all kinds of horrible things that you can do if you don't want to go down this path of Nick Stacking.
Yeah, I know he gassed the Kurds and just killed all these men, women, and children in villages that were Kurdish. Yeah, that's an interesting, totally psycho strategy.
Make people do horrific things that, at best case scenario, is they get killed for doing it. Worst case scenario, they're tortured to death or whatever publicly after the regime falls.
So you really just have to go to bat for Saddam. Yikes.
It's not even just dictators. In some of the civil wars, what groups would do is, when they were struggling to recruit fighters to join the rebellion, effectively what they would do is kidnap children and then force those children to commit atrocities near their home villages, which meant that they were locked into the rebellion.
When you look at this world, when you look at the way that some of these regimes function, some of these mechanisms at play, it can be quite depressing. It seems like by focusing on all these internal threats, dictators almost have to mismanage the military and their defense against external threats.
So I'm going to guess that dictatorships are not as powerful against external threats just because of the mess they have to create in order to stay in power. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a misconception that a lot of people have that dictators are particularly good at waging war.
And there are some reasons why one could suspect that. So one of the things that dictatorships are very good at is taking casualties, for example.
So when the caskets come home or when injured people come home and they land back in the US.S., the American president is going to have a massive issue. And he's going to have that issue because people that come home dead or the people that come home injured are directly a part of the constituency that keeps him in power because he needs to win elections.
And the soldiers coming home, their families and their friends and all of these people can vote. If you're Vladimir Putin, you don't really have to be concerned about people from some Siberian village dying, because people in that Siberian village have zero influence on you staying in power or not.
So that's one of the things that dictatorships tend to be much better at. But there are a lot of flip sides.
So first of all, what we just talked about in terms of coup-proofing is a massive issue for a lot of these militaries. Because once again, they are not building militaries in order to actually fight wars.
So when they're forced into fighting wars, they're in trouble. So one of the examples that I give in the book is a war between Iraq and Iran.
And essentially what happened is Saddam Hussein was a lot more worried about his own people and about his own security services than the Iranian soldiers. So what he did was he used almost the entire intelligence apparatus that he could in order to spy on his own people and on his own soldiers.
And as a result, you had, I think, three people in the entire Iraqi intelligence apparatus looking at Iran, and two of them spoke Farsi, the language that you need to understand to actually understand what's happening in Iran. So obviously, this type of machine is not good at then going to fight against Iran.
But what he gradually realized is that, okay, the Iranians coming closer, they're not quite within range of my palace yet, but now Iranian soldiers are starting to become a bigger issue than Iraqi soldiers. And in the case of Saddam Hussein, he could still pivot because Iraq is a comparatively powerful country, but has resources that it can trade.
So gradually what he did is he loosened the grip that he had on his own generals. He redirected the intelligence apparatus towards Iran, and he did less micromanaging because he came to realize that actually, okay, I'm not the person that should be determining how wide the trenches should be.
I'm going to let the professional... I mean, that's real.
He actually did that. Wow.
That's, yeah, ridiculous. I'm going to give a little bit longer leash to my generals because now I'm more worried about the Iranians than I am about my own people.
And it allowed them to maintain power. But not all countries can do that.
So a lot of them essentially look for external protection. If they cannot protect themselves, if they cannot go back on this coup-proofing, they need somebody else to protect them, essentially.
I take it it's really bad for a dictator if they lose a war. I keep hearing about how Putin is going to have a bad time if it looks like he lost in Ukraine.
And surely it has to start seeming that way right now, given how long this is taking and how many Russian boys are coming back and boxes are just not coming back at all. Is that the case with dictators? With any politician, they have to win, but dictators can die if they don't.
Yeah, chances are high. You can survive in power, even if you lose a war, but chances are quite high that you do end up losing power.
But I think this is quite interesting when it comes to Russia, for example, because we talked about the influence that outsiders have on the survival of some of these regimes and of some of these dictators. And I think when it comes to Putin, outsiders actually have much more influence than they often have, but they are less willing to use it.
Unlike with a lot of these other dictatorships, we can have a massive influence on whether Vladimir Putin stays in power or not, because we can have an influence on the way that the war goes in Ukraine. The more likely it is that Putin loses that war, the more likely it is that he also loses power.
But I think we're less willing to use it because the consideration is, of course, also, okay, if Putin feels that he has his back towards the wall and that he might actually lose this war, what is he going to do? And I think in European capitals like Berlin, but also in DC, for example, the thinking is, okay, if we empower the Ukrainians too much and Vladimir Putin thinks he might lose the war and subsequently might lose power, he may use nuclear weapons. So I think we've got a bit of a paradox when it comes to Russia currently.
How do we topple tyrants or empower their people? And should we even be doing this? Because sometimes it just makes things worse. Look, I'm going to catch flack for this either way.
Assad was objectively a horrible human being. Like I said, I wanted to see him strung up in Damascus full of holes.
But also stable, psychopathic asshole is better than ISIS, for example. I'm not saying the current regime is ISIS, but that's what could have happened, right? We could have ended up with a giant country full of Islamic terrorists, and we still might.
We don't know. So uncertainty is generally bad.
Should we be empowering people to topple tyrants? How do we enable them to do that? Can we even do that? Yeah, I think a lot of the time we can, particularly with cases that are not quite as bad. So like I said, somebody like Kim Jong-un, somebody like Assad, it's very difficult.
And I think outsiders can have an influence, but it's going to cost a lot. It might lead to dead soldiers.
It's going to be very costly. It's going to be very bloody.
So that is something that policymakers have to think about long and hard. But when it comes to some regimes that are more in the middle, right? So they're not the worst of the worst.
Maybe they haven't existed for multiple decades. Maybe they're not quite as powerful.
There are things that we can do. And the way that I look at this is essentially three parts.
So you want to weaken the incumbent. You want to strengthen alternative elites, and you want to empower the masses.
Because if you do not empower the masses, and there are a variety of ways to do it, you risk a scenario where basically one dictator walks out the front gate and another walks in on the other side of the palace. And that can mean sanctions to make it more difficult for the regime to redistribute gains.
It can mean running workshops. It can mean making sure that communication networks stay open.
It can mean training people in strategy. There's a bunch of things that you can do that are very cheap and where the outcome is unlikely to be catastrophic.
If you run a workshop for independent journalists somewhere in Central Asia, it is unlikely to lead to a million deaths. Maybe it happens, but it's highly unlikely.
I am actually helping run a workshop for independent journalists. I can't say where, but it's funny.
That's one of the things I'm doing this month with the idea that they're going to then use their skills to chip away at the dictators in the countries where they're from. When it comes to some of these more drastic measures, right? When it comes to things like, do you support assassinations? Do you provide weapons to regime opponents? Do you encourage sabotage? Do you perhaps go to war? I'm extremely skeptical because I know that historically speaking, a lot of the time it has gone wrong.
But at the same time, I only grew up in freedom in Germany because somebody else went to war to beat the Nazis. So I am not going to sit here and argue that force is never justified.
There is some sort of line at which these leaders are so destructive and so damaging that it is worth taking that risk and that it is worth going to war. But where that line is, is difficult to say in general.
I think it's a case-by-case decision. What do you think of Lukashenko in Belarus? This guy has just barely kept power by the skin of his teeth.
It seems like Putin doesn't even necessarily like the guy. He just tolerates him because he doesn't want to lose another ally.
But man, did he almost have a moment a couple of years ago when 100,000 plus people were out in the streets of Minsk. I thought that was the end for him.
I did. It's a really fascinating case.
And what it really demonstrates is how popular protest works and when it doesn't. And it's a curious question, right? Because you've got some of these entrenched dictatorships being brought down by school teachers or by pensioners just marching in the street.
And the mechanism through Deutsche Bank works is by splitting the regime. So you're a dictator, you want to project strength and you want to project inevitability.
You want to make sure that people think there's no other option. So you cannot tolerate people in the streets because that's a direct challenge.
But when they're there, you use violence against it, you try to club them down. You might have more people in the streets because you have this backlash as people are upset.
So you have more and more people, and eventually you're forced into a situation where you might have to give an order to shoot. But the problem is that even when you give that order to shoot, somebody actually has to follow it.
And oftentimes at that very moment, the security services refuse, and the regime crumbles on the weight of its own repression, because even though the dictator might want to shoot these innocent civilians, others in the regime do not. And as a result, these regimes can blow up.
But then in Belarus, what you saw is that dictators can maximize their chances of survival by bringing in security forces from elsewhere. Because, of course, you are going to be much more likely to shoot somebody from a foreign country than you would be your neighbors or maybe somebody from your family.
So what you saw in Minsk is essentially a form of dictatorial solidarity where the dictatorship was able to count on these Russians. And these Russians not only made it less likely that the regime would crumble under the weight of its own repression, but it also reassured regime elites, like the generals and so forth, that the regime would continue to survive.
And given that they then thought the regime would continue to survive, it became irrational to defect, which otherwise they would have potentially done. I've got friends in Belarus, and I pay attention to some of the English subreddits and things like that.
And people are just not up for protesting anymore. Tikhanovskaya, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya of the opposition, she's exiled right now, I think, in Lithuania.
And she's like, go into the streets. And people in the subreddit are like, why? So I can get bayoneted to death by the police? No, our moment has passed.
It's not worth it. A lot of the leaders are dead or in prison of the opposition.
There's nobody who's going to really go out there and do this again because they know that Putin, since he can't afford to lose an ally, is going to send those like special police over there again on a couple of buses and they're going to shoot and kill people. It's like just it's just not worth it.
Even the KGB, the Belarus still has the KGB. They're killing people allegedly in Kiev.
They killed that opposition leader. They hung him up from a tree in a park, made it look like a suicide when he was out for a jog.
So this is a guy who's not going anywhere. But then again, that's what I thought about Assad.
And two weeks later, he's gone. In dictatorships, there's a very small line between apparent stability and complete chaos.
And the reason for that is that so much of these regimes is built on strength and about these perceptions of inevitability. So as soon as people come to think that the leader could actually fall or will actually fall, they can switch sides just like that because there's no bigger ideological project, there's no legitimacy.
It's just about maximizing your own interest, staying out of prison and staying alive. And that's why you saw, for example, in the case of Assad, once his soldiers came to realize that he might actually lose, they just took off the uniforms and off they went.
So authoritarian stability is often a mirage. And the other thing that I would say, though, is we often tell ourselves that conflicts can only be won if we win hearts and minds.
That's a lie. For these regimes, that's a lie.
For us, to an extent, it's possible because we have legal and ethical constraints that we cannot simply bomb civilians into submission. But if you're a Putin or if you're Assad or if you're Lukashenko, you absolutely can.
If you are able to use brutal violence for an extended period of time, you can stay in power, even if the vast majority of your own people hate you. As depressing as that is.
Do you think any Western leaders exhibit any characteristics that are often associated with tyrannical leadership? And if so, who and what? There's no Western leader that I would call a tyrant or that I would call a dictator, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't want to be one. And democracy is not God-given.
So it could be that in the future, we see a European country or a North American country turning into a dictatorship. I try to end the book sort of on a positive note, but I do actually also think it's true.
Obviously, all of us are bad with uncertainty. And obviously, sometimes things can look terribly, but oftentimes I think that doesn't necessarily mean that they actually are bad.
If you think about revolutions in the past, oftentimes they were atrocious, right? I mean, you had civil wars, people getting killed, executed, guillotine, and all that. And now we look back and we think, oh, you know what? That was a key moment on the path towards French democracy, for example.
And I think we might also look at the Arab Spring in 50 years or look at Assad in 50 years and say, yeah, that was absolutely awful. But actually, that was a key on the path towards this Syrian democracy or Tunisian democracy or whatever, right? So I don't know.
I mean, I try to stay positive, but yeah, sometimes it's not the most cheerful of topics. Let me put it that way.
No. This is a really good episode, man.
Marcel Derses, thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me.

You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Yasmin Muhammad, who grew up under the tyranny of radical Islam. This religion forces people to just get stuck in time.
It is the root of so many of the evils that are happening in these countries. This is why we can't progress.

We always hear about how the caliphate is coming, how Islam will rule the world, how Muslims will get rid of the infidels, we're going to kill off all the Jews, and Muslims are going to control this whole world. And the whole world will go back to Allah the way it should be.
Everybody on the planet will be praying to Allah. These people are indoctrinated into a belief system that turns them into monsters.
It erases their humanity. It tells them your basic humanity and what you believe to be right and wrong, you must ignore and you must follow what you are told to do.
This is happening in your backyard. And if you don't care about what's happening in Afghanistan or what's happening in Pakistan, what's happening in Saudi Arabia, then care about what's happening on your own soil, at least.
Terrorism is the art of fear. And the only way to defeat terrorism is to not be afraid.
In the face of these people that are telling you, you are not allowed to have free expression, you are not allowed to have free speech, you are not allowed to have an opinion, you say, okay, watch this. Watch my opinion.
Watch my free expression express itself. For more about Yasmin's harrowing story and her escape, check out episode 748 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.
I realized when I was talking about Lukashenko, the dictator over in Belarus, I didn't really explain what was going on with him. So in 2021, there was a huge series of mass political demonstrations and protests against the Belarusian government and President Alexander Lukashenko.
And what he did was he had Russian police, special police, riot police come in and kill a bunch of people and beat people up and throw them in vans and throw them in jail and torture them in jail. His own regime probably did the jail torturing part, but it's hard to say.
And so this is the way that he kept control because he probably had an inkling that his own troops were not going to fire on his own people. But he can always call Putin for that kind of backing.
So I'm not sure we're going to see change in Belarus until we see his patron, Saint Vladimir Putin, not need him anymore, which is unlikely, or not have the power to protect him anymore, which is probably what's going to happen. But who knows how long that's going to take.
Something from the book that we didn't discuss, the dictator's dilemma. Dictators create a climate of fear, which keeps people silent, which means they never know what people really think, even their closest advisors.
Thus, their ability to make decisions degrades considerably, and they also never know who is loyal. So this is kind of one reason that they go nuts and they're so paranoid and they have to kill people because there's never anybody keeping them in check.
But it's also the reason they make so many bad decisions because they can't get good information from anyone. Everyone's just thinking short term, how do I survive this next interaction or the next few months or years or whatever with the dictator? They're not thinking about how they can do the best thing for the country.
They're just trying to survive. One of the reasons it's so hard to overthrow dictators is that winning a civil war, for example, overthrowing a dictator, that's a lot harder than simply not losing.
And that's what a dictator has to do. Assad basically, for example, just has to hold out.
He failed at that, of course, but he doesn't have to win. So that's why he was able to hold on for so long.
All he had to do was barrel bomb hospitals and people at zero real cost to him and just survive and outlive the rebels. That's really all he had to do.
And that worked for a while until he lost his Iranian backing and then everything came tumbling down. We discussed this towards the end of the show.
Tyrants, they are terrible, but getting rid of them, it doesn't mean that democracy is forthcoming. Only 20% of dictators in the past century were followed by a democratic regime once they lost power.
So most, of course, were followed by, what, another dictator? Maybe just a big old civil war? So it's not all roses once you get rid of a dictator. It's kind of step one, and what comes after that might be really, really bad.
So as bad as these people are, and I wouldn't want to live under one, or even next to one for that matter, it's often better than the alternative, unfortunately. All things Marcel Derzis will be in the show notes on the website.
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