Marshall here. Welcome back to The Realignment.

On today's episode, I've got an amazing guest for a really great conversation

speaking with Matthias Dofne. He is the CEO of Axel Schringer, one of the largest publishers in

Europe and the owner of American Brands such as Business Insider, Politico, and Morning Brew.

He has a new book out today. It's called The Trade Trap, How to Stop Doing Business,

Dictators. In it, he proposes a broader alliance of democracies inside and outside the West,

forming a new trade partnership that excludes authoritarian regimes and gets at some of the

issues we discussed with the future of Europe and Asia as regards to Russia and China.

Hope you all enjoy this conversation. I definitely thought there was so much here and it's unusual

to have a book from a CEO be so deep that we can get to this level of conversation.

Huge thank you to the Foundation for American Innovation, supporting the work of this podcast.

Hope you all enjoy this conversation. Matthias Dofne, welcome to The Realignment.

Hi, Marshall. Really excited to be here. I think this is a fascinating topic that cuts across

a variety of areas I'm deeply interested in. So let's just start by you introducing yourself

to the audience and then after the introduction, of course, what drove you to be interested in this topic?

Yeah, with pleasure. So I originally wanted to become a musician. I played bass guitar,

spent some time at the Berkeley College of Music in Boston, found out that my ambition is bigger

than my talent. I would never become a new Marcus Miller. And so I decided to write about music,

became a music journalist, then later editor-in-chief of three different newspapers in Germany,

and then in 98, I joined Axel Springer first as the editor-in-chief of National Newspaper

Developed. And then a couple of years later, I became a board member and then CEO in 2002. And

when I became editor of Developed, I wanted to digitize the newspaper entirely into a digital

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