As soon as you start thinking of your neighbor as someone you denounce as opposed to someone who's your fellow citizen or your neighbor,

then you are taking part in the authoritarian regime change.

Everybody knows this and if we choose not to understand it, then we're inviting problems.

Welcome to the Art of Charm. I'm Jordan Harmager and I'm here with producer Jason DeFilippo.

Today we're talking with Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale and one of the most celebrated historians of the whole world.

Paulist, his latest book is on tyranny. 20 lessons from the 20th century.

I read this book when it first came out a few months back. It's been on the best sellers list almost the entire time since then.

Jason, you've read this a bunch of times, have you not?

Yeah, I've read this book four times so far. I got it unaudible and when I go take a walk, I'll just pop it on because it is so fascinating.

Yeah, it's a short book. It's an hour read. Go get it. We'll link to it in the show notes, especially if you want something to just listen to real quick.

It's got 20 discrete lessons you can easily consume. You should listen to this episode.

If you want to learn how to think to protect your rights and our democracy, we'll discuss mindsets to become and stay aware of shifts in how we and others around us think and behave.

We'll detail small actions we can take every day to ensure that we're doing our part to maintain an open and free society for ourselves, our families and our communities.

And last but not least, some scary historical comparisons and some even scarier current comparisons that we can use to become sharper and more discerning critical thinkers when it comes to consuming information and with respect to our roles in America or the world today.

Now let's hear from Timothy Snyder.

What is the story of this book's formulation? And it's a little scary when I saw this. I actually read it right when it came out thinking,

oh, this will be this cool academic-ish overview of subjects that I'm interested in and I lived in the former Yugoslavia. I've got a lot of friends in Russia. I lived in the former East Germany.

So I've kind of grown up in places in certain times in my life around that is nostalgia really the right word for it where it's like, well, things were great back then.

Oh, they were also horrible and terrible, but there was also this good thing because that's how people remember their childhoods or their teenage years.

Kind of regardless of what's going on unless maybe there's a war in the country where you're living and even then sometimes it just depends on how affected you were by that same war.

And I ended up reading a practical how-to guide about how to deal with something that you just really hope never happens to your country.

So the story of the book coming about is the story of me, I mean, home. I'm an American. I'm a historian, but I'm not an American historian.

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