I don't know, Freddie. I think that worked.

I think it is.

I think it is. It is working.

Hello, everyone.

Welcome to the Spectators' US edition's second event.

And we are hugely honored to be joined by one of my favorite Americans and a great,

great writer, Thomas Frank, and we're going to be talking about his book, The People Know

a Brief History of Anti-Popular.

Now, Tom, I remember when you were starting on this book, we had lunch in Washington, and we talked a lot about all the books that have been written about populism in the last five years. There's so many. It's a sort of subject that everybody talks about now.

Yeah.

What's the sort of a lighted upon is that nobody really seems to talk about where it came

from and what it is. And so I wanted to ask you, first of all, what do you think is the worst

book to be? Oh my God. And then secondly, why do all these books get it so wrong in your

opinion?

Okay.

So there's a, so can I take a step back and say, so years ago I studied American history.

I got a PhD and it was going to be my life's work.

And then, you know, what happened in the American academic job market, the bottom fell out. And so I found something else to do with myself. But one of the subjects that I

specialized in, or if you want to say specialized, that I studied a lot, read a lot about, was populism,

meaning this American movement in the 1890s. It was the last sort of big third party movement in this

country. It was a left-wing farmer labor party that for a couple years burned very brightly,

overthrew ruling elites, by overthrow, I mean voted out, ruling parties all over the Midwest

...