There's tools and technologies they have that was just not available to a previous generation.

That's the first piece and then the relationships between one another is another new aspect.

So going back to Maduro again, why has Maduro been able to stay in power despite being profoundly unpopular and a disastrous failed ruler of a, you know, who's destroyed destroyed his country it's because he's had

investments from Russia Russians have sold him military equipment it's because

the Chinese have invested in Venezuelan companies and sold surveillance technology to the Venezuelan state.

It's because the Cubans have offered secret police and training for secret police. It's because the Iranians all the way on the other side of the world

have come to help the Venezuelans avoid sanctions and change that, you know, invest in their oil industry.

So it's almost like there's a club of autocrats

who come to the rescue in the case

when their brother autocrats are in trouble,

both because they want to make money there or because they want their natural resources,

but also because they have, it's not exactly an ideological tie, but just a sense that when one dictator falls, it's bad for the rest of it.

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. My guest today is Anne Applebaum. Anne is a staff writer at the Atlantic.

She's a senior fellow at the S&F Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University where we are colleagues

and where we've actually taught a class on democracy together.

She is a Pulitzer Prize winning author of a number of books and her latest book which is just out

is Autocracy Inc. The Dictators who Want to Run The World. We talked about how it is that dictators went on the offensive over the

course of the last decades. Why it is that they felt the need to wretched up repression to make the societies a lot more

controlled, a lot more regulated in order to hold on to power.

How it is that they are coordinating internationally in order to expand the influence and power.

And finally, whether we should think of real connections between the straight up dictators who have power in the world

and the cast of characters we know are the authoritarian populists who are arguably undermining democratic institutions within the democratic world.

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