Hey everybody, I'm John Donovan, host and moderator of Intelligent

Squared U.S. debates. But as you know, if you've been listening this summer for

the past few months, we've been putting some different chess pieces on the board.

In fact, it's been a while since we released a new episode where we held a live

formal debate, which we do now about 15 times a year. This summer we've been

doing a kind of bi-weekly show, meaning you get an episode of Intelligent Squared

U.S. every other week. I've just wrapped up four episodes of a series we're

calling Discourse Disruptors, where I've been sitting down with people who

have exceptional minds in the arena of shaping public discourse today. You can

scroll through your feed to hear those. Today I am back in the studio with two

fantastic guests for another special episode of our podcast. And this time the

focus is the latest issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine whose theme is the rise

of autocracy around the world. And by autocracy, what we're basically talking

about is we're using it essentially as another word for dictatorship, the idea

of a single individual or a very very small group of individuals who hold all

of the power, who are aspiring to or are moving toward holding all of the power

in a given society or system. Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs, says

that this way the leading figures on the world stage today are practicing a

brutal smash mouth politics, a personalized authoritarianism. And this

issue of foreign affairs features a number of fascinating pieces and profiles

of some of the autocrats out there and also a think piece on what do these guys

need to do to stay in power? Do they have the tools that they have to stay in power

...