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Hello, my name is Evan Spiegel. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc. and this is the podcast of my special guest-edited edition of the Today program.

In this show, we explored the ideas that could form a new vision for America and the ways of thinking that might shape American society in the decades ahead.

The today presenters Michelle Hussein and Simon Jack spoke to guests across a whole range of areas that tell us about America today and where it might be going.

America has always been shaped by big ideas. The historian Margaret McMillan

explained the two which defined America in the past 100 years, the New Deal and Reganomics,

and why we could be on the cusp of the next big idea. When you get a great crisis like the

pandemic we're going through at the moment, it does make you,

or makes us all think about what might be wrong with our societies, whether we're responding well

or not, where our weaknesses are, what could we do better? And it is a moment at which we look at

where we might be going. It's a moment of reflection. But these ideas don't come out of nowhere.

And I think what often happens is that things are moving

slowly underground or small groups of people are talking about new ideas, where can we go from here.

And so I think often a crisis will bring these ideas to the surface, but they often have a long

gestation period underground. And in the American context, the one that is often talked about is Roosevelt's New Deal.

So what was the genesis of that and the impact?

The New Deal comes directly out of the great crisis in the United States, the Great Depression.

In 1929, overnight, the bottom fell out of Wall Street and millions held their breath

as their savings melted away like ice under the summer sun.

It was a time of despair, suicide and panic.

By 1933, when Roosevelt took office, something like 20% of the American population was out of work.

People were starving, children couldn't go to school, they were barefoot. There were people camped outside Washington in desperation.

...