Hello, my name is David Runseman and this is the last episode of Talking Politics.

And with Helen Thompson, I'll produce a Catherine Carr and we're going to be talking a bit about

the past, the present and the future. Talking Politics has been brought to you for the last five

years in partnership with the London Reviewer Books, who are mourning the end of the podcast the

only way they know how, with one last unbeatable subscription offer for Talking Politics listeners,

get six issues, that's three months of the LRB where I'll be continuing to write about politics

and more, for just six pounds by using the URL lrb.me slash talk six, that's lrb.me slash talk six.

Because this is our last episode, the first thing that we wanted to do was to dedicate it to Fin by

Olivia and Aaron Rapport. Fin by Aaron were dearly loved colleagues of ours and many listeners may not have heard their voices.

They both died tragically young in the summer of 2019 and we wanted to remember them.

They have to suck it up and this is one of the fragile moments I think for the electoral process in America.

If they don't suck it up, they're basically saying all bets are off. It's not a cold war question, right?

It's a current events question and I think we oftentimes think of this debate as somewhat historical.

It is historical in that it should be informed by history but it's very much contemporary, especially as the United States and Russia and China

are all thinking about ways of modernizing their arsenals, making them more accurate, making them more protectable, making them more usable in a way.

Aaron those two clips does make me feel as I've often found myself thinking what would Fin by make of the world now,

of party gate, of craziness in American politics, of the chaos of supply chains after the pandemic, all of the stuff he was so interesting about and then I'd love to know what Aaron would think about Putin now.

I was thinking last week after the invasion that pretty much my first clear memory of Aaron in this department was during the Crimean crisis

and I remembered the urgency and moral seriousness with which he took the situation and discussing a conversation which we discussed nuclear weapons and Putin's psychology and he was thinking about the things that have turned out to be pretty important.

The Crimean crisis of 2014, we started podcasting in 2015, we're coming to an end now, we've done six and a bit years of podcasting in total and five and a half years of talking politics and we're ending in the middle of...

I don't know what you think, in the middle of a crisis which I think is on a different scale than anything we've talked about before.

It almost feels like those six years which seem so frenetic and so full of politics and so full of pretty wild moments.

...