Welcome back to the podcast, brib, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today we're discussing a great and timely new book on a new generation

of less brutal but nevertheless effective dictators.

Our guest today is Daniel Treisman. Daniel is a professor of political

science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a research associate of the National Bureau of

Economic Research, where he focuses on Russian politics and economics. Daniel's new book is Spin

Dictators, the changing face of tyranny in the 21st Century, written with his co-author,

Sergei Guriev. Daniel, thank you for joining me. Thank you. Great to be here.

I enjoyed the book for many reasons, but in part for putting a lot of structure around a phenomenon,

we can see unfolding internationally, but haven't quite been able to pin down.

So let's start with a very broad overview.

What is a spin dictator and how do they differ from traditional, more violent dictators?

Well, if we look at the dictators of the 20th century, the images that usually come to mind are very violent, overtly aggressive,

often very extreme leaders such as Stalin or Mao or Hitler, who literally killed millions of people

and imprisoned hundreds of thousands or millions of political prisoners. So it was a really terrifying,

very extreme form of rule. And the goal was very clearly to spread fear, to dominate society

by intimidating people so that they would obey out of anxiety, out of fear.

So we call those dictators in the book, Sergey and I, we call them fear dictators.

They were extremely prevalent in the 20th century.

There were still some left, of course.

The most notable dictators that end up in the news like President Putin now and Kim Un in North Korea

or Assad in Syria. They're very widely covered in the media and they remain very violent,

...