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Hello and welcome to the edition podcast where each week we take a look at various articles in the magazine with the writers behind them.

I'm Laura Prendergast, and today on the podcast, myself and Will Moore will be asking, why is there such a lack of faith in Western leaders?

We'll also be looking at how you go about

escaping from the Church of Scientology. And finally, we'll be asking, should we both give boxing a go?

First up, we're joined by our deputy editor, Freddie Gray, Callum Williams from The Economist,

and Harvard Professor Barbara Callerman, to discuss why does the world feel so leaderless.

Freddie, you write in your cover piece this week about the surprising weakness of Western

leadership. Now, a lot of these Western leaders such as Biden or Johnson or Macron, you know,

they were elected with pretty solid democratic mandates.

So why is it that you say in your piece that you think that there is a dearth of political

authority? Well, I think just, I mean, look around the world and all supposedly advanced

democracies are having some kind of crisis in democratic leadership.

And what's odd is that we've spent a lot of this century talking about the rise of authoritarianism,

and that's definitely true.

If you look around the globe, that's the major rising powers, China, India, Turkey, places like that.

They have authoritarian figures who've become

more authoritarian as the century has gone on. And yet you have this paradox of, in Western

democracies, there's been a lot of talk about the drift towards authoritarianism, yet at the moment,

you seem to only have weak leaders or leaders that are hamstrung by the political

systems in which they operate.

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