This is GPS, the Global Public Square.
Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Farid Zacaria. Today on the program, we'll look at the legacy of 9/11, and the wars that followed. As the world prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of that tragic day,
“Peter Bergen has written an important book on the subject, and he will join me.”
Then the transformative effects of GLP once, the worrying amount of time people are spending alone, and the thought that AI will not take away all of our jobs. Those are some of the big trends of 2026 that the writer Derek Thompson is watching. He will explain.
And I explore the worrying state of democracy around the world with some great thinkers on the subject. Francis Fukiyama, Christopher Lund, and David French. 25 years ago, on a crisp September morning, the brilliant blue skies were shattered by inconceivable acts of terror.
The 9/11 attacks launched America into a war that would span four presidents and expand from Afghanistan to Iraq and to ISIS. The war terror produced some remarkable tactical successes, but at enormous human and financial cost. And it has fundamentally changed the way America exercises military power.
Peter Bergen, a CNN national security analyst, examines that history in his new book, all the presidents' wars. He joins me now.
Peter always a pleasure to have you on.
This book really is a kind of an accountant. It brings it all together of these various actions that all fall under the idea of a kind of global response to the 9/11 attacks and to the rise of a kind of radical militant Islam.
“What do you think, like, what is the theme that to you emerges out of it?”
Well, one big theme for you, thank you for having me on, is we never, or very rarely, seem to plan for the day after the conflict. We're very good at breaking things and killing people. But the big theme is we can win every tactical operational engagement, but often it's not attached to a real strategy.
And when we look at Iran, of course, that is the case right now. But Trump, so stop from in there. What you're saying is you can win the military part of it, but you often lose in the politics, the diplomacy.
And so the victory is never enduring.
It never can translate into success politically on the ground. Exactly. And if you think about it, check this. You're trying to go to war. You have congressional authorization.
You have NATO allies. You have a UN resolution. You have a real imminent threat.
“You'd have a plan for the day after hostilities.”
You'd have a strategy. And like none of those things are being ticked in this case, in the Iran War. And so every mistake that we've made in the past, we've been bothering sending in large numbers of ground troops. We're replicating.
And so we don't learn from our own history. It's very sad. There's another piece of it, and this comes through in the book, which is that there is a kind of shift in the world of Islam, particularly of Middle Eastern, of Arab Islam, of Sunni Islam.
There was a lot of militancy, fundamentalism, kind of a celebration of violence against foreigners, against the West. A lot of it funded, that's beyond us, by Saudi Arabia, and a few other countries. There has been a huge shift there.
The Saudi Crown Prince is actually now actively pushing the opposite message tolerance. He has defanged the religious authorities in Saudi Arabia. He has stopped the export of all that kind of fundamentalism.
Yeah, I mean, there's an estimate of about a hundred billion dollars
of the Saudi spent exporting their fairly extreme version of Islam around the world. And that stopped. You know, MBS, the leader of Saudi Arabia. He's also imposed a rather dictatorial regime domestically. So I totally agree with you.
On the other hand, there is no dissident movement. Or of any kind, right in Saudi Arabia. So it's kind of a cost. But it's not like there were a lot of dissidents. There was a consensus based absolute monarchy.
Now it's a kind of Stalinistic dictatorship, minus the Gulags. But also liberal when it comes to religion. I mean, that's kind of the way I see it. It seems to me that what has become clear is the aspirations of ordinary Muslims.
In that part of the world is more to be Dubai than to be Afghanistan.
And it's, you know, he's playing to that.
But also, there feels like there is less of that kind of intellectual support for Jihadism.
“Do you think that we're at the end of this chapter?”
I don't. Because when you look at previous waves of terrorism, they either succeeded like the anti-colonial wave or the Marxist wave kind of collapse with these collapse of the Soviet Union. This is the religious wave. And you can't abolish God.
And so, you know, we began this 79 with all the events that we know happened in that year. I don't think it is ever going to go away. It could be managed. But it can't be abolished. The part I worry about is the ratchet of the bigger and bigger state,
the decline of civil liberties, the search function of government going up there. And you have these numbers. And the post-9/11 was basically cost $6 trillion. You put, if you added all up, you know, two trillion of currented projected veterans care. But you know, so much of the rest of it was just the expansion of the Pentagon.
All that stuff. It feels like it would be worth 25 years. It's a good market to say, look back. What did we do right? What did we do wrong?
And other things that can be dialed back.
But that seems to never happen in government.
We got some things right.
“All of the things we did in Afghanistan, I think succeeded.”
The fight against ISIS succeeded with very limited American troops on the ground, allowing with local Iraqi and Syrian forces. And that was both an Obama plan and a Trump plan. So I call it go like go long, where you is politically sustainable here. So like go long, don't try to occupy, don't try to rule.
It seems to me to be the last. Advise and assist in the Americans are in the back. And, you know, the people liberating the territory of Iraqis and Syrians. They're not Americans on humvies. Eventually after trial and error, we got to this policy, I think, with ISIS, which actually succeeded.
Now, it came at also at a cost because we had 35,000 American asterisks, Mosul, second largest city in Iraq turned into a parking lot. It wasn't perfect. You know, a lot of people died on the Iraqi and Syrians sides. But the point is from an American perspective.
I do think the fight against ISIS provides something of a model for how to go about things. So you don't have to. That is politically and financially sustainable here.
“So maybe that is the, you know, the kind of the one important lesson that came out of this.”
Yeah, I think so. I mean, we'll see if it, you know. Is it being followed in Iran? Well, I mean, I guess, you know, Iran is a puzzle wrapped inside of you. Another puzzle like it.
I don't know. That'll take another another interview. Yeah. Next on GPS, I'll speak with the author, Derek Thompson, to get his stake on the trends defining the new cycle in 2026.
In some cases, he is more hopeful than you might think. To have I got news for your ears, the podcast. I am your host, Michael Ian Black. What are we going to talk about? Let's get into it.
We're talking about. We're back at war with Iran. And Trump has the AI slot videos to prove it. Dan Driscoll quits. Right when we learned who he was.
Trump's midterm plans involved several unpopular things. himself. And data centers. Have I got news for your ears? Check us out on Apple and as a music.
Wherever you can watch, the podcast on Spotify. And you look at the trends that seem to define modern life. It can be quite depressing. There's economic anxiety, social isolation, global wars, political polarization.
But my next guest has done a deep dive into the data and come away with a different and more hopeful conclusion. In a piece published on his sub stack, the author and podcast host Derek Thompson, the German six of the mega trends that he sees defining the news cycle
in 2026 here is our conversation.
Derek Thompson, welcome as always.
Great to be here. Thank you for read. So when you looked at the mega trends, the first one you talked about is one that a lot of people have been talking about, which is the increasing level of loneliness that people seem to feel. And what it's striking is you have,
it's not just a feeling. There's a lot of data to back it up. Yeah, and maybe I would like to begin by making a piece of vocabulary distinction. It's not just loneliness. It's a loneliness.
It's the fact that Americans today buy the official statistics. Spend more time alone than any period in recorded history. This is true for every age group.
It's true for rich and poor.
It's true for educated and non-educated, but it is most true for young people. Young people spend much more time alone. They spend significantly less time socializing with others. They tell posters.
They have fewer friends. They tell posters. They go out with their friends less. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, American time you survey,
has a clever way of asking young people how much time they spend and how much time they spend. That's a very good way of asking young people. That's a very good way of asking young people. That's a very good way of asking young people.
That's a very good way of asking young people. That's a very good way of asking young people. That's a very good way of asking young people. That's a very good way of asking young people. That's a very good way of asking young people.
That's a very good way of asking young people. That's a very good way of asking young people. The automobile was already pulling American life inward.
“But I think when you add all of these technologies together,”
the suburbs and the car, television and couches, comfortable homes, smartphones, infinite entertainment on our phones, it has collectively pulled us away from other people and towards screens. And I think it's having a berserk effect on American society. I do think it is making a satter.
I think in many cases it is making us lonelyer. And it is pulling us out of the real world such that when we experience or when we think about things like politics, we don't think about the politics of our street or our community. We experience politics through our phones. And that has a way of nationalizing politics, globalizing politics,
making it significantly more of an in-group versus out-group conflict, which tends to do very well in social media. And so I'm interested not only in the fact that yes, we are more alone.
We are spending more time alone, but also the second and third order consequences,
the fact that we are not in the world. We're not plunged into the world as much as we used to be. Fascinating. I want statistic that you point to, which I think is so interesting, given that everyone is talking about declining fertility rates in the United States,
and much of the world.
“In the 1980s, teenagers who asked a do you ever go on dates?”
87% say yes, today that number is 46%. Your second trend is a more helpful trend, which is the do-it-all drug. What is that? I think the GOP-1 revolution, we're talking about drugs, like Nouveau Nordics, Ozzampic, and Eli Lilly's sweet of drugs.
This GOP-1 revolution does so much more than treat-type 2 diabetes. It's just so much more than cause weight loss. This seems to be a whole body drug. It seems to reduce inflammation. It reduces arthritis.
It seems to make people more healthy from a cardiovascular level, and reduce rates of heart disease. And it's even being investigated for neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer's, although I think the jury is still out there.
I mean, just very recently, Eli Lilly came out with its third generation GOP-1 drug.
We had some a glue tied, which is better known as Ozzampic. We had to zip it tied. And now there's a new category called redotru tied, which tries to focus on not just one hormone, but three different hormones.
It causes significantly more weight loss, and it very likely is significantly better at reducing things like inflammation and the risk of heart attack. I think it is very possible for read, that despite the fact that, of course,
we want to be careful about the possible side effects of new drugs. We are looking now at redotru tied, and what may be the most popular and most profitable drug ever sold in American history. And it's going to be very important,
“and I think very interesting to look at the way”
that it changes all sorts of things about American life. Like the same with the anti-social century, is one phenomenon that has this ripple effect. The fact that GOP-1's being taken more is reducing alcohol intake.
It's moving eating from snack food toward other healthier food. And so companies like PepsiCo or Bacardi are going to have to react, which is an extraordinary change
that a single drug category is going to have in American life. Trend number three is AI apocalypse-nope. We have talked about this before, but it explained very quickly why you think the fact that AI is going to be used for all kinds of things
doesn't necessarily mean you're going to have the job school way. Sure, I call this trend apocalypse-nope because I spent most of 2025 quite worried that artificial intelligence was a bubble,
and most of 2006 looking at the fact that Anthropic and the larger AI industry is seeing revenue growth.
It is basically unlike anything we've seen
in modern history of corporate accounting. And so as revenue growth is accelerating,
Less worried about the fact that AI is a bubble.
But it pulls in other worries
like if AI is being used at this scale
“at what point should we fear that it's going to steal our jobs?”
I want to give people one sort of framework for hope. There's an idea in lab economics called the O-ring job, and O-ring borrows its name from the part of the challenger, the tiny O-ring that was responsible
for the explosion of the challenger space rocket. Well, lots of jobs, these economists say, similarly have an O-ring. So imagine, for example, if someone's job is five tasks, and AI is very, very good at automating
four of those tasks, but it can automate one of those five tasks. That still remains in the realm of humans being better than AI. Well, maybe AI doesn't automate that job at all because of this O-ring exception.
Maybe what it does is make the job much more productive.
Therefore, higher paid, and it stays in the domain of four humans only because humans are the best at doing that, proverbial O-ring.
“Well, that's the world where artificial intelligence”
does not wipe that jobs. It's more like a world where artificial intelligence makes a lot of these jobs more productive and therefore higher paid. And so, I'm not making any particular prediction here,
but I want people to keep top of mind the possibility that while artificial intelligence might automate some entire job categories, it's absolutely possible that it will do just with the internet or digital spreadsheets
or automobiles did to the U.S. economy, which is make the overall economy richer and make certain jobs much more highly paying. And the spread spreadsheet example is sort of, the put it very quickly.
You had the spreadsheet was invented, people thought we won't need accountants. In fact, we ended up with more accountants and suddenly it becomes very easy to use spreadsheets to analyze everything, right?
It's not just that we ended up with more accountants. We ended up with jobs that didn't exist in the 1970s that are based on work in spreadsheets. So, in the same way, you could buy analogy, imagine a world in which, you know,
AI, Claude, ChatchbyT, doesn't bring unemployment to like 20%. It rather becomes the kind of home screen for a new kind of white collar worker who is working with this AI technology
with the same frequency that they're working with, say, Microsoft Office, Excel, and PowerPoint. Next on GPS, I'll ask Derek about two more of the trends he examined. Global violence and AI.
It's effect on media specifically when we come back. And I'm back with Derek Thompson, host of the podcast, "Plan English" and author on "Substack" to talk more about the mega trends that he sees
defining our current moment. I want to move to another one of your trends, which is the paradox of global violence and the data here is pretty remarkable. Explain it.
The media is very good at reporting stories that are sudden and negative. The media is much worse at reporting stories that are slow moving and positive.
“And for that reason, I think a lot of new shows”
have missed one of the most important stories in America,
which is that in the early 2020s, especially coming out of the pandemic, there was an enormous crime wave. Murders went berserk in New York and New Orleans, Washington, D.C.,
but something really remarkable has happened in the last few years that's gotten very little attention. Murders have not just fallen to the 2010 lows. Murders, the homicide rate, has fallen to all-time lows in some of the biggest cities in this country.
In fact, if you compare where the homicide rate is now, compared to where it was at its 20th century peak in most of these cities, we're talking about a decline between 80 and 90 percent. This is the sort of new story that if you were freaking out
about crime in the 1970s, 1980s, or even 2022, this seems like a kind of miracle. And so that's one part of the paradox of violence that is this mega trend. The other part is that if you look abroad
and up to a data conflict, does a really, really good job of compiling this data, the number of interstate and interstate conflicts around the world have soared. We're talking about cartel violence in Latin America,
Interstate conflict in Africa, and then of course, the more famous wars in Gaza and Ukraine and elsewhere. The number of conflicts around the world are surging, and I'm just very interested in the fact that these two things are happening at the same time.
A historic peace wave in America coinciding with an undercover explosion of interstate and interstate conflict around the world.
The last one affects the media,
and it's really about what AI has done to media. What's the trend here?
“Well, I suppose if you're someone who's very interested in AI,”
and it's affecting the media, you have this sort of question that's hanging in front of you, which is is AI going to lead to just more media, or is it going to lead to better media? We're talking about quantity of quality,
and looking at the data being completely objective,
the answer is that for now,
it is leading to a revolution in quantity and not quality. The number of e-books, and this is mostly AI Slap, but the number of e-books published on Amazon and Kindle, has absolutely exploded since CHBT came out. If you're an academic journal,
you have seen an absolutely explosive influx of science papers that when scientists actually look at the way these papers are written, they conclude that they are overwhelmingly at least half written by artificial intelligence. If you're an HR department at the same time,
you're probably dealing with hundreds of thousands, millions of applications from college students and beyond, in part because what does AI do to the resume? It makes it very easy for you to copy and paste, and rather than apply to say 30 jobs,
which is what I applied to, and I graduated from college in 2008, I know for a fact having talked to college counseling offices, that you or career counseling offices, that there are students applying to hundreds
even up to a thousand jobs per person. AI is leading to a world, where we are becoming simply inundated with media quantity, and we're going to need to develop some kind of countervailing force,
some kind of defense mechanism or process by which academic journals, weed out the AI Slap, companies weed out the obvious AI Slap. This is going to be a huge new challenge
that AI simply sort of puts media on steroids and creates this revolution of quantity, long before it creates a revolution of quality. All right, and one of my mechanisms to find the signal amidst the noises
to read Derek Thompson's sub-stack block.
Derek, always a pleasure to have you on.
Thank you, Fred. Next on GPS, around the world and right here in America, liberal democracy is being challenged. It makes people wonder,
is the democratic model still viable? I'll bring you an all-star panel of thinkers when you come back. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life Podcast.
Last week, there was this important report
“that dropped that I think got a lot of attention.”
It's about football, and there was this new study in the British Medical Journal, which estimates that of all the NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021,
about 878 players, at least 25% of them had confirmed CTE. That is the disease that is caused by repetitive hits to the brain. So CNN's resident NFL veteran Koi Wire,
he called me, we called fellow CNN Sports Anchor Andy Sholes, and we were talking about it. I know as a former player, anytime I forget my keys,
if I get a slight headache, it pops in my head. I'm thinking like, man, I hope this is just,
Andy, do you forget your keys? I'm rarely. Oh, do you have fun? Yes, on the time, Koi, may we feel better?
Listen to chasing life, streaming now, wherever you get your podcasts. In 1989, a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall,
the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, bend a seminal essay entitled The End of History, and it he argued the decline of communism, marked the end of human kind's ideological evolution, and predicted that liberal democracy
would ultimately triumph around the world.
Nearly four decades later, that model of government is under strain. From the rise of authoritarianism around the globe to deepening political polarization and decline in public trust in democracies,
there are signs that liberal democracy may be in retreat. At the Aspen Ideas Festival, I talked about it with three great guests, the former deputy prime minister of Canada, Krista Freeland,
David French and New York Times columnist, and Frank Fukuyama himself, whom you will hear from first. So in many ways, since this is an ideas festival,
question to ask, is there actually an idea of a superior form of social and political economic organization,
“than the kind of liberalism liberal democracy that we've seen?”
And I have to say there are certainly competitors. You have a Chinese model, you have an Iranian model, but which one of these is really likely to become universalized and seen as a substitute or a higher stage of human development?
And I have not seen that in that period. However, you have real world events,
There's no question that we're in a period of deep backsliding.
You've got the consolidation of Russian,
China, authoritarian systems that are clearly from the GEPCO, not democratic.
“I think one of the most surprising developments”
is the growth of populist movements above all in the United States, that have rejected certain institutional features, particularly the rule of law in one of the countries that really established the rule of law and constitutional government as the norm.
But I do think that it's helpful to take a longer-term historical view. We have been through setbacks to democracy before. We had the most serious one, really, in the 1930s and 40s,
with the rise of Stalinism and fascism.
We had a lot of discouragement over democracy after the oil crises in the 1970s when people ask can democracy survive. And I would say that the game is not over by any means, because there are good reasons why for economic,
political, social reasons, liberal democracy remains a system that is durable and sustainable in the way that authoritarian government is not. And we can get into this, but I do think that there's already signs of a turnaround
in this 20-year backsliding that we've seen.
It feels to me that the argument of the populist right
is that this world that liberal democracy, liberalism, has created, and I mean liberalism in the old-fashioned sense of enlightenment liberalism, is too much a world of rules and constraints and elites and process. And that what you really need is the rule of strong men and strong gods.
So tell us whether you think there is a coherent right-wing critique or off this and where it's going. Here's a sort of slogan you hear all the time on the right. Strong men make good times. Good times make weak men.
Week men make hard times. Strong men need to be come back to restore from hard to good. And so you kind of have this historical throughout history. And then the other thing that they say is that one thing that liberal ism does is it destroys through increased emphasis on individualism.
This is a very big part of the attack and increased emphasis on individualism leads also to civilizational weakness by degrading pre-liberal institutions. In other words, individualism degrades the family. Individualism degrades the church. Individualism degrades your bonds with civic associations.
“There have been some degradation in some of these really important pre-liberal institutions.”
There has been degradation in the family. We have a lot more broken families when used to. There has been very dramatically declining, although leveling off now, sort of church attendance. There has been a fracturing of sort of these civic associations and these civic bonds that are decaying. And so in many ways a critic of liberalism is able to identify some legitimate problems that do exist.
And then everything starts to fall apart as they do, as they start to pivot to okay now what. And when they're pivoting to the okay now what is when we start walking through the museum of wretched ideas. Because we're not talking about the invention of new and interesting ideologies to combat liberal democracy. We're talking about the revival of ancient hatreds and authoritarianisms. So you're seeing wrong on the young right rising interest in fascism.
34% or so of young Americans expressed some affection for communism. You're seeing tariffs? Yeah, tariffs. That's a great idea. Never been tried. And then sort of the most malignant thing is this rising antisemitism, which is tapping into
some of these ancient hatreds and ancient maladies of authoritarianism. And then oh yeah, we've got a guy going for a land war in Europe. That works out really well for all of us. And so again and again and again they're turning to these dark ideas. I want to pick up on something that Frank said.
I think that we're going to look back on the spring of 2026 as the turning point. When liberal democracy around the world started to fight back and successfully win. And it's yeah, I think we will.
“I think Minneapolis is really important.”
I think Orbons defeat in Hungary is really important.
I think the most important thing is Ukraine.
I should also put my cards on the table.
I am an economic advisor to President Zelensky. It's an unpaid volunteer role, but it's a formal one. So I've picked aside.
“But what I think is important to understand about Ukraine's battlefield success is,”
you know, the fight between authoritarianism and liberal democracy and Ukraine. It's not rhetorical. It's not about who has the best memes or the cutest talking points.
It's about who lives and who dies and who wins and who loses.
And what's remarkable about Ukraine is they are actually winning because they are a multicultural decentralized, feminist democracy. There are 70,000 Ukrainian women fighting in combat positions. But for them, it's not a culture war thing. For them, it is about being a democracy and everyone pitching in and everyone doing what they can do to be free. Being smart and ingenious and fighting back.
“And I think if the Ukrainians can do it, I think the rest of us should be able to do it too.”
Next on GPS, there's at least one country that has issued the right-wing populous waves sweeping the globe. A nation where liberal democracy seems to be actually thriving. What country is that and what can the United States learn from its success? That's up next. Back now, with more of my conversation with Christopher Lund and former deputy prime minister of Canada,
they will French the New York Times columnist and Francis Fufiama, the political scientist. I want to ask about a place where liberalism, centrist liberalism has succeeded. Canada.
“I think we don't give enough credit to Canada, right?”
There's this other place up north that didn't rebel against the British Empire that had no declaration of independence. It's kind of turned out okay. Like Canada doesn't seem like a case study in some horrendous dystopian version of what would have happened.
Had we not had the declaration of independence, which always tempers my sense of celebration about all of it.
I notice now that Canada is ruled by, in fact, has been ruled by two centrist liberals for the last almost dozen years. Why are you guys not succumbing to this kind of right-wing populist wave that seems to be sweeping the rest of the world? The immediate answer is Donald Trump. So we're very aware as a country of what happens in the United States. And the election of Donald, the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024, made Canadians absolutely believers in liberal democracy.
And really made us recognize that it's an existential crisis for us. And we had to be united and we had to be united behind a party. My party actually called the liberal party. What I will say though is I would urge Americans as you think about liberal democracy fighting back. Don't just think about doing it in your own country. Think about how you are going to restore America's place as a leader of the global alliance of liberal democracies.
And I say that because it's better for the rest of us if you do that, but it's better for you too. What really worries me about a post-American world is if America is not on the side of liberal democracy and leading that fight, the rest of us are going to be engaged in the balancing act with China. We haven't talked about China here, but I think that the real challenge to liberal democracy is not the mega model. I don't think that actually works very well economically.
It's the China model. And if we don't have an America which is a strong liberal democracy at home, a strong and generous ally of its liberal democratic partners around the world, China is going to get stronger and stronger and stronger, and going to make more and more inroads into our own countries.
One day we may wake up and actually say, yeah, history ended, and it's Chines...
And I think that would be a terrible outcome.
“Why is it that most Western democracies seem to be stuck in this crisis of governance?”
And we've talked about it for a while, you know, people have come up with, why is it that it seems impossible to do anything other than talk about it? Why does it not seem to get better? I do think that there is something common across liberal democracies, which is its inability to get things done to build things. And the reason for that is actually kind of intrinsic in liberalism, liberalism is about the rule of law.
But many liberal countries have too many laws.
This is the one part of the conservative critique that I take seriously. You need the rule of law.
“You do not want to create a situation where you have a Trump or an Elon Musk that simply says, let's just forget about law.”
Just do what we want. But law is a real problem, I mean, it is a real constraint. It leads to something that I call vitocracy, meaning rule by veto, where many of our countries we have so many players in the political system who can stop something from happening. I do think that there is a common problem that is experienced by many liberal democracies today. So you do have a bunch of Republicans who do get stuff done.
I mean, Ron DeSantis actually runs Florida quite well. If you look at Texas, they are able to build, they have built more solar and wind than California, without any subsidies, any preferential treatment. Just because it is so damn easy to belay anything in Texas, right? And so you can get pipelines, you can get whatever you need wind farms. Is this the sign of a kind of post-Trump mega right?
“Well, I think it is very important to draw distinction between the National Republican Party, which is, it's hard for me to find a lot of hope there just to be honest.”
The state Republican parties are handling things different state by state, but many of them are doing quite innovative things. So, for example, the Mississippi miracle in reading is something that every state should be looking at. But a lot of people will not look at it because it is Mississippi, and because it is a red state, and it is going to be mega coded in all of this. So we have to be open to solutions from interesting places and from people with whom you have disagreements. We have to be open to that.
And the one thing that I would say about democracy that I do think is a common thread overseas and here is a lot of the problem of our current liberal democracies is they don't have as much democracy as they should. So a perfect example is here in the United States, think about this guys, 80% of us live in one party states. Where it's a trifecta, all blue or all red, and it's about evenly divided, 39% in blue trifecta states, 41% in red trifecta. Of the remaining 19 points, something, most of us live in single party districts.
So we can't think of America as having a two party system anymore, it has two one party systems.
And one party systems are almost always going to be deeply flawed.
So we're getting almost like none of the benefits of the two party system and all of the maladies of the one party system being channeled through two highly polarized separating regions of the United States of America. So when I say what are some of the problems with liberal democracy right now, one of the answers is not enough democracy. Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week. In 2024, a man was killed by the FBI. And to this day, the authorities have refused to say why. He was a father, an ex-husband, and a Russian born American citizen.
He just seemed like a lonely guy, and he needed a friend. And he kind of talked about death, then he talked about you just never know when it's your time. I'm CNN investigative reporter Isabelle Chapman, host of the new limited series, civilian or spy. They noticed that he was communicating with people that were of concern to the FBI. Oh my god, she's just head over to the CNN present speed and listen to our three part series, civilian or spy, available wherever you get your podcasts.
