Francis Fukuyama is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is known for his book The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that liberal democracy represented the endpoint of humanity's ideological evolution. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about whether his end of history thesis holds up by modern standards, the nature of democratic backsliding in the United States, and the main contributing factors behind the decline in social trust within the country. Show Notes The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama "It’s the Internet, Stupid" by Francis Fukuyama, Persuasion "Is Social Media Destroying Democracy—Or Giving It To Us Good And Hard?" by Dan Williams, Conspicuous Cognition