While many of you are reading my book, I’m reading The United States of Oligarchy: How America’s Wealthiest Ally With Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy by Casey Michel.

The book is a compelling history of oligarchy—rule by the wealthy few—in the United States and around the world.

“At its core is a search for a grand unified theory of how oligarchs both foreign and domestic began to work in tandem to dismantle American democracy,” writes Michel in the book’s introduction. “This book does not revolve around a single character, but rather a single story: how oligarchic forces in the U.S., aided by dictatorships abroad, are attempting to mount an antidemocratic assault on the U.S. like we’ve never seen before, trying to destroy the last, best bulwark against not only oligarchy, but tyranny itself.”

Our books complement one another, and Michel’s book includes some of the characters I focus on in The Nerd Reich, like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Curtis Yarvin.

But he also zooms in on oligarchs in Russia, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to show how wealthy criminals and tyrants around the world are plotting against democracy. And Michel highlights Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s failson-in-law, who has become a key vector of oligarch power in the U.S.

I highly recommend The United States of Oligarchy. Michel is a writer and investigative journalist who also serves as director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation.

This week, I’ll interview him for the podcast. Got questions? Leave them in the comments or reply to this message.