When Men Were Not Afraid (5-24-26)

[music] >> Good day, mate. Forty here. Haven't streamed in about a month and [music] haven't missed it at all. Had no plans on live streaming today, but I just got so mad. Got so angry. They don't do this to me. I'm coming back here 100 times if I have to. So, dog on it. I forget. Whenever I press stream on my OBS software, there's this involuntary shake that that I do. I notice it just course right through me. It seemed to center in my neck. So, no matter how cool, calm, and collected and buffeted I aspire to be, the the shake, the the nerves just uh rifle through me. It was involuntary. It's just uh just like uh that. Whenever I I press live stream. So, I've enjoyed taking time off to just write my essays. I'm writing a whole series of biographies on various [music] writers. And I just find it healthier for my nervous system. I seem to calm down. I seem to pursue depth. I get to follow thoughts to their conclusion. And it was just great to take the time off. Didn't didn't miss streaming at all until I got so triggered about an hour ago. I thought, "Dog on it. I might as well live stream." And so, what the heck triggered me? Well, here's the background. Before I go to bed at night, I often like to calm down by watching a Dallas Cowboys victory. So, I've been making my way through the 1977 and Dallas Cowboys season that that culminated in a Super Bowl victory in January 1978 against the Denver Broncos. And I arrived in America in May 1977. So, we didn't have a TV. So, I haven't seen almost any of these games. I have watched the Super Bowl on on YouTube before. So, I'm getting to watch these games. And and what strikes me about the commentators on these 1977 games is how unafraid they were. So, I got mad thinking about I miss that America where people were not afraid, where men in particular were not afraid. So, these commentators, Pat Summerall, Paul Hornung, the former Green Bay Packer great, Tom Brookshier, uh Lindsey Nelson, they would just tell it like it was as they saw it and they weren't afraid. They would comment on how beautiful the cheerleaders were. They'd talk about drinking to excess, going out at night. They'd talk about uh the intestinal distress that they would experience eating certain exotic foods. Paul Hornung would just matter-of-fact comment that uh college basketball no longer needed people like him. So, apparently he played basketball for Notre Dame, didn't distinguish himself in basketball, but he said explicitly on the air in 1977, well, there's no longer a need for 6'2" white guys. I don't think any commentator would say that dare say that today. Uh Tom Brookshier would say about Roger Staubach, he runs like a girl. No one would say that today. They just seem so at ease. It just seems like a couple of blokes at a bar talking with other blokes. And there was no obvious fear of cancellation. They were just confident and at at ease and it made me nostalgic and then it made me mad that this has been taken away. That cohesion and ease and confidence that American men used to have as displayed by these TV commentators. I I miss those days. I'm mad that that's been taken away from us. I register it as a significant loss. And we should talk about it. We should talk about the loss of the fourth-right American. Americans used to be known for plain speaking and for just being forthright and saying what they thought and just laying it out there. That was the the international reputation of Americans, but that has dramatically changed since the 1990s. Okay, here is a discussion from the Hoover Institution. Kurt Campbell is the guest talking about China, allies, and US power. >> a constant, you know, source of immediacy for us, whereas the Indo-Pacific tends to be the longer-term strategic play, right? The rise of China, there was the rise of Japan. Uh it doesn't have the same degree of um you know, sort of heightened conflict and urgency, exactly. The only thing I would say to that list, I think that is a misreading of the kinds of challenges that we are facing. Um I we and we would I think both of us agree some of the challenges may be subtle in technology and like, but they are very much urgent, and they require um immediate attention. And so, I mean, one of the surprising things about what's happened in um the last couple of months, I I think um President Trump made a powerful argument about avoiding political quicksand in the Middle East. And and and remember the most brutal critiques of the Iraq war do not come from Democrats. They came They come from President Trump. But in many respects, what he has undertaken um here is likely to have longer and more important implications in some ways uh than what we've seen in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those were both countries that were largely irrelevant to the global economy. But Iran is so important with respect to the provision of you know, fuels and uh a variety of associated capacities like, you know, fertilizer and the like. And I think the changes in the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz that flow from this are going to make the region much different than it was before. And And I think the hard thing for the Trump administration is that they face very, you know, difficult challenges. They either continue on in some way, which will be expensive and difficult, and will take us away from the drama of the Indo-Pacific, or they acknowledge that maybe this we made some mistakes here and cut a not very good deal. But don't you think looking at the discussion right now that's underway um in Beijing between President Trump and President Xi that that linkage really between the Middle East, especially Iran, and the Indo-Pacific, and China, I mean, has been made, right? Quite explicitly. So, there's there's no separating the two. I mean, China is Iran's most important patron. Economically, security, they're deeply invested. Um So, these two have now come together, I think, in an important way. And I'm just going to remind you You You may or may not remember. You said to me um when you became Deputy Secretary of State, you said, "You know, Liz." She said, "We think dealing with So, this is obviously recorded during the recent summit. What was it? Two weeks ago? Asia is hard. Let me tell you what's really hard is the Middle East. >> Yeah. Right? So, you said you think that this Iran conflict is is going to be transformative over the long term. Maybe play that out a little bit. It will. Yeah, maybe just So, so look, I think you are right that the linkage has now been made, but I think the reasons um are manifest. First, you know, the the closure of the strait have had It's had impacts on the United States that, you know, we can feel in the gas pump and we're starting to feel it in certain areas, secondary and tertiary areas, but it's have profound impacts across Asia. So, much So, there was some downsides to these commentators like Pat Summerall and Tom Brookshier being unafraid when they were commenting on the NFL. And one major downside for these two men in particular is that they were typically drunk when they were broadcasting. And I don't like drunkenness in public. I don't like drunkenness in my broadcasters. So, that was not good, right? I I don't like being around drunk people. But when I came to the United States in 1977, people started using a term for me that I never heard in Australia, and it was a completely accurate term, and it was reflective of California's much greater psychological sophistication than the background I came from in rural Australia. And that is people would call me insecure. And so, I think there are many benefits to increased uh psychological sophistication, but I I did notice a decline over the years in confidence in in American men. So, used to be you listen to these 1977 football games, and the commentators sound like two men at the end of the bar talking the way men talk when no one is keeping a ledger of their sentences, because back then nothing was likely to be clipped and frozen and then shipped around the world by noon, right? A line would live 3 seconds and then die. So, they were able to loosen up. And I love the ease and much of the ease that I love is the ease of the low stakes per word. Right? And the audience right? was was part of this construction. The broadcast booth assumed a we. It talked to you as a fellow, as a bloke, as a man at home with a beer who'd take jokes in the spirit they were thrown. So, when Paul Hornung said the game no longer wants the slow 6'2" white college player, right? He spoke to a room that was inclined to agree with him, at least one that wouldn't turn him in. And I also noticed how the cameras on these games seem to linger longer on the cheerleaders. Why don't we have this kind of academic research that lets us know exactly how long the the cameras linger on cheerleaders and how that's changed over the years. And so, you had blokes who were at ease and it just seemed to me reflective of this greater ease and confidence when Americans had more in common. So, diversity does come with some blessings and it also comes with some curses. Diversity means that we have less and less in common with each other. And the less in common you have with other people, the less likely you are to volunteer, to share, to open up, and to be at ease. So, we had a much stronger collective sense of ourselves back in the 1970s. So, we have the rise of political correctness on American university campuses during the 1980s. And then, we have the blowback against any speech that defies these new rules of political correctness. Then, you get corporate consolidation. Then, you get sponsors who fear association with anything that's politically incorrect. You start getting recordings that never die. Each sentence now carries a risk to your career. So, every sentence gets scrubbed before it even leaves the mouth, and now you can hear the scrubbing. Right, the modern booth addresses no one in particular because modern commentators fear the crowd holds someone who's just waiting to be wounded. And a man can no longer speak publicly as to a friend. Right, he has to speak past the audience. Right, we have lost the intimacy, we have lost the ease, we have lost the confidence. And this ease and confidence rested on a united and trusting America, a very different America than the one we have now. And what has replaced that ease is not better taste, right? It is fear dressed up as taste. Right, the commentator could joke in the 1970s cuz he trusted you to take a joke. He could linger on the cheerleaders, and he could appreciate their beauty because he assumed that you saw what he saw, and he felt no need to pretend otherwise. He could be much more open and honest and real. He could talk about himself, his appetites, his hangovers. Right, he could treat the broadcast as a conversation among men rather than a liability to be managed. So, the trust goes, the intimacy goes with it, and now you get two professionals narrating to a camera. They are careful, they are smooth, they are censored, they are absent. There's no warmth and connection like we used to have because we used to belong to a common nation, a common community. Right, there was warmth coming off the screen, and it's gone. It's a giant loss. And all the social ease and confidence that cannot be brought back with no amount of production values. Now, Australia held onto this ease longer than America cuz in Australia there's a much stronger tradition of mateship. In Australia, there is much more recognizable character, the larrikin, the man who just says what he thinks and expects to be teased for it. So, Australian male speech runs blunt, and it runs so blunt that when I go back to Australia, it feels like running into a blowtorch. So, I I really appreciated the sensitivity that Americans displayed in comparison to Australia. So, I would come with my Australian bluntness, and I would pay a price for it in America, and sometimes I'd say, "Oh, Americans are too soft." But then I appreciated the sensitivity that Americans would show back. So, Australian male bluntness deflates pretension, right? It treats euphemism as cowardice. It uses insult as a sign of affection rather than attack, right? A man takes the piss out of his mate because you're mates, you're friends, right? The mate gives it right back to you, and you understand the exchange as mateship, as warmth, right? You have a shared safe space, and and the mockery is proof of the trust. It's not the enemy of trust. And there are a couple of other Australian norms that would guard that type of speech that outsiders would often find as coarse and offensive. So, first is the notion of the tall poppy. Australia punishes the man who takes himself too seriously, who tries to climb above other people, and announces his own importance. So, from the outside this looks like envy, but in practice it operates in a way of building social cohesion and social trust. Right, to install a sensitivity regime such as you have in America, you have to believe that there is a class of people who stand above the crowd and have the moral stature and standing to correct the crowd. Right, tall poppy syndrome mows that down. And Australians have mateship, right? Where making rough jokes about each other is a sign of belonging. So, when you feel free to mock someone, you're signaling that you're one of us. And Australia kept this longer than America cuz one, Australia is more homogeneous, two, there's more separation between the sexes, male and female, in Australia than in any other industrialized nation of which I'm aware. Uh Australians naturally distrust authority. Australians do not like to be lectured and the Puritan inheritance that drives American moral panics runs much thinner in Australia. So, finally, the American sensitivity police arrived in Australia by import. The managerial class, those who went to university in Sydney and Melbourne, right, they started taking on American norms and then through the universities, the corporations, the media, right, these norms would travel down in social class. They would copy the prestige class in America and so the censorship regime eventually reached Australia the same as everywhere else along with a decline in social cohesion, a decline in social trust, a decline in just that that bondedness, that mateship, that that feeling of safety as Australia became more diverse. And this change happened most rapidly in the inner city professional world and slowest in the bush, in the trades, in the regional towns, in the football clubs. So, Queensland holds much more of it than the Sydney Harbor suburbs. And the men who work with their hands, right, they abide by the speech restrictions much less than the managerial class, right? People in the trades talk like blokes still in Australia. But how long will they be able to hold out? Right, the common survives as long as the watcher stays out, but the watcher, the censor, the political correctness police is moving in everywhere. steeper, much more um impactful than most people in the United States know. There are a variety of countries that are teetering with respect to shortages of fuel, of diesel, of jet fuel. Some airlines literally have a week or two left of supply. So, there are going to be major consequences there. China is among all the Asian powers the most insulated, but they too are starting to feel it. I I think it if I could say um um China has had the ability to watch us as a great power for 20 or 30 years. Um and you know, these they are very attentive students of global politics. If we have taught them anything, it is to be wary of the Middle East and it and the challenges that it can present. And so, I fully expect as we sit here that President Trump is asking for more from President Xi with respect to, you know, trying to help in that in the conflict. And to date, the Chinese have been very general in the things that they said, you know, they they So, the Dallas Cowboys might have been my strongest emotional attachment starting about 1978, but uh running neck and neck with the Cowboys was the Australian pop group Air Supply. And the rise of Air Supply represented this rare moment in Australian culture where it was okay for men to show vulnerability without irony. That you could just sing that you feel lost, that you feel out of love, that you feel undone by your need, that you don't have to hide this and camouflage this with irony. You don't have to create distance between the singer and then the feeling. You could mean it, you could trust it, you could release it, you could say it, you could experience it. What I found in Air Supply was the clearest, most soothing, most honest articulation of what was going on inside of me. And so, between about 1981 and 1984, there was this rare moment where it was okay for men to be vulnerable in America. And that vulnerability didn't vanish, but it lost its public space. Right, it still surfaces at times. Right, occasionally there's still room for grown men to be earnest in front of the country and not be filed under cringe. The The critics hated Air Supply, right? They flogged Air Supply. Uh it was regarded as as very lowbrow. And what destroyed this rare moment of vulnerability was the rise of irony. And it became a hardened default posture of anyone who wanted to seem elite, intelligent. It was armor against the very sort of emotional exposure that Air Supply offered. So, MTV accelerated this sorting of everything into cool and cringe, and earnestness sorted you onto the wrong side of that divide. In the early 1990s, vulnerability came back, but under armor, under grunge music, where you get pain wrapped in noise and self-loathing. Not simply the clean, honest, clear confession of a man who wants a woman to love him back. And I I think this exile fell hardest on men. And after this turn, masculine pop became aggressive and detached. And a man could no longer admit when he feels helpless. And all of us feel helpless, right? Life is a spiral staircase, I heard the psychiatrist Steven Bummer say this on the Dennis Prager's radio show. We're always moving in and out of four different states, and one of them is helpless. You're You never get to graduate from immunity to feeling helpless. At any time, where wherever you are, however you're doing, you may be entering the helpless mode, and you'll never become invulnerable to feeling small in a big world. And then at other times, you will feel mastery. And then at other times, you will feel grandiose. And we all move in and out of all these stages. So, Air Supply caught me at that age of 14, 15, when my feelings were far more intense and far out in advance of my words about what I could tell people. So, I was full of all these feelings that uh I didn't really have any forum to share them. And so, Air Supply would articulate them. the the the pure want the pure need the the embarrassing the the vulnerable. And you can only share these kind of vulnerable feelings in a safe space. Where you have a great deal in common with those around you. The less you have in common with those around you. Right the the less likely you are to be. Fearless and honest and vulnerable. And I think Donald Trump is a survivor of this 1970s confident male culture that he came up in the New York tabloid world of the 1970s and 80s and he never updated the way he spoke cuz he was formed before political correctness took over. So I hear Tom Brookshire in these 1970s sports commentators in Donald Trump. I'm hearing that same era talking. He's. The contemporary these broadcasters he was raised with the same permissions the same confidence. He hands out nicknames he riffs he digresses he doesn't manage his sentences. Right he deflates pretensions he talks about winning and losing he's open and honest about the bodies and about money and power and status. Right he would talk in the clear honest confident way that these 1977 broadcasters would. Now for most of us in the public square today in America particularly in the more professional spaces you have to weigh every word. Right you cannot be fearless in the the modern professional world because there are just so many. Disasters awaiting you if you say the wrong thing. Have I asked people to go to the negotiating table they've played a little bit of a role behind the scenes but not much more. Now the question is if President Xi decides that he is. Going to consider. You know doing more what does he ask for in return and I think what we're all waiting for and uncertain about. Is what's taken place behind closed doors on Taiwan. Um and we'll get to that in a bit. But But I would say, Liz, generally speaking, you're right. The the connections between the Gulf and Asia now are profound and deep. And there is an expectation that we do what we can to close this, you know, this basically festering um economic and energy-related stoppage that is having massive global implications, much more so than we realize in, you know, here in the United States more generally. Um and I I I think what's hard is that much as So, as I've been devoting myself to writing rather than live streaming my opinions, the more off-putting I find polemics and instant punditry. So, I still watch and listen to Mark Halperin's daily shows. Though I I think it's a big shame that he's now doing something like 14 podcast shows a week. All right. That That robs you of the time that you need for reflection. But I I still listen to Halperin twice a day. And I have a part of me that would like love to be a guest on Mark Halperin's show. But when I listen, I just find so many of the questions absolutely ridiculous. And I didn't see this as clearly when I was live streaming on a regular basis. But he will ask the, you know, "What do you think's going to happen next?" And of course, nobody has any idea what's what's happening next. You would constantly pushing for winners and losers. And this is not the type of speech that is conducive to depth and to thought. And it As I listen to these Mark Halperin shows, and I imagine myself participating as a guest, I realize that most of the time I'll probably say pass because I I don't like what it would do to me to dignify these questions and take it seriously and just say things off the cuff because there's absolutely no way to know right now whether this putative deal with Iran is a win for Donald Trump or a loss for Donald Trump. We we won't know possibly for years. It it's not clear. And I emotionally liked it when Donald Trump launched this war against Iran because Iran has killed and injured thousands of Americans either through through various proxies, right? In Iraq and in Lebanon and in other places. So I I came to America in 1977. I remember the Iran hostage humiliation. So I'm not a big fan of Iran. And I'm not a big fan of Iran getting a nuclear weapon. I'm not big fan of Iran getting missiles. I'm not a big fan of Iran killing Americans. And so I'm glad that I'm emotionally glad that Donald Trump is taking on the Iranian regime. But I didn't support it because I'm not intellectually sure it's the right way to go. There are just so many downsides, so many complications that while emotionally felt great to me I I couldn't clearly see that oh yeah, certainly this is in America's best strategic interest. It was just too complicated question. Didn't support it, didn't oppose it. And I noticed with dominant elite commentary there is a great eagerness to see the war as a disaster for Donald Trump, a loss for Donald Trump. And to attribute to the Iranians uh a great deal of of rationality and cool-headedness and looking for every possible opportunity to say that Iran is winning this conflict. And Iran may indeed be winning this conflict, but I can't help but notice the enthusiasm among elites to attribute all sorts of qualities to Iran that not necessarily there. On the other hand, I notice a ton of ridiculous commentary about the Iran war that the Iranian regime and the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps possess these essential qualities that they are insane, that they are madmen, they are not people that you can negotiate with. There's no essential quality to Iranians, to the Iranian regime, to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Right? There are some generalizations that you can make. You You can point to past decisions. But I think there's absolutely no evidence that there's any essential quality to how Iran operates. And I think the the argument that Iran is insane or acting without regard to rationality doesn't hold up. Iran acts out its hero system. And now I'm essentializing Iran because you can't talk in in the vernacular without essentializing. So I recognize that essentializing is both false and inevitable way that we talk. So I don't believe for a second that the Iranian regime and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the Ayatollah is insane or irrational. They just have a different hero system than we do. And there there are ways to possibly reach some kind of accommodation or a deal that may work out in the interest of America, of the Middle East, of Iran. And the idea that there's this essentially irrational quality to the Iranian regime I reject. So I find that cliche quite ridiculous. And and imputing any inevitable essential quality to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard or any other aspect of Iran is simply not true because we all act differently under different circumstances, that we may have generalizable tendencies, but they will express themselves differently in different circumstances. For example, when I'm happy, I tend to be quite voluble. I tend to talk a lot. I tend to share. I tend to allow my mouth to outrun my my brains. I I tend to engage when I'm not happy, when I'm feeling small in a big world, when I feel lost, when I feel helpless, when I feel vulnerable, then I tend to retreat, and I don't live stream, and I don't reach out to people, and I'm just a completely different person. When I go to Sydney, Australia, 90% of what bothers me in Los Angeles, I find doesn't bother me in Australia. So, when I change my uh location, right? I change myself. I am a different person in different settings. I speak differently in a bar than I do in a a doctor's office versus a synagogue or a 12-step room. So, when my incentives change, I change, too. Right now, I'm powered by caffeine. On Friday and Saturday, I had zero caffeine. This morning, I got up and I had two cups of coffee, and that fills me with a confidence and an enthusiasm that I wouldn't have without the caffeine. One one bloke attributed the enlightenment to the rise of coffee shops. Instead of going to bars, more and more people go to coffee shops. Instead of drinking alcohol, which acts as a downer, people would drink coffee. They'd get caffeinated, and they'd become much more enthusiastic and optimistic. And you really have to be an enthusiast and an optimist to regard people as governed by reason. And the enlightenment was all about the power of the individual to use his reason. So, looking here at the screen, we've got news about some kind of deal coming with Iran, and I've no idea if it's a good deal or a bad deal. And I have no idea perhaps Trump's critics are right. This is absolute uh catastrophic defeat for the United States for for Donald Trump. It's kind of cool stepping back from daily punditry to follow my ideas through in the form of essays instead of feeling a need to just uh come out with some kind of uh immediate uh opinion. The Trump administration tries to explain why this made sense and was a good strategic move. I think to most strategists, they would view this as a as a very challenging detour, which will have substantial short-term you know consequence. So, I want this Trump attack on Iran to be a victory. I want America to win here, but I think Kurt Campbell is absolutely right. Most strategists tell us that this is being a debacle. for our economy, for inflation, but not just that. Like one of the things that both you and I have been involved with is the patient accumulation of military capabilities to support deterrence in the Indo-Pacific. And that means the provision of, you know, uh ballistic missile defense to Japan and South Korea, um substantial marine expeditionary capabilities, two and a half aircraft carriers basically on station. You can go on and on. More fighter aircraft at Kadena. What What people don't understand is that this new capacity in the Middle East that is being used to stand watch and to inspect and to um most of that comes from Asia. And and so, the quality of our deterrence has definitely been affected in a downward way. And so, as President Trump goes to Beijing, I think first of all, it is understood that this has not played out. This has not been Venezuela. Um you know, the for whatever reason, the um uh Iran has not sort of modeled themselves after the Maduro regime, right? So, that's very clear. Um and I think it becomes clearer and clearer that the president took this decision um impetuously. You know, just he's an improvisational player. And this bet, after talking with a couple of foreign leaders, not really consulting the experts inside our government, is going to turn out to be a dangerous one. And the Chinese know that. And so they're hosting him at a moment that I think they appreciate that the correlation of power in many respects has shifted against President Trump. Yeah, I mean, I think it's it's interesting, certainly, Admiral Paparo, you know, our head of Indo-Pacom has tried to make the case, I think, that our deterrence capability has not been affected by Iran, but I don't think that's probably the view of many people. >> You have to make that argument if you're the commander. I mean, I mean, what is he going to say? Like, like, I'm I'm I'm in dire need. But all you've got to look at >> Right. the the the the new in Japan has vacated. I mean, we don't really have an aircraft carrier in such he can go through a variety of things. Yes, and the perception is shared not just in a couple of places. One area where I strongly disagree with the conduct of the Trump administration, in particular Donald Trump, is the disregard for our allies. So, personally and nationally, group strategies tend to out-compete individualist strategies. And our European allies in particular snapped when Donald Trump made these ridiculous threats about just taking Greenland. And at the time, I admit there were there were moments when I just found Trump's commentary on Greenland hilarious, just the funniest thing ever. This would often be when I was feeling giddy and happy and late at night. And then I'd wake up in the cold light of day and think, this is an absolute disaster. This is horrible. This is not going to go down well with our allies, and you never know when you're going to need someone. You never know when you might need the Danes or the English or the French. And to to needlessly, gratuitously insult, belittle, downgrade, upset, damage, offend is not usually a a good national strategy. It's not usually a good individual strategy. I I love a good joke. I love a good put-down. But for a general way to plot your your way through life as a nation or as an individual, you don't want to be needlessly accumulating enemies. And so Donald Trump went from insulting the Europeans and making threats over Greenland to then mounting what appears to be very successful operation in Venezuela, where we did not appear to need our allies, and then launched this war in Iran, and Japan doesn't feel great about its relationship with the United States. Australia doesn't feel great, and those are the two most important countries for our American policy with regard to Taiwan. I support the American policy of not being clear regarding whether or not we'll come to Taiwan's aid, because I think Taiwan's efforts to harden and defend itself are pathetic. And if the Taiwanese are not willing to fight to preserve their country, why should Americans? So, until that Taiwan gets serious about its own defense, I would be quite reluctant to deploy American force. I do like that the Trump administration has seemingly successfully pushed the Europeans to do more to defend themselves, but but Trump just needlessly ticked off our allies. And you tend to get a lot more done when you operate with alliances, whether as an individual or as a religion, a synagogue, a church, a stamp club, a bar, a business, or a nation-state. These These These group strategies consistently outcompete individual strategies. But across most of our allies and partners, there is a worry about this. I know. I think I think maybe the one thing that we can be grateful for, ironically, um is that uh the head of the KMT, the chair of the party, was recently, you know, Taiwan's opposition party, was recently in Beijing and seemed to, you know, smooth some waters and grant perhaps Taiwan a little bit of space, oddly enough, where she didn't ping, you know, can maybe make the case that peaceful reunification is on the horizon, so that our sort of sort of weaker uh deterrent capability And you you lose skills when you don't exercise them regularly, and this is my my first time live-streaming in a month, and and that that shudder, that involuntary shudder that that went through me when I pressed uh stream. I've I've lost some skills, bro. So, I came to the United States in 1977, and I started fairly quickly seeing the erosion of uh male confidence, and I didn't properly register at the time cuz I was 11, 12, 13 years of age, but one of the the key developments that demolished confidence was the onslaught of civil rights legislation, which also brought many positive things. So, I'm not here to arguing that uh civil rights were a disaster, right? Like every other piece of legislation, right? There were trade-offs, right? There were gains and losses. One of the losses was a loss of national cohesion and unity, and freedom of speech and the freedom to use your your property as you saw fit. And you had ever-increasing government intrusion into our private lives due to the ever extension of civil rights legislation going first of all from covering matters of race, then covering matters of sex. And one of the pivotal moments where male confidence was was damaged in America was the decision in 1978 that a press credential would govern access to the locker room. So, from 1978 onward, female reporters got access to male locker rooms where men are naked, and there was never for a second any consideration of the reciprocal type of arrangement where men would gain access to female locker rooms, right? That was never on. So, this development did provide benefits, right? Women got more access to athletes more quickly, and as a result, they produced some great sports writing. But, there were also tremendous losses, right? The locker room was one of the last places where men could be unobserved by women. And that stopped, right? Men had to behave differently when women were present. The candor dropped. The confidence dropped. The camaraderie dropped. The crudeness dropped. The rawness the the real man had to be adapted and and changed and and mediated, right? So, the unobserved locker room and the observed locker room are not the same place, right? The thing that made it vulner- valuable, right? A place where men could drop their guard, right? Was the same thing that made it incompatible with a mixed-sex press corps. Right? The athletes had a dignity claim that got steamrolled, right? Naked men interviewed by close strangers is a strange arrangement. And then the whole arrangement was completely dishonest, right? Everyone knew it. It it it was a weird situation. Men were never considered to be allowed into female locker rooms. We grant women a dignity in their own nakedness that we deny men. We say, "Hey, a woman's exposed body deserves protection from the opposite sex's eyes, particularly from a stranger's eyes." And we tell a man to get over it. Right, the argument that well, women belong in male locker rooms, men do not belong in female locker rooms is not a a strong argument. Right, you can say, "Oh, the threat runs in mostly one direction. It's men who commit the most amount of sexual aggression." Well, what if there was a racialized component to say various crimes? Would you then be A-OK with active racial discrimination as you're okay here with discrimination on the matter of sex? And the legal argument that one female reporter's access to male locker rooms was that the male locker room is only a workplace. And no one ever believes it, and you see that because the argument in reverse doesn't hold. And uh for millions of Americans such as myself, it's not even a question that women perhaps should be allowed into male locker rooms. Of course, they should not. Just as men it should not be allowed into a female locker room. Right? And I didn't reason my way to this reaction. It's a reflex. And you're not going to be able to reason me way out of it. Right? I have a reflex. I have a nature. I have an instinct for what is proper and what is not proper. I have a here a system that comes out of a combination of my own genetics and my own upbringing. And the idea that just strangers get open access to seeing you naked, right, to me is ridiculous. And it destroyed confidence. It it destroyed social cohesion. It it destroyed our traditional ways of doing things. And I like this idea of Chesterton's fence. Chesterton, G.K. Chesterton said if you observe a fence in the world, but before you tear it down, ask what does the fence what function does the fence serve? And it may not be immediately clear to you, but if you consider it, there may be something valuable, something that protects dignity and cohesion and confidence that will be destroyed if you tear it down the fence. And so, we we had Title IX, which destroyed a large swath of male sports, and sports is simply far more important to male well-being and male thriving than it is for women. Sports and competition is simply far more important for men than sports are for women. But we passed this Title IX, which mandates equal access to sports, and as a result, colleges have to end all sorts of male sports programs and start funding equally female sports programs that don't play nearly the same role for women as they they play for men. doesn't then uh signal to President Xi Jinping that this might be a moment to take some action. So, maybe the the constellation of of forces, political and military, are maybe not going to sort of trigger something that they might otherwise have. You know, my own sense is, Liz, I I I I do believe we overestimate how much that China is thinking about taking near-term immediate military action. I I actually think and I I the the visit of the Camp T in a different way. I I think this is a pincer strategy designed to profoundly you know, kind of erode the confidence uh uh politically of um the current administration and basically place them in a deeply vulnerable position. So, the first is you you welcome her. You Uh different groups have different strengths and different needs and different vulnerabilities. For example, if you do not reserve certain rituals just for men, men will drop out of religion. Right? Women much more naturally bond than men do. So, if you don't reserve certain rituals such as sports and certain practices in religion just for men, men will decohere. Right? Men will will spin out and they will spend more and more time playing video games and and watching porn and pursuing solitary pursuits. Men do not naturally bond to the tribe, to the group the way that women do. And so, to keep men socialized and productive, right? You have to protect them just as there are certain protections that you want to enact for women such as not allowing men into female locker rooms. Right? The the different sexes, different groups have different strengths and different vulnerabilities. And in all the enthusiasm for civil rights, uh saying these basic truths became more and more problematic as the the academic would say. And so, all these rules, all these changes in law favoring women and disadvantaging men rode behind black civil rights victories, right? They used the same statutes, the same clauses, the same vocabulary, the equality. And to oppose it, it made you sound like a man relitigating racial segregation and you couldn't say that in public. Right? You just immediately came off as a loser and a bigot and and the stink was transferred to you. And the logic of organized interest, all right, our elites got fully on board with extending these rights to women and at the same time, simultaneously, whenever you extend rights to one group, you have to take rights away from other groups, such as men. And the courts decided these fights before anyone really spoke up. And law only hears language of measurable interest, function, and harm. And the thing that uh was being defended by those with the more traditional identity, all right, it didn't really have an organized vocabulary. It was more of an inchoate feeling. It was harder to articulate, just like it's it's much more difficult to make the case with words against gay marriage compared to making the case for uh marriage equality, all right? One side is much more conducive to the use of words than the other side, and laws are written on the basis of words. Now, a community, when it's flourishing, doesn't operate primarily on the basis of law, it operates primarily on the basis of communal feeling. And when you pass more and more of these laws and you enforce them and you legislate them and you you change the way that people have operated, communities have operated for hundreds of years, you disrupt these communities, you disrupt traditional identity, you disrupt families, you disrupt the the natural course of things, and you create tremendous harm that is challenging to put into words. But some harm is much easier to put into words because the very categories that we're using, all right, are largely coming down to us from an elite who hold by the the buffered identity, that what's most important is what's inside of us, that we have the capacity to choose right and wrong for ourselves, that we have the capacity to strategically autonomously choose our path in life, when in reality life is porous. Right? The most important things in life are outside of us, and it is our duty to pursue these external standards of morality and what makes a meaningful life. So, one example of the buffered porous distinction is something I notice particularly with young women, they often change their name. So, Heather MacDonald changed her name. MacDonald used to be just one word, the Manhattan Institute scholar, she changed it to Mac space Donald. Right? She wanted to stand out, so she disrupted hundreds of years of her family. And she now regrets the change, and I find it annoying cuz when you stop doing the habitual, customary, traditional thing, you increase the costs of interaction. So, now every time I type MacDonald for Heather MacDonald, I have to pause and go against every other MacDonald of which I'm aware. Right? Every other MacDonald I know, MacDonald is one bloody word. But now Heather MacDonald in her 20s thinks, "Oh, let me make Let me add a space." She legally changes her name, and then she just increases the costs of interacting with her because you have to add in a space. And all these other people who had fancy name changes, right? They think that they can create themselves, and they have this this great faith in their own buffered autonomy. But then they find out reality is porous. And when they make it more difficult to interact with them, and adding fancy uh accent marks on their name and the like, you just create trouble, and you create inconvenience. And when you stop doing things the accustomed way and start doing them in an individualist bespoke manner, right? You make it harder for people to live together, work together, talk together, and to get along. You You roll out the red carpet. Um that creates political anxiety. And now, I think the hope will be the Chinese intend to play this meeting in Beijing. And I I know we're going to disagree on this. >> We are going to disagree. >> Because I I think they're going to play this as a G2. Yeah. And they'll look two great powers standing astride. And it's going to create a lot of anxiety in Asia. And particularly in Taiwan. So, I think that's the pincer movement. There's There They are intent on weakening So, who decide what constitutes a harm? And so, the harm of female reporters being denied access to male locker rooms, that was established by very smart lawyers. This is a very real harm. But the harm to the men and to male camaraderie and cohesion and to traditional ways of doing things, that was not as easily articulated in words. And almost the entire expert class, right, has its own various hero systems that are generally not the traditional ways of doing things. So, you had almost the entire expert class siding with the great harm that comes from denying women access to male locker rooms. The great harm that comes to women from denying them equal funding for college sports, even though men need sports and need outlets for their aggression much more than women do. So, you have an expert expert class that essentially decides what constitutes harm. And that is then ratified by a legal establishment that shares a very similar enlightened modern hero system. And as a result of these changes, right, you have more and more men who feel like the game is rigged. And not just men, people with a traditional identity, they feel like the society and the legal system is rigged against them. They They develop a grievance that often they have difficulty placing in words because maneuvering through all these changes is a lot easier if you're highly intelligent and university educated, but for the less intelligent, it just increase the cost and the difficulties of making one's way through life. And there is a reduction in dignity and happiness and efficiency and effectiveness, and it builds a rage that often doesn't have a very clear, explicable foundation. But just because someone can't make a philosophically, ontologically convincing case to you about a harm they've suffered, doesn't mean that the harm wasn't real. And with this decline in social trust and social cohesion, right? Men start asking, "Why should I increasingly sacrifice for women and abide by the old codes of etiquette and chivalry? Right? I'm getting screwed here." So, we've had a steady reduction in uh marriage, in relationships, in in sex, and in the quality of male-female relations. Now, I think you can make a strong case that this doesn't primarily come from civil rights law. You can look at the rise of the smartphone, social media, pornography, gaming, declining male earnings, right? There there may be all sorts of other reasons that are much more important. Now, chivalry worked when it wasn't even a choice. When you simply accepted that there were these external codes to which you as a man were expected to live up. As soon as chivalry, right? Becomes a choice, it it's no longer really chivalry. Now, you have some kind of negotiated exchange. And this is the difference between an individualist community and a collective community. In a collective community, such as Orthodox Judaism, you don't have to negotiate everything. So, if you're willing to stomach the rules, whether it's an Orthodox Jewish community, in a Christian community, in a neighborhood watch group, in a stamp club. If you're willing to put up with a series of rules in a group, the benefit of that is interactions become easier because you weed out the antisocial and the maladroit and and those who are just unpleasant to be around, and you get to then let your heads out and be at ease and to recharge yourself in the company of prosocial like-minded peers. And so, if you're willing to stomach the rules, there are all these benefits of of exchange of energy, of of a feeling of confidence and ease because there's a shared hero system, a shared framework, a shared legal system that that protects you, and you don't have to negotiate so much. But, in an individualist society, everything has to be negotiated. In a corporate society, your group identity comes first. Now, there are there are benefits to the individualist society, and there are downsides, and there are benefits to the more corporate community, and there are downsides. So, I'm not saying that one is inherently better than the other, but you definitely have a higher level of social cohesion, social trust, and greater sense of ease when you're in some sort of communal structure, and you don't have to go through the exhaustion of negotiation. My therapist would often comment how much I dislike having to negotiate relationships. And I am not flexible as I would like in my relationships. And I I probably reacted to living in a dozen different homes when I was just a kid and going from home to home cuz my mother was dying of cancer, and so, probably reacted to that dislocation with a rigidity that doesn't serve me. But, I don't know about you. I just find it exhausting negotiating everything. Now, some level of negotiation is absolutely necessary, and and I push myself to do many more communal things than come to me naturally, but sometimes there are certain interactions and I just say, "I'm just not willing to engage. And it's just it's just too much of a hassle. Like this person, I just don't have the bandwidth, the the aggravation, the aggro, as we'd say in Australia, the the negotiation, the the process, the the price, it's too much for for the rewards of interacting in this particular group or with this particular person. So, life I find just goes better when you're not having to negotiate and calculate everything, when you can just operate on what's just automatic, just automatic instincts because you're operating within a group where there are established rules and there are established traditions and you don't have to work everything out and bargain through everything and make a legal contract. meaning the confidence um in Taiwan. And I don't think we tend to underestimate, you know, Taiwan is a remarkable achievement in every possible way. You know, democratically, technologically, culturally, but much of it is grounded on the assumption of an ironclad American commitment um that is bipartisan. And I I think there are now probably in the next couple of weeks going to be questions about that. Now, it is possible that we'll see a kind of backlash among a still pretty timid Republican group on the hill that will say, "No, no, we've got to continue to stand by Taiwan." Much more to come, but I think what I'm trying to argue here is that the Chinese strategy really right now is to use other forces to try to constrain and to undermine Tai- Taiwan's um you know sense of confidence and and I worry about that. >> Yeah, I mean I don't I don't disagree that that's their strategy. Perhaps we disagree on whether it's actually that effective because I do think you know the polling in Taiwan and we had a little bit of this discussion last week in Washington. The polling in Taiwan suggests that actually the visit of the chairwoman to Beijing was a negative for the KMT for the upcoming elections. The majority vast majority of the population in Taiwan has no interest in reunification with the mainland. So I I think that that visit didn't actually accomplish what Beijing would have wanted it to accomplish, but I think it does enable Xi Jinping to create a fiction. So Maddy Bateman and Ben Shapiro, a couple of authors, they rose to prominence in their teens. They were writing I think nationally syndicated columns when they were 18. And about 22 years ago I I knew Maddy Bateman a bit and he's on the left. So I didn't share his hero system, but I I recognize he was pretty strong writer. But he his his first book just infuriates me and part of the reason that I'm live streaming right now is because I'm writing an essay about Maddy Bateman's career and it just reminded me of the title of his first book. It's called Death to all cheerleaders. I I just hate that sort of title. Death to all any group. I I I just think completely socially unacceptable. I don't want it censored in law. I just want it socially censored. You should not be able to say death to all drugs, death to all cheerleaders, death to all Christians. Like it's just a horrible horrible thing to say. I just can't even imagine how one comes up with something so antisocial. And cheerleaders are overwhelmingly female girls. Right? Who are at a particularly vulnerable point in our life. And any traditional community puts particular emphasis on protecting its women, protecting its girls, protecting its teenage girls in in particular. The these future mothers and wives. And and to publish a book called death to all cheerleaders where I remember this. When I was working on this essay, it just infuriated me. That should be completely unacceptable. Look, your breaking streaming has depleted the chat. You find it or you did it, man. Yes, it has. Right? People run on habit. And when you stop performing at the expected time, you don't get the the crowd. But I mean, how on earth does it does one think it's acceptable to write death to all cheerleaders? Uh did death to all any group? Now, I I grant you that we do not tend to naturally accord humanity to outgroups. So, if cheerleaders are an outgroup for you, then I I don't I don't expect you to recognize and and respect their humanity. But I would think that in your public pronouncements, you would do that. I mean, what kind of world are we where you can just publish a book saying death to all these groups, right? Cheerleaders, jocks, frat boys, hipsters, yuppies, lawyers, bankers, influencers, tech bros, the rich, politicians, Karens, boomers. How how on earth is it socially acceptable to say these things? You certainly couldn't say death to all Jews, black people, Muslims, gays, trans, disabled, immigrants, indigenous people, children, women in most senses, right? So, I mean, death to all it's just a horrible thing to say. And it's the type of thing that uh reduces social cohesion, social trust, and and just is a license to abuse. And and cheerleaders, once again, they're teenage girls, right? They are among the least powerful people alive. They are young, female, still forming, anxious, vulnerable. They don't hold much power and and they they hold some symbolic status. But to just license this kind of cruelty is infuriating to me. So, that's why I'm here. I I I I I hate the public acceptance of any speech that is, you know, death to even I I don't like communists, but I I don't think I would like a death to a communist, but communists I don't regard as part of the we, right? Cheerleaders are part of the we of America. And so, yes, I feel far more protective towards cheerleaders than I do towards uh communists. that the time is moving forward in the way that he would like. I think in terms of the current um Trump and Xi summit, I would say so far, so good. Now, so we still have the possibility that things will go sideways uh in terms of what uh the president might say or do around Taiwan, but I think initial indications are the Chinese came out very hot at the beginning, sort of giving this warning that Taiwan is the most important issue, it's central, uh don't do anything stupid or we're going to end up in conflict. Um the response from the US side has been nothing. There hasn't been an acknowledgement of even the statement. Um Secretary Rubio said after the first day that our policy has not changed on Taiwan. It's been one administration after another. Now, you're right, there's there's still time for things to to change on the the next day of the discussions, but um but I think that, you know, members of Congress, senior members of the Republican Party in the lead-up to this summit have come out pretty clearly and said they don't want to see any shift in US policy on Taiwan. And don't forget Taiwan just passed huge arms purchases. That's KMT and DPP aligned. So, I came from an eccentric variant of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. I grew up a Seventh-day Adventist. But pretty much everyone I knew growing up was a WASP. Pretty much everyone I knew was a Seventh-day Adventist until my father lost his ministerial credentials in 1980. We moved out of the church. But I know from my reading of history that uh WASPs, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, dominated America's elite until about the 1960s. So, you had a class that dominated the first 230 years of American history, 200 years of American history, and then they lost their powerful position. And yet there's no recognized genre of the angry WASP writer. So, you have a a ruling class, a ruling caste, a ruling tribe that lost its power and authority and dominance, and it is not accorded any recognizable expression of that loss except to possibly mock it and to put it down. So, I I could find no academic genre for the angry WASP writer. But think about the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite. They held the commanding heights of America's institutions, America's culture, American universities, and they lost it quickly, right? By the the 1960s. And we have a recognizable genre of the angry WASP writer that is not accorded any genre. So, think about the leading WASP writers in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, people like John Cheever, John Updike, Louis Auchincloss, right? They all wrote about failure, humiliation, suburban melancholy, failed marriages, weakening churches, moral exhaustion. But they wrote within a stiff upper lip code, right? Their protagonist suffered in silence, and the WASP was expected to continue to suffer in silence today. He's not expected or allowed to be angry about his loss of status and power. Right? So, what defined the WASP in this literature is suffering in silence, their composure. So, they would fail and be humiliated, but they would preserve their dignity. A man might lose his marriage, his faith, his power, his status, his nerve, but he would keep his voice level. And the WASP form treated reticence as a sign of good character. Now, over the past 30 years, this restraint has hardened into anger. The Protestant managerial class has lost its monopoly over the institutions it once governed, universities, newspapers, publishing houses, law firms, banks, cultural foundations, are more and more meritocratic, bureaucratic, secular, global, heterogeneous. The old WASP establishment has by and large kept its wealth and its credentials, but it's lost confidence in its own moral standing, its own permanence, and its own right to rule. So, you have this WASP literature of displacement. But it's a completely different type of anger. This is not working class rage, this is not black rage, gay rage, immigrant rage, feminist literature, post-colonial writing. Right? This was those forms were all about outsiders demanding entry. The angry WASP narrates dispossession from authority. He speaks as an insider who discovers that the world no longer treats his assumptions as universal or legitimate. So, the earlier Protestant elites really didn't even see themselves as a particular group. They just saw themselves as the standard, the invisible standard, right? They took their manner, their mores, their morality, their speech, their schooling as just identical with being a professional. So, you get the rise of the angry WASP writer at the moment that that invisibility ends. So, now the WASP is increasingly conscious of belonging to a tribe. WASPs have usually looked down on tribes. Now, they recognize that they are part of a tribe, a contingent ruling class whose authority other men can now challenge, can mock, can manage, and replace. Probably the leading angry WASP writer is Jonathan Franzen. So, if you read his novels such as The Corrections and Freedom, he places upper-middle-class Protestant families at the center of his stories. And he writes about people who have watched their civilization built on seriousness, restraint, literacy, disciplined stewardship, and they now increasingly encountering a culture that values none of these things. That the gatekeeping function of the WASP elite has been destroyed. And what makes it particularly challenging for these WASP writers is that they can't say explicitly what they're feeling, that they've been displaced, that everything that they have been raised to take for granted as professional and decent and moral is no longer accepted. And you also get a rage from Jonathan Franzen in particular that uh the serious novel no longer holds the cultural power that it once did when WASP rules. So, Franzen hates the online world. Right? He acquired his standing through institutions, through the printed word, and now that's been overthrown. That's why he attacks social media and Twitter and all the noise on screen. Uh Rick Moody talks about wasp suburban disintegration. His most famous novel is The Ice Storm from 1994. Now depicts post-war Protestant order as a landscape of sexual drift, emotional vacancy, spiritual fatigue. AM Homes describes more surreal violence and domestic collapse in Protestant families. Brett Easton Ellis only writes the core of the most nihilistic branch of the form of wasp rage. David Foster Wallace would describe it in his books like Infinite Jest. And the the prose is just curiously defensive, self-conscious, and satirical because it's really hard for people who once belonged to a tribe that ruled America to regret it because their universalist Protestant outlook, their secularized version of their Protestant outlook accepts that their homogeneous dominance of America's institutions was morally wrong, that diversity is morally right. And so the angry wasp genre right, can't say that its own tribe deserves to rule. So they have an anger where it would embarrass them to articulate their loss of status and power. So they have to displace their anger on the internet and all sorts of other things, right? The wasp angry writer cannot argue for the return of his tribe to power, right? He shares the moral premises of our new elite that condemned the old wasp rule. He was schooled in them. So his grievance has no respectable object, no sincere object. He he can't aim it at anyone. He's got this rage and he there's no one that he can honestly strike with it. So he has to scatter his rage onto various safe targets and they are not chosen at random. So he'll attack social media and consumer capitalism and bureaucratic jargon and the therapeutic vocabulary and the credentialing machine, right? Because you're permitted to hate those things. But his loss of power and status, he can't come out and say it. And it's not that he suffers from Stockholm Syndrome. Nobody took the WASP elite captive. WASP elite still owns the wealth and the credentials it still has power and influence. It is just no longer as dominant as it once was and their own creed says, "Well, it's wrong for us as Protestants to rule over others." And no other animal does this, right? The lion does not apologize to the gazelle. The wolf feels no guilt over the deer. Right? No creature in nature apologizes for power and rule. Only the WASP. mind uh in the legislature in Taiwan, huge arms purchases um agreement um I agree that that is what Rubio said, but I think as significant is what Bessen said in an interview in which he indicated a couple of different things that President Trump acknowledged, understood, felt some of the Chinese issues um with respect to Taiwan and would have more to say in the next few days. So my sense is that signals um perhaps some subtle um adjustment in our policy. And I think what's important to keep in mind is that the dominant player in the formulation and execution of strategy on So an important book for understanding the decline of WASPs is the 2020 book by Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement. Right? Christopher Caldwell makes explicit what these angry WASP novelists feel but cannot name. Right, the the literary WASP give you their emotions. Christopher Caldwell gives you the structure that produces the emotions. So, his thesis in The Age of Entitlement is that the civil rights reforms of the 1960s created a second constitution that has increasingly displayed our original constitution. Right, we now have a rival constitution that has changed what freedom of speech and the power of private property used to mean. And Christopher Caldwell says that the costs of desegregation, right, were large in addition to the benefits. One of the costs was the loss of the old freedom of association and the taken-for-granted social cohesion and trust that used to empower the confidence in the freedom and and the rule of the WASP elite. And none of the WASP writers will say this because to say it appears to mourn the old days of racial segregation. Christopher Caldwell makes the argument the new civil rights order didn't only persuade, it governed. It encouraged litigation and government scrutiny of our most private decisions. Right, ordinary people were increasingly placed under surveillance for racism. There were increasing costs to any dissent with the civil rights regime. You could lose your job, your social standing, your respectability, your status. So, the the Protestant conscience increasingly criticized the old WASP ruling regime. And then this new civil rights regime would come along and punish anyone who defended the old ways of doing things. So, Christopher Caldwell makes the argument the novelists would not. So, Jonathan Franzen rages at the internet, and Tom Wolfe rages at institutional cowardice, and Christopher Caldwell talks about the rise of a new constitution, and describes the cost. Another approach, much more biological and racial approach is the WASP question by Andrew Fraser. He lost his job as a law professor in Australia by complaining about uh Australia's immigration policy. And so, he explicitly takes on WASPs as a tribe and as a race, and he promises an essay on their biocultural evolution and their future prospects. So, he's the man who walks all the way across and out of polite society to make the argument that the novelist cannot make and that Christopher Caldwell stopped short of making. So, Andrew Fraser, one of those rare intellectuals, makes an explicit case for the return of WASP rule. So, the novelists and Andrew Fraser share a diagnosis that the WASP elite is weak and have surrendered, they've lost their nerve, they've been abandoned by their own people, but they then split entirely on what follows. So, the angry WASP novelists treat this surrender as a tragedy, and they turn their rage inward into guilt, self-loathing, and rage that eats itself. Fraser treats the surrender as a sickness, and he wants to cure it by turning the rage outward and downward. Then, Aaron Renn comes along and treats this question in an explicitly Christian lens. So, he publishes in 2024, Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in Anti-Christian Culture. So, Aaron Renn supplies the religious access of this decline. He puts a date on it. So, he says that until about 1994, the United States was a pro-Christian country. Between 1994 and 2014, Christianity was just one option among many, and then the negative anti-Christian America runs from about 2014 to the present. And Aaron Renn then outlines a program for WASPs to reclaim their identity. Uh on China and the Indo-Pacific is not Rubio. Um Senator Rubio is is barely involved. He's much more involved in the Middle East and in Latin America. It is Bessen who is the dominant player in all issues associated with China. And so let's see. Um but I also would say Liz there there are already plenty of indicators that would at least cause some anxiety. We know that President Trump and President Xi have talked about managing or discussing issues associated with with with arms sales to Taiwan. That that has been made clear in their last conversation. And when, you know, President Xi called President Trump to complain about um the Japanese position on Taiwan, President Trump immediately called her and warned her as opposed to speaking out supporting the Japanese position, which we've tried to get them to do substantially. And so I would just say, and I understand and I I hope what you're saying is true, but I would say at best the record is ambiguous and there are lots of indicators that suggest perhaps a different approach. And we do know from a history of things that the president has said and done that he feels like big countries should have maybe a little bit more say over their immediate neighborhoods. And and that has been how he thinks about the United States and Latin America, how he sees Russia in Ukraine. And we'll see, but I I do think there are clear indications that strains of that thinking have um affected how he thinks about China and Taiwan. Okay, so we'll we'll we'll call that, you know, we'll see in the next 24 hours. >> Yeah. Um, I mean, I might just It's going to play longer than that. >> I I do think I do think that, you know, there was this understanding at the outset of this administration where that, you know, President Trump was consumed with this notion of spheres of influence. But I think if you look at the national security strategy, if you look at what we've been doing since that time, it is clear that we are still deeply engaged in the Indo-Pacific. >> Do you think Do you think he read or had anything to do with the national security >> I I think I think what's surprising about this administration to some extent is is that they are actually doing a little bit of what the first Trump administration did, even though I think they're much weaker in terms of experience and capabilities and and knowledge, um, certainly of Asia than the first Trump administration. They're doing a little bit of what that administration did, which is to run their own play in Asia, kind of irrespective of whatever the president is saying or doing. That's interesting. But one of the more powerful analytical tools that I've learned over the past few years, I learned from Ronnie Goodman's book on conservative claims of cultural oppression, and he in turn learned it from a Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, who published a book in 2007 called A Secular Age. And, uh, Charles Taylor came up with this distinction between the buffered and the porous identity. And the WASP establishment was extremely buffered, right? This was the disengaged man, self-controlled, reserved, surveying society from above and pronouncing on it, insulated from being acted upon, conferring meaning. This is the buffered self wearing a cloth, and this whole ethic of restraint and composure is the elite wasp way, right? To be buffered is to see oneself as the captain of one's own life, as the one who judges and is not judged. And then the angry wasp genre is the rage of a person who discovers that life is porous. So, believing that the most important things are inside of you, that you can choose right wrong for yourself, that you can strategically, rationally, autonomously pilot your way through life and you do not have to be held down by whatever profane thing is going on around you has many advantages. It is a useful fiction, but it is a fiction. Life is porous. So, in Orange County, over the past few days, there is some chemical danger that if this chemical container explodes could wreak, you know, vast amount of damage if there's an earthquake, if there's a crime wave, right? No matter how buffered you are, you may well be at loss. One thing that I've learned from interviewing thousands of people is that everybody has a large realm of vulnerability. Right? We all affect each other. And so, I I recognize the advantages to this buffered fiction, but reality is porous. Right? What goes on around me affects me. I I cannot separate myself. And so, the anger for many people who believe they they were buffered and then realize that reality is porous is intense. And you see this particularly in the prose of David Foster Wallace. Right? David Foster Wallace holds very strong moral claims, but he has nothing to hang his moral claims on. And so, he is continually hedging and adding footnotes and qualifications and and producing these endless anticipating self-corrections. are all part of him trying to negotiate his his global moral commitments with the fact that he has nothing to hang these commitments on as he's not a traditional religious man. All right, he is buffered and he keeps trying to reseal his buffer that is continually punctured by, among other things, his addictions. So, he recognizes that his buffered approach to life is false, that it will not hold, that it will not protect him, that his addictions will keep breaking through. And he feels disgust with the therapeutic vocabulary, with the decline of the United States, the diminishing of social trust and cohesion. All right, he in his buffered self is recalling recoiling from the horror of of porous reality. And so, he deals with it by all these footnotes and hedges and qualifications. He he's he's trying to deal with the collapse of authority, uh collapse of his identity, re- finding out to his great dismay that life is is porous. So, he he sees the therapeutic culture, which he despises, is built on a reality of a porous self, that we are permeable, we are relational, we are open. All right, it was really hard for me to do this live stream for the first hour without anybody in the chat. I I need a relationship, I need to be able to relate to you, I need to get your feedback, I need to read your your words. Bob says, "I'm reading The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante." So, I was just uh commenting on her. So, she is a novelist who takes great pride in her uh private identity. She She does everything that she can to protect it. And so I was just writing an essay on the literary critic Maude Embry who did interview via email with Elena Ferrante and then put together a book that came out in 2019. So David Foster Wallace hates the vulgarity of therapy culture. Right? And it doesn't matter to him. In fact, he hates it even more because he recognizes that it is more true to reality than his own buffered identity. Right? He knows that much of his own self-construction is false. He knows that the moral structure that he wants to impose on the universe uh cannot be rationally argued. That there there is no firm, eternal, transcendent basis for it, but he will not give it up because we all feel certain things are just objectively right and wrong. Even if we have an intellectual commitment that there is no such thing as a universal right and wrong, we all live as though there are certain essential things that are right and are wrong, that are evil and that are good. And it drives people crazy if they can't refer their understanding of reality to some unimpeachable transcendent source of truth such as God and religion and and the Bible. I think they have a much more aggressive um policy. One that's much more in line with Biden administration. >> Yes. Strengthening strengthening relations with our Indo-Pacific partners. I mean, restarting uh mil-to-mil with uh Cambodia and new exercises with Yeah, yeah, that that'll really set Uh okay, well, anyway, let's let's go back. I want to go back. No, No, I want to go back. I I had to just say one thing though. >> I'll give you the last word on this and then I want to go back. want to go Yeah, so people will bully you. Right, she's trying to bully him and say you can't talk about this. And this happens all the time. And if you're in an inferior position at work, then you may just have to suck it up and take it. But if your income does not depend on it, don't allow people to bully you, generally speaking, into what you say. So good on Kurt Campbell here for refusing to be bullied because most interview hosts will try to bully you. And I'm going to be a good guest. I'll be a good guest. That's right. So Look, I I don't think you can argue that the allies and partners are being nurtured and supported. Our most important partner, Japan, is quite anxious right now. Um I think it is also the case So yeah, about every 6 months I just shave my head and it all stemmed from a time, I think in 20 13, when I went to the barber to get my hair cut and he says, "Oh, you need to make an appointment." This was like a This was not a prestigious fancy barber. Right, this was just an ordinary barber and he told me that I had to make it an appointment. I was like, "Heck, no." I went home and shaved my head. I've been doing it about every 6 months ever since. So among the things that have uh taken up my time over the the past uh few months in my devotion to writing biographical essays, I did one on my father. And I've developed certain frames that I just find incredibly useful at correctly situating people, including myself. And uh one frame is FAFO. F around and find out. So if people with the power to hurt you have been very clear that they will hurt you if you do X Y Z and you know that they have the power to hurt you, then if you F around, you will find out. And uh this is a frame that I've used on my father to understand his life because when I was growing up as Desmond Ford's youngest son, my father was like a rock star in my community. He was a preacher, a theologian. He was the chair of the religion department at Avondale College. He was widely revered inside my Seventh-day Adventist world. And then he lost his ministerial credential in 1980. We moved out of the Seventh-day Adventist church. And I I found that nobody knew who he was outside of the church. Right? My father had tremendous pull and power and status and rank and following and intensity all around him, both pro and con, within Seventh-day Adventism. And then outside of it, he had nothing. He He He was just completely unknown. So, we often have currency in one part of life and then no currency in other parts of life. And so, we will naturally gravitate towards spending as much time in those areas of life where we have currency. Cuz when you have no currency, that sucks. Right? When you have no money, that sucks. When you have no status, right? That's difficult to deal with, particularly when you become habituated to being high status. So, I had a reflected uh status or I was a an object of interest because I was Desmond Ford's son within Adventism. As soon as we left it, I had no currency like my dad. I I was just nobody special. I was just who I was. So, one way of describing this is my father was a regional theologian. He was a theologian within Seventh-day Adventism and outside of that, he was nobody. Now, my father did two PhDs. He was competent in both of his PhD theses. He accomplished both of in 18 months each, which was extraordinary, but the work itself is dissertations themselves were not extraordinary. They were merely competent. So, he worked for a second PhD at the University of Manchester under New Testament scholar who was widely known, F.F. Bruce, and my father would invoke that name all the time because that was his best claim to some status outside of Adventism. And so, my father's association with F.F. Bruce was the high point of my father's external scholarly recognition. So, I I never saw my father pocket any money that didn't belong to him. I never saw my father commit any financial or sexual crimes. But, when he was allowed a a book allowance and he was able to buy new books, for example, on the book of Daniel, first thing he would do when he'd buy a new commentary on the book of Daniel, he'd look at the back at the index and see if he was cited. And it was one of his greatest joys that uh various commentaries would cite him. But, my father, despite the occasional commentary citing him here or there, had no purchase, no currency outside of Adventism. So, he was a rock star in one world. He got removed from that world in 1980. And then, he tried to stay within an orbit where he was no longer officially employed because outside of that orbit, he was nobody. So, where did my father put his energy? Where do I put my energy? Where do you likely put your energy aside from earning a living? You likely put your energy into those areas where you have the most currency. So, right now, I have the thrill of talking to 16 live people on YouTube. And so, that gives me energy. I have a tiny little bit of uh currency on YouTube, and that's why I'm speaking to you. If uh 91 minutes into a stream, nobody was watching, it would be really hard to keep going. So, my father, like the rest of us, put his energy where he got the greatest return. And so he devoted himself to arguments within Seventh-day Adventism about theology. And his entire theological apparatus was developed through these arguments. And and prior to these arguments, he didn't have the distinctive theological apparatus that he developed, right? My father developed who he was like I develop who I am and how you develop who you are by spending the most time and engaging in those activities that reward you with the most social status. So my father would make commonsensical points about justification by faith and the assurance of heavenly salvation, right? That Lutheran theologians had established in the 16th century. But when he made them inside of Adventism, right? He he did it in a world where mainstream Protestant scholarship had not conquered. So he carries into this closed Seventh-day Adventist system the consensus of the wider scholarly world. And so his achievement was taking something that was taken for granted outside of Adventism into Adventism. And then the the church chose to hold on to its distinctive theological doctrines that my father said were false because every group insists that it is right, that it is the the true center of the universe, that it is connected to to the divine, to the to God, to the transcendent, and that it is special, that it's got a special mission. And when my father brought in these wider Protestant Evangelical perspectives that diminished the chosen nature of Seventh-day Adventism, of course the the church rebelled. But my father couldn't then move on outside completely of Adventism because outside of Adventism he had no purchase. Now, my father had many gifts, and one of his gifts was this prodigious ability to just recall scripture verses off by heart. But, just because you can recall a large number of scripture verses off by heart, that's not a substitute for argument or for scholarship, right? It is a performance. And so, my father would perform in a way that was tremendously compelling to some people and ridiculous to others. So, what is charisma according to David Pinsof? It's the ability to pull off social paradoxes. So, you'll get more status if you appear that you're not interested in status. You'll get more status if you appear like you were just following truth. And so, my father had charismatic authority with those people who bought his narrative that he was simply pursuing truth. Now, I looked at my father through many of my favorite uh theoretical frames. One of them is alliance theory. And one way to boil down alliance theory is we believe what is convenient. We believe what is necessary to connect with the group who's most important to us. So, in the world of politics, alliance theory says that uh political parties have no coherent philosophy, that uh whatever coherent beliefs can be attributed to different political philosophies and parties are simply ad hoc, post hoc justifications for seizing the coercive powers of government. So, one shorthand to figuring out if something makes sense is to ask, does this make evolutionary sense? And given all the advantages of seizing the coercive powers of government and the lack of advantages that evolution will bestow upon you simply because you're ontologically sound, you're philosophically coherent. There's no evolutionary payoff for that unless you're able to attain status and resources based on that. But generally speaking, no evolutionary payoff for philosophical coherence. So, the different dogmas and doctrines and beliefs of different political parties and theories really just post hoc ad hoc justifications for whatever you need for your group to seize power. And so, too, you can then apply that to my father's theological battles. The rhetoric was theological, but what you really had was a battle over power. And you had theology used to try to gain power. Then another theoretical frame that I love is Steven Turner's work against essentialism, right? There is no essential Adventist, no essential Jew, no essential Christian, no essential black man, white woman, lesbian, right? All these groups behave differently in different circumstances, right? One Seventh Adventist in Australia may not have very much with a say a Seventh Day Adventist in Africa. Judaism often expresses itself quite differently in the United States compared to Canada, compared to Mexico or Argentina or Brazil or Israel or Australia or New Zealand. And so, too, with Islam. Right? There's no universal essential Muslim. Muslims are quite different depending on the situation where you go in the world. Then you can also use the frame of expertise. Experts like to claim authority based on other experts bestowing upon them the title of expert. And experts usually say, "Hey, I'm just following truth. I'm just a neutral administrator." But experts, like every other group have their own interests. And so people will often say things that are not quite true to more effectively pursue their interests. Another one of my favorite theoretical frames I learned from the sociologist Randall Collins. And he published a powerful book in 2004 called Interaction Ritual Chains. So when you get on the same page with someone and you develop some sort of rhythm in your interactions, you'll gain emotional energy from that. So let's say you get up and you have a good relation with your relations with your spouse, with your family, you'll leave the house feeling good. If you have bad relations with your spouse and your family, you will not leave the house feeling charged up. If you walk into work and you have good relations with most of the people you interact with, you will be energized by that. If you walk into work and you consistently have bad interactions with people where you're unable to get on the same page, right? You will be depleted. And one way that you can tell if you're having a successful interaction with someone is the length of the pause between one person speaking and the next person speaking. So if the pause is typically over a second, right? You don't have very good relations with that person. And therefore you will be depleted. When my father lost his Seventh-day Adventist ministerial credential, he was no longer he could no longer really live in the Seventh-day Adventist world. He was no longer a superstar within Seventh-day Adventism, within its employment. He could no longer teach in Adventist institutions. He's no longer a visiting speaker at various Seventh-day Adventist churches. And so he lost energy because he was disconnected from his rock star status. that a country that we had really worked to pull into the fabric of our engagement, India that has fallen on very hard times. So, I don't think you can argue that this has been woven together effectively as a strategy. The second thing I will say that I've seen now in the Middle East, in Europe, and now in Asia is a general lack of interest in what experts have to say. They really are not interested in that. And I remember asking a very senior person about like, "Who do you listen to on the Iran stuff? Like, who do you" And he said, "Well, you know, um you know, the the the people that really are on the ground, Mr. Witkoff and the president's son-in-law, um Jared, are the ones." Now, look, they have a lot of experience in real estate and stuff, but they don't probably they're not imbued in some of the history and the like. And so, I I I actually think we are both falling into a trap that I always warn Asians about, which is the constant search for an overriding strategy or logic when a lot of these things are really guided by personal impetuousness, lack of coordination, long-held biases and beliefs, and that they're So, I spent hour upon hour applying these various frames to my father. And then I asked AI to tell me why. Why did I do this? And I I gave it a particular frame to then apply to me. David Buss, off the evolutionary psychologist from UCLA, says that uh we expect children to outcompete, to outdo their parents. And when that doesn't happen, people become unhappy. And so, AI says, "Look, Forty, you've stacked 11 frameworks on your father. All right, the accumulation was not required for understanding your father. Two or three of these frames would have produced most of the analytical yield. So, all these frames that you're applying to your father is doing other work. And so, what you are doing is not the work that you are advertising, right? The advertised work is the honest intellectual biography of a complicated father figure. But, what's really going on is something different. Number one, you're engaged in a status competition with your father. Right? You are arguing with your father. Your father cannot answer you because he is dead, so you get to win every round by default. Second, you are signaling to your audience, right? That you know better, that you are sharper and smarter. I'm the kind of analyst who does not flinch. I'm the kind of son who can use the tools on the man who raised me. And I didn't follow my father's footsteps. I built a completely different life, so I can employ these frames and I can both honor and diminish my father at the same time. I can show that I understand his significance and I can demonstrate that I have moved past his significance. So, I have created all these frames as a protective layer between me and my unanalyzed feelings about my own father, the man who took a path that I did not take. So, I find consolation in this analysis. I also get to produce content for my audience. And I get to conduct a pseudo argument cuz my father cannot respond, right? There's no father listening to me because my father is dead. He can't challenge me. He can't punch holes in my argument. So, the the things that we say we are doing are often quite distinct from what's really going on. So, one of the frames was the neutralization theory of hatred. And this academic paper notes the large difference between anger and hatred. So, we don't tend to be angry at those we want to neutralize. So, we hate those whose very existence right, damages our prospects. So, my father was hated cuz his very existence was damaging to traditional Adventists, and my father didn't respond with hatred. He responded with with anger. So, when I was looking at uh my father's work, I I found a paper that he wrote in 1963, and none of his most uh distinctive theological dogmas were in it. All everything that my father became famous for as a theologian were absent because everything that my father built, he built out of polemics. He built out of argument. And that's one of the dangers of argument is that it becomes all-consuming. It it takes you over, and then it can just uh direct the path of your life. So, in 1963, my father wrote a very uh common type of uh Seventh-day Adventist argument called Ethics, Chaos, Chaos, and the Cosmos. And it contains none of his distinctive theologies, none of his distinctive intellectual moves. It was just bog-standard Seventh-day Adventism, modern culture has lost its ethical bearings. And the root cause is Charles Darwin and the materialist theory of our origins, and the cure is the doctrine of uh divine creation by a personal God. So, when I was reading this essay and saw nothing that my father is famous for in the essay, it just struck home to me that everything that my father became famous for was built out of his arguments. That uh none of it was apparently present in 1963. >> isn't a kind of a convening overarching principle. And I I try to remind myself of that cuz my my instinct is to constantly look for um what's the you know kind of the larger strategy in place. Okay, I'm going to say I agree with you. I don't think that there is a coherent strategy. What I do think is that this administration is intensely competitive with China in technology, economy, and national security. Yeah. So I and I think those are the things that are driving the type of actions that I'm talking about. >> So you're right. It's not an overarching strategy, but it nonetheless can get us to a place that I think is better than the one that you are envisioning. But we will see. >> all of our Liz's good listeners and watchers. She has the last word on this. I'm going to be very gracious and just we'll move on now. >> Okay. >> Okay. So let's let's backtrack just a little bit because one of the things that you have I think really That's a beautiful quality if you can have a discussion and argument where you passionately disagree but you can just grant the other person the final word. really um architected is not a word. So let us just say that you have created um over the past couple of decades is this approach to the region of focusing on our allies and partners um as opposed to the G2 notion um and just thinking that the the country that we need to deal with first and foremost is China. All right, you have been very much about working with our allies and partners first. That's most important. So did that come out of your first Pentagon experience as you were describing it? You know, you were looking and working with Indonesia. You were seeing all the Vietnam, all these other countries in addition to China. Or how did you come to that sort of thought? So I no longer read that many novels. What I I particularly enjoy a nonfiction books that read like a novel. And the name for this genre is literary non-fiction. So, I love literary non-fiction as embodied by people like Tom Wolfe, right? Prior to The Bonfire of the Vanities, everything that he wrote was literary non-fiction. So, there were just a tiny number of magazines and publishing houses that produced the elite literary non-fiction. And there are only certain stories that this elite wanted told. They wanted stories about reformist liberal progress. They wanted stories about civil rights as moral drama. They wanted stories about the federal government as a competent steward when staffed by the right people. They wanted stories about the Cold War as a struggle between liberal democracy and totalitarianism with the liberal democrats as heroes. They wanted exposés of corporate wrongdoing. They wanted stories about harm to the environment, political corruption, particularly when those targets were Republicans, Southerners, or aligned with big business. Right? They wanted war reporting that emphasized America's failure and the moral cost, especially after Vietnam. They wanted positive profiles of the cultural elite, writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, intellectuals. Right? They wanted long, intimate, admiring pieces. They wanted writing on place seen through a particular cultivated American sensibility. So, John McPhee could publish a book on Alaska, on geology, on the Pine Barrens. They wanted crime narratives where the crime exposed something horrible about white gentile society that the editors wanted exposed. So, Truman Capote wrote about the Clutter killings. Norman Mailer wrote about Gary Gilmore. They wanted personal essays where a writer of moderate fame examines his own life. But there are also many stories that they did not want. They didn't want stories sympathetic to the white working class. They didn't want stories sympathetic to cultural conservatism or traditional Christianity. They didn't want stories about middle America. They didn't want stories about the Christian South. They didn't want people who worked in the stories about people who worked in the trades, the hard hats, right? When stories about these groups appeared in the prestige outlets, they were done in a distant and often mocking manner. The the subject would be studied, but he was not heard. You didn't want any stories critical of liberal institutions from the right. So, conservative magazines existed, but the prestige outlets would ignore them. You didn't want any stories about say Jewish disproportionate representation or influence, right? Because the most prestigious magazines and publishing houses were disproportionately edited and owned by Jews. So, they didn't want reporter writing a piece on Jewish presence in finance, media, law, academia, and the profession, right? The facts were public, but the framing was forbidden. The only acceptable framing in this context was to put forward Jews as a model minority assimilating into America. The unacceptable frame would put Jews as one group among other groups with disproportionate influence in some areas, right? You didn't get to work for any prestigious organization if you took that frame. Any story about group differences, racial differences in cognition, behavior, and crime was unacceptable. Any critical stories about gay life or gay behavior or of AIDS was unacceptable. The prestigious outlets wouldn't publish anything regarding the harms of feminism, no-fault divorce, single motherhood, and the sexual revolution. The only acceptable frame about women's liberation was that it was great, it was progress, and it was an unfinished project. You couldn't publish any stories about mass immigration that were critical. You couldn't talk about corruption inside the editorial elite. You couldn't publish stories about the publishing industry's labor practices, the publishing industry's casting couch arrangements. Right? The Harvey Weinstein story sat for years and years and years before it broke. You couldn't write stories about America's intelligence services in a way that was critical. Carl Bernstein wrote one long piece on the CIA's relationship with the American press in Rolling Stone in 1977. Piece stayed buried and it it gave birth to no follow-on pieces. You couldn't tell stories in the prestigious forms of literary nonfiction about religious belief told with sympathy and the believer's perspective. You couldn't tell positive stories about evangelicals, Mormons, Catholics, Orthodox Jews. So, for the elite, American religion was at best an anthropological curiosity and very likely a threat to liberal democracy. So, the religious believer really gets a narrative voice in the prestigious literary nonfiction. So, the people who had the money and the power to commission literary nonfiction came from a very narrow slice of American life. They're educated at elite universities. They tended to live in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Washington, Cambridge, and Berkeley. They were married to people in similar professions. Their children attended similar schools. Their politics tended to run from center left to left. Their cultural reflexes lined up. They knew what made a story serious and what did not. They knew which sources to trust and which to dismiss. They shared assumptions that they never had to articulate. The taboos lived in the room before anyone arrived. No one had to enforce them. So, then people like Neil Strauss came along and crossed the line, right? The the the game inside the secret society of pickup artists. He had a frank treatment of male sexual strategy and female mate choice that would never have run in any prestigious magazine. White-on-white crime, right, got the long-form literary treatment. Vincent Bugliosi wrote about the Manson family. Joe McGinniss wrote about Jeffrey MacDonald. Jon Krakauer wrote about Mormon fundamentalists. You had an entire growth of the true crime books. Uh white-on-black crime got considerable treatment, right? But uh black-on-black crime got almost no treatment in the prestige outlets. And black-on-white crime got no treatment. To the extent that black-on-black crime was covered, it would be only covered as the fault of uh white people. So, a white killer of white victims serves as evidence against white America. That uh white America is materialist, it's ruthless, it's religiously extreme, it's lonely, it's effed-up. White Gentile America. A white killer of black victims serves as evidence of America's racism. And a black killer of either white or black victims is only analyzed and written about if it is evidence of America's structural racism, right? Black perpetrators are never assigned agency. They are never allowed to stand for anything about black America because the prestige register does not permit any critique of black America from this angle. No critique of gay sexual practices, promiscuity, STDs like AIDS and monkeypox completely out of bounds. So, this produces literary nonfiction with all sorts of strange holes. You got all these long, careful literary crime box about white on white murder and nothing about the most common forms of everyday violence that produce most American homicides, black on black crime. You had a whole string of Atlanta trial murders that was largely ignored because they were carried out by a black man. But about working with allies and partners, creating this kind of network, not even just kind of hub and hub and spoke. Beyond that, I think in certainly in the Biden administration, but encouraging our allies and partners then to form their own sort of a lattice as somebody I think maybe it was wrong, right? Lattice sort of effect. How did you come to that? Where where did that come from, that idea? Well, look, a lot of it evolved over time. Um, the if you work at the Pentagon on Asia, then you spend most of your time nurturing allies and partners. And that is hard work. It's often very narrow work on like what altitude do helicopters fly? And since very practical and very operational and you develop deep ties with your counterparts. I was able to see, I think in the 90s, a very different quality of interaction between our allies and partners and the kinds of interactions I had with my Chinese friends. And I I I have always been struck that even during periods when we were working more closely together, we had almost no habits of cooperation. And at the very core of almost all of my Chinese interlocutors' approaches was just a deep abiding, profound suspicion of the United States. And it was hard to break through with that, and I think part of that was ideological and part of it was systemic. But I think I realized pretty early on, certainly after what happened in the Taiwan Strait crisis, when China launched this massive military modernization program, which has reached heights that no one imagined in the early to mid-1990s. But I would say I believed that we would be facing a country that did not share our values and our interests, and that would be more competitive with us. And I think I probably, like many, underestimated how quickly and how rapid and how sustained that uh effort would be. But the the truth it really coalesced around the leadership of Xi Jinping, in which most of those approaches were no longer um uh shadowed. They were very much out in the open. I I also observed, um in both our administrations, an approach to policy making in Asia in Asia that I think undermined or did not pay heed to the interests of other nations in the region. And And some of that was almost on the verge of disrespectful. And the idea was the only thing that really mattered was sitting in the stuffed chairs next to the Chinese and talking about the French Revolution, and that other diplomacy and engagement was secondary and not in our interest, perhaps. And so I I thought it was, you know, both a misreading of China's interests, but also misunderstanding of the import of working more closely with allies and partners. So, Bob Ross, when I'm going to decode anger. So, I think one difference between anger and hatred is that hatred tends to burn cold, while anger is a reaction to something that's being done to you. Hatred is a reaction to somebody's existence that you feel just by them existing in your vicinity that they they diminish you, that they endanger you. So, we we feel anger and hatred and other emotions because these emotions have helped our ancestors survive and pass on their genes. So, I notice one very productive use of anger when it gives you the power and the energy to do something that you need to do, but that without it you'd be much less likely to do. So, if somebody in the moment is stepping on your foot and not not showing any remorse or care about it, usually an angry hey, what the heck will serve your best interest. So, if you can take care of something through displaying anger, that will likely work out in your best interest, then displaying anger is is useful. So, often when I've been placed in a position of authority and I will ask nicely one, two, three times and then if asking nicely doesn't get something done, I start upping the degree of anger that I use to remind someone that this is important. And so, that's an adaptive use of anger. What's a maladaptive use of anger is when you you can't solve anything or do anything, but you're angry anyway. Right? That that doesn't serve you. And that develops because you write people up for unenforceable tickets, right? So-and-so should not have spoken to me that way. Right? Somebody should not have cut me off in in traffic. So, if you get angry over things that you have no control over, no ability to shape, then that's maladaptive. And then hatred is recognition that the existence of this person at work, in your community, next door, is a danger to your life, right? Then, that doesn't display as anger. That That will most likely display as hatred. When When you have accurately recognized a threat, then hatred is a rational response to a threat to your life. First, and I would say the people that originally formed that school, it was a very small school of, you know, kind of strategic thinkers, and many of them were more operational than they were strategic. Rich Armitage is is often thought of as one of the fathers of this school, but at the same time, I will just say we were in a very small minority and looked down upon by those that would say, "Look, you know, what's important is, you know, functioning and getting things right between Washington and Beijing." I tried not to diminish that, cuz I think it's very important. And I did a lot of Chinese diplomacy, but I wanted it in a larger context. I also think it became increasingly clear, Liz, unlike previous challenges that we have faced in the Second World War, in First World War, Vietnam, we had the wherewithal technologically and militarily to stand up to any potential challenger. We were the giant on the sidelines that, you know, would enter the fight. That is no longer the case, and and I would argue that over the course of the last 10 years, it becomes increasingly clear that if we want to have an effective global strategy, we have to do with allies and partners, and that means with respect to technology, procurement, you know, planning and the like. And here, I would say that every administration, including the one I served in, has not gone nearly far enough in terms of the kinds of relationships that we will need. There is still a substantial amount of paternalism and you know, kind of imbalance in roles and responsibilities, dialogue, consultation, even with our closest allies and partners. It will It will take a sea change of sustained bipartisan effort to really build the kind of integrated coalition of allies and partners, all of whom also should be seeking to build ties and engagements with Beijing. My own view, and I realize that this is controversial, is that the best way to have a good relationship with China is to engage them from a perspective of strength. Now, I the reason why I'm probably Okay, I've dissipated my anger. I've vented. I am tired. I'm ready to return to the quieter, more deliberative uh work of uh writing essays. Good to talk to you. Talk to you later. Bye-bye.