An Interview with Peter Zeihan

Peter Zeihan is a geopolitical strategist and futurist. He and I had a conversation about his book, The Accidental Superpower, which was featured in the U.S. Navy Reading Program. Peter shared his insights for using geopolitics to makes sense of a changing world, investing your money to make sure that it grows even in a changing world, and his take on who will be using nuclear weapons in the future.

below is the transcript of our conversation, it can also be heard here

Brendan Carr: 00:23 So Peter, how did you become a geopolitical strategist? Because that’s a little different than the jobs that I saw in my parents and my friends’ parents growing up.

Peter Zeihan: 00:31 My background is in geography and political science and economic development. I’ve always been interested in why things are the way they are and why they work the way they do. And after doing about a half a dozen jobs in the political sphere from the local to the international level, I was struck by just how tedious it could all be. And so I was getting ready to go back to school, but a friend of mine from grad school sent me a website for a place called Stratfor that he said, “You know, these guys think kind of like you do.” And I picked up the website and I read through some of their stuff, and they thought geographically, but it was very clear that everybody in their shop had a military background and they really needed somebody to do kind of the plumbing, if you will, of how economically things fit together.

Peter Zeihan: 01:17 So I found a couple of really glaring errors, and I wrote in and I said, “Just so you know, I love what you do, I love the way you think, but it’s A and not B and X and not Y.” And I got a really bitchy response from the founder of the company, who basically said, “If you think you can do it better, punk, give it a shot.” So I sent in a submission, and two weeks later I was interviewing, and a month later I had moved to Austin and was working for Stratfor.

Brendan Carr: 01:40 Whoa. So it turned pretty suddenly for you. And what were the political interests that you were working on before that, Peter?

Peter Zeihan: 01:46 Oh, sure. I had worked for local and state legislature. I had had a job for a think tank DC. I did a brief stint with the state department. And for the most part, none of it really fit for me. The issue that I have is that geopolitics, which is the intersection of geography and everything else, politics, psychology, economics, finance, you name it. It’s something that in the United States has been dropped. The issue before World War II, the world worked differently, the world worked geopolitically, and that led to a series of cataclysmic wars, as all the empires clashed.

Peter Zeihan: 02:24 With the World War II system … Excuse me. Let me rephrase that. World War II brought the entire system crashing down. All the empires basically died, and the Americans designed a new economic structure from which to manage the global system. We call that Bretton Woods. And the basic idea was that we will subsidize your systems, we will patrol the oceans for everyone, we will guarantee all of your security so long as you are on our side versus the [inaudible 00:02:50].

Peter Zeihan: 02:51 We basically told everyone in the world that geography no longer matters, because we will take care of it. And so countries that lacked a good geography and didn’t have navigable rivers, didn’t have large chunks of arable land so they could feed themselves, all of a sudden could participate in the global network that they didn’t have to fight for. That created the wold that we understand, the world that we live in now. But it also meant that geopolitical studies kind of fell by the wayside, because if there is no operational difference on the international scene between a mountain and a swamp and a river and a coastline and a plain, then why study it.

Peter Zeihan: 03:27 So my background in economic development honestly gave me an angle into international politics that had pretty much been dropped for the last 70 years. Of course, you may have noticed that the global system is starting to break down now and it’s coming back into vogue, which is, of course, great for me.

Brendan Carr: 03:44 Definitely. And in your books you spell out just how specifically the Bretton Woods system and geography have shaped the entire world. Could you tell us more about that, Peter?

Peter Zeihan: 03:55 Well, most people, when they think about Bretton Woods at all, they think of the gold standard and the rise of US dollars, the dominant currency, and that’s definitely in the Bretton Woods system. But from my point of view, that’s not the context that really gives the Bretton Woods system its bulk and it’s function. It was a straight up butter-for-guns swap: “We will pay you to be on our side.” And that led to the greatest explosion of economic activity in world history and created the greatest military alliance humanity has ever known, and it has been a really good seven decades. But the Cold War ended back in 1992, technically 1989, so the union fell apart in 1992, and we never updated the system. The only president that we’ve had that has attempted to do that update was George Herbert Walker Bush. But Americans were not sufficiently impressed with the end of the Cold to reward him with a second term, so his efforts were not completed.

Peter Zeihan: 04:54 And then the successors that we’ve had since … first, Clinton basically wasn’t all that enthusiastic about foreign policy. He kind of studied for the test the night before and kicked the summit out of the park, but then go back to doing domestic politics the next day. George W. Bush had a monochromatic foreign policy. Obama basically didn’t have one. Now Donal Trump is taking a wrecking ball to what’s left.

Peter Zeihan: 05:17 These four presidents all, in my opinion, fall into the same bucket in that they knew the global system needed changing but were not interested in doing it in a constructive way. So the first three broadly ignored it, and Donal Trump is actually destroying it. But this is the logical conclusion of the road we’ve been on now for 30 years.

Brendan Carr: 05:38 Okay, got it. So what updates to that system, then, would you recommend, Peter?

Peter Zeihan: 05:42 Oh, if I were king for a day?

Brendan Carr: 05:44 Yeah. Teach us your ways.

Peter Zeihan: 05:46 Well, the first obstacle that needs to be overcome is actually at the domestic level. We as a country have not yet had an open, honest national conversation about what we want out of the world. And to do that, the political parties have to be functional. Both political parties, unfortunately, are going through a period of internal discussion, factional maneuvering, and dislocation that is fairly normal in American politics. It happens every 50 to 70 years, where a party completely breaks down, the factions scatter, new factions come together to make a new party.

Peter Zeihan: 06:21 The last time we did that in this country was the 1930s, and it took about 12 years for the parties to settle on the form that we’re in now. Unfortunately, we’re only in the first or second year of that process now, and it’s not going to complete any time soon. Until then, Congress is a mess, the presidency is unmoored, and it’s very hard for us as a country to have a conversation about what we want. And until we know what we want, we can’t have a foreign policy that means anything. So step one, fix the party system, have the conversation, figure out our goal.

Peter Zeihan: 06:52 Step two, again, if I were king for a day, is I would bring together what I call the friends and family plan, the countries that are so tightly knit into the United States either economically, culturally, or politically, that it’s very easy for us to kind of have a common view of the rest of the world. That’s Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, probably Mexico, and maybe a couple others. It’s a very tight group.

Peter Zeihan: 07:23 And once we make our pitch to these countries, we then go out to the next group, countries that are not strategically complicated, that would be fairly easy to bring because they don’t necessarily need a lot. We don’t necessarily have to offer them a lot to join the system. That’s France, that’s Japan. That might be India. That’s Thailand. That’s a lot of Southeast Asia.

Peter Zeihan: 07:48 And then if you can have agreement on that kind of double circle, then you can present to everybody else as a take-it-or-leave-it. That’s when you go to countries like China or Germany or Korea or Russia, and see if they’re interested. But at that point, you already have a strong enough block of countries that it would work, anyway.

Peter Zeihan: 08:04 First step, we’ve got to figure out what we want first.

Brendan Carr: 08:08 Got it. So you would suggest that we first take a hard look at ourselves, get our own stuff taken care of, then get with our friends, and then go out to the world at large. And I love that philosophy so much, because that’s a lot of my own personal philosophy, too, is that I want to take care of myself and get my own stuff straight before I go out and try and affect someone else. I think it’s the best way to make yourself unhappy is to go out and try and change other people, especially when you’re still a mess. So I’m all for that.

Brendan Carr: 08:38 And if people haven’t figured it out already from listening to you, your style is a little irreverent and pretty funny, even in your writing. How do you work humor into a serious topic like geopolitics?

Peter Zeihan: 08:51 I’m basically talking about the end of the world as we know it, and so I have a choice between just being dour and depressed, or focusing on what in my opinion is of most interest to the people who happen to be in most of the rooms that I’m in. The United States comes through this looking pretty good. United States has the largest chunk of high-quality arable land in the world, we’ve got the most navigable waterways in the world. We basically have the best part of a continent to ourselves, and there’s ocean motes between us and everyone else.

Peter Zeihan: 09:18 You cannot conquer the United States from the outside. I don’t want to say that the United States is for forever, but until we have a fairly significant change in the technology of transport, United States is large- … and that means as this global system breaks down, the US is the country that’s going to suffer the least. Remember that for the Americans, trade was how we subsidized the global system. We never actually integrated with the global system economically, so if it falls apart, we’re more or less okay.

Peter Zeihan: 09:50 Now, in my opinion, it would be good to get the politics of NAFTA right, because we actually do trade with our immediate neighbors, but for the rest of the world, meh. Once you kind of come to that conclusion that yes, it’s going to be a really dark night but there’s a really bright light in the middle of it, and that bright light happens to be where you live, some of the pressure is off.

Peter Zeihan: 10:09 The world is dark, but honestly, if you look at why things are the way that they are right now, it’s kind of hilarious. There are so many strange things happening in the global system right now that could have never happened under any scenario except for the final days of Bretton Woods. Thinking of the Chinese as a superpower, if you know Chinese history, is one of the most ridiculous things that any historian before 20 years ago would have ever thought of. China’s only been integrated into a single entity for like 300 years of its 3,000 years of history, and half of that was under the Mongol occupation. So to have this paranoid delusion in the United States that China is the next superpower is just funny.

Brendan Carr: 10:54 Yes. And that really shows through in your writing, where you make a case for why the US is so strong, but what do you think are some of our weakness as a country?

Peter Zeihan: 11:05 Oh, the United States is not invulnerable. I don’t mean to suggest that it is. And there’s a thousand things that we could do differently in the international scene that would make us a stronger and more secure place. If you just want to pick something domestically really quick, the Bill Clinton administration succeeded in balancing the budget. That was then blown up by both the George W. Bush administration and the Obama administration, and it looks like Donald Trump is doing his best to out-Obama Obama.

Peter Zeihan: 11:32 If we had been able to hold the line on the Clinton program, the United States economy would be at least 40% larger today than it was then, and we would have already paid for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, for the entirety of the baby boomer retirement. Our choices have consequences. My point is that the United States has so much wiggle room strategically in the world that we can make mistakes like this. Other countries make mistakes like this, they cease being countries.

Brendan Carr: 12:01 Yeah. And for us who have grown up as Americans, it’s hard to imagine a reality like that, that is so harsh.

Brendan Carr: 12:08 Peter, I’m amazed at how you tackle these problems that are so complex. I’m trained as a physiologist, so I’m trained in the workings of the body, and I can tell someone how their heart is going to work, but if they take a deep breath or have a glass of water, everything changes. So how do you deal with things that change on a global level, things that change with the weather, with population, with food availability? How do you tackle a big, complicated research problem?

Peter Zeihan: 12:35 Well, first I cheat a little bit. When I was at Stratfor, it was my job to kind of synthesize what everybody else did, so there was always a Europe analyst who knew more about Europe and an energy analyst who knew more about energy. But I was usually the guy who knew the second most about any topic in the room. Didn’t necessarily make me very popular, but it gave me a good way to integrate things into a broader context, so I always kind of play things against that. That’s kind of my backdrop. But really, if you’re looking at the world, there’s only three … How easy is it for you to move things within your system, because if it’s easy, you’ll be rich, and if it’s hard, you’ll probably have a lot of ethnic uprisings and it’ll be difficult to consolidate, versus how easy is it for things to get from the outside to you. Is it easy for you to be invaded? So kind of the perfect scenario is to have a chewy inner section with rivers and plains, and then a really crunchy external section with mountains and oceans. United States kind of has the best of all of that. A country like, I don’t know, the former Republic of Georgia’s kind of a disaster in comparison.

Peter Zeihan: 13:42 So piece one, your geography. How does that shape you? Piece two is demography. People who are in their 20s act differently from people in their 40s and people in their 60s. If you’re in your 60s, odds are you’re not spending a lot of time at spin classes, and odds are if you’re in 20s, you’re not spending a lot of time to find out what the mystery meatloaf of the day is at the retirement home.

Peter Zeihan: 14:03 Once you kind of lay out that in economic terms, you see that young people do most of the spending and drive a consumer-based economy, whereas mature workers do most of the investing, because they have high incomes, but they’ve pretty much bought everything that they need already. It’s the balance between the age groups that determines whether you are a growth economy or an investment economy. And if you can map that out for all the countries in question, you can see where the capital moves. You can see where the trade flows. You can see who has to export because they don’t have enough young people, and that determines overall economic timber and strength. And then the final piece is energy. If you can’t get enough petroleum into your country, good luck doing anything else.

Peter Zeihan: 14:46 So you look at these three factors, and that determines the state of development that a country is in currently and what their flight path happens to be for years to come. And what I’ve basically done over the last decade is done that for all the major countries, and then whenever I’ve got a client who has an interest in a smaller country, we break it out for that country. And after a while, I realize, “You know what? There’s probably a book in here,” and that’s The Accidental Superpower.

Brendan Carr: 15:12 Wow. So you’re doing this analysis on every country, and over the years you’ve built up a repository of this analysis on every country? That’s how it works?

Peter Zeihan: 15:22 That’s how it works, with the occasional migraine.

Brendan Carr: 15:25 And in The Accidental Superpower, you talk about how our changing geography and demographics are shaping the world, especially the demographics that you were just hitting on a little bit. Could you dig into that a bit deeper for us?

Peter Zeihan: 15:37 Yeah, sure. Well, we all know about the baby boomer retirement, and we all know about all the financial and governmental problems that it’s going to cause. When they stop paying taxes when they retire, they’re going to be drawing benefits. It’s going to turn government finances inside out. All of that is true. I don’t mean to suggest for a heartbeat that it’s not.

Peter Zeihan: 15:56 But, our baby boomers are different from everybody else’s baby boomers in two important ways. First of all, they actually had kids. Those are the millennials. And there are a lot of us who are over the age of 38 who don’t think very highly of the millennials, but thank God they’re there, because they are the consumption base of the future and they are the tax base of the future. Our baby boomers are a big financial burden, but we will get through this, because there’s a replacement generation coming up below. No one else has that. There’s a few countries that have some, the French, the New Zealanders, but really, that’s about it. And it is not a problem that is limited to the rich world. The Chinese actually have the world’s fourth fastest aging demography because of the one-child policy. So that’s factor one, the baby boomers had kids.

Peter Zeihan: 16:49 Factor number two, as the proportion of the population in the United States, the baby boomers are actually the smallest of their cadre compared to their international compatriots. There’s just more British baby boomers and German baby boomers and Japanese baby boomers. So the problem we have is real, but it’s temporary, and it’s manageable. The problem everyone else has is permanent, and it’s catastrophic.

Peter Zeihan: 17:16 Countries of the world, just to name a few real quick, South Korea, China, Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain. They have the largest work force and the largest tax base that they are ever going to have right now. It shrinks every year from now on. And with the exception of Spain and Britain, every country on that list is already past the point of possible demographic regeneration. These are terminal countries.

Brendan Carr: 17:46 Terminal countries, what a phrase.

Brendan Carr: 17:50 So with all that in mind and your economic background, where do you invest your money?

Peter Zeihan: 17:57 Let me start by saying I’m not a financial advisor, so take this for what it is. There aren’t a lot of foreign assets that I am really excited about, largely because I see a lot these markets going to zero as their political systems fall apart. So like if you were invested in the stock market in the Soviet Union, not that they really had one, but when the Soviet Union fell apart, you would have lost everything, and I see that happening in a lot of markets around the world, but China’s probably my biggest red flashing danger sign.

Peter Zeihan: 18:28 I look for things that are housed in the United States that are dependent upon consumption, preferably in the United States, because the United States has a positive and growing demographic, so you can expect to see steady growth out of these plays over years and decades. The second thing I look for are things that are energy intensive. I’m not big on investing into energy production, because that exposes you to a lot of risk in places that might be not all that safe, but mostly because the Shale Revolution in the United States has pushed down the cost of producing crude so much that everybody’s in a race to the bottom in terms of costs. It’s very cut-throat. Profits tend to be pretty thin. So I’d rather be the person using the energy that is produced rather than producing the energy.

Peter Zeihan: 19:22 So if you’re in pipelines, if you’re downstream, that makes more sense. And anyplace where those two happen to intersect with an industry that can also tap an international market for something that is rare, that’s kind of the trifecta. So for example, refining looks great. It uses artificially cheap American crude. It’s high quality and low cost. Processes it into a finished good and sends it out into the wider world where there’s a shortage. From my point of view, as the global system breaks down, you cannot not make money with something like that. Closer to home, anything that’s energy intensive and consumer driven, that’s pulp and paper, that’s water purification, transport, that’s plastics. There’s a lot of options up there where these two things intersect.

Brendan Carr: 20:08 Got it. So not a financial advisor, but a futurist, and you’re saying to capitalize on the Shale Revolution, find things that are going to make money on that cheap source of energy. Nice.

Brendan Carr: 20:18 So we polled our community for some questions for you, and this one comes from Red Ray 404. He asks, “What about nuclear weapons? Sure, Fortress America is secure, but ICBMs exist. Is mutually assured destruction enough for our security?”

Peter Zeihan: 20:33 Anyone who wants to pick a nuclear fight with the United States that is not a pure power is simply flirting with personal Armageddon, and I think everybody realizes that. The North Koreans certainly have made that almost publicly known with the summit. The only countries that the United States needs to worry about nukes are peer countries, and when I say “peer,” I mean peer in terms of arsenal, and that is exactly one country. That’s Russia. And that is a reason enough in my opinion for the Americans to make sure that we never allow relations with the Russians to sink too low.

Peter Zeihan: 21:09 The Russian demographic and economic situation is tragic, and the Russians will probably cease to exist as a country within the next 40 years. You do not want to be the country that they lash out at, rather than going quietly into the night. So in my opinion, our current relations with Russia actually … Our relations with Russian under the last two presidents has been criminally mishandled, and that is something that in my opinion needs to improve.

Peter Zeihan: 21:41 But for everybody else, the United States is not a peer power compared to them. They are more consumed with issues in their neighborhood, and there is no advantage in a world where the United States is no longer maintaining global security and going out and picking a fight with an expeditionary power that has 10 aircraft carriers and 3,000 deliverable nuclear warheads, who happens to be on the other side of the planet and just really doesn’t care about you. Why pick that fight?

Peter Zeihan: 22:10 And so as the United States withdraws, we’re not going to be containing the Chinese, but the Japanese will. We’re not going to be containing Iran, but the Saudis and the Turks will. Nukes are likely to be used, but they are not likely to be used on us, because all that does is guarantee your country’s complete destruction. Mad only works when there’s parody, and no one has parody with the United States except Russia.

Peter Zeihan: 22:40 Now, the countries that are likely to use nukes probably aren’t the list that you’re thinking. You use nuclear weapons when you are in a fight you can’t win conventionally. That’s not Iran. That’s not China. That’s Japan, that’s Korea, that’s Saudi Arabia, that’s Ukraine, that’s Sweden. So we need to rethink how we process the nuclear with, because most of the places where I expect nukes to be used are not the folks that Americans are traditionally concerned about. We’re concerned about the countries that we’re concerned about right now because we’re maintaining global order, and that means we have to stand up to the local regional powers, who happen to be for whatever reason preventing the global order from working. And today, that might be China. That certainly is Iran. But those days are coming to a close very, very quickly.

Peter Zeihan: 23:32 I think that the best example to kind of highlight that is what’s going on with North Korea right now. I don’t mean to suggest that the Trump-Kim Summit of last weekend is the end-all, be-all. There’s a long way ahead of us. But we’ve already seen some very real commitments from the North Koreans in terms of practical disarmament steps. But you’ll note that those steps have nothing to do with the nukes; it has to do with the missile program. The United States really doesn’t care if North Korea has nuclear missiles that can only be delivered a few hundred kilometers. We just want to make sure they get rid of their missiles so it can’t hit North America. So this now is a Chinese, South Korean, Japanese problem. And in a world where the United States is not maintaining the global order, that’s a success.

Brendan Carr: 24:16 Wow. You have such a knack for making those important distinctions, and that’s crucial to understanding these real situations.

Brendan Carr: 24:24 This next one comes from Mr. Walleye, and this one would lead into some discussion about your third and fourth books that I know are coming up. Mr. Walleye asks, “Since the printing of his first book, how have things changed for the key nations outlined?’

Peter Zeihan: 24:37 Well, that’s … Yeah, we can go into all kinds of things. Well, first of all, there is a second book out. The Accidental Superpower came out originally 2014, and then two years later, the Absent Superpower came out. And in Absent, we start with the premise that we began in Accidental with the global systems breaking down. We go a lot more deeply into the Shale Revolution, and we play that forward to show how the major military conflicts are going to erupt around the world. And so that is a war in the Persian Gulf between Saudis and the Iranians, that’s a war in the Eurasian fringe between the Russians on one side and an alliance of Germans, Pols, and Scandinavians and the Brits on the other side, and then a final naval conflict among the four powers of Northeast Asia, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and China, as they desperately try and ultimately fail to keep themselves fueled in an environment where Middle Eastern and Russian crude is a lot harder to come by. So that’s kind of the next big piece that’s all forecast.

Peter Zeihan: 25:36 As for things that have changed, I have been a little surprised by how fast the system’s broken down. Barack Obama was president when the first couple of books came out, and I really did expect him to do more to at least mouth some commitments to the global order. But in the end it was almost like he didn’t want to have conversations with people, and so he would see something and he would back away from it, which leads to this weird distinction between Trump and Obama. Obama gave a few interviews in his final year as president, where it became very clear that he really deeply understood how everything worked, why the Chinese had the economic system they did, why the Russians were intervening in the elections, why solar energy can’t work without a backup, what a good tax policy would look like. He really understood where all the pieces were and how they fit together. He just didn’t care enough to have a policy on any of them.

Peter Zeihan: 26:35 With Trump, we get the exact opposite, almost an allergenic rejection of context and understanding, but an absolute commitment to have a policy on something. I’m not sure what’s worse, knowing and not caring, or caring and not knowing. That’s where we are with American foreign policy today. And that has forced other countries to on a much more timetable take matters into their own hands. That’s part of the logic of DRexit. I always believed that the European Union would fall apart. I never really considered that the Brits might leave before that happens. That’s part of what’s going on with the Chinese rise. They are trying to smack as much development as they can while the United States is still providing global security, because they know the day that that ends, everything falls apart.

Peter Zeihan: 27:27 What has been surprising from my point of view is not how aggressive the Chinese have been, but how reserved [Je 00:27:35] himself has been, ’cause he’s actually come to these summits with the Trump administration almost on his knees begging the Americans to not move too quickly, and as a result has been very cooperative with a lot of biparti- … or excuse me, a lot of … what’s the would I’m looking for … bilateral issues with North Korea at the top of that list.

Peter Zeihan: 27:55 But everywhere else, it’s almost like people are holding their breath and waiting for the whole thing to fall apart. They may be doing it because they think the United States is done and they don’t know what’s next. I don’t think they necessarily have really internalized the disaster that’s coming, but I think everybody realizes we’re at a moment of change.

Peter Zeihan: 28:13 One of my upcoming books, which is a present unnamed, is going to be looking at the countries who are going to do very well out of this new broken global order, the countries that don’t need the global order, that actually have the ability to survive and thrive on their local resources and actually have the capacity to reach out and reshape their neighborhoods. There’s only four of them aside from the United States, and that’s Japan, Turkey, France, and Argentina. They’re going to be the country of the future.

Brendan Carr: 28:42 Wow. Before I ask my final question, Peter, where should our audience go to find you online?

Peter Zeihan: 28:50 Zeihan.com is the website. Once you get there, you can sign up for the newsletter. We currently have a multi-part newsletter going on in the aftermath of the G7 Summit. We’re about halfway through right now. We’re basically laying out what all of the individual countries that are part of the G7, the core American allies, are going to do in a world without America.

Brendan Carr: 29:12 Awesome. Look for that at zeihan.com. That’s spelled Z-E-I-H-A-N, zeihan.com.

Brendan Carr: 29:22 Peter, my last question. If you were talking to a young navy leader, someone who wants to understand geopolitics, someone who wants to use that information to make better decisions, what advice would you give them?

Peter Zeihan: 29:33 Read. Read everything. You need to understand why the world is in the shape that it’s in, and as it’s breaking down, that is very, very difficult. So start with the basics. Learn geography. Learn why it is the way it is. Why do we have a navy in the first place? And the advantage of being able to visit military force upon a country half a world away and then be gone the next day is monumental in a period when global stability is the norm. In the world where instability is the norm, it becomes absolutely essential. I have no doubt that the navy is going to be the only branch in the military that matters for a good long time.

Brendan Carr: 30:10 Incredible. Peter, thank you so much for coming on the show. Ladies and gentlemen, that is Peter Zeihan, geopolitical strategist, futurist, and author of The Accidental Superpower, which is featured in the navy reading program. And if you want to help us get more great guests like this on the show, then be sure to give us a review on iTunes, and we’ll catch you next time.

You can also listen to the conversation here.