Welcome to The Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund, hosted by Mitch Daniels. We welcome our audience to the latest installment of The Future of Liberty, a podcast sponsored by the Liberty Fund, an organization committed now for seven decades to the preservation and promotion of the texts and the best that has been said and written about human freedom and dignity. We've had some tremendous guests on this podcast, but none I've been more grateful to or excited about than today's. Walter Russell Mead, scholar, author, noted historian for a long time, has in recent years become, in my judgment, the most persuasive and probably the most cosmopolitan commentator on world events through his columns in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. And if today's media environment doesn't allow any one person to become, let's say, today's Walter Lippman, but if it did, I'd be talking to him right now. Welcome to our podcast, Dr. Mead. Well, thank you so much for having me on. It's a real privilege. Let me start by asking you a question with its roots in history. we've seen the continuation, or maybe it's the resumption of a very old debate about the role of the U.S. in the world. Are we simply to be an example of liberty or its promoter from George Washington to John Quincy Adams to Woodrow Wilson to JFK? We've oscillated between what is sometimes called isolationism, interventionism, some say realism, which is a label which has occasionally been attached to you. How would you describe today's, before we make any normative judgments, how would you describe today's role of the U.S. in the world? Right. Well, great question. And like a lot of great questions, it's hard to answer. It's easier to ask it than to answer. But But I guess looking back at history to begin with, the U.S. has both, you know, I think the most important thing we can do for the rest of the world is, in fact, to be an example of a free society that works here at home. And by that works, I don't just mean produces a good GDP and, you know, an ever growing pile of consumer goods, but that produces men and women who have the strength of character and ideals and purpose to maintain a free society. because without a certain degree of virtue, freedom simply will not continue. And so that historical test is something I think that in every generation, Americans need to succeed at both for our own good and for the purposes of demonstrating to the world that it is possible. And that if we're not doing that, no matter what else we're doing, we're not going to be particularly effective at promoting liberty. But it is also true that the opposition that some people claim to see between our ideals and our self-interests, I think that is often overstated. I do think George W. Bush maybe went a little far in his second inaugural when he said, there is no difference between our interests and our principles. They are the same. That in real life turns out to be a line you just can't walk. But I do think that if you ask yourself, what does America want from the rest of the world in terms of our own security and prosperity? These interests are actually linked to the freedoms of other peoples and countries. That is to say, it is bad for us if a single power dominates Europe. It is bad for us if a single power dominates Asia. So what does that mean? It means that America's interests want to see the liberty of people in Europe, the liberty of people in Asia to live their own lives in the way that they would like to. So there's a kind of an objective link between American national interests and a world that is, if not perfectly free with flourishing democracies everywhere, a world in which the right of self-determination by peoples is being upheld and defended. And so it means that in moments like now, say, when China is seen as a threat to the freedom of other countries in Asia, those countries naturally turn to us as somebody who has a stake in the same problem that they confront. It's sometimes been said that the, if I can call it a mission or the example anyway, that you just described is noble. It's sometimes been often been extended. Madeleine Albright or someone coined the term the essential power. Are we essential in the in the world beyond our own interests? And if so, what does that mean these days? Right. Well, I think she was speaking at, you know, what they Charles Krauthammer called. the unipolar moment when after the fall of the Soviet Union and before the rise of China, America was a sort of dominant in the way that we were kind of right after 1945, when the rest of the world had been ruined by World War II, and we'd been enriched by it perversely. So I think something that you might have said in 1993 or 94 is not going to be applicable necessarily. But I will say this, I think without America's investment and engagement in this idea of liberty for nations that then create a balance of power that favors our security, I am not sure that the Europeans could have defeated Nazi Germany without us. In fact, I don't think they could. I Japan might not have been defeated without our help, the Soviet Union. So our role is. It is I is at certain moments a necessary one for the preservation of any kind of international freedom. And we need to be aware of that. I think we shouldn't be too puffed up in vain about it that, you know, and sort of prance around the world boasting of our, you know, you all need us and we are the greatest and you should all sit in the back seat. That's generally not a great way to get things done. Yeah. Well, you, among others, have cautioned that it's not unthinkable that we might have to play that role again, that events could force that. We'll come to that maybe here in a few minutes. Well, let's prance around the world if you're willing to, because, again, there's no one I can invite on this program better equipped to do that. China's the natural place to start. How would you describe their, I guess I'll say President Xi's, ultimate goals? I remember reading with some reassurance, Henry Kissinger or somewhere many years ago saying, well, China has never really wanted to be a hegemon outside its own part of the world, but they sure act like they'd like to now. Yeah. Well, you know, the world has changed and China's been around for thousands of years. And during most of that time, you couldn't sail across the Pacific if you wanted to. So, right. So China didn't, you know, didn't have a history of wanting to be globally hegemonic, but it had a very strong history of wanting to be hegemonic in everything that it could get to. And so the distinction between China's historically limited regional aspirations and its current more global aspirations is more a function of technology. I mean, the Roman Empire didn't try to conquer North America and South America. They might well have if they'd known they were there and had and had a way to get over there. Yeah. So I do think. Look, I think Xi Jinping genuinely believes two things. One is that a dominant China is the key to global stability, prosperity, and as he might say, harmony. And, you know, that in that sense, China is the indispensable nation. and that the Chinese Communist Party, the security of the power of the Communist Party of China is essential for China to be able to play this global role. And he sees those things as connected. He will not sacrifice the security of Chinese Communist rule for some foreign adventure. He's not going to risk getting overthrown because he's trying to do something in Venezuela. But at the same time, he believes that that by showing that the Chinese Communist Party is able to make China great again, so to speak, he that helps to underwrite the security of communist rule at home. As ominous as their growing power, technological emergence, all of that is, would you rather have his problems or ours? He's not without challenges. Right. Yeah. Look, I think it remains the case that the United States is sort of uniquely blessed among the powers of the world. our resource base, if you compare sort of how much agricultural land we have, if we were forced to live simply on our own resources, on what we have in our own territory, we would be much better off than China faced with that same condition. And our geographical position between Mexico and our 51st state, as I believe the current president regards it, Canada, even when we provoke them, and we often do, they do not threaten us in the way that the neighbors of many other powers threaten them. So we have a certain security in our hemisphere, a prosperity that is underwritten by the natural resources of the continent. And I would also say a flourishing and dynamic social culture of entrepreneurialism, of openness to new technology and change. And that is a kind of trifecta of advantages. The Chinese are not without advantages, but I think I like our place better than I would like theirs. Then to ask you about somebody who claims to feel threatened in his neighborhood, Vladimir Putin. How do you assess his ultimate goals, even beyond the war that he conducting right now Well I think Vladimir Putin wants to make Russia great again You know for him Russia you know preserving Russian civilization Russian power, extending Russia's boundaries. This is in his DNA. He's not a communist. In fact, he hates the communists because he's much more like a 19th century Russian imperialist than he is like a 20th century Soviet communist. I just saw that he and I didn't see the rationale blaming Lenin, you know, in part for the dissolution of the Russian Empire. I mean, I have to go back and look. Lenin gave some up temporarily, but he reclaimed it after the communist power. What Putin didn't like was that Lenin tried to build the national consciousness of some of the minorities in the Russian Empire. So the whole thing of like dividing the empire. So there's a republic of Armenia, a republic of Georgia. That was that was a no no for Putin. Maybe it's I don't think it's a common view. It's the common view in Europe, but it's not an unheard view. The prime minister of Estonia said not too long ago, it's not a matter of if Putin will invade a NATO country. It's when. Is that too alarmist? Well, you know, I think, again, with Russia, Kennan, I think George Kennan made the point. And by the way, the key point in his article about Russia, his famous X article or the long telegram, as people have seen, was that, look, our problem with these people is not actually that they are communist. It is that they are Russian. And and he had a very, very thoughtful reasoning behind that. But if, you know, the Russian will probe with the bayonet until it encounters steel resistance, and then it will stop. And so Kennan's idea was first, Kennan did not say you can never make a deal with Russia, you can never reach a mutually beneficial arrangement. but that the precondition for that is showing them, demonstrating that they can't simply increase their power by pushing, whether military or in another way. Only when they've recognized real limits on what they can do, will they then be in a position, will you be in a position to say, OK, now that's your side of the lake, this is my side of the lake, now let's talk about what happens in the lake or whatever. Well, it was only yesterday, it seems, back in that unipolar moment you mentioned, back when that pesky history that ended briefly restarted itself. But, you know, we told ourselves that these countries, having encountered freer capitalist markets and so forth, would inevitably move toward freer political institutions. Instead, we got the opposite. that will, in different circumstances, brought these two strong men to these positions of apparently complete control. Will these systems survive the passing of the two strong men or are they embedded, do you think? Are they maybe more natural in the cultures of those two countries? Well, I think communist parties have demonstrated real reliance in outliving their charismatic founders. So, you know, China has already passed from the death of Mao and the Communist Party rules survive there. Castro, you know, died in Cuba and communism has continued because communism builds a set of institutions. and the people in those institutions want to keep their power. So they tend to band together if the system is threatened. So I would say unless there's some huge catastrophe and Xi kind of perishes as a result of sort of overwhelming social unrest or something, Chinese communist rule is likely to continue after his death or retirement. In Russia, it's a little bit different. There, I think what you see is a kind of modern form of feudalism. And the communists, in a way, were this way. When you have a strong czar, then everything in theory belongs to the state. When you had weak czars like Gorbachev and Yeltsin, what you saw was that the duke of Azerbaijan declares independence. I'm the king of Azerbaijan. So the same guy that ruled Azerbaijan as a communist under the USSR emerges as the ruler of independent, free, non-communist Azerbaijan. And Russian privatization went a lot of the same way that the person who ran the Russian steel industry as a communist minister then emerges to run a privatized steel industry as an oligarch. So Putin is Putin after the weak czar Yeltsin. Putin has become a strong czar. And now to extend in Russia, he does own everything. If he doesn't want you to have something, you lose it. You are exactly as rich or as poor as Vladimir Putin thinks you should be. Now, if his rule is weakened, things in Ukraine, for example, don't go well or whatever, he'd become weaker as a czar. I think we saw some of that with Primakov, sorry, with, you know, the Wagner group's head trying to create it. And Putin crushed it. Yeah. So if Putin might be succeeded by a weak czar or a strong czar, but that system may well continue for a while in Russia. It may, but I was just prepared to ask you that among oligarchs, I mean, there is the prospect of revolt from within. I don't, as far as I can tell, Xi has been very effective in stamping out, particularly people who rose to very prominent economic status. Yeah. Let me ask you this question. Ever since the information technology revolution began, people have speculated as to whether these new technologies would empower people, empower individuals, create greater freedom, or become tools of oppression. When I look at those two countries, and I'm sure there's things I don't see, but in Putin's Russia, I don't see the use of technology effectively to stamp out unrest. The social credit system and things we are watching in China seem to head the other direction. Is it is it possible that that Russia and Putin and his potential successors are more vulnerable? They have not built that particular tool or or institution? Yeah, I think, you know, back in the 1920s, when radio was sort of the hot new medium, everybody used to say, oh, this is going to democratize everything because it will democratize the spread of information. But people like Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini were actually able to harness radio very effectively to control information and to build, you know, increase their hold over their populations. So I think in many ways, the Internet kind of works in that way. To say that technology automatically favors liberty over authoritarianism is not quite true. I think more that what technology does is it turns up the volume on whatever people are doing. It doesn't change the nature of what they're doing as much as we think. So in a free society, the rise of these technologies may actually empower individuals in an effective authoritarianism like Xi's China. They can empower the state. And in a weak or sloppy authoritarian environment, their effect can go either way, depending on the competence and the vision of the ruler. Yeah, this rather interesting book, the fellow's name is Gurry, if I don't mispronounce it, the former CIA analyst, The Revolt of the Publix, I think is the name. His central insight is that when institutions, public or private, lose their monopoly over information, inevitably their authority is undermined. And so we see that all over the world in multiple contexts. But I don't yet see it in Xi's China. And maybe that just substantiates the point you just made. Yeah, it happened for a while early in the Internet. China was more open to information. And, you know, Xi Jinping, one of his, you know, things that he really focused on was building what they call, you know, the great cyber wall of China to seal off that Internet increasingly. Putin has been doing the same thing in many other authoritarian states. North Korea has an Internet now, but you're not going to find anything on that Internet that the Kim dynasty doesn't want you to see. Right. You've written for a long time. You've illuminated a lot of us about events in a part of the world that you just wrote. President Trump hopes will become quiet in the Middle East. actually seemed it was quiet for a little while. Now it's back front and center for various reasons. And so I wanted to ask you, what are the prospects that the Middle East changes in some direction that people like Trump would find encouraging? Well, we should start with the observation that Americans generally think of the Middle East as a problem to be solved. And most Middle Easterners think of it as a reality that must be lived with. And that leads to very different kinds of agendas. I actually think the Middle Easterners understand their region better than we do. I'm surprised. see if you look across the straight into Europe, the monument to the Gallipoli battle, where in World War I, people are fighting in the same place. And I have to say, ever since that experience, I've not been someone who believed that a permanent peaceful order in the Middle East that has not been there for thousands of years is going to miraculously appear during my lifetime I hope it does but I don think it will And I think what we seen is a really that doesn mean that nothing happens in the Middle East and it just changed, you know, is changeless and so on. We've, in the last couple of years, we've seen something very dramatic, essentially a kind of a proxy war between Israel and Iran. And by and large, Israel has won that war. You know, the Houthis are still around, but Hezbollah and Hamas have really been crushed. They'll survive probably because it's it's hard to pull up, you know, like kudzu. There's some things that it's just hard to get rid of once and for all. But they've been seriously weakened. Iran has lost its control in Syria. Its position in Iraq is weaker than it was. And there were some, I think, both in the U.S. and in Israel who thought, wow, if we could beat Iran, then everything will be great. But what we're seeing now, for example, is that Saudi Arabia, which at one point was seriously considering normalization with Israel, is less interested now. And the reason in a way was what was driving the Saudis toward the Israelis was common fear of an opposition to Iran. And if that is less necessary now, thanks to Israel, the Saudis have less reason to pay a sort of political price or any other price to normalize with Israel. So that you solve one set of problems and you don't totally solve them. Hamas is still there. Hezbollah is still there. Iran is still working on the bomb, et cetera, and still hates you. but you deal with at least temporarily one set of problems and another set of problems crops up. And so life in the Middle East, I think, is just going to be one thing after another. So what we have to do and what the Israelis have to do is to intelligently align our policies to both the opportunities and the risks of this new era in Middle Eastern politics that's opening up. You have argued persuasively to many of us that Israel just did what it had to do in Gaza and what it's continuing to do. Now, here's a case of the only democracy, authentic democracy in that entire part of the world, deciding that its interests require it to act in a very brutally suppressive manner. I guess that's what we call realism in in in the world you in which you're a thought leader. Well, you know, I'm I was actually born in South Carolina and folks in the part of the country where I come from still remember this guy, General Sherman. And and we remember that he he burned down a lot of stuff. What I think we also remember is that was the end of the war, essentially. You know, Sherman said, you know, war is hell. And what you got to do is persuade the people you're fighting that war is hell and they need to stop. And so I think, you know, and if you look at American history in the last five months of World War II, American bombs on civilians in Japan killed more civilians than all American military casualties in all our wars going back to the revolution. Yes. One night in Tokyo. Some German civilians, too. Exactly. One night in Tokyo saw more civilian deaths than our total military casualties in Vietnam and Korea. So, you know, it's a little, I would say, if Israelis get annoyed at Americans now wringing our hands and, you know, trying to present ourselves as moral exemplars here, I can understand that feeling. Now, the other side of that, though, is what is your is the goal that you are pursuing attainable through the means that you are pursuing it? And I think the Israelis now are very much divided. OK, what's been done up to now may be necessary. But what does that tell you about what needs to happen tomorrow? And the one thing we know in life is that going on eternally repeating the actions of even the recent past does not always produce the result that you want. So I think Israel is at a moment of really having to rethink. And it's a difficult set of problems. I wish them every success in finding a path. But they are at a very difficult juncture. You recently taught the rest of us about or updated us on events in the continent of Africa. You said pretty definitively that democracies collapsed all over that continent, that our approach to aid has been our approach, the U.S. approach to aid has been a failure. And I think that by extension to Europe and other countries. Does it matter? Should we care? If so, what new policies might be an improvement on what's failed so manifestly? Well, you know, I think we need to look at Africa as it is, not Africa as we would like it to be. And so, you know, if you read some of the media coverage about Africa, it really is, you know, is democracy winning in Africa and so on and so forth. Actually, you know, there is democracy in Africa and I'm all for it and I hope that it grows and succeeds. But I think the latest estimates are something like 10 percent or less of the population lives under Democratic governments and it's not going up. There was, if you want to understand the misguidedness of some of the West Africa policy, during some recent elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo, there were actually stories of helicopters airlifting paper ballots to remote villages for this vote. Now, there were babies dying in those villages who had no medical care, and the helicopters weren't flying babies or doctors. And nobody really believes on the planet that actually that election was anything like what an election would look like in the Netherlands or Spain with well-organized parties for a government that can actually do things. It was kind of just a pretense, a whole thing, a sort of Potemkin village. We need to be thinking much more about the real problems and the real situation in Africa. Some U.S. aid has actually been effective, like PEPFAR, in saving a lot of lives, and that's great. But we need to we need I think the whole sort of democracy promotion agenda in Africa is something that we need to put it put on a shelf for a while and start thinking, OK, all right. You know, China is going after these rare earths and other minerals that are in Africa. How how much does that affect our security and what should we be doing? I look at what Russia has been doing through the Wagner Group in North Africa. I think, gee, we say we're opposed to what the Russians are doing in Ukraine. Maybe what we should be doing in Africa is just making Wagner Group go away. You know, this is I think the United States of America could and with our allies could actually, you know, make mincemeat of Wagner's aspirations. And that would explain to Putin quite clearly there is a price on your Ukraine policy. And that price is that everywhere around the world, everything you try to do is going to fail. So let's think about this, Mr. Putin. And now let's talk again about our political relationship. So I think we have interests in Africa. But I think that the idea that what we're trying to do short term is to turn Africa into Western Europe is just delusional. And a lot of Americans who listen to some of this, you know, and have good hearts and good intentions about Africa, when they hear the sort of Africa lobby supporting ridiculous ideas, then they say, let's just get out of it completely. We don't trust the foreign aid community. We don't trust the Africa lobby community to come up with sensible policy. So let's just not do anything. Well, thank you for that tour of the world dazzling. And I don't know who else could have taken us on it. I am moved to remind you, you have, as far as I know, failed completely to write about Antarctica yet. So we'll await illumination on that score sometime soon. But let's finish by talking about our continent, our nation, in fact, and the state of play and our prospects here. You're one of our great historians. There are many schools of historians who think in terms of cycles or think they identify patterns and repetitions in history, and many are with us now. Many are foreseeing for different reasons a major crisis coming to this country, a crisis of the kind that can either extinguish liberty or somehow revive it on the backside. you know, is a wrenching crisis likely in this country? And if so, what would it what would cause it? Well, let me say, first of all, that I think we can talk about the crisis in our country without needing to sort of gin up a whole set of historical cycles and stuff. You know, I think I think we just benefit by looking at our current situation. And what I would say is that we are very much going through an economic transformation of our country as big as the Industrial Revolution. You know, say that after the Civil War, when the railroads and you're building huge steel factories and really just changing the way the country works. And people after the Civil War in the U.S., they didn't have like they didn't understand. I mean, even how do you keep clean water in a city of 5 million people, where before that the United States had not had really big cities in the modern term? And now you've got Chicago going from a bunch of prairie flats to a major world city in the space of 30 years. I mean, how do you keep it from burning down, for example? You know, does Mrs. O'Leary really need to keep a cow in the middle of a wooden city, right? But how do you stop diseases? How do you educate millions of children whose parents come from outside the United States? What do you do about economic cycles and credit cycles that suddenly, in the old days when you had a problem people would go back to the farm and live with their families until things stabilized Well no farms and not enough places on them et cetera So all of this stuff And our institutions weren't set up to deal with this emerging reality, our ideas, our political parties. And so we went through 30, you think about it, from the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to the assassination of William McKinley. The United States really didn't know where we were going. Can we think of a president in that era or a law or a senator in that era who had that clear vision? Now, afterwards, we began to adjust. And beginning with Teddy Roosevelt and going on, we started developing institutions and ideas for how do you manage this new set of social conditions, we learn to use the resources that the Industrial Revolution created to address the problems that it caused. We are now at a similar point with the emergence of social media, AI, various other kinds of IT. They changed the way our country works. And most of our ideas were developed for that old industrial era. And so I think there is no way we avoid going through a period when, in a sense, our system of government, our political ideologies and so on fit uneasily on the reality of this, on this horse that is galloping into the future. So that, I think, is clear. And ultimately, I really am an optimist in that I believe that at the far side of this is greater abundance, greater individual freedom, greater individual opportunity. And I and I look back to that earlier period. By the time McKinley was assassinated, the United States had built the greatest economy in the world, even though our government flubbed almost every big question that it was asked to solve for 30 years. So I think it's always been the dynamism of American society rather than the smooth functioning of our institutions that has kept us on the path. And this I see that there as much or even more than ever. And that makes me ultimately optimistic, though it also makes me think we need to keep our seat belt buckled for the next portion of the ride. Bumpy air ahead. I hope that's right. Far be it from me to argue history with the nation's expert, but our government has taken on to itself a lot of tasks in the days since McKinley was elected that could get in the way of the dynamism, which I agree with you was our magic formula for so very long. Well, let me just ask you this penultimate question, I guess. Here are some threats to liberty that we've talked about or at least touched on here. Pick out the ones that should trouble us the most or rank them at all, if you will. I'll just name six or seven. And so China, Russia, war of some kind, whether it's with them or other wars have tended to empower states, nation states and all the rest. Domestic illiberalism, either of the left or the right. AI as a potential superintelligence that might rather quickly decide that, you know, we're dispensable. or fiscal or fiscal collapse, economic collapse, all much, much being discussed these days. Which of those should we be most watchful about? Are there a couple on that list? Don't bother you at all. All right. Yeah, I think probably not just war, but the approach to war. I think I would put there as number one, because we, God willing, we will not go into another major international conflict. But it already looks to me as if we are in the equivalent of a Cold War with China. And so, for example, on things like, you know, how fast do we proceed with AI and so on? It's not just up to us in terms of what would make me happiest about AI. But if we don't develop it and China does, where does that leave us? So already, to a certain extent, the international competition is taking some choices out of our hands. And that may exacerbate some of our other problems. But you still you have to attend to business. So I do see that as as an immediate and and severe threat. I'm actually a little bit less worried about AI taking over everything, in part because I don't want to say anything bad about Amazon here, but I use Amazon quite a bit for purchasing and so on. And I look at the books and the music that it recommends for me, and it's not that good. It's not that good. And honestly, if AI, and I'm sure they invest a lot of money, And that's the kind of place where AI really gets deployed. And they're not that good at predicting my preferences or whatever. So I would say the gap between the almighty AI that we all worry about and what actually the technology can do now is less. I would say both in some ways domestically, the biggest danger and the biggest opportunity seem to me to be connected. because let's talk about Medicare and Medicaid, which I think are the great drivers of our financial problems. That is, if the only thing we had to worry about was keeping Social Security solvent and these other programs were fine, we could keep Social Security solvent forever, basically. As somebody said, that's the easy one. Ironically, that's the easy one. And if you if you took out the others, you could fix it in a very painless way, actually. Yeah. But it's the fact that, you know, but and fundamentally, you know, Medicare and Medicaid, I think we we we don't need to see them as problems of arithmetic, but problems of service delivery. I ask myself, what will health care likely look like in 50 years? And I think it's actually going to look a little bit like this, less, you know, a human doctor who's been trained very expensively and so on. It's going to be a flight attendant with a smart box in a sense where the most of the knowledge, overwhelming preponderance of the knowledge is going to be in the medical system, computers, AI, generators, whatever. Right. And the human part of the medical profession is going to be helping us understand what's happening and feel good about it, about what's happening and comply with whatever it is that that we need to do. And that system is likely to be almost infinitely better because of the amount of knowledge and individualization that you can get with those technologies and much, much cheaper to operate because even a very good flight attendant doesn't need all the training and so on. Now, there will still be a handful of great human experts and so on in the system. Computers don't replace that. Now, that system would be affordable. And so when we think about Medicare reform and so on, to try to get into an argument about, you know, how do we chop and chip here and there, you get a lot of political resistance to any kind of cuts. Can we think instead about how do we build what I call the infrastructure, not infrastructure, but infrastructure that can get us closer to that much better and cheaper health care system that would be affordable? And I think if more of the reform discussion went into, no, no, no, you can't have what you want, right, because it's too expensive and was much more, well, let's figure out a way that you can get even more than you now think you're entitled to. And we all pay less for it. I think that that path is the better path. So I'd say whether we as a society are capable of moving in that direction matters hugely, because I don't think you can solve the problem of our the health care we need is going to keep going up and up and up. And our current system delivery, it'll simply become exponentially more expensive to provide it. And a democratic society is basically going to have a really hard time saying, is grandma going to get her cancer medication or are we going to have a big budget deficit? Or are we going to pay taxes that, you know, just completely choke off our economic and personal lives? That discussion is a loser. We need to move to a different kind of discussion. Well, I love and buy into the end state that you described. I think that the question will be whether we can get there nearly in time, whether there's a mismatch in time here and we go broke running the old system on our way long before we can provide the one you described. And so getting people who are good at looking for opportunities to begin reducing costs now. Yeah. Yeah. Is, you know, so that we we want to bring that transition forward. There will still be questions about cuts and how and priorities and all of this. You can't wave a magic wand to make everything go away. But can you get people to a place where they feel that we have a path toward solving this? And it's a long path, but we're already moving in the right direction. I think if you can do that, the spirit in which the country looks at some of these problems starts to change. And that creates more opportunities for progress. Well, Dr. Mead, with your typical impressions, you have anticipated the question I usually end these conversations with, which is, will we be more or less free in 2050? You've expressed optimism, and I certainly hope you're right. But for now, let me just thank you. You are, in my judgment, America's premier thought leader and both the best informed and most wide-ranging person on these questions that we've talked about. And please press on for the benefit of your faithful readers out here. Thank you very much for all the time you've and insight you've shared with us this morning. And thank you all for joining us on this latest Future of Liberty podcast. We'll be back with more. You'll see this one on stream very shortly. Thank you for joining us and see you next time. The Future of Liberty has been brought to you by Liberty Fund, a private educational foundation dedicated to encouraging discussions of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals. Thank you.
