Patrick, for the first time since then, is taking questions on all

of it.

Are you angry at yourself? Do you feel like you failed in some way in this period? Or do you feel like you did the best you could? I think I did the best I could with what I had

What can we expect from the piece on Sunday?

I think the biggest thing is just a portrait of Patrick's life in the aftermath of this incredible tragedy and what it's like to deal with that kind of grief, that kind of unimaginable experience as a father, and then what it means to try and rebuild your life in the shadow of that experience and try and go forward from there.

Why do you think Patrick Clancy wanted to do this interview? I think from the beginning, he's been focused on trying to make sure that the memory of his children stays alive and stays close to the center of this story.

And obviously, there's been so many debates, so much controversy about all of the different issues around this story.

Mental health, you know, marriage, men and women, the medical system, all of these things.

Well, what have you learned about writing persuasively?

I mean, this is banal advice, but it's still the fundamental thing.

It is to argue effectively, you need to understand why people you disagree with hold the views that they do.

And you need to start from a version of their argument that is high-minded rather than low-minded, and that is sort of the best version of the perspective that they hold.

And that doesn't mean that you can't think that like secretly or subconsciously they hold their opinion for bad or wicked reasons or because they wanna, you know, just destroy their enemies and salt the earth.

Like, you can believe that that exists somewhere in their mind.

But to argue with them, you have to actually engage with the version of the argument that they themselves would put forward as their own best defense, right? So like the obvious examples, I'll pick one from the right and one from the left, right? So if you are pro-choice and you want to argue with pro-lifers, like actually argue with them, you cannot start from a description of the pro-life position that says the point of pro-life politics is to subjugate women and punish them for sexual immorality.

It's like the new China, uh, on a smaller level, but like the new China.

Well, what have you learned about writing persuasively?

I mean, this is banal advice, but it's still the fundamental thing.

It is, to argue effectively, you need to understand why people you disagree with hold the views that they do.

And you need to start from a version of their argument that is high-minded rather than low-minded, and it is sort of the best version of the perspective that they hold.

And that doesn't mean that you can't think that, like, secretly or subconsciously they hold their opinion for bad or wicked reasons or because they wanna, you know, just destroy their enemies and salt the earth.

Like, you can believe that that exists somewhere in their mind.

But to argue with them, you have to actually engage with the version of the argument that they themselves would put forward as their own best defense, right? So, like, the obvious examples, I'll pick one from the right and one from the left, right? So if you are pro-choice and you want to argue with pro-lifers, like actually argue with them, you cannot start from a description of the pro-life position that says, "The point of pro-life politics is to subjugate women and punish them for sexual immorality." You're allowed to think that that's out there and, like, is part of, you know, the socially conservative psyche.

It's like the new China, uh, on a smaller level, but like the new China.

A- and again, I think some of that is, uh, i- is probably unintentional, but it's kind of a, it's just part of who he is, that he, he represents something, and the other side gets outraged, and they find themselves becoming more radical and saying more radical things, um, because they can't help themselves, in a way.

I think there's truth to that.

I, I, I mean, and I think it connects to what I was saying earlier about how my own views have changed.

I, I do think Trump has played...

The whole Trump phenomenon has been revelatory in lots of different ways.

Uh, I think it's been negatively revelatory about some of his supporters, but I think it's also been negatively re- revelatory about some of his enemies.

And these range from figures sort of associated with the center and the center-left establishment to sort of the more radical parts of the American left, where Trump sort of tearing things down creates a permission structure in which other people go further and further.

But, uh, is, is there any s- way in which your shared Christian faith can give you, even as you sit on different sides of the political spectrum here, a hope that there is a, a future for, for a, a more unified kind of politics? Let's start with you, Ross.

Mm

... that part of Alex's brain," and so on.

There is this really profound n- As you yourself, I think would agree, difficult to bridge philosophical chasm between the materialist description and what seems to happen to human beings- Hmm ...

in conscious experience.

Um, and I think that alone sort of at the very least sets up a question, which is, you know, in a way w- you could say one of the first religious questions is, what is primary? Mm-hmm.

Mind or matter? Yep.

Right? And we have access to both, and modern science and all of its great achievements are founded on prioritizing the study of matter and what matter does and how matter interacts- Mm ...

Mm

We got tough people here listening.

Well, uh, but I, I don't, I don't know just how, uh, I, I don't know just how strong a word to use right now.

Uh, I mean, I, I would say that there has been essentially a rolling transformation in US public opinion about Israel going back many years, but really, I think accelerating in the last few years, especially later in the war in Gaza, accelerated by a lot of different forces inside the US as well as events in the Middle East.

And then I think the Iran war, which our government didn't wanna call a war, of course, um, essentially brought to a kind of really sharp point the, you know, what had been the critique of the US-Israel relationship in the US for a long time, mostly from the left, sometimes from the right, more from the right lately than before, uh, which is that, you know, the US acts in the Middle East on Israel's behalf.

And I think historically, that critique was relatively weak because people could look around and see that there were just a lot of different forces in play when the US was profoundly involved in the Middle East.

Um, you know, if you go back to something like the Iraq War, Israel's influence was very complicated.

Israeli elite opinion on the wisdom of the Iraq War was divided, and there were just a lot of other, you know, balls that the Bush administration was juggling as it sort of made the case for war and talked itself into the war.

But nevertheless, there's more.

yours.

Again, I've ended up professionally constantly having arguments that I'm underqualified for, but this is the nature of journalism, so I just have to accept it.

One way to look at it is that Well, if we basically create artificial minds that exist in digital substrates and so on, that this just shows that mind was material all along.

We should assume, even if we haven't quite figured out why, that just as a mind can arise from a computer, it can arise from a brain.

We are computational, they are computational, and so on.

And I think a lot of people will sort of default to this view and say it strengthens the case, therefore, for some kind of materialism.

In practice, though, there are several questions raised by that.

on-campus

Why do you think Iran has been that breaking point?

I think it's a combination of the nature of the thing itself and the scale.

So the thing itself is a violation of Trump's promise to not be George W. Bush, and that's a promise that, you know, goes all the way back to the Republican primaries in 2016 when Trump famously criticized the Iraq War, I think on the South Carolina debate stage, and people booed, and people were shocked, and his support was just fine.

And it was like th- that was...

It was a moment when he identified a sort of unspoken part [laughs] of right-wing politics, this sort of not yet articulated recoil against the Bush doctrine, nation-building, the Iraq occupation, all of these things.

Um, and I think especially for people whose, who have sort of made their, made their names as conservative influencers in the Trump era, um, or like Tucker Carlson, have reinvented themselves in some profound way, that idea that Trump was, you know, was not a candidate of military intervention, had...

It's just been really important.

And so I'd just get, like to get your response to the degree to which the economic consequences of this war are a major reason for why it's fractured the Republican Party, and how significant you think Israel's involvement is in making Trump vulnerable to losing elements of his coalition.

So do you think what we're seeing right now on the right is worse than what we saw, the rupture in ninety-two? Because to me, it's many people are hysterical about what's happening within the right, but actually, by my lights, it's, it represents something much smaller than the Buchanan explosion in ninety-two.

I think it depends on what you are most concerned about, but Buchanan is a broad spectrum ofIdeas, right? Trumpism sort of contained within itself a lot of elements of that, like Trump on free trade.

You know, Trump's trade agenda is a victory for Buchananism, right? So depending on where you're looking, you could see Buchananism more ascendant today than then, or less ascendant.

But if we're talking about Israel and antisemitism and the right, I think what is different between now and the early nineteen nineties is that there is a, just a stark generation gap within the right-wing coalition around Israel and around antisemitism, and sort of the zone in between criticism of Israel and antisemitism.

And obviously, like when one becomes the other is contested and up for grabs.

But again, I'm just looking at, you know, this is Pew polling from a few weeks ago, and if you're asking the percentage of Americans who have a very or somewhat unfavorable opinion of Israel, and it's true, it's much, much higher among Democrats than among Republicans.

It is eighty percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners have at least a somewhat unfavorable opinion of Israel, and it's only forty percent of Republicans.

What is the just war concept, and what is going on with Catholicism and young conservatives?

I

think it depends on what you are most concerned about.

But Buchanan is a broad spectrum of ideas.

Right.

You could see Buchananism more ascendant today than then or less ascendant.

But if we're talking about Israel and anti-Semitism and the right, I think what is different between now and the early 1990s is that there is a just a stark generation gap within the right wing coalition around Israel and around anti-Semitism and sort of the zone in between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism and obviously like When one becomes the other is contested and up for grabs.

But again, I'm just looking at, you know, this is Pew polling from a few weeks ago.

What is the just war concept and what is going on with Catholicism and young conservatives?

That's right

... where we will be in terms of strikes, withdrawals, boots on the ground, anything else.

I would say that I, I have a pretty negative view of how the war is going.

I think that the US military has obviously performed admirably and visited all kinds of severe destruction on the Iranians and taken relatively few losses in return.

But I think fundamentally, separate-- You know, there's many levels at which you can analyze this, but I think fundamentally the key thing about this conflict was that it began as a, not as a war against Iran's military infrastructure, but as a decapitation attempt against their regime.

Um, and you can sort of draw these fine distinctions and say, "Oh, well, we were doing the military to-- You know, we were degrading the military infrastructure, and the Israelis were doing the decapitation, and these are different strategies or something." Whatever.

It's one war.

The smartest, most articulate version of this is Chris Caldwell, who I have enormous respect for, but I think he, he had a really flawed piece on this.

[chuckles]

A broad strategic approach.

Uh, I think the most consequential strategic choice the Trump administration has made has been to not just double down, but triple down and quadruple down on a kind of unilateralist style of executive governance, which has had two effects, and it's way too soon to tell which is the most important one.

One effect is to both expand de facto presidential power, to discover new presidential power, to basically put Trump himself in a position of a certain kind of executive dominance that I don't think we've seen since Franklin Roosevelt.

At the same time, that coexists with a failure to instantiate changes through legislation, which was certainly something that FDR was pretty good at, right? That makes it really, really hard to tell how enduring, you know, 80 to 90% of the concrete policy changes of this hyperactive Trump year will be, and I think this extends everywhere from, you know, the budget cuts in DOGE to the Trump administration's struggles with the major universities.

You can go on through the list.

You can encompass immigration policy.

What's your best understanding of what's motivating the president here? [laughing]

Mm-hmm.

... trying to sort of say things that sound reasonable that are maybe closer to what I actually believe.

But, you know, my, my basic view is I am a social conservative in the sense that I think that I'm pro-life on abortion.

I think, you know, in some way, abortion should be restricted.

I think, you know, just to tie into what we were just arguing about, I tend to be fairly socially conservative on issues related to things like drugs and ...

You know, I, I have a kind of ...

I, I think there's a kind of public moralism that's valuable in public policy, and I also think that a society like the United States that has a kind of broadly liberal constitutional framework also benefits from having some kind of broad moral consensus or moral center that people use to litigate and debate controversial questions, and I think for most of American history, this was a form of Protestant Christianity.

Mm-hmm.

Why was that line of argument important to you? And what has been the reaction in the circles in which you travel?

So I think the line of argument was important to me in part because maybe because of a slight limitation on my, you know, the kind of like broad generosity of intellectual spirit that you're kindly attributing to me, right? Which is that, you know, when I think about how my own perspective on the world has changed over my adult lifetime, I would say in many ways I've become less dogmatic with age, less, you know, less certain about my political perspective and also even less certain about, you know, every specific religious claim that I believe in.

I'm a conservative Roman Catholic.

That hasn't changed.

But, you know, the Catholic Church is unsettled.

There's a lot of unsettlement out there.

One place where I've become less unsettled, more dogmatic, is that I just think atheists are wrong.

Why don't you reflect on how it may not just attract new believers but actually strengthen the confidence of existing ones to live out their witness in the public square and to the extent that was a motivation for you.

Mm

... we're in the shadow right now of trends in artificial intelligence that however far they go are likely to kind of ramp up the pressure on human beings as human beings.

And I wrote an essay, I think around the time actually that my book on religion came out, where I suggested that we were in this kind of bottleneck almost, this kind of evolutionary bottleneck, which is maybe more a cultural evolutionary bottleneck, but where there was just gonna be all this pressure on human nations, human cultures, human families, human individuals to sort of figure out how to live under this, you know, very, very novel technological dispensation.

And that a lot of institutions, people, whole countries might not make it through.

That, you know, with extreme examples being, you know, nations in East Asia like South Korea and Taiwan that have incredibly low birth rates to the point where it's unclear how these nations will survive the next fifty or sixty years.

And yeah, I-- So I think that's-- maybe that's a slightly unusual way of putting it, but I think this is a, a widely shared-

Mm.

So you just have to be, I think you just have to be aware of the magnitude of the challenge if you're talking about a purely leisure-based society.

Why don't you talk a bit about why you said yes to the request from Curtis to be the inaugural speaker and what you're going to cover in your lecture?

Well, I mean, I said yes, because I have done things with Cardis in the past.

I've always appreciated my voyages to our, you know, cousinly nation, nation to the north.

And it just seemed like a tremendous honor and opportunity.

So it was an easy, an easy thing to say yes to.

I will say that my plane to Ottawa was turned back.

last night because of fog.

Talk a bit about that tension or debate and how you're thinking about it.

So I'm asking you questions about it.

Christianity does not provide some kind of incredibly strong bulwark against powerful people doing the kinds of things that powerful people do, which means self-interested conquest of various kinds and so on.

What it does provide is an ongoing internal critique that those powerful people have to wrestle with and address in ways that are fairly unique in the historical relationship of power and piety.

So if you look at something like, to take the most famous example maybe, the Spanish conquest of the Americas.

In terms of what is actually done in the course of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, you can find plenty of terrible crimes that you, Ezra Klein, would say, "Well, you know, what good is your religion if your civilization commits these kind of crimes?" But from the very beginning, in Spain itself, in the heart of super Catholic, like, you know, Counter-Reformation era Spain, there's an ongoing and agonizing and sometimes intensely legal and practical, sometimes high level philosophical, theological debate that subjects the behavior of the Spanish conquistadors and others to this kind of sustained critique, and leads to, at various times, sometimes successful, mostly unsuccessful reform efforts driven by the Catholic monarchy of Spain, and ultimately builds out and influences everything from the anti-slavery movement in the 18th and 19th century that's ultimately successful down to, uh, contemporary ideas about human rights and international law that, again, today's secular liberals take for granted as a kind of scripture.

All of that emerges out of the efforts of serious Christians in a context of profound historical temptation and constant sinfulness to sort of generate from within the resources of their religion.

And I think, you know, if you take the Trump administration, for instance, it's not as though you cannot find Christian critiques of Trump administration cruelty.

(laughs)

What's going on here?

I mean, so at one level, what you're talking about is just the phenomenon of how the internet has changed political culture and, and controversy, right? Where again, I have the view that there is sort of always a large degree of conspiratorial thinking about the world and a large range of strange crackpot ideas.

And, and by the way, in calling them crackpot ideas, I'm not ruling out that some of them actually get, get things right, right? But there's, there's always this range out there.

And, you know, the internet has essentially widened the aperture and widened the number of platforms for people to carry on conversations about topics that, you know, in a world with a, um, a more constraining media establishment, those conversations would still be taking place, but they'd be taking place on AM radio at 3:00 AM right? And in, you know, sort of mimeographed newsletters sent around and now there's, there's no control.

And I think there, I think there was an attempt at control that sort of peaked around 2020 where you had this kind of consolidation of media companies, uh, consolidation of power in Silicon Valley.

And there was this sense that, oh, actually maybe the internet, you know, if it allows for a certain kind of, uh, imposition of conformity, right? And this was something that, you know, you had a certain kind of experience with, uh, before you founded The Free Press and that, but that, that moment passed and shattered and cracked up and broke down.

And now here we are in 2025, and every kind of conspiracy theory, every kind of bizarre, paranoid view about the world can find a platform, find an audience.

What do you think is going on here and how do you ultimately think it's gonna play out?

So you write about the emails you get from, um, people who read your New York Times column and, and note that more and more of your secular readers seem, um, quote, "Unhappy with their unbelief." How do you think we arrived at a moment with so many unhappy unbelievers?

I think it's-- One, it's a, it's a combination of a certain kind of inevitable overpromising from some of the people who were the most vehement scourges and critics of religion in the period, you know, ten or fifteen years ago, when we kind of entered into a new era of secularization in American life.

Um, so you can think of the decline of religion in America in the modern era as having two big phases, one immediately after the 1960s and then again starting sometime after September 11th, sometime in the presidency of George W. Bush, right? And the second period was dominated, at least for a little while, by the new atheism, by figures like, you know, Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, many others, who just made really full-throated frontal attacks on religion, um, and made a lot of, you know, really sort of concrete arguments about how the biggest problems in the early twenty-first century world, uh, from, you know, radical Islam abroad to sort of ignor- you know, ignorant fundamentalism at home or something, could just be removed if people stop believing in mythical flying spaghetti monsters and sky daddies and these kind of things, right? And I think we've had a nice run of about, you know, not quite a generation, but a pretty substantial period of time testing is a less religious America a more rational America? Is it a less polarized America? [chuckles] Is it a more optimistic America? Is science held in higher repute now that fewer people go to church? I think we can just look around and say the answer is pretty much no, that the decline of religion in America, maybe it didn't cause some of our present derangements, but it certainly didn't help.

Um, so there, there's that there in the background.

Then I think liberals in particular, um, have, you know, i-in part because of the kind of deep commitment to politics that you're, you know, you describe as having been instilled, uh, in you in your Jesuit education, right? Um, I think liberalism struggles kind of existentially when the arc of history doesn't seem to be going its way, right? It's like, well, you know, there's no God, maybe there's no God, but good news, there is this kind of vision of progress, this sort of unfolding story where, you know, the arc of history bends towards justice and so on.

I think that's a fairly commonplace liberal perspective, and it's just harder to sustain in the era of, you know, a triumphant Donald Trump and a general, you know, a general climate of political turbulence than it was when Barack Obama was ascending to power, right?

Why is it rational to believe in a higher power?

Because the world as it presents itself to us gives a lot of converging lines of evidence that make more sense and make sense of one another, uh, if there's some kind of mind or purpose behind the cosmos.

Yeah.

Timothy Dolan, um, you know, of New York and Blase Cupich of Chicago are not on the same page, generally, about, like, sort of big questions in the Church and so on.

So that, that alone is striking and interesting.

But, uh, yeah, I, I think, I think it's, it's a safe bet right now that whatever he does, whatever his agenda turns out to be, it will be less aggressive and transformative or trying to be transformative than, than Francis's.

I think he has done a bunch of symbolic things that you might call sort of the restoration of normalcy, just in terms of, like, what vestments he wears, right? Like, Francis was sort of flagrant in simplicity, in sort of rejecting normal trappings of the papacy.

And, um, without being sort of a full Latin mass, you know, Kappa Magna guy or something, uh, the new pope has just sort of gone back to what popes normally wear.

He has...

Yeah.

Listening to Vance here, I, I was struck by how much issue he takes with those who question this approach, and really he takes issue with the fact that those who don't recognize the problem as he sees it don't really have much ground to stand on

onIn criticizing these edge cases, as he calls them.

Basically, he seems to see left-leaning critics as unworthy of much engagement around this issue, which just struck me.

Yeah, I think the general administration view is that a lot of the criticisms that they get from Democratic politicians and liberal activists and so on are, if not in bad faith, at least just sort of non-responsive to what they see as the actual problem that they're trying to solve, that the criticisms are basically intended to set up impossible roadblocks, to establish standards of due process that would make it impossible for the Trump administration to deport anyone.

Now, personally, I think it really is true that a lot of critics of the administration's policy basically don't want to deport anyone, or anyone except a few, you know, of the absolute worst cases.

But it's also true that Vance was not exactly being responsive to the question of whether the system itself is going to create abuses, including abuses that could fall upon American citizens, which seems like a l- especially like a live issue, given that the President of the United States floated the idea of sending American criminals to an El Salvadoran prison as well.

So I asked him about this.

That's my understanding of the American people.

That he talked a good game, but he didn't actually change the church in the more liberal direction that many of his most ardent supporters thought he would.

I think the best way to put it is that he created a large zone of ambiguity around Catholic teachings, and this wasn't just about homosexuality or same-sex marriage.

It was also around issues like, uh, divorced and remarried Catholics, whether they should be admitted to communion without getting an annulment.

Um, he opened a debate about whether women could be ordained as deacons and didn't actually settle it.

Um, so he gave, I think in certain ways, uh...... more liberal Catholics a lot more room to argue and maneuver without going all the way to a kind of formal, explicit break in church teaching.

But what that meant in practice was that divisions within the church tended to widen because the more liberal factions in the church saw themselves as having openings that they hadn't had before and wanted to push further, and more conservative factions that had tended, for understandable reasons, always to be very loyal to the Pope, ended up finding themselves in rebellion or near rebellion against him.

So, you know, in a way, you had Catholicism in Subsaharan Africa, for instance, going in one direction in a kind of conservative resistance to the Pope, and Catholicism in a country like Germany where the church is very liberal, trying to push as far as it could in a liberal direction.

But does that mean they're liberal? And how will this play out?

Look, I don't think a thing I'm saying here...... is it gonna convince somebody on the Christian right to turn around their view of Donald Trump? I am genuinely curious how somebody of your politics and your religious background interprets somebody like JD Vance, so I'm asking you questions about it.

Christianity does not provide some kind of incredibly strong bulwark against powerful people doing the kinds of things that powerful people do, which means self-interested conquest of various kinds and so on.

What it does provide is an ongoing internal critique that those powerful people have to wrestle with and address in ways that are fairly unique in the historical relationship of power and piety.

So if you look at something like, to take the most famous example maybe, the Spanish conquest of the Americas.

In terms of what is actually done in the course of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, you can find plenty of terrible crimes that you as a client would say, "Well, you know, what good is your religion if your civilization commits these kind of crimes?" But from the very beginning, in Spain itself, in the heart of super Catholic, like, you know, counter-reformation era Spain, there's an ongoing and agonizing and sometimes intensely legal and practical, sometimes high level philosophical theological debate that subjects the behavior of the Spanish conquistadors and others to this kind of sustained critique, and leads to, at various times, sometimes successful, mostly unsuccessful reform efforts driven by the Catholic monarchy of Spain, and ultimately builds out and influences everything from the anti-slavery movement in the 18th and 19th century that's ultimately successful, down to, uh, contemporary ideas about human rights and international law that, again, today's liberals take for granted as a kind of scripture.

All of that emerges out of the efforts of serious Christians in a context of profound historical temptation and constant sinfulness just sort of generate from within the resources of their religion.

And I think, you know, if you take the Trump administration, for instance, it's not as though you cannot find Christian critiques of Trump administration cruelty.

(laughs)

... we're so of the, we're so of the Earth because we evolved to be that way.

Right, well, this, no, this, and this is actually on the particular question of consciousness and its understanding of reality.

This is actually a- a key and useful debate, right, where, yes, the argument goes, well, of course you would expect us to be able to understand the heights and depths of reality because it is evolutionarily adaptive to have this kind of understanding.

Um, that doesn't answer the question of why we are conscious to begin with, why we have something called understanding, why we perceive the world the way we do, but it- it does provide a potential explanation.

The question is, does that explanation make sense? And the explanation takes for granted the idea that a, you know, an early hominid, let's say, evolving to deal with life in-...

the savanna, you know, whe- wherever, wherever early hominids evolved, right? You need to deal with saber-toothed tigers or, you know, elephants or what, whatever you need to deal with.

You need some kind of toolkit.

Contend with that for me.

How could a thoughtful, intelligent, rational, educated, enlightened person in 2025 actually believe in an invisible being that you and I would call God?

So, the conceit of the book is that most of the reasons that made people, made it seem reasonable to be religious back then, as your correspondence would put it, still obtain today.

And that there is a sort of master narrative of modern secularism or modern atheism that says, "Look, uh, you know, there were good reasons to believe before Copernicus and Galileo." Um, or there were good reasons to believe before Charles Darwin, or maybe some people would say there were good reasons to believe before neuroscience or, you know, the different, different, um, different sort of scientific, um, revolutions are, are picked out and identified.

And I think that those revolutions did in fact call into question certain specific tenets of specific religions and, uh, you know, we operate in the west inside a monotheistic Abrahamic heritage, you know, we've had a sort of heavily Christian, Christian-dominated culture.

And there's no question that, uh, you know, the, the early scientific rev- revolu- revolutions and revelations about, you know, the shape of the cosmos and the solar system and everything else challenged medieval Catholicism's conception of, um, you know, the, the, the order, the order of the planets and the sun and the stars, which was I think not really a strict- strictly speaking a point of Catholic doctrine.

It was more an inheritance from Ptolemy, but, you know, it, it...

But it was something the church was committed to and that very famously created a particular crisis.

But you can react to that if you want, and then you can talk about near death.