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Welcome to Dedicated. I'm your host Doug Brunt. Today we're talking with Admiral James

Stavridis. The Admiral is the author of numerous works of nonfiction and also two novels. During

his military career, he was commander of the U.S. Southern Command, commander of the U.S.

European Command, and he was the NATO Supreme Allied commander from 2009 to 13. His latest book is

the novel, 2004. This is speculative fiction. The title is a reference to the year

2004, and there's nobody in a better position to tell us all

what's coming down the pike than Admiral Stavides. Admiral, it's an honor to have you here.

Thanks for coming in. Doug, it's great to be here. You know, you use the term speculative fiction,

which it certainly is. I reject the term predictive fiction, because I'm not predicting these

events, but ultimately, I think it's

a work of cautionary fiction. In other words, we still have time to kind of reverse engineer

it and avoid some of the challenges that we lay out in 2054. Well, and it's clearly deeply

informed by your sort of incredible experience of seeing what's going on and probably

seeing predictive classified reports from which you then have some fun in fiction.

Exactly. And, you know, I get asked a lot, why did you start writing fiction? Because I wrote

10 books of nonfiction, a lot of history, geography of the oceans, maritime.

But I turned to fiction, Doug, because exactly what you say, you shed this straight jacket of footnotes and the nonfiction world where you're so under the gun to get everything precisely right.

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