You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy, Defense and Foreign Affairs.

My name is Ryan Evans. I'm the Editor-in-chief of Warren The Rocks. This is one of our

around-the-world episodes. We have a great panel to discuss all sorts of things that are happening

around the world. We have Will McCants of the Brookings Institution

Rod Iingar of Brand

Bridge Colby of the Center for New American Security

and Bill Rosin now of CNA. Thank you all for sitting down with me.

It's great to be here I should say before we get started, the first presidential debate is tonight.

We are recording it just a few mere hours before, so we're obviously not going to be current on that,

and we're not going to really be talking about the debate results because we don't have a time machine.

We're working on that at War on the Rocks though.

Will, your book came out late last year and it's done tremendously well. What are some of the things that you wish you, that have surprised

you about the Islamic State since and that you wish you sort of paid more attention to in your

book? What did you get absolutely wrong?

Nothing.

I nailed it.

I looked back on it and thought, wow, I could not have done it any better.

You know, I had to make a decision early in the writing what tense I was going to use in writing the book and I found myself often writing in present tense and I realized, ah, this isn't going to work because every time I'd go back and make a revision of a chapter it had already changed so I made everything in the past tense so it holds up well because it's all in the past tense

But of course the big change that happened since the book came out was

ISIS went global made a determined effort to build an international terror organization.

So when I had to update the book with a preface,

that's what I talked about.

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