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with Peloton. This message was paid for by Peloton. My name is Tom Meeney and I'm the author of

the article you're about to listen to. I reported this piece on Edward Lutfak in the summer of 2015.

He required a fair amount of travel. I visited Lutfak in New York, at his home in the suburbs of

Washington, D.C., and at his Amazonian farm in Bolivia. The article was not meant so much to be

about Lutfak the man himself, but about a peculiar kind of temperament. Attempement that projects

total coherence, wisdom, and a sort of confidence verging on Megalomania. I think we tend to find this kind

of temperament more commonly in the art world, or in religious settings, or in academia. But it's

rare that such a person, a person with what I think is fundamentally a literary persona,

not only moves comfortably in the defense policy and military contracting world, but thrives in it.

So the article is in some ways as much about the environment that allows Edward Lutfak to exist,

as it is about Lutfak himself. Now if I were to conduct a self-criticism of this piece,

I would say that it doesn't deal enough with Lutfak's formation in the culture of the Cold War.

The construction and the prosecution of the Cold War by US policy elites created a substantial

demand for the kind of prophecies that Lutfak, another academic warrior thinkers like Herman Conn,

Alfred Wallsetter, and later Francis Fukuyama were able to abundantly supply. The piece has been

criticized for assigning Lutfak trans-historical qualities. To that I can only counter that I think

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