Turning, I guess, to the kind of me to the essay, you distinguish between, you know, what are kind of two strands of American gentry. And the first is one that most people, I think, are already familiar with. And it's the kind that mostly dominates the cultural imagination. So, you know, the jet setting, cosmopolitan, big bourgeoisie,

the kind one associates with, you know, Ivy League degrees, Martha's Vineyard, you know,

high finance, et cetera. But you write, quote, the reality of American wealth and power is more banal. So with that in mind,

how would you characterize the second strand? What's its composition as a class? What's its

geographic distribution? Is it mostly an urban or a rural phenomenon? So I would say it's exurban

and rural. I think that the United States is full of

like these kind of small metro areas that have 100,000 people, 200,000 people, maybe up to a half

a million people. It's like like Bakersfield, California, you know, Fresno, Odessa, Texas, Muncie, Indiana. The United States is full of places like this that aren't small.

They may be quite proximate to a large metropolitan area, but they are their own little world.

And I think these are the places that breed this kind of local, that breed this kind of local gentry.

There are places where social relationships, I think,

play a much heavier role in kind of mediating market relations. So you're much more likely in a

place like that to give the contracts to build a big thing to somebody that you know, as opposed

to just being an international construction company that comes in and puts down a bit. It's not that those relationships don't exist in big

urban areas and they too have their powerful families and their dynasties. But in these places,

I think they're much more salient because there is no global or national point of reference

for them. So I think that it's an exurban and a rural phenomenon.

I think it's pretty familiar to people who have grown up in places like this.

Like you know, you know the people.

They may have, you may have different names for them.

They may call them the local royalty.

They're, you know, some particular number of families who are kind of the founding generation

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