Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine. I am joined today by the best-selling author Barry Eisler, ex-CIA, ex-lawyer, the author of many thriller novels that are in fact, I only found out today, favorites of Elizabeth Warren, which is interesting.

And most recently, the new novel, The System.

Barry Isler, you might remember, has been written about in Card Affairs magazine,

an article called The Politics of Thrillers,

which discussed the kind of right-wing assumptions underlying a great

number of popular thrillers and said that the politics of thrillers are off the terrible,

but drew a major exception for my guest today, Barry Isler, and said his novels are great.

So Barry Isler, welcome to Current Affairs.

Thank you, Nathan. It's nice to be here and thank you for that nice introduction.

Your new novel has blurbs from some great people, including Friends of the Magazine, like

Arnautrand and Ryan Grimm, who are kind of unusual people to blurb a, you know, a political thriller.

And, but, but the thing about this novel is, and what's so cool about this novel, is that

this isn't just a, a story, a piece of entertainment.

This is a piece of Fomo sociology.

This is like if Noam Chomsky was in your line of work.

If you're trying to make my day, it's working.

Yeah.

Well, it's so cool because you're not just,

and say you're not just telling a gripping story and there's sex and violence in the story.

You know, there's plenty to entertain people. But what you're also doing, I mean, the novel is called the system.

And you're really trying to show people in kind of a realistic way how power works, or at least that's how I interpret

what you're doing here. But maybe since you're here, you could tell me what your interpretation

...