Episode 64: Transcript

"Republicans are sick of this crap, too." - with Bryan McGrath

Doug French: I just can't keep up.

Magda Pecsenye Zarin: You can't keep up? What do you mean? I thought I told you all about this. We have a product. Mike and I have a product.

Doug: What?

Magda: Okay, so.

Doug: I mean, I'm sure it's fine. I'm sure it's fantastic. And if I owned a fish tank, I'd be in the market.

Magda: No, no, no, no. It's for research labs that do research on fish and other aquatic animals that are grown in labs or in tanks, I mean. And there isn't any existing product that makes taking inventory easy on these tanks. So Mike just created a product, you know, he's a database developer, right? He created this product, we're calling it TankCensys. And it makes it super easy to take inventory of your tanks. We just made a super easy, scanny process. And we're selling it to managers of aquatic tank research labs.

Doug: How do you make a super easy, scanny process for fish? What are the conversations around your breakfast table where you decide, let's find a way to count fish for people?

Magda: Okay, so he had a client years ago that had this issue and he solved it. So then he started getting calls from other people who were like, can you make this same product for me? And he was like, yeah, let me just make the same product and just sell it to everyone instead of forcing them to pay four or five times what we're charging for it to have it developed just for them.

Doug: Right, right. But what is the scanny thing? How do you just say, you know what, let's just have a thing that counts fish? What I mean, does that already exist and had to be conformed to aquatic life?

Magda: No, there is no product out there like this, which is surprising to us. There are zoo products. But they're basically trying to organize the individual animals and like their feeding schedule and stuff like that. And that's not really applicable to the situation. So, you know, there's one lab that has, say, 10,000 tanks and there are six different researchers in there. So the tanks belong to different researchers. And so when the tanks get dirty, there are nursery tanks that are growing eggs. And then when the fish get to be a certain number of days old, they move into adult tanks. So it's more like the status of the tanks that's happening. And this just keeps track of it with UPC. Well, it's not UPC. It's some other kind of code, but it's just a scanner. So somebody can go through and just take census.

Doug: Why are you making a gesture that looks like a clicker of people counting people into a baseball game?

Magda: Oh, because I'm trying to show you the scanner gun. It's just like when you scan somebody. Yeah, that's what it's like. It's like when you scan somebody's tickets going into a football game while you're scanning the tank. To say this tank is dirty.

2:57

Doug: You got me thinking, of course, about Jurassic Park. The book, not the movie.

Magda: Of course.

Doug: An element of the book that the movie very unwisely avoided. Because in the book, there's like dozens of velociraptors, right? In the movie, there's three or two. But in the book, they've got to keep track of how many dinosaurs there are on the island.

Magda: Okay.

Doug: And they have software that counts them. And the whole point is they want to confirm that they're not multiplying. You know, they've rigged everything so that every velociraptor is female and they can't be fertilized. They remove the DNA and so they can't reproduce.

Magda: Oh, that's like growing cannabis in the United States. You can only buy feminized seeds.

Doug: I'm sure that's relevant. But... Anyway, God, where was I?

Magda: All right. So they can't reproduce.

Doug: We're like a minute into this and I'm already exhausted. You know, so the point is they want to keep track of everything, but then they're out walking one day and they find an eggshell and they're like, oh shit, this shouldn't be here. And so they think, wait a minute, we have to check the software now. And so they run the scan and the software counts up and it goes, and it stops. Like we got to have a hundred velociraptors or something. And it stops at 100. They're like, okay, yeah, so we're fine. But then they realized.

Magda: Oh, did they set the limit?

Doug: They programmed it to stop once it reached the amount it was looking for. And they're like, oh, wait a minute. So they turn that off. And it's like at the end of a chapter. It's one of the most cliffhanger-y endings to a chapter I've ever read. So they go and they turn that off. And it's like 100, 101. 101. 102, 103, dot, dot, dot. Blackout. That was a really suspenseful part of the book that the movie just completely shit on. Yeah, so... Anyway, so I'm vamping here because I had to go and turn the heat off. I don't know if you can hear this, but I know it comes out on the mic. The price of having an excellent mic is that it picks up a...

Magda: Forced air is so loud. So, so loud. And I grew up in a house with steam radiators, and so they banged a little when they first came on but then the whole rest of the day they were fine.

Doug: Well, yeah. The clang of a radiator was a reassuring thought that it was about to get warm in the house. I think I have a pavlovian response to

that, frankly.

Magda: Yeah, I do, too.

Doug: So we could devote the rest of this intro to HVAC, but why not instead talk about Bryan McGrath?

Magda: Yeah, I thought we had a great conversation with him. When you first proposed talking to somebody who is a blogger who has the adjective “conservative” in his blogger name, I was like [makes weird sound], I don't know how I feel about that. I'm not the kind of person who likes to argue about politics, right? And I think...It's been my experience that men like to argue about politics much more than women do. And I think that you especially are in a very specific age range of men that really were sort of trained to talk about politics and argue about politics.

Doug: I feel profiled.

Magda: It's really OK. But, you know, things are radically different now. Like if we had been having this conversation 10 years ago, I'd have been like, eh, what am I going to have to talk to with this guy about?

Doug: But we didn't talk about politics. That wasn't the point. I mean, he is.

Magda: Well, we didn't.

Doug: But he's he feels as adrift politically as we do, because he's not a Trump guy, never has been. And he's like, “I'm pushing 60 and this is not going to change in my lifetime. So what am I supposed to do?”

Magda: Right. And I think that that is what was interesting to me about the conversation.

Doug: Well, what caught my attention, too, was that Substack he wrote about reconsidering being a firebrand. I mean, he's been very politically active after, you know, two and a half decades in the Navy. And he's kind of taking stock now at what that's done to his mental health, to his personality. I think that's a real issue with a lot of people our age as we kind of look at how we're going to spend our time. Because I want to stay involved. I think that keeps me young. I want to be aware of things, but I also don't want to be so cripplingly disappointed like I am, like I still am a month later, and recognize that am I going to be cripplingly disappointed for the rest of my life, given the way money has completely overtaken our country now? And anytime you can agree on one thing with someone who has voted on the opposite side all their life, I think that's progress.

Doug: So, more important than the political ideology, though, is just how he's really thinking “how much of a firebrand is left in me?”. And I don't know if it's just situational, just given the shock of what happened, or this is a shift that's going to have legs. If it's going to take root and recognize, I'm not going to write as much anymore. I'm not going to get wired up because it's bad for me.

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: And how do you find the line now when you're in your 50s and you're prioritizing your time and you want to be a force for good or you want to work for what you think is best? But how much have you got left to make that happen?

Magda sighs: I think it's disappointing for somebody who has spent a long time thinking that he was doing good by expressing views,

Doug: Or just having an effect, you know, just, you know, making a ripple in the pool.

Magda: Right.

Doug: It's kind of like going outside and staring out into space and recognizing, Oh, right. Yes. I'm on this tiny rock in the middle of a void.

Magda: Yeah. Have you heard of that phobia, fear of large things? Yeah. I can't remember what it's called. I figured out that I have it. I get super, super weirded out when I'm near really large things that are sort of isolated by themselves. Like if I look out the window of the plane and can see the curve of the earth, that freaks me out. If I'm driving and I see huge windmills, it really freaks me out.

Doug: Really big stuff. I mean, tell me you can look this up and find out that there's a term for that, a fear of really big things.

Magda: Yeah, fear of large objects. It's called, oh, well, it's called megalophobia. You know, I kind of get that. Like, it feels like there's a lot of large things now.

Doug: Which is interesting because I have the exact opposite. I see large things and I am comforted by that. I think relative insignificance lowers the stakes on the problems in my life.

Magda: Ah, that's very interesting.

Doug: So we're going to have a whole podcast about that. But in the meantime, here's Bryan.

[Theme music fades in, plays, fades out.]

Doug: Here's Bryan. Before you came on, Magda, we were talking about Bryan. He got together with a bunch of fraternity brothers and watched a UVA basketball game in Maryland.

Magda: Are they still having the same issues that they were last year when you forced me to watch a UVA basketball game at that bar?

Doug: When did I force you to do anything, much less watch a UVA basketball game?

Magda: It was that time that I was at your house while we were waiting for one of our kids to come back and he was delayed. And you and I were just like trying to figure out what we were going to do. And so we went to a bar to eat and the UVA basketball game was on and you were like, “oh, I don't want to force you to watch this, but I kind of have to watch it. So I'm going to force you to watch it.” And I was like, oh boy.

Doug: I don't want to speak for Bryan, but I know, I mean, since our two main revenue sports, the coach has just up and quit.

Magda: Oh, wow.

Doug: Yeah.

Magda: That must feel bad.

Doug: It's kind of killing off my enthusiasm. Yeah. And I think that's going to be a theme throughout what we talk about. Just the idea of what we let ourselves get excited about and what we let ourselves get really pissed off about. Because the main thing that inspired me to reach out to Bryan in the first place was this Substack he wrote. There was a real sense of, “retreat” is a strong word, but just the idea of re-evaluating so much more about what you write about and how often you write and how the world invades your central nervous system. I think there's a reset going on. Is that fair to say?

Bryan McGrath: Clearly, yeah. Very deep reset. Or at least an attempt at one. Like I said in the piece, I don't know if I'm capable. I just know that I have the desire.

Doug: For those who haven't read it, I mean, we'll link to it in the notes. But when you think about the ambition to reset a bit, especially now as an empty nester with plenty of options ahead, how would you like to winnow your life and embellish it at the same time?

Magda: Can we give a little bit of context here? Because, you know, like Doug, you know Bryan very well. And I just came to Bryan when you shared his Substack with me and said, “I'd like to have him on.” And I was like, oh, wow, this is going to be a good guest. Because Bryan, I would think of you as a traditional Republican, like a traditional conservative. White man, you were in a fraternity, you were in the military for a long time, and you're an orderly kind of person.

Bryan: It's all very fair.

Magda: And so I think that people who have never been Republican think that you are sort of the base of the Trump world, but in reality, you're sort of this, I think, a group of people that have been 100 percent left behind and shocked by Trump taking over, even moreso than the Democrats have been.

Bryan: Also very fair.

Magda: Okay, so our listeners can kind of situate where you are, and then...

Bryan: I am a Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke, William F. Buckley conservative.

Magda: Okay.

Doug: The Substack he writes is called The Conservative Wahoo, which is based on his allegiance to the alma mater and the political allegiance that he's followed as long as I've known him, which is going on 100 years.

Magda: A Wahoo is somebody who went to UVA.

Doug: Yes.

Magda: There's my little glossary entry.

Doug: He's grouped in with lots of other Republicans who didn't attend the convention and, you know, all the cabinet members who won't support him and who are essentially given the choice of either to hop on the bandwagon or live in the hinterlands until the Republican Party hopefully recovers, if that's even an option. I mean, is that part of where you are as far as resetting your engagement with the world?

Bryan: The political side of it clearly is a big part of it, but it's more global than that. I've spent my entire life with my eyes way above the horizon. I've never cared about what was happening in my town, my schools, my local environment. I've always worried about the United States as a nation and how it fits into the international order and the degree to which we are leading that order in important and meaningful ways. And that's what I want to change. I want to roll my scan in. I want to worry about my town, my family, my friends, my church, my backyard, because I feel like I have a better chance of influencing positive outcomes there than I have had for 40 years in that more global and national game.

Doug: And how long have you been writing The Conservative Wahoo in whatever form? It was a blog before it was a Substack.

Bryan: Yeah, it was a blog on WordPress or one of those. It still exists out there, I think. In 2008, I think is when I started it.

Doug: And what inspired you to start it? What set you off to say, I have something to say and I want to put it out there?

Bryan: Reading other people. There was a right-of-center intellect who wrote a blog called Tigerhawk. He was a Princeton graduate from Iowa, so he called himself Tigerhawk. And he was phenomenally literate. And eloquent. And it just connected. And I would read it voraciously. And I thought, you know, I think I might be able to do that. I think anybody who does podcasts is a little bit of a show-off. Podcasts, blogs, those kinds of things. And I have always been a little bit of a show-off. [Laughs] And so I thought, why would I want the American public to be denied all of these wonderful things that I'm about to write for the next 15 years? And now I've reached the point where I realize that they have been far less interested in it than I thought they might be. [Laughs]

Doug: Well, that's another come to Jesus moment. Just the idea of recognizing the nature of whatever influence even is. It's all balkanized now. There used to be just a handful of platforms everybody was on. And now it's all become very niche and very splintered. And I think we're all kind of establishing platforms. What hopes we could have for the audience we could build and how engaged that audience could be and how human that audience could be because, you know, so much of the audience we find on these bigger platforms is just fake bots and stuff.

Doug: But you still have clearly plenty to say, you know, even as a diarist, not necessarily as a commentator. just in terms of who you are as a person, how you're processing life in your late 50s, because you've got a lot ahead of you. You've got a lot of options. It's just you and Catherine. I mean, the girls have grown. If you think about what you'd like to accomplish with your life now, with these freedoms that you have, do you think much about that as far as what the way forward is, both as a consultant and as a writer?

Bryan: You know, I think it was two summers ago I went sailing in Maine with Catherine and a couple of friends. And Catherine had brought along a compendium of E.B. White essays.

Doug: She's a keeper already. I've never met her, but I already love her because she's an E.B. White fan.

Bryan: Yeah. And I did not know of the great non-Stewart Little Charlotte's Web literary career. I did not know of that. And I read his essays and they hit me in the dental nerves. It was like “This, this is how I want to write. These are the things that I want to concern myself with.” Essays on snowy winter mornings and the slaughtering of a goat. I loved his scan and what he was writing about. And that was, I think, the first thing that got me moving down the road I am trying to go down now.

Doug: Were you ever shown Strunk and White when you were a kid?

Bryan: Sure.

Doug: The Elements Of Style?

Bryan: Sure. I would be lying if I told you that I knew that that was E.B. White.

Doug: When I read “Once More To The Lake,” that's one of my favorites.

Bryan: Yeah.

Doug: Even that line, I've actually, I've lined it up here. He's taking his child to the lake to swim. And he says, and I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals, the small, soggy, icy garment. And as he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death. He's so pithy and blunt and cuts right to what you may be feeling about things. Well, I share your admiration for him. Let's backtrack a bit because your background is you're a military man. You were in the Navy. How long?

Bryan: 21 years.

Doug: And that ended when?

Bryan: I retired in 2008. My last sea tour, I commanded a destroyer. And then I came to Washington and I worked with a group of people who put together a national sea power strategy. And, um, I reached the conclusion that I wanted to be good at two things. And so I decided to leave the Navy and strike out on my own as a national security consultant. And that's what I've done since then.

Magda: Wow. So this Tulsi Gabbard thing must be just crushing you, like twisting your innards.

Bryan: I think more to the point, it would have been crushing me had I not decided two weeks ago that I was no longer going to allow things like that to crush me.

Magda: All right. That makes sense.

Doug: Why does this sound like George Costanza's father and “Serenity Now”?

Bryan: It certainly is playing in my background.

Magda: Oh, yeah. Of course. Of course.

Doug: You never know.

Magda: I guess my question is, what else can a person do when their life's work is being eviscerated and huge harm is about to come to millions of people and there's nothing you can do about it. Right. I mean, I remember during the first Trump administration, there were a lot of people I knew who were just watching what was happening every day on a minute by minute basis. They were listening to NPR all the time. They were monitoring what was happening in the White House all the time. And it was causing real harm to them.

Magda: And it wasn't doing any good for anybody because there wasn't anything they could do about it. And I've noticed this in the way people parent sometimes. If you can't do anything about something, you somehow feel guilty about that. And so you feel like you need to be aware of what's happening all the time, even when and especially when it's painful, almost like as a way of paying penance for not having any control over it. And I don't think that's healthy at all. I think this idea of detaching for your own mental health and so that you can be effective in other areas, there are jobs for everyone. And if you need to detach from the larger thing to be able to do your job usefully, I think that's the greater part of valor.

Doug: Well, this is clearly a transparent attempt to wind him up.

Bryan: You don't know me very well, Magda, but I'm pretty self-assured and I'm not likely to be knocked off an idea that I have by someone else. So I find myself at this point looking at the same set of circumstances that you just described and saying, “I howled at the moon. I fought them. I was elbows deep in the resistance. And he was elected again. And so I can either continue to do the same things and get the same outcomes and in the process, spend a ridiculous amount of time angry, disappointed, surly, curmudgeonly, or I can think to myself, is there something else in my life? Is there something as universal and as big?”

Bryan: And I look around and I have this beautiful home life. I live in ridiculous physical beauty. And I have friends. I have wonderful, amazing friends. And I thought to myself, maybe you should spend your time on those things and leave the howling at the moon to others. Because your howling at the moon, Bryan, didn't work. It was radically unsuccessful. So that's where I am.

Magda: Right. That makes a lot of sense.

Bryan: I have one for you. Yesterday, I went on Twitter and I saw that Dr. Oz was being nominated to something. And I just thought to myself, “this is a moment where three weeks ago, you would have had just spun up on the governor. And this is a moment for you to put into practice what you are trying to achieve.” And I took a deep breath and said, “not my problem.”

Magda: So you know how you guys were upset about the Virginia sports? Yesterday was a horrible, horrible day for people who went to Bryn Mawr like I did and people who went to Haverford like my husband did because Lutnick, who went to Haverford and has been wreaking havoc on the campus of Haverford because he's been donating buildings and the students are so repulsed by him and his actions that they're actually questioning, like, “Is it legitimate to go study in the Lutnik Library on campus?” So he was appointed to Commerce, and then Dr. Oz is married to somebody who went to Bryn Mawr. And so that's a question. What do E.B. White and Dr. Oz have in common?

Doug: Oy.

Magda: So, of course, the whole alumni community was all abuzz with, like, how? We have so many, so many people, so many grads who are fighting for good things. And these are the two that get tapped.

Bryan: Well, I would add Doug French to that list. Doug French married a Bryn Mawr grad.

Magda: Yes. Well, yes.

Doug: But 16 years ago, I got religion. Yeah. There you go. Now, you're from New Jersey, right? Where'd you grow up?

Bryan: Grew up in South Jersey, a town called Mount Laurel. Exit four, for those who mark. Exit four on the turn.

Doug: So I knew we were Jersey kids. Now, before you even got to school, was the military something you were considering as a career?

Bryan: For your younger listeners... Magda, I presume you're much younger than we are because you look considerably younger than we are.

Magda: Sooooo much younger than you are. I'm 51.

Bryan: Okay. Yeah.

Magda” And you guys are 59, 58.

Bryan: Yeah, we're 59. When we were in our latter years of high school, we were in a time of double-digit inflation, double-digit interest rates, double-digit unemployment. My father was a small businessman. I was one of six kids. I had three above me. And he felt it was his responsibility to pay for college, to his enormous credit. College looked expensive, and I knew that I wanted to go somewhere good. And good equaled expensive, or Uncle Sam could pay for it. And so I decided to have Uncle Sam pay for four years of education at the University of Virginia and then pay Uncle Sam back with four years of military service. I never intended to stay one day longer than my four-year anniversary, but I got into it and I realized that I utterly loved it. I loved going to sea. I loved Navy life. I like institutional food. I mean, it was a life that really appealed to me and it was meaningful. It was enormously meaningful. And so I decided three years in, like, all right, I'm going to make a run at this.

Magda: When you went out to sea, how long were you out there? Was it like six weeks?

Bryan: Well, you sometimes go out for six weeks of training. The basic cycle is that you come home from a deployment. That deployment at that time was about six months. You'd be forward in Europe or Asia for six months. You come home, you get some maintenance done, you train, you train with other ships, and then you deploy again. And that repeated itself on an 18 to 24 month cycle forever and ever.

Magda: So it was sort of a regular rhythm maintenance, not like a project where it was like everybody was all hyped up for the project and then you relaxed afterwards. Just from a workflow perspective?

Bryan: I'd say from a workflow standpoint, it was a little of both. You always knew that you had that deployment coming. The deployments were very predictable. Now, all the things that happened between deployments, things that broke, Things that sent you into maintenance periods for another 10 weeks that you didn't know about earlier. You know, none of that was predicted. People look at me in the way I act, in the way I am, in the way I conduct myself. And they will say something like, “The Navy created that. The Navy baked that into you.” And what they don't understand is I was like this before I went into the Navy.

Bryan: Like I said, I was one of six kids and there was chaos and disorder in my house. I went for order. My mom would do laundry every day and she'd throw all the clothes into piles on the floor in the living room. I would go get my clothes, fold them all and put them into the right drawers or hang them where they were supposed to go. While my brothers just pulled these piles and just threw them in the drawers. So one of the reasons I think that I enjoyed and thrived in an environment of

controlled creativity was because I had to figure out how to bring order to chaos as a child. And then it all just, it worked. Now, the larger picture is navies and especially the United States Navy that has unique or has taken unto itself unique responsibilities in world affairs that no other navy on Earth generates or is responsible for, being part of that, even on the small scale that I did as I was moving through my career, reinforces you a sense of grand strategy and relations among blocs and relations among nations and deterrence, assurance.

Bryan: All of these giant things get baked into you when you're in your 20s and 30s and 40s. So those are the things that I am pushing away from now. What was happening in the town that I lived never mattered to me. Where I lived was where I put my stuff. That was all I cared about. Where's my furniture? Where's my clothes? Where are my books? That could be anywhere. And I didn't care where that was. What I cared about was this great big world and how is American power going to be applied in a positive and important way. That stuff was baked in for a long time. I don't want to play that game anymore.

Doug: So does this mean you're going to spend a little less time folding laundry in your house?

Bryan: No, no. The concept of order, I run a tight ship. I live with three or two, just one magnificent woman right now. The other two are grown and off on their own.

Magda: How old are they?

Bryan: 25 and 23.

Magda: Oh, okay. So that age where they occasionally come back, but they're really out on their own.

Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. And in general, our standards of order and housekeeping are not phenomenally well aligned. [Magda and Doug laugh] And so my life has been... spent compromising. And don't get me wrong, they have looked at me and seen the things that bother me and done better at taking the peanut butter knife and actually putting it in the sink rather than leaving it on the counter. Yeah, they figured that.

Magda: My husband is going to listen to this podcast because he listens to all of our podcasts and he's going to laugh when he hears the line, “our standards of housekeeping are not phenomenally aligned,” because that's the story of our relationship, too. He's much more like you.

Doug: That's a euphemism for our time, for sure.

Bryan: Well, the world needs everyone.

Doug: How did you meet Catherine? Because I think another interesting story about this is the way your family blended because Catherine's daughters precede your involvement in the family.

Bryan: Yeah, yeah.

Doug: How soon after her husband passed did you meet her?

Bryan: It was a reunion, the 2007 reunion, which I saw that would have been 20 years at UVA. And I'm almost certain you were there, Doug.

Doug: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Bryan: Yeah. And I'm standing around talking with a friend of mine from first-year dorm. And at the time, you know, I was 41. I had been single for a long time. I got married out of college to my college sweetheart. We got divorced three and a half years later. Wonderful starter marriage, love her to death, we're close to this day, but I had then a nice period of time where I spent, you know, 80% of my money on women, cars and alcohol and wasted the rest. [Magda and Doug laugh] And so I was at 41 talking with my friend. And he wanted to know what it was like to be single in Washington, D.C. at 41 years of age. I was describing my life at the time. And his wife, who had had a few beers, looked over and she said, “Wait a second, you're single? Oh, I have someone for you to meet.” And she's, “Well, I have three people for you to meet.” And she told me about each of them, little thumbnail sketches, that she started with Catherine and she described her as “A young, lovely widow who lives on the water surrounded by books.” That's what she said. That was the line.

Magda: That would hook anybody in.

Doug: That's like, yeah, that's a fairy tale.

Bryan: I was done. And so she told me about the others. I was like, no, no, no. The one on the water. surrounded by books. And then she said, well, no, I can't do that. I can't do that. She's a 9/11 widow. Her husband died in the World Trade Center, left her with these two beautiful kids. At the time, they were six and eight. So this is all happening six years after her husband died in 9/11. And she said, I won't do that because they were the best. They were soulmates. Everybody understood that about them. And I said, no, no, no, that's the one. So she held off on introducing me. She introduced me to one of the others. We didn't connect. And I kept bugging her.

Magda: It almost sounds like The Dating Game, right?

Bryan: A little bit.

Magda: Like she described the three contestants and you knew which one you wanted. But you had to go out on a date to get the other one.

Doug: Bachelorette number one, please.

Magda: Yeah, really. Exactly.

Bryan: And so I finally started talking to her on the telephone. And I maintain that I fell in love on the telephone. And when we saw each other in real life for the first time, that's all I needed. It was done. Game over right there.

Doug: Oh, really? So you knew her, just her personality before you even met her?

Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. She giggled with amazing effect.

Doug: You got to love a good giggle.

Magda: That's cute.

Bryan: It was a good giggle. So I came into a family. I came into a family of three who lived in this idyllic little spot on the Miles River in Talbot County, Maryland. At first, I told friends that I didn't think it would work because she was geographically undesirable. I lived in...

Magda laughs hard: I haven't heard “GU” in a long time.

Doug: Oh, yeah. That's like “Upper East Side. Screw that.”

Magda: I know. Like, “oh, my God, they're in Queens. Never.”

Bryan: It worked. And the next 17-and-a-half years have been a story of me largely growing up and maturing and becoming capable of aligning with that family. It wasn't easy. It wasn't easy to not be a single guy anymore. It wasn't easy to roll into a family where they had established an established rhythm. And this was a very quiet, very lovely, very supportive little house. And I came from this big brawling Irish family. I mean, dinner at my dinner table was full contact dinner and it was great. And I have over time matured and aged to where I think I might finally have figured it out.

Doug: Have you adopted her daughters?

Bryan: No, no. I'm still under consideration for matrimony. I'm holding out hope that maybe someday that I can get over the goal line there. I have not adopted the girls. I call them my daughters. They've never called me their dad. Their dad, Chris Murphy, if you can discern a person's character by the character of the friends he or she had, I've been able to discern that he was an enormously special and wonderful man because the friend group that was opened to me consists of unbelievably wonderful people. I have never tried to displace him. One of the early things I said to Catherine was, you and Chris climbed that mountain. We're headed that way. And that's the way I tried to handle that. I've never felt like I had to compete with him, but I never, ever, ever tried to displace this father that a two-year-old and a four-month-old lost.

Doug: And I get that. That's got to be a daunting thing to say I'm different. I'm a different Darren Stevens. I'm not that guy.

Bryan: That's a great analogy. Can you name the two Darren Stevens?

Doug: Dick York and Dick Sargent.

Bryan: Excellent. Very good.

Magda: Wow, good job, Doug. Well done.

Doug: Well, you know, the memory's gone, but stuff from the ‘70s, it's all up there. [Magda laughs]Was there an event that kind of suggested, cause I totally get, you know, wanting to tread lightly, the whole idea of like recognizing that I want to be a part of this, but I want to join on their terms during that particular transition. Was there one event that kind of suggested to you, I belong or I, I can be a part of this foursome.

Bryan: I, it's a mistake to think that I tried to gingerly find my way in.

Doug: Oh, okay. [Everyone laughs] So you, you barreled in and threw your stuff around.

Bryan: I was a bull in a china shop. And the bottom line is that realizing that that was not an effective choice was the work of several years. I was like, hey, I'm a grown ass man. You can't talk to me like that. When I say jump, you say how high, you know, blah, blah, you know, those, those.

Magda: And that really doesn't work with an eight year old at all.

Bryan: No. No. And they had rhythms. They had practices. They had their things. I don't know that there was any one event that it was just, it was the accumulation of so many terribly obvious lessons that Mr. Obvious couldn't integrate. It took a while, but over time those switches have flipped. But no, there was no aha moment. And Catherine's enormous patience with me is the only reason we're still together.

Doug: Here's a question too, that's independent of the romance. When you're in your fifties and you think about marrying someone, it can be as much about just logistics as anything else. So when you think about getting married, if that even were to happen, Is there anything particular logistically for taxes, power of attorney? I mean, as you age, are there benefits of that marriage independent of the romance that you and Catherine have considered?

Bryan: She has a rather complicated financial situation. She has benefits from her husband and a number of things that our financial lives are not merged. I want to get married to Catherine Murphy because I love her enormously. And I've grown up in a society that marinated me in a sense of that's what you do when you fall in love. I asked her to marry me four months after we got together. She said, yes.

Doug: Oh, so you're engaged. Okay, that's good. Congratulations.

Bryan: We've been engaged. But the bottom line was there was a time, there was a moment where I had an aha moment where I realized, you're letting not being married bother you. You're letting not being married be some symbol of that this is something less than it could or should be. And you are not, as Marcus Aurelius or Eckhart Tolle would tell us, living in the moment. And in the moment, this is really an enormously wonderful relationship. Why are you bitching about what could be and not just swimming in that wonderful pool of what is? And I got to that point. So while I kid around with her about not being married and maybe we'll get married someday and everything, it's not important.

Doug: The reason I ask that in general is that, I mean, one of the great things about being married is that when you decide to split up, there is something tangible to unwind. You know, I mean, Magda and I went through the process and we had paperwork that got us together. There was paperwork that got us apart.

Magda: Yeah, but you gotta pay a lot of money for that paperwork. And I have to say, like, for me, it was ultimately unsatisfying because I had not changed my name when I married you. Like there was a point in time when we were getting divorced when I absolutely wished I had changed my name just so I could change it back. Like it felt like slamming down the phone, you know.

42:24

Doug: But I'm also thinking longer term, like what if one of you gets ill? Will there be a barrier between the one caring for the other because you're not married? As you advocate for each other in older age, would a marriage benefit you just from that independent of the love just from that standpoint?

Bryan: I'm not sure. I mean, I live in a relatively small town. Virtually everyone here thinks we're married. They're shocked when we tell them that we're not. Okay.

Magda: Do you have paperwork like medical power of attorney and stuff like that? Because I think that's as much of a sub for a legal marriage as anything else is.

Bryan: We do. All of that paperwork is what you might expect in a marriage. Absolutely.

Magda: So I think you're covered with that, right?

Bryan: We're covered, but there's this societal thing, right?

Doug: Maybe you're common law married and don't even know it. [Everyone laughs]

Bryan: I am not immune to the culture I grew up in. And I find myself thinking, “I would love to go down to the courthouse one day and marry this girl.”

Doug: I would love to hear that. I'm looking forward to reading The Conservative Wahoo one Monday and finding out that they got married over the weekend. That'll be awesome.

Bryan: Stay tuned.

Magda: Okay. So I think we are going to want to talk about some of the institutions that you want to put a little more time in. So before we talk about that, can I ask you what denomination church you attend?

Bryan: I attend an Episcopalian church, which is Catherine's faith. I grew up as a Catholic and still consider myself a Catholic.

Magda: Okay. So a lot of the turmoil around the Trump thing and all of that has been about Christian Nationalism and Christian Right and the Evangelicals. And I think a lot of those of us who are coming out of more traditional, less punitive faiths are trying to reckon with how those denominations got overwhelmed in society and culture by the Christian Nationalism and the Evangelical stuff. And I think, you know, if you're Episcopalian, like, yes, it's very traditional, but it's also to me giving a structure for flexibility so that you can respond to current conditions in a more common sense kind of way.

Bryan: So traditional, less punitive translates to old line Protestantism and traditional Catholicism?

Magda: Yeah, the traditional Catholic and also some of the Orthodox denominations that have traditionally been more focused on helping others, social justice, being the hands of Jesus instead of constructing a trap for their people that they can't really survive.

Bryan: I imagine there are plenty of people who would take issue with that dualism that you just suggested. [Magda laughs] And I won't attempt to carry their water for them. All I can say is that among the great sources of my disappointment with my fellow Americans over the course of the last few years has been my disappointment with Christians, because I think there has been a good deal of shaving of their priorities and their beliefs and what they think is important, I think, to match the times and to match their preferences. Christian Nationalism bothers me not because it's Christian, but because it's nationalism.

Magda: Right.

Bryan: And because it's more properly populism. And I think populism is ridiculous as a governing philosophy, as a governing ideology. I turned a blind eye to that crowd as soon as they started to pop up. They're just annoying. I don't think they're coherent ideologues. And I use the word ideologue in a very positive sense. I am an ideologue. I have a set of practices and ideas that I use to evaluate new facts. And that template is how I interrelate with the world. And it is a sort of old line conservative non-populist. I have been very happy to champion very unpopular ideas throughout my life.

Bryan: I am disappointed in what used to be called “the religious right” for the degree to which I think they have exposed themselves as less Christian than they wish us to believe they are. We've always had fervent religious people. The difference that I note that bothers me is that I believed when there was a three-legged stool of Reaganism–national security, limited government, religious right–that kind of thing that brought together, that those people were actually interested in moral probity in their leaders, that they wanted their leaders to be representative of the things that they believed. I think that's gone now. I think they absolutely, a number of them have exposed themselves as just power seeking.

Magda: Have you read Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Du Mez?

Bryan: No.

Magda: You would appreciate it because it's extremely... legitimate academically. She's a professor and she sort of traces the rise of that religious right and how they came to have so much political power and sort of these crisis points at which things could have been directed in a different way. It was extremely useful for me, somebody who came out of mainline Protestantism and had not been raised in that culture, to figure out how the culture of the religious right had taken over so much and how they had accumulated so much power.

Bryan: In the sort of cartoonish view of Reaganism and the new right of the late ‘70s and through the ‘80s, the religious right had more purchase than they actually did within the policymaking of that movement. What I see now is they're even less influential in the policymaking, but they're very influential in the selection of candidates.

Magda: Yes.

Bryan: But in order to do that, they've had to dramatically walk away from things I thought they once held dear.

Doug: I also wanted to talk a bit about this year for you, which has been very costly in terms of animals and people in your life that have crossed over. And you mentioned your dad, who I want to hear so much more about. You say he was a small businessman supporting six children in southern New Jersey.

Bryan: Yeah.

Doug: And you lost him this year. When we talked about this, you mentioned along the lines of kind of cultivating a preparation for when he was going to pass. There was no questions between the two of you about what you meant to each other.

Bryan: When I think about my father and I think about his role in my life, again, it's an amazing, to me, duality in that when I left home at 18, went off to UVA and into the Navy, my father was no longer a source of advice and counsel to me. He was my dad. I'd check in with him, let him know how things are going. But at that point, whatever sense of agency or ego or whatever it was led me to believe that I'm on my own. I got to do this stuff. This is what I do. I am the captain of my soul. I am the master of my faith either way.

Doug: Do you think that was part of being part of a large family or is this independent of that?

Bryan: Maybe, maybe. But my parents also raised us to be really independent. But what is, what's amazing is I didn't rely on him for advice and counsel throughout my twenties and thirties. But what I continue to come back to, to this day is that no man was a anywhere near as influential in creating this man. The way I talk to you, Doug. The way I interrelate with other men. I learned carrying my father's golf bag on Saturday mornings, watching him shuck and jive with his guys. I watched how he gave it to them, how he took it. So often at 59 years old, I'll say something and the words will come out of my mouth and in the back of my head is saying, oh my God, that was Dad. He died in February. For 15 years leading up to that date, he began to sort of visibly age, he died at 92.

Bryan: My parents live in North Carolina and I would visit them three or four times a year. Every time I would leave, I would have this conversation with my dad. And it was always, do we have any unfinished business? Is there anything that we're not on the surface here? Wow. I love you. You love me. And I would leave thinking he might die between then and the next time I came back.

Doug: Yeah.

Magda: Oh.

Doug: I relate to that specifically. Yeah.

Bryan: Catherine would make fun of me for it. She's like, you've been killing your dad off for 10 years.

Doug: Oh, you got to marry this girl.

Bryan: That's how I conducted that relationship. When he was in his last few days and it was obvious he was going to die, I was really sad. But I wasn't devastated. I think I had pre-chewed and pre-processed a lot of that over 15 years. I had begun some sort of a grieving process a long time before that. It wasn't complete. It's still not complete. I still think about my dad all the time. But when I think about my dad, I smile. I think about the time I came to the breakfast table when I was in college. And my father was sitting at the end of the table in his position. And he was just wearing this ridiculous outfit. I think it was like a green velour quarter-zip shirt. It's like green polyester pants. It was one of the worst outfits I'd ever seen in my life. And I remember saying something about it.And my father looked at me and he said, “Who the F do I have to impress?” [Magda and Doug laugh] And I can't tell you how many times in the 40 years since he said that to me, I've used those exact words to other people. Who the F do I have to impress? That's my dad.

Bryan: Yeah, but he died in February and my mom is still alive. She's 89 and she's declining, but she has the youngest and the oldest. My youngest sister and my oldest brother both live in the same town in North Carolina and they are spectacular caregivers. They are shouldering the load while the other four of us roll in and, you know, virtue signal our support. But they're doing the hard work.

Doug: First of all, listening to you talk about your father, I'm relating to so much of that just because of memories that stand out and will never leave. Also living far apart from your father and never leaving without making sure we're straight. And you're, I guess, to some extent, because he lived a long life, lived as long as he did, That's a great blessing to have.

Bryan: In 2006, I assumed command of a destroyer in this ceremony and, you know, it's on the ship and there's audience and everything. And I remember standing there at the podium in my choker whites, medals, a sword, the whole nine yards. And I was king of the world until I looked down in the front row and saw my father crying like a baby. It was, to this moment, it's just unbelievably emotional. I can summon that moment. He spent three years in the Navy as a very young man, and he could not process that his son was the commanding officer of as a destroyer, because when he was in that position, the CEO of a destroyer was a titan, some sort of a man god.

Doug: I mean, yeah, where do you go from there? That's

Magda: Wow. Wow. That's like an extreme version of the first time you go to the doctor and they're younger than you are.

Bryan laughs: Yeah. Or the airline pilot. That one gets me.

Magda: Right.

Doug: Well, so now just even this conversation tells me why you're compelled to write because of the background as a younger kid in a chaotic household and finding order and finding your niche in the Navy and having opinions and having information that you want to share. And so I actually totally relate with the idea of focusing locally because I too, I've lived in Ann Arbor now for 13 years. It was really hard to make friends here, especially as a divorced couple. Married people don't want to hang out with amicably divorced people. I mean, we tried it a couple of times and I would get texts saying like, dude, help me out here. What did you do? I'm like, that's not the goal here. So maybe as you do focus more on the lovely patch of land in the water full of books, what would you like to comment on? How do you see your writing career mirror your own spiritual reset here?

Bryan: have this love-hate relationship with writing. And that is, until two or three weeks ago, I felt that my most effective writing was my political and strategic foreign affairs commentary. And it's what I took the most pride in. And it's what I thought distinguished me. What pissed me off was that I got the best responses to the stuff I wrote about everyday life.

Doug: Yeah.

Magda: Mmm, yeah.

Bryan: And while it was very gratifying, I was like, yeah, but what about the three-hub Navy that I just talked about? That was genius. That's my thing. That's right. That's something you can hang a national strategy around. Come on, people get with it. But it was, you know, when I would write about the death of a dog that people really responded and really, and it really connected to, And so it's been a process over the years of actually believing that the everyday stuff is worth writing about. As much as I may preen that I'm writing for myself, I'm not. I like the endorphin. I like when people say “that was good.” I'm still a four-year-old with his mom and having her say, you're smart or you're witty or whatever. I still like that return on investment. And I have to come to grips with whether or not the juice is worth the squeeze. Because I've read E.B. White and I've thought, Holy moly. This is amazing stuff, and my stuff is just crap.

Doug: Yeah, what am I even doing here?

Bryan: What am I even doing here? Writing, yeah.

Doug: Well, don't compare yourself to E.B. White, man, because that would intimidate almost everybody.

Bryan: I swear to God, it's just beautiful stuff. It's beautiful stuff. And V.S. Naipaul, when I read his stuff, I just, I go, “This is art. Why do I even grab this stupid keyboard?”

Doug: Yeah, well, comparison is the thief of joy, as you know.

Brayn: Yeah.

Doug: All you got to do is just, you know, put your chin out and hope for the best. And I get it that's why we join social media platforms. We want the interaction, it's a community and we want the gratification. And we want the the recognition that we're doing this and people appreciate it. It's really hard to write and avoid.

Bryan: Yeah, I'm not proud of it.

Doug: I'm not proud of the need. Yeah, no one is, but I think it's healthy to acknowledge it.

Bryan: I want it to be less important.

Magda: Well, I mean, okay, there's a whole field of study of the relationship between the writer and the writing and the reading and all of that. So, I mean, clearly there's a lot to dig through, unpack, and a lot of variation in “is it worth writing if nobody reads it?”. You know, like, I'm sure some people would say, “yes, of course.” You know, avid diarists, right? But I think for most writers, we are writing to be read. We're writing for the reader.

Bryan: I think where I'm concerned, it's mostly for the reader, although there is a little bit I like when I've come up with a new turn of phrase that makes me happy. Or when I stumble across an idea that I develop in a way that I haven't before, it gives me a little charge even just in the writing. But when I write it and it doesn't land, that's a little turn of the screw for me.

Doug: I actually love the fact now more than ever that you've titled your sub stack The Conservative Wahoo because conservative is now kind of differentiating itself from extreme, given the wide cohort of traditional conservatives who are not aligned with the current cabinet, with the current...

Bryan: You're an educated man and you're making a subtle differentiation there that a lot of people aren't, especially the people in the MAGA movement who consider themselves to be conservatives. And they consider people like me to be squishes and to be out of touch. And those are people that have studied no academic conservatism. They have no clue what American conservatism was before 2016. And their glandular impulses are what pass for conservatism today. I like to think that some political party may someday come to embrace my ideology, but as of right now, neither of the two does.

Doug: So what do you think about the prospects for an uneasy alliance between moderates and conservatives and the left? You know, the idea that Elon Musk is going to be in charge of getting rid of a third of the federal budget just gives me hives just thinking about it. So is there a way forward, even temporarily, to just kind of counteract what kind of shenanigans we're in for?

Bryan: If I answered that question, I would be violating the precepts of my desire to… [Doug and Magda laugh] I don't know. I honestly don't know. I honestly know that I was in no way, shape, or form energized by the counter arguments raised to the Trump candidacy. I could be reduced to a shaking, quivering mass of anger when I would think about the student loan repayment programs. That just took me to excesses of political anger, That can't happen anymore in my life. I don't know that that means that I will ever have an affinity for policies like that, that would enable me to join a coalition with the Mark 1, Mod 0, Center of Mass Democrat. Doug, our two friends, our two good friends from college that I went to the basketball game with Friday night, they're both mainline Democrats and always have been. We used to have these arguments in college. They didn't see anything good about Ronald Reagan when we were in college.

Bryan: I still have nothing in common politically with these guys, except we don't like where the right broadly understood is headed. So my thing is, is I figure I'll just spend the rest of my life in a political wilderness and I'll be fine with it. And I will retreat from the world and I'll write about what our farmer is farming this year. We get 50 acres of farmland and at some point in the spring, I'll find out what's going to grow there that year. That's the kind of stuff I want to write about.

Magda: What did they grow this year?

Bryan: Soybeans.

Magda: Soybeans. Interesting. Who's the client for the soybeans?

Bryan: Pretty much all the soybeans and the corn grown on the eastern shore goes into feed for the poultry.

Magda: Oh! That's interesting and something I didn't know.

Bryan: Yeah, I didn't either until I signed on to a farm.

Doug: Well, I'm so glad you came on to talk about what you're going through now, as you've mentioned. And the Substack is The Conservative Wahoo, which I'll link to in the show notes. And to the extent you still will be opining about anything political or soybean related, where can we find you?

Magda: I think it would be interesting to hear more about the soybeans, honestly. I really would.

Bryan: I wish I knew more. Catherine runs this world here. And I have not been a part of it. I haven't been a partner. And that's something I want to do in the next phase of my life is to be available to her. Now, she may not want my partnership on that. [Everyone laughs] We'll see. I want to be more available. But I have no idea. Our farmer and she had this running battle with some sort of invasive weed that was really, really causing Catherine a great deal of consternation.

Magda: Oh, was it knotweed? It might have been knotweed.

Bryan: Johnson grass is what it was called.

Magda: Oh, okay. We don't have that here. I'm going to have to look it up.

Bryan: Johnson grass.

Doug: All right, so look for a name change to The Conservative Farmer's Almanac. [Laughs] And why not?

Magda: Look, there's a whole world of people that are interested in invasive plants out there that are very intensely working on this because it's a legitimate problem for our food supply, for individual people, for all of it.

Doug: And it's Tidewater too, right? So there's all sorts of invasive stuff happening.

Bryan: I just wonder what the crossover with people who want to hear that from The Conservative Wahoo.

Doug: So will you be on a social media platform also, or are you kind of weaning yourself off those, too?

Bryan: Yeah, I mean, I'm on Twitter. I'm on Twitter. I won't call it X. It's Twitter. Yeah. And my handle is @conswahoo, just a shortened version of Conservative Wahoo. And I, you know, there's two parts to Twitter, right? There's the active part and there's the passive part. When I read it, it makes me angry. It makes me excited. It makes me want to do something.

Doug: Mission accomplished.

Bryan: It still does that. Yeah. What I'm trying to do is to not respond. I'm trying to be far less responsive as my first step in managing Twitter. My second step in managing Twitter will be to stop looking at it. That's something I hope to do over the course of the next year or so as I slowly recede.

Magda: Have you considered going to Bluesky?

Bryan: Not a bit.

Magda: Okay.

[Doug and Magda laugh]

Doug: He told you he's not persuadable. You know, let's be clear.

Bryan: Not even for a second, because number one, it does not appeal to me. Number two, because I want to break the relationship with that kind of thing altogether.

Magda: Okay. All right.

Doug: Amen. Well, I got to say, I'm really glad you are still writing. I'll tell you that I find the pop-up in my phone every Monday morning, and I do enjoy reading what you write.

Bryan: I appreciate it.

Doug: So to the extent this level of validation helps anything, I want you to know that I do enjoy it, especially since I enjoy reading things from your perspective. My mind expands a bit when I am forced to think outside of how I normally think. And so whatever form Conservative Wahoo takes going forward, I hope you'll keep at it because I enjoy it. And it's only gotten better over the years.

Bryan: That's wonderful. Thank you for saying that. Magdo, it was a pleasure to meet you.

Magda: It was wonderful meeting you, too.

Doug: Yes, I'm really glad this happened. Thanks for coming along, Bryan. And thank you all for listening to episode 64 of the When the Flames Go Up podcast with Magda Pecsenye Zarin and me, Doug French. Our guest has been Bryan McGrath. When the Flames Go Up is a production of Halfway Noodles, LLC, and is available on all the usual platforms and at whentheflamesgoup.substack.com. Please subscribe for your weekly episode every Wednesday and our Friday Flames newsletter, which comes out every other Friday. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.

[Theme music plays.]

Bryan: That was lovely. Thank you.

Doug: I appreciate that. I’m really glad.

Magda: Thank you. You already have your Christmas tree up.

Doug: Oh, yeah.

Magda: I'm kind of delighted by that.

Doug: The last thing I included on the list was his very clear ideas of when the Christmas season is.

Bryan: November 1st to January 1st.

Doug: So when does your tree come down? It comes down January 2nd?

Bryan: Usually on the 1st. Someday on the 1st. I do two things on the 1st. I take my tree down and I make a video. And it is me talking to myself about how I wish to be dealt with if I start to lose my faculties.

Magda: Oh, wow. Has that changed at all?

Bryan: No, no, I've got five of them. And I send that video to my girls and to Catherine to say, I want to go into that facility. I want to. I love institutional food. I like a dorm. I will do fine over there.

Magda: For people who were, who would be over 100 right now, I think it was kind of disorienting to them. But for people our age, it's like going back to college. It's like living in a dorm because everyone is your same age. You go down to the dining hall for your meals. People leave their doors open. And it's just like everybody getting your same references.

Doug: It's like first year all over again.

Bryan: Without the clove cigarettes.

Magda: Right. Exactly.

Doug: But lots more STDs, apparently.

Magda: Oh, God. Yeah, that's awful.

Bryan: Eeew. Eeew.

Magda: Doug, you're kind of obsessed with that, I think.

Doug: And how often can we look forward to the trumpet concerts?

Bryan: I do them every day.

Magda: Bryan does trumpet concerts?

Doug: Bryan goes on Facebook and trumpets out Christmas hymns.

Bryan: I do a Christmas carol virtually every day from November 1st until Christmas Eve.

Magda: That's delightful.

Bryan: They're not good. [Doug laughs] They're not good.

Doug: Hey man, art is art, man. You're putting it out there and I salute you.

Bryan: I'll give you my, it's bad. It's bad.

Doug: To the extent a salute from a non-military person cuts any cloth with you. [Magda laughs]

Bryan: Well rendered. Well rendered.