i'd spent year as a china analyst in hong kong, working with people like stan karno and so on and so forth. and the idea that we were actually going to go to china and that nixon -- by the way, this took a lot of political will in both governments. and only people as powerful as mao and nixon were able to pull this off. >> but tell us about -- how did you all sort of repurpose your brains from this sort of cold war perspective to suddenly, this is okay? >> my brain was already repurposed. i wanted a relationship with china. i thought it was long overdue. we had operated under the analytical assumption that china and the soviet union were a united bloc, which was crazy. it was wrong. so much evidence that that was not so. and what nixon was doing was taking advantage for the first time in policy terms of the sino-soviet difficulties, sino-soviet and it completely changed the way the dynamics of international politics went. >> and how did the drip itself, max and nick, change your minds? when you landed there, you were of one frame of mind. what frame of mind were you in when you left?