David Wallace-Wells:  The Politics of AI Are Shifting in Real Time

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show. It's been a minute. Opinion writer for the New York Times and columnist for New York Times Magazine. He writes about science, climate change, technology, and the future of the planet. His book, The Uninhabitable Earth, is a real pick-me-up. It's David Wallace Wells. What's up, man? I'm just great to be here. I'm grateful for you stepping away from Romeo and Juliet to hang out with me for a little bit. As my gift to you, you have such a broad remit over there, as mentioned. I've read interesting newsletters about AI, ice, climate, Fauci redux. I'm just going to let you pick what you want to talk about first. What are you the most animated about right now? I mean, at the moment, I think the politics of AI is the most exciting thing I've ever heard. I think it's the most exciting thing I've ever heard. I think it's and dramatic political story of the summer. I mean, I would say there was polling that just came out today, I think, or yesterday from HeatMap showing that now 75% of Americans oppose the construction of data centers in their communities. Something like 60 plus percent oppose them strongly. That is more than would oppose the construction of a nuclear power plant. And if you think back to what the opposition to nuclear power did to the, you know, build out of nuclear power decades ago, it looks like we're heading for an incredible collision course here because we're building out data centers, trying to construct a massive compute empire at breakneck speed. And this opposition is rising, growing really, really quickly. And that's been happening for, you know, nine months, 12 months, depending on how you want to clock it. But the really significant thing that's happened over the last couple of weeks is that a lot of political leaders are aligning with each other. And I think that's a really important thing. They're aligning themselves with the opposition here. And Kathy Hochul in New York was the first one. But, you know, Greg Abbott in Texas, of all places, is now, you know, signed a kind of data center moratorium. We're seeing, you know, Josh Shapiro, who is basically campaigning for president as a, like, I'm going to build stuff guy, get shit done is his motto. He's imposing a data center moratorium. And so you see across the political spectrum, politicians, like, you know, getting a read of which way the wind is blowing, and putting themselves in the camp of data center opposition. And this is, you know, completely, you know, novel, as far as I'm concerned, you know, signing up the populists against the sort of economic interests of states and communities. And I think the, you know, the sort of decision there, the sort of contrast there, the showcase there is really, really powerful when you dig into it. Just a few brief little case studies. In Loudoun County, Virginia, they're now making half of their tax revenue from data centers. They've cut property taxes by 30% because of the revenue coming in from data centers. In down in Louisiana, where you are, Richland Parish, I think it's called, they've given elementary school teachers $50,000 bonuses. These are women and men who make less than $50,000 a year. All of them, they got bonuses because of the construction of a new meta data center there. And you see similar stories all around the country where you have this incredible flow of money coming into local communities when data centers are built there. And yet, the local populations are unwilling to accept those projects, even with that money promised to them. And increasingly, you now see state and national leaders signing up, not with the corporations who want to do that work, but with the people who are opposed to them. And this is, I think, just a really big deal, a really new pattern in American politics, and a sign of where populism is in the summer of 2026 that we're now seeing people like Greg Abbott or Josh Shapiro on the protest side of the equation. Yeah, the Shapiro thing caught my eye, too. He signed an executive order this week that he described as implementing the strictest standards in the nation on AI data centers, which is a little bit counter to his brand, right? And he's more of a technocrat, it's not as if, you know, you wouldn't want to have reasonable restrictions on data centers if you're a Josh Shapiro, but to kind of try to position himself on the cutting edge of this, I think is noteworthy. I'm curious your thought, this is, I think, more of a social psychological question. I kind of want to separate out the particulars, because I do think that the story with the data centers in these local communities is like, it's just different, different places, right? Like in some places, the local city councils cut horrific deals, and like, gave away these huge tax benefits to the richest people in the world. And you can understand why people are pissed. In some communities, like the pollution and noise issues are like really bad, and you can understand why people are pissed. And then in other areas, like Loudoun County, it is kind of like, why are people pissed here exactly? Like, everybody's making more money off of this. You would think that would be an absolute golden ticket appeal in American politics. You can pay less taxes, your local government will be much better funded, they'll be able to provide more social services. You would think that would be the kind of appeal that, you know, pitch men and politicians would dream of. And yet, no. And so that's my question is, okay, if you kind of set aside, like the particulars of each case, what is driving the broad based distrust, and anger and backlash? And because to me, like, it seems pretty obvious that it's, again, setting aside the particular communities, if you're a data center isn't in your community isn't affecting your life day to day. Like, why are people so upset about it? And it feels like it's like a physical stand in for fear about AI, being pitchforks about the richest people in the world getting richer and richer. Maybe something else. I don't know. I see it in roughly those terms, too. It's a sort of a catch all objection to people feeling out of control and powerless, feeling that their lives, their communities, their futures, their economic prospects, are all being determined by other people, not by them. And they've been feeling this way for a while, they've expressed that frustration in a variety of ways. But the AI build out is a sort of useful opportunity to express all of those frustrations. And people bring different things to it. I mean, you mentioned a lot of the particular objections. There's also old school NIMBYism. There's old school environmentalism, there's new school environmentalism focused on the climate impacts. There are people who are worried about electricity prices. There are people who are worried about the fact that these data centers might shadow their whole small town and change the physical landscape of their environment. There are people who are worried about AI being used for surveillance. There are people who are worried about unemployment, job loss, even existential risk. It's such a big, messy bucket. It's such a big, messy coalition that I think you're right. We shouldn't think about it piecemeal. When you think about it piecemeal, you almost get to a place where you say, well, there could be some bargains struck here. We should be able to persuade people. We should be able to make sure the sound isn't as loud. We can make sure that the electricity prices are actually going down rather than going up. There are a lot of things that can be sold to local populations. But when you have 75% of the country saying that they are opposed to this, I mean, this is just an astronomical number. It is not the kind of number that we see in American politics about anything. Three quarters of the country opposed to data center build out. I mean, three quarters of the country. Those numbers, they're just almost too big to imagine. A lot of people associate it. They think in their minds, oh, this is NIMBYism or it's opposition to environmental, you know, opposition to renewables. People support the construction of renewable energy by 65 to 30. Right. People oppose the construction of data centers by 75 to 20. This is a super majority coalition larger than anything we have seen in American politics in a generation. And I think some people, their opposition is thin. Some people, it is informed by misinformation, disinformation. I'm not guaranteeing that this resistance will succeed and stall the data center build out. There are a lot of forces moving in the other direction. But it is striking. That number is so large that you can lose quite a lot of people from that coalition and still have an incredible command of political power. And I think that's where we're heading, because every time you see a new poll, the number in opposition goes up. It's not going down. This is what I think is about trust in the tech oligarchs and people who are optimistic about social media and now hate it and not wanting to get fooled again. And I got this when I was on my vacation. You're taking a break from your vacation now, which I'm so grateful for. I did not do that for anyone, so I'm honored. But I was with one of my friends. He was ranting about the data centers, and among his rants was the water complaint. And I'd just been doing a lot of reading on that. And I was like, I actually think your water complaints are a little overstated. There are other issues. I received this text from him that I think is very representative of the anti-data center feeling. Okay, I've done some additional reading and research, and I'm swayed by your opinion that the water issues are not the biggest problems. I'm still quite anti-data centers, though. I'm just much better informed in my opposition. I saw some polls that came out last week about how much people trust each of their tech leaders and AI leaders. And it's like, 70% distrust all of these figures. Dario Amodei, who's on some level the most approachable, the least obviously sociopathic, he's still widely distrusted. You know, Elon, Sam Altman. Because he's not obviously sociopathic, that makes me distrust him. It's like all you other guys I could tell are evil. What's happening with this one? And I think it's tied up in this broader story, which is that, you know, the last 20 years of American life, people have had material gains. They've been sort of unequally distributed, but by many measures, Americans are doing better than they used to. And yet we've had this incredible growing unhappiness and distrust with our society. And that's especially true when you ask those questions about the Internet and social media, which seemed 10 or 15 years ago to be, generally speaking, forces for good, which most Americans appreciated, and now feel deeply corrosive. In fact, a lot of people suspect that they kind of ruined a generation. And maybe ruining the entire human race. I'm not a doomer on those points. I think a lot of those arguments are overstated. But Americans feel in some deep way that their experience of the world is getting worse. That is in part because more and more control and power is being exhibited by a small number of people, many of them in Silicon Valley, and many of them centrally positioned now to be determining the shape of our collective future. And when people look at that possibility, they don't. They don't think here are generals I want to follow into battle, here are leaders who I want to emulate, they think these people's vision of the future is completely distasteful, in certain ways anti-human, it's certainly anti-worker, and we just want to reject that out of hand. And, you know, what's striking to me most about this phenomenon is that if you had spoken to me about this six or nine months ago, I would have outlined that story in almost exactly the same way. But I also would have said, one of the deeply unhappiest things that I've ever done in my life as a human being, is that I'm not going to let the world know that I'm a human being. One of the really unhappy things about this moment is that so many people feel out of control and powerless to do anything about it, and that even if there was this incredible upwelling of resistance, probably it would be accompanied by the sense of fatalism, like, what are we going to do, these people are so rich, they've already bought the land, they've already bought the politicians, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's really amazing to see a huge movement, something equivalent, I think, to Occupy or the Tea Party. It's a sign that people are maybe feeling frustrated, maybe feeling alienated, but responding to that, not by retreating into despair, but trying to fight back, perhaps in some irrational ways, perhaps in some ways that will burn out relatively quickly. But as an expression of broad American distrust of the powers that be, I don't think that we've seen anything this strong. I don't think that we've seen anything this strong and this wide in many years. Yeah, Rich Lowry of the National Review, like a child, wrote about how his support for Trump III was because it was a big middle finger to all of the liberal elites that he hates. That inner child that we all have, though, that we want to give a big middle finger to the people we hate. In that case, it was pretty silly, given that putting the stupidest, most bigoted American as the leader of the three-year-old was the result of that middle finger. But this feels like kind of that same emotion channeled towards the tech oligarchs. Like the data center thing is like the nation's middle finger to all of you fuckers that have been totally unresponsive and uncaring. And the times that you do demonstrate that you maybe care about us, you come off as so anti-human and weird that we do not possibly trust you. I mean, I come back to the example I cited at the beginning. I mean, in Richland Parish, Louisiana, elementary school teachers who have annual salaries of like $30,000 to $40,000 got a $50,000 bonus. And still, that community is not happy. Yeah. People are like, you can't buy me off with your dirty fucking Silicon Valley evil supercomputer money. On the evil supercomputer front, there's another thing you wrote about this week was kind of the safety stuff that is also happening really fast. Like right now, the summer, at the same time as the data center stuff, there's this hugging face situation where some of the open AI models broke out of the prison that they were supposed to be in, kind of. And, you know, engaged in attack on something that you can explain it. But the interesting, I think, meta, no pun intended, point that you were making talking about this was you saw this pattern in kind of the AI pushback that you saw in climate change where there's this kind of early wave of like apocalyptic feeling that gives way over time to like more normalization. And I think that on the safety side, we are seeing that a little bit. Yeah. I mean, I think this hugging face incident woke some people up. So there's been a new little wave of alarm. The people who are working very seriously on AI safety found an opportunity to weigh in again and show their faces in public. But in general, when we first encountered ChapGP2D in 2022, 2023, people were really worried. It felt like an existential challenge. It felt like, you know, maybe it wasn't that we were on the brink of Skynet or human extinction. It was something really deeply profound about the world that we're about to live in. People worried about bio risk and they worried about terrorism and they worried about, you know, yes, the effects of like mass unemployment and, you know, complete transformation of the economy. And all of those worries are in some ways still present in the zeitgeist and in the American psyche. But, you know, when you look at the front page of The New York Times or you watch cable news or whatever, people are much more likely to be talking about things like, is it possible that Anthropic can earn back its capex so that its investors will be made? And those are important questions. If they can't, it does mean something significant for the medium term of the American economy, since this country has bet so much money on artificial intelligence that if it doesn't work out, not just in general, but if it doesn't work out in precisely the pattern that the bets were made suggesting, we're in for a kind of a rocky road ahead. So I don't want to diminish those things. But it's not the same thing as saying, you know, this antisocial outcast. The local high school can now design a superbug that will wipe out the entire town or possibly the entire world, which is the kind of worry that people were having three or four and five years ago. And to some degree, that change is because the people monitoring safety have basically thought that things are going a little bit better than they worried. And yet every few months, in some cases, every few weeks, you have one of these incidents where something quite alarming happens. So in this case, they were doing some training runs on the models. They were not connected to the Internet. They were tasked with finding some cyber vulnerabilities. And that's a kind of an open-ended task. And so they found their way onto the Internet, even though they weren't technically connected to the Internet originally. They weren't, I don't think, disobeying any explicit orders. So it wasn't as though they'd been told not to get to the Internet. It seems like they were trying to follow the order in the most extreme way possible. It's like because they weren't on the Internet, the model could not identify the bugs it was supposed to. And so anyway, that seems like what happened. I think it's so important to keep in mind with all of these sorts of stories, like these models that we're freaking out about, the same as we did a year or so ago when we heard that they were blackmailing executives or that sort of thing. These are models that are in training runs, being tasked with particular tasks. And I think on some big, profound meta kind of a level, we should keep in mind this distinction between what models are, what they're doing on their own, and what they are doing in response to things that we have asked them to do. And when we talk about them, at least in this moment, in 2026, with the models, with the capabilities that they have now, when we talk about them as totally autonomous, as though they are seeking out their own goals, I think we're letting ourselves off the hook, not just in the context of a training environment, but more generally. Everything that AI is doing now, humans asked it to do. I think that is likely to be the case. I think that is likely to be the case forever after. But at least for now, we should be really, really careful in attributing true agency to AI agents. They are AI agents because humans asked them to undertake a task, not because they are coming to decisions on their own about ultimate goals. And so, you know, this was nerve-wracking for cybersecurity people. It's nerve-wracking to some extent about people who are worrying about, you know, what AIs can do. But I think at a base level, we should remind ourselves as often as we can that when we're worrying about disasters that might strike from artificial intelligence, we are still overwhelmingly today thinking about disasters that humans will task AIs with undertaking. People want another hour on that topic. I listened to Derek Thompson and Alex Stamos over on his Plain English podcast on just this topic. It's really good. I'll put a link in the show notes. The one other AI thing I want to talk about before we get to ice and climate stuff is, which I also talked about on that. Plain English podcast is this kind of open source versus closed source sort of question about the AI models and how the big American companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, have these closed models, but the Chinese companies have more open models. And there are a lot of implications to that. Some of the implications of that are security risks, that the Chinese models will be harder to control when security risks like this arise. There's some other economic implications to it, too, which is kind of like, Part of the reason why the AI, the tech leaders talk about how we are. We need to invest more and more and more in this because of how important it is to beat China. But it's kind of like if you get to a place where there are very powerful open source models, like, you know, and the medium term would like even matter kind of who won the race, if everybody has access to this eventually. Anyway, talk about just kind of like the implications of all of that in the competition versus China. The way that I think about it is that we've been told a very particular story over the last four or five years about AI as a business proposition, which is to say we looked at these charts that had AI capabilities growing quite quickly. We saw plotting a future AI development beyond the present into the future. And we saw that at some point, those charts started to look pretty vertical, kind of exponential. And the basic case that was made to us by the Frontier Labs, but also by, you know, to their investors, to the American public, was that at a certain point, artificial intelligence, would be so productive that the companies who had moved fastest and made the most progress would be just drowning in profits from how transformative the tools that were coming out of their labs would be. And that meant that the race was really, really important. And the race was important between Anthropic and OpenAI and other players who have sort of since fallen behind. And it was really important between the US and China because getting past that point, you would have true exponential growth, sometimes called recursive self-improvement, sometimes called artificial superintelligence. AGI. Yeah, AGI, AGI, ASI, whatever. You would just be in an entirely different world on the other side of that boundary as you are today. And I just think for a number of reasons, that is starting to seem at best questionable. And we are seeing remarkable improvements in many capabilities of artificial intelligence. We are also seeing, relatively slow effects on productivity, relatively slow effects on economic growth. Some of that is about the slow pace of diffusion through the economy. But a lot of it is because the truth is we haven't figured out how to make these things super useful. And there are probably many things that it can't be all that useful in doing, at least for the time being. Another big part of that challenge is that if it needs to be the case that a frontier lab passes that threshold and is on that exponential curve for them to really, really, really profit and earn back the investment that has been made in their capabilities, then the fact that there's a whole sea of alternative models, mostly in China but not exclusively, that can do like 90, 95% as well as the true frontier models, at 5%, 20%, 30% the cost, that's a big challenge to the basic business case, because there may still be some opportunities and there may be some applications that require the absolute best in class, but most of the world, and not just me and you writing emails with it or doing research with it, but businesses trying to do analysis with it, they don't necessarily need the absolute first class version if they can get something that's almost as good for a quarter of the price. I mean, I think about the way that investment banks work with their research analysts who are just out of college, they pay them a fraction of what they pay their senior people, they work them like crazy hours so their brains aren't completely functioning, but most of the work they're doing is just churning through spreadsheets. AI can do that. Maybe a better AI can do it a little bit better, but if you could find one that does it almost as well for a fraction of the price, many people are gonna go for that. And that leaves the businesses that have been built on the promise of AI monopoly kind of in the lurch. And that is really the abyss that open AI is staring down right now, where they've even started openly acknowledging that they're more focused on price competition with one another and with open source models than they are in terms of improving the frontier of the actual capabilities. And I think it's notable that over the last few months, they've made that acknowledgement. A number of tech leaders have welcomed open source into their lives because it makes startups easier, it sort of circulates as easy to use. And you've seen some openness from the White House, which given the sort of the geopolitical context of a year or two ago is really quite striking. The US AI industry was built on this massive race to AGI. We have to get there before China. The individual labs in the US were racing just as hard against one another. And now we seem to be in a very different place where we're realizing that AI will be with us, it will be transformative, but all of the gains are not gonna accrue to one company or even necessarily one company. And exactly what that means for all the money that's been shoveled in the direction of these companies is who knows, but I think there may well be a kind of significant correction coming down the pike. - Well, I'm trying to decide where my fears lie there, whether the economic correction coming down the pike or the Chinese open source models and the aforementioned loaner teen getting access to all that. While we're doing scary stuff, I'll keep this system going. Would you rather talk about, talk about ICE or climate change first? - Let's do ICE. - Okay. This is your most recent newsletter. I think this is gonna be a pretty surprising statistic for people, which is that ICE arrests hit a new high in July, last month. I think that there is a total misconception in the narrative about what is happening. It's like the sense that after, you know, Kristi Noem was replaced by Mark Wayne Mullen, that there was some pullback from the administration and that is not the case at all. - Yeah, it's probably gonna set a new record in August. Deportations are likely to set a new record this year. Certainly deportations of people seized within the border are gonna be way above what they've ever been before. And this comes in the wake of this confrontation in Minneapolis, which was sort of observed by the country, real time, and seemed to me, and I think a lot of people I know, to mark a real shift in the mood of the country about immigration and about Trumpism. It looked like the citizens of Minneapolis stood their ground against an invading horde of federal agents, and there was conflict. There were a few deaths. There was a lot of protest activity and a lot of media attention. And then the Trump administration retreated, with its tail between its legs. And Greg Bovino was forced out, and yeah, Kristi Noem was forced out as well. But, you know, Stephen Miller's still in the White House, and he's still maybe the second most powerful man in the country. And what happened, as I understand it, is that there was a kind of a sort of strategic conflict going back a couple of years between people who really wanted to stage spectacular confrontations with immigrants. - They wanted the ice porn. They wanted the ASMR videos with the immigrants in chains, and they wanted to rub it in their face. And as part, I think, as a strategic point of hoping that if they did that, people would self-deport and leave, and also in part because there's some sadists in the White House. - There were a lot of sadists, yeah. But there were also people, including Miller, who was like, you know, we can do this. We can do this in a much more strategic way. The ultimate goal is actually getting these people out of the country. The standard they set for themselves on the campaign trail was 20 million immigrants deported, and we're nowhere near that. So we have a long, you know, we have a long way to go to the absolute worst case scenario. But if you were horrified by the brutality that we saw on our phones last year, in many ways, things are worse today, because in order to keep up with their quotas and hit their numbers, they're actually targeting immigrants who are complying with immigration law. - This is like the most important point right now, 'cause that's how they get to them. They are targeting the people that are showing up for their appointments who are actually doing things the right way. - And still doing quite brutal things to them. I mean, we're talking about, you know, deporting people who are from Central America to Central Africa. Why? For punitive reasons. These are countries that we're sending them to Central Africa. We're reaching agreements with it. The State Department literally says it's not safe to travel to, and DHS is deporting law-abiding immigrants to those countries. If they're from Mexico, Mexico is saying like, "We'll take everybody back." And yet we're still sending those people to Honduras, to Nicaragua, just to fuck with them. The policy is still remarkably cruel. The numbers are still remarkably large. And I think the scariest thing is that the dollar figures, that the agency has to play with is just, it's so astronomical. I mean, ICE was like a $10 billion agency before Donald Trump returned to office. It got $75 billion in the one big beautiful bill. And they're spending a huge chunk of that to build these detention centers, which make them now the largest federal detention centers in the country. It makes ICE the most well-funded federal law, well-funded federal law enforcement agency in the country. - More well-funded than a lot of the military branches. - And the Marines, yeah. - Yeah, it's astonishing. And maybe the most astonishing thing is that liberals have sort of turned away from that um sort of clocking minneapolis as a victory and thinking that you know trump may be wreaking havoc on this front or that front but on immigration we'd sort of boxed him in and it's just not the case just to expand a couple of those points because i was looking at this the other day um i've been doing some japanese internment camp reading just try to get a baseline on where we're at and then obviously there's similarities and differences in a way that we're treating people worse now or better um but the like number of people through the system this year is like significantly greater than the total number of japanese that we have interned um in the 1940s right like that so that's the scale of it um and in these detention centers and um to back to your point on how they're going after people they can find and like i do think this is the key point because they have the resources to do that like if you all are the person that people imagine when they're thinking about an illegal immigrant like somebody that came snuck across the border you know went to some community inside the interior of the country is working landscaping jobs cash only or whatever like you know working the fields or in the worst case scenario selling drugs or whatever like those people are hard to find that's a challenge it's a resource intensive challenge we've got a lot of idiots working for ice right who's easy to find people that um you know applied for asylum and have been going to their court dates hoping to get here legally or in a worst case scenario i talked about the couple the iranian couple in california that have a green card but then there was a change.org petition talking about how their green card should be revoked because one of their family members is an iranian official or whatever and okay well we know how to find the green card families because you know they're in the system and so that that couple that was here legally is doing nothing is still in dilly right now but they're kid and so like that is what is happening right now like people that are following the rules are the ones that are getting targeted and this is you know it's an illustration of how ideological the project is for trump because he actually could have declared victory even before minneapolis because the border had effectively closed right you know he could have said there's nobody coming over anymore and he would have been basically right and part of that's going to go after criminals we're just going to find criminals use this money to find criminals yeah but the fact that they're doing all of this they did all this last year and then they're doubling down on it this year is a sign that this is the true ideological goal is not closing the border and it's not seizing criminals it is actually eliminating tens of millions of law-abiding immigrants of foreign origin and getting them out of the country that's what they want to do um and i think it's going to continue through the end of the administration and what worries me is that this may be one of those situations where trump does something extreme and then future democratic administrations are a little bit less extreme but still you know following the same path so in the way that you know trump's trade war and kind of cold war with china in the first term gave way to bidenomics um you know we may see a sort of similar or or even now with the tariffs i think it's quite likely in the next democratic administration that some amount of tariffs stay in place and that's going to be a big problem i think it's going to be a big problem um i think it's going to be a big problem um i think it's going to be a big problem in the future because i think that's going to be a big problem i think that's going to be a big problem in the future because i think that's going to be a big problem and i do suspect slash worry that there will be significantly more border enforcement under a future democratic um president than we saw um for instance under joe biden maybe some people think that's for the good i'd count it as a win if they kept the border enforcement but then got rid of the fucking ice thugs and went back to you know the ins and sent people letters if they were here illegally that's my pitch to any 20 28ers that are listening the big picture point is that like there is no crisis at the border anymore which means that one could do you know you might want to look at joe biden's record and say he didn't do nearly enough to police on the border there was this huge influx of people i would point out that was a global pattern it wasn't just in the u.s it was in canada it was in the uk it was in the eu everywhere around the world in the rich world in the aftermath of the pandemic there was a huge upsurge of migration um it was not primarily the result of biden's border policy nevertheless you could fault him for not doing enough if you wanted not to be taking control of the border if you wanted not to not to be taking control of we're in a very different situation now we're almost starting to be in a very different situation in 2029 we will not have that kind of you know um flood of of migrants to the border and so the suite of options facing any future leader is you know what seems political politically palatable is i think much more open than was the case a few years ago the other depressing thing that you note in that newsletter um is um despite trump's approval rating kind of sinking across the board on a bunch of stuff and just his general approval rating approval rating on iran economy um his ratings and immigration still are kind of better and it's you know whatever um but i do think that's because of just this lack of awareness his immigration numbers were going down with everything else during the more visible ice raids and i think that the out of sight out of mind nature of this um is is creating a sense that things are okay and i do think it's incumbent upon the democrats and the opposition to make sure people realize that that's not true let's talk about climate stuff when we talked last year i don't talk about climate enough on here it's hard a lot happening in the news trump derangement syndrome etc um so i just i do like to check in with you when you're here last year i asked you to kind of update us on the uninhabitable earth and the basic summary you gave was um projections as far as like warming growth uh have gotten better since you wrote the book um but they've also plateaued because they got better and then people stopped caring about this and you know populists won uh uh here and around the globe in a bunch of places and his climate even gonna be discussed in the democratic 2028 debates who knows um so like basically you know the shorthand was it's gotten better but like it's still a big problem and and doesn't feel like we're as serious about it anymore is that kind of still the shorthand for where we're at today do you think yeah i would say that this summer has given us a few reasons to worry a bit more um about the climate impacts i think you know when i look at what happened in spokane washington where 700 homes were destroyed by a wildfire and because it sort of paled in comparison to what had happened in los angeles 18 months before people almost didn't notice it i don't even really know if it's going to get better or if it's going to get worse and if it's going to count it as a national news story we had smoke in the northeast people worried about that a little bit but it quite quickly got into this argument about you know how the canadians aren't doing enough to manage their fires we've had huge forest fires across parts of europe all the way up through scotland and england and places that really really just don't deal with fire very often at all and they're also dealing with drought and these incredible heat waves they've had five heat waves in europe um that would have been considered historic in any other year and this is a pretty bleak sign i would guess that when the european summer is all said and done we're probably going to see estimated mortality from the heat there close to 100 000 people dying this year in certain places and i've seen data in germany and france where the most intense stay of heat in june killed more people than the deadliest day in the entire pandemic did in that country and so we are already kind of now staring face to face with some pretty grim climate impacts it's also the case that scientists are growing a little uneasy being so confident in giving the kind of reassurances that i was giving to you last year which is to say emissions are better than we thought they would be you know we don't expect a huge huge increase of emissions over the course of the century but the emissions are only one half of the equivalent of what we think they are and so we're starting to worry about what's going to happen to the atmosphere we're starting to worry about what's going to happen to the climate the climate system is the other half what happens when we put those emissions in the atmosphere and more and more scientists are starting to worry i think um pretty reasonably that the climate system now appears to be more sensitive to emissions than we expected which means that even if we're doing better on emissions than we thought we would the ultimate climate impact may be considerably larger and there are a lot of other factors that we need to look at in order to be able to make sure that we're doing the best we can and i think that's a really important aspect of what we're doing so i think that's a really important aspect of what we're doing so i think that's a really important aspect of what we're doing so i think that's a really important aspect of what we're doing so i think that's a really important aspect of what we're doing so i think that's a really important aspect of what we're doing so i think that's a really important aspect of what we're doing so i think that's a really important aspect of what we're doing so we've sort of run this natural experiment over the last few years when years when years when a particular set of regulations was put a particular set of regulations was put a particular set of regulations was put in place just monitoring in place just monitoring in place just monitoring the pollution from global shipping the pollution from global shipping the pollution from global shipping routes so boats going across the big routes so boats going across the big routes so boats going across the big oceans had to really clean up their fuel oceans had to really clean up their fuel oceans had to really clean up their fuel kind of dramatically in 2020 and it may kind of dramatically in 2020 and it may kind of dramatically in 2020 and it may well be the case that we're seeing a well be the case that we're seeing a well be the case that we're seeing a kind of significant acceleration kind of significant acceleration kind of significant acceleration in the rate of warming just because of in the rate of warming just because of in the rate of warming just because of that effect that the ships on the ocean that effect that the ships on the ocean that effect that the ships on the ocean are now polluting less than they used to are now polluting less than they used to are now polluting less than they used to and in the big picture you know and in the big picture you know and in the big picture you know that's scary if we're in a position that's scary if we're in a position that's scary if we're in a position where our emissions are flat which is where our emissions are flat which is where our emissions are flat which is basically how they've been for about basically how they've been for about basically how they've been for about half a decade or so half a decade or so half a decade or so and yet warming is getting faster, that's starting to feel like an out of control system because we're turning the knob that we thought was controlling the system. And the problem that we're worried about is getting worse. It's not stabilizing and it's not getting better. I think there are going to be a bunch of reports coming out over the next few months exploring this in detail. But I would say that on the scientific front, there are some reasons to be concerned that things are getting worse rather than better. Why can't the supercomputer solve this? I thought that was the point of AGI. You know, it's funny, in my book, which I would now feel is so long ago, it came out in 2019, I did quote Eric Schmidt saying that AI had effectively already solved climate change in 2019. It's kind of like when Sam Altman said he doesn't know how they're going to get to a profit, but the AI is going to get smart enough that it'll figure it out for him. I mean, this is on all of these fronts, when they talk about curing cancer, when they talk about you know, it's the promise of the technological tool is real. There are many things that increased computing power and really impressive AI can do for us. But the world is not a computer program. It is a complicated system full of ecosystems and humans and politics. And it cannot be designed as simplistically as you design a computer game. You know, one of the phrases that people keep saying these days on this to make this point is that intelligence isn't the true bottleneck. It's not that we haven't cured cancer, because we didn't have enough brains working on it. It's because cancer is really, really complicated. And in fact, the more that we learn about cancer, the more complicated we learn that it is. When we were kids, we thought about cancer is like stage one to four. What kind of cancer was it? And what stage was it in? Now we know that almost every single person's cancer is genetically unique, and might require a unique approach to really combat it. Now we have tools that may be promising on that front. Very exciting. Just this week, Moderna released some promising phase three trials of a melanoma mRNA treatment, which is doing exactly this fully customizing cancer treatment to the individual. But it's a reminder of how complicated the whole problem is that we're even trying to do that to customize treatment down to the level of the individual and the individual itself. It's not as simple as saying, stage one breast cancer, that's easy. Stage four melanoma is tricky, whatever. Everything is different. Everything is more complicated. And we tell ourselves these just so stories in imagining a happy AI future that are just deeply misleading about the complexity of the world, when the reason we are struggling in this world is because it is complicated, not because the answers are there to be grabbed and easy to see, but because there are huge contestations over this. And the thing about this that maybe most alarms me, or is stuck in my mind most over the last few months, is not a technical point. It's an ideological point. It's an intellectual point. I heard Dario Moda say he believes that in relatively short order AI will mean that ideology itself cannot survive. What he meant by that was that all of the questions that we have about how to allocate resources and prioritize social programs, how we organize our society, these big, deep, profound questions that have preoccupied humans and pulled them into conflict with one another since there were humans. He believes that AI will become so intelligent that we need no longer ask those questions because we will know the answer. But that is fundamentally a misunderstanding of what those conflicts are really about. They are not about whether we know how to optimize economic growth. They are about how do we share in the common good? Who is entitled to what? To what extent are we comfortable punishing one another? To what extent are we comfortable cooperating with one another? This is not a math equation that can be solved by a super intelligent computer. It has to be solved by humans. And the fact that the people who are designing these systems seem to believe that it can be solved by computers is exactly the problem. It's why so many people feel so alienated from their judgment. Yeah, the most efficient allocation of tax dollars is not actually the fundamental fissure in the country. I'm a little annoyed at you because I was going to end on the Moderna news as a positive. I wanted to give people something positive. And you managed to kind of take that anecdote that Moderna had this big advancement using MNRA, MRNA, excuse me, with a potential skin cancer vaccine and kind of warp it also, go into a negative framework. Overdoses are falling dramatically. Maybe this year are going to be only half as high as they were in their peak. We're seeing school shootings at historic lows. We're seeing obesity rates falling, although only slightly because of GLP-1s. Crime is so historically low. We set a record for the pace of crime decline last year, and we're going to break that record this year. In almost every city in America, we're going to have homicide rates that are comparable to European cities. That's not true of all cities, but most American cities. Sorry, Memphis. When you look at petty crime, we're actually already ahead of many of those countries. So when we tell ourselves a story about America beset by crime, we're a violent country, we're a criminal country, it actually is no longer that true. Maybe not even true at all. Our national death rate fell to an all-time low last year. We're up 5% better on an age-adjusted basis than the previous year, which is an incredible jump. So there is amazing progress. It's just also the case that everyone looking at their phone, thinking about what shape the future will take, thinks that it will be determined by who wins the death battle between Sam Altman and Dario Modai, neither of whom they trust at all. Right. I agree with that. I think the MRNA stuff is also, just the advancements potentially there, both of the GLP-1s and the MRNAs, pretty amazing. And we probably need an additional, the only good thing Trump ever did, Operation Warp State, we probably need an additional one for the next administration. Before I lose you, can I ask you two just kind of practical climate questions? I'll let you get back to vacation. You wrote about needing to retrofit the planet, and you kind of mentioned this, listing the climate concerns. I mean, there were 7,000 deaths in France due to heat in June. Europe needs air conditioning. I mean, we're also concerned about climate. But people in different cities need different temperature controls now than they did 20 years ago. One of my buddies here in New Orleans, one of his big things is trying to convince the city to have a program to fund these more sturdy roofs. Because in the long term, it will save money. Because inevitably, you get hurricanes, the roofs will not be as vulnerable to them. Are there other kind of tangible examples of that when you're writing that newsletter? Yeah, I mean, New Orleans, you know, the levees that they rebuilt after Katrina don't protect against Category 5 hurricanes. Oh, I mean, the pumps also don't work. Don't forget a Category 5 hurricane, bro. Like, we had a big rainstorm the other day, and the roads were flooded. I was like, this is kind of a bad sign. I think we should probably be fixing the pumps rather than putting up flock cameras. But yeah, whatever. That's just me. I mean, I think that adaptation is going to be the project of a generation, maybe, maybe even a century. We will be adjusting to an entirely novel global landscape. The planet's already warmer than it's ever been in the entire history of humanity, which means that climate conditions that govern the whole of human history are already behind us. They've been lost. And we will be living in a new future. And that means we're going to have to do a lot of rebuilding. I mean, just on the question of heat, you mentioned AC, which is already, you know, Europeans are 10 times as likely to have AC as they were in 1990. They're already moving relatively quickly compared to where they were. It's just that they literally didn't have weather like this for their entire history. So it took them a little while. In the US, we were just dealing with, you know, wildfire smoke from Canada. I don't think that kind of threat is going to stop. We need to retrofit our buildings so that at least the air inside is clean and safe and breathable, which isn't the case at the moment because too few buildings have filtration systems. We had a little flurry of interest or excitement about that around COVID, but then everybody kind of bailed. We have to take control of the forest fire risks in the West directly. And that is a really, really tricky one. This is really a conversation for an entirely different podcast. But you know, we told ourselves a story in America for a decade or so in which we said the problem was really that we fought fires too aggressively for 50 years. And that meant there was all of this dead wood out there that was going to burn when fires did strike. And so what we need to do is to try to reintroduce new, good fire into the landscape to prevent future fires. And I think that's a really, really important thing to do. But when you look at what happened in Los Angeles or Lahaina or Boulder or Santa Rosa, Paradise, a bunch of fires in Canada, these are not wildfires in the traditional sense of the term. They're not burning through forests for hundreds of thousands of acres and then leaching into some unfortunate community of homes. These are fires that start literally in or right next to dense kind of suburban scale residential communities and burn through those communities house to house. They actually leave the trees, typically leave the trees unburned. If you see the images from, you know, Palisades or Altadena, you can, the trees are often green. in the aftermath of the fire because the fire burns so quickly through that it found the readier fuel, which was the homes themselves. We need to rebuild those homes. We need to reimagine those neighborhoods. We need to redesign them so that, you know, streets aren't lined up with wind patterns. We need to take control of the landscape so that more homes don't burn. We need to build houses in places where it's safe as opposed to because of housing scarcity, forcing people further and further out into the wildland urban interface. We need to grow crops so that better in heat so that when we're dealing with an El Nino like this year, when many of the world's bread baskets are going to be suffering under extreme heat, many of them also having less fertilizer than they would have otherwise because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, it won't result in something like 50 million additional people being pushed into extreme hunger, which I think is what the UN just estimated will happen this year because of El Nino and the fertilizer crisis. So, you know, there are sort of solution sets everywhere. The biggest one is the one that we were talking about earlier, which is one that I'm personally a little bit uncomfortable with, which is the one that I'm personally a little bit uncomfortable with, which is the one that I'm personally a little bit uncomfortable with, which is the one that I'm comfortable with, but which is growing in public attention and seriousness, which is this geoengineering idea that we don't need to take control of every ecosystem on the planet. We can actually recreate the kind of sunshade that pollution provided to the planet for 50 years. Mr. Burns solution, the Mr. Burns solution. Yeah. All right. Well, just give me the TLDR. You mentioned El Nino. That was my last thing for you on 2026 or people in here in particular in America, like where is it going to impact? Just to be candid, I like saw one thing that was like El Nino means fewer hurricanes in the Gulf this year. And I was like, great news. And so then I stopped reading about El Nino, but I understand that people have other interests besides my parochial. The impacts on the U.S. are relatively muted in general. It's we're not going to be one of the parts of the world that's hit hardest. We have a big boost in global temperatures, so we're going to have a lot of record heat, which is one reason why we're seeing what we're seeing in Europe and the U.S. this summer. In the American West, there's probably going to be a lot more rain. There may be some of those atmospheric rivers that we start to see. But I think it's going to be a lot more rain. A few years ago, that can be especially worrying in the immediate aftermath of wildfire. Because if you have a hill that gets like, you know, the trees are burned down, that means there are no roots holding the soil in place. And then if you have a big flooding event, you can have mudslides like the ones that killed people in Santa Barbara in 2018. And I think the bigger effect, though, is going to be on food growing around the world, because many of the many of the sort of world's most productive agricultural regions are likely to be hit by either drought or flooding. And that's going to be bad. And it'll probably be bad in, you know, for the people, the most vulnerable people in terms of extreme hunger. But it'll also be bad for the rest of us in terms of driving up food prices. And there are a lot of economists and researchers who are already identifying a real signal in the food price trend because of climate change. This El Nino is going to play a big role there. And that's because it is by far the biggest El Nino that we have ever seen. I mean, in 1877 or 1878, that used to be the record setting one. That might have killed 50 million people through famine. This one is probably going to be at least 25 percent more intense than that one, maybe 50 percent more intense than that one. It seems likely to be the most intense El Nino event in the entire history of human civilization. We are better prepared for it than we were in 1877. The effects on food production as we were then. But this is going to pack an enormous climatological punch. And one big question, which a lot of people are already arguing about and thinking about, is whether it will bring climate change back into the center of the political agenda, you know, like it was a few years ago before we moved on because of inflation, politics, the war in Iran, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not sure. I think it's quite possible, as with so many other things. I think it's quite possible. I think it's quite possible that we will encounter some extreme impacts and normalize them rather than responding to them. But it is going to be at the level of what happens to the planet, what is thriving, what is suffering. It is going to be an enormous alarm that will be ringing over the next year or 18 months. We needed to end with alarm. What else would we do at the end of the podcast? David Wallace, I owe you one, man. So think about what that is. You know, I can take you around New Orleans before it floods or we can do a podcast on one of your hobby horses sometime. All right. Thanks so much for having me. Talk to you soon. Appreciate it, brother. All right. Thanks so much to David Wallace-Wells. Go check out his newsletter. We are back to your regularly scheduled Trump Derangement Syndrome tomorrow with one of our oldest and most deranged friends. Looking forward to it. We'll see you all then. Peace. Out. The Bulwark Daily is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Dante DiCicco, and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.