The Iran War and Our Energy Future with David Wallace-Wells

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That poor, I don't know if you guys saw that the CNC Music Factory guy gave what maybe I think one of the great, I don't want to say Getty Perk address, but he gave one of the great speeches while sitting on his toilet about how he views the type of performances that may be going on in DC. I can't urge you enough to find it online and watch it through because it rolls through his feelings of performing in front of, let's say, the dictator of North Korea whilst drinking wine from Venezuela and smoking Cubans the guards. It's something. And for some reason, he is maybe one of my favorite people in the world right now, given that speech. But today's show, we're going to go in a slightly different direction. We're going to talk to one of my favorite sort of utility players in the world of breaking down all the different events and threats that may be looming on our horizon. He's an existentialist as you could tell from the title of his bestseller, The Uninhabitable Earth, life after warming. But he's reason I've just really enjoyed a lot of his columns that range on a variety of topics from the Middle East to AI to all those different things. So I haven't talked to him in a little while and I'm excited to talk to him again. Let's just let's just bring him on in. David Wallace Wells is joining us today. David Wallace Wells, one of my favorite writers, writer for The New York Times, opinion, calmness, New York Times Magazine, author of the bestseller, The Uninhabitable Earth, life after warming. But you have been expanding David, your writing platforms. So here's what we're going to do today. This is our task for today, David. Tell me. I was convinced that you thought global warming was the existential threat to humankind. I now believe David Wallace Wells, and you could tell me this true or not, that you've expanded your extinction events into AI or perhaps the Middle East. So today we are going to go through where you believe our fatal mistake will come from and destroy the entirety of the planet. Are you still in the mindset that in your hierarchy of extinction events is climate still the top of the list or are you finding other existential threats underneath it that you want to explore? You know, I wouldn't call any of these things extinction events actually. I think, you know, no matter what happens, there are going to be billions of people living on a planet, probably most of them living relatively normal lives. But I do think we have a bundle of existential challenges in the sense of challenges that are revealing the meaning of our existence. And I'm not I'm still pretty worried about warming. We can talk about that, but there are some near-term challenges too, which may be looming a bit larger for, you know, your listeners. Let's do that. Let's first of all, thank you for saying we have listeners that that's meaningful. Let me let me all right. So we'll we'll start with that. We'll start with near-term challenges and then we'll we'll go to the long-term challenges. So let's pop in with near-term challenges. Who's in the the poll position for near-term challenges for humankind? Well, we're dealing with a war in the Middle East that was needless and elective and I think really poorly conceived and which has scrambled an awful lot of geopolitics and done a lot of damage to America standing in the world and made the future seem a whole lot more a whole lot less stable than it did even a year ago when we still had Donald Trump in office. But, you know, we weren't having an oil and gas supply crisis. We weren't having a fertilizer crisis on the onset of growing season. We weren't having shortages of, you know, aluminum to make die-cook cans and helium to run MRI machines and, you know, plastics to make condoms to deliver to the developing world. So I think that, you know, over the last six months, that's the thing that has introduced itself most dramatically, the warner on totally needless in my view, totally ill-defined and I think catastrophic and revealing on a number of different levels. Let me let's tease that apart a little big is that that's interesting to me. It felt like the world has always had problems, but there was a relative amount of stability. It's it seems very clear that in the last few years and maybe we'll start it with Russia's invasion of Ukraine or maybe even their occupation of Crimea that the world order was about to go through a bit of a reset that we were going to be re-choosing. Who are the allied powers and who are the access powers? And is America aligning with the access powers? Are we, is that what this Iran war represents? I mean, you know, that famous skip from some British comedy show where it's like two Nazi soldiers looking at each other and going, are we the baddies? I do, I do think, you know, I don't want to underestimate the villainy of Iran. That regime has been brutal for many decades. I mean, it is certainly not a place that I would want to live. I don't I think very few Americans would want to live there, but that's not the same thing as saying that that bad behavior justifies regular military action against essentially non-existent nuclear threats in my view. And especially so poorly thought through that now the result of this conflict has been I think a pretty clear humiliation for the American military and a pretty clear elevation in global status for Iran not to mention, you know, the entire global economy being put into a kind of a vice such that we're all now ever all 8 billion of us on the planet dependent on, you know, these these two kind of madmen, one of whom is running America and or many of many more than one running around, but I'm coming to some kind of rational conclusion and rational exit from this conflict, which is sort of hard to imagine or to the extent that we can imagine it, it's not going to solve all the problems that the conflict itself caused. And do you think that the conflict, you know, I'm always interested And in what countries misbehavior rises to the level of intervention? You know, Russia's behavior, invading countries, threatening Europe with energy shortages, all these other things, that rises to the level of, well, maybe we'll help the people under attack with some money and some missiles. But Iran's behavior, that we must intervene there immediately. Those behaviors of bombing, not only do we not intervene, we give them the materials to do it. Saudi Arabia, their behavior can be abhorrent in the human rights arena. There are allies. It's very hard to find a consistent through line morally. Well, I mean, I don't think that this administration is applying a moral test at all. I think the purpose of this war wasn't even strategic. I don't even think, you know, they now are telling us that the goal of this war was to eliminate Iran's nuclear weapons program, which, you know, everyone who looked at that closely said had been badly damaged in the attacks last year, was pretty far from posing an imminent threat. I think you have to look at this not as a strategic choice by the Trump administration, but an effort to project power without responsibility. And that's basically a through line that I think you've seen through the second Trump administration, you know, we had this big document that they put together, the Pentagon, which declared that thing, you know, the Don Roe doctrine, which a lot of people interpreted as a, as this, you know, a kind of plan to, for America to retreat from its rivalry with China in particular and focus on dominating the Western hemisphere. But I think that's a little bit of a misreading. And when you look at, you know, what we did in, in Venezuela, what we've done in the Caribbean, what we're now doing in Iran, I think that Trump basically just wants to play the role of a 19th century imperial power where he gets to do what he wants. He doesn't have to own any of the damage that he creates elsewhere, and he mostly wants the rest of the world to kind of cower and fear, um, intimidated by us. And that's why the Iran war is such a significant event because even a week beforehand, most military analysts would have said, this is probably strategically unwise, but the US is going to absolutely, but the US is going to absolutely destroy Iran in this, in this conflict, you know, what, what, what, what it would lead to who knows whether it unleashes chaos in the region, who knows, but this is going to be an obvious American show of dominance. And we have done a lot of damage to their military facilities. We've also, you know, um, killed some schoolgirls and, um, done damage to a lot of civilian infrastructure hospitals and universities, um, in ways that used to be casually called, um, war crimes, um, casually, but the actual like military conflict has not been in any meaningful way one by the United States. In fact, I think you'd have to say that it's been lost if anything. We are now in a weaker bargaining position than we were when it started, um, Iran has demonstrated its power and control over one of the central economic pathways in the world, the straight of Hormuz. Um, and they've done that in a way that tells a lot of really interesting stories about the near term, you know, geopolitics, um, in an age of an energy transition in an age of drone warfare and in an age of declining American power. I think this is really, really significant. You know, when you look at what happened not just what happened not just in Iran, but what has happened in Ukraine over the last few years and indeed what happened when the U.S. tried to go to war with the Houthis last year, we've seen a complete rewriting of the script of conflicts involving superpowers and lesser powers. You know, we used to think, okay, maybe the U.S. will bungle its way in Iraq and Afghanistan, but like we can be clear that the military advantage there lies with the superpower. Um, when Russia invaded Ukraine, it looked somewhat similar, but Ukraine was able to respond by essentially standing up an entirely new drone infrastructure, drone production system that then changed the logic of war and has allowed them to at least fight the Russians to a standstill and then over the last year actually regained territory from the Russians. This is a completely new kind of war and Ukraine's 70 to 80% of casualties are now the result of drones, not soldiers. They've had a number of episodes where one army or the other has taken a position exclusively with robots and drones and we're now seeing something similar play out in Iran, which is, in which Americans may be able to shoot down an Iranian drone, but it's going to cost us, you know, a $20 million missile and that drone might have cost them $10,000, which means they just have an incredible natural advantage. And what that means going forward, I think is really complicated. If we had all assumed a few years ago that, you know, superpowers may value the life of their soldiers so highly that they were reluctant to get into war, but if they got into war, they would really kick ass. Now we're in a situation where it's not even clear that in conflict between the world's most powerful militaries and obviously lesser adversaries that the powerful militaries have a meaningful advantage. And that opens up huge questions about America's rivalry with China, about our standing in the world, etc. But David, how in God's name have we not learned that over, you know, over the last 30 years? We get about the last 30 years, the last 70 years since World War II, you know, I think back to Vietnam. And the big lesson of Vietnam was it doesn't, you can carpet bomb a country, you can napom it, you can destroy the village, to save the village, you have the military advantage. But when a country is fighting for its own territory, its own sovereignty, you don't necessarily have an advantage, if you are the invader or the occupier, even if you have a military that has tremendous superiority, what you were just saying about Iran, forget about drones, obviously that was a different technology. They would say about tunnels or that, you know, tunnels are the new way of fighting warfare that humble the great superpowers. Vietnam was the lesson that should have humbled us in terms of the way that we deploy our military. And for a moment it did. And then we pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in, you know, a few weeks and then we invaded in a few days and we thought, oh, we're back. How is it that we don't learn that lesson? Well, we told ourselves in that period that we have found a technological solution to the problem of Vietnam, which is that we were going to fight wars remotely. We were going to fight them from the sky with targeted smart bombs and we were going to deploy soldiers on the ground to the extent that it was necessary only after we had completely obliterated the enemy. And we did that. It was in some cases somewhat successful and other cases less successful. But it never really achieved the strategic aims of those wars. This is something that the scholar Robert Papers really emphasized that we can make shows of dominance through air power, but if we really wanted to effectuate change on the ground, we're just as, we have just as hard a time in the 90s and 2000s as we did in the 60s and 50s. And, but we told ourselves that whole time that we were, that we were kicking ass. We told ourselves that we kicked ass in Iraq. We told ourselves that we kicked ass in Iraq the second time. We told ourselves that we kicked ass, you know, in, in Libya and that was just a story we told ourselves to pump ourselves up, to make ourselves feel more powerful than we really were. And more consequential than we really were on the global stage. You know what I hate, ladies and gentlemen, almost more than anything. It's slow growing trees. Come on tree. I don't have all day. Well folks. It's growing trees has the answer. They got all the plants your yard or home needs and you might think, but I suck at growing stuff. 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I do think that drones are really a powerful next phase of that story. Right. And the way that I would illustrate that is to say, you know, not that long ago 15 years ago during the Obama drone wars when America assassinated on or a walkie via drone. It was like this incredible. You know, I felt myself pulled into the science fiction future in which there's this global superpower maintaining total global surveillance such that we could track an individual bad actor on the other side of the world. And then go and find him with flying robots that then killed him. That seemed like we had just discovered the death star as America. As America now right whether that did we did we just curious. Yeah, did we watch the end of that movie because I don't know If you do you do have to ask those questions about a lot of these military people like Do they stay in the theater till the final credits roll and see what exactly happened to the day? Yeah Well, I mean, I mean to your point that the movie series was obviously a Vietnam allegory right um, but you know even five or eight years ago Military futurist would would think of American technological advantage or something that just could not be overcome by a lesser adversary And then we saw it happen very rapidly You know, it's not just that the cost of these drones are so cheap And what they allow any country with any meaningful industrial base to do is to compete on an equal level with like the world's most expensive Largest military and I do think that you know This is something that we're finally waking up to now because I think most Americans look at what's happening in Iran And see it clearly whatever they're hearing on Fox News or whatever see it clearly as a setback See, I think that Americans don't I think Americans if you look at it through the prisms of of how Americans view it There are all kinds of narratives that are coming out of this one of the most powerful ones politically now Has nothing to do with the kind of Icarus theory that we're talking about which is we continue to think Oh, you know what if I just have the right wax. I can fly as close to the Sun as I want You know every time you think all right, we'll change We'll we'll figure out a way to level the playing field on drones and we can go back to flying next to the Sun But if you think about the narratives now the narratives now are much more Defined through the kind of populist demagogue lens that we're seeing now if we just get rid of Israel We won't have any of these problems anymore because it's really their Influence or if we just get rid of immigrants, we won't have these kinds of problems anymore. It's It's an elimination theory rather than a coherent theory of You can have influence in this world But you cannot control it and attempts to control it will inevitably lead to you plunging into the sea when the wax melts off your feathers And I think that's where we're heading over the next few months I mean, it's it's a little hard to know exactly what the consequences Will be in part because you know, we had a lot of warnings right at the beginning of the war about the economic fallout Most of the smart people said that Pain was going to really hit within four or six weeks and here we are now three months later and there are consequences for the US and bigger consequences Elsewhere in the world, but it's not like we're you know, living through the depths of the COVID recession right now or anything like that But the smart people now tell us that we have about you know, we managed to Extend that timeline because we drew down our oil and gas reserves because around the world We've fit found ways to sort of maybe cut 10% of global fossil demand and but now we're about to hit the point where You know, the ship really hits the fan and that may be A whole new or a whole new phase of this conflict and we then we've encountered before and then I think is also really important Which is another thing that's changed in this conflict is that we used to think of Like sanctions and trade war as something that we did to avoid hot conflict like it was a lesser Escalatory choice which might eventually graduate to a hot war And this conflict is really interesting because the real fight Is not military The real fight is economic It's like who is controlling who's got the hostage right right right and who's suffering most from the holding of the hostage And like that the occasional sorties and bombing I would like that to stop But it doesn't feel to me like the peace the ceasefire periods that we've been in are in any meaningful way preferable to the global order Versus the hot conflict periods of this war that we've had. It's actually the main fight is about The economy and I wonder if that's also a sign of where we're heading see you just here's where this is just blowing my mind out See now we're going to take it back to when I think about your writing on climate I always think about When you talk about the real victims of the climate being those that live Sub-economically from ever they're the ones That that suffer the most and in some ways it's one of the reasons we don't address it in the manner in which maybe we should Is that there seems to be A kind of and by the way the police are coming to take David Wallace was away. I don't know where he moved to not for you, John But it is not no I'm a jersey baby. We don't even have cops It's all it's it's nirvana Uh when you talk about the economic we're all waiting for the economic damage to hit But isn't there a certain plane of existence now In the stock market and with the AI titans and with the upper middle class that actually Gas could be five dollars six dollars and they wouldn't feel that pain but there is a level of economic Pain in America that is just now endemic that that the the 50% 60% 70% of the people that are just living through these squeezes And it's just life that that the people that make the decisions On Iran and AI and climate don't actually ever feel That economic pain and so why would they change course? It's almost the opposite, right? I mean in this particular case in in the future things won't be quite as corrupt one hopes But in this particular case the Trump administration has been making Announcements and decisions about this war. It seems basically based on like they're looking at their Bloomberg terminal And they see the entire they see that terminal as the entire Expans of the universe. So yes, if they make an announcement and prices go up their friends profit Sometimes literally criminally through insider trading in other cases just you know in the normal course of corruption And then his kids get a drone contract yeah at the Pentagon Yeah, and then they make another announcement and the market moves in the other direction and the different set of friends if there's benefit And there's very very little appreciation for the real world economic consequences But the truth is the market is to some degree also operating that way in the sense that you know We have had an enormous blow to global oil and gas supplies right And the market has not I mean they've responded the market has responded But it hasn't responded nearly as dramatically as most analysts expected it to they found ways to find new supply But they've also just kind of continually bet on the possibility that this is a short-term disruption that will be Smoothed out in the long run and so you haven't had the you know the the Total turmoil in the markets that one might have expected at the outset And I do think that you're exactly right. There's a there's a kind of global story playing out in which you know The nations of Asia which were hit first and hardest by this shortage of a fuel they've undertaken some incredible emergency measures. They've You know shorten their work weeks. They've clothed schools. They've imposed restrictions on fuel use Um in the countries of of Europe and the US we've we're now paying a little bit more for gas and maybe first some other Price some other products we buy at the supermarket But it hasn't been all that catastrophic and yet even here where we're relatively insulated You know, there's huge gradations between who's suffering more as a result and who really could price these changes and without noticing And I think that you're exactly right. I mean in the in the in the global I don't mean the global you know the planet. I mean the global American context the the the the scale of the you know the scale and shape of the economy I do think that the fundamental fact of this um of the present is this incredibly intense inequality Which is growing year on year And in some quite you know remarkable ways especially at the very very top And we see all of these plutocrats and oligarchs Every day on our tv screens every day on their podcasts and their panel conferences Talking about the future of humanity talking maybe particularly about how AI is going to change everything But also about economic policy also about the war and these are people who are just living in an entirely different universe Then not just the bottom 50 percent you know the bottom 95 percent. Yes Not to mention the bottom 50 percent who are also living in a completely different universe right and I think that's one of the things that is behind Um that sort of growing AI backlash Is this intuition that this is a technology and a world historical force that is being designed by a small handful of people literally five people And a huge amount of the world's wealth is being channeled in their direction and the shape of our collective future is being Written in part by those in large part by those five people and for anyone who spent the last decade worrying about Not just the concentration of wealth but the concentration of social power that follows from that wealth That is an incredibly concerning acceleration of pre-existing trends which even in their earlier phase Caught have caused a huge amount of political turmoil and you know widespread suffering The people at the top have always are always somewhat insulated from the pain that some of their decision making The effects the literal effects of their policies on the people whose lives are affected through those policies I don't recall a time when the distance between those two Has ever been this large and I think your point about AI is a really great one because that's just going to accelerate it In a way that that we haven't seen before what is your thought process on when the world that the grand designers and decision makers is so removed from the day-to-day experience of the people, the vast majority, the 90% of people, the 95% of people that those decisions will impact, where's the cracking point? You know, you got Trump out there saying like, hey, people's financial decisions, that doesn't play into this. He's just, they've invented a story that Iran was about to get a nuclear weapon and drop it on people. Meanwhile, North Korea has a nuclear weapon. Pakistan has a nuclear weapon. Like, nuclear weaponry and the technology that surrounds it is going to be more accessible to smaller and smaller countries. That's just a fact. And one of the messages of this war is like, you should get over the finish line if you're developing a nuke. Let's hurry. Because then you're protected. Yeah. So when did they, it's not just a board game of risk. When did they start feeling the pressure from below? Or will they ever? Well, I think, you know, different actors here are in different positions. So I think the Trump administration is operating in a very different world than like the AI plutocrats. I think that the Trump administration feels that they have their, you know, 90 plus percent of their self-identified MAGA Republicans are on board with everything. I think Trump basically only looks at that polling. He doesn't look at polling if the country is a whole, which is one reason why he keeps telling interviewers that he's got such support that nobody else seems to credit. And I think that they're quite comfortable, you know, ruining the country by stripping it for parts and enriching themselves, whatever the political consequences. I mean, that is the Trump MO and has been for 50 years. That's how he operates and that's how he's operating now. Now that he's been sort of empowered and without, you know, the sort of limited oversight that there wasn't the first term. The AI guys, you know, first of all, they're kind of ideologically diverse. As some of them are libertarian and some of them are libertarian fascists. Is that the ideological diversity in that world? I think that Dario Modi is genuinely a liberal who is trying to figure out how to square his own, you know, the sort of the market logic of his company with his own set of values. And I think he's going through a very public reckoning. Right. And the purpose of AI with his values, totally. Yeah. But you know, 10 years ago, all of these founders were obsessed with existential risk. They thought that AI was going to, there was some chance that AI was going to bring about the near term extinction of humanity. There's some surveys that show that they're still a relatively significant share of AI engineers who believe this is a real possibility. But the the guys who are really in charge have kind of moved on. They've stopped talking about existential risk. They've stopped talking about bio risk. Sure. And they've started to now, over the last year in particular, really focus on what I think the public is most anxious about, which is, you know, disruption to employment patterns. Right. Political, you know, political concentration of power. And they don't exactly have a set of, I think, serious proposals for how to deal with those possibilities. But they are at least signaling or trying to signal that they hear the public's anxieties and that they want to be seen as people of conscience on these questions seen as seen as people of conscience, not people of conscience, not actual. Yeah. No, I mean, I think, I think one big part of the story is that it's not just them. It's all the rest of us, too. It's not clear like how much faith we should have in our ability to exercise democratic control over these forces. You know, I was just reading the Pope's encyclical about AI. Right. And thinking about the fact that 30 years ago when, you know, the first sheep was cloned, the Catholic church came out and said, we're not going to do human cloning. And they weren't alone. They were a lot of other people who said the same thing, you know, from on the right and on the left. But there was able to be a kind of social consensus built that this arc of progress actually could be stopped and must be stopped and would be stopped. And it was stopped. We haven't cloned humans in the 30 years since. Right. Now, it's not an exact parallel. But when Pope Leo comes out with his encyclical against AI now, it's like, do we have any hope of taking control of these systems? Our friends and quints are back to help fashion plates like myself and like my audience upgrade your summer wardrobe. You know, I can't always wear couture. If that's what they call it, hot couture, hot couture, hot couture. I can't always wear that. I'm not always at a ball or filming an episode of upstairs downstairs. I also have times to be casual. That's where quints comes in. They've got the summer staples, the breathable, comfortable, high quality, 100% linen shorts and shirts, Pima cotton tees. Well, quints also, by the way, they're not looking to exploit labor to bring you the softest, most durable pecans. They work with ethical factories that cut out the middle man. You're getting premium materials without the massive retail markup. Please, I beg of you. You know, you know, you know me. I don't like to nag. I beg of you. Refresh your every day with luxury you'll actually use. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quints.com/TWS for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's q-u-i-n-c-e.com/TWS for free shipping and three six five day returns quints.com/TWS. You know, there are some policy proposals on the table. Bernie just came out with a proposal to take a significant public ownership stake in the big AI companies. I absolutely think that should be the case. But even that isn't that just a way to corrupt humankind. You know, I'm on board because I think they're strip mining our intellectual property in the first place. The whole point of AI is it's training itself on the entirety of human existence and yet they get to put it all behind proprietary walls and we don't see either a shareholder's stake or anything about it. In fact, we have to pay them for the privilege. Yeah. My boss, A.G. Salzburg, the publisher of the time, just had a great speech about this and he's making a big stand on this front too. But, you know, when I think about the Bernie proposal, I also worry that we're essentially affirming the monopolistic structure of this system. If we're saying that the US government is going to take a 50% stake in the leading AI. Just give us a cut and we'll let it go. And that means that the US government will then be invested in the stability of that system in which for instance, anthropic or maybe open AI is dominating this whole field. And maybe that is the natural course of the technology that it trends towards monopolistic structures. But I would bet all do. Well, I mean, I would say. I mean, every time you have an advance in terms of communications or science or things, people tend to try and corner the market on it because so much money pours into the first few people that develop it. And then they use that money to pull ladders up from everywhere else. They use it to feed into the political system. I mean, it's a well-worn, you know, the industrialists of the early 1900s do the same thing. I agree. I think that's something that's happening in which we need to worry about. But I wonder if there's also something else another thread here to pick up on, which is, you know, what AI people called diffusion. And that is, you know, the bet of these big frontier labs is that it's so important to be the best, that we should leverage all of this capital and all of these resources and, you know, risk antagonizing the American public in order to be a little bit better than the next best guy, because there's so many large returns to being number one. But I wonder just how true that is. If you have AI progressing so rapidly, that an open source model from China or elsewhere, that is 80% as good as the frontier model at 10% of the cost, they're going to be a huge number of people who find that valuable. Maybe not the absolute cutting edge cancer researchers or the people in the Pentagon. But for the average person doing like, you know, research on what stocks to invest in or where to go on vacation, they don't actually need, you know, the absolute cutting edge frontier model, they can use one from six months ago and be totally fine. Right. And in that landscape, I wonder just how large the returns to dominance really are. That's interesting. And whether the natural structure may actually advantage smaller, more nimble. And that's basically, by the way, the bet that China is making on AI, they are focused on making sure that every person and every job can use this tool well utility. They're making it about utility and developing usage. Right. The other bet they're making that, that is seemingly much smarter than us is, they're making a bet on electrification. And on the fact that this is going to be an enormous, they're already setting aside land for these data centers and water and to electrify their grid. So that because that's really going to be the challenge is, you know, people, these AI companies, they can corner the market all they want. If they run out of tokens and power, They're done. It doesn't matter if it's model 8. 9178 clawed or 10.135 clawed like yeah, exactly you don't have the power. You don't have the model I mean if maybe 18 months ago or so I wrote a piece in which I said like the U.S. is betting on AI and China's betting on green tech and You know that these were like the two they were the bets for their century and The the you pointed out the silliness of that which is that AI also depends on electricity right and we need a abundant cheap You know available electricity clean energy is the fastest cheapest way to do that and America is not only not embracing that Technology they're doing a lot of stuff to to slow its roll out someone ineffectively But the policy direction is against clean energy rather than for it and in China, you know, they're not you know They're still building coal plants. They're still you know producing emissions. I don't want to make them seem like a perfect A hero here, but especially in the context of the Iran war, which is where we started this conversation The entire world is now looking out and realizing that clean energy is cheaper That it is more reliable Because it doesn't it's not subject to oil shocks And it is not subject to hostage taking by the world's malevolent actors, right and it is Domestically sourced once you build the infrastructure so that yes You have to import some solar panels and stuff But once you do that the sun keeps shining in your country and the whole world is responding to this crisis As they did really the the last crisis with Russia's invasion of Ukraine By dramatically increasing their green electrification programs and importing much much more green tech Particularly from China. So, you know, we have since this war Everybody predicted that it would produce a surging coal. It hasn't happened Instead we've seen a huge surging in the purchasing of Chinese solar panels of EVs all around the world Oh China's killing it China's killing it right now. This war has Absolutely heightened the need for their cars and their solar technology and we're all sitting around It makes me think in America and it kind of gets us back to the Vietnam of it all But the last time I remember this was the 1970s that was the oil shock when OPEC finally realized You know what we actually have some power over these Western societies who have such a huge need for our delicious energy That we can consolidate that into OPEC and we can start to have some control here And not just me and this war feels like A kind of throwback to the analog world that we were living in back then It's about oil and nuclear power when everyone else is moving into that next century of AI and electrification Yeah, I mean the biggest irony there is that it may be the end of OPEC Right, it made it may destroy it and and also scramble all of these alliances that The Trump administration has spent so much time building over the last decade Right, you know trying to build a sort of a coalition of countries Um, around basically venture capital and tech capital in Israel right in the Gulf and many of those countries Well, that's why it's always so funny He sends Jared and Witt cough over there and they oh their plan is always like What if we just get two hundred billion dollars to build like a golf course in some hotels in Tehran Would that be good for you guys like Well, then this is I think one of the underrated consequences of this war is that a lot of that money is actually drying up and You know Saudi Arabia's not for him though, not for Kushner. I mean not not not for the Trump family in particular But the the Gulf the Gulf sovereign wealth funds are reconsidering their investments Yeah Around the world they are a lot of stuff has already been withdrawn and cancelled That's why you're seeing you know problems for you know the the golf stuff and They cancelled their they're money for Mikkelson now that this war started But those were those were basically efforts to court Um, you know court power western alliances and western power and they're reconsidering those Um in the response to this war because even the allies even Trump's allies in the Middle East who have benefited from these Deals over the last decade and have been scrambling to push more money in that direction Even they see the lesson of this war as America is no longer a reliable partner They are fickle they are punitive and They're just not they doesn't make sense to put all of our you know All of our chips in that in that basket. Well, they were also you know what they were their vision for the future in the Middle East Was a future we are the cities of the future We are going to build these we're going to put islands where islands didn't exist anymore We're going to build these incredible buildings. It's going to be a place of yeah Leisure and technology and all these different things, but the one thing that it requires in not just energy is stability and peace and and peace and if you're in a volatile region of the world and suddenly drones are hitting in the middle of Doha Well, suddenly it all looks like a fiction and it collapses on itself Even more than that the country that they depended on To guarantee their peace is the country that is attacking them Wow Now that's that that's really true and it brings up to get back to the existential part of this The throughline here is is it that humans can't help themselves and I know that's sort of you know I think you you think on a more philosophical level and so as we go through all these you mentioned cloning before And that we were able to stop ourselves from cloning people A I'm not sure we have Like I don't you don't really know what they're doing in the crisper but There's also there's not a huge public utility to that that we can see AI is different Yeah, that's true Is the throughline through all of this That in truth even when faced with catastrophic results on the horizon from our actions That we can't help ourselves That if it's there to be made will make it That is Trump's Philosophical claim Yes That's what I'm saying and we are living in a world now in which Many other actors beyond Trump are behaving in parallel ways This is not just a problem of the who is president. It's you know, there are many leaders in the world Who have become considerably more self-interested? a moral Acquisitive in their approach to world affairs um That is true and I think it is depressing and distressing Um, but I also think it's not the some total here. It wasn't that long ago When you know 2014 2015 2016 just to use you know the the climate story is a kind of illustrative example It wasn't that long ago that the world's two great powers the US and China got together and Even before the incredible declines in clean energy made electrification in obvious economic win Even before that the US and China said we really have to get together and and do something about climate And that's the result of that negotiation was effectively the the Paris Accords Which was a global agreement in which all countries the world said that they were going to which we're going data of this Well, I mean it's it's not just that though. It's you know, it's um we've lived out of so many things But um, you know 10 years ago we were the UN was saying okay the millennium development goals that we had Put forward in the late 90s were so successful we had pulled so many people out of poverty We had driven child mortality down so much that we now took I need to come up with an entirely different set of goals For 2030 and they did that and the whole world was very excited about making those real And you were you know, we were just in general imagining a more cooperative future Which to the paranoid looked like a kind of the arrival of a global governance structure Which maybe they found unlikable but even so the trend of history seemed to be more towards integration Through globalization, but also through um, you know Cooperationism cooperation all those things were ascendant 10 years ago is not that long ago And we we've now lived through a decade or a decade plus of Break from that pattern But I don't want to forget that it wasn't that long ago that we were on that track and it wasn't such a different world materially economically And I do think in one perverse way You know the lesson of the Donald Trump years is Like those of us who diminished the great man theory of history And elevated structural explanations for how things progressed have really missed out because Small changes in electorates producing particular personalities in particular places Can meaningfully change the entire course of planetary history. That's what we've seen Um in the US and it's quite depressing But it also means that you get a different set of people in there and things could be quite different And I do think that there are that's certainly more optimistic I mean, but it also says maybe there's a theory that You know whether it is globalization or climate that leaders have to be more cognizant of the collateral damage of progress And that if you ignore that that collateral damage so And this can apply to climate or AI or anything else. Yeah, if you ignore it you risk what we're seeing now which is the political backlash to that. So let's go back to your, you know, 10 years ago or 20 years ago and China's in the WTO and we start forming these more global organizations. But then a climate tax is levied that hurts French farmers and truckers. And so they suddenly have a huge protest and it leads to a kind of rejuvenation of that populist right all through Europe as well as our interventions in these other places that lead to the immigrant crisis and migrant crisis in Europe and in the United States, which leads again to that populist right-wing backlash is, is the left is, is liberal world values, not cognizant enough of the unforeseen consequences of what progress can look like. You know, we talk about Trump and them, they live in ivory towers and they don't feel the effects of this, is the left have a blind spot as well in that. And if we had covered it better, is it possible we wouldn't be facing this backlash? Yeah, I mean, I think in the American context, I think a lot about the moment in late 2008, early 2009, when, you know, Larry Summers solicited a bunch of proposals for how much stimulus to ask Congress for, and Lail Brandner proposed, I think 1.5 trillion, that was how big she said the gap between where we needed to be and where we were was and the government needed to fill that gap with 1.5 trillion dollars in spending. And Summers looked at that and was like, we can't even present this to Obama because there's no way we're going to get more than a trillion. Let's ask for a trillion and we'll negotiate down from there. And he did that and the stimulus was, I think, $800 billion. And who knows how the alternate history would have unfolded if that 1.5 trillion dollar estimate had actually made its way to Obama's desk? Who knows whether it would have made it through Congress? Who knows, who knows? But if we had found a way politically to deliver double the stimulus that we had, I think we'd be living in a very different place in America politically than we were, than we are now, and with considerably less suffering and considerably less turmoil. I don't know, that's not to say that it would have solved all the problems of the China Shock and the Industrial Midwest and it's not to say that there wouldn't have been backlash against migration, which by the way, I think has many causes, global causes that most Americans don't appreciate because the big surge in 2021-22, we saw the same surge in Canada, we saw the same surge in the UK, we saw the same surge in the EU, every rich country in the world had a huge migration surge coming out of the pandemic and we tell ourselves that there was about Biden's indifference to the border, probably that contributed, but there's a bigger story there too. That's a separate point. More specifically, I do think that considerably more could have been done over the last 20 years to soften the jagged edges of all of these changes and I think it's quite striking and scary that we seem to be heading into a similar transformation, a parallel transformation to globalization in the form of AI, without anything, like even the things that we tried to build into our response 15 or 20 years ago, when at least we talked about, you know, retraining industrial workers and, you know, and we're not doing that now with AI at all and I personally don't know how big an impact AI will be for employment over the next two or five years. I think it's more of an open question than many people suggest, but if we take seriously the high end projections of how much turmoil and disruption it could cause, we need to be doing dramatically more to respond to the fallout. Yes. On the other side of that, though, there's a debate within the party about whether we've become too much, we're too safety-est and we're too worried about technological change and then we need to enable transformation of our economy, we need to build more, we need to, you know, impose fewer, you know, union regulations on our technological change. And so there's a kind of a natural conflict in the coalition, which I think we're skating towards the midterms acting as though we don't need to resolve that and maybe, maybe that's a bad bargain. Maybe we really do need to resolve that in the favor of one side of the other. I know a little secret about a lot of the folks that listen to this podcast, you like animals. I'm just going to say many of you like cats and cats are delightful, but you know the thing about cats is they got to eat too. You don't just leave them out there because here's the thing about them, so I've had outdoor cats and I've had indoor cats, boy, the cats at the farm are literally killing machines. So you don't need to feed them. But for most cats, the civilized cat, the cat that has been domesticated and is not armed with what appears to be five hunting knives and they just follow around looking for mammals smaller than them, you need to give them food. And that's where smalls comes in. By the way, that is, I don't think a great segue because I may have presented a picture of cats that may not be the one that is appropriate to this commercial. But I'm talking about your cat, your delightful cat, little pupils, little pupils. And smalls makes the cat food. And by the way, it's human-grade food for cat, you know, most cat food brands, it's all cheap fillers and whatever they found on the floor of the factory. That's not good for your cat. Your cat is not going to be healthy. But smalls, protein-packed recipes with preservative free, 100% human-grade ingredients. So stop serving your little carnivore, a bowl of processed shortcuts for limited time because you are a weekly show listener, get 60% off your first order plus free shipping and free treats for life. When you head to smalls.com/tws, holy shit, I don't even like saying this, it's such a good deal. One last time, that's 60% off your first order plus free shipping and free treats for life. And you head to smalls.com/tws. One of the things I agree with you, a lot of times on the left, what we'll do is, in expectation of collateral damage, we'll put up barriers prior to going into it, making a guess, because if you're going to solve one problem, it has to also solve every problem. So if we're going to build more housing, it also has to solve the climate crisis and it also has to solve racism and hiring and it also has to solve the way that women make less money in the work put. So we'll put in all kinds of barriers and ultimately don't get to build things. What we don't seem to do well in this country is actively manage these processes for where the collateral damage is occurring. We're really good at putting up a ton of barriers that bureaucratically cost a shit ton of money and waste a shit ton of time, because you were talking about earlier, which I thought was a great point, these inflection points, where we always have like the 2008 financial crisis, where in hindsight, geez, maybe helping out only the financial institutions and not homeowners was a mistake and create, oh, maybe letting China into the WTO and flooding all Western markets with cheap goods, with people that are making a lot less money taking jobs from people in the Midwest, wasn't a good idea. Rather than front loading obstacles, maybe the answer is more actively managing the collateral damage of that through the things that you're talking about, like stimulus, right? And there's a theory of government that I have, which is I think government has made it so that it has an adversarial relationship with the people it purports to help. It's built on the idea that we have to guard against fraud. And so if we treat everybody like they're ripping us off, that will keep the 3% of people that we're gonna rip us off from doing it. It'd be much cheaper and I think much smarter to treat those programs like they're designed for people to access them and be fought fraud and enforcement on the back end, which is cheaper, make the penalties much higher. It's a long-winded of saying is I think we need to change the theory of government. Does that make sense? We did do some of that during COVID, right? I mean, we basically let people cheat the government as a cost of getting the money out the door more quickly and more seamlessly. But what did it do differently than in 2008? It saved people's lives and homes. And Larry Summers fucking hated it, maybe not for that reason, but that's what I'm talking about. But Summers is also illustrative. I mean, he's illustrative of some things that are right with our world and our country. But one of the things is that I think liberalism in America… liberals in America really do believe at their core. That the world is legible. They can understand trade-offs quite clearly and make judgments from on high, which they then pass down to the public. I mean, that is to me one of the real, you know, that that that story I just retold about Lail Brainerd and Larry Summers. Like Larry Summers, I am going to decide what the right amount of stimulus is. And I'm going to give that to President Barack Obama and he's going to give it to Congress and then it's going to be implemented. And he wasn't just making a perfect technocratic calculation. Actually, Lail Brainerd was the one who made the perfect technocratic calculation. What Summers was doing was saying, I cannot just understand the gap in this in this economy. I can also understand the political reality and I can incorporate those two considerations as though they are different inputs in a spreadsheet and tell you the perfect answer and avoid his his proposition. I'm going to avoid the ideological conflict around the size of this stimulus by simply spitting out the right answer ahead of time. I'm kind of really striking to bring it back to the present. In this wave of debate and conversation among the AI leaders, I saw an interview with Dario Modai recently where he said, on this very point, I do not think that ideology can survive the arrival of this technology. Because machines will know what the optimal distribution of resources will be. They will tell us that. We won't have to fight over it. We will have the answer. And this is a profound misunderstanding of political conflict and human psychology and human nature. You know, conservatives always always yell at liberals and say, you don't understand human nature. Everybody is a inquisitive and market oriented. My view is like you, you, you, you, you know, you plutocrats don't understand human nature. You can't simply run the entire world like you run a factory floor room. Right. You have people fighting. And that fight is inherent to the process of human life and human growth. And if you try to navigate around it, you're only going to produce more backlash. And no matter what it is, whether it's AI or whether it's anything else, and I'm sorry, a computer can optimize it as best it wants. It doesn't know what it doesn't know. We don't know as people what we don't know. And that's the theory of the case that I think we're missing in terms of governance. That's what you just described about Larry Summers saying, I went through the spreadsheet and I came up with the answer. And now that I have the answer, we can move forward. As opposed to saying, here's what I think the answer might be. Let's introduce it into the system, but be prepared to change if we see that the unforeseen consequences of introducing this go in a direction that we did not foresee, or if the consequences of introducing it turn more negative than what we thought. And we have to, we have to be more active in managing those consequences. And we're not. I think that's the, the blind spot of, of that type of thinking is, I figured it all out on paper beforehand, put it into the system and let's all sit back and go work on a different thing. I mean, I think that there is a huge cultural blind spot, particularly among liberals on that front, but I also think that there's a huge, when you think about it as a matter of state capacity, it's like, and social trust. You know, if we're imagining a world in which we are not in one fell swoop, you know, issuing a huge set of, for instance, new AI regulations, but responding in real time with different kinds of attentive stimulus packages and retraining programs. And yes, that, but that requires a huge amount of new state capacity and social trust to make that happen. Not state capacity, though, David. Utilization of capacity that exists. The capacity, I don't think it's a capacity problem. It's a distribution problem. It's a, it's a read and react problem. Don't you think we have the capacity? I just look at the way that the government has functioned over the last 20 years and I see very little that gives me faith that we could be nimble and responsive. You know, we've gotten some big things done, you know, like I do think that a lot of the stuff that came out of the financial crisis was good and significant. I think healthcare was good and significant, imperfect, but good and significant. I do think a lot of the stuff that we did, you know, in the COVID stimulus was again imperfect, but good and significant and, you know, in certain ways remarkably effective. And I do think that the IRA and bill back better, though they've been, you know, undermined by Trump, were also really quite significant. But I don't see a pattern of real time responsive governance. I see people acting in fear of the next administration trying to get everything done and banking progress so that nobody could mess with it. And that is a appropriate intuition about the shape of governance and politics in our country, where, you know, every piece of legislation is only, you know, we can only trust will last as long as the next election. And in that context, can we really imagine designing a more responsive, you know, social welfare state to deal with more significant changes coming? Yes. I'm not sure. Yes. I would like to believe so. I say yes, David, because that's so opportunity lies in those gaps. The gap that we're describing is not a place for fatalism, but a place of opportunity. What we're describing about here is something in the system that is missing, that is not functioning correctly, that is not responsive or agile to those needs. What I'm saying is, we have a factory that has capacity and can be retooled to function in a way, especially with the advent of artificial intelligence tools that allow us to be more agile and responsive. And that I think for the left, that's where the opportunity is for a new new deal. Not the old new deal that has necessarily building these large sort of marginal lines that protect against social safety consequences, which I think is absolutely necessary. But the ideal is to build that machine in a way that is more coherent to the way people live today. And I think it not only can it be done, it must be done. I'm with you. And I also think that here in New York, you know, Zora Mamdan, he's mayoralty. Yes. Is it a perfect illustration of this value set? Yes. And he, you know, he's an obviously ideological actor. I share a lot of his political values, maybe not all of them, but I'm a big supporter of his. But even beyond ideology, he is saying we need to make government work for the people of New York City. And the test case for progressivism is whether it can deliver better outcomes for the voters in the city. And that is not a matter of, you know, playing hardball ideologically, it's a matter of like filling potholes and actually getting 2K open and all the rest of it. The question for me is whether that is scalable as an approach to politics at the national level. I do take a lot of, I'm really heartened by Zora and have been much more hopeful over the last year as a result of his rise than I would have been in the absence of him. And I actually see a lot of parallels elsewhere in the country where, you know, sure, we also have like local leaders in other places who are leading the charge. San Francisco is now that's a guy who's not, you would not consider ideological in terms of a leftist, but is building a more responsive government. And then you see Los Angeles was the antithesis of that, which is democratic governance that seems utterly unmoored from the needs of the people or the desires of the people or what they think about things. And I do wonder one possible, whether one possibility here is that Americans come to see national politics, maybe they have already, as essentially cultural war theater, and actually look for responses from their local leaders because there's just so much more direct responsiveness there. You know, we already, to some degree, see the fight between Democrats and Republicans in DC as, you know, abstracted from our lived daily realities. But we may be much more engaged with mayors and governors, which may be one reason why we are, we find them so much more popular than the people in DC who are so horrifically unpopular. I think that's absolutely right, but I'm heartened by, because what's so interesting to me is one of the, one of the things that made the soil fertile for someone like Donald Trump as people feeling like government was no longer responsive to its, to its needs. He took that dissatisfaction and used the tools of a demagogue. Oh, the problem is trans kids in sports and immigrants. And if we fix that, but he hasn't actually fixed it because he's not actually making government responsive to the needs of the people. He's making government responsive to the emotional kind of reflexive reptilian brains of the people. But what that says to me, though, is, again, opportunity. Yeah, and I mean, I would just say about Trump, just to sort of tie some of these things, these threads together. Yes. The story with Trump and climate is also really interesting because he is, you know, he is an avalanche. Chinese hoax. And he's a hater of wind and hater of solar. And he prioritized the destruction of the IRA first day office, first day in office signing an executive order. to undo it. You know, he's about as big a fossil fuel villain as you can imagine. He started all of these wars in fossil fuel rich places in part because he actually still believes that we need to control the world's fossil fuel reserves. And yet, even in the context of that 90% of all new energy infrastructure built in the U.S. last year was green, 90% which means for every unit of new dirty infrastructure we built, we built nine times as much clean energy infrastructure. This year, the share is expected to be even larger. Is that subset? Is that private industry? How is that even possible? Well, some of it is because though Trump tried to repeal all of the tax credits from the IRA, it was politically difficult given the power of the green energy companies. And so many of them have been placed on hold or are now being sunset, but sunset far enough in the future that companies can still take action on it. But mostly it's just because we have a basically mature fossil fuel infrastructure. We're still doing some amount of natural gas build out. But for oil and coal, we're not, we're just, we have a basically mature system. Right. And there's now where the growth is going to be. Yeah. And globally, that's true too. I was just looking at a report on the other day that said that since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the world's energy importers, people who need energy, have spent five times more money investing in renewables nuclear than they have in fossil fuel infrastructure five times as much. The world's energy exporters, the people who are trying to sell stuff on the world stage, have spent twice as much investing in fossil fuels as they have in renewables and nuclear. The irony, the irony, David, award to preserve our dominance in fossil fuels has ultimately led the world to try and become more resilient and move away from it. And we're moving pretty rapidly in that direction. I think that the, you know, there's going to be another inflection point in the green transition with this war. You know, we're still really far from Ned Zero. We're very far from stopping the warming of the planet. There are a lot of things to be worried about. I don't want to sound too polyannish about it. But, you know, Michael Lieberk, who's, I think, a really thoughtful analyst just wrote a piece last week saying he thinks this war has brought the peak of global emissions on this side of 2030, whereas he used to think it was on the other side of 2030. And once we've bent that curve, you know, it's a long way down, it's a long ski slope, but we're skiing. And I think that's, you know, that's the near term future that we're looking at for energy. Can I tell you something? That may be the most hopeful metaphor or analogy that I've heard here is once we start going downhill, we're skiing. So to wrap it around our original thought process, which is, yes, here are these threats. Climate, energy, demagogues, populism, and all these other, and AI, and things that are so fraught with peril, and yet within all that, underneath it all, opportunity. And that's what's starting to be uncovered. Yeah, I mean, you know, just this week, there was the national conference of oncologists that reported all of this great news on cancer breakthroughs. I mean, there is, you know, the future in many ways is bright. There are huge obstacles we're living through difficult times. And on a personal level, the thing that is so painful to me is having to abandon the suppositions that I grew up with as a child of the 90s, thinking that the future while progressing erratically would bring us in a sort of predictable way towards more justice, more prosperity, more equality. I think we've learned that we need to fight for that rather than just put the whole thing on autoplay. But I also think when you look at, for instance, the AI backlash or the backlash to Trump himself who is, you know, the most unpopular president in history, now violating all those stories, we told ourselves in the first term about how he had he was Teflon Don. We can't tell ourselves those stories anymore because he is incredibly unpopular, including with all the demographic groups that we told ourselves had amounted to a political relignment. Right. Right. We're seeing, we're seeing all of those, in all of those indicators that people are willing to fight. The question is whether, you know, the structures of power are assailable or whether as in the case with sort of, you know, the AI labs, whether they're now operating in some way beyond the reach of democratic control. And I'm not willing to, you know, I'm not, I'm not willing to make a bet there either way. I may be a little more worried about that than you are. The fight is certainly visible. The question is, you know, to what extent any of these institutions remain responsive or subject to popular will. Right. And I think ultimately that's the test. No, and I appreciate that. And I do, and oddly enough, because our conversations, and for those people who don't know, David and I have had many conversations over the years, are generally with me taking the role of the pessimist who says we should believe in people and their ability thing and David explaining very patiently to me why there is progress on the horizon and why things are a little bit of more optimistic. You know, I'm a famous optimist. I don't know if you knew that. Famous optimists. Famous. Uh, but, but in, in this instance, I, I believe I am more optimistic than you're not because I've seen how these systems can be bent. And they can be bent by bad actors, but boy, oh boy, they can be bent by good actors. And if there has ever been a moment where this country and this world is ground down to a nub by the chaos and incoherence of a man child who has been handed power, he didn't earn. This is a moment, this is a moment where a good actor can, a sale, as you said, these towers of power and reform them in a way that benefits us. I really believe that. I just want to say one thing to illustrate that and then one thing to complicate it. The illustrate point is I want to take us back in time to the period between the election in 2024 and say March or April of 2025, when Donald Trump was returning to the, to the White House and we were just awash in this sense that liberals too, that Maga was on the march, that there had been a political realignment in the country, that Donald Trump was not, it wasn't just tragic and awful, that Donald Trump was returning to the White House, but he was winning all of these voters, you know, all of these votes from young voters, black voters, brown voters, he was rewriting the demographic coalition of the Republican Party and that he had effectively won the culture war, especially with the support of the tech billionaires. And now I think about, you know, this great American state fair that they tried to stage 15 months later and they, they booked 10 people and it was like the headliners are like mille vanilla and vanilla ice, that's the best they could do. And then all those people had to drop out because they, they were just like, this isn't for us. It's too costly. And it is just so clear to me, the approval ratings show it, you know, but on the culture level, Donald Trump has not won the culture war. He has lost the culture war. The podcasters are out on him, the, you know, entertainers are out on him. And I think to some degree, the story we told ourselves 15 months ago was a bit of an illusion, a self-lacerating illusion that liberals were telling himself because they wanted to beat themselves up. And in fact, we were never as weak and he was never as strong as he seemed. The complicating part of the story is you say someone can arrive, a new leader can arrive. And that is true. But when I look at the Democratic Party in particular, I don't see it. There are a lot of people that I like. There are a lot of people that I admire, but there's no Barack Obama walking to those doors. And there's no idea, there's no, it's almost beyond even an individual. There's no theory of the case. And I think the theory of the case that we are making today is one that they should be cognizant of. And I think the theory of the case is there to be made. I actually really think it's within their grasp, it's just a simple formulation of people want to feel like they're getting value for their money. And government has to be aligned along that axis. Forget about anything else. And it's there for the taking. And I think if somebody is able to formulate that in a coherent way, they've got a real leg up into that. That's what I would say. I remain always hopeful within that, from your lipstick, I'm serious, because I'm famously optimistic. David, it's always such a pleasure to talk to you, man. You too. David Walliswell's, obviously you can see him in the New York Times opinion columnist and New York Times magazine and obviously the best seller, the uninhabitable earth life after warming. David, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. I don't know what you want out of a phone company. What I want out of a phone company is, deliver me a good product for less, and don't bother me. Don't bother me with the like, oh, have you heard about our new program? You can upgrade to it. It'll just cost you a lot more. And then they'll call you a bunch on their own phone. Think about that. Think about the diabolical mind game. That phone companies are playing by like locking you into an expensive phone program and then using the very item that they sold you to contact you About paying more for some ridiculous upgrade. That's not even really an upgrade Oh, they're diapolk with non-minimable minimobile plan 15 bucks a month 15 bucks a month What is it? 1992 15 bucks a month high speed data unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network to get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month Go to minmoble.com/tws. That's minmoble.com slash TWS Got your wireless build a 15 bucks a month and minmoble.com slash TWS That's it. There's no catch Upfront payments of $45 for three months 90 dollars for six months or $180 for 12 months plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes May slow a network is busy includes up to 20 gigabyte hotspot capable device required availability speed and coverage Varys cement mobile.com. I really hope they speed that up Guys Can I share something? Yeah, please. I feel weirdly like giddy I Think it's really telling that David Wallace Wells the author of the uninhabitable earth is one of the more optimistic Conversations that we've had in a while. I'm not crazy I also think it's concerning that he's getting his optimism from Millie Vanilli Well rob not millie not vanilla. It's really just millie But I'll tell you why I feel so energized There was a moment when he was described. It's It sort of felt like a shark tank moment like where you go like there's got to be a better way Like the way that he was talking about how liberalism functions specifically through The vestiges of government how the how the summers of it all Designs the program and the grand and answers all the questions and talk because he's the smartest person that's ever existed And they just put it into the facts machine and send it out and it gets Deployed Yeah, it always works that way. It always works that way It made me realize one of those like there's got to be a better way and there is And that there is actually a theory of government that can be more reactive That can take into account the the negative consequences the unforeseen collateral damages of even the well-intentioned policies Mm-hmm and try and address it in a proactive way that can preempt The hollowing out of the Midwest that can preempt the kinds of Difficult resentments that arise through immigration. It can be done. Yes. I feel it. I know I mean I would I agree I really like there's moments when you feel really hopeful because it does sometimes feel like we are turning a corner And we're seeing a really affirmative case being made right now in New York City and people are loving it I mean San Francisco too. You know, we don't spend much time out there because it's obviously I spend a little time out there as you know Gillian has it for those of you don't know at home. Gillian has a unhealthy Relationship with I think unhealthy with the San Francisco Giants right now. It's pretty abusive. Yeah No, even and by the way, that's coming from a Metz fan Darker for the San Francisco Giants that's for the New York vets. That's right. So so even even within that but but and and and two Polar opposite visions of what maybe liberalism might be but are making government in those places or trying to at least more responsive And you know what they're also doing is like Broadcasting what they're doing. Yes, they're showing people. Here's how government is working for you I'm not just going to assign something into effect. I'm going to show you how it's being effective simply too. Yeah people love it And hopefully acknowledging when it's not the transparency of it all I think if you can just connect those things The actions of the government with the money that you're putting in and the value that might be coming out of it People will start to you can start to earn their trust again. It's not an easy process But it's one that must be undertaken if we're to recapture You know, whatever the backlash will be to this toxic Nationalism and populism. That's that's arising. Yeah, I thought it was interesting when he was saying how Trump has lost the culture war right now and I do agree with that. I feel like on the outside. Yeah, I'm feeling that change but on the inside I don't know that I 100% agree with that like yes, we're seeing everyone back out of this concert and stuff But like we're also seeing people he endorsed win primaries But that's also a very narrowly, you know, because it's it's the base But what I would say to that is there's a difference between Losing something and somebody beating you and right now nobody's beaten him A lot of this is self-owns Yeah, and and at my point was that the Democrats have not been able to mount a convincing Alternative to what he was offering. He's just so fucking incompetent that he's losing it And they're almost leaning in. Yeah, they're almost saying government actually can't work for you So you shouldn't have to pay taxes if you don't make a certain amount of money right as opposed to saying You're going to pay your taxes. It's going to be a progressive tax rate other people are going to pay more And we're going to make the system work as well as it does for them for you Yeah, and it's not enough for them to say like we're going to tax the billionaires if people don't believe that you're going to use that money In any way that benefits their lives. They're just not really they're not going to give a shit absolutely Brittany, what do we got? What do we got? Already now that I'm fired up. I love positive John positive Johnny Uh, John, what is your favorite topic to talk about on the podcast? Sandwiches almost always sandwiches. This is a sandwich podcast. Yeah, it's if in fact if we could do the sandwich podcast I think I would do do you guys have a sense of my favorite topics because I don't I would say food is probably Really? I was going to go with an economist No, that's my most that that's my most fearful Economist can I tell you something economists are my bet noir. They are my white whale I am I am a have I am always on the search of An economist who will not Treat me condescendingly although we do find them actually. Yeah, we have yeah, we've had some lovely ones Darone was was lovely the guys from MIT Clara Mate was great. Yeah, kitty Richards That's right. Yeah, it's so nice to know that in Boston you can be an economist and not an asshole Oh my gosh. Yeah, the combination of those two things that Boston and economist. Oh God. Right. It's not a good It's not a good combination, but uh, yes, uh, I do love I do love talking about that stuff and egg sandwiches I would say that the two are my favorite, but I'd be happy to hear from the audience talk about Can I tell you something this food? It's food It really is we record so close to lunch time It's just at the Crunch Rapture premium. It's not just that it's food It's that it's the engineering supremacy of it all it's that Manufacturing it's US manufacturing. It's also food that you imagine was drawn up on an architect's table A very high architect you imagine somebody with a t-square going what if we just you know a burrito is so fucking easy You just stop the way shit and you roll it up. What if we give What about a parallelogram? What if I take a fold it this way hold on let me get my t-square and a protractor And figure out where I can put the beans We have got to get talk about the sponsor us. She means by the way, they already do. They just don't know it They are the fuel that keeps me Uh, going on there. What else we got next? At John how long do you think Trump and his quote extreme intelligence would last on jeopardy? Oh God on jeopardy, Jillian you can answer this you're the I don't think you would have good buzzer skills that hand is like a little Seen better days Boy is that true talk about the bruising that would occur after After a match I think the only difference with Trump is he would still answer Like even if he wasn't he wouldn't wait till the end. He would just blur it out Or do that, but I've always felt that fur and toe. So where's your brain located? It's the head and the head is at the top of it sort of like If you think about it as a New York apartment building. It's the water tower. Okay. What's the most important thing in the water tower pressure And the hydroxyl and what does Trump have? Chronic Venus insufficiency. He's got shitty water pressure Wow. So what happens? Not good the plumbing ain't working. Not good. No, no water pressure. No good shower flushes are kind of hard to come by So as far as jeopardy is concerned this dude's not getting the the the water pressure I mean he only just found out dumb has it be in it. So I don't know if I don't know if jeopardy is the right That the idea that he was saying to her and for those who don't know it was he was describing how he came up with the democrat And it was explaining that the Lara Tromb, you know, I thought Dumbacrat, you know, and I dropped the B because most people don't know there's a B in that. I'm like, well, most people who aren't dumb, no. He said himself up for that one. Yeah. How is this real? He is definitely a more of a wheel of fortune guy. I don't think even I think even the spinning of the wheel would throw him a vertigo. What's our last one? What's our last one? Last one. John, do you hear kids like you? Why would they, but I hope so. I hope that not only do they love me that they like me because I, I love them, but I also really like them. I find them very good company. I find them fascinating, interesting, singular people that I enjoy. And by the way, not just heavy, you know, oh, let's talk about life and, you know, different things. I like just being with them around them. It's fun. They're fun. They have, they both have great senses of humor. They're both really smart. They're fun to be around. So I really got all that from Tracy. Tracy. You guys met Tracy? You know what I'm talking about. But yeah, but oh, God, what, that's one of those questions like where you almost feel like the hair on the back of your neck go up like, what? What have you heard today? Submit this question. Like do your kids like you like that? I think as far as like a parents fear, that would be like that beyond the list other than like health, their health, their happiness, all that stuff. Them not liking you would be like, oh, shit, like devastating. Yeah. Do you think there is ever a time that they didn't like you? Oh, sure. Yeah. I mean, so relationships are fraught no matter how beautiful and wonderful and deep and intense that, you know, and I'm sure there are moments of frustration and there are patterns of behavior and answers that I know that I probably do that I roll. But within healthy relationships is grace. And we have hopefully grace for each other in those moments of understanding that will be that the baseline of our relationship is respect and love and like, even though there's moments I'm sure were like, I can be a pain in the ass. If that makes sense. We all can. But I also think it changes as kids get older and stuff. I mean, I don't have young kids, but I just know of being a kid like my mom and I definitely went through it when we were teenagers. But then as always get like older, you know, you find a friendship and you find hobbies together and you love doing things. It's you, you definitely grow into being more friends as well, which is such a beautiful new chapter. I wonder if the tough times are necessary because otherwise you'd never leave. Yeah. I think that's probably true. Yeah. We, I mean, we laugh about it now like man, I was 16, I was stealing the car, sneaking out windows. Wait, I thought, hold on a second. That just took a turn. Brittany, that turned from like, you know, we went through it a little bit like we used to fight a little bit like I kind of slept late and stuff and I stole the car. Oh, yeah. Oh, and I committed grand theft auto arm. We're really good friends now. And I robbed a liquor store. Joanne, did you go through it at that age? Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think it's a nice. Yeah, teenage eggs, you know, that's necessary. They have to separate from you because when they're young, it's the most beautiful thing. But it, you know, it has to end and that the heartbreak of parenting is that is that you know when they think you're a Superman that at some point they're going to realize you're going to make me cry. All right. I want to. All right. We'll move on. We'll move on. Oh, I think the question before we wrap. Okay, complete this sentence. All right. Nicks in. Oh, anything. Nicks in anything. God willing. Nicks in anything. Please. Are you going? I'm hoping too. I'm trying not to think about it. I'm so excited. We'll always have them that. Settle down. Settle down. Brittany, how did they keep in touch with us? Twitter. We are weekly show pod Instagram threads TikTok Blue Sky. We are with the show podcast and you can like, subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel the weekly show at John Stewart. Fantastic. Thank you guys very much. And thanks for for keeping in touch with us and asking those provocative and sometimes emotionally wounding questions. Thanks as always to everybody. Couldn't do without you producer Brittany Mammadavik, producer Jillian Spear, video editor and engineer, Robert Tolo, audio editor and engineer Nicole Boys in our executive producer's Chris McShayne and Katie Gray. Thanks so much guys and we will see you next week. Bye, boy. The weekly show with John Stewart is a comedy central podcast is produced by Paramount Audio and bus boy productions. Perustin Pyöräilyva teita valmistavan Ornottin vuonna 2013. Mielestäni parasta Shopify saan se, että voimea harioittaa liiketoimintaa ilman teknista osaamista, voimea hallinoida yrityksen taustajärjestelmiä ja frontendia sekä myyden verkossa, vaivatta, jos Shopify olisi pyöräilyvaruste, sollisi mielestäni itse polku pyörä. Sillä asiat hoidetaan ja meida liiketoimintamme hoituu shopifaissa. Aloita ilmainen kokeilu shopifypiste.com sivustolla. Olen Shannon Maldonado, käsintehtiä artesaanitua teita myyven jaui-lahiakaupan perustaja. Valitsin Shopify koska alustoja testatessani totesin sen ehdottomasti yhdeksi helpokäyttöisimmistä alustoista. Minulo oli tärkeä pohtia kehittymistämme tulevaisuudessa. Kaikki myyntiin tarvittava työkalut, kuten varaston suunnittelu, ovat kättevästi dashboardissä. 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