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

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My wallet for Shopify, because Shopify is in the same way as the other platforms I tested, with the famous ones. I've been waiting for all the money. All the tools for the development of the business are important, so that you can find out from the store.

Now there's a constant test on Shopify.com. Hello and welcome to the Boulder Daily. I'm your host Tim Miller. Delight 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.

You're right about the science, climate change, technology, and the future of the planet. His book, The Uninhabitable Earth, is a real pick me up. It's David Walswells. What's up, man? I'm 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, what are you the most animated about right now?”

At the moment, I think the politics of AI is the most exciting and dramatic political story of the summer. I would say there was polling that just came out today, I think, or yesterday, from he map 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.

If you think back to what the opposition to nuclear power did to build out a 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. That's been happening for 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 aligned in themselves with the opposition here.

And Kathy Hockel in New York was the first one, but Greg Abbott in Texas of all places is now you know, signed to 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 as his motto, he's imposing a data center moratorium. And so you see across the political spectrum, politicians like, you know,

giving 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 unconcerned, you know, signing up with 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.

So a few brief little case studies in Latin County, Virginia, they're now making half of their tax revenue from data centers. It could property taxes by 30% because of the revenue coming from data centers in, um, down Louisiana where you are virtual in Paris, I think it's called, um, 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, um, data center there. And you see similar stories all around the country where you have this incredible flow of money coming into local communities, um, 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. You 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

side of the equation. Yeah, the Shapiro thing caught my eye to send an executive order this week.

Uh, the described as implementing the strictest standards in the nation on AI data centers, which is a little bit countered his brand, right? Yeah, and he's more of a technocrat. It's not as if, you know, that you wouldn't want to have reasonable restrictions on data centers if you're a Josh Shapiro, but it's kind of, uh, positioned himself on the cutting edge of this,

“I think is not where they, I'm curious you're 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 is 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 what people are passed to in some

communities, like the pollution and noise issues are like really bad. And you can understand what people are passed to. Then another area is like loud and county. It is kind of like why are people passed here exactly? Like everybody's like making more money off of this? You know what thinks? That would be a absolute golden ticket appeal in American politics. You can pay less taxes, your local government will be much better funded, you'll be able to provide more social services.

You would think that would be the kind of appeal that, you know, pitchman and politicians would dream of. And yet, no. And so that's my question is, okay, if you kind of set aside like the

“particular is of each case, what is driving the broad-based distrust and anchor and backlash?”

And because to me, I get seems pretty obvious that it's, again, sitting inside the particular communities. If you're a data center isn't in your community, isn't affecting your life data 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 their 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 nimbus and 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 worry 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 a 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 large 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 we 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 buildout. I mean, three-quarters of the country. Those numbers, they're just almost too big to imagine. A lot of people associate that they think in their minds, oh, this is an envy as a more opposition to environmental, you know, the 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 the generation. And I think some people, their opposition is thin. Some people, it is informed by misinformation, disinformation. It's not guaranteeing that this resistance will succeed and stall the data center buildout.

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

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, I key 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 were all 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. So 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 Amodai who's, I'm some of the most approachable, the least obviously sociopathic, he's still widely distrusted. You know, Elon Sam All-Man. Because he's not obviously sociopathic. That makes me distrust. It's like all you other guys, I could tell or 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

“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 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 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 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 would be accompanied by the sense of

fatalism. Like, what are we going to do? 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, springing up”

in the time of even more fatalism and despair about our politics. 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'll 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 and this wide in many years.

Yeah, Richel, I'll read the National Review, like a child wrote about how his support for Trump 3 was because it's a big middle finger to all of the liberal elites, city hates. That inner child that we all have, 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 big in American as a leader of three-year-old was a result of that middle finger. But this feels like kind of that same emotion

channel towards the tackle, a guard's honest. Like, the data center thing is like, the nation's middle finger to all of you fuckers that are have been totally undersponsored on caring. And the times that you do demonstrate that you like maybe care about us, like 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 started at the beginning. I mean, in Richel and Paris, Louisiana, elementary school teachers who have annual salaries

of like $30 to $40,000, got a $50,000 bonus. And still, that community is not happy. Yeah, people, you can't buy me off with your dirty fucking Silicon Valley evil super computer money.

the safety stuff that is also happening really fast, like right now, the summer at the same

times the data center stuff. There's this hugging phase situation where some of the open AI models broke out of the prison that they're supposed to be in, it kind of, and you know, engaged in

“attack on something that you can explain. 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 phase incident woke some people up, so there's been a new little wave of alarm, the people who are working very seriously

on the 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 break of sky net or human extinction, but there was something really deeply profound about the world that we are about to live in. People worried about bioresk and they worried about terrorism and they worried about, you know, yes, the effects of like mass unemployment and, you know, complete retransformation of the economy. And all of those worries are in some ways still present in the

zeitgeist in the American psyche. But, you know, when you look at the front page of the year 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 k-backs so that its investors will be made whole? And those are important questions if they can. 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 and 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 anti-social outcast at the local high school can now design a super bug that will wipe out the entire town or possibly the entire world, which is the kind of worry that people are having

three or four and five years ago. And to some degree, that change is because the people,

monitor and 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, the models 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 order. So it wasn't as though they've been told not to get to the internet. They just seemed like they were trying to follow the order of the most extreme way possible. It's like because they were on the internet, the model could not identify the bugs

“that I suppose to identify. 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 were 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 were 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 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 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 ask 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 cyber security 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 without

over on his planning list podcast on just this topic. It's really good. I'll put a link in the show notes. This segment is brought to you literally by the New York Times. My guest lady David

Wallace was Wright's essential newsletter for the paper that I read as soon as it hits my

“inbox all the time. That's why I tried to bring him to you today. And it is extremely varied and”

important. It is based on his own reporting. He talks directly to a lot of climate scientists. Something we talked about in this episode about the ever-a-volving views on what's happening in our Earth, what's happening with warming, what could be best done to mitigate the concerns, because there's a bunch of other issues, technology, what's happening with ice. We didn't get to it in this episode, but he has a great newsletter looking back on Fauci and the work that was

done during the COVID pandemic through a analytical perspective, not a political perspective.

What lessons can we learn? What did they get right? What did they get wrong? Rather than focusing

only on the nonsense being shouted at him on Fox News and in the Senate committee hearings. So it's extremely valuable just like the other reporting by the New York Times. Another reporting by folks doing the hard news reporting here at the bulwark and at your local newspaper and in other outlets. Fact-based journalism and this is fact-based journalism. It's so important. What I do here is try to raise the attention of stuff, raise salience of things that other people are reporting.

We hash out and try to figure out what the right way to contextualize how reporting is, but you need the fact-based reporting to underpin all of it and I appreciate people like David and other folks in the New York Times for bringing us the real stories that matter. So wherever you seek it out, nationally, locally, here at the bulwark, support and fact-based reporting. We appreciate it. The one of the AI thing I want to talk about fully get to ice and climate stuff is

which I also talked about on that. A planning research podcast is this kind of open source versus closed source sort of question about the AI models and how the big American companies and Thropic and open AI have these closed models with the Chinese companies have more open models. And 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 another economic implications to it too, which is kind of like does part of the reason why 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 be China.

But it's kind of like if you get to a place where there are very powerful open source models

and the medium term would even matter kind of who won the race, if everybody has access to this eventually. Anyway, talk about the implications of all 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 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 open AI 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 of true exponential growth, sometimes called recursive self-improvement, sometimes called artificial superintelligence, with people, yeah, AGI, AGI, AGI as I, 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

be the case that a frontier lab passes that threshold and is on that exponential curve for them to a really, really profit and earn back the investment that has been made in their capabilities, then the fact that there is a whole C of alternative models, mostly in China binoculars exclusively, that can do like 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 an

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 there, 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 turning through spreadsheets. I 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 going to go for that.

That leaves the businesses that have been built on the promise of AI monopoly,

kind of in the lurch. That is really the abyss that can open an eye or staring down right now,

where they've even started open the 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. I think it's notable that over the last few months they've made”

that acknowledgement. A number of tech leaders have a welcome open source into their lives because it makes startups easier. It's sort of circulates as easier to use. You've seen some openness from the White House, given the sort of geopolitical context of a year or two, it goes really straight, quite striking. The USA 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 going to accrue to one company or even necessarily one country, 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 significant correction coming down the bike. Well, I'm trying to decide where my fears lie there, whether the economic

correction coming down the pike, whether the Chinese open source models and the aforementioned loan or teen get a extra success to all of that. On and on, there's about 2,013. We're on the bike's side. The biggest advantage of shopping for me is that we're going to be in a different situation than technical forecast. We can all go back to the front end and the front end of the road, and so it was like to go to the online shop. If shopping for a bike for a bike, then

we'll go to the platform for the actual bike. It's just the basic thing. Our whole story is over. Start to yet stay in custom laws and test of Shopify.com. Well, we're doing scary stuff. I'll

“keep this system going. Would you rather talk about ice or call in a change first?”

Let's do ice. Okay, such a nice recent newsletter. I think this is going to be a pretty surprising statistic for people, which is that ice arrests hit a new high in July last month. I think there is a total misconception in the narrative about what is happening, like the sense that after, you know, Kristi Nome was replaced by Mark Wayne Mullen, that there was some pullback from the administration, and that is not the case at all.

Yes, probably going to send a new record in August. Deportations are likely to send a new record this year. Certainly deportations of people seized within the border are going to 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 in a 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 hoard of federal agents. And there was conflict. There were a few deaths. There was a lot of

its tail between its legs. And Greg Bavino was forced out. And yeah, Kristi Nome was forced out as

“well. But, you know, Steven Miller's telling the way that is. 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, you know, sort of strategic conflict going back a couple of years between people who really wanted to like stage spectacular confrontations with immigrants. They wanted the ice core and they wanted to ask some of our videos with the immigrants and 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.

Well, I'm sadists. Yeah. But there were also people including Miller who was like, you know, 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 a campaign trail was 20 million immigrants

deported. And we're nowhere near them. So we have a long, you know, we've 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. Because that's how they get to them. They're 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 in Central Africa, where we're reaching agreement with. If 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, you will take all, we'll take everybody back. And you were still sending those people to Honduras, to Nicaragua, just to 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-fended federal law, well-funded federal law enforcement agency in the country. More real funded than a lot of the military branches, more money than the Marines. Yeah. Yeah. It's astonishing. And maybe the most

astonishing thing is that liberal sub-sort of turned away from that sort of clocking Minneapolis as a victory and thinking that, you know, Trump may be wreaking havoc on this front to that front, but I'm immigration. We'd sort of boxed him in. And it's just not the case. Just to expand it with those points. Because I was looking at this the other day. I've been doing some Japanese internment camp reading. I was trying to get a baseline. And we're at, and then obviously

there are similarities in differences in the way that we're treating people worse now or better. But the like number of people through the system this year is like significantly great within the total number of Japanese that we have interned in the 1940s. Right like that. So that's the scale of it. And in these detention centers. And to back to your point on how they're going

“after people think it's fine. And like I do think this is the key point because they have the”

resources to do that. Like if you are the person that people imagine when they're thinking about illegal immigrant, like somebody that came across the border, you know, went to some community inside the interior of the country, is working, landscaping jobs, cash, own way or whatever. Like 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 in terms of challenge. We've got a lot of idiots

working for ICE. Right? Who's easy to find? People that 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 of 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 couple that was here legally is doing nothing

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. 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 of this last year and that 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 seasoned criminals. It is actually eliminating tens of millions of law-biting immigrants of foreign origin and getting them out of the country.

“That's what they want to do. 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 binomics, you know, we may see a sort of

similar or even now with the tariffs. I think it's quite likely in the next democratic administration that some amount of tariffs stand placed in part because they're hard to remove, but in part because they're useful now that they're already there to whoever's in power. And I do suspect slash worry that there will be significantly more border enforcement under a future democratic president than we saw for instance under Joe Biden. Maybe some people think that's so

the good. I've counted 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 some people letters if they were here illegally. That's my pitch to any 20, 20, eight or 30 less. The big picture point is that like there isn't a crisis of 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 US. 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. It was not primarily the result of Biden's border policy. Nevertheless, you could fault him. For not doing enough, if you wanted that to be taken control of, we're in a very different situation.

Now, we're almost starting to be in a very different situation in 2021. We will not have that kind of flood of migrants to the border. And so the suite of options facing any future leader is, you know,

“what's the political, politically palatable is, I think much more open than was the case a few years ago.”

The other depressing thing that you noted that newsletter is despite Trump's approval rating, kind of sinking across the board on a bunch of stuff, I'm just his general approval rating, approval rating on Iran, economy. His ratings and immigration still are, kind of, better. I know, you know, whatever. 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 rates. And I think that the

out of sight out of my nature of this is, is creating a sense of things are okay. And I do think it's incumbent upon the Democrats on the opposition to make sure people realize that that's not true. Let's talk about climate stuff. We talked last year. I don't talk about climate enough on here, tarred, lot happening in the news, Trump's arrangements syndrome, et cetera. So I just, I do like to check in with you. When you're here last year, ask you to kind of update us on the

uninhabitable Heart Earth. And the basic summary you gave was projections as far as like warming growth have gotten better since you wrote the book. But they've also plateaued because they got better and then people start caring about this and, you know, populists one here and around the globe in a bunch of places. And he's kind of even going to be discussed in the Democratic 2028 debates

you know. So like basically, you know, the shorthand was it's gotten better but like it's still a

big problem and it doesn't feel like we're as serious about it anymore. Is that kind of still the shorthand for over at today, do you think? Yeah, I would say that the summer has given us a few reasons

“to worry a bit more 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's sort of pailed 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 counted 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,

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 and that would have been

considered a stark in any other year. And this is a pretty bleak sign. I would guess that when the European summer is all set 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 in France where the most intense stay of heat in June killed more people than the devliest 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 reassherences 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 equation. 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 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 reasons for this having to do with aerosol pollution and how that's coming down, having to do with cloud formation because they're fewer, there's less pollutants in the air. Clouds actually have a harder time forming and

clouds are basically reflective of solar power, so we need more pollution, as what you're saying.

Other types of pollution. We need to get acid rain back. This is not at all a controversial position among a certain cohort of climate scientists who believe that we should be suspending some kind of particular matter in the upper atmosphere. Either directly to reflect sunlight or to encourage the formation of more clouds. We've sort of run this natural experiment over the last few years when a particular set of regulations was put in place just monitoring

the pollution from global shipping routes, so boats going across the big oceans, had to really clean up their fuel kind of dramatically in 2020. And it may well be the case that we're seeing a kind of significant acceleration in the rate of warming just because of that effect. That the ships on the ocean are now polluting less than they used to. And in the big picture,

you know, that's scary. If we're in a position where our emissions are flat, which is basically

how they've been for about 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 an ob 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 they're 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. I can't, the super computer solved this. That that was the point of AGI. I, you know, it's funny. In my book, which I would now feel is so long ago, I came out in 2019, I did quote Eric Schmidt saying that AGI had effectively already solved climate change.

In 2019. Yeah, it's kind of like with Sam Altman said he doesn't know how they're going to get to a profit, but the AIs 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 current cancer, when they talk about, you know, it's the, the promise of the technological tool is real. There are many things that increased computing power and really impressive A.I. 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 don'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

Moderna really 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 cancer. 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 say,

but because there are huge contestations over this and the thing about this that may be most

alarms me are most 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 Amoda, I 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 societies, big deep profound questions that have preoccupied humans and pulled 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 a fundamentally,

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 wise from many people feel so alienated from their judgment. Yeah, the most efficient allocation of tax dollars is not actually the fundamental official in the country. I'm a little annoyed at you because I was going to end on the Dernah News as a positive. I wanted to give people something positive and you managed to kind of take

that anecdote that Madena had this big advancement using an MNRA MRNA, excuse me, with a potential skin cancer vaccine and kind of warp it also into a negative framework. Over noses are falling dramatically. There may be this year going to be only half the size 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 ones. 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 the 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, we set by crime work, we're a violent country, we're a criminal country. It actually is no longer

that trip, maybe not even true at all. The national death rate fell to an all-time

little last year, 5% better, and then the HHSA based system, 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 shaped the future will take. Things that it will be determined by who wins the death battle between Sam Altman and Dario Monai, neither from the trust at all. I agree with that.

“I think the MRNA stuff is also just the advancements potentially there, both of the GLP ones”

under the MRNA is pretty amazing, and we probably need an additional, the only good thing Trump ever did. Operation Moore State, we probably need an additional one for the next, the next administration. Before I lose you can I ask you two, just kind of practical climate questions. Yeah, 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 to eat and June. Europe needs air conditioning. I understand 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

because inevitably you get hurricanes, like the roofs will not be as vulnerable to them.

Well, the other kind of tangible examples of that when you're writing that newsletter. Yeah, I mean, New Orleans, you know, the levies that they rebuilt after Katrina don't protect against category five hurricanes. No, I mean, with the pump, so I'll sit down work. Well, for category five 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 block cameras, but you know, whatever. That's just me. I mean, I think that adaptation is going to be the project of the generation maybe even a century. We will be adjusting to an entirely novel global landscape, the climate's already warmer than it's ever been in the entire history of humanity, which means that climate conditions

that governs the whole of human history are already behind us. They've been lost,

and we will be living in the new future. And that means we're going to have to do it a lot of rebuilding. I mean, just on the question of heat, you mentioned AC, which is already, you know, Europeans are ten times as likely to have AC as they were in 1990. There are 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 two few buildings have filtration systems. We have 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 to 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 catastrophic fire.

But when you look at what happened in Los Angeles or La Hina or Boulder, Santa Rosa paradise, 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 tree as typically, leave the trees unburned. If you see the images from, you know, palisades are out to you know, the trees are often green, and the aftermath of fire because the fire burns so quickly through that it found the ready or few old, 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 landscapes, so that more homes don't burn, and 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 wild land urban interface. We need to grow crops so that better and heat so that when we're dealing with an elinear like this year when many of the world's bread baskets are going to be suffer and under extreme heat. Many of them also having less fertilizer than they would have

otherwise because of the closure of the straitiform was. It won't result in something like

“um, 50 million additional people being pushed into extreme hunger, which I think is what the”

UN just estimated will happen this year because of elinear and fertilizer crisis. So, you know, there are sort of solution sets everywhere. The biggest one is the one that we were talking about earlier. It's just one that I'm personally a little bit uncomfortable 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 sun shade

that pollution provided to the planet for 50 years. Mr. Burns solution, Mr. Burns solution. Yeah. All right, it'll just give me the TLDRU mentioned Elineania. That was my last thing for you on 2026, where people in here, particularly in America, like, where is it going to impact? Just to be candid, I saw one thing that was like Elineania means fewer hurricanes in the Gulf this year and I was like, great news and so then I stopped reading about Elineania, but I understand

that people have other interest besides my profile. The impacts on the U.S. are relatively muted in general. It's where 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. the 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 started seeing a few years ago. That can be especially worrying in the immediate aftermath of a wildfire because if you have a hill that gets like, you know, the trees are

flooding event, you can have much slides like the ones that killed people in Santa Barbara in 2018.

“And I think the bigger effect that was going to be on food growing around the world,”

because 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 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 Niño is going to have, you know, played big role there. And that's because”

it is by far the biggest El Niño that we have ever seen. And when I say 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% more intense than that one. Maybe 50% more intense than that one. It seems likely to be the most intense El Niño events in the entire history of human civilization. We are better prepared for it than we were in 1877. We are not as vulnerable to the effects on food productions 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 and Iran, etc, etc. I'm not sure. I think it's quite possible”

as with so many other disasters that we 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 two months. We need to end with alarm. What else would we do? The end of the podcast. David was as well as 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 year hobby or some time, 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 regular scheduled Trump arrangement syndrome tomorrow with one of our oldest most arranged friends. Look forward to it. We'll see you all then, peace. The more daily,

it's brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Anzley Skipper, and with video editing by Dante DeChico and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.