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

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We are back, my name is John Stuart. We were off for a week and we are refreshed and healthy. And ready to roll on this Tuesday, June 2nd, it will probably air on June 3rd. I'm still waiting to see if I'm going to get booked to open for freedom to 50. Right, right before flow ride down.

Which is the right now.

“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, get even perka dress. 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 D.C. And I just, 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 Cuban cigars, it's something. And for some reason, he is maybe one of my favourite people working 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 favourite 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 best cellar, the uninhabitable earth. Well, I've after warming. But he's recently, 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 bring him on in. David Wallace Wells is joining us today.

“David Wallace Wells, one of my favourite writers, right?”

For the New York Times opinion, communist, New York Times magazine, author of the best cellar, 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, you were 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 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 still pretty worried about warming. We could 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 start with that. We'll start with near-term challenges and then we'll go to the long-term challenges. So let's pop in with near-term challenges. Here's in 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 less stable than it did even a year ago when.

We weren't having a fertilizer crisis on the onset of growing season. We weren't having shortages of, you know, aluminum to make diacocans 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 interest itself most dramatically.”

The, 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, let's tease that apart a little bit because 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, is that what this, a, a Ron war represents?

“I mean, you know, that, that famous get 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. Um, that regime has been brutal for many decades. I mean, it's 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, um, 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 advice, such that we're all now, ever, all eight billion of us on the planet dependent on, you know, these, these two kind of madmen, um, one of whom is running America and, or right, many, 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 kind of imagine 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 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. Uh, that rises to the level of, well, maybe will help the people under attack with some money and some missiles. But Iran's behavior, that we must intervene there immediately. Israel's behavior of bombing, not only doing not intervene, we give them the materials to do it. Saudi Arabia, their behavior can be a born 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 Road doctrine, which a lot of people interpreted 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 Venezuela, what we've done in the Caribbean, what we're now doing in Iran, I think the 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 power and fear 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,

You know, what 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, killed some school girls and done damage to a lot of civilian infrastructure hospitals and universities in ways that used to be casually called war crimes. Yes, 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. Iran has demonstrated its power and control over one of the central economic pathways in the world, the state of Formus. And they've done that in a way that tells a lot of really interesting stories about the near term, you know, geopolitics 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's happened, not just in Iran, but what has happened in Ukraine over the last few years.

“And indeed, what happened when the US 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 US will bungle its way in Iraq and Afghanistan, but like we can be clear that the military advantage there lies with the superpower. 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 regain territory from the Russians.

This is a completely new kind of war in Ukraine's 70 to 80 percent 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, you know, 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, how in God's name have we not learned that over, you know, over the last 30 years, forget 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 nae bomb 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 had 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 Robert, this 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 of time in the 90s and 2000s as we did in the 60s and 50s.

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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 Allahwaki 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.

Right. Did we just curious? Yeah. Did we watch the end of that movie because I don't know what people know. You do have to ask those questions about a lot of these military people.

“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, the allegory. Right. But, you know, even five or eight years ago, military futurists would think of American technological advantage, just 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. I 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 there 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.

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 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, a whole new phase of this conflict, and we've encountered before.

“And that 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? And who's suffering most from the holding of the hostage? And like 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.

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 there are the ones that suffer the most.

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 Walswell's away. I don't know where he moved to. Not for you, John. But it is not. No, I'm in Jersey, baby. We don't even have cops. It's all, it's, it's Nirvana.

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. The 50 percent, 60 percent, 70 percent of the people that are just living through these squeezes and it's just life 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 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 expansive 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 sort of friends that 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,”

you 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 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 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 fuel.

They've undertaken some incredible emergency measures. They've, you know, shorten their work weeks. They've closed schools. They've imposed restrictions on fuel use.

And so, you know, in the countries of Europe and the US, we've, we're now paying a little bit more for gas and maybe for some other price, some other products we buy the supermarket, but it hasn't been all that catastrophic.

I think that you're exactly right. I mean, in the, in the global, you know, the, the planet, I mean the global American context, the, the scale of the, you know, the scale and shape of the economy. I do think that the fundamental fact of this 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 blue-to-grats and oligarchs, everyday on our TV screens, everyday on their podcasts and in 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, they're not just about 50%. You know, the bottom 95%. Yes, not to mention the bottom 50% who are also living in a completely different universe. Right. And I think that's one of the things that is behind the 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, have caused a huge amount of political turmoil and, you know, widespread suffering.

The people at the top have always 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 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.

What's the, 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.

“And 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 here."”

You're developing a new. Let's hurry because then you're protected. 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? 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% 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 of the country as 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.

“Right. 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 was in the first term.

The AI guys, you know, first of all, they're kind of ideologically diverse. Some of them are libertarian and some of them are libertarian fascists. Is that, is that the ideological diversity in that world? I think the Dario mode I 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.

Yeah. Like, 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 there's 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 have 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, 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. Seeing as, seeing 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 poops and cyclical about AI 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 a 30 year sense. 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?"

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“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 stake or anything about it. In fact, we have to pay them for the privilege. Yeah, my boss, AJ Sultzburg, 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.

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 transforms towards ballistic structures, but I would, 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.

I mean, it's a well-worn, you know, the industrialists of the early 1900s to 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 call 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. 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 in 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 it's 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 challenges, 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 Claude or 10.135 Claude, like, you know, you don't have the power, you don't have the model. I mean, maybe 18 months ago or so, I wrote a piece in which I said, like, the US is betting on AI and China is betting on green tech. And, you know, these were like the two, they were the bets for their century.

“And the, you pointed out the silliness of that, which is that AI also depends on electricity, right?”

And we need 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 slow its rollout. Someone in effectively, 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 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, 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 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 surge in coal.

It hasn't happened. Instead, we've seen a huge surge in the purchasing of Chinese solar panels of EVs all around the world. Oh, China's killing it. Now, this war has absolutely heightened a 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 this war feels like a kind of throwback to the analog world that we were living in back then.

Yeah, I mean, the biggest irony there is that it may be the end of OPEC. Right. It made destroy it.

“And also scramble all of these alliances that the Trump administration has spent so much time building over the last decade.”

You know, trying to build a sort of coalition of countries around basically venture capital and tech capital in Israel and the Gulf and many of those countries. Well, that's right. It's always so funny. He sends Jared and Witt Poff over there.

And they owe their plan is always like, what if we just get $200 billion to build like a golf course and some hotels to Ron?

Would that be good for you guys? 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 is not for him though, not for Kushner. I mean, not not not for the Trump family in particular, but the Gulf, the Gulf, sovereign wealth funds are reconsidering their investments 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 Gulf stuff and they cancel.”

No more money for Michaelson now that this war started, but those were those were basically efforts to court.

You know, court power Western alliances and Western power and they're reconsidering those in 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. And 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, it 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, they're vision for the future in the Middle East was a future, we are the cities of the future. We're 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 leisure and technology and all these different things. But the one thing that it requires is not just energy is stability and peace and peace. And if you're in a volatile region of the world and suddenly drones are hitting in the middle of Doha will suddenly it all looks like a fiction and it collapses on itself.

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's really true and it brings up to get back to the existential part of this. The through line here is, is it that humans can't help themselves? And I know that's sort of, you know, I think 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. Hey, I'm not sure we have, like I don't, you don't really know what they're doing in the CRISPR, 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, is the through line 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.

“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.”

Right. 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. That is true. And I think it is depressing and distressing. But I also think it's not some total here. It wasn't that long ago when, you know, 2014, 2015, 2016, just to use, you know, 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 do something about climate. And that's the result of that negotiation was effectively the power of the courts, which was a global agreement in which all countries, the world said,

We had pulled so many people out of poverty. We had driven child mortality down so much that we now 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 we 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 government structure, which maybe they found unlikable.”

But even so, the trend of history seemed to be more towards integration through globalization, but also through, you know, cooperationism, cooperation, all those things were ascendant.

10 years ago, it was not that long ago. And 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. 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 and particular places can meaningfully change the entire course of planetary history. That's what we've seen.

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 collateral damage, and this can apply to climate or AI or anything else, 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 then 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.”

There's a lot about the moment in late 2008, early 2009 when, you know, Larry Summer's solicited a bunch of proposals for how much stimulus to ask Congress for and Lail Brenner proposed I think 1.5 trillion and 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 and spending. And Summer's 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. He knows whether it would have made it through Congress, who knows, you know, 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, then we are now and with a considerably less suffering and considerably less turmoil.

“But it's not to say that it would have solved all the problems of the China shock mean, 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 you know, 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 a pandemic.

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.

That's quite striking and scary that we seem to be heading into a similar transformation, parallel transformation to globalization in the form of AI without anything like even the things that we tried to build into the to 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 from 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, now on the other side of that, though, there's a debate within the party about whether we're we've become too much we're too safetyist 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 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.

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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.

“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, you know, the way that women make less money in the work, 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. Do you were talking about earlier, which was 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, you know, with people that are making a lot less money taking jobs for people in the Midwest.

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 that 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 were 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 beef up fraud and enforcement on the back end, which is cheaper, make the penalties much higher. It's a, 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'd basically let people cheat the government after, right? 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. Yeah. 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. Right. With our, with our world, our country. But, you know, one of the things is that, I think, you know, liberalism in America.

Liberals in America really do believe at their core. That the world is legible. They can understand tradeoffs quite clearly and make judgments from on high. Which they then passed down to the public. I mean, that is to me, one of the real, you know, that, that story I just retold about,

Larry Summers, like Larry Summers, like Larry Summers. I'm 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. He wasn't just making a perfect technocratic calculation.

Actually, Lail Brainard 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 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. Yeah, I've got a really striking to bring it back to the President. In this wave of debate and conversation among the AI leaders, I saw an interview with Dario Mood, I 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.

Conservatives always yell at liberals and say, you don't understand human nature.

You can't simply run the entire world like you run a factory floor room. 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 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 be more active in managing those consequences. And we're not. I think that's the the blind spot of that type of thinking is I figured it all out on paper beforehand.

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. Yes, 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? 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 in significant.

“I think healthcare was good in significant imperfect, but good in significant.”

I do think a lot of the stuff that we did, you know, in the COVID stimulus was again imperfect, but good in significant.

And, you know, in certain ways, remarkably effective. And I do think that the IRA and Bill Beck better, though, they've been, you know, undermined by Trump, we're 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, 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 is not a place for fatalism, but a place of opportunity. What 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.

“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, so I'm I'm done, his mayoralty isn't a perfect illustration of this value. 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. 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 pot holes 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 hardened by Zaryn and have been much more hopeful of 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 like local leaders in other places who are leading a charge. This goes 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, which is 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 possibility, whether one possibility here is that Americans come to see national politics, maybe they have already, as essentially culture war theater.

You know, we, 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, 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 that made the soil fertile for someone like Donald Trump is 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 and 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 event. 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 is, he is 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 US last year was great 90% which means for every unit of new dirty infrastructure we built nine times as much clean energy infrastructure.

This year the share is expected to be even larger.

“Is that, is that, is that, is that private? 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, you know, 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, you know, oil and coal, we're not, we're just, we have a basically mature system. Right. So how are the growth is going to be? Yeah. And globally, that's true, too. I was just looking to report on the other day that said that since the, 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, a war 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 that zero. We're very far from stopping warming up the planet. There are a lot of things to be worried about. I don't want to sound too polionish about it. But, you know, Michael Libra, 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 been 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 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, you know, 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.

thinking that the future while progressing erratically would bring us in a sort of predictable way towards more justice, more prosperity, more quality.

“I think we've learned that we need to fight for that rather than just like 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 it, he was Teflon down.

We can't tell ourselves those stories anymore because he is incredibly unpopular, including with all the demographic groups that we told ourselves had, I'm after to a political realignment. Right, right. We're seeing in all of those indicators that people are willing to fight. The question is whether, you know, the structures of power are, are a sailable 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 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.

Now, and I appreciate that. And I do and oddly enough because our conversations and for those people don't know David and I have many conversations over the years are generally with me taking the role of the pessimists who said we should believe in people and our ability thing and David explaining very patiently to me. Why there is progress on the horizon and why things are a little bit more optimistic. You know, I'm a famous optimist. I don't know if you knew that.

“But famous optimists, famous. But but in in this instance, I believe I am more optimistic than you not because I've seen how these systems can be bent.”

And they can be bent by bad actors. But boy, 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 nob by the chaos and in coherence 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 sail 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 White House and we were just awash in this sense that liberals to that maga was on the march. 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 then he had effectively won the culture war, especially with the support of the tech billionaires.

“Now I think about, you know, this great American state fair that they tried to stage 15 months later, and they booked 10 people and it was like the headliners are like millivonilly and their eyes.”

That's the best they could do and then all those people had to drop out because 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 of self-lasterating 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 this 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 through those doors. And there's no idea, there's no, it's, 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, and I think the theory of the case is there to be made.

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, and it's there for the taking, and I think if somebody is able to, to formulate that in a coherent way, they've got a real leg up into that.

“That's, that's what I would say, and that's why I remain always hopeful within that.”

From your lipstick I'm serious, because I'm famously optimist.

David, it's always such a pleasure to talk to you, man.

You too. David Wallace, as well as obviously you can see him in the New York Times opinion, calmness, 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. Of course. macht fast, all is automatic.

Stow it as long as. No, I'm just bad. No, done. Hold it. Now it's time to work.

With resources. Best of 130 Newly upgeben. Guys. Can I share something? Yeah.

Please.

I feel weirdly like giddy.

“I think it's really telling that David Wallace, as well as the author of the uninhabitable Earth,”

is one of the more optimistic conversations that we've had in a while. I also think it's concerning that he's getting his optimism from Millie Vanillie. Well, Rob. Not Millie. Not Vanillie.

It's really just Millie. But I'll tell you why I feel so energized. There was a moment when he was described. It felt like a shark tank moment where you go, like, there's got to be a better way. The way that he was talking about how liberalism functions specifically through the vestiges

of government, how the summers of it all designs the program and the grand and answers all the questions in top because he's the smartest person that's ever existed. He just put it into the fax 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 negative consequences, the unforeseen collateral damages,

of even the well-intentioned policies 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 agree. I really, like, there's moments when you feel really helpful 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. I'm feeling it for those of you who don't know at home.

“Jillian has a unhealthy relationship with, I think, unhealthy with the San Francisco giants.”

I'm right now. It's pretty abusive. Yeah. No, and even, and by the way, that's coming from a Mets fan. These are darker for the San Francisco giants, but for the New York vets. That's right. So even within that.

But, and to polar opposite visions of what may be 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 at 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 arising.

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 when primaries. But that's also a very narrow, 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 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 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. That's right. 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. They're not going to give us. Absolutely. Brittany, what do we got? What do we got? Alrighty.

Now that I'm fired up. I love positive John. Positive, Johnny.

“John, what is your favorite topic to talk about on the podcast?”

Sanwiches, almost always Sanwiches.

This is a sandwich podcast. Yeah. It's, 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's my most fearful. Economic, can I tell you something? Economists are my bat noir. They are my white whale. I am, I am, I am always on the search of in economists who will not treat me condescendingly. Although we do find them actually.

Yeah, we have, yeah. We've had some lovely ones. Yeah, yeah. Derewn was was lovely. The guys from MIT.

Clara Matay was great. Yeah. Kitty Richards. That's right. It's so nice to know that in Boston you can be in a economist and not in.

Economist and not an asshole. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. The combination of those two things are Boston and economists. Oh, God.

It's not a good, it's not a good combination. But, yes, I do love, I do love talking about that stuff and egg sandwiches. I would say the, the two of them are my favorite. But I'd be happy to hear from the audience. Taco Bell.

Can I tell you something in this food? Food is food. It really is. We record so close to lunchtime. It's just that the crunch rapture cream.

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. Just stop the way shit and you roll it up.

What if we give, what about a parallelogram? What if we take a fold it this way? Hold on, let me give my T square and a protractor and figure out where I can put the beans. We have got to get talk about this sponsor us. She was.

By the way, they already do, they just don't know it. They are the fuel that keeps me going on there. What else we got? Next. 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 here. I don't think you would have good buzzer skills. That hand is like a little.

It's seen better days. Boy is that true. But talk about the bruising that would occur after aftermath. 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.

So where's your brain located? It's the head. And the head is at the top of it's sort of like, if you think about it as a New York apartment building. It's the water tower. Okay.

“And what's the most important thing in the water tower?”

Pressure. And I draw. And what is 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 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 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. I don't know if jeopardy is there. The idea that he was saying to her. And for those who don't know, he was describing how he came up with the Dumb Accrat.

I dropped the B because most people don't know there's a B in that.

I'm like, well, most people who are in Dumb No. He said himself up for that one. Yeah. How is this real? He is definitely a more the wheel of fortune guy.

“I don't think even, I think even the spinning of the wheel would throw him on.”

Vertigo. What's our last one? What's our last one? John, do your 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 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 different things.

I like just being with them around them. It's fun. They're fun. They both have great senses of humor. They're both really smart.

They're fun to be around. So they got all that from Tracy. Tracy. You guys met Tracy, you know what we're talking about. But yeah, but oh God, that's one of those questions.

“Like, we're almost feel like the hair on the back of your neck go up like, what?”

What if you heard? Debate submit this question. Like, do your kids like you? Like, I think as far as like a parent's 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. There are patterns of behavior and answers that I know that I probably do that I role. But within healthy relationships is grace. And we have hopefully grace for each other.

In those moments of understanding that we'll be that the baseline of our relationship is respect and love and like. Even though there's moments, I'm sure we're 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 being a kid.”

Like, my mom and I definitely went through it when we were teenagers, but then actually as you get older, you know, you find a friendship and you find hobbies together and you love doing things. 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, I mean, we laugh about it now. Like, man, I was 16, I was stealing the car. And you can outwind those. Wait, hold on a second.

That just took a turn. Brilliant. That turned from like, you know, we went through it a little bit. Like, we used to fight a little bit. I kind of slept late and stuff, and I stole the car.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, and I committed grand auto. Armour wrestling friends now. And I robbed a liquor store.

Great. Enjoying. Did you go through it at that age? Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think everybody else.

Yeah, teenage eggs, you know, that's necessary. They have to separate from me because when they're young, it's the most beautiful thing. But you know it has to end. And the heartbreak of parenting is that is that you know,

when they think you're Superman, that at some point they're going to realize. You're going to make me cry. Alright, I want to do that. All right, we'll move on. We'll move on.

What are you asking before we wrap? Yes, yes. Please just sentence. All right. Next in.

Oh, anything. Next in anything. Please. Are you going? I'm hoping to.

I'm trying not to think about it. I'm so excited.

We'll always have them that settle down.

settle down. Brittany, how do they keep in touch with us? Twitter, we are weekly show pod. Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Blue Sky. We are with the show pod cast and you can like.

Subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel.

Fantastic.

Thank you guys very much.

“Thanks for keeping in touch with us and asking those.”

Provocative and sometimes emotionally wound in questions.

Thanks as always to everybody.

Couldn't do without your producer.

Brittany, my mate of a producer.

“Jillian, spare video editor and engineer Robotolo audio editor.”

An engineer Nicole Boyson, our executive producer. Chris Machena, 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.”

It's produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions.