Optimism Amidst Political Chaos

America is an aspirational idea, one we're still working to fulfill. It was shaped by enlightenment ideals, reason, liberty, and freedom of conscience. The belief that power comes from we the people, not a divinely appointed ruler, and while these ideals have not yet been fully perfected, they created something powerful, a framework that has expanded rights and freedoms over time Now, those freedoms and your rights are under attack. We're seeing growing efforts to blur the line between church and state, using public funds to promote religion, putting Ten Commendments into classrooms, and pushing a version of America that leaves out too many people. As our nation approaches its two hundred fiftieth anniversary, the Freedom F Religion Foundation is working to protect the Constitution, defend secular government, and ensure that freedom continues to expand Eone because America isn't just where we started. It's what we choose next. Go to frf. U slash state or text state to five eleven five eleven. teext state to five eleven five eleven, Txt fees may apply Cs trust the Home Depot for heavy duty storage solutions for any job site or garage. Right now, get up to fifteen percent off select storage and organization, impact and water resistant toes and shelving built to hold up to two thousand five hundred pounds. Storage systems have space for all your tools and protect them in the garage, on the job site, and everywhere in between. Save time and maximize efficiency with adjustable shelving customized to your business's needs Shop and save on pro grade storage at the Home Depot, how pros get more done Hey everybody welcome to the weeklyh Podcast. We are back My name is John Stewart. We were off for a week and we are refreshed and healthy and ready to roll on this Tuesday June second it'll pry air on I'm still waiting to see if I'm going to get booked to open for Freedom two hundred fifty No Right before flow Rida I don't know if you guys saw that the CNC music factactory guy gave what may be I think one of the great I don't want to say Getty Bg address But he gave one of the great speeches while sitting on his toilet about how he views the type of performances that may be going on in u in DC and uh 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 cubpan cigars. It's It's something A And for some reason, he is maybe One of my favorite people right now given that speech. But today's show, we're going to go in a slightly different direction. We're going to talk to one of my favorite sort of utility players in the world of breaking down all the different events and threats that may be looming on our horizon. He's an existentialist as You could tell from the title of his bestseller, The uninhabitable Earth warming But he's recent 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 bit while and I'm excited to talk to him again. Let's just let's just Bring him on in David Wallace Wells. is joining us today David Wallace well is one of my favorite writers, writer for the New York Times opinion, Calmness New York Times magazine author the bestseller of 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 Wellells, and you can tell me if this's true or not that you've expanded your extinction events into AI or perhaps the Middle East. So today we are going to go through where you believe Our fatal mistake will come from. and destroy the entirety of the planet Are you still in the mindset? that in your hierarchy of extinction events is is climate Still the top of the list Or are you finding other existential threats underneath them? that you want to explore. You know, I wouldn't call any of these things extxtinction events actually. I think, you know, no matter what happens, there're going to be billions of people living on the planet probablyably 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 then I'm still pretty worried about warming. We could talk about that, but there's some near term challenges too, which may be looming a bit larger for your listeners. Let's do that. Let' firstirst of all, thank you for saying we have listeners 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. Who's in the pole position for near term challenges for humankind We're dealing with a war in the Middle East that was needless. and elective, and I think really poorly conceived, and which has scrambled an awful lot of geopolitics and done a lot of damage to America standing in the world and made the future seem a whole lot more a whole lot less stable than it did even a year ago when we still had Donald Trump in office, but you know We weren't having an oil and gas supply crisis. We weren't having a fertilizer crisis on the onset of growing season. We weren't having shortages of You know, aluminum to make dye coke cans and helium to run MRI machines and plastics to make condoms to deliver to the developing world So I think that over the last six months, that's the thing that has introduced itself most dramatically, the war Iran tootally needless in my view, totally ill defined, and I think catastrophic and revealing on a number of different levels Let me let's tease that apart a little bit. Is that That's interesting to me it felt like The world has always had problems, but there was a relative amount of stability It's It seems very clear that in the last few years, and maybe we'll start it with Russia's invasion of Ukraine or maybe even their occupation of Crimea, The world Oder was about to go through bit of a reset. that we were going to be re choosing who are the Allied powers and who are the Ais powers And is America aligning with the Axis powers Are we is that what this Iran war represents I mean, you know, that famous skit 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 I don't want to underestimate the villainy of Iran. That regime has been brutal for many decades. It is certainly not a place that I would want to live. I think very few Americans would want to live there. But that's not the same thing as saying that that bad behavior justifies regular military action against essentially nonxistent 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 the entire global economy being put into a kind of a vice, such that we're all now all eight billion of us on the planet dependent on, you know, these two kind of madmen, one of whom is running America and 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 can imagine it, it's not going to solve all the problems that the conflict itself caused And do you think the conflict I'm always interested in what countriry's misbehavior rises to the level of intervention You know, Russia's behavior, invading countries Bob threatening Europe with energy shortages, all these other things. That rises to the level of, well, maybe we'll help the people under attack with some money and some missiles But Iran's behavior, that we must intervene there immediately. Israel's behavior of bombing, not only do we not intervene, we give them materials to do it. Saudi Arabia, their behavior can be abhorrent in the human rights arena There are allies. It's very hard to find a consistent through line morally Well, I mean, I don't think that this administration is applying a moral test at all. I think the purpose of this war wasn't even strategic. I don't even think 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 Um, you know, we had this big document that they put together Pentagon which declared that thing, you know the Don Roe 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 in Venezuela, what we've done in the Caribbean, what we're now doing in Iran, I think that Trump basically just wants to play the role of a nineteenth century imperial power where he gets to do what he wants. He doesn't have to own any of the damage that he creates elsewhere. And he mostly wants the rest of the world to kind of cower and fear intimidated by us. And that's why the Iran war is such a significant event because Even a week beforehand, most military analysts would have said, this is probably strategically unwise, but the US is going absolutely But the US is going to absolutely destroy Iran in this conflict. You know what it would lead to, who knows, whether it unleashes chaos in the region, who knows, But this is going to be an obvious American show of dominance And we have done a lot of damage to their military facilities. We've also, you know 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. You know, war crimes. Yes. Casually. But the actual like military conflict has not been in any meaningful way won 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 Strait of Hormuz. 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 U. S. tried to go to war with the Houthis last year, we've seen a complete rewriting of the script of conflicts involving superpowers and lesser powers You know, we used to think, okay, maybe the U.S will bungle its way in Iraq and Afghanistan, but like We can be clear that the military advantage there lies with the superpower When Russia invaded Ukraine, it looked somewhat similar, but Ukraine was able to respond by essentially standing up an entirely new drone infrastructure, drone production system that then changed the logic of war and has allowed them to at least fight the Russians to a standstill and then over the last year actually regained territory from the Russians This is a completely new kind of war. In Ukraine, seventycent to eighty 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, Americans may be able to shoot down an Iranian drone, but it's going to cost us, you know, a twenty million dollars missile and that drone might have cost them ten thousand dollars, which means they just have 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 suuperpowers 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 conflicts between the world's most powerful militaries obviously lesser adversaries that the powerful militaries have a meaningful advantage. that opens up huge questions about America's rivalry with China, about our standing in the world, etcetera But David, how God's name, have we not learned that? Over, you know, over the last thirty years forget about the last thirty years, the last seventy years, since World War two You know I think back to Vietnam The big lesson in Vietnam was It doesn't matter You can carpet bomb a country, you can napomb it, you can destroy the village, to save the village. You have the military advantage 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 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, in other cases, less successful, but it never really achieved the strategic aims of those wars. This is something that the scholar Robert Pape has really emphasized that we can make shows of dominance through air power. but if we really wanted to effectuate change on the ground, We're just as we have just as hard a time in the nineties and two thousands as we did in the sixties and fifties. But we told ourselves that whole time that we that we were kicking ass. We told ourselves that we kicked ass in Iraq. We told ourselves that we kicked ass in Iraq the second time. We told ourselves that we kicked ass, you know in Libya. and that was just a story we told ourselves to pump ourselves up to make ourselves feel more powerful than we really were and more consequential than we really were on the global stage. You know what I hate, ladies and gentlemen, almost more than anything slow growing trees Come on, tree I don't have all day Well, folks fast growing trees has the answer. They got all the plants your yard or home needs. And you might think, but I suck it. growing stock. tatter you can get support from trained plant experts And they're available seven days a week whether it's email, chat or phone or whatever they do personalized video consultations to help you plan your landscape care for your plant No more slow growing fast They got a variety of apartment friendly house plans Did you know you could have a lemon or avocado tree indoors? Did you know that? Indoors. You know, how nice that would smell And right now, they have great deals on planting essentials. Up to half off on select plants And listeners to our show get twenty percent off their first purchase when using the code TWS to check out. That's an additional twenty percent off, better plants and better growing at fastgrowingtrees dot com usingsing the code TWS a check out. fastgrrowingtrees. com code TWS plant. Let's grow together. Use TWS to save today, offer is valid for limited time, terms and conditions applly I do think that drones are really a powerful next phase of that story. R. And the way that I would illustrate that is to say, you know, not that long ago, fifteen years ago. during the Obama drrone Wars, when America assassinated Oor Alwaukee 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 America.. whether they the Did we I'm just curious. Yeah. did we watch the end of that movie? becausecause I don't know if people do you do have to ask those questions about a lot of these military people. like do they stay in the theater till the final credits roll and see what exactly happened to the de? Yeah. Well, I mean, I mean, to your point, the movie series was obviously a Vietnam allegory,. But you know even five or eight years ago, military futurists would think of American technological advantage as 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 think that Americans don't I think Americans, if you look at it through the prisms 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 kind of Icarus theory that we're talking about, which is we continue to think, o 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 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 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 a little hard to know exactly what the consequences will be in part because we had a lot of warnings right at the beginning of the war about the economic fallout Most of the smart people said that pain was going to really hit within four or six weeks. and here we are now three months later. and there are consequences for the U. S. 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 ten percent of global fossil demand And But now we're about to hit the point where you know the shit really hits the fan. And that may be a new a whole new phase of this conflict than 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 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 Wh is controlling who's got the hostage? Right,, right 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 pe the ceasefire periods that we've been in are in any meaningful way preferable to the global order versus the hot conflict periods of this war that we've had. It's actually the main fight is about the economy. And I wonder if that's also a sign of where we're heading See, you just, here's where this is just blowing my mind. Now see now We're going to take it back to it. 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 they're the ones that suffer the most And in some ways, it's one of the reasons we don't address it in the manner in which maybe we should. is that there seems to be kind of and by the way, the police are coming to take David Walliswell'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 Nirvana. Uh When you talk about the e 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 there is a level of economic pain in America that is just now endemic the fifty percent, sixty percent, seventy percent of the people that are just living through these squeezes. It's just life people that make the decisions O Aan AI and climate don't actually ever feel 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 expanse of the universe. So yes. if they make an announcement and prices go up, their friends profit Sometimes literally criminally through insider trading, in other cases, just, you know in the normal course of corruption. And his kids get a drone contract at the Pentagon. Yeah. And then they make another announcement and the market moves in the other direction and a different set of friends of theirs 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 you know, we have had an enormous blow to global oil and gas supplies. R. And the market has not, I mean, they've responded, the market has responded, but it hasn't responded nearly as dramatically as most analysts expected it to. They've 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 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. you know, shorten their work weeks, They've closed schools, they've imposed restrictions on fuel use. In the countries of Europe and the U.S, we're now paying a little bit more for gas and maybe for some other products we buy at the supermarket, but it hasn't been all that catastrophic. And yet even here, where we're relatively insulated, you know there's huge gradations between who's suffering more as a result and who really could price these changes in without noticing And I think that you're exactly right. I mean, in the global I don't mean the global the planet. I mean the global American context, the scale of the 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 plutocrats and oligarchs every day on our TV screens, every day on their podcasts and in their panel conferences talalking 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 than not just the bottom fifty percent You know, the bottom ninety five percent. Yes, notot to mention the bottom fifty percent 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 those in large part by those five people. And for anyone who spent the last decade worrying about notot just the concentration of wealth, but the concentration of social power that follows from that wealth, that is an incredibly concerning acceleration of preree existing trends, which even in their earlier phase have caused a huge amount of political turmoil and widespread suffering People at the top have are always somewhat insulated from the pain that some of their decision making. The effects, the literal effects of their policies on the people whose lives are affected. through those policies, I don't recall a time when the distance between those two has ever been this large. And I think your point about AI is a really great one. because that's just going to accelerate it in a way that we haven't seen before What is your thought process on when when the world that brand designers and decision makers is so removed from the day to day experience the vast majority, the ninety percent of people, the ninety five percent 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. I'm he's just he 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. Nuclear weaponry and the technology that surrounds it is going to be more accessible to smaller and smaller countries. That's just a fact And one of the one of the messages of this war is like you should get over the finish line if you're hurt Right? You're developing a new. let's hurry because then then you're protected. Right yeah. So when do they, it's not just a board game of risk When did they start feeling the pressure from below? or will they ever I think you know, different actors here are in different positions. So I think the Trump administration is operating in a very different world than like the AI plutocrats. I think that the Trump administration feels that they have there' you know, ninety plus percent of their self identified MGa 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 fifty years. you know, that's how he operates and that's how he's operating now. now that he's been sort of empowered. Um, and without you know, that 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. someome of them are libertarian and some of them are libertarian fascists. Is that the ideological diversity in that world? I think that Dario Modai is genuinely a liberal who is trying to figure out how to square his own you know, that 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 And the purpose of AI with his values. Totally Like, you know, ten 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 guys who are really in charge have kind of moved on. They've stopped talking about existential risk. they've stopped talking about bio risk.ure. 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 are trying to signal that they hear the public's anxieties and that they want to be seen as people of conscience on these questions. Sen as seen as people of conscience, not people of conscience. Not actual. Yeah, no. I mean think I think one big part of this 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 Um, you know, I was just reading the popeess encyclical about AI and thinking about the fact that thirty 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. There 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 buildill that this Arc of progress actuallyctually could be stopped and must be stopped and would be stopped And it was stopped. We haven't cloned humans in the thirty years since. Right. Now, it's not an exact parallel. But when Popelio comes out with his encyclical against AI now, it's like Do we have any hope? taking control of these systems O friends at Quiner back to help fashion plates like myself and like my audience upgrade your summer wardrobe. You know, I can't always wear tour That's what they. our hot Koutur? Always wear that I'm not always at a ball. or filming an episode of upstairs downstairs. I also have times to be casual. That's where Quince com in. They' got the summer staples of breathable, comfortable high quality. hundred percent linen shorts and shirts, Pima cotton tees Quintince also, by the way, they're not looking to exploit labor to bring you the softest, most durable macons. They work with ethical factories ut out the middle man, you're getting premium materials without the massive retail markup Please, I beg of you you know, you know me. I don't like to nack beg of you Refresh your every day with luxury you'll actually use. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quQintince d. com slash tws for free shipping on your order and three hundred sixty five day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's QUI NCE com slash TWS for free shipping and three six five day returns, quQince d. com slash TwS You know, there are some policy proposals on the table. Bernie just came out with a proposal to take a significant public ownership stake in the big AI companies. I absolutely think that should be the case. But even that, isn't that just a way to corrupt humankind? You know, I'm on board because I think they're strip mining our intellectual property in the first place. The whole point of AI is it's training itself on the entirety of human existence and yet They get to put it all behind proprietary walls and we don't see either a shareholder stake or anything about it. In fact, we have to pay them for the privilege. Yeah, my boss Aie Salzbury, the publisher of the times, 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 fifty percent stake in the leading a. Just give us a cut and we'll let it go And that means that the U.S. government will then be invested in the stability of that system in which, for instance, anthropic or maybe open AI is dominating this whole field. And maybe that is the natural course of the technology that it trends towards monopolistic structures, but I would bet all do. Well, I mean, I would say, I mean, every time you have an advance in terms of communications or science or thing peopleople tend to try and corner the market on it because so much money pours into the first few people that develop it and then they use that money to pull ladders up from everywhere else. They use it to feed into the political system. I mean, it's a well worn You know, the industrialists of the early nineteen hundreds did 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, 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 eighty percent as good as the frontier model at ten percent of the cost, there're going to be a huge number of people who find that valuable. Maybe not absolute cutting edge cancer researchers or the people in the Pentagon. But for the average person doing like you research on what stocks to invest in or where to go on vacation, they don't actually need You know, the absolute cutting edge frontier model they can use one from six months ago and be totally fine. Right. And in that Landscape I wonder just how large the returns to dominance really are. That's interesting. And whether the natural structure may actually advantage smaller more nimble. And that's basically by the way, the bet that China is making on AI. They are focused on making sure that every person in every job can use this tool well Uility. They're making it about utility and developing and usage, right The other bet they're making that is seemingly much smarter than us is they're making a bet on electrification and on the fact that this is going to be an enormous they're already setting aside land for these data centers and water and to electrify their grid so that because that's really going to be the challenge is, you know People are These AI companies they can corner the market all they want. If they run out of tokens and power doneone. It doesn't matter if it's model eight point nine one seven eight clawed or ten point one three five clawed. L Yeah exactly. You don't have the power, you don't have the model I mean, maybe eighteen 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 best for their century And 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 iss not only not embracing that technology, they're doing a lot of stuff to slow its rollout somewhat ineffectively, but the policy direction is against clean energy rather than for it. And in China, you know, they're not know they're still building coal plants, they're still, 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 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. And it is domestically sourced once you build the infrastructure, so that yes, you have to import some solar panels and stuff. But once you do that, the sun keeps shining in your country. And the whole world is responding to this crisis as they did really the 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 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 EV's all around the world. Oh, China's killing it. China's killing it right now This war has absolutely heightened the need for their cars and their solar technology. And we're all sitting around. it makes me think in America kindind of gets us back to the Vietnam of it all. The last time I remember this was the nineteen seventies. 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 we can consolidate that into OPEC and we can start to have some control here and not just be this war feels like kind of throwback to the analog world that we were living in back then. It's about oil and nuclear power. When everyone else is moving into that next century of AI and electrification Yeah, I mean, the biggest irony there is that it may be the end of OPEC. Right. it may destroy it. And also scramble all of these alliances that the Trump administration has spent so much time building over the last decade trying to build a sort of a coalition of countries around basasically venture capital and tech capital in Israel in the Gulf And many of those companies Well that's why it's always so funny. He sends Jared and Witkoff over there. And they their plan is always like, what if we just get two hundred billion dollars to build like a golf course and some hotels in Tehran? 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 Saudi Arabia. not for him though, N for Kushner. I mean, not for the Trump family in particular, but theulf the Gulf sovereign wealth funds are reconsidering their investments around the world. they are a lot of stuff has already been withdrawn and canceled. That's why you're seeing, you know, problems for, you know, the golf stuff and they cancel their there more money for Michkelson now that this war started But 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, even they see the lesson of this war as America is no longer a reliable partner They are fickle 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 their vision for the future in the Middle East. was a future, we are the cities of the future We are going to build these, we're going to put islands where islands didn't exist anyore, 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 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, Well, suddenly it all looks like a fiction collapses on itself Even more than that, the country that they depended on guarantee their peace is the country that is attacking them Wow No, 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 we were able to stop ourselves cloning people Hey. I'm not sure we have I dont you don't really know what they're doing in the CRISPper 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 In truth even when faced with Catastrophic results on the horizon from our actions We can't ourselves If it's there to be made, we'll make it. That is philosophical . 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 who is president? It's, you know, there are many leaders in the world who have become considerably more self interested um am moral acquisitive in their approach to world affairs Um That is true. and I think it is depressing and distressing U But I also think it's not the sum total here. It wasn't that long ago. When you know twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen. justust to use, you know, the climate story as a kind of illustrative example. It wasn't that long ago that the world's two great powers, the U.S and China got together and even before the incredible Declines in clean energy made electrification an 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 Paris Accords, which was a global agreement which all countries of the world said they were going whichich we yonked out of so as soon as Well. I mean it's not just that though it's we've yoked out of so many things. But know ten years ago, we were the UN was saying, okay, the millennium development goals that we had put forward in the late nineties were so successful. 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 twenty thirty. And they did that and the whole world was very excited about making those real. And you know we were just in general imagining a more cooperative future, which too the paranoid looked like a kind of the arrival of a global governance structure, which maybe they found unlikable. But even so, the trend of history seemed to be more towards integration, through globalization, but also through you cperationionism, cooperation, all those things were ascendant Ten years ago is 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, materially, economically And I do think in one perverse way you know, the lesson of the Donald Trump years is Like those of us who diminished the Great Man theory of history and elevated structural explanations for how things progress have really missed out because small changes in electorates producing particular personalities in particular places can meaningfully change the entire course of planetary history. That's what we've seen in the U.S. 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 collateral damage. so And this can apply to climate or AI or anything else. Yeah. If you ignore it, you risk what we're seeing now, which is the political backlash. that. So let's go back to your you know, ten years ago or twenty years ago, and China's in the WTO and we start forming these more global organizations, but then U 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 in them, they live in ivory towers and they don't feel the effects of this is the left have a blind spot. as well in that And if we had covered it better possible we wouldn't be facing this backle Yeah, I mean, I think in the American context I think a lot about the moment in late two thousand eight, early two thousand nine when You know, Larry Sumers solicited a bunch of proposals for how much stimulus to ask Congress for And Lle Brainard proposed think one point five trillion, that was how big she said the twin where we needed to be and where we were was, and the government needed to fill that gap with one point five trillion dollars in spending. And Summers looked at that and was like, we can't even present this to Obama because there's no way we're going to get more than a trillion Let's ask for a trillion and we'll negotiate down from there And he did that. and the stimulus was, I think, eight hundred billion dollars and Who knows how the alternate history would have unfolded if that one point five trillion dollar estimate had actually made its way to Obama's desk Who 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 than we are now and with a considerably less suffering and considerably less turmoil. And that's not to say that it would have solved all the problems of the China shock in the industrial Midwest. And it's not to say that there wouldn't have been backlash against migration, which by the way, I think has many causes global causes that most Americans don't appreciate because you know the big sur surge in twenty one twenty two, we saw the same surge in Canada. We saw the same surge in the UK. we saw the same surge in the EU. every rich country in the world had a huge migration surge coming out of the pandemic. And we tell ourselves that it was about Biden's indifference to the border probablyrobably that contributed, but there's a bigger story there too That's a separate point. More specifically, I do think that considerably more could have been done over the last twenty years to soften the jagged edges of all of these changes. And I think it's quite striking and scary that we seem to be heading into a similar transformation, a parallel transformation to globalization in the form of AI without anythingthing. evenven the things that we tried to build to our response fifteen or twenty years ago, when at least we talked about you know, retraining industrial workers and, you know, and u We're not doing that now with AI at all. And I personally don't know how big an impact I will be for employment over the next two or five years. I think it's more of an open question than many people suggest. But if we take seriously the high end projections of how much turmoil and disruption that it could cause. We need to be doing dramatically more respond to the fallout. Yes. Now on the other side of that though, there's a debate within the party about whether we we've become toooo much we're too safetyist And we're too worried about technological change, and 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 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 may maybe that's a bad bargain. Maybe we really do need to resolve that in the favor of one side or the other secret about a lot of the folks that listen to this podcast You like animals I'm just going to say, many of you like cats, and cats are delightful But you know, the thing about cats is they gott to eat too. You don't just leave them out there because here's the thing about them. I've had outdoor cats and I've had indoor cats. Boy, the cats at the farm. literally killing machines. So you don't need to feed them. But for most cats, the civilized cat cat that has been domesticated And, uh is not armed with what appears to be five hunting knives and they just follow around looking for mammals smaller than them You need to give them food. That's where smalls comes in. By the way, that is, I don't think a great segay because I may have I may have presented a picture of cats that may not be the one that is appropriate to this commercial But I'm talking about your cat your' delightful cat Little Pibbles, Hello Pibbles And smallms makes the cavoo. and by the way, it's human grade food for cat. You know, most Cat food brands, it's all cheap fillers And whatever they found on the floor of the factory That's not good for your cat. Your cat is not going to be healthy smallmalls, protein packed recipes with preservative free, one hundred percent human grade ingredients So stop serving your little carnivore a bowl of processed shortcuts for limited time because you are a weekly show listener gets sixty percent off first order plus free shipping and Free treats for life When you head to smalls d. com slash Tws Holy shit. I don't even like saying this it's such a good deal One last time That's sixty percent off your first order plus free shipping and free treats. For life. When you head to smallalls. com slash twS One of the things I agree with you is a lot of times on the left, what we'll do is in expectation of collateral damage will 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 Bob. you know, the way that women make less money in the work like 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 ively 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 'Cause you were talking about earlier, which was I thought was a great point, these inflection points whereere we always have like the two thousand eight financial crisis where in hindsight, geez maybe helping out only the financial institutions and not homeowners was a mistake create o, 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 from people in the Midwest. wasasn't a good idea, rather than front loading obstacles mayaybe 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 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 three percent 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 Beef up. Fraud and enforcement on the backacke 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 Well doeses that make sense? We did do some of that during COVID, right? I mean, we basically let people cheat the government left and right as a cost of getting the money out the door more quickly and more seamlessly. But what did it do differently than in two thousand eight 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 Sumers is also illustrative, I mean, he's illustrative of some things that are wrong with our with our world and 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 trade offs quite clearly. and make judgments from on high, which they then pass down to the public. I mean, that is to me one of the real You know, that that story I just reld about Lele Brainard and Larry Sumers is like, Larry Somer is like, I'm going to decide Yeah what the right amount of stimulus is, and I'm going to give that to President Barack Obama and he's going to give it to Congress and then it's going to be implemented and He wasn't just making a perfect technocratic calculation. Actually, Lale Brinard was the one who made the perfect technocratic calculation. What Summers was doing was saying, I cannot just understand the gap 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 spittning out the right answer ahead of time Yeah. I found it really striking to bring it back to the present. in this wave of debate and conversation among the AI leaders, I saw an interview with Dario Omodai recently where he said, on this very point 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. Everybody iss acquisitive and market oriented. My view is like you know you plutocrats 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 Summer saying I went through the spreadsheet and I came up with the answer and now that I have the answer, we can move forward 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 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 we have to be more active in managing those consequences. and we're not I think that's the blind spot of that type of thinking is I figured it all out on paper beforehand. putut it into the system and let's all sit back and go work on a different thing I mean, I think that there is a huge cultural blind spot, particularly among liberals on that front, but I also think that there's a huge Um 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, issuing a huge set of, for instance, new AI regulations, but responding in real time with different kinds of attentive stimulus packages and retraining programs and yes,, 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. ity I don't think it's a capacity problem. It's a distribution problem. It's a It's a read and react problem. Don't you think we have the capacity I just look at the way that the government has functioned over the last twenty years and I see Um Very little gives me faith that we could be nimble and responsive You know, we've gotten some big things done, I do think that a lot of the stuff that came out of the financial crisis was good and significant. I think healthcare was good and significant, imperfect, but good and significant. I do think a lot of the stuff that we did in the COVID stimulus was again, imperfect, but good and significant and in certain ways remarkably effective And I do think that the IRA and buildback better, though they've been undermined by Trump, were also really quite significant. But I don't see pattern of real time responsive governance, I see people acting in fear of the next administration, trying to get everything done and banking progress so that nobody could mess with it And that is a appropriate intuition about the shape of governance and politics in our country where you know, every piece of legislation onlyn you know, we can only trust will last as long as the next election Um 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 that we're describing is not a place for fatalism place of opportunity What we're describing about here is something in the system. that is missing that is not functioning correctly, that is not responsive or agile to those needs What I'm saying is we have a factory that has capacity. 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 notot the old New Deal that has necessarily building these large sort of magino lines that protect against social safety consequences, which I think is absolutely necessary But the ideal is to build that machine in a way that is more coherent to the way people live today. And I think it not only can it be done, it must be done. I'm with you, and I also think that here in New York, you know Zoram Mamani's mayayoralty is a perfect illustration of this value. Yes And he's an obviously ideological actor. I share a lot of his political values, maybe not all of them, but I'm a big supporter of his. But even beyond ideology, he is saying we need to make government work for the people of New York City. And the test case for progressivism is whether it can deliver better outcomes for the voters in the city, and that is not a matter of playing hardball ideologically, it's a matter of like filling potholes and actually getting two K 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 U I do take a lot of I'm really heartened by Zoran and have been much more hopeful over the last year as a result of his rise than I would have been in the absence of him. And I actually see a lot of parallels elsewhere in the country where, you know sure. We also have like local leaders in other places who are leading the charge. San Francisco is now, that's a guy who's not you would not consider ideological in terms of a leftist. but is building a more responsive government. And then you see Los Angeles, which 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 whether one possibility here is that Americans come to see National politics Maybe they have already as essentially culture warar theater and actually look for responses from their local leaders because there's just so much more direct responsiveness there. we already, to some degree see the fight between Democrats and Republicans in DC as you know, abstracted from our lived daily realities, but we may be much more engaged with mayors and governors, which may be one reason why we are we find them so much more popular than the people in DC who are so horrifically unpopular I think that's absolutely right. But I'm heartened by What's so interesting to me is One of the one of the things 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 use the tools of a demagogue Oh, problem is trans, kids in sports and immigrants. And if we fix that But he hasn't actually fixed it because he's not actually making government responsive to the needs of the people. He's making government responsive to the emotional kind of reflexive reptilian brains of the people But what that says to me though is 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 aal 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's about as big a fossil fuel villain as you can imagine. He's 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 ninety percent of all new energy infructure built in the US last year was green. ninety percent, which means for every unit of new dirty infrastructure we built we built nine times as much clean energy infructure. This year the share is expected to be even larger that is that subet Is that private industry? How is that even possible Well, some of it is because though Trump tried to repeal all of the tax credits from the IRA politically difficult given 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 u 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 buildouts for, you know, oil and coal we're not we're just we have a basically mature system. There's How where the growth is going to be? Yeah. And globally, that's true too. I was just looking at a report the other day that said that since the since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the world's energy importers peopleeople who need energy have spent five times more money investing in renewables and 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, you know, there's going to be an another inflection point in the green transition with this war. know, we're still really far from net zero. We're very far from stopping the warming of the planet. There are a lot of things to be worried about. I don't want to sound too pollanish about it. But you know, Michael Lieibrk, 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 twenty thirty, where as he used to think it was on the other side of twenty thirty. And once we've bent that curve, you know, it's a long way down, it's a long ski slope but we're skining. And I think that's you know, that's the near term future that we're looking at can I tell you someone? that may be the most hopeful metaphor analogy that I've heard here is once we start going downhill We're scaying 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 Uneath it all Tunity And that's what's starting to be uncovered Yeah, I mean, you know, just this week, there was the National confonference 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. Um, There are huge obstacles. We're living through difficult times Um and on a personal level The thing that is so painful to me is having to abandon the suppositions that I grew up with as a child of the nineties thinking that the future will progressing eradically 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 autolay. But I also think when you look at, for instance The I backlash or the backlash to Trump himself who' You know the most unpopular president in history now violating all those stories, we told ourselves in the first term about how he had he was Teflondon. We can't tell ourselves those stories anymore because he's incredibly unpopular, including with all the demographic groups that we told ourselves Um had amounted to a political realignment. Right, right. We're seeing We're seeing in all of those in all of those indicators that peopleeople are willing to fight. The question is whether, you know, the structures of power Um are sellable or whether as in the case with sort of the AI labs, whether they're now operating in some way beyond the reach of democratic control 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. R. And I think ultimately that's the test. No, And I appreciate that. And I do and oddly enough, because our conversations and for those people who don't know, David and I have had many conversations over the years are generally with me taking the role of the pessimist who says we should believe in people and their ability to thing and David explaining very patiently to me why there is progress on the horizon and why things are a little bit more optimistic. know, I'm a famous optimist. I don't know if you knew that. Famous optimist. famamous Uh, 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. Boy, oh boy, they can be bent by good actors. And if there has ever been a moment where this country and this world is ground down to a nub by the chaos and incoherence of a man child who has been handed power he didn't earn. This is a moment This is a moment. where a good actor canan a sale as you said, these toowers of power and reform them in a way that benefits us. I really believe that 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 twenty twenty four and say March or April of twenty twenty five. Donald Trump is returning to the White House. We were just awash in this sense that liberals too. that Maga was on the march that there had been a political realignment in the country, that Donald Trump was not. it wasn't just tragic and awful that Donald Trump is return to the White House. He was winning all of these voters, you know all of these votes from young voters, black voters, brown voters. He was rewriting the Democographic coalition of the Republican Party, and that he had effectively won the culture war, especially with the support of the tech billionaires And now I think about You know, this great American state fair that they tried to stage Fifteen months later And they booked ten people and it was like the headliners are like Milly, Vanilly, and Vanill I. That's the best they could do. And then all those people had to drop out becausecause 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 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 fifteen months ago was a bit of an illusion, a self lacerating illusion that liberals were telling themselves 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 say it, there are a lot of people that I like There are a lot of people that that I admire. But there's no Barack Obama Walking through those doors And there's no idea. There's there's no it 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 I actually really think it's it's within there. grasp. it's just a simple formulation of People want to feel like they're getting value for their money goovernment 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 too formulate that in a coherent way, they've got a real leg up into that That's what I would say, and that's why I remain always hopeful within that fromr your lips to God's ears. ' I'm famously optimist David, it's always such a pleasure to talk to you, man. You too. David Wallace wellells, obviously you can see him in the New York Times opinion, columnist and New York Times magazine and obviously the bestseller. The uninhabitable earth Life after wararming. David, thanks so much for joining us Thanks for having stududies. Play Come together on a Windows eleven PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds! Get the unreal college deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows eleven PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft three hundred sixty five Pmium, and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller Learn more at windows. com slash student offffer. Lawupplies last ends june thirtieth, turnerms at aka. ms slash college PC Gys I share something Yeah Please I feel weirdly like giddy. I think it's really telling that David Wallace Wells, the author of The Un Un Hallibth is one of the more optimistic conversations that we've had in a while. Frazy? I also think it's concerning that he's getting his optimism from Millie Vanilli. Well, Rob, Millie, not Vanilli. It's really just Millie, but I'll tell you why I feel so energized There was a moment when he was described.s It sort of felt like a shark tank moment, like where you go like, there's gott to be a better way The way that he was talking about how liberalism functions specifically the vestiges of government how the summers of it all designs the program and the grrand and answers all the questions and Doc because he's the smartest person that's ever existed. And they just put it into the fax machine and send it out and it gets deployed M Yeah. It always works that way. It always works that way. It made me realize one of those like, there's got toa be a better way and there is. Yeah And that there is actually a theory of government that can be more reactive 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 can Pempt. The Hollowing out of the Midwest that can preempt Stob kinds of cult resentments that arise through immigration. it can be done Yes. I feel it. I know. I mean, I would I agree. I really like there's moments when you feel really hopeful because it does sometimes feel like we are turning a corner And we're seeing a really affirmative case being made right now in New York City and people are loving it I mean, San Francisco too. you know, we don't spend much time out there because it's obviously I spend a little time out there as you know For those you don't know at home, Julian has an unhealthy relationship, with I think, unhealthy with the San Fancisco Giants if R right now, it's pretty abusive. yeah. No And by the way, that's coming from a Mets fan. Things are darker for the San Francisco Giants than for the New York Mets. That's right. So even within that to polar opposite visions of what maybe liberal lism 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 assign something into effect. I'm going to show you how it's being effective. Simply too. Yeah. People love it. And hopefully acknowledging when it's not the transparency of it all. I think if you can just connect those things The actions of the government, with the money that you're putting in and the value that might be coming out of it, people will start to you can start to earn their trust again. It's not an easy process, but it's one that must be undertaken if we're to recapture you know whatever the backlash will be to this toxic nationalism and populism that's that's arising Yeah I thought it was interesting when he was saying how Trump has lost the culture war right now And 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 one hundred percent agree with that. Like yes, we're seeing everyone back out of this concert and stuff We're also seeing people he endorse win primaries But that's also a very narrow, you know, because 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 my point was that the Democrats have not been able to mount a convincing alternative he was offering, he's just so fucking incompetent. 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 gonna pay your taxes. It's gonna to be a progressive tax rate. O 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 gonna give a sh. Absolutely. Brittneany, what do we got? What do we got? Allrighty, now that I'm fired up. I love positive John. Positive Johnny John, what is your favorite topic to talk about on the podcast sandwiches, almost sandwich. This is a sandwich podcast. Yeah.'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 gonna to go with an economist. No, that's my most that that's my most fearful Ecom Can I tell you something? Economists are my betet noir. They are my white whale. I am Ahab I am always on the search of an economist who will not treat me condescendingly. Although we do find them actually. we have yeah. We've had some lovely ones.. Deron was lovely. The guys from MIT. Clara Matay was great. Yeah Katie Richards. That's right.. It's so nice to know that in Boston You can be an economist and not an asshole. Oh my gosh, ye. The combination of those two things though, Boston and economists. Oh God. Right. good it's not a good combination, but yes, I do love I do love talking about that stuff and egg sandwich are my favorites. but I'd be happy to hear from the audience. Taco Bell Can I tell you someone that this food is food. It really is. We record so close to lunchtime It's just that the crunchrapsure pree. 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 tea square going, what if we just, you know, a burrito is so fucking easy. You just stuff it with shit and you roll it up What if we give What about a parallelogram? What if we take Fold it this way. hold on, let me get my te square and a protractor and figure out where I can put the beans. We have got to get Tabel to sponsor us. 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 All right next John, how long do you think Trump and his quote, extreme intelligence would last on jeopardy. God on Jeepy. Jillian, you can answer this. You're the I don't think you would have good buzzer skills. That hand is like a little, it' seem better days Boy, is that true? But talk about the bruising that would occur after a match. I think the only difference with Trump is he would still answer evenven if he wasn't, he wouldn't wait till the end. he would just blurt it out or do that, but I've always felt that for 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. Now what's the most important thing in the water tower? pressure and the hydragics so And what does Trump have? Chronic venous insufficiency It's got shitty water pressure Wow. So what happens? Not good Pbing 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 a be in it. So I don't know if I don't know if Jeopardy is the right And The idea that he was saying to her, and for those who don't know, it was he was describing how he came up with the Democrat. and he was explaining to Larry Trump Uh, you know, a do I thought Democrat you know, and I dropped the be because most people don't know there's a B in that. And I'm like, well M most people who are in Dumb now He set himself up for that one. Yeah. How is this real? He is definitely a more of a wheel of fortune guy. I don't think even I think I think even the spinning of the wheel would throw him off Verttigo. What's our last one? What's our last? Last one, John Do your kids like you Why would they? I I hope so. I hope that not only do they love me that they me because I I love them but I also really like them find them very good company. I find them Fascinating, interesting singular that I enjoy And by the way, not not just heavy kind, you know, oh, let's talk about life and you know, different things. I like just being with them around them. It's fun They're fun They have they both have great senses of humor. They're both really smart. They're fun to be around T Sm sure they got all that from Tracy. Try. You guys met Tracy, you know what we're talking about U But yeah, but oh God, what that's one of those questions like where you almost feel like the hair on the back of your neck go up like what What have you heard? Do they submit this question? Like do your kids like you? Like that I think As far as like a parent's the year that would be like that'd be on the list other than like health their health, their happiness, all that stuff them not liking you be like Oh, shit, like devastating Yeah Do you think there was ever a time that they didn't like you Oh, sure I mean So Relationships are fraught no matter how beautiful and wonderful and deep and intense they, you know And I'm sure there are moments of frustration. and there are patterns of behavior and answers that I know that I probably do that I roll But within Healthy relationships is grace. And we have Hopefully grace for each other in those moments of understanding that baseline of our relationship is respect and love and light evenven though there's moments, I'm sure where 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 momum and I definitely went through it when we were teenagers, but then as used to get like 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, we I mean, we laugh about it now, like Man. I was sixteen, I was stealing the car, sneaking out windows. Wait, I that hot, wait, hold on a second. That just took a turn. Brittany. That turned for m you know, we went through it a little bit. like we used to fight a little bit and like I kind of slept late and stuff and I stole the car. Oh ye. Oh, and I committed grand theft auto Aur roly friends now. Oh And I robbed a liquor store. Jillian, did you go through it at that age Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. I think. Yeah. Yeah, teenage eggs, you know, that's necessary. They have to separate from you because when they're young It's the most beautiful thing but 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 gonna to realize you're gonna make me cry. All right, I won't do that. All right, we'll move on. We'll move on. I have a question before we wrap.. complete the sentence. All N in Oh, anything. Nixon anything God willing, Nixon anything Please. Are you going I'm hoping to. I'm trying not to think about it. I'm so excited So we will always have the bs to ball back. Settle down. Settle down. Brittneany, how did they keep in touch with us? Twitter, we are Wekly S show pod, Instagram threads TikTok Blue skky. We are We weekly Sh podcast, and you can like, subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel, the Weekly Show with John Stewart. Fantastic. Thank you guys very much and thanks for keeping in touch with us and asking those provocative and sometimes emotionally wounding questions. Thanks as always to everybody. Couldn't do it without you, producer Brittany Medvic, producer Jillian Speer, video editor, engineer Robertolo Audio editor, engineer Nicole Boy, and our executive producerers Chris Machinee and Katie Gray. Thanks so much guys, and we will see you next week ly show with Jhn Start is a comedy central podcast that's produced by Paramount Audio and Bust Boy Productions This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a fifty page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check Rponssees set upp required compatibility and availability varies eighteen plus