Latest / Saving the World From Bad Ideas / Bad Idea #35 "THIS is the Future" with David Wallace Wells

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Bad Idea #35 "THIS is the Future" with David Wallace Wells · Saving the World From Bad Ideas

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The fact that this large scale global paper was so sensitive to
0:05
this one particular analysis of this one particular country I
0:09
think tells us something about how complicated, dense, and
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absolutely full of assumptions almost every model we try to use
0:18
to project almost anything out into the future really is just.
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Predict for us the world in 2050.
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How's it going to look? Not 2100, just 2050.
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And we'll come back by the way in 25 years and in episode
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10,000 and two or something and we'll we'll see how widely did.
0:34
Oh my God, can we do like 20-30? I'd feel maybe a little more.
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There will be changes that when we look at them from the year,
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if we were to look at them in 2025, we would think that is
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really dramatic. But almost certainly when we're
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living through them in 2035 or 2045 or 2050, they feel a lot
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more normal. And I think ultimately that's
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the sort of meta prediction that I would make that we won't be on
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the other side of a massive singularity, whether that's
1:07
about AI or about, you know, Chinese hegemony or climate
1:13
apocalypse. Welcome to saving the world from
1:17
bad ideas. I'm Mark Linus, and I've had a
1:19
few bad ideas in my time. I used to go out in the night
1:22
time to destroy GMO crops, and I also opposed nuclear power.
1:26
But then when I looked at the science, I found I got it wrong.
1:29
Oops. I've learned the hard way that
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none of us are right all the time.
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So now I'm here to challenge the assumptions that we all too
1:35
often take for granted because the future depends on us getting
1:38
it right. My guest today is David Wallace
1:41
Wells, who's a weekly columnist at The New York Times and a
1:44
writer and commentator of many years standing on climate change
1:48
in particular, but also on a whole load of other things, from
1:50
COVID to vaccines to US politics.
1:52
Welcome, David. We've been trying to book you
1:54
for ages, so I'm particularly delighted to have you today as
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our guest for the inaugural episode of Season 3 of Saving
2:01
the World from Bad Ideas. I'm thrilled and honored and
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humbled to be here. So thank you for having me.
2:06
Great to great to find the time to talk.
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By the way, I'm the producer today as producer Rob is on his
2:12
way back from Brussels after having spent the day outside the
2:16
European Commission dressed as a veggie burger.
2:18
But channelling producer Rob Spirit, I need to, 1st off,
2:22
establish with you what the bad idea is that you're saving the
2:25
world from. And we discussed this a bit, but
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I think I think you wanted to have something about kind of how
2:32
the extent to which we can accurately predict the future,
2:34
right? Yeah.
2:35
And this is for me, it's a bit of a personal story.
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So I've been writing about climate now for almost a decade,
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which is a little bit hard to believe.
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Also wrote a lot about the pandemic when that happened.
2:46
And I've sort of found my way to a focus on what I like to think
2:51
of as the messy future. Sometimes I describe it as the
2:54
near future. And the longer I've spent with
2:56
that material, that is to say, trying to think about where the
3:01
world as we know it is heading six months, two years, 20 years
3:06
down the line, honestly, the more humbled I am by that
3:09
process and the more impossible that project really seems.
3:13
I mean, we're talking, we're talking this week in, in early
3:16
December, just recently in climate world, there was a, a
3:19
big paper that was retracted that was trying to project
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economic damages from climate change over the course of the
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21st century. And there was a, this paper had
3:30
a big finding. It said that economic output was
3:32
going to decline by, I think, 62% by 2100 compared to a no
3:37
climate change alternate reality.
3:40
And it kind of came under some criticism almost immediately
3:43
after being published. And now maybe a year or eighteen
3:46
months later, they've actually retracted it.
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And that in and of itself isn't actually even the thing that I
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think is important or illustrative here.
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It's the fact that the key problem with the paper was that
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they had made a miscalculation in assessing the climate effects
4:02
on Who's Becky economic data, and that alone had contorted
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their overall finding. So much so that rather than
4:12
predicting a 23% decline in economic output from climate
4:16
change by 2100, they predicted a 62% decline in economic output
4:22
by 2100. And the fact that this large
4:26
scale global paper was so sensitive to this one particular
4:31
analysis of this one particular country, I think tells us
4:34
something about how complicated, dense, and absolutely full of
4:38
assumptions almost every model we try to use to project almost
4:43
anything out into the future really is.
4:45
And we can talk about, I imagine we will talk about a lot of ways
4:49
in which that shapes the way that we think about climate
4:51
science, in particular our sense of the climate future and where
4:54
we're heading. But I have to say, like the,
4:58
the, the experience that I had that most brought this home to
5:01
me was not about climate. It was about COVID, which was
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that in, and this is it just it's, it's another story.
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So apologies for telling a second story right off the bat,
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but I think it shows things even clearer.
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And in the first case, we're talking about a paper that's
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trying to project 75 plus years into the future.
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We're talking massive political social assumptions about the way
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the world will look in the year 2100 in this case.
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In the second case, we're talking about the way that we
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model the spread of COVID in the midst of the pandemic here in
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the US. We had the CDC collecting 26
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modelers, their best estimates for where the disease would be,
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not two years, not 20 years, not even two months out, but two
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weeks out from the present day. They found, they collected they
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the people they thought were doing the best job of predicting
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just two weeks into the future and publishing them in real time
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on the CDC website so that you can see you could get a sense
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for where things were heading. You were trying to make
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decisions about your own life or theoretically think about what
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you think the appropriate political social response would
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be. And in January of 2021, the CDC
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published these 26 scenarios. And two weeks later, the actual
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outcome lay outside the 95% confidence interval of 24 of
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those 26 models, which means they got together, their best
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people, the best people that we had anywhere in the world,
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projecting the spread of COVID, though they projected just two
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weeks out. And two weeks later, only two of
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those models had even treated the ultimate outcome as
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mathematically possible. This is how difficult models of
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any kind are, even when we have an extremely constrained
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timeline, even when we have a very narrow band of question
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we're asking, like how many cases will there be of COVID 2
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weeks from now? And the more I write about
6:47
science, the more I think about science, the more I think about
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the near future, the more I worry that absolutely everything
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we think we know about where we're heading is bedeviled by
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the same basic epistemic problems.
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We we are building future projections so much off of our
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own projections that we really, really can't see that future all
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that clearly. Wow, there's so much to get
7:10
into. Well, we're seeing from the same
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hem sheet here. I've just finished Co authoring
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a paper for hopefully for Nature looking at this issue really in
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the context of of 1.5° and what we might do to replace it as
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that sort of retreats into the rearview mirror, if you like as
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a target. And I think the problem is that
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any of these like very far off targets for 2100, let's say, I
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mean, the planet's temperature in 2100 will be the, the, the
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emergent product of a highly complex nonlinear system, the
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Earth system, where you don't just twiddle a single thermostat
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of greenhouse gases and, and get to a particular result, as you
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well know. And even if that, even if it was
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as simple as that, we have no clue what humanity is going to
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be doing and what kind of planet we're going to be living in,
8:00
what kind of societies. We don't even know with AI
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what's going to be happening in two years time, let alone at the
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end of the century. And it's kind of, and I actually
8:08
have a line somewhere about it. This is, it's about as absurd
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for us to pronounce on 2100 as it would have been for people in
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the 1950s to tell us how we ought to be living today.
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So a dose of kind of humility is in order, right?
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And I think, I mean, it's, it's, it's telling enough to try to
8:26
transport back in time to the 1950s, but you can even
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transport back in time 8 years and say we weren't anticipating
8:35
the pandemic in the way that, that transformed climate
8:38
politics, the way that it produced inflation, in the way
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that that transformed our understanding of the relative
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priority and urgency of decarbonization.
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We weren't anticipating Russia's invasion of Ukraine in the way
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that that precipitated an energy price spike that transformed the
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politics of energy all around the world.
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I mean, that's not 50 years in the past.
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That's that's six or eight years ago.
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And those are some of the major world historical forces that
9:04
have shaped the present in 2025. They were not at all on the
9:09
horizon a decade ago when the Paris Agreement was signed or
9:13
when the 1.5° report was put out in 2018, which is the moment
9:18
that really gave the sort of climate left, the activists left
9:22
of the climate movement the talking points that it used to
9:25
mobilize people the world over. So much has changed even in that
9:28
amount of time. But I also think it's, I want to
9:31
be careful because I'm, I'm guessing you'll agree.
9:34
But I think that in the climate area, in the climate space and
9:37
the climate story in particular, humility of this kind has often
9:41
been weaponized by people who say that we don't have to worry
9:43
at all about what's coming. Sometimes because they say that
9:46
the science is going to prove to be hysterical itself.
9:49
Sometimes because they say that when we try to incorporate even
9:52
good science into models of the human future, we're leaving out
9:55
so much that we're telling ourselves a a sort of
9:57
apocalyptic fable rather than allowing for human ingenuity.
10:00
And but I think at an emotional level, what that message really
10:04
tells us is that we can discount futures that scare us because we
10:09
don't know for sure that they're going to happen.
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And I think, I don't know exactly how to assess the math,
10:15
but I would say it's something like as likely that words wrong
10:18
in a scary direction that's whereas wrong in a comforting
10:21
direction. And that we need to take that
10:22
very much seriously too. And any, any effort to humble
10:26
ourselves and to be modest in what we can and can't know about
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the future. We should take seriously the
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warnings of people like Marty Weitzman who said that's it's
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not the stuff we know that scares us.
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It's the stuff that we think is probably unlikely but could
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happen that's really quite scary.
10:40
Well, I mean, you say you've been at this for 10 years.
10:43
How much of how I feel I've been at the same coal face for for
10:45
1/4 of a century. And yes, I think I've been
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repeatedly humbled about getting things wrong.
10:51
And in some ways, that's the theme of this podcast.
10:53
You'll hear from the opening sort of monologue, but I really
10:55
want to talk about your, your journey on climate.
10:58
And then we'll talk about some other issues as well, because I
11:00
don't want to just just bang on about climate all the time.
11:02
But you, you hit the scene like a bombshell with the, your book
11:07
Uninhabitable Earth in I think it was 2019, which was an
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enormous success, a bestseller. And the essay that predated that
11:15
was the biggest red essay ever on I think it was New York
11:18
Magazine, right? It's since been surpassed, but
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it wasn't the time. Yeah.
11:23
Well, well, you had your moment of virality anyway, and that
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that catapulted you to to fame and and where you are today as
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as one of the most successful opinion writers on the the
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biggest paper in the world. So how how differently do you
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see the climate issue from? So how humbled have you been?
11:41
Yeah. No, no, no, no.
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Talk about the specifics of how you read climate change back
11:46
then. Yeah, well.
11:48
You start your opening words are it's worse, way worse than you
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think, which is very portentous. And that's very much the sort of
11:54
the tone of the book. Do you still feel the same way?
11:57
Because I'm guessing you don't. Well, it's actually interesting
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on some of these points. So I wrote the article, which
12:03
came out in 2017 was a self-conscious survey of worst
12:07
case scenarios. And it was meant to scare the
12:10
reader among other among other impacts, but really to showcase
12:15
that some things beyond what we were being promised were in
12:19
store for us were possible that things could be worse than the
12:22
median projections. And even when site, when policy
12:25
makers and scientists and journalists talked about median
12:28
projections, they tended to sort of under play what that meant,
12:30
as you know as well. And the original line in that
12:33
piece, which is about worst case scenarios, was actually, it is,
12:36
I promise, worse than you think. The book, which was more in line
12:40
with those median scenarios, I actually rewrote the first line
12:43
in scarier direction. So that is, as you say, is much
12:47
worse than you think. I think I would still sign on to
12:50
some version of the original first line, which is to say it's
12:52
worse than you think. I think that to some large
12:55
degree the world has since then tried to wrap their minds around
13:00
the fact of global transformation at the hands of
13:05
industrial civilization and everything that we're putting
13:07
into the atmosphere. I think that we have reckoned
13:11
with at least readers of mine, readers of The New York Times,
13:14
readers of yours, have started to think about climate change as
13:18
one of the grand forces of this century which is shaped, will
13:21
shape the human future. Have thought about how it may
13:23
shape geopolitics, have thought a little bit about what it means
13:26
for the fate of developing nations.
13:28
And I probably thought a little bit about what it means for
13:30
their lives and the lives of those around them.
13:33
And that means that we're living in a bit of a different world
13:35
socially and culturally, to some extent politically, than we were
13:39
8 or 10 years ago, when I think a lot of that reckoning had yet
13:44
to be done. That said, I do think that the
13:48
future that we're heading for now in 2025 looks in a lot of
13:53
ways like a more manageable future than the one that I was
13:56
writing. We might fear in 2017 or 2019.
14:00
I don't have all that much certainty about that for some of
14:05
the reasons that I mentioned at the top.
14:07
I think we can say with some certainty that the 21st century
14:11
is not going to be dominated in by coal in the way that most
14:15
energy modelers and climate scientists said was would be the
14:18
case a decade or 12 years ago, producing a whole raft of
14:22
science that was based on what we're basically unreliable
14:25
future energy projections. I think we can say with some
14:29
certainty that the green energy roll out is going to be much
14:32
faster than most people predicted 6 or 8 or 10 years
14:35
ago. There's a lot more green tech
14:37
than you look at all these. Every year the International
14:40
Energy Agency makes its projections for solar and every
14:43
year that gets obliterated by the reality those projections
14:46
are shown to be too pessimistic every single year.
14:48
So I think we can also say that green energy is is proceeding
14:52
and being installed much more rapidly and expensively than
14:55
most people predicted. But there are still huge
14:59
unknowns about where that leaves us.
15:01
We we don't know at what pace we're going to be genuinely
15:05
retiring fossil fuels. I'm actually considerably less
15:08
confident in the decarbonization of agriculture than I might have
15:11
been five years ago, because a lot of the stuff that people
15:13
seem to think was promising then doesn't seem nearly as promising
15:16
now. And on the flip side, we are
15:19
doing better on what used to be called the hard to abate
15:21
sectors, industrial emissions from things like making cement
15:24
and steel and unbalanced. Maybe those two things balance
15:28
out, but I don't really know. And then beyond all that, I
15:31
would, I would just point to something you said a few minutes
15:33
ago, which is just this unbelievably complex earth
15:37
system, climate system that we are toying with.
15:39
We know we are toying with it. We're messing with it much more
15:43
dramatically and much faster than humans ever have before.
15:45
In fact, much faster and more dramatically than the planet has
15:48
ever been messed with by any force in the entire planetary
15:52
history of Earth. But we don't know exactly what
15:54
that means. We don't know whether a certain
15:56
amount of emissions is going to land us at 2° or 2 1/2.
15:59
We don't even really know for sure that we can.
16:01
A certain amount of emissions will land us between 2:00 and
16:03
3:00 as opposed to within north of four.
16:05
We can say that with some confidence, but again, I'm
16:08
trying to be humble about everything that we do and don't
16:11
know. And the truth is we have really
16:13
big questions about how sensitive the climate system is
16:16
to these perturbations, which are historically enormous.
16:19
And I'm sure your listeners know.
16:21
But, you know, just to, not to put too fine a point on it, but
16:25
the data point that I like to cite about just what scale of
16:28
experiment we're running is that the carbon that's currently
16:32
hanging in the atmosphere from our emissions weighs more than
16:35
everything that humans have ever built on the surface of the
16:38
Earth. It weighs more than all the
16:40
biomass on Earth combined. We've already done that much
16:43
damage to the atmosphere. We've already transformed the
16:45
atmosphere that much. We just don't know what it is
16:48
going to mean in precise detail for sea level rise in 2100 and
16:53
sea level rise in 2800. We don't know exactly what it
16:56
will mean for the rate of and pace of heat waves across Europe
17:01
or across the Middle East. We don't know exactly what it
17:03
means for the ocean circulation system.
17:05
We are learning more, and I hope that the message here isn't that
17:09
we should toss signs out the window and not pay attention to
17:11
it. But I think every time now, when
17:13
I read a new scientific paper projecting what the planet will
17:16
be like at 3°, I try to file it alongside other papers on the
17:20
same subject. Not as a definitive and
17:23
comprehensive new statement, but as one of many contested and
17:28
contestable hypotheses, probably all of which we have to take
17:32
into account if we're projecting our future.
17:34
Now, that all said, yes, you're asking me in 2025, am I the
17:40
alarmist that I was in 2019 or 2017?
17:43
The answer is no. Part of that is relatively good
17:45
news from the energy system. Part of that is my maturation,
17:49
my understanding that there's more to this story than the
17:52
climate impacts that humans can respond.
17:55
And part of it is my understanding, which I wrote a
17:58
little bit about in the book, but has come to be a bigger part
18:00
of the way that I think about how humans adapt to this ragged
18:04
future is that we just normalize a lot and accept a lot.
18:11
And that is probably going to govern a whole lot of our
18:15
future, too. There will be climate disasters
18:17
beyond the kind that we've seen in the past.
18:21
Probably to some extent we will be able to limit the human
18:23
damage of those disasters, but to some extent we won't and
18:27
probably will sort of define the gap between those two as the
18:32
acceptable drift of the climate system and find ways to live
18:35
relatively normal lives even on a world that 5 or 10 years ago
18:39
we would have considered horrifying and if not destroyed.
18:44
And I think about that with regard to the particular
18:47
disasters that we've seen in recent memory.
18:50
I mean, I'm, I'm working on a story right now about the Los
18:53
Angeles fires of last January, which not a narrow simple
18:57
climate story. It's basically an urban
18:59
firestorm. Most of the fuel was the homes
19:02
and the properties of other homeowners there nevertheless
19:06
had some kind of component and even beyond the question of
19:08
climates relative responsibility.
19:10
You just, this is a, this is a just an absolutely mind bending,
19:14
horrifying, tragic human disaster.
19:17
A very visible, large, very wealthy, well connected, well
19:22
resourced neighborhood in the what you could say is the
19:26
cultural capital of America or even possibly the world being
19:30
incinerated overnight with 1600 homes destroyed and dozens of
19:35
people killed. And literally a map part of the
19:38
city get just getting wiped off the map.
19:40
And here we are less than a year later.
19:42
And it just isn't a big part of the way that we're talking about
19:45
what happened in 2025. And that is an indictment of us.
19:49
It's an indictment of our human empathy and our capacity for
19:52
compassion. But it's also, I think, a sign
19:54
of the way that we'll navigate a world's pockmarked by so much
19:57
more climate disaster, noting it quickly, maybe being moved by
20:00
it, being angry by it for a time, but then moving on.
20:04
And if I, if I had to tell you my mental model for what the
20:07
climate future is going to look like, it's that there's going to
20:09
be a lot more human suffering than we would have wanted.
20:14
That was necessary. And probably many billions of
20:17
people living on the planet will hardly even notice.
20:20
Wow. I mean, it's true, isn't it, how
20:22
rapidly we forget these things? And I mean, I think probably
20:25
the, the most obvious recent example is COVID.
20:28
I mean, I hate talking about it. I hate thinking about it.
20:32
And I'm very happy to just move on and never think about it
20:34
again. Like I think the vast majority
20:36
of the human population, and I don't really know why that is,
20:39
but what is that a that's, but I know that's not a normal
20:43
reaction. I know it's not a useful
20:44
reaction. No, no, it's an incredibly
20:45
normal reaction. My reaction, which is just like
20:48
a sociopath keep turning back to the pandemic, is, I think, the
20:51
unusual one. But I do think in a really
20:53
profound way, we can say that that experience really reshaped
20:58
a huge amount of our society in politics and culture.
21:02
And that one of the things that we're missing by wanting to move
21:04
on and forget about it is just how differently we're living and
21:07
thinking about one another and our obligations to one another
21:10
than we did before then. I think, speaking for myself, I
21:13
think we're living in a world that is considerably more
21:15
selfish. I think we're living in a world
21:18
in which we are unwilling to do much for others and unwilling to
21:24
tolerate safety as precautions, even those that are undertaken
21:29
on our behalf. We consider the intrusion, the
21:32
burden of those kinds of actions to be too much almost no matter
21:37
what the what the human cost is. I think we are more atomized and
21:43
isolated. We regard each other.
21:45
This term that became popular over the course of the pandemic,
21:47
lifted from gaming, but it got went far beyond that.
21:50
We regard each other as NPCS, as non player characters.
21:53
Our politics, I think, have been deformed by those forces too,
21:56
where we regard the other side and even less humane ways than
21:59
we might have a few years before.
22:01
And I think we basically, for someone like me who has the kind
22:05
of political commitments that I have, it's really dispiriting.
22:09
We started this period, the pandemic period, in a spasm of
22:13
incredible solidarity, health solidarity.
22:17
We basically all around the world, not just in one society
22:20
or another. Americans like to talk about our
22:22
experiences, though. It was exceptional.
22:24
But if anything, we had a looser pandemic experience than most
22:26
people in Europe did all around the world.
22:28
We undertook A dramatic response in to try to defend ourselves
22:32
against this threat, to protect ourselves and those around us.
22:35
I think at some point in the spring of 2020, there were more
22:38
than a billion school children out of school.
22:40
And considering there are only 8 billion people on the planet,
22:42
that's a remarkable fact. Basically nobody was going to
22:45
school anywhere on the planet. We suspended our romantic lives,
22:48
our social lives. This was a major burden.
22:52
But it was also, to me, inspiring to think that in
22:55
response to a threat that we didn't even know existed a few
22:58
months before, we had radically upended our way of life in an
23:02
effort to limit the damage. And that really wore on us.
23:06
Most people decided, especially after the availability of the
23:10
vaccines, that they wouldn't want to do that again, and they
23:13
wouldn't want to do that kind of thing for anyone, no matter what
23:16
the threat. Here in the US, we now have laws
23:19
in a bunch of states prohibiting public health officials from
23:22
ever instituting future guidance against mitigation.
23:25
Which is to say, even if we had a disease as infectious as COVID
23:29
that was 50 times as deadly, they are prohibited by law from
23:33
imposing restrictions on on movement.
23:35
Now, I would assume that if we truly saw a pandemic of that
23:39
scale, people would change their minds and get scared again.
23:42
But Even so, it is a kind of sad development that we had this
23:47
incredible gesture of human solidarity and then collectively
23:52
basically decided we don't want to do that ever again.
23:56
It's not worth it. We should have just skated
24:00
through the pandemic, letting the old and vulnerable die so
24:04
that the rest of us who are relatively less old and
24:06
vulnerable could thrive. And I just want to say for
24:10
clarity, like that paradigm about who is vulnerable and who
24:13
is not is self-serving. We are the survivors.
24:16
There were plenty of young and middle-aged people who got very
24:19
sick. Some of them died.
24:20
It's true that the age skew was quite dramatic and the older you
24:23
were, the more vulnerable you were.
24:25
But we have a distorted view of the risk landscape because we
24:29
endure, all of us. We're talking now endure the
24:31
pandemic. And I think it's really it's
24:34
really made our society uglier. And I say that about our
24:38
geopolitics. We have a much more
24:40
nationalistic, nativistic world than we had before the pandemic.
24:43
I say that about our politics, where I mean maybe most vividly
24:46
in the US, but not only they're much more combative selfish
24:49
politics, but I also think it's really true with the level of
24:52
anecdote and personal lived experience.
24:54
I just think when I talk to my friends about the obligations
24:58
they feel towards one another, the obligations they feel to the
25:02
homeless in their in their city or the drug addicts in their
25:05
city. In 2018-2019, those would have
25:07
been sources of at least if you didn't feel like you should do
25:11
something more for those people, you at least felt guilty about
25:13
saying that. And now I talk to people who
25:16
will half jokingly say, I just want those people thrown in jail
25:20
or I've even had friends, again, half jokingly say, I think
25:24
almost people should just be killed.
25:25
And this is like the kind of thing that maybe some sociopaths
25:29
thought in 2017, but nobody would have felt comfortable
25:32
speaking out loud. And now I think we've given much
25:35
bigger, much bigger birth for that kind of thinking, up to and
25:40
including the American president and his followers, who are
25:43
considerably uglier, considerably more self
25:45
interested than they were even in the first go round.
25:49
Yeah. And one of the things that's
25:52
equally surprising is the hostile reaction against the
25:56
scientific triumphs which were the COVID vaccines and which
26:00
enabled us to emerge much earlier from the pandemic to D
26:02
mask and basically get on with our lives without it costing
26:06
millions more debt and probably saved.
26:08
I mean you probably know the figure, but 10s of millions of
26:10
people were undoubtedly so by COVID vaccines and yet the
26:13
reaction to that has been a massive transformation in the
26:16
power of the anti vax movement which is now essentially running
26:19
the usus Department of Health. Like what the actual fuck?
26:24
It's a really unfortunate and uncomfortable story.
26:29
I would say a couple of things about it.
26:30
The first is in the US, we have had a major backlash against the
26:37
COVID vaccines. There's a large minority of the
26:39
country who wishes who thinks that they were either not had a
26:44
null effect or were had a negative effect.
26:47
It's not a majority of the country, but it's a disturbingly
26:50
large portion. I know something like 25% of the
26:52
country feels that way, but in 2020, 195% or more of American
27:01
seniors got their COVID shots, which is to say the large, large
27:06
majority of the most vulnerable people chose to get those shots.
27:10
We actually had relatively good uptake among the young and
27:14
middle-aged compared to anybody who would have been guessing
27:17
before the pandemic how tolerant and and willing to submit to
27:20
such a shot the American public would have been.
27:23
We did less well than the UK. We did less well than most of
27:26
the countries in Europe who got their seniors well above 99% and
27:30
all adults above 90% relatively quickly.
27:32
And the US failed that test compared to those peer nations.
27:35
But starting from scratch, I'm thinking if you're like in 2019
27:38
and someone says to you, there's going to be this novel virus
27:41
that's quite scary. It's really infectious.
27:43
It's pretty deadly, but it's really infectious.
27:46
We're going to invent new vaccines using a platform that's
27:50
never been even trialed in humans before.
27:53
We're going to design those vaccines in two days over the
27:56
course of a weekend in 2020, in January 2020, actually before
28:01
any American had even died of COVID.
28:03
We're going to design them in two days.
28:04
We're going to have them being manufactured within two months.
28:06
Would you be willing to get that shot within a year?
28:10
The fact that we got 95 plus percent of American seniors to
28:12
say yes to that and something like 2/3 of American adults to
28:15
say yes to that is on some level inspiring and testament to, at
28:20
least in the context of pandemic fear, the level of trust that
28:24
people did have in the scientific authorities, even as
28:27
they were telling pollsters and ranting on social media that
28:31
they didn't. So I think that there is a kind
28:33
of divide here between, you know, revealed preference and,
28:36
and, and how you articulate your political views, particularly on
28:41
social media and particularly after the fact.
28:43
So a lot of the people who are really ranting about these shots
28:45
got the shots. That's one thing to note.
28:49
Another thing to note is that while overall vaccination rates
28:53
have declined in the US since the pandemic, they actually
28:55
haven't declined that much. We went from about 94% of
28:59
kindergarteners getting all the the full slate of shots to like
29:02
92%. That's the effect of the
29:05
pandemic. And that's epidemiologically
29:07
consequential because measles requires a higher level of
29:10
protection than herd immunity than 92%.
29:14
And there's certainly parts of the country that are well below
29:16
90 where we're now seeing outbreaks, and that's quite
29:19
troubling. But while it's epidemiologically
29:22
significant, I'm not sure how much meaning to make out of the
29:25
cultural change there. If we go from 94% to 92%, are we
29:30
really living through a new dark ages when it comes to vaccines?
29:33
Or are we living through something that would have looked
29:35
like noise in the data in a slightly different time?
29:38
And on that point, I would also say, despite the fact that the
29:42
US has an unusual, maybe even unique culture war fight over
29:46
science unfolding right now, and it's unfolding in the way that I
29:50
hate. Nevertheless, when I look around
29:52
to our peer countries, I see vaccination rates falling
29:56
similarly in the UK, in Europe, in Canada, in Mexico.
30:00
And in fact, in all those places there have been bigger and more
30:02
deadlier measles outbreaks than in the USI don't want to
30:05
downplay what's happened in the USI mean it's actually quite
30:07
corrosive and quite horrifying that RFK and his band of COVID
30:11
contrarians are empowered now. But I think the key point there
30:16
to emphasize is that it's COVID contrarians.
30:20
And what I mean when I say that is that in that not what's
30:23
called the Maha Alliance to Make America Healthy Again alliance,
30:27
there are all of these contradictions.
30:28
There are people who think that drugs are being approved way too
30:33
quickly and that we need as a handout to the pharma companies
30:36
and we need to be much stricter about what we allow patients to
30:40
take. And there are other people who
30:41
think the FDA approval system is broken because we can't elect to
30:45
take drugs that haven't yet been approved and that we should be
30:48
allowed to undertake human challenge trials that will
30:50
accelerate drug development. Those are intellectually,
30:53
ideologically incompatible positions, and yet they are both
30:56
part of the of the Maha alliance.
30:59
We have people who think that the great document of of the
31:03
COVID contrarians, the Great Barrington Declaration, was at
31:06
least nominally built around the idea that we need to protect the
31:09
vulnerable, but we need to focus on the vulnerable in order to
31:12
protect them and not pretend that we need to protect
31:15
everybody. That was the central pitch of
31:17
that document, which was published in the fall of 2020.
31:21
Now, one of the central authors of that document, J
31:23
Bhattacharya, is the head of the the NIH, and he just wrote a a
31:26
big essay in which he said the best way to prepare for a future
31:31
pandemic is to make America healthy again.
31:33
We need to eat better. We need to lose weight, we need
31:35
to stop smoking. In other words, there's no
31:38
protecting the vulnerable at all.
31:40
He's just focused on getting people to become not vulnerable.
31:43
So even in that one person, in his one narrative, in his
31:46
development, there's a there's a contradiction there.
31:48
And the the lesson that I draw from this pattern where you have
31:51
all of these basic disagreements, there are people
31:54
who advocated for the vaccines as an absolute end to the
31:57
pandemic in 2021. We don't have to worry about
32:00
anything after you get that shot, forget all these worry
32:03
warts and and anxiety mongers. Just get the shot and forget
32:07
about the pandemic. And then there are people within
32:09
this coalition who insist that most of the deaths that we
32:12
recorded were actually the result of shots from the
32:14
vaccines. The fact that we have all of
32:17
these contradictory elements in this coalition tells me that the
32:19
coalition is fundamentally about the pandemic, not about science.
32:24
Because the only way that you could organize these people
32:26
together is through opposition to the public health
32:30
establishment and a conviction that they, the powers that be,
32:34
mismanaged things. Once you get even one level
32:37
deeper in that critique, it all is a mess and doesn't suggest a
32:41
clear path forward. And I think you're seeing some
32:44
of that in the way that RFK and his team are managing the
32:46
question of vaccines, where they're doing a lot to sow
32:49
doubt. You could tell that they want to
32:51
really unwind the vaccine schedule.
32:53
They really want to get reduced the number of vaccines the kids
32:56
take. But they actually haven't taken
32:58
a very aggressive posture, fundamentally changed the nature
33:02
of the sort of vaccination bargain in the country.
33:04
Because I think they understand that if they do that, they're
33:06
going to be like, whatever it is 75.
33:08
Eighty, 90% of parents who are like, actually get my kids
33:11
vaccinated against these diseases.
33:14
And that means, I think, that we're still living in the
33:17
aftermath of COVID, again, in ways that we don't entirely
33:20
recognize. If we Fast forward five years, I
33:24
don't think that the same coalition of people could be in
33:27
charge, even if JD Vance, JD Vance is the president next time
33:30
around. Because I think the memory of
33:31
the pandemic will have faded. The resentments that it
33:34
produced, the frustration to produce would have faded.
33:36
And people will be asking themselves slightly more pointed
33:39
questions about whether it really makes sense to talk about
33:42
routine vaccination against measles, mumps and rubella in
33:45
the same way that we talked about the mRNA vaccines for
33:48
COVID. Now, personally, both of them, I
33:50
think they're both miracles. But even if you object to the
33:53
first, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to object
33:55
to the second. And I think at the moment, we're
33:58
living in a in an unusual period where our politics allows us to
34:02
pretend that all that stuff is getting thrown out with at the
34:04
same time. Ultimately, I think, hope, pray
34:08
that where it's a brief period and we'll end up on the other
34:12
side of it. Well, while we're on US
34:14
politics, you'll remember not that long ago, you and I sat
34:17
down for coffee and Bryant Park in New York City.
34:20
And that was during New York Climate Week.
34:22
And it was around the time that Jimmy Kimmel had been kicked off
34:25
the airwaves. The philanthropies were being
34:27
attacked by the Trump administration, the universities
34:29
were being cowed. And it really felt like America
34:32
wasn't a place where you could speak openly about certain
34:35
things anymore and that it was becoming a former democracy.
34:39
But somehow I feel that that moment is also has now passed
34:43
and people are feeling a bit freer and a bit more confident
34:46
that that they can speak out against the Trump administration
34:49
and that things haven't changed quite so fundamentally and quite
34:52
so quickly. How do you feel about that?
34:55
And isn't the New York Times being sued by Trump?
34:58
And you don't seem to be behaving in a very coward way,
35:01
which has, I think, given us the rest of us some some cost
35:05
optimism. But how are you feeling right
35:06
now? Well, I think it goes back to
35:08
what we're talking about at the top of this conversation and
35:11
also connects to what we were just talking about around COVID
35:14
and the fallout. Which is just to say we're
35:16
living in a period in which every small shift in the vibes
35:21
feels like a permanent change, which we're going to have to be
35:24
adjusting to for the rest of our lives.
35:26
And then it turns out that just a couple weeks later, things
35:29
feel very different. And I've observed this in a
35:33
longer term way when I think about the way that we've endured
35:37
freak outs about fertility crisis and population decline
35:42
and AI takeover and smartphones are ruining our brains and
35:46
climate is part of that too. But we just had this series of
35:49
over the last decade or so, relatively brief but intense
35:53
social bouts of hysteria. And then a year or two later or
35:57
maybe even a month or two later, we start thinking like, what
36:00
does that? Does that data really suggest
36:02
that? Does it really make sense to
36:03
worry in those terms? You, you just wrote a book about
36:06
nuclear weapons. And it's like if you had written
36:08
that book in 2021 or 2023 or 2025, it actually would have met
36:13
the cultural moment in a different way.
36:15
And it's really quite weird that the landscape is that bouncy and
36:19
that bumpy. And when it comes to US
36:21
politics, I feel that on a day-to-day way.
36:24
I mean, one day I wake up and I think, Oh my God, American
36:27
cities are overrun with ICE agents and their American
36:30
Marines in support. And they are arresting long
36:34
standing members of local communities who have deep roots
36:37
in an area. Children in the public schools
36:39
working for the same company for 25 years.
36:41
They're, you know, hauling them off the street and sending them
36:44
who knows where essentially to black sites off the map of the
36:48
American detention system. And I feel like anyone who
36:53
downplayed the sort of fascist threat of Trump in the first
36:57
term must feel incredibly humiliated and foolish.
37:01
And then the next day, I wake up and I think, yeah, not only is
37:08
Donald Trump suing the New York Times, but the New York Times is
37:10
suing Donald Trump. We're still doing everything
37:13
that we're doing. Many of the actions that were
37:17
taken by the Trump administration against
37:19
universities, for instance, have been thrown out.
37:22
It's actually been quite ugly to see how many universities
37:25
prematurely capitulated rather than fighting, but those that
37:28
fought have tended to be pretty successful and in pushing back.
37:32
Same with state municipalities, state and local municipalities
37:36
suing the government over this or that.
37:39
And ultimately the the the sort of meta net.
37:42
The two drivers of the meta narrative here are I think
37:45
social media and Trump's popularity.
37:48
I do think Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter has been an
37:51
underrated driver of our this this period of hysteria and
37:56
particular particularly the fear of people on the left that were
38:00
losing, I think is to some meaningful degree the result of
38:04
Musk's ownership of this one social media platform.
38:07
I think it's important to keep in mind Trump didn't even win
38:12
50% of the vote in 2024. It was treated as a major
38:17
landslide victory because it was the first time since 2004 that a
38:22
Republican had won more votes than a Democratic candidate, and
38:25
it was the second time since 1988 that a Republican had won
38:30
more votes than a Democratic candidate.
38:32
But he didn't even cross the 50% threshold.
38:34
He won considerably less votes than Joe Biden had won in 2020.
38:38
This is not even the Barack Obama victory of 2008.
38:42
It was a divided electorate, angry and upset about the
38:46
pandemic in its aftermath. And the way that Biden had
38:48
handled it. Really didn't like how old Joe
38:50
Biden was. And yet we saw this massive
38:54
efforts at reckoning with the meaning of Trump's return that I
38:58
think quite overstated, even at the outset, what it meant for
39:03
the electorate, which all this talk about young voters
39:07
undergoing a massive generational shift to the right,
39:09
black and brown voters doing so in similar numbers.
39:13
And to some degree, that was substantiated by patterns that
39:16
we observed in other countries around the world.
39:19
We could say this was a sort of generational shift beyond the
39:22
American political experiment, but already we're less than a
39:26
year in and all of those groups have just swung massively back,
39:30
at least away from Trump. It may be the case that they're
39:32
no longer loyal Democratic voters.
39:35
They may be that they're sort of anti system voters who are going
39:39
to pick and choose whether they even vote in elections, let
39:41
alone what party they vote for. But this was not a grand
39:45
realignment in which all of these groups were now the not a
39:48
parties to lose. They were free floating, loose,
39:53
low information voters who went to Trump for because they didn't
39:57
like the price of the price of living, price of groceries,
40:01
because they didn't like how old and out of touch Joe Biden was.
40:05
Maybe some of them because they didn't like the war in Gaza.
40:08
But in general, they were not committed voters.
40:11
And So what we've seen over the course of the year is just that
40:14
support diminishing pretty steadily.
40:18
And as a result, the kinds of actions that the Trump
40:20
administration was taking in the spring, first of all, to the
40:23
extent that they're still taking those actions, they're now
40:26
doing. So they're kind of picking their
40:29
spots and doing it less. And then to the extent that
40:31
they're still do, still taking kind of dramatic actions, you
40:35
see a much more invigorated liberal response ranging from
40:40
people on the sidelines just rolling their eyes to something
40:44
like we saw in New York City with Zoran Mandani going to DC.
40:48
And basically like extracting from Trump what seems like a
40:51
promise that he won't mess with the city, which is like the
40:56
power dynamics. They are just so different than
40:57
what we might have imagined they would have been six or nine
41:00
months ago. And on some level, that's not to
41:03
sound too optimistic or Pollyanna ish, but that's a
41:07
testament to the strength of the American system.
41:09
I mean, it's you have a a willing strongman backed by an
41:14
army of acolytes who have very little respect for
41:18
constitutional precedent and the rule of law, who have done some
41:21
really gross, awful, punishing things in the year or so they've
41:26
been in office, but are not marching on their way to a
41:31
Kingdom for Donald Trump. And maybe that's a sign of how
41:37
far my expectations for the future have fallen over the last
41:40
decade that I'm willing to take that as a victory.
41:43
But on some level, I think you're right that we are now in
41:47
December 2025, in a pretty different place than it seemed
41:51
we were in August of 2025. Then it seemed we were in April
41:55
of 2025 or certainly in February in 2025 when we had Elon Musk
42:00
promising to dramatically downsize the federal government,
42:05
like by essentially rewriting it's it's code without any
42:09
consultation, without any democratic scrutiny.
42:12
Donald Trump is not going to try that again, I don't think.
42:15
And Trump, Musk wasn't even really able to achieve much in
42:19
part because I think ultimately, however cocky Trump world can
42:24
seem, they are respond. They're responsive to public
42:28
pressure and public opinion too. And they saw relatively quickly
42:32
that a lot of what they were undertaking was, was quite
42:35
unpopular. And we'll see how that all
42:37
shapes out in a Caribbean and and with Venezuela, which does
42:40
seem to be the next test. I don't want to sound like an
42:44
apologist for Trump or MAGA world, but I do think some of
42:48
the most outlandish or large, large fears that you or I might
42:52
have had six or nine months ago now seem considerably less
42:55
likely. And it's basically to the
42:56
American people and the American systems credit that that's come
42:59
about. Yeah.
43:00
And Trump, of course, is not unique.
43:03
And we tend to speak of him as if he's some kind of incredible
43:07
anomaly that somehow managed to dominate the American political
43:10
scene when life elsewhere is continuing as normal.
43:13
But of course, it's not. I mean, this, this sort of
43:15
populist, authoritarian thing which has been going on since,
43:18
well, 2015, 20/17/2018. I'm not sure exactly when you'd
43:22
date the big rise, but it's been going on. 2015, I think it's
43:26
like when Yeah, but. It's been going on long enough.
43:29
Now that it's a, it's a sort of an enduring political phenomenon
43:32
which has happened across pretty much every single country in the
43:35
Western world. And so there must be, there must
43:37
be reasons for it, whether it's social media or inequality or
43:41
something, which are not unique to the US either.
43:43
What's your take on this and what can you tell us from having
43:47
looked at it? Well, I mean, we're not going to
43:49
make big projections here about what's happening in 20 years or
43:53
even 20 months, but 20 days seems like a stretch.
43:56
But I don't know, how do you how do you see the political
43:58
landscape more broadly? Well, it's interesting, you
44:00
mentioned earlier that you and I met in during Climate Week in
44:04
New York, which is also the the week of the General Assembly in
44:06
New York. And because I work at the Times
44:08
at the privilege of being able to sit in a lot of meetings at
44:12
that time that a lot of the world leaders do come through
44:15
the newspaper and have and sit downs with the editorial board
44:18
and editorial leadership. And so some of them are on the
44:21
record, some of them are off the record.
44:23
But you do you do get you managed to get a relatively
44:27
illustrative cross section of global leadership in those
44:29
conversations, which is an incredible privilege to have.
44:32
And I can't tell you every single person who came into
44:36
those offices talked about the Internet as the driver of this
44:40
wave. Personally, I think that that's
44:44
a little bit simplistic and naive.
44:47
I think it's quite important to recognize that we had a
44:50
financial crisis in 2008. And if what we're saying is that
44:55
this pattern was replicated is not just in the US but is also
44:58
in Europe. Europe has not recovered from
45:02
2008. There has been almost no
45:03
economic growth across the continent as a whole in what is
45:06
now 17 years of activity. That's not true in every single
45:10
country. There are sunnier experiences
45:12
and and bleaker experiences. And as a whole, I think that
45:15
there have been a few percentage points of growth, but we are not
45:18
in any kind of expansionary future forward.
45:23
Just looking at the underlying economic fundamentals, you would
45:27
not expect that Europe in this period would be very excited
45:31
about sharing in the in a rah rah way that like the the
45:34
changes of the economic of the future and the and the force of
45:37
globalization that brought it about.
45:39
Quite the opposite. It is true that it's not just
45:42
Europe, it's not just the US, but you know, I think that on
45:45
some level it's useful to sort of isolate different factors and
45:50
forces here. I do think that in a long term
45:53
way, the sort of cultural alienation that people feel
45:57
because of the long term story of globalization is quite
45:59
profound. And when I say that, I don't
46:01
mean just that America turned to Trump because a lot of people in
46:07
factories in the upper Midwest lost their jobs when they were
46:10
outsourced to China. What I mean is that all of these
46:13
forces that are acting on us now feel considerably more beyond
46:18
our control than they might have seemed a decade or two ago, in
46:21
part because they seem to be unfolding above politics.
46:26
When we talk about immigration, where there's a lot of anger and
46:29
rage in certain corners of the West about the level of
46:32
migration. I think a lot of this is racist
46:34
and prejudice. But it's one fact of our
46:36
politics is that people are really upset about borders.
46:39
But this is not a story that is driven by domestic policy like
46:44
the UK Border policy is not the reason that people showing up in
46:47
the UK. America's border policy is not
46:49
really the reason that people are showing up in America.
46:51
You're it's like in 2021 and 2022, every rich country in the
46:55
world saw a huge surge of migrants.
46:57
There were different drivers in different parts of the world.
46:59
But like, this is a global story about global displacement.
47:02
And we tell ourselves or get that our local leaders are to
47:05
blame. We ask them to solve the problem
47:07
for us. And then we sort of note that
47:09
it's really hard to do that, that these are forces that are
47:12
probably bigger than the capacity of nations to control.
47:15
And that is a humbling, even humiliating lesson to learn.
47:19
The same is true of inflation in America was an awful lot of
47:22
consternation and self flagellation about the way that
47:26
the pandemic recovery packages that first Trump and then Biden
47:29
pushed through contributed to the inflation we saw.
47:32
But the truth is inflation was a global phenomenon.
47:35
It started at the very beginning of the pandemic because of
47:37
supply shocks and what that meant.
47:40
People were staying at home, they weren't going out, they had
47:42
more money to spend. These are all things that
47:43
happened everywhere in the world.
47:44
It wasn't because the stimulus package was of X many billions
47:48
of dollars as opposed to .5 X many billions of dollars
47:51
spending. They've contributed a little
47:52
bit, fiscal policy and policy contribute a little bit.
47:56
But again, it's a global story that people are feeling like is
47:59
driving the shape of their lives beyond any lever of power that
48:03
they may have access to to shape it.
48:05
I think the Internet is similar. We have, we're now all living so
48:09
much of our lives on our phones, on social media apps and
48:12
algorithms. And we're only just now in
48:14
2024-2025 starting to ask ourselves whether we should we
48:18
should be subjecting those systems and those forces a
48:21
considerably more political scrutiny than we had a decade or
48:24
two ago when we basically treated them as like world
48:27
historical forces that we were just on.
48:29
We're just riding the waves of Europe has done more on that
48:32
front of the US has. But in general, I think the AI
48:35
revolution has been, among many other things, a prompt for
48:40
liberal war rewards, reminding us that like we kind of missed
48:44
the boat on shaping social media on the Internet the first time
48:47
around. And probably we need to do a
48:48
better make a better effort to other going forwards.
48:52
So I think all of those things are unfolding.
48:54
I think you have the Great Recession in the in the deep
48:56
background. You have the shorter memory of
49:00
inflation and immigration. I think you have the structural
49:03
dynamic of the Internet and social media, the the legacy of
49:06
the pandemic and what that taught us.
49:08
All of those things are happening.
49:10
I would close this kind of complicated answer by saying
49:13
that I think that the story that we have about the world shifting
49:18
dramatically and inexorably to the right over this period is I
49:21
think a bit simplistic. And when I think about Lula in
49:26
Brazil, I think about the Pedro Sancho's in Spain, I think about
49:31
Claudio Shinedown in Mexico, Mark Carney in Canada and to
49:36
some extent here, Starmer in the UK.
49:38
These are all examples of people who have one major electoral
49:43
victories in the recent past running on the left.
49:46
Now you could tally up the figures and tell a different
49:49
story in sheer numbers with people who've benefited in the
49:52
other direction. And I don't want to equate
49:55
someone like Claudia Scheinbaum or Lula with Kier Starmer, whose
49:58
politics are very different and whose whose historic scale
50:02
majority is in other ruins like a year and a half after his
50:06
election. Nevertheless, I think you a lot
50:08
of this stuff is is somewhat accidental.
50:11
Like in the US, we had Joe Biden presiding over the period that
50:15
Boris Johnson was presiding over in the UK.
50:17
And as a result, we turn the page from Joe Biden to Donald
50:20
Trump. You turn the page from with a
50:22
little interact from Boris Johnson to took your stomach.
50:27
And there's been a, there's been a sort of a basic kind of a
50:31
conventional wisdom from the global commentariat over this
50:34
entire period that we need to do that, that liberal parties and
50:40
need to do much more to answer the complaints of the left
50:44
behind who have abandoned them in droves as liberal parties the
50:48
world over have become much more comfortable homes for the well
50:51
educated and the prosperous. And there may be some validity
50:55
to that, But I also think that it's again, that kind of a too
50:58
simplistic just so story. And I would just, and on that
51:01
point, the the way that this is often talked about is like the
51:04
the we need to look to the Danish model.
51:06
We need to look to Meta Frederickson and the Social
51:09
Democrats in Denmark who were relatively early in Europe in
51:13
moving to really radically restrict immigration and who
51:15
have stayed in power as a result.
51:18
And I don't want to speak too authoritatively about the micro
51:20
dynamics of each nation's politics around immigration in
51:24
Europe. But I would say that it's not as
51:26
though other leaders in other countries have not tried to
51:30
restrict immigration in Europe. I mean, in fact, that's been a
51:33
big part of Starmer's approach as as Prime Minister in the UK
51:37
and beyond that, as Joe Biden also did major crackdowns in the
51:41
US. He was a little late, but he did
51:42
major crackdowns in the border. Carney has tried to do the same
51:45
thing. It's not like nobody's trying
51:46
this. And I do think that the lessons
51:49
are really mixed. The results are really mixed.
51:52
And in fact, last month in Denmark they had elections in
51:56
which the Social Democrats, which had never been a party
51:59
that commanded more than 20% of the of popular support, lost
52:02
dramatically. They lost control of the
52:04
mayoralty of Copenhagen, Copenhagen for the first time in
52:06
100 years. Which is all just to say that
52:08
this is quite messy, that we are not living through simplistic
52:13
narratives in which you can say, well, everybody is going to
52:17
drift in the same direction and we're all just following the
52:19
same wind gust. A lot of it is local, a lot of
52:23
it is particular. A lot of it is a matter of like
52:25
who is in power in this year as opposed to the next year in this
52:28
country as opposed to that country.
52:29
And I think ultimately that opens up quite a lot of
52:34
possibility beyond the like narrow kinds of confines of this
52:38
sort of oppressive question of whether centrist liberal parties
52:42
are going to take two steps to the right or one step to the
52:44
left. And I do think you're seeing a
52:46
really interesting illustration of that dynamic in the UK in
52:49
particular where you have reformed basically destroying
52:54
the Tories. There's Conservatives still have
52:56
some support, but there's been a pretty dramatic reversal there
53:00
even since the last election. And you have some possibility of
53:04
the Greens overtaking Labor and the Lib Dems.
53:07
And now that's if there were an election tomorrow, I wouldn't
53:10
trust that the Greens should be in the lead of the three left of
53:13
center parties. But that is where they are now
53:15
in some polls. And that just shows you that
53:17
what we're talking about is much more a fracturing of
53:22
establishment politics as we understood it 1/2 generation
53:25
ago. Then it is a dramatic and
53:29
inexorable March, right Word everywhere in the world.
53:32
So if I were to make forecasts and prognostications, I mean, I
53:35
would start in the USI think I'm pretty confident the Democrats
53:39
will have a very successful midterm in 2026.
53:42
Whether that means that they can take the Senate back or just the
53:45
House, I would guess probably for structural reasons it'll
53:48
just be the House and not the Senate.
53:49
But I think the Senate is a reach possibility.
53:52
And I would bet if I were a betting person, though, we could
53:55
talk about how much I hate betting markets too.
53:57
If I were a betting mark, a betting markets person, I would
54:00
bet on Democrats winning the presidency in 2028.
54:03
I would guess that something like that will happen across
54:06
Europe too, where we see many more steps away from the far
54:10
right, then we see steps towards the far right and something like
54:13
a return to quote UN quote, normal politics out of this
54:17
pattern, which seemed to be so strong for a brief window where
54:21
everything was just moving inexorably to the right.
54:24
But I don't know, we could have a pandemic, we could have an
54:26
invasion of a, of a country in Europe that changes a lot of
54:29
this stuff. And ultimately, I think that's
54:31
that's the main message that I would hope that we've hit on
54:34
again and again here, which is we may think we know where the
54:37
wind is blowing, but weather patterns change all the time.
54:41
And probably the best way to think about the present in the
54:44
near future is just to understand how dynamic and
54:50
changeable all of those systems really are.
54:52
Well, we began this conversation by agreeing that it was a bad
54:56
idea to try to predict the future at all.
54:58
You've just given us some quite interesting predictions
55:01
actually, which I welcome. Well, it is, right?
55:05
It's like we find ourselves staring at the future.
55:07
And how can you? How can you avoid trying to?
55:10
But no, but that's The thing is there's something, there's
55:11
something really reassuring about it.
55:13
I, I, I'm fascinated by what people think is going to happen,
55:16
but happily read a column by you about why you think that the
55:20
Democrats will win the next presidential election.
55:21
I'd love to hear more about it. And, and that's the thing.
55:25
I don't think we can just give up on, on, on trying to think
55:28
through how the future is going to look.
55:30
And we shouldn't make overly quantitative predictions about
55:34
the exact specifics of the climate or anything else, any
55:37
other parameter really, in the year 2100.
55:39
But I still, I don't think we should give up on this
55:41
altogether. And I want to close by asking
55:44
you a very sort of moderate question.
55:47
Just predict for us the world in 2050, how's it going to look,
55:50
Not 2100, just 2050. And we'll come back by the way,
55:53
in 25 years and in episode 10,000 and two or something.
55:57
And we'll, we'll see how well you did.
55:59
Oh my God, can we do like 20-30? I'd feel maybe a little bit 2015
56:05
years. I mean, I'll start with climate.
56:07
I think that we're likely to be above 2° of warming in 2050.
56:11
And I think that that will, as I sort of said earlier, will have
56:17
meaningful, quite damaging effects that those looking
56:22
closely will be able to see quite clearly and be quite
56:25
horrified by and which many of the rest of us will find ways to
56:29
avoid really reckoning with. I think that I find both stories
56:34
of that, the Chinese century and the resilient American empire,
56:39
both to be a little threadbare and I don't know exactly where
56:44
that pulls us. For geopolitics.
56:46
I have my heartstrings pulled by those who talk about the rise of
56:50
the global South and a sort of revival of the non alignment
56:55
movement and a new bricks powerhouse, but I find those
56:59
narratives a little simplistic too.
57:01
And so on. Geopolitics.
57:03
I don't really know, except to say that it doesn't seem likely
57:08
to me that the projection for that future that we might have
57:11
made in 2014 or 2015, imagining the Millennium Development Goals
57:17
and the Paris Accords bringing about something like a stronger
57:22
and more cohesive one World government.
57:24
I don't think that that's likely to play out.
57:25
I think we're likely to see a more fractured, balkanized
57:29
world. I'm personally skeptical of a
57:34
lot of the most dramatic predictions about artificial
57:38
intelligence. I think that there's an awful
57:41
lot that machine learning and AI is already doing that's really
57:44
powerful and important in terms of drug discovery, in terms of
57:48
big data processing on the kind of climate and energy side, in
57:51
terms of finding deposits of important minerals, in terms of
57:55
balancing really erratic grids. Like all of that is already
57:59
happening and very important. But the LLMS that we've so
58:03
focused our attention on over the last couple of years, I
58:06
don't feel confident saying that they've had a ceiling and are
58:09
not going to get us to a meaningfully new artificial
58:12
intelligence future. But I'm skeptical that we are
58:15
heading in that direction in the in the immediate future.
58:17
I think that it's quite possible that five or eight years ago,
58:20
years from now, we look back and think of this period as a one in
58:25
which many, far too many people were far too sure that that
58:29
technological revolution was going to be existential then
58:32
fundamental. And I think on many other fronts
58:37
one could say similar things. I think that that's on some
58:39
level a good model for or good cut and paste version of my
58:44
answer across areas, which is just there will be changes.
58:50
There will be changes that when we look at them from the Earth,
58:53
if we were to look at them in 2025, we would think that is
58:57
really dramatic. But almost certainly when we're
59:01
living through them in 2035 or 2045 or 2050, they feel a lot
59:06
more normal. And I think ultimately that's
59:09
the sort of meta prediction that I would make, that we won't be
59:14
on the other side of a massive singularity, whether that's
59:17
about AI or about Chinese hegemony or climate apocalypse.
59:24
But we will be living in a world that has both discontinuities
59:29
and continuities to the present, and that those people living in
59:32
it will be much more aware of the continuities than the
59:36
discontinuities. And no nuclear war.
59:40
You tell me, Mark. Well, I mean, I, I sort of said
59:46
in my book that if you try to quantify the chance of nuclear
59:49
war by, by adding together 1% per year, which is sort of what
59:53
many experts think, you get to about a 2/3 likelihood of
59:56
nuclear war over centuries. So from 20, well, from 1945 to
59:59
2045. But I don't know, it feels
1:00:02
pessimistic. I, I, I know we've come very
1:00:04
close to it in the past, but. Somehow I still deep down think
1:00:08
that humans aren't that stupid to to press the button.
1:00:12
I think that sort of summarizes our conversation in a nutshell,
1:00:15
which is to say somebody somewhere came up with this
1:00:18
figure which you can use in a kind of crude mathematical way
1:00:22
to get to a quite scary vision of the future.
1:00:27
And that is one way of quote, UN quote, modeling the future.
1:00:30
And you might even say that there are those who say that it
1:00:33
is more responsible to work that way, to kind of isolate a
1:00:36
particular mathematical unit that you feel confident in and
1:00:40
then sort of work out words from there.
1:00:42
Or you could say, since we dropped the first nuclear bombs,
1:00:47
we haven't dropped others on human populations.
1:00:50
And that's a better way of thinking about this particular
1:00:53
future. And we probably shouldn't be too
1:00:55
confident that nobody will ever do it ever again.
1:00:58
I think I would agree with that. But I also think like when I'm
1:01:01
talking, when I think about adding up like in a spreadsheet,
1:01:03
1% every year, it just feels like so abstracted from the
1:01:08
actual reality of decision making as it will be undertaken
1:01:13
by anyone relevant in those rooms that it feels, yeah, just
1:01:19
like guesswork that we're pretending has a degree of
1:01:23
precision that human forecasting can't possibly actually fulfill.
1:01:29
And just finally, have you got another book in the offing?
1:01:32
I hope that by 2050 I will have produced another.
1:01:35
Book well, well, well, I mean, look, thanks so much, David.
1:01:44
It's been an absolute Tour de force and I'm super, super
1:01:47
grateful to for joining us and for helping to, well, save the
1:01:51
world from bad ideas. Thanks so much for having me.
1:01:54
Really great to talk and I appreciate the time and your
1:01:56
wisdom on all this as well. Thanks so much for listening to
1:02:01
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