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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome back to Firewall. I'm your host, Bradley Tusk. My guest today is David Wallace Wells. A lot of you already know who he is. He's an amazing opinion columnist for the New York Times. So, David, thanks for joining us.
- [00:18]
B
Great to be here.
- [00:19]
A
So, you know, you're kind of known, I think, for a lot of your climate work more than anything else. But the reason I asked you to come back on, and you were on once a couple years ago, is you wrote this piece not long ago about kind of vibe shift that just, I thought was utterly fascinating. And it wasn't sort of climate specific, but. But one, congrats on writing. It was rare that something, like, stops me in my tracks, and it did. So why don't we just start with, like, for the people who didn't get a chance to read it yet. What's the thesis?
- [00:51]
B
The basic idea is, like, a lot of people, I woke up, you know, in whatever the election day, the day after election day in 2024, feeling like Liberal America had lost and that we had just lived through a period in which Democrats had won the popular vote in seven of eight elections. They dominated popular culture. Even though Trump had won in 2016, it still felt in a certain way like Obama's America. And that was an anomaly. And there was an election, and Trump won the reelection, and it seemed to carry a whole lot of cultural weight.
- [01:23]
A
Wait.
- [01:23]
B
It wasn't just because he won. It was because he'd won the popular vote. It was because he had done much better with black and brown and young voters. It was because he had the support of all of these people in Silicon Valley, which seemed to herald this new era of moneyed Republicanism. And it was because when you took the temperature of the culture, whether it was in podcasts or music, it sort of felt like the wind was blowing in a different direction than it had for a very long time. And. And I think that was, like, the overwhelming mood of the country between the time of the election and when Doge really got to work in the spring. And if you fast forward now and try to take the same temperature of the country, I think you see that that was just not a lasting realignment. It wasn't a Reagan revolution. It wasn't even really an Obama revolution. It was kind of a passing thing that looks a lot more ephemeral now. And the thing that illustrated that to me most clearly, I mean, we could talk about the vote shifts and, you know, the politics of Silicon Valley, all the rest of it, but the thing that illustrated it Most was Trump tried to throw this 250th celebration for America, and it was just embarrassing. I mean, Fox News was there.
- [02:32]
A
That Cash Patel's girlfriend is really talented.
- [02:34]
B
They had to cancel, like, the whole lineup of the singers that they booked, even though they booked a pathetic lineup of singers. Like, it was, like, Vanilla Ice and Milli Vanilli. That's not better than Trump could have done in 2017.
- [02:46]
A
I think it was only half a Milli Vanilla.
- [02:47]
B
Right? The living half.
- [02:48]
A
Yeah. Mistaken. Weren't they exposed as lip synchros to begin with?
- [02:52]
B
Yeah.
- [02:53]
A
Yes. So why not get the actual person that's saying, bradley, you sold fashion. Okay.
- [02:59]
B
No, but I mean, you know, this is, like, people made fun of Trump's lack of cultural reach in the first cycle when it was like, the best guy he'd get for the convention is, like, Scott Baio. And now here we are, and we're supposed to be living in a new Trump era, a new MAGA era, and he's actually not improved at all. And then they had this state fair, and Fox News, like, set up their, you know, their shows to show, and it's like, you know, all of the anchors are sitting right in front of the mall, and there's just nobody there. And that was striking to me because I remember in the 2017 inauguration, there was all this fight about how many people showed up to celebrate Trump, and he was exaggerating the numbers, and Democrats were like, he's lying about the numbers. I looked back, and it was like 600,000 people came to that inauguration. There were, like, 500 people who were on the National Mall for the 250th. And I just think there's a lot that's changed over this last 18 months. The air has really gone out of the Trump balloon. That's not to say that he hasn't changed the course of history, American history, in some ways. But, like, if we told ourselves a year and a half ago that we were at the beginning of a new political era when MAGA was ascendant, I just don't think that's the case anymore.
- [04:07]
A
Right. And also, I have noticed over the years that every time someone on either side, whether it's Carl over David Axelrod or whoever's like we are now, have defeated the other party in a permanent majority, like, that's never true. Right. So when you talk about liberalism, do you think about it more as a specific set of policies or more as a view that the institutions and rule of law that have basically been the under kind of lying structure of this country for 250 years is kind of how things should work.
- [04:44]
B
I mean, I think both things are important ingredients. But you kind of illustrate an interesting contrast, which is to say, when I was speaking a minute ago, I was talking about basically the kind of Obama view that, you know, the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.
- [04:58]
A
Right.
- [04:58]
B
Not about the health of America's institutions. And America's institutions, arguably.
- [05:03]
A
I'm not funny when you just said that.
- [05:05]
B
Yeah.
- [05:05]
A
I interpreted it the other way, which was if you have a set of institutions and rule of law that you live by, you might not like the specifics at any given moment, but it eventually does land in the right place.
- [05:18]
B
And, you know, that was. That's the dream.
- [05:20]
A
Yeah.
- [05:22]
B
But I would say, I mean, one of the things that's happened in this Trump era, which I would, you know, going back to 2016, not just since 2025, is that those institutions are really suffering. And, and that is not just institutions in government where you had Doge just cutting so much capacity out of the scientific establishment, et cetera, but also in the private sector. I mean, the way that American law firms, the American university, remade itself to accommodate Trumpism, I think was really bad. And I think it's really bad because of exactly what we're seeing now, where they thought they were taking the. They were like, put their finger in the wind and saw which way the wind was blowing, and. And they were kind of wrong. And now it's like, if the University of Chicago is no longer admitting graduate students because they needed to redesign their graduate program to accommodate a more MAGA America, or a bunch of Ivy League universities are searching for new presidents because they had to fire the presidents because they weren't MAGA enough, that was probably a bad bet. Just in terms of taking the mood of the country. Now, what does this mean about whether people trust the Supreme Court or trust Congress or trust the doj, you know, in the long term, I think that damage is going to last, not disappear, even if, you know, Democrats come back into power. And I think more broadly, at the cultural level, it's like, when I think about, you know, AI and the way that that's remaking our world, I do worry that, like, the average American citizen who is pretty worried, doesn't actually feel like government is capable of taking control of this at all. And if you think back to, like, the way that, you know, George W. Bush, like, banned funding for stem cell research and that last a few years, it really changed the course of American scientific, you know, the progress of American scientific research. In part that happened because we, we trusted or we believed that politicians had that power and that through public pressure they could be, you know, brought to like. But they just. People don't believe that anymore. Right.
- [07:24]
A
So let me give you a somewhat alternate take on your take.
- [07:28]
B
Yeah.
- [07:28]
A
Which is that Trump is obviously sort of a caricature of life in every conceivable way. And therefore, because everything he does is so extreme and over the top, there was obviously an embrace in it by the public choosing to reelect him against all sort of logic in many ways. And then the rejection of it that you kind of explained really well in the piece. Here's a different approach. Curious when you think about it, which is Trump is less the creator of this as the ultimate manifestation of it, meaning that since the early 1960s, the underlying approach to life in American society has been different. Meaning that the baby boomers, while their worldview did probably lead to important advances in individual rights, in many ways was a culture of individualism and I would argue selfishness in many ways too, that led to the erosion of trust in institutions, whether it is government. And so like you said, people don't feel like government can regulate AI. But that is not because Trump himself is such a clown show, although he is. But it's the product of 60 years of this mentality of loss of faith in higher ed, like you said, and media and Wall street and the church and everything else.
- [08:44]
B
Yeah, People talk a lot about institutional decline and attribute it to like this last 10 year period or even like the last 5 year period. They talk about how the pandemic destroyed trust. But when you look at the actual surveys, it's like everything is in steady decline since the late 60s.
- [08:57]
A
Yeah, basically, since I would argue where Vietnam obviously was in and of itself, it was terrible before kind of our time. But it also was the first time that I think the government lied to the people and they could on television see that they were being lied to.
- [09:13]
B
And it's the second part of it that's maybe more important because there were always lies.
- [09:16]
A
Right now that the lies didn't exist is that they were exposed in a way not unlike your point about the Fox anchors being on the mall. And you know what they're saying is not true because there's only five people in the background. And that kind of led to this steady state of a shift in perspective from a buy in to the collective good, which obviously was in many ways narrow and excluded a lot of people. So you can't say that it was in any way perfect or even close to it, but nonetheless it did feel like up until that point there was some sense of a greater hold than just your own individual needs at that moment into a zero sum mentality where, you know, life became about what you could get personally at the expense of everyone else. And it went from a theory of like your, you know, your colleague as for client would say abundance to well, his specific context of housing, but overall to one of zero sum where it's like the only way purpose in life is to succeed and success means the accumulation of wealth and status and doing what you want and you're in competition with everyone else. And I would argue that Trump is the ultimate manifestation of a zero sum mentality and its logical conclusion. Right?
- [10:25]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think that that is perfectly persuasive account of this recent history and I do think the zero sum part of it is really important. And there's been actually some pretty interesting research that I think has been somewhat misinterpreted on this question, which is to say we can say pretty definitively that like the zero sum view of the world is growing over time. And a lot of people have said, well, how are we ever going to get out of this hole if that's happening, if people keep, keep feeling more acquisitive, more competitive. And that's true on some level, but it's also the case that that mentality growing matches perfectly with like the decline of GDP growth rates over time. So basically, like what, however fast GDP was growing when you were a kid, you are more likely to be have a positive some view of the world. And as that's declined over the decades, people have a more zero sum view of the world. And that's on some level a rational response to material conditions.
- [11:14]
A
Yes. Though interestingly, because in not the GDP growth is sort of a fixed number and it's just a redistribution of a pie. But in many ways the upside and downside of globalization is billions of billions of people who lived in extreme poverty all over the world no longer do, which is great. But as a result their GDP is higher, our GDP is lower compared to relative to before. And therefore that produces the condition that you talked about, which is that in order to make the world better overall, we have to be able to make do.
- [11:48]
B
Yeah. Although it's also true in within the country. I mean, some of the stuff that I like pops up to me more and more when I'm thinking about the depressing state of American political culture is that this economist, Raj Shetty, does this work about opportunity. And he shows that babies that were born right after World War II in America had a 90% chance of out earning their parents in inflation adjusted terms. And in later generations It's 50, 50. So now it's like the idea that you could reliably count on every generation being better. We are richer over time. But when you compare yourself to your parents, there are a lot of people.
- [12:20]
A
How much of that, though, from, in your view, is the product of a structurally flawed system here compared to if the wealth that we had then becomes in many ways shared with the rest of the world? In order for other people to not have the worst of the worst, we have to be able to sort of have a little less. Like, there's an argument that that is not only a logical conclusion, which is what I think Trump would say of, of globalism and free trade and everything else, but also in many ways, I think you could argue that it is the just and moral outcome of all of it. You know, Raj Chetty, I think, sort of posits a lot of his work around kind of morality. And this is moral and this is not moral, but perhaps the most moral thing is that Americans only have a 50% chance of out earning their parents. But 3 billion people in Southeast Asia and Africa and Latin America now have longer life expectancy and drinking water and electricity and everything else. Like, is that inherently a bad thing?
- [13:17]
B
Well, I just wonder. Wonder whether one thing is how much one thing is related to the other. You know, it's like if we think about the huge decline in global poverty over the last generation or two, like the lion's share of that happened in China. That system was. Did benefit from globalization. It did produce.
- [13:32]
A
And India, a lot of you too, right?
- [13:34]
B
I think it's like 70% of the decline in extreme poverty was just inside China.
- [13:38]
A
China, yeah.
- [13:38]
B
I mean, you can measure it in different ways, but you know, and still
- [13:42]
A
like a fifth of the world.
- [13:43]
B
Yeah, no, I mean, that's. That is like on some level the story of this period.
- [13:47]
A
Yeah.
- [13:48]
B
In America, we talk about it as the age of global. We talk about is the end of history, et cetera. But it's like in China, there's no end of history. They are like racing forward into the future, even though their growth rates are also declining. There's an enormous amount of transformation there that we should probably celebrate. The question is how much of that is dependent on America stagnating and getting. And especially America actually isn't stagnating. We're growing faster than any of the other developed countries in the world. But there's a lot of frustration among Americans because I think primarily we don't experience economic growth, you know, on a spreadsheet. We think about how we're doing compared to how we expected to do. And we could think about how much faster our lives are changing compared to how previous generations are changing. And that's all disappointing. But I just want to say one other thing that we skipped past a few minutes ago before getting to zero sum, which is that even though we have declining trust in institutions and declining trust in politics, very recently on the Democratic side of the aisle, there was still faith that, like, government could do big things. Barack Obama did do health care. Yeah. Not perfectly, but he did.
- [14:51]
A
It was a genuine big thing.
- [14:53]
B
Joe Biden did try to do something about climate change in a big way.
- [14:56]
A
Yeah.
- [14:57]
B
And now we're, like hearing all of these people who are trying out for president on the Democratic side, and they're all just talking about tax cuts. Well, yeah, they just want to. They want to tax the rich more so they could tax the middle class less.
- [15:06]
A
And it's like, yeah, there's a wealth transfer. It's. It doesn't. She doesn't.
- [15:09]
B
It's a very different thing.
- [15:10]
A
Right.
- [15:11]
B
Yeah.
- [15:11]
A
Well, that. It's interesting. So, so, so on that point, and this wasn't my insight, I'd heard Ian Bremmer talk with this on a podcast. But my assumption was, okay, Trump loses, and the next president, who's, I think, almost assuredly gonna be Democrat as long as AOC is not the nominee, but let's just even say a Republican other than Vance will naturally return to the norms and rule of law, which to me is in some ways even more important than any individual policy or anything else. And Bremer made the point to say, if you're a Democrat and you see, if you're Trump, if you just bully and bluster your way through it, you can do whatever you want. You can take whatever you want. You behave however you want. You can respect or not respect any particular institution or rule however you want. Why wouldn't they follow that lead? Perhaps with a different set of policies, but nonetheless a behavior that is not really all that different? How much do you worry about that? Do you think that? And if you talk about where Trump might have had a truly lasting impact, it might be on if the behavior and respect for all of law is permanently changed. That's really material.
- [16:17]
B
Yeah. I mean, I don't think. I think I have Too much faith in the Democratic Party to think that something like the corruption that we've seen under Trump would be recreated by a Democratic president at that scale. I mean, we're talking about, like, you know, billions of dollars.
- [16:30]
A
Yeah, but that's the least of our. I mean, as bad as it is, I would argue that's the least of our problems.
- [16:34]
B
But, you know, I do think that there is a. Yeah, there'. There's a. The, you know, the Overton window is shifted, the door is open, and I think many more kinds of corruption will be permitted. I think that, you know, not to make this. Not to focus on this as a moralistic issue. But it's like in the Biden years, we had a regulatory apparatus focused on crypto that treated it as worrisome. There's no way that that's going to be return because money is too present on the Democratic side. Like, that is just.
- [17:09]
A
Yeah. Although it's interesting on crypto specifically, which is that. Yes, but I would say there were two motivating factors. One was a sometimes inability of Democrats to read the room. Right. They're so sort of focused on, well, if you went to Yale and work at cap, and you can write in white papers and bullet points, yeah, you're smarter than everyone else. Crypto itself was the birth of, or came out of the frustration of the Great Recession in 2008 and a rejection of the institutions that people feel like are failing them. And when Biden, for example, told everyone inflation is not really a problem, you're wrong. They're like, go fuck yourself and they vote for the other guy. Right.
- [17:52]
B
Yeah. No, I mean, I'm not trying to make a case for more aggressive crypto regulation. I'm just saying that not that long ago, Democrats felt that they could run against money in a direction that they thought was important. And I just don't think that the party is capable of that anymore.
- [18:08]
A
Well, but they're running against it. Look, they're all. Because of what Fair Shake did. They're all freaked out about it. And look, on climate, we're running this campaign. You guys written about it a bunch of times. On the solar side, that's where we took out Chip Roy. And honestly, that was modeled on Fair Shake. Right. But at the same time, I would argue that the behavior of the far left and the far right, I'm not even a member of a party, in many ways is the same thing, which is sowing fear and dissent and distrust to consolidate power for individuals. And I'm not equating Zoram and DABI and AOC with Donald Trump in terms of their sort of corruption. But in terms of the using censorship and intolerance to gain power, I'm not sure that either side is that radically different.
- [18:59]
B
I mean, I see it differently. I think that there are figures on the left who want to do damage to the American establishment. That's absolutely true. When I look at the way that Zoran has run New York, I don't see that as the way that he's running New York. And I do think that this is a pattern that applies. This actually brings us back to where we started, which is that in the aftermath of the election last year in 2024, there was a lot of self criticism on the left about how did this party fail to defeat Donald Trump a second time when he was so unpopular. I mean, literally, you look at the approval ratings for Donald Trump, he's in the positive zone for one week, election day in a 10 year period. And a lot of Democrats were like, you know, the Democratic Party was like, went way too far left. We were like crazy woke. And on some level that is an accurate description of the cultural move of liberals and progressives in this period, but it wasn't really a description of the party. It's like, was Joe Biden really like making a fuss about trans issues? I mean, I have my own perspective on trans, but you know, just as a description of like the state of play, it's like, was he out there campaigning about trans rights every day? No.
- [20:21]
A
I mean, Joe Biden was uncomfortable with abortion.
- [20:23]
B
Yeah. I mean, and you know, on many of those issues, like the party actually occupied a pretty conservative position in the range of like political feeling on the left. It was just that the voters had surged in a left wing way and that did alienate some people. Like people got really irritated about their HR departments and like what the way they were being policed in the. And this is a big problem for the Democratic Party in general, which is like, if you think of like liberalism or even the, or Democrats as being represented by the liberals that you work with or the people that you see on social media or your neighbors, it may well be the case that you are turned off by how left wing they are. But when you look at the way that the party's actually operating in power, it just seems really hard for me. I'm more to the left of you, but it seems really hard for me to see that as like this party went insane. It seems like the party is still like the party of Clinton and Obama to me, you know.
- [21:16]
A
Right. And do you think so it seems logical that in general, if you take the unhappiness of America, even independent of Trump, and the structural flaws that make it so hard to solve problems, government, even if you're trying to. And occasionally you can get something big done, like the aca, although we'll see
- [21:37]
B
if anything like that ever gets done again.
- [21:39]
A
Yeah, well, I think, look, I would argue that, that if you accept that politicians, by and large, kind of regardless of party or level of government or where they're from or anything else, are basically seeking reelection at all times at the expense of anything else, it doesn't mean that they don't have other views that they care about. But it is very rare that they will sacrifice their chance of winning a reelection to advance those views. And in a world of gerrymandering, all the primaries matter. One primary turnout is typically about 10%. Then by definition the 10% who actually does bother to vote calls the shots on everything. And if those tend to be the people at the ideological extremes or whatever, special interest knows how to move money and votes in a low turnout primary that dictates not just who wins office, but then what they do once they're in office. And if, you know, it's funny, cuz if you take most issues, there is a solution that 80% of us could agree upon, Right. If you take intoleration, 80% of us would say you shouldn't have open borders, but immigration is a good thing. It's kind of what's been our country, what it is. Or 80% of us would say if someone has a gun legally, you shouldn't storm into their home and confiscate it. But it doesn't mean you should have to walk into a Walmart and buy an AK47. But if only 10% on each side are voting in the primaries and only the primaries matter and politicians are governing for that 10% because that's what they need to do to stay in office, then I think you're right, which is that structurally it is almost impossible to get to that 80% solution.
- [23:08]
B
I mean, you're talking about structural problems among the electeds, but I think there are structural problems among the voting population, which is to say, like, I think that most people don't really expect change. They don't even demand change from the people that they elect. And what they want is culture war. And as we people want that, I
- [23:26]
A
think the people who, I would argue the people who tend to vote want that on the left and the right and most people don't. They find the culture war. So fair enough. So it's such a turn off that they just tune out entirely.
- [23:38]
B
Yeah, fair enough. But the ultimate. In both cases, there's little expectation for policy change. And then when you do see meaningful policy change, you know, it's like the Republican Party spent a decade trying to undo the aca. You know, Donald Trump was running it on repealing it in 2016, and, you know, they did take a hatchet to the IRA after Biden left office. They've actually done less damage to it than seems was gonna be the case at the outset. And more of it endures because as it turns out, green energy actually is pretty popular. But they tried to undo it. And I just feel both parties, the Democratic Party too, is learning that lesson and is like, why even bother, Right?
- [24:17]
A
I do think, and this is probably naive of me, but the network effect could work the other way too. Meaning that if you could change the structural problems that I was talking about in the way that I'm personally trying to do it is through mobile voting. Because I believe that, you know, the vast majority of people clearly will not go out of their way to vote. But if you can do it on your phone while you're waiting for your coffee, can we get turnout from 10 to 30? Yeah, I think so. And I think that having spent a lifetime in government politics, politicians, they're never gonna be different people or better people, but they are gonna always logically follow their incentives. And if all of a sudden 30 means that it is more in their interest to try to work together, because now they're not just governing for a small alienated group, they can start to get some things done. And my hope would be that could start to change perceptions of the efficacy of government, because now people see it probably starting more at a local or state level before, I mean, you look
- [25:14]
B
at Daniel Lurie in San Francisco or Zohar, and here the people that are, like, seeing what they're doing, that's, like, visible what they're doing in a way that it doesn't seem visible what DC Is doing.
- [25:21]
A
Yeah. And that's partly also just like I happen to have worked in city, state and federal government. And like, in city government, it is tangible and visceral. Right. Whereas at the federal level, it's so I remember when I spent two years working for Chuck, and when I was done, I went back. It's like, you know what? I know that we had a press conference at least twice a day because I was a scopster out there did a single thing ever become a law. And the answer was no, not a single. It was besides the point, right? The point was to get you guys to write, to get the cameras to show up. Whatever it was, it wasn't.
- [25:53]
B
And those incentives have probably gotten worse since.
- [25:56]
A
But at the same time, I do believe that technology, which in many ways has brought about some of the problems you were talking about, which is part of the dissatisfaction we feel is that we now see a whole world of what we think we should have and don't have. And even though we don't actually need most of it, we feel deprived and therefore aggrieved as a result. It has also I think in a way changed and significantly increased the ability of a regular person who is, you know, motivated and organized to get things done in government. Meaning that in the old days if you want to get something done, you had to find the guy that knew the guy, pay the guy and hope that it all worked out. Nobody got in trouble, right? And now because of technology, the ability to reach and influence elected media advocacy groups, all these other stakeholders in the system is significantly greater. Like to me that became clear like I ram is, you might know the campaigns to legalize Uber, in many ways that was sort of the first manifestation of it where Taxi were the ultimate insiders, right? They had money and they had political muscle, but that was it. No one liked that. They want hated them, but. And we were a tiny little startup at the time, didn't have any of that. But what we did have was a significantly better product that once people tried it, we're like, oh, I prefer this to that. And through the app we were able to mobilize millions of people and kind of use technology in the outside game to defeat the inside game. And I do think that there's more opportunity than people realize. I'm actually about to start beta testing of an app that we built, Ganimai foundation that basically lets anyone see if you want to change a rule or a law regulation, much more on the local level. So you want to ban cell phones at your kids school or get a stop sign on the corner or more trash pickups. I don't think this would work for natural of Congress. You put in, okay, I want to ban cell phones in my kids school. Where do you live? Flagstaff, Arizona. Okay, here's the current rule, here's what it says, here's what it would need to say, here's who could change it, here's how you reach them, here's what you said to them. Here's how you handle earned media, social media, paid media, grassroots polling, Apple, whatever might be relevant for you as an individual or as a small group of people with presumably no money or very little money to do it. And here's how you can use technology and organization to effectuate change in the form of new laws or regulations or policies that I think was impossible before. So whether it is something like mobile voting that can change the underlying incentives that might get politicians to choose to work together simply because it becomes in their political interest, or this tool that we're right now calling, you know, how to create societal change, which is a terrible name which would show people like, hey, you can actually do this. I have this hope, again, probably totally naive, but that there is actually the ability to use technology to fix some of the same problems that it has helped create in the first place.
- [28:51]
B
Yeah, I mean, I just wonder about, I think about, for instance, like, what happened with the IRA under Biden, where, you know, the, the operating thesis that so many people came into the Biden administration in 2021 with carried over. They thought they learned the lesson of the Obama years. And the lesson was we need to show people the impact. Of what? Of the laws that we're passing. And once they see that impact, they will be persuaded. And that was like, literally, if you talk to high up people in the Biden administration, that's all that they said as they were going. It was like, we learned our lesson, we're gonna govern differently this time. And they passed. They threw a lot of political capital behind this climate bill, the ira. A huge amount of money went out the door and the public didn't notice.
- [29:36]
A
Right, but that's right, Totally true. But I would say two things. One is there's a real mentality, especially in Washington, that you solve the problem by passing the law or spending more money as opposed to like, did it actually then result in the society.
- [29:52]
B
Yeah, there needs to be a lot more of that. And actually, I think the story of the IRA's failure, as I was saying a few minutes ago, has been somewhat oversold because it turns out that when Trump came in and tried to cancel all those tax credits, people were like, actually, no, we like those tax credits. But nevertheless, there's a basic idea that once the government can do things, show their progress to the public and get rewarded for it. And I'm not sure that that is. I think that that mechanism may have broken down too much, especially. And not to sound like too much of a, you know, whatever, but it's like on this two to four year
- [30:24]
A
cycle, it's like, yeah, for sure at the federal level. But, you know, you mentioned Dan Lurie earlier, and I do think that in San Francisco you do start to see that people feel like, okay, the city's different, the city's different, the city is better. There was a particular political mentality that we, that really didn't work. And it turns out pretty much at the end of the day, everyone's like, yeah, I don't like this. And then you like someone differently, who governed differently, and you're starting to see the result. Now. There's always going to be people who are winners and losers in any given policy choice. So. And you have to always be mindful of selling it. Like, you know, I come out of the Bloomberg world and I think one of the reasons to build a Blasio one was while Mike Bloomberg, his third term was still better governance than any of the other alternative. Now, I'm biased. I ran the campaign, but still, it did also produce both the Blasio, because 12 years had enough people feeling like, okay, this thing that I don't like about Bloomberg is significant enough that it grew to a point where they picked the alternative. Right. But I do think that again, maybe, at least at the local level, some of those norms of government is particularly totally hopeless and pathetic and useless. You do see examples of change, right? You see school systems where people buy into a different belief and all of that. But, right. Once we get to sort of a federal level that gets.
- [31:47]
B
Well, and then there's just. There is, I think, a kind of an idea vacuum. I mean, when I think about, you know, so we're, we're, we're looking at 2028, thinking Democrats are probably in a pretty good position to, to win the White House in 2028, going into 2029. I think back in time to like, where the Democrats were in 2006 or where the Democrats were in 2018. They had a lot of big ideas. Like, you know, Barack Obama wanted to solve climate change in 2006. He wanted to do healthcare in 2006. Democrats in 2018. I mean, Joe Biden had like the most expensive Democratic agenda you could imagine when he came into office. And now I look around and I'm like, you know, I find some of these leaders appealing rhetorically politically, but I'm like, what is the program that they're proposing here? If it comes to pass, the Democrats even have a trifecta. I mean, this is not gonna happen. But if you imagine even that they get into a filibuster proof situation like Obama had, what even would they try to do? They would just try to like fix Obamacare.
- [32:43]
A
Yeah, no, I think that's right. And I think the biggest example of that and something you've been writing about also, which is, you know, around AI, AI is really, really unpopular. I think in large part based on anxiety as opposed to reality. It doesn't mean the anxiety will become reality, but you know, the fear of job displacement is palpable.
- [33:01]
B
I think it's overstated.
- [33:02]
A
Yeah. But when you ask people really on either side of the aisle, like, okay, politician, like how do we fix this? You know the answer I always get put worker training. It's like, all right, do you want to have 200 million plumbers? Like, clearly, like there might be some rule for that, but it's highly overstated. I mean, I would argue that there are. I'm not running for office, I guess, doesn't matter what I think. But there are like three underlying things that if you were to do could really reshape society. Meaning take a country that is so wildly abundant and yet so unhappy. Right. We're 24th in the world, happiest report in 62nd for people under the age of 25. And that is one, something like Universal basic income. There are different ways to tax and appropriate funds, but to give people a sense of okay, there's a basic security net that even if you do lose your job to AI or whatever else. And look, you can like Andrew Yang or not, but he was onto something when he wrote, you know, his book in 2012.
- [34:03]
B
Well, we'll actually see if in 20 years people haven't lost any jobs. Who knows, like maybe that will end up being.
- [34:08]
A
But even now, now I think that even. Look, it's interesting. The people on the far left who tend to do the most agitating are not poor, right. And they have more than, you know, they have Netflix subscriptions and gym memberships and they go to vacation and they're really not suffering in any way. But there are a lot of people in this country who truly are poor, right. Who don't have enough food, who don't have basic healthcare, all of those things. And to me, if you were able to give people some relief of the anxiety of if something catastrophic happens to me, I'll be okay, or if people don't have anything enough to be okay, combined with one of the real costs of this sort of Trumpian zero sum mentality is it doesn't lead to happiness. Right. And if you think that Money and status is what's going to make you happy. You almost always disappointed because hedonic treadmill sort of definitionally said.
- [35:00]
B
And it's so individualistic, right?
- [35:02]
A
Totally. Whereas, you know, if you look at Israel and putting aside whatever the various debates are for people under the age of 25, it's the second happiest country in the world according to the World Habits Report. And I would. The reason why is because they have to serve in the military. There's a shared sense of purpose and meaning, whether you agree or not with.
- [35:21]
B
Well, even beyond the military stuff, it's just a much thicker social network in America. Everybody is atomized and atomized.
- [35:28]
A
I mean, I would require for me, and I would love to see one of the candidates for national public service, which not military, because we don't need 20 million people in the military, but picking up trash in parks, you know, meant tutoring kids, going to the senior center, not even because it provides free labor for a problem, but because it starts to teach you that you feel your best when you feel of service to others. And it starts to cut against the sort of Instagram mentality. It's all just about, you know, likes and dollars and whatever else. And then the third would be, you can't make politicians different or better people. So that gets back to mobile voting, which is you have to align our policy incentives with their political incentives. And that means that you, if you're not going to get rid of gerrymandering, you have to make primary turnout materially higher. And I think you can only do to that go to do that if you meet the people where they are, which is on their phones, like, I love open primaries, my choice voting and all that stuff. But if you still have to go up, show, not take your kid to school on a Tuesday and show up somewhere, you're probably not gonna do it. You know, you'll do it for the presidential election. But that's kind of really, really it. So I think, to me, at least, there are ideas that could get towards the larger societal problems that are making this country feel bad enough, that there is this constant anger and dysfunction and polarization. I agree with you. I don't see the kid. Instead they're leaning into that as opposed to saying, you know, how do we solve for it?
- [36:55]
B
Well, I mean, I think what, what someone who is giving a more generous read would say is that perhaps the underlying fact here is income inequality. And by that I don't even mean concretely the difference between the.01% and the 90th percentile and the 50th percentile. I mean, the perception that, like, all of the country's wealth is being hoarded by a very small number of people. And, you know, on some level, punitive wealth tax is a solution to that problem. And it may not be, you know, you know, optimal measured in other ways, but it may prove politically powerful because that's really what people want is not. Is not even something that changes the fabric of the country. It's just to see some of that wealth liquidated. Yeah.
- [37:39]
A
As long as it is, in my view, leading ultimately to more money to help poor people. So I'll give you examples. One of the things we do out of our foundations, we funded and run most of the campaigns around the country to mandate universal school meals. And we did a poll in New Jersey, and it was one of the most depressing things I've seen in a long time, which was 43% of respondents did not support using more public money to feed hungry kids. And that was true on both sides. Right. And on the left, people supported closing corporate tax loopholes more than feeding kids. And to me, it's like, well, the fucking point of closing the tax loopholes generate more money to then feed the kids.
- [38:15]
B
What's the point?
- [38:16]
A
Who need it? And this is where sort of the regulatory taxation arbitrage becomes important. Right. So the California billionaires tax.
- [38:23]
B
Yeah.
- [38:24]
A
From a emotional standpoint, does some of what you're talking about. If ultimately it results in sending more wealth out of state and there's less total tax revenue over time to then pay for food stamps, Medicaid, public housing, things like that, you're sort of not really achieving the goal. Which is, again, to your point, why you. Why Washington is important? Because people might move their home from New York to Miami. They're probably not renouncing their U.S. citizenship.
- [38:50]
B
Yeah. I mean, one other aspect of this I think is really important, which we haven't touched on, is I think there have been pretty profound cultural effects coming out of the pandemic. And I do think that one of the things that happened there was we had a relatively brief period where we did quite a lot to protect one another. It was like a kind of national, genuine national performance of solidarity. In retrospect, it gets talked a lot about as though, you know, half the country was opposed to, like, lockdowns and hated it, but that wasn't what it was in 2020. That stuff really emerged at the end of 2020, into 2021, and for the first three to five months, like, people Were like. I mean, I wouldn't say happy, but they were like, they understood the importance of doing what was being done to protect one another. And then they kind of decided, like, I'm never going to do that again. Like that thing that I did where I prioritized the health of vulnerable people in the community over my own well being, that was a real burden and I fucking hated it. And I think more and more people do feel that way, even just like anecdotally. But when I also look at survey data, it's just like it feels like people, even on the left, even in the center left, they do not feel the same sense of solidarity or mutual obligation that they felt even five or eight years ago. And that is really bad. It is political. It has political elements, but it's also social.
- [40:06]
A
Well, right. It's right. It's not just right. Like, I was the gym right before this, and there was a guy using two machines at the same time with his stuff taped all over them. She couldn't even try to work.
- [40:16]
B
You just see that kind of stuff
- [40:17]
A
all the time, or people staring at their phones and blocking whatever entrance or whatever it is. Yeah, I mean, I think that is. So I was just in Copenhagen, in Stockholm, which is sort of held up as sort of the example. And I do think that they seem to function better in some ways. Have you ever seen an example of a pluralistic society where everyone has relatively equal rights and there is a true emphasis on the common good and the collective good? Because that, for example, in Copenhagen, yes, people do seem to have equal rights, and yes, there seems to be more emphasis on a collective good, but it's not really a pluralistic society. Right. Have you seen it? And do you think it's possible?
- [41:03]
B
You know, my mind goes to. My brother is always saying, My brother just. He lived in Massachusetts for a long time and he recently moved to Seattle. And he's just. He was always saying, when he was in Massachusetts, he was like, people on progressive governance, like, this is a paradise up here in Massachusetts. It's like, everybody's rich, the schools are good, the crime rate is low. Like, there's, you know, a real sense of, like, community and mutual obligation and like, you know, it's not a perfect place, but, you know, it's like when. Especially through the. The period when everybody was like, you know, look at how terrible New York is, look at how terrible San Francisco is. Crimes, every homelessness everywhere. He's like, Boston's fucking thriving. This is great. You know, at the national level, I think that's, you know, what everybody says about America is, it's a, you know, it is an unusual experiment. It's a much more complicated, complex place and it has produced a lot more social resentment than is produced in a more uniform community. When I think about, you know, the countries of Scandinavia, I think that they have done well. But yeah, it's been on the back of ethnic homogeneity and the kinds of, you know, healthy social bonds that we don't have here in America. And when I say that, I don't just mean like, yeah, it's not just about how diverse our country is and the racial resentments that that produces. It's also just the atomization that I was talking about a few minutes ago. I mean, I've been thinking about working on some stuff around the American mortality anomaly. Like how many more Americans die than die in other countries. People know a little bit like we've got a little life expectancy gap, but that sort of misstates the point. Like the point is that every single year more than half a million Americans die who would not die if our death rates matched the rates of other risks.
- [42:47]
A
These are deaths of despair or these are deaths of there everything.
- [42:50]
B
That's the most amazing thing. It's at every age from at least 0 to 65, and the gap really shrinks at 65 in part because that's when we get socialized medicine in America. It's at every education level, it's at every income level. We do worse health wise compared to the rich countries of the world. And it's by all these causes, it's gun violence, it's drug overdoses, but it's also heart disease. It's also most cancers, although we're doing better on smoking related cancers, on all other cancers, we're doing less well than these other places. And I think the, you know, my, my perspective on it is that we should actually start thinking of this as one of the things that makes America America. That we have this incredibly lethal country. You know, we think about America's distinctive qualities as its libertarianism, its emphasis on market economics, our diversity. But one of them might just be that we're, we're surrounded by much more death in part because we live in a, we live so far from one another. We don't have like the, you know, when you think about the stereotype of the, you know, the long lived Italian Nona or whatever, there's like 105 or, you know, that, you know, all of those people in the Mediterranean who are like living it's like those people have a strong sense of community. They live multi generationally, they're surrounded by people who love them in the place where they were born. And all that stuff really matters in America. We're cast across this vast country.
- [44:13]
A
But that's the paradox, right?
- [44:14]
B
Because.
- [44:14]
A
Yes, all true, but at the same time, 20, 30 minutes ago, you talked about how America still is outpacing everyone else and in many, like it's, you know. Yes, I think there are certainly, it's certainly possible that in many ways, sort of the people who, you know, live in the village, in Italy or in Copenhagen, whatever it is, are happier. On the flip side, I think there's only one meaningful tech company that's come out of Europe this century, which is Spotify. And basically this is sort of the American paradox. Right. We achieve these heights of greatness and ingenuity and achievement, by the way, not just technologically and economically, but also around scholarship and systems like government and capitalism and everything else, but also at the expense of the collective good in many ways.
- [45:04]
B
But it is possible. As a general rule. Of course, you're right, but it is also possible. The most significant technological development of this, of my lifetime is Ozempic.
- [45:15]
A
Yeah.
- [45:16]
B
And that was not an American invention.
- [45:18]
A
That's true, that's true. Well, and by the way, the less and less that we fund things like R and D, you know, like as, as a venture capitalist, you know, I like to think that, oh, we're the ones that are powering innovation. Like, not really. Like the early, early research happening at universities, generally funded by the government, are what really creates all of the science behind it. And then my founders take it and then do something with it to commercialize it in a way that might be incredibly useful for the world or might be a great company, but they didn't really discover it. Right. Most of the time, most of the time they're sort of taking what's already been done in a much earlier stage from an institutional perspective and then sort of adapting it from there.
- [45:59]
B
Well, there was also like a 10 or 15 year period when technology founders in Silicon Valley wanted to be seen as world historical shapers of the future. And yet the products that they were producing were, you know, made our lives a little better, but they weren't, you
- [46:15]
A
know, we wanted flying cars when we got 140 carats.
- [46:17]
B
Yeah. And I do think that we're now in an interesting different phase, not just with AI, but also, you know, drones and robotics and defense tech. There is a move towards embodied technology in Silicon Valley. And I think that those changes, if they, if they really do, you know, spread out through the world, will be considerably more visible. But when I hear founders today talking about how confused they are by public backlash, I'm like, well, you know, for a while, like, if you ask the average American what did technology do over the last 15 years, they're going to say, it gave me social media. That's the main thing that people think changed. And, you know, people get some benefit out of social media. It's not, you know, it's not a total bad. But like most, most people also think that there's some real downside costs to it. And that's a, that's not just a matter of the structure of innovation. It's also a matter of, you know, what is being prioritized, what kinds of, you know, what kinds of problems are being solved by technology and what we're prior, what the investors and innovators are prioritizing. And, you know, if you prioritize something that is a basically like an addiction machine for spending your time online.
- [47:24]
A
But there is also all the green energy and technologies that we talked about. And there is as much as I think.
- [47:29]
B
But to your point earlier, most of that progress over the last 15 years has been from China.
- [47:33]
A
A lot of it. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I also think, by the way, you guys, as the media wildly overstate just the role of politics in Silicon Valley one way or the other, you have a handful of people who back Trump and have gotten benefits from it, and you guys obsess about that. But Mark like to say that Mark Andreessen's affecting the tech world. It's that AZ16 is just funding tons of stuff for better or for worse, but doing it. It's not that he has Trump on speed dial. Like that stuff is very, very well.
- [48:02]
B
Also, as I mentioned in the article, like the, you know, at the level of voting, Silicon Valley, like actually barely moved from 2020 to 2024. I think it was like the total shift was like Trump got 3,500 more votes in those three counties.
- [48:15]
A
Yeah, yeah, I'm not sure that really in a lot of ways, sort of, as we head towards sort of the back end of the Trump term and sort of, you know, the endless obsession on who the next leader will be. I think in some ways, if you take the entirety of the discussion we've just had, it's really, is there someone who sees the world and the role of government as can we bring people together as opposed to exploiting their differences for individual gain? Can we take really, really big ideas that might not be particularly partisan or ideological, but just that are things that can really help people and advance them. Is there a truly great leader among them as opposed to a great politician? I don't know the answer to that question yet.
- [48:59]
B
I mean I would say I don't see much hope on the Republican side just putting my ideological question why would
- [49:04]
A
you really see more than two candidates at the moment?
- [49:07]
B
But I do think that there's a lot of enthusiasm especially among the kind of wonk class that got so excited about Obama around Jon also.
- [49:14]
A
Yeah, but do you think it's that cuz there's always a desperate as someone who has lived amongst the wonk class but sort of does not not count myself as a savior. They want a savior and they also desperately sounding smart is the number one currency of people like you. I don't mean you specifically.
- [49:31]
B
Yeah, yeah, totally.
- [49:31]
A
Right. And so if it's like we found the guy.
- [49:34]
B
Yeah. Like I literally have heard that from
- [49:37]
A
Democrats and that and that may or may not be true. I don't know But I, I worry a little bit that the identification of someone is a truly great leader that can bring people together, has the actual ability to do it, not just the smart savvy enough to say the right things dinners on the Upper east side and then the kinds of ideas that are transcend sort of partisan politics and all that stuff and by the way will return to a respect for the institutions and the rule of law. So for example, someone like Rahm Emanuel, I would argue would worry me quite a bit in that, you know, his policies might be more palatable to me. But would he be Trumpy in a lot of ways? Absolutely right. Rahm is about the accumulation of power and he's not stupid at all. And I think he probably would take a lot of what Trump did and adapt it in ways with different messaging. But at the end of the day.
- [50:34]
B
Well, Biden did actually the same I mean, you know, a lot of his industrial policy was basically learning from Trump's instinctive moves on China and trade. Yeah, yeah. I mean I, I, we will see.
- [50:47]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [50:49]
B
I mean the one thing that worries me is given how much power and capital is accumulating in Silicon Valley, especially around AI how those leaders are committed to a vision of a world ungoverned by politics.
- [51:04]
A
Yes. But two things. One, Alex Boris. Right. OpenAI propelled his campaign. Right. So the one thing I will tell you as someone who works either with or around these people, don't overestimate Them too much around all of this because a their political instincts are terrible. And not just sort of Boris, but the idea that they thought they could build all these data centers, impose these massive negative externalities and costs on everyone else and just not be held accountable for that shows in some ways how naive they are in many ways. But also I would argue, argue that actually because of technology, the role of money in politics is far less than people. I know for you guys it's a great narrative to complain about constantly at the time.
- [51:44]
B
You don't think it matters that much?
- [51:45]
A
I think it matters much less. I think Zoran is a perfect example of it, right? He spent 17 million between hard and soft money almost in 70s or kicked his ass. I think that grassroots and social, which are both very cheap, are a lot more powerful now than most paid media
- [52:01]
B
in terms of winning elections. But what about in terms of shaping policy?
- [52:04]
A
I think the same thing. I think that right now you have this. Still there's one group that sort of watched them because it's older, both in terms of the elected, the staff at the high levels and the political consultant types who still believe like oh, a TV ad that attacks you on NBC at 4, 6 o' clock is devastating, like not really because no one's fucking watching live TV anymore. And the vast majority of spend, whether it's electorally or on an influence campaign, like take the stuff we did to take our chip rock, right? All of our spend which was relatively limited, was ads that we made that were really, really attention grabbing. And you know, we only ran them on two places, truth, social and rumble. That's it. We don't bother with broadcast tv any of that stuff. And it worked, right? And we're doing more of those now on behalf of the solar industry. But like, so no, I actually do think that simply because of technological normative change where people are watching far less live television and the biggest cost driver is the fact that broadcast spectrum is definitely limited and therefore the supply demand makes it really expensive and inefficient. That's going away. And then direct mail is just a scam by political consultants that sucks up a lot of money but literally just goes straight in the trash. And I think as those consultants who sort of believe in those two things, both because they think it's the right way to win elections or win influence campaigns or, or because it makes a lot of money as they start to die off, I actually think the efficacy of money in politics will decline simply because of normative and technological change.
- [53:41]
B
So anyway, it's interesting because, I mean, the numbers are just getting.
- [53:45]
A
I know, but I think it's almost always.
- [53:46]
B
It's just wasted money.
- [53:48]
A
Yeah, for sure. So anyway, David, thank you. This was amazing. Other than just sort of reading your work in the Times, what are the best ways for people to follow you?
- [53:55]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think the Times is the best way. I've got a newsletter. It goes out every week. You know, Twitter active there. But just. Yeah, read the pieces.
- [54:04]
A
There we go. All right, David, thanks for joining us.
- [54:06]
B
Thanks for having me.
- [54:09]
A
Firewall is recorded at my bookstore, PNT Netware, located at 180 Orchard street on the lower east side of Manhattan. We'd love to hear from you with questions, feedbacks or idea for a guest. Just email me at Bradley Firewall Media or find me on link LinkedIn. And to keep up with what's on my mind and my latest writing, please follow my new substack@bradleytus.substack.com thanks again for listening.