About thirty years ago, a small computer graphics studio in Richmond, California, was struggling. Financial losses had forced a sell-off of the company’s hardware division. More than half of its employees had been sacked. The owner, a tech entrepreneur busy with other projects, was trying to find a buyer even as the company locked down the biggest animation deal it had ever signed.

Then came a film that would stun audiences and transform the industry forever: Toy Story, the world’s first CGI-animated feature. The company was, of course, Pixar, and with the winds of considerable critical and commercial success at its back, its owner, Steve Jobs, suddenly reconsidered his decision to sell.

Since then, a lot has changed in the animation world, even as Pixar has continued to ride . . . and ride . . . and ride its breakout hit. Putting aside the debate over whether Pixar is what it used to be, the studio does continue to reliably push industry boundaries—even on a fourth recycling of the same story; Toy Story 5 comes to theaters next week. (Those looking for a riskier move will have to wait until 2027 for Gatto, a reinvention of the studio’s signature visual style.)

If you go to see the latest Toy Story, pay special attention to a new character, Blaze. She’s a half-Black, half-Armenian eight-year-old, with long, curly, extraordinarily detailed hair that has already brought the internet to tears. Really.

So what’s the big deal about the hair?

Hair is hard to animate. Think of each individual strand as a tiny, independent object that needs to interact naturally with the countless other strands on our heads—not to mention with body movement, clothing, the elements, and so on—and you see the problem. It also takes a ton of computing power. In 1995, Toy Story was an enormous technological leap forward, but the characters’ hair looked like this:

The difficulty of animating hair is a big reason why Tangled, Walt Disney’s 2010 retelling of the Rapunzel fairy tale, was at the time the most expensive animated film ever made. And Rapunzel’s hair was pretty darn straight.

Curly hair is another beast entirely. Pixar tackled it first in 2012’s Brave. The process of developing the fiery-red curls of the spirited Scottish princess at its center, Merida, took three to four years and included the close study of real curly-haired people, who visited the studio so the animators could scrutinize the movement of their manes. The result was fantastic, but it required lots of hand animation: Merida’s mop was made up of more than 1,500 individually sculpted curls.

As curly-hair technology evolved, room opened up for people of color to take center stage. After tackling the hair challenges of Tangled and Frozen—that one made complex by the Scandinavian braids and near-constant presence of snow—Disney next took on the waves of a Polynesian chieftain’s daughter in 2016’s Moana and the bouncy bob of Colombian girl Mirabel Madrigal in 2021’s Encanto. Moana was the first Disney movie to feature curly, dark hair, and Encanto the first with all 12 hair types, from the pin-straight 1A to the dense coils of 4C.

But from Merida to Mirabel, the curls of all of these main characters have been relatively loose. Blaze’s curls are the much tighter type 4. They were made possible by a newly built system that uses a physics simulator to model hair’s natural movement; rather than the hair itself being animated, the character’s head is, and the hair responds. As Pixar VFX supervisor Thomas Jordan explained, “each curve or curl knows about one another, so that they can bounce and collide off of each other.”1 It’s super neat! Have a look (click here to see the full video):

@thenebellionshe's perfect 🥹⭐ #toystory#toystory5#pixar @Pixar @Disney

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

It also means that Pixar is setting themselves up to include a greater variety of high-quality hairstyles in the future, opening up avenues for storytelling and perhaps finally reflecting the country’s—and the world’s—full diversity. Judging by the comments on this video, plenty of curly-haired people are already quite moved by the thought of seeing their tresses represented with such sophistication on the big screen.

And they won’t be the only ones that will see their hair situation depicted for the first time in Pixar’s most famous franchise: Woody, I regret to announce, has a bald spot.

—Emma Varvaloucas

Share

What Could Go Right? S8 E9: Surviving the 80-Year Cycle of American Crises | with Anthony Scaramucci

Famous for his turbulent eleven-day stint in the Trump White House, Anthony Scaramucci joins Zachary to ask the big questions: Are we just trapped in a predictable 80-year cycle of national crisis? And if so, how do we push through the chaos to reach an era of renewal? Moving past the usual partisan talking points, the two discuss the future of the Republican party, the heavily debated utility of cryptocurrency, and the responsibility of the wealthy. | Listen now

By the Numbers

16%: Decrease in “deaths of despair“ in the US between 2021 and 2024

16.9: Gigawatts of solar panels imported by Pakistan in 2025, effectively making it the world’s No. 1 solar importer

7 in 10: Share of American cancer patients that now survive at least five years, up from less than half in the 1970s

260K: Estimated number of premature deaths from pollution prevented by EV adoption in China

Quick Hits

🧑‍🦼 It’s boom times for accessible adventure travel as opportunities for people with disabilities expand, from off-roading to white-water rafting to paragliding. (NYT $)

✈️ Meanwhile, a growing African middle class is exploring the continent for the first time, shifting travel from luxury good to everyday part of life.

🌏 The world has been gaining more mangrove forests than losing them since 2010, an unexpected change driven by legal protections and increased public awareness of their importance in soaking up planet-warming gases.

🧠 Twenty-one people have now been implanted with Neuralink, a brain interface that allows those with debilitating diseases to control a computer with their thoughts.

💉 AI has been used for the first time to create a new type of vaccine that gives protection against a family of viruses rather than a single strain.

🏳️‍🌈 Hungarian police have approved Budapest’s Pride march this year, a reversal of a crackdown on LGBTQ rights by former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Charges have also been dropped against the city’s mayor, who held the parade last year despite an official ban.

👩‍🍼 Japan’s youngest female mayor will become the nation’s first elected official to take maternity leave. Shoko Kawata, who plans to take 16 weeks, hopes her decision will be a “catalyst for changing the system.”

🕷️ An expedition to a remote plateau in eastern Angola has yielded dozens of species potentially unknown to science, including a fluorescent spider and another that mimics the appearance of a toxic insect in order to deter predators.

🚘 In Ethiopia, the share of electric vehicles now rivals that of the EU, after the African nation became the first in the world to ban the import of gas and diesel cars in early 2024.

🫁 A set of proteins in the blood can accurately predict lung cancers more than five years before diagnosis, a research team found, and an existing anti-inflammatory drug could significantly reduce the risk of their development.

🔬 GLP-1s may protect against cancer, a growing body of research shows.

👀 What we’re watching: Scientists have precisely gene-edited embryos for the first time, engendering enthusiasm—and alarm.

💡 Editor’s pick: No, AI is not conscious.

Subscribe now

TPN Member Originals

(Who are our Members? Get to know them.)

• Why you should be a techno-skeptic | After Babel | Jonathan Haidt

• The triumph of capital | Slow Boring | Matthew Yglesias

• The Trump savings accounts | Tangle | Isaac Saul

• Bernie’s AI fix | Diane Francis | Diane Francis

• Anthropic might be the most powerful company in the world | WaPo ($) | Zachary Karabell

• A great reverse migration is shifting the balance of power in the US | WaPo ($) | Theodore R. Johnson

• The axis of US decline: anti-data center, anti-AI, anti-nuclear | Faster, Please! | James Pethokoukis

• Human intelligence will win out over AI | WaPo ($) | Fareed Zakaria

• Optimization: Metrics maxxing | No Mercy/No Malice | Scott Galloway

• Is America’s racial reckoning over? | TFP ($) | John McWhorter

• US Supreme Court cases that could change the presidency | GZERO | Ian Bremmer

He joins Zachary to ask the big questions: Are we just trapped in a predictable 80-year cycle of national crisis? And if so, how do we push through the chaos to reach an era of renewal? Moving past the usual partisan talking points, the two discuss the future of the Republican party, the heavily debated utility of cryptocurrency, and the responsibility of the wealthy.

It’s a frank, surprisingly hopeful dialogue about the death of political apathy and how to find our footing when the country feels hopelessly divided.

Watch the full conversation below:

All episodes of the What Could Go Right? podcast are available here.

Transcript

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, and today we’re going to talk to one of my favorite humans, for whom a lot has gone wrong and who has continued to look at what could go right. That is Anthony Scaramucci, whose recent fame was spending eleven days as communications director for the first Trump administration, a role he has both talked about a lot and come to regret. Not regret in the sense that he’s questioning his sanity, but regret in the sense that he is no longer on the same team.

He is a fascinating individual. He is deeply engaged in the warp and woof of our political life, and he’s somebody who’s thought about what does it mean to be an engaged citizen. What does it mean to have ambitions? What does it mean to fail, given that he has both succeeded well beyond what most people dream of, and failed far more than most people would like?

And he’s thought about crypto, which is and continues to be a controversial thing, and controversial in part because of its current indelible association with Trumplandia.

He has thought about what does it mean to be an engaged citizen without a party, given that he’s a lifelong Republican who no longer associates with the Republican Party as it is, and what do you do about that? And how can we heal our wounds as a country? Wounds that are real, but wounds that he and I and others keep saying are deep and are far deeper than this moment. They transcend our current political malaise and go back really till our founding. And what do we do about that?

These are important questions, and it’s really a joy to be able to have this conversation with someone who kind of lives it. Whether you like Scaramucci or not — and he is a firebrand in his own way — he is somebody who really is alive to these questions, and I’m looking forward to having them with him.

All right, Anthony, I’ve known you for 17 years, give or take a day or two. Your joke when we met was that you were a hairbreadth away from SkyBridge going under, and then it didn’t. And I feel like over the past 17 years, your kind of death-defying trapeze act of things almost going wrong and then going right, I was kind of amused, you’re doing this podcast with Novogratz, who I also know, and I feel like the two of you have parallel lives in things almost go wrong and then they go spectacularly right.

Anthony Scaramucci: He’s a lot smarter than me, which is why the podcast is so good. But you’re going to make a point, Zach. Go ahead.

Zachary Karabell: It’s more of a question. People come to you and they’re like, oh man, tell me what I should be doing with my life, or tell me about the world. It seems to me like career advice of, almost fail spectacularly before you succeed spectacularly. Would you give that career advice?

Anthony Scaramucci: I think the problem for me is that I’m a risk-taker. And the problem for me is that I wanted three things out of my career, and none of them were coming without any potential trapdoors.

I wanted some political engagement. Well, guess what happens in politics? You get your ass kicked. I didn’t think I was going to get my ass kicked after 11 days, but you do get your ass kicked. Most people get fired from politics or walk out of politics, whether it’s the Tony Blairs of the world or you pick the people.

The second thing I wanted in my career, I wanted my own business on Wall Street, but I have no legacy. My parents were blue collar. So how do you do that? And then how do you survive the risk-taking associated with that?

And then the third thing, which is how we sort of met, is I always wanted to be in a convening space. So I started the SALT conference 17 years ago, which is how we met, frankly, in 2009.

Those three things came with risk and came with reward, no question. But you get the doctrine of unexpected consequences. You, better than anybody, know that anything you think cannot happen on Wall Street, happens on Wall Street, right?

Zachary Karabell: Yeah.

Anthony Scaramucci: Or, as Lloyd Blankfein said to me, I interviewed him for his new book — “The 1,00-year flood happens every five years on Wall Street.”

So yeah, I have failed upward. And I’m still failing, and I’m still a work in progress. But at least I’m failing humbly. At least I’m smart enough to know that I’m not that smart.

Zachary Karabell: You know, it’s funny. One of the pretexts of this whole podcast, and kind of the work that I’m trying to do about, maybe we are, in Wall Street terms, over-indexing for Armageddon and under-indexing for utopia, is that not just humility about one’s own career, but humility about what we think we know, particularly about the future, which none of us know, right?

Everybody’s guesstimating about the future, which has endless pathways, and we’re all trying to figure out which one it has. So I kind of salute the humility of, take a deep breath. None of us are that special.

Anthony Scaramucci: Some of it’s luck, Zach. Listen, I made an Anthropic investment. I didn’t know if Anthropic was going to win or not. I didn’t know if it had the right — you know, again, I’m not bragging. By the way, I’ve lost, I have zeros. I have a phone book of zeros. But I was in the right place at the right time. I made an Anthropic investment. It went 60 to 1. Okay, so am I a genius because I made the Anthropic investment? No. Right place, right time, series of investments, many of which failed. I have one nugget that did okay. My point is, you have to stay in the game. I think the biggest message, someone came to see me, and I said, wow, if I got fired from the White House and left the field on the day that I got fired, different career arc. If I had this setback in the 2008 financial crisis, and somebody came into — not this office, because I was upstairs on 16 — but a similar office to this in March of 2009, and Zach Karabell, you will remember the Dow was at, like, 6,000? Some crazy number. The S&P was at 666. I remember that because that was like the movie The Omen. It was horrific. And a former Goldman Sachs colleague of mine said I should shut the business down. By the way, that was really good advice. He was really smart, and he was a really good guy, and he didn’t mean me poorly. He said, it’s time to get out of the business. And I started the SALT conference and bought Citibank’s business, their fund of funds, and merged it into the business. It made all the difference, but it was a good idea to shut the business down, but I didn’t. So my whole thing with people is, get up, dust yourself off. Look, I’ve got some crumbs on me from lunch. You see that? There was a crumb there.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I see it.

Anthony Scaramucci: You dust it off, and you move on.

Zachary Karabell: There have been three major financial crises in our professional lifetime: 2000, 2008–2009 and 2020. And other than 2008–2009, those didn’t have the same kind of shockwaves of a generation. You’re totally right about the Wall Street thing. Brilliant people do badly, stupid people do well. It’s one of the only professions I’ve ever encountered where you can get the big picture right and get the investing thesis completely wrong, and you can get the investing completely right and the big picture completely wrong, which is kind of a mindfuck.

But I wonder, in the financial world and the political world, we are sort of primed for things to go wrong. The entire financial world is predicated — I mean, yeah, you could say CNBC, which we used to both be on, tends to be more bullish because it sells. But in general, the financial world is always looking for the next shoe to drop. And I think we do the same thing in the political world.

I wonder, for you, you are legitimately, based on your own experience and your own read, negative about Trump. But you’re not a particularly negative person, right? You don’t sit there going, oh my God, we’re on the precipice of some sort of cultural implosion. How do you square that?

Anthony Scaramucci: No, no, no. Listen, he represents something that’s always been in the country. There’s been a feeling of nativism. There’s a feeling of isolationism. There’s some levels of racism and white supremacy.

There’s a story that could have gotten told — you’ve talked about arcs of history and different timelines. There’s a story that could have been told in the 1930s. Charles Lindbergh was the progenitor of the first America First movement. Had that movement caught political fire at that time, you could have had a very different outcome to the Second World War.

Zachary Karabell: I am so glad you said that, by the way. He is an iteration of currents that have been there. He’s just a very pure distillation of them in one person.

Anthony Scaramucci: Yes, but he’s also a manifestation of an establishment crisis that happened at the end of the Berlin Wall.

So my thesis — hear me out for a second — the Berlin Wall comes down. We’ve beaten the Soviets. We now have this “end of history,” Francis Fukuyama said. But of course history didn’t end, and we started making decisions based on democratic-style capitalism is going to rule the Earth.

So we let the Chinese into the World Trade Organization, thinking that would help them but would also modify their system. That didn’t happen. We then went to war in the Middle East, which we’re still fighting, frankly, 25 years of war. We did that without tax increases, the first time we went to war without a tax increase in U.S. history.

And then, since you mentioned the financial crisis, we had a bailout concomitant with that crisis. Most of that money went to the banks, if not all of the money — banks and insurance companies. None of it went to the little guy. So you had Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party movement. And frankly, you’ve got a lot of people in this country who are very angry with the establishment, very angry with the social contract. And so where a Charles Lindbergh would have represented them in the 1930s, there just wasn’t enough of them.

You’ve now gotten to the 45, 49 percent threshold number where there’s now enough people that feel disaffected. And by the way, I say this about Trump, he saw this, we have to accept that he has good political instincts. He saw that the people I grew up with, who were economically aspirational, 35 short years later, that very same group of people were economically “desperational.” So that’s happened in life. We have to accept it, and now it’s up to us to figure out whether or not we want to fix it. Because if we don’t fix it, what’s going to happen is, you’ll be fine, I’ll be fine, we’ll just be in these little barbed-wire security-compound McMansions while our fellow neighbors are suffering, and I think that would be a horrific state to be in.

I’m watching a lot of feeling-less, apathetic billionaires march their way to a trillion dollars, and they’ve lost sight of the noblesse oblige, or they’ve lost sight of the savoir faire necessary to help their fellow current travelers on Earth.

We can fix it, and we can make it better. And I think Trump is providing us, frankly, an opportunity to do that.

So, you’re a historian, so let me posit something to you. This country is very young. It’s only 250 years old. It’s based on an idea. There’s not a lineage. It’s not Russia. It’s not France. It’s not the United Kingdom or Britain. It’s not Italy. This is an idea, and we all came here. It’s a melting pot of people. And so we don’t have the generational, cultural memory. So every 80 years we go into the tar pits. We had a revolution. Eighty years later, Civil War. Eighty years later, the Great Depression. The Great Depression led to the Second World War. Eighty years out from the Second World War, we’re in the pits again.

So now it’s up to us. Are we going to pull ourselves out of this and be the neurally plastic country that we’ve been known to be? We’ve had other crises, in my opinion, that are worse than this one, and we pulled ourselves out of those. So now the question is: can we pull ourselves out of this one? And I believe that we can.

Zachary Karabell: And that is the really, we’re beginning to face this question of, is this sort of Trump 10-year period — and it’ll be 12 years by the time ‘28 rolls around — is it an interregnum? Is it a new normal? Where are we going to go from here? It’s not clear.

Anthony Scaramucci: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: It is certainly clear that there is nobody who’s going to inherit Trump as Trump, right? He is a unique figure.

Anthony Scaramucci: The cult of personality will die, or will be extinguished along with his political relevancy. Will there be populist elements that stay with the next wave of the movement? We’ll have to wait and see. But I would submit to you, this is the great irony, is that a 60-year-old Joe Biden would have had his shit together better. Because if you look at the Biden policies, they were actually trying to heal that divide in the country between the haves and the have-nots. Unfortunately, he was sundowning. It became self-evident. So he dropped out of the race, and it cleared the way.

Remember, Trump’s political survival is directly tied to the misfiring of two Democratic political candidates: Hillary Clinton, unfortunately, and Vice President Harris. They were weak candidates. Again, people can be mad at me for saying that, but just think about this: Joe Biden, who I would say is a mediocre presidential candidate, beat a sitting president, Zach.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah.

Anthony Scaramucci: Okay? So all you had to have was a mediocre candidate. This guy is not well liked. He’s got a 34% approval rating. The independents, forget it. It’s an 80/20 split with the independents. He’s got 90-plus or 100% of the Republicans, but Republicans are going down in terms of their voter registration every year. They’re the lowest registration. Independents are No. 1, Democrats are No. 2. So yes, his base is shrinking. He has his base. There’s a big opportunity there for somebody normal to say, okay, listen, this is our moment again. Lots of great technology. You write beautifully about all the things that are going on in the world that we can take advantage of and all the abundance that’s out there. We just need the political leadership that can join that bright future.

Zachary Karabell: So on that note of things that people don’t like to look at, there are these things that are going on in the Trump administration quietly, because you don’t trumpet them, that I think a lot of people would agree are probably a good thing, even though Trump is doing them, or his administration is doing them. There’s a more creative approach toward innovation and technology and maybe nuclear fuel, not nuclear weapons, but nuclear fuel. Other than his bizarre animus about wind power, a more diverse approach toward innovations, even in the energy space.

And I kind of worry that because everything now that Trump touches is going to be perceived by an entire class and generation as inherently sullied, that some of this stuff is going to be easily rejected just because it’s him. Even some of the stuff around crypto, right? The fact that he’s become incredibly kleptocratic about crypto doesn’t mean that some of the regulatory framework around this, which even the big banks, as you know, like JPMorgan and all these others, are embracing — I wonder if there’s a way to preserve some of this, if you could detach the policies from the Trump.

Anthony Scaramucci: I appreciate your comments related to my analysis because there are some things that he does, I call it the good Trump and the bad Trump. You’re mentioning some of them on the energy side, or trying to get some propitious crypto regulation or whatever it might be. But the aura is bad. If you’re shooting people in Minneapolis, if you’re tweeting out that you’re going to end a civilization, which, just so everybody knows, it’s a war crime to threaten a war crime. I think everybody should know that. So you have the leader of the free world, the president of the United States, saying he’s going to end a civilization.

That to me, on the scales, you could say, well, he’s got really good energy policy, he’s got good banking policy, he’s got good crypto policy, but he wants to end a civilization. I don’t know. It outweighs it.

Zachary Karabell: I’m not suggesting for one minute that these things balance each other out. I’m suggesting that the political dynamic will be, if the Democrats take Congress in the fall of ‘26, if a Democrat takes the White House, there’s going to be — we’ve been in these kinds of violent oscillations.

Anthony Scaramucci: Yeah, they could unwind it. The big opportunity — there’s a great new book coming out called The American Patriarch. It’s written by H.W. Brands, and it’s about George Washington. Remember, Washington hated political parties.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah.

Anthony Scaramucci: Part of his farewell address was that if you get into a political party, you’re going to have entrenched self-interest around the party, and then you’re going to have a partisan divide. He preferred there to be more of an amorphous body politic as opposed to political parties.

If you just step back for a second, we’re going to need a post-partisan leadership. We’re going to need something more transformative than we currently have.

It would have to be, at this moment, at least, a Democrat, because if a Democrat replaces a Republican, they could take Trump’s playbook and say, okay, I’m now going to punish the Republicans the way they just tried to punish us. And then, to your point, we could oscillate back and forth between this insanity.

Or you could get a Mandela-like figure who says, okay, we’re not going to do that. We have to transform the country for the betterment of everybody. It takes a very big person to do that, Zach.

Zachary Karabell: I was always amazed that there was this brief opportunity in 2017 where, if Trump had been — and you had been a more persuasive figure for more than 11 days — had he been politically astute, you could have assembled this kind of bipartisan coalition. You could have embraced the Sherrod Browns and Bernie Sanders in a pro-working class, anti-globalist, even somewhat more tariff, anti-China. You could have broken both parties up and created this whole new domestic coalition. Now, maybe that wouldn’t have been the right thing economically, and we could debate, but the opportunity was clearly there. It’s gone now.

Anthony Scaramucci: One hundred percent. I’ll say it a little bit differently. You can’t put into somebody what God left out. He had that opportunity, but he just didn’t have it in him. But you can’t put into somebody what God left out.

There was an opportunity there, Lincolnesque opportunity. People don’t remember this now because we’re in this woke culture and we’re taking down statues and renaming things, but Robert E. Lee’s portrait was actually in the Oval Office during Dwight Eisenhower’s administration. If you Google it, you’ll see there was a portrait of Robert E. Lee over the fireplace. When Eisenhower was asked about it, they saw Robert E. Lee as a patriotic American. They saw him differently, and primarily because Lincoln pardoned everybody. And if you really remember your constitutional history, they had the right to secede. It got abrogated or repealed in 1869 by the Brown vs. Texas Supreme Court case. But the thought was, okay, they had the right. Lincoln overruled that right. He abolished habeas corpus. He got the country to stay together. But we revise the way we think about these things.

But Lincoln was a post-partisan, even though he was our first Republican president, he was really working on national healing and national unity. And of course, his premature death altered that timeline. I think things would probably have gone slightly better in the Reconstruction process with Lincoln’s gravitas and his leadership.

Zachary Karabell: That raises a question of, should Biden have pardoned Trump in ‘21? Should whoever succeeds Trump in ‘29 —

Anthony Scaramucci: I thought he should have. Let me give you some historical context there. In September of 1974, Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon.

Zachary Karabell: Yep.

Anthony Scaramucci: Teddy Kennedy went ballistic. He excoriated Jerry Ford. Thirty-five years later, in 2009, Kennedy was dying of brain cancer. He said that he made a mistake. He said that Ford saw that by pardoning a man, he was preserving the institution —

Zachary Karabell: Exactly.

Anthony Scaramucci: And preserving the bipartisan culture, and he didn’t create a banana republic where we were building jail cells for each other depending on which party we were from. You want to avoid that.

Trump has done some things that I think are pretty suspect — you know, for his family businesses, other things — but he’s one guy. I would be very careful setting this thing up in a way where we’re eviscerating each other’s adversaries in politics.

Zachary Karabell: So this also raises this question of, where does one go politically? You were a lifelong, and I think still are, a lifelong Republican, but the Republican Party has been completely, or almost completely, hijacked by a personality cult. You’ve got a few people like Thom Tillis and maybe Thune on a good day, and Massie —

Anthony Scaramucci: Not Thune. No, I think Thune’s a coward.

Zachary Karabell: Massie and some of these others. So where do you go, basically? Where does anybody go? You’ve got these two parties. Democrats are still absolutely a much bigger tent currently. You’ve got the Elissa Slotkins on the one hand, you’ve got AOCs on the other, and they are very different humans and represent very different strains of a party. But particularly if you’re a Republican, where do you go? And if you’re a pro-business centrist Democrat or a social conservative Democrat, where do you go? What do you tell people? I’m sure people ask you this as well.

Anthony Scaramucci: I have no party, and that’s why I now sit with all these independents — 40-plus percent… I mean, I’m still registered as a Republican. I think there’s only one group of people doing worse than the Republicans. Those are the New York Mets. That’s the only group I can think of. I’m a fifty-five-year Mets fan. You don’t give up.

Zachary Karabell: You tried to buy these sports teams. This could have been you, man.

Anthony Scaramucci: Well, who the hell knows? Maybe I would’ve done worse. That’s the other thing. Steve Cohen is a brilliant guy, and Steve Cohen has a tremendous amount of money. He said that one of the public goods he wants to have is to make this team win. And I’m sure they’re trying super hard, but man, they have a 33% winning percentage. That’s okay for a batting average, but it’s the worst — they’ve had the worst start. They have the second-highest payroll in Major League Baseball, and they have the worst start of any team since the expansion era in 1962. But I’m still a Mets fan, so I’m still a Republican. I’m hoping that my team, which has moved away from my core philosophy and the philosophy of many…I had lunch last week with Mitt Romney, who I’m sure you remember.

Zachary Karabell: Mm.

Anthony Scaramucci: He’s 79 now. He looks great. But Mitt Romney was my kind of Republican. He was telling me about the 20th anniversary of Romneycare in Massachusetts, where he helped to set up a healthcare system and frankly lowered the cost of medicine in the state because of Romneycare.

Because what do you know, Zach, what I know, good policy in medicine is about prevention. Waiting until someone’s got to go to the emergency room is not the most efficient way to price out their healthcare.

Could we ever get it back? I don’t know. But I’m a believer that things go in cycles. Here’s what I know: whatever you think is today, we both know that it’s going to change. We both know that. The same way it’s changed from the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, the 2020s are going to be very different from the 2030s or the 2040s. Could be worse. I’m not saying it’s going to get better. But I’d like to believe it will be, because it’s America.

Zachary Karabell: So let’s turn to crypto, which you’ve been deeply involved in the past years. Look, a lot of people — particularly now with the Trump involvement in it — have seen crypto as essentially this place where people can break the law, circumvent government accountability, self-enrich, self-deal. It’s the ultimate Ponzi scheme because there’s no underlying blah there. What do you say to people whose view of this is that? And now it’s kind of had the cherry on top is, if somebody like Trump endorses it, it must be bad.

Anthony Scaramucci: Well, it was very bad under the Biden administration. They had Operation Choke Point 2.0. They were de-banking people. They were trying to prevent the ETFs from happening. You had to have a lawsuit with the SEC, that the SEC actually lost, in order to get the Bitcoin ETF together, and then they did all kinds of shenanigans —

Zachary Karabell: No, no, I know. But these are people who — and I talked to Gensler, who was there at the time, they really felt that crypto was immoral, destructive of the sovereign right of states to issue currency. One of the things states like to do is control their money and control their defense. There’s a lot of people who just think this is wrong, full stop. Morally wrong, politically wrong, economically wrong.

Anthony Scaramucci: Alright. But there were probably people who thought the horseless carriage was wrong. It was creating some level of pollution, and why would we want that when we got all these beautiful horses that we can ride around town with? So yes, I understand that. But if technology is better, and I would submit to you that if you had a tokenized structure — let’s just go to the NASDAQ for a second. They’ve signed with Kraken. They’re going to tokenize stocks, and they’re going to do 24/7 trading. They hope to unveil that before the end of the year. So it’s a better platform. The blockchain can create permissionless traffic very efficiently and very securely. So I would just submit to you, yes, I understand that there are people who are against it and think it’s morally wrong, but if you have better technology, generally better technology gets adopted.

Uber, nobody wanted Uber. The taxi commissions didn’t want it, the mayors didn’t want it, no business city official wanted it. You and I, unfortunately, are old enough to remember Bloomberg’s fight over smoking. Nobody wanted no smoking in restaurants. All the restaurant owners and bartenders said, that’ll be a disaster for our business. Turned out it was better for the businesses.

Zachary Karabell: I owned a bar in the East Village when that happened. We had a funeral ceremony the night the ban went into place. We all smoked past midnight, played a dirge. It was very sad.

Anthony Scaramucci: But it turned out it was good for your restaurant, right?

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, it was fine. I’m just saying we thought it was going to be miserable.

Anthony Scaramucci: That’s my point. I think all that stuff is overblown. But I do like the technology long term. I think it’s going to be with us, and we have to get the regulation right. Trump, in ways, has been better, and in ways he’s been way worse. I said this, I was in Davos with Brian Armstrong, sitting on a panel together. I said, he launched this meme coin a couple of hours before he got re-inaugurated. It’s going to be bad for us, because his opposition, the Genslers of the world, are going to say, ah, you see? Low-life grifters. President-in-chief, low-life grifter. And let’s stop this. I think that’s the main reason why the CLARITY Act — I would have thought the CLARITY Act would’ve gotten passed last year. We’re already heading into May and we have no CLARITY Act.

So, Zach, this is a problem. This tribalism, this left-and-right-ism as opposed to right-or-wrong-ism, this is a problem. And it’s going to persist until somebody says, time out. We have to break the fever. Even if it hurts my party short term, it’ll help the country in the long term. I don’t know who’s going to do that, but I predict that it will happen.

Zachary Karabell: One more thing on crypto. What about the utopian version of crypto that was out there for a long time of, we’re in this world where states have reasserted their primacy. That’s certainly true of the United States as a national state. There’s a theory of the case around the Trump people of this should be a world of competing nation-states, not of global institutions like the UN or multilateral institutions like NATO. China is certainly asserting itself as a state. Iran is asserting itself as a state.

There was a vision, a utopian vision of Bitcoin as a way in which human beings could, across the world, transact peer-to-peer without states interfering, without them tithing, taxing, knowing, in a way that would liberate human beings, liberate their energy. That seems to have fallen a bit by the wayside. But I’m not sure it should have completely fallen by the wayside as a vision.

Anthony Scaramucci: That’s been clouded, frankly, by the overpromise culture. Our generation — I think I’m older than you, Zach, but I’m in the Baby Boomer generation, so I’m born ‘46 to ‘64 — this Baby Boomer generation has failed the country. So I think everything you’re saying, yes, but it’s been clouded by the overpromising, under-taxation wreckage, going from George Washington to George W. Bush. When Bush left office, we went from George Washington to George W. Bush, $7 trillion, and we’ve gone from Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump, in that short period of time, it’s staggering, you know, $34 trillion. I mean, come on, guys, what are we doing? You know, Donald Trump first term, $8.2 trillion, $1.2 trillion more than George Washington to George Bush. I mean, come on, guys. It’s not sustainable. So everything you’re saying, yes, but it’s being overshadowed and clouded by this disequilibrium.

Zachary Karabell: As we wrap up, what do you think of this idea? That, you’re active on social media. You play the game. That there are more people clamoring for their voices to be heard than ever before, that are discontent, that are angry, that are roiling. That’s on the left, on the right, in the center. No matter where you look, people are pissed off. They want their voice heard. They don’t feel that the institutions that serve them actually serve them, whether it’s a hospital, whether it’s a court, whether it’s the Mets, whether it’s Washington.

The upside of that anger and that roiling and your engagement, is, hey, we can do better. We should be doing better. We’re not just going to settle. You used the word “apathy” earlier. The one thing that makes me, if not hopeful, then feel like there’s a different story than we’re telling going on here, is that there seems to be a complete dearth of apathy, and that’s a good thing. People are not apathetic.

Anthony Scaramucci: Yeah. We just have to make some adjustments. Listen, this kid James Talarico that’s running for the Senate in Texas, he had a great line, so I have to give him credit for the line. I’d love to steal it from him, but I have to give him credit for the line. He said that we have policies that can satisfy the poor. We do. The problem is we have no policies to satisfy the rich. And I just want you to think about that. He’s right, because the rich want to get richer. And so what do they want? They want certain benefits to help enrich them. Enough is never enough, and that’s the struggle.

When we were at our best, and you know this as an economist, generally, Linda Datcher Loury before she passed away, she was a labor economics professor at Tufts. She had great research on this. If you have economic rent associated with businesses and GDP overall, if the allocation is 50% toward capital, that’s shareholders and owners, and 50% toward labor, she could show you historically the country usually does very, very well. You have high living standards in the middle class, sort of from 1944 to 1971. When that starts to shift and capital is taking more of the excess, or taking more of the economic rent for themselves — and right now we’re at 53/47 — guess what happens? People get angry.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah.

Anthony Scaramucci: They get dissatisfied. The great irony is, Zach, if you have 50% going to 1% of the people and the other 50% goes to the other 99% of the people, you have happy campers. But we have to go to 53%. What Talarico is saying is something I really believe, it’s hard to satisfy the rich. So we’ve got to get somebody in office — Roosevelt understood this, Teddy Roosevelt. He’s like, all right, guys, I’ve got to bust up somebody’s trust. You have to knock it off, because you can’t have one or two guys worth 2.5%, 3% of the GDP of the country.

Zachary Karabell: Well, we’re certainly going to have that opportunity, because we’re probably going to have the first trillionaire in the next few years, and it’ll probably be Elon.

Anthony Scaramucci: Listen, I don’t want to make it overly political. I think the mayor is actually doing an okay job, Mamdani. Seems like he’s pretty practical. I don’t want socialism or communism to creep in. I would like us to get back to some standard where we have democratic-style capitalism with some levels of liberalism and individuality, protection of people for their religious freedoms or their ethnic origins, or whatever it might be. But let’s pay people a little bit more so that they don’t have an affordability crisis.

Zachary Karabell: And to some degree, you’ve mentioned this before, of some consciousness amongst people who have a lot that they have a responsibility to people who have less.

Anthony Scaramucci: I certainly believe that. I’m working on a few things. You and I should get together, because I’m working on a few things you would like which I think addresses some of this stuff.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. All right, Anthony, it’s such a pleasure to talk to you today.

Anthony Scaramucci: Great to be on with you.

Zachary Karabell: I want to thank you for listening, for watching. As always, it is an honor to spend some time with you. I know you all have a choice in how you spend it, and the fact that you’re spending it with me and with these conversations is not something I will ever take for granted.

I would welcome the feedback. Go to theprogressnetwork.org. Go to info@rivertwice.com. You can send carrier pigeons, smoke signals, anything to register your questions, contrary or positive.

I want to thank the people at Kaleidoscope for producing, and the people at The Progress Network for supporting, and all of you for being part of these discussions. And we’ll be back with you next week.

What Could Go Right? is produced by The Progress Network and Kaleidoscope.

Watch the podcast on YouTube.

Follow us on X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok: @progressntwrk

Plus, scientists have discovered what may be one of the world’s largest deep-sea coral reefs off the coast of Argentina, an ecosystem that is home to 40 species new to science. A golf ball-sized, bright blue octopus near the Galapagos Islands has just been confirmed as a brand new species. NASA has unveiled its renderings for a permanent moon base, with three missions targeting launch before the end of 2026. Additionally, researchers in the Czech Republic are racing to climate-proof the Saaz hop, the backbone of Czech pilsner, before droughts and heatwaves do the unthinkable.

Watch the full episode below:

All episodes of the What Could Go Right? podcast are available here.

Transcript

Emma Varvaloucas: The Supreme Court banned race-based affirmative action three years ago, and let’s just say some unexpected things happened next. Also this week, a massive deep sea coral reef discovered off the coast of Argentina that scientists didn’t know existed, NASA’s plan to build a permanent base on the moon, and the most important climate science story of the year: saving a crucial beer ingredient.

Welcome to the What Could Go Right Progress Report, where we dive into all the good news that you probably missed because it was buried under the barrage of bad news. Hey, if you’re new here, I’m Emma Varvaloucas, and I’m the executive director of The Progress Network. Let’s get into it.

First up, affirmative action, specifically race-based affirmative action in college admissions.

In case you’re not familiar, this was, for decades, the tool that elite colleges used to build diverse campuses, giving particular minority students a better shot of getting into schools that had historically shut them out, and those degrees led to better jobs and more money. But in 2023, the Supreme Court banned it, with the majority asserting that race conscious admissions violate the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

Affirmative action was officially ruled unconstitutional. Headlines and the court’s three liberal justices in their dissent warned of a massive fallout in minority enrollment to come. So when I saw there was now halfway decent data out from the last two years, I wanted to dig into it. What actually happened to those college students?

Let’s start off with the not so good, and don’t worry, the good is coming. At the country’s 50 most selective schools—so think the Ivy League, Carnegie Mellon, NYU—Black and Hispanic enrollment dropped pretty significantly in the 2024 freshman class. We’re talking a net negative of about 2,700 students. In the 100 most selective schools, Black enrollment still suffered somewhat, but Hispanic representation actually improved.

All of this, by the way, comes from the most comprehensive analysis of enrollment trends I could find, which was done by James S. Murphy at the grassroots network called Class Action. His data covers more than 3,000 institutions across the US. On the other hand, White and Asian enrollment was basically flat.

Asian enrollment did tick up at Ivy Plus schools (that’s the Ivy League plus a small elite group like Stanford). But overall, not much changed, which is probably a surprise to critics of affirmative action, who expected that it would surge. Now, this general pattern seems to have continued into the 2025 class as well, although that data is somewhat limited.

To sum it all up, at the very top of the country’s prestige pyramid, Black and Hispanic students somewhat down, everyone else largely unchanged. Not ideal, but not a disaster either. But, and this is a big but, that is a sliver of American higher education. Like, a very tiny sliver. As Elle Woods once said... What, like it’s hard? Well, yeah, it actually is. 3 to 6% acceptance rate at the Ivies hard.

At all other types of four-year colleges in the country, which is, you know, most of them, minority enrollment went up, in some cases by a lot. Enrollment of Black students rose 50% at the University of Mississippi. Hispanic enrollment rose 35% at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 83% of public flagship universities saw diversity increase.

This is actually something that scholars predicted, and it’s called the cascade effect. The idea is that high-performing minority students who before the Supreme Court ruling might have ended up at, say, Rice or Vanderbilt, instead ended up at what were probably their safety schools, places like American University or Fordham.

Still good educations, but you can imagine the pissed off teenagers finding out that they didn’t get into their dream schools. Been there. But hey, these schools and a lot more like them saw big jumps in diversity, and that is a win for those campuses.

Now, before you fully exhale, the cascade effect does have a potential downside. Those “cascaded students” end up at schools with lower graduation rates and lower after college earnings on average. And if they didn’t attend those super elite universities, chances are that they missed out on what’s essentially a golden conveyor belt to the nation’s halls of power.

What is a positive is that so far, another risk of the cascade effect, which is that the influx of super qualified students would completely push out students lower on the academic ladder, hasn’t happened. The number of Black and Hispanic students enrolled in a bachelor’s degree program overall has stayed steady.

So, on the racial diversity front: mixed bag. Not great at the very top, but to the benefit of almost everywhere else.

Now, here’s where things get really surprising. With race off the table for college admissions, elite schools shifted their focus to socioeconomic background. In a sample of top 100 colleges, the Progressive Policy Institute, which does advocate for class-based admissions policies, found that the share of first-generation college students is rising. Yale and Dartmouth actually both set records for it in 2024, and the share of admitted students eligible for federal Pell Grants, which go to middle and low-income students, is also growing.

So in a weird, unintended, nobody fully planned this way, the end of race-based affirmative action may have accidentally accelerated the rise of class-based affirmative action. But the reality is, is that the full picture of the 2023 ban is going to take years to come into focus. If anything, this is a reminder that things are rarely as cut and dried as they seem, and there are often factors that come into play that shift outcomes in unanticipated ways.

Before we get into our shorter stories, here are some numbers to make you smile. 90%, the share of Gambians with access to electricity, up from 60% in 2018. 1,450, that’s the number of loggerhead sea turtle nests that have been counted so far in Florida as their nesting season heads into what people expect is going to be a record-breaking year.

64%, the share of US adults who say marijuana should be legalized, up from 31% in 2000. And eight, that’s the number of crested ibises that were just released into the wild in Japan. If you don’t know what a crested ibis is, it’s an endangered bird that had previously gone extinct in the country.

And here are our quick hits for today.

First up are two ocean discoveries that I am particularly excited to dive into. Pun intended. To start us off, scientists just discovered a deep sea cold water reef that might be one of the largest in the world. They found it off the coast of Argentina at a depth of 3,300 feet. And in case you’re thinking that that sounds like a great destination for your next dive, it’s a little outside normal human range, which is part of the reason why these deep sea reefs are just now being discovered.

Over two expeditions in 2025 and early 2026, biologist Erick Cordes and his team of scientists scouted this reef, which goes for an impressive 560 miles, using a remote operated vehicle. Think Mars Rover, but for the ocean. And to give you a sense of just how large the reef is, just one of the coral formations is 96 acres. That’s the size of the Mall of America. . . . I wonder if they have an Auntie Anne’s.

And this is where things get really exciting. Santiago Herrera, one of the biologists on the expedition, told Mongabay that this is one of the most vibrant and lush environments in the deep sea that he’d ever seen. He says, “When we go down into the deep, we know that food becomes increasingly scarce, and so that means that life becomes increasingly scarce.”

So you can imagine he probably spat out his water in shock after finding out just how much life there was there, including 40 new deep sea species. And the best part? The researchers aren’t just invading the privacy of these deep sea creatures. The reef is also showing some signs of damage, possibly from commercial fishing. So they’re not just down there for the sake of science, they’re also actively trying to restore the reef. Pretty epic when you think about it.

And for a bonus round of deep sea discoveries, a small blue organism was found floating around the waters near the Galapagos Islands. And no, it wasn’t a member of the Blue Man Group snorkeling.

It was a golf ball sized octopus, and scientists have just announced it as a brand new species. And you guys, if you can’t visualize the size of a golf ball so easily, this octopus is small enough to fit inside of your palm. It’s teensy weensy, and it’s blue, and it kind of looks like a grumpy old man crossed with a Powerpuff girl. You gotta look it up.

So to run it back, this little guy was actually first spotted in 2015 about 5,800 feet below the surface near Darwin Island in the Galapagos. When they found him, scientists on the ship could be heard laughing and saying, “Is that a cute little guy or what?” Which, same. And no, that is not a joke. You can literally hear it on the audio feed from the dive.

Okay, so you might have clocked that this all happened 11 years ago. So why are we talking about it now? Well, here’s why. In order to determine if an organism is a newly discovered species, scientists need to perform a complete autopsy, which let’s just say is destructive to the sample.

Those researchers only collected one specimen, and they didn’t want to cut it open, I mean, obviously, because it’s adorable. The scientists found a solution, though, which was to use CT scanning technology to get an in-depth view of its anatomy without having to tear it apart. So the tiny blue octopus is now a confirmed species, and its official name is the Microellidon galapagoensis.

I know. I was sort of thinking that they’d go with something like Octo-Blussy. I don’t know, I think it could be the title of a good Bond movie starring the cutest villain ever. Or not.

Next up is a story that’s really shooting for the moon. As part of the Artemis program, NASA is on its way to building a permanent base on the moon, and they’ve just released the renderings of what it would look like.

If you’re thinking, “Didn’t NASA just send astronauts to the moon in April?” Yes, they did, and that was record-breaking for the furthest humans have ever traveled into space. And the astronauts got to see parts of the moon no one had ever seen before with the naked eye. So naturally, NASA was stoked, and they were like, “That was so fun. I wanna go back.” So much so that they’re spending $20 billion to construct a permanent base at the moon’s south pole that they’re hoping is going to be operational by 2032. I am curious what you guys make of this because part of me is like, yes, like imagine all the groundbreaking scientific research, and then the other part of me is like, what’s next? A Starbucks and an Equinox?

But let’s forget what I think for a second. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman announced in a news conference recently that they’re planning three moon-based missions, mostly to drop off equipment, and which are all targeted to launch before the end of 2026. That is a very ambitious mission on a very ambitious timeline.

In fact, some experts are saying that the timeline is so ambitious that it’s a little, how do I put this? Delulu. But for ambition bordering on delusion, who better to go to for the first mission than the king of free same-day delivery, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos himself. Like some of the more eccentric billionaires, Bezos has a space company called Blue Origin. They’re one of several private companies that NASA is partnering with on these moon missions to utilize their lunar landers and other equipment.

And like we’ve seen before in history, there’s nothing quite like a good old-fashioned space race, but this time, China is the main character. The US wants to get humans to the moon by 2028 to beat China’s target of 2030, and China is also working with Russia in order to get their own moon base going by 2035.

Who’s gonna win? With all of my love to NASA, I do feel like we’re kind of behind the eight ball here, and I don’t know, maybe it’s in China’s destiny. I mean, they did invent the Lunar New Year. Anyway, I’m taking bets, and I think we all need a bracket to look forward to after the World Cup. Am I right?

And last up, climate science, but make it delicious.

Researchers in the Czech Republic are working to save one of the country’s most prized exports from the effects of climate change. That export is beer, and this is serious. Listen up. This news should concern anyone who drinks and enjoys beers, which I imagine is most of you. The Czech Republic, which drinks more beer per capita than any other country in the world, is facing a serious climate problem. Aren’t we all.

Droughts and heatwaves have been hammering the central European nation in recent years, putting the country’s prized Saaz hop under real strain. The Saaz hop, if you’re not a beer connoisseur, is the signature ingredient, nay, the backbone of the world-famous Czech pilsners.

And if you’re thinking, “Who cares about the Saaz hop?” Well, that exact hop is one of the main ingredients in Pilsner Urquell and Stella Artois. And if we’ve got any Stella drinkers listening to this, what are you doing with your life? I’m sorry, I just don’t like Stella.

It’s not just Czech brewers who have climate change on their mind. Hops producers the world over are worried about the future of the crop, so hops researchers are hopping to it, including at the Czech Hop Research Institute—I love that that’s a thing—which is breeding new varieties of the famous hop that can handle hotter, drier summers without losing the flavor profile that the ingredient is famous for.

And side note, how fun would it be to be a beer scientist? I feel like a lot more people in my high school, if they had known that that was a legitimate career option, would’ve tried harder in science class.

And so far, the institute’s new varieties are showing drought resilience, so it’s proving to be successful on the farms and in the breweries. The proof is in the pint. Listen to this. Earlier in May, the institute’s top hops researcher debuted a new lager that is brewed with climate-resilient Saaz at a Prague pub, and an hour before the keg was even tapped, craft beer fans were already lined up. When he raised the first glass, the room applauded, and that says a lot in the Czech Republic, where beer culture is basically a religion.

So climate change, still a thing, but at least we’re gonna be able to drink our way through it. And that’s all for this week’s Progress Report. I hope these stories remind you that there is so much good going on out there in the world, so it’s important to shift our focus away sometimes from all the bad.

So if you got some value from this episode, maybe something you can bring up at your World Cup watch party, send it to a friend who could use some positive news. And make sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on your preferred podcast platform and leave us a review. If you want even more stories like this delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for our newsletter.

The link is in the description. Got a good news story that you want to see us covering next week? Let us know in the comments. Thanks for watching, and see you next week on the Progress Report.

What Could Go Right? is produced by The Progress Network and Kaleidoscope.

Watch the podcast on YouTube.

Follow us on X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok: @progressntwrk

Many braced themselves for the fallout of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision that banned the consideration of race in the college admissions process, not least the court’s three liberal justices, who warned of a “devastating impact” on minority enrollment in their dissent. A systemic collapse—at least in elite institutions—seemed imminent. And then the issue fell nearly completely out of the news cycle.

So what has happened since? The data is both complex and limited, but there is enough at this point to suggest some preliminary—sometimes counterintuitive—contours.

Let’s start with the not so good. James S. Murphy, a senior fellow at the grassroots network Class Action, has compiled the most comprehensive analysis of enrollment trends I could find. According to his data from 3,000+ institutions, in 2024’s freshman class, Black and Hispanic enrollment declined significantly at the nation’s 50 most selective colleges—think the Ivy League, Carnegie Mellon, New York University, and so on. In the 100 most selective, Black enrollment still suffered somewhat, but Hispanic representation actually improved.

And, White and Asian American students didn’t much benefit. Except for an uptick in Asian American enrollment at Ivy League Plus institutions (Ivies and a small group of other elites, such as Stanford), enrollment was essentially flat for the two groups, puncturing the predictions of affirmative action’s critics. This general pattern, a report by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) confirmed, continued into the 2025 freshman class, although there is a ton of heterogeneity across schools, and data is missing from many of them.

The story changes dramatically, however, if we look beyond this sliver of the American educational landscape. In the country’s remaining four-year colleges—which is to say, nearly all of them—minority enrollment grew. In some places, it ballooned: by 50% for Black students at the University of Mississippi, for instance, and 35% for Hispanic ones at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.1

This outcome, perhaps surprising to the public, was predicted by scholars. It’s what is known as the “cascade effect” in action. High-performing minority students who may have gone to Rice or Vanderbilt before the Supreme Court’s decision instead flocked to what were probably their “safety schools”—places like American University or Fordham University, which both realized big increases in campus diversity.

It’s a definite upside for those institutions, if not necessarily for the “cascaded” students, who land in environments with lower graduation rates and after-college earnings potential—not to mention who miss out on what, at certain schools, amounts to a conveyor belt to the nation’s halls of power.

The other potential consequence of the cascade effect is that the influx of those super-qualified students pushes aside applicants lower on the academic ladder, who then end up pursuing associate’s degrees or certificate programs. That hasn’t happened so far—overall, the number of Black or Hispanic bachelor’s students has remained steady. But Murphy does note a troubling increase in Black first-time enrollees in for-profit colleges.

So, on the racial diversity front, it has been a mixed bag—not the disaster many predicted for Black and Hispanic students, but not ideal, either. (On the other hand, I imagine a number of Asian American households were ecstatic when admittance letters came.)

And other kinds of diversity? The PPI report—which advocates for admissions policies that benefit low-income students—suggests that the past two years have been a win for the socioeconomic kind, as elite colleges switched their recruitment and admissions focus.2 In a sample of top 100 colleges by rank, the authors found that the share of first-generation college-goers is rising. Some schools, such as Yale and Dartmouth, even set records for that cohort in 2024. Meanwhile, the share of admitted students that are eligible for federal Pell grants—which, as they are awarded to middle- and low-income undergraduates, are roughly representative of socioeconomic status—has swelled.3

For his part, Murphy stresses that all of this data only illustrates what’s happening, not why it’s happening. College admissions is an opaque process, and plenty of other factors, from an “unprecedented increase” in the number of applicants choosing not to identify their race or ethnicity to how colleges count multiracial students to a return to using test scores may have tipped the scales one way or another. In any case, it’s also entirely possible that once free of Trump administration scrutiny, colleges will loosen up on how they look at race, and numbers will change yet again.

For now, though, they are a reminder that reality often defies expectations, no matter whose.

—Emma Varvaloucas

P.S. A brief update on last week’s Ebola edition: While health officials are still playing catch-up with the outbreak, the WHO has greatly reduced the number of suspected cases, and a handful of patients have recovered.

Share

What Could Go Right? S8 E8: Why AI and Drones Won’t Bring the Apocalypse | with Sarah Kreps

What does a future where autonomous weapons and artificial intelligence collide on the battlefield look like? Sarah Kreps, a Cornell University professor and former US Air Force officer, joins host Zachary Karabell to navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of drones and military AI. | Listen now

By the Numbers

90%: Share of Gambians with access to electricity, up from 60% in 2018

1,450: Count of loggerhead sea turtle nests as Florida’s nesting season heads into a record-breaking year

64%: Share of US adults who say marijuana should be legalized, up from 31% in 2000

58%: Share of the global population that has access to safe sanitation as of 2024, compared to 31% in 2000

8: Crested ibises recently released into the wild in Japan, after the endangered bird had gone extinct in the country

Quick Hits

🪸 One of the world’s largest deep-sea coral reefs has been discovered off the coast of Argentina—and it’s home to dozens of species new to science.

🐙 An additional 1,100+ new species have been identified so far during a global initiative to accelerate the discovery of marine life. (Bonus: a golf-ball-sized blue octopus just discovered near the Galápagos Islands.)

🔋 Australia is installing an astonishing amount of batteries—roughly one for every 25 homes this fiscal year alone. The push has helped drop annual emissions by two percent.

📈 Globally, people’s satisfaction with their day-to-day freedoms has reached a record high, with gains in former Eastern Bloc countries offsetting a deterioration in G7 nations.

🍺 Scientists in Czechia are hard at work creating climate-resilient hops varieties amid droughts and heatwaves in the country that drinks more beer per capita than any other.

🔬 Researchers are hailing a “functional cure” to hepatitis B after the first-of-its-kind drug was shown to permit a stoppage in treatment without the virus returning.

💉 An injection has shrunk the tumors of head and neck cancer patients in an “unprecedented trial result,” in some cases eliminating them entirely. Trials involving other types of cancers are ongoing.

🌍 Namibia has received funding to permanently conserve more than 24% of the country in the first investment-for-protection initiative in Africa designed to ensure long-term success.

👷 Brazilians might soon enjoy a two-day weekend as lawmakers move to shorten the workweek to 5 days and 40 hours, with no change in pay. Brazilians currently work 44 hours across 6 days.

📉 Internet prices in the US have fallen across the board for 11 consecutive years, in stark contrast to other categories of household spending. Real prices are down over 43% since 2014, as speeds have dramatically increased. (Related: balcony solar, coming soon to dozens of US states, could also help with electricity bills.)

🚫 Vermont is the first state to ban the toxic herbicide paraquat, and a dozen other states may be next.

🚀 NASA has unveiled its next steps for building a permanent moon base, although many say the proposed timing is unrealistic. China is also aiming to get humans to the lunar surface by the end of the decade.

👀 What we’re watching: Amid GOP backlash, Trump drops his $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund—at least for now.

💡 Editor’s pick: Not all is lost for new college grads: they’re doing better than the vibes suggest.

Subscribe now

TPN Member Originals

(Who are our Members? Get to know them.)

• The post-Trump era is beginning | Breaking the News ($) | James Fallows

• Lessons of successful resistance: The water defenders of El Salvador | Lucid | Ruth Ben-Ghiat

• They grew up with AI. Now they’re taking control | Life with Machines | Baratunde Thurston

• The pope’s guide to the AI revolution | TFP ($) | Arthur Brooks

• Be excellent, not efficient | Persuasion | Eboo Patel

• Japan leads space race | Diane Francis | Diane Francis

• Few Americans can afford long-term care—but this state program could be a game changer | MarketWatch ($) | Ezekiel J. Emanuel

• Magnanimity | No Mercy/No Malice | Scott Galloway

• Honey, where did all the male workers go? | Of Boys and Men | Richard Reeves

• Renovating Harvard (and other Ivies) | The Renovator | Danielle Allen

• Seventeen thoughts on Graham Platner | Slow Boring | Matthew Yglesias

The conversation looks beyond the doomsday prognostications surrounding lethal tech. Kreps shares insights from her time in the military around 9/11, reflecting on how constantly gaming out worst-case scenarios surprisingly led her to a more optimistic view of the future. Together, Karabell and Kreps explore the recent tensions between AI companies like Anthropic and the Pentagon. They also examine whether historical conventions for nuclear or biological weapons can offer a blueprint for governing AI and ubiquitous drone swarms.

While acknowledging the genuine uncertainties of our technological leap, Kreps explains why false certainty about the apocalypse is dangerous and why she believes society can harness this disruption without breaking.

Watch the full conversation below:

All episodes of the What Could Go Right? podcast are available here.

Transcript

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, and this is my podcast. And it’s called What Could Go Right? because we’re trying to look at, well, what could go right, given that we live in a world where everybody is chronically looking at what could go wrong.

And we are going to talk today with someone whose topic area is absolutely suited to both of those questions, and who has addressed one of the pressing issues of our day, namely: Will all this new technology kill us? Should we be as scared as many of us are?

Now, that doesn’t seem like a “what could go right” question. That seems like the opposite. But it is a question posed in light of, are we overdoing our sense of doom, and is that clouding our ability to see a sense of possibility?

And this emerging world, not just of AI, but of drones, which current conflicts over the past couple of years have really shown autonomous technology du jour. I mean, we talk about Waymo and we talk about cars, but drones really have solidified a clear sense of what this future world is going to look like, particularly in areas of war. Although, as we’ll talk about, not just that.

So today I’m going to speak with Sarah Kreps, who is a professor at Cornell University, was once upon a time a U.S. Air Force officer, who was around early in her career when the Predator drone was first deployed.

She’s written a number of books, including one that is forthcoming called Harnessing Disruption: Building the Tech Future Without Breaking Society, which is a great subtitle. Great title, actually. We’ll talk a bit about that, even though you’ll have to wait for the book for a bit — unless you’re listening to this a bit later, which is also possible.

So on that note: Hi, Sarah.

Sarah Kreps: Hi, Zachary. It’s great to be here.

Zachary Karabell: You’re kind of in both the academic and professional business of trying to assess not just where we are with a new technology, but where we’re going.

And one of the things you’re grappling with — or the world is grappling with — is rapidly changing, expanding drone technology, and you fuse it with rapidly changing and expanding artificial intelligence technology. Not necessarily the LLM aspect of artificial intelligence, but really the different AI agents. And you’ve written a lot about this and thought about all this.

And we’re having this conversation also on the heels of this very bizarre, I don’t know if you’d call it a battle, but something went on, obviously, between Anthropic, which develops the Claude AI models, and the Pentagon, and Anthropic’s concern that its models would be used in ways that it, in a corporate sense, found unethical by the Pentagon in terms of what’s targeted.

One of the, I don’t know if irony is the right word, but the fact is, even though that happened before the Iran conflict, Claude’s models are embedded in Pentagon systems anyway. So it actually was used that way, whether or not either Anthropic or the Pentagon wanted to.

Given that the models were used that way anyway, is it too late? I mean, are there any guardrails? Do we need guardrails? What would guardrails even look like?

Sarah Kreps: Yeah. I found that debate between the Pentagon and Anthropic — which is obviously still going on — to be a bit surprising in a way because Anthropic became involved with the Pentagon and with this company, Palantir, which is a largely military contractor organization, in 2024.

So for the last year and a half, they’ve been developing Claude to be integrated into a military system. And so it was a little bit surprising that then they said that they weren’t comfortable with whether this would be used in lawful ways. So I just wondered what they thought was going on when they got involved in this project.

And I also couldn’t help but think about something that had happened in 2018, when Google had been in a somewhat similar situation. They were developing what was called Project Maven, which is now the Maven support system that Anthropic supports, and Google had essentially gotten out of that contract because 3,000 Google employees had said basically what Anthropic said this time: We don’t want to be in this business of things that we don’t think are lawful or that we’re not comfortable with.

Zachary Karabell: And weirdly enough, this makes me less negative. Human beings develop tools. If you’re the person inventing one of those tools, the idea that you can actually predetermine what uses those tools will be used for once they’re released into the world, I just feel is silly.

Sarah Kreps: I think I agree with you. I don’t think that’s how Anthropic sees it. I think that is exactly the point, which is they want that control, and I think that’s why Google got out of that business in 2018.

So Google was able to get out of that business because there was no one else to step in. And one of the things that’s, I think, different now is there are so many AI companies that this makes it tricky for Anthropic because they might say, hey, we think that we can do this better, more ethically, more legally. But that sort of principled view of it only goes so far, because as they stepped away, OpenAI says, hey, we’re happy to do this. And if OpenAI doesn’t do it, there are five or 10 or 20 or 100 others that are willing to step in and do it.

So I think that the whole landscape has changed so much in the last, whatever that is, six to eight years.

Zachary Karabell: But isn’t it a little bit like if you and I had invented a light bulb and I said, I don’t want to sell my light bulb to anyone who’s going to turn it on between the hours of 12 and 2 because I believe firmly that human circadian rhythms mean that you should be asleep in the dark then?

Sarah Kreps: Yeah. I think that’s like what it’s saying. But I think this is why, in a way — and I think we’ll get to this — I wrote this book, because it did remind me so much of what happened with the nuclear project 80 years ago, which is why I think it’s very interesting and ironic that Dario used to give new employees Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb book because he also saw these parallels.

And I think that they think that they can do what the Manhattan Project scientists did. And there are debates about how much they were able to maintain agency over what happened once this product — your light bulb was, in this case, the nuclear weapon — was released because there were a lot of scientists who said, we don’t want to use the atomic bomb on Japan. That’s not what we got into this for. But the U.S. government said, it’s not your product anymore. This is now in our hands.

And then at some point there was a debate about whether to develop the hydrogen bomb. And so what I think is very interesting is you see these similar debates. You see these scientists who have these ideas, and they get involved in this kind of path dependence, technological innovation, and then they kind of get to this point where this is captured, in a way, by a government agency who is much more powerful than they are because — and I think this is what we’re seeing with the Pentagon — the national security imperative is a pretty powerful trump card.

And so what can Anthropic say? And this is how the courts have viewed it, which is, well, national security, and that then basically ends the conversation. And so I think, in a way, the answer, if these companies or individuals are uncomfortable with it, is just not to get involved with it in the first place.

I think where Anthropic thought they were different is that if this was going to be developed, they wanted to do it better. They wanted to do it more ethically. And that’s where they ran into this problem at the end, which is they developed what they hoped would be a better and more ethical product, but then there were these questions about this end use and whether Anthropic could say, you can’t use this light bulb between 1 and 4, and the Pentagon says, you gave us this light bulb. What do you mean we can’t use it between 1 and 4?

Zachary Karabell: My take has always been, if any scientist who was working on the Manhattan Project was under any illusions that this weapon wouldn’t be militarized, they were engaged in a massive act of delusion and denial in the service of really wanting to pursue this line of scientific inquiry. You know, they wanted to see what could be done to harness the power of the atom. But if they thought for one minute that that would not then be utilized by the military … . And there were people who told themselves that story unequivocally, who were involved in the Manhattan Project.

And as you referenced, there was a subsequent debate with Edward Teller. Oppenheimer was on the other side of that, losing, about the development of the hydrogen bomb. And of course the argument then was, if we don’t, someone will, therefore we should, which is exactly the same debate now about AI, right?

Sarah Kreps: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Zachary Karabell: If we don’t, the Chinese will, and the Chinese are like, if we don’t, the Americans will. And if Anthropic says, well, if we don’t, then OpenAI will.

The only point in human history, I think, where there was a collective act of recognizing we’re not going to develop certain things was certain conventions around biological weapons that have somewhat held.

Sarah Kreps: Yeah. I know there are a lot of debates about that in different disciplines. So is it a question of whether that was an ethical decision, or the kind of rationalist, economics argument would say the militaries just did not find any utility to biological or chemical weapons.

And, you know, we saw this in 1915 when these militaries were in trench warfare and these chemical weapons are blowing back into their own soldiers’ faces. That’s not a very useful weapon. And so maybe that doesn’t undermine the argument, which is that these militaries — whether they were moved by ethics, or whether the ethics were reinforced by the absolute inutility of these weapons — maybe that doesn’t matter. But I think you’re right. These are exceptions.

Zachary Karabell: No, I mean, that is a good point. It’s one thing to say we all saw the ethical wisdom of not using chemical and biological weapons, which you kind of want to be the truth. As opposed to, if we had figured out how to use them without blowback — literally, in the case that you just talked about — we would have. But we couldn’t, so we didn’t.

Sarah Kreps: Yeah. How much does the mechanism matter? I guess the mechanism matters because it points to whether this can replicate in other cases. And I think the reason why nuclear weapons were different is that they were such a deterrent that you couldn’t get other countries to agree not to develop nuclear weapons because there was a real consensus that even if you don’t use nuclear weapons, there’s a deterrent value to having them in an arsenal. And I don’t think that that’s true with chemical and biological weapons.

Zachary Karabell: So what about drones, and what about drone swarms? The assumption now, I think, is we’ve unleashed this new autonomous technology, which is going to be infused by AI, that we’re loosely calling drones, that can be developed by non-state actors, state actors, less expensively deployed for huge amounts of disruption for little amounts of effort.

And whether that means a country like Ukraine being able not just to credibly resist an invasion by Russia but potentially turn the tide, I mean, who knows? We’ll see. But there are some indications now that that is going to have another chapter that’s mostly drone-driven.

But if that becomes ubiquitous, you could imagine a scenario where human beings start realizing there’s no defense. The only actual defense is some sort of collective agreement not to use them. Do you see that as a possibility?

Sarah Kreps: I think that’s more likely when you have a scenario that is so overwhelmingly destructive the way nuclear weapons were. And I think the problem with drones, and I would say AI as well, is that, A, it’s really hard to ensure compliance. Back to your circularity of, well, if they’re going to develop it, we’re going to develop it. And if we can’t know that they’re not going to develop it, well then we have to.

I mean, a little bit like the Elon Musk thing where he said, let’s do a moratorium on AI development, and everyone sort of scoffed at this, and then he said, well, I guess if no one else is going to observe a moratorium, we’re going to accelerate our development. And this is, I think, again, why AI governance is close to impossible. You know, it’s in no one’s economic self-interest to issue and observe any kind of moratorium on AI.

And I think that’s true for drones too, and that the costs are not consequential enough that they can deter use the way we saw with nuclear weapons. And so I think those differences are really important.

Zachary Karabell: Or maybe just not yet. Meaning, if you knew for a fact that every individual, every state, every group had sufficient access to lethal enough drone technology to make your life miserable, and that there was no sure defense against it, you might be incentivized not to do it in the first place.

Sarah Kreps: Yeah, maybe. But I think that what we saw — and I wrote about this in the 2010s, about these international organizations that were prohibiting the transfer of the kind of U.S.-style armed drones, and actually that worked fairly well. But what happens, I think, in these kinds of agreements is the unintended consequence is it basically pushes development below the threshold that was prohibited. And so everyone’s like, well, if there’s this MTCR — the Missile Technology Control Regime — that’s saying we can’t produce this large type of drone, we’ll just kind of produce and manufacture and make ubiquitous this smaller drone that is also very capacious. And so that’s exactly what happened to the industry.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I guess I’m projecting some sort of near science-fiction future, which is probably going to be the reality in 10 years, where there are just so many drones between delivery drones and agricultural drones. I just finished this book about corn as a technology we eat, and drones becoming fertilizer drones, and planting drones, and seeding drones. And you have delivery drones throughout China. You have delivery drones throughout the world. You have transportation drones. Like, if everybody’s got a drone, and all those can be weaponized, and you can’t defend against them...

I mean, maybe it’s a similar argument to Second Amendment purists in the United States, right? The idea of, well, if everybody has a gun, nobody will commit crimes because you know that the person you’re potentially going after has a gun. There’s no real evidence that it works that way, but the argument’s out there.

I mean, I hear you. You’re saying basically no, that it won’t work that way. But we’re still kind of at the early stages of just massive, ubiquitous drone use.

Sarah Kreps: Yeah, I don’t know. On the other hand, and this is where, in my book, I just arrived — because for the longest time, whatever I was looking at, drones, nuclear weapons, AI, I was such a doomer. And then I looked at all of the doomsday prognostications, including my own, and realized actually none of them had come to pass. And I started thinking, well, what happened? Why not?

And I think, coming back to your question of, we’re going to live in this world of ubiquitous drones — you know, when I was working on this, I guess more than 10 years ago, everything was about, we’re going to have delivery drones, and how is the FAA going to regulate airspace? And we’re going to have these collisions and this and that. And we’re not, I don’t think, anywhere close to that, much as what we’ve read about with flying cars for years and autonomous vehicles, Waymos and things like that. Now they are taking off, but nothing ends up being as fast as we think. And again, this is kind of what I get at in the book, is that there are two things that happen. One is I think that these doomsday prognostications basically mobilize a lot of resistance, so it stalls that acceleration. But another reason is often that it turns out there are much more efficient ways to do things.

For example, I wrote a lot in 2013 and 2014 about how we were going to see drones just going around and assassinating people. And I quoted the late Dianne Feinstein, and in a hearing she said, these would be the perfect assassination weapon. She meant in a civilian setting. I can’t think of a scenario where drones have been used in that way, and I think it’s because, just crudely, there are much more efficient ways to kill people than using a drone and strapping on some explosive and trying to kill one or two people.

So I think both of those things are at work, and I think it comes back to this thing of, a lot could have gone wrong, but there are a lot of reasons why that’s not what happens.

Zachary Karabell: That’s funny. I was going to ask you the, how does one sleep at night question, when you’re focusing on all the worst-case scenarios. And obviously there’s a whole series of people — people who are focused on counterterrorism, biological weapons, nuclear proliferation — who spend their time both gaming out worst-case scenarios and trying to plan contingencies for them, and also monitoring traffic in real time. I’ve always wondered: Did you have trouble sleeping when you were most in that? I mean that both metaphorically and literally. Like, how does one go about one’s life as if there is a tomorrow worth living for when you spend all of your time focusing on all the possibilities that tomorrow is either not going to happen or going to happen very badly?

Sarah Kreps: That’s a great question. I was in the military and then in the intelligence side of the military around 9/11 and the Iraq War, and so I thought about and wrote about this a lot — that you need to think about all of the scenarios that could lead to an attack.

Because I don’t know, probably a lot of listeners were not around or don’t remember that, but after 9/11 there was — and for years — this question of what would be the next way that there could be a terrorist attack, and that you really had to get imaginative about what those scenarios are to be able to guard against them. And so that was my intellectual world for many years.

You know, I think the reason you can sleep is it almost becomes — and this isn’t good or bad, I don’t think, it’s probably bad — that you become almost clinical about it. This is a problem you’re trying to solve. And it becomes an intellectual pursuit about solving that problem.

But I wonder if it was so many years of, again, waiting for the worst to happen and it not happening that led me to a much more optimistic conclusion, which is, you can think about the infinite ways things can go wrong, but those don’t seem to happen, and there must be a reason why.

And maybe it’s that imagination and the thinking and the planning and almost, in some ways, the scare tactics that cause us to put our guards up, and that that’s sort of a salutary process of ensuring that we don’t end up in those existential crises.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. I mean, I’ve wondered this post-9/11. Why weren’t there more low-level attacks? Why weren’t there a bunch of people with machine guns in malls?

If you wanted to think of something that would have been hugely disruptive and presumably relatively uncomplicated — like it didn’t require logistics — and if the people doing it were not eager to live, then even fewer obstacles to doing it. And yet none of that happened, right?

And it just led to this question that I feel has never really been answered, which is, we do, as you just said, spend an immense amount of time focusing on all the what-ifs in a negative scenario, and we plan accordingly. And maybe that planning, as you said, is an ingredient in them not happening. But of course we don’t really have a good cognitive explanation of why things don’t happen, right? We don’t really understand why if something bad happened once, it doesn’t happen again. Because we don’t, I think, really understand — it’s much harder to chart the human instinct not to do bad stuff than it is to examine the human potential to do bad stuff.

I mean, did you ever sit around and have these conversations of why aren’t people doing all these things that we think they could do, that we’re planning they might do, and yet they haven’t done?

Sarah Kreps: Yeah. I had that conversation with my dissertation advisor, where I was just so worried about some sociopathic person using a drone to kill a bunch of people. And he said, they have much better ways to do it. They don’t need a drone to do that.

But I do think another ingredient, which we don’t tend to — as a society or media or intellectuals — articulate much, is that maybe there just aren’t a lot of nefariously minded people out there trying to do bad things. You know, the better angels of our nature. I found that kind of compelling, and I know it’s controversial, but this argument that we’ve gotten more “civilized” over centuries. And I’ve been reading a lot about European history, and it really is so striking that for centuries Europeans just killed each other, in the millions.

Zachary Karabell: Regularly.

Sarah Kreps: All the time. And it’s kind of remarkable that that just doesn’t happen anymore.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah.

Sarah Kreps: And that’s great.

Zachary Karabell: You’re totally right. This sort of waking up and going, wait a minute. We’ve done a lot of really bad shit as a species to each other at regular bases for a long time. And it has not led to these doom points nearly commensurate with the fear of them.

And here we are again, where AI is kind of the catch-all in the moment, and then when you attach it to certain physical technologies like drones, you have this supercharged sense of, okay, now we’ve finally gone and done it. We almost went and done it with nuclear weapons, but now we’ve finally gone and done it. And you can’t prove a future negative, right?

Sarah Kreps: Yes. Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: There is no argument that settles the argument about the future.

Sarah Kreps: Yeah, exactly. I think this is the thing. I was talking to a colleague who wrote a book about financial crises, Dan Drezner. It was called The System Worked. And basically these mechanisms that were put in place actually did a pretty good job to prevent another financial crisis, but no one likes that argument because if you’re an optimist, people can just say, well, the worst hasn’t happened yet, so you don’t know that you’re right. And so I think that there is a risk.

The one thing that I wonder — and I was in D.C. last week, and someone was talking about the guy who coined the expression “cyber 9/11,” kind of this catastrophizing language about how we were going to have a cyber 9/11. Well, years passed, and of course it didn’t happen, and he said his regret was that he felt like he sensationalized it unnecessarily. And I think it does raise this question. Was it the sensationalizing that actually is the reason why it didn’t happen, or were the ingredients just not there because what does that even mean? And I think it’s really hard to tease out which of these things is really operative.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. I mean, I love Dan, and I did a piece for The Washington Post a couple of months ago about why the financial system was surprisingly stable even with this massive oil shock and fertilizer and supply shock in the Gulf. Now, I wasn’t saying stable meaning stuff doesn’t go down. I was saying stable as in, this was not a 2008 moment where there was a legit fear for a period of time that the entire system was going to fracture. It’s like a power grid. It’s one thing to say it’s being strained. It’s different if it actually goes down completely. And the problem, as you just talked about, is it gets the immediate blowback of, yeah, yeah, right.

And nobody wants to be that person saying — like the famous economist Irving Fisher in, I think, October of 1929 — that the stock market has reached a permanent plateau of prosperity or something like that. You don’t want to be that person who proclaims, you know what? We’re good, like two weeks before we’re clearly not. And that should not be a reason not to do it, but there’s always a human professional reputational instinct of, well, I really don’t want to be that guy who people look back on and say…

And weirdly enough, there’s some incentive to be the guy, like The Big Short people. You’d rather be the guy — and I’m just using it because it’s often guys — you’d rather be the guy in their mother’s basement in their underwear forecasting the end of days who turns out to be right than be the person like Dan, or in this case you or I, who’s saying, you know, probably not, and be wrong.

Sarah Kreps: Yeah. There’s this famous book in international relations by a guy — I mean, this was the early 1900s — Norman Angell. And he said that the economic interdependence between countries was getting so tight that neither would have any incentive to go to war because economically that would just be disastrous. And then a couple years later, World War I happens, and these two countries that were so inextricably linked economically are now killing each other in trench warfare. So yeah, you don’t want to be that guy either because a century later we’re still talking about how dumb that prediction was.

Zachary Karabell: So who’s more pessimistic, you or your students these days? Because you teach at Cornell. You have a lot of undergraduate students and graduate students.

Sarah Kreps: Oh, that’s a great question. More pessimistic or more optimistic?

Zachary Karabell: Well, I mean, it’s basically the same question, right?

Sarah Kreps: Well, I don’t know. The question is so good because now I’m wondering whether they are just mirrors of what they think is the right answer. But since I tend to be somewhat optimistic, that’s sort of what I seem to get back from them. But no, I guess there are people...

I had a student a few weeks ago who was saying that the student did not want to use AI for anything because she was worried that the AI was going to steal her idea, and then her Ph.D. dissertation would now have been scooped.

Zachary Karabell: Huh.

Sarah Kreps: Which was a very pessimistic take. So yeah, I guess I think it’s sort of like a distribution, and so there are people at the tails that think of things that probably don’t worry me at all.

Zachary Karabell: So when you think about those questions — we’ve talked about it a little with Anthropic, and you just referenced it, about the fears of, I guess, the sentient AI. Although people who are really talking the most Armageddon view of AI talk about a sentient AI whose sentience is not understandable to humans. It’s not human intelligence writ large. It’s a whole other thing.

I think people who are really in the most doomer camps talk about it as, we could no more understand the real artificial general intelligence of the AI that’s forming than ants could understand us. So it’s not just like they’re a really smart human. It’s like they’re a whole other thing. Which I at least find an interesting thought experiment, right? Like, what would that be? What would that look like? Would it be indifferent? Would it have its own dictates that are totally distinct from any programming dictates that humans have created?

How do you think about these things in terms of governance? Is governance overrated? Is it just this kind of — as we talked about a bit between Anthropic and the Defense Department — is it just this sort of post hoc human attempt to go, ooh, wait a minute. Didn’t quite mean to do that?

Sarah Kreps: Yeah, yeah. So I think these debates are so interesting, again, because they are somewhat recurrent, but also it seems to me that the proponents of certain positions are not always doing themselves a service. And I’ll give you an example of Dario, who in 2023 was talking about the end of days that would happen two years later, in 2025. And then in 2025, when he was testifying or speaking, he said, oh, no, no, no, it’s 2027. And what I think that does for the debate is take what I — and I think you started here with the unknown and uncertainty — it suggests that there is so much uncertainty with new technologies that you can’t even...

And people talk about the — it sounds arcane — but the difference between risk and uncertainty. Risk is something where there is a probability distribution that you can map, and I think the challenge with new technologies is there’s so much uncertainty you can’t even map this with a distribution. But I think there’s a fallacy in these individuals, the CEOs speaking as if there is a way to map this, and that they can speak with certainty about, well, two years from now. When you’re moving the goalposts, it’s not a helpful way to frame the conversation, and it’s not a helpful way to mobilize attention. And I think in some ways that has been a problem with the climate change debate, is that if you catastrophize an outcome and talk about all the things that can go wrong — and it comes back to this kind of type one, type two error. Would you rather be predicting the worst and it doesn’t happen, or predicting that it’s going to work and then something doesn’t work out?

But I think the challenge is, in terms of governance, you need to build coalitions of reasonable and serious people, and if your catastrophized predictions do not come to pass in the timeframe that you have stipulated, then you’re just not going to be able to get the coalition together to do something meaningful in terms of guardrails.

So I think that that has happened in the climate change space to some degree, and I think there’s a risk of that happening in the AI space, is that if you’re predicting doom and gloom and now this timeframe, this time horizon, comes and goes and we’re not anywhere close to that, then I think people start to kind of move on and think that that threat is not very serious.

And so I think that’s, for me, the important thing is, a sober take in trying to ask the right questions, not just talk about these paperclip scenarios of the AI being programmed and somehow now taking over the world because it’s trying to optimize paperclips.

So I think those are the risks and why you don’t get meaningful governance — not just because it’s really difficult to do in terms of verification and compliance compared to nuclear weapons, but also because the debate hasn’t developed credibly around what is the credible and verifiable risk.

Zachary Karabell: I think you’re totally right on about that. And this thing of false certainty being rewarded more than honest uncertainty, which is threaded throughout society. It’s threaded throughout academic advancement. A scientific paper is likely to get attention because it makes a conclusive statement about an uncertain set of data rather than a nuanced statement about an uncertain set of data. A warning about future problems is likely to get more attention if expressed in stark binary terms than if expressed as a series of probabilities.

All these things mitigate against the humility of uncertainty and privilege the arrogance of certainty about future outcomes that are by definition unknown. We should all be humble about the future in the sense of, unless you can show me a crystal ball, a quantum computer, or some mechanism of future prediction that is near certain, then we should all be humble about what we think is going to happen and be aware of the fact that none of us know and we’re all trying to make our best guess.

And you’ve articulated that beautifully in the sense that there are also risks to that certainty when it’s presented because it crowds out other potentials and it has behavioral effects, right? If we’re so certain about impending climate doom, either you do nothing about it because you can’t do anything about it if it’s certain, or when those things don’t come to pass, people who would otherwise be willing to do something that probably would be ameliorative and mitigative are like, well, you were not right about your future negative scenario here.

So what kind of things do you think are realistic? And I guess the other question is, you have the agency of being informed about something and to articulate a vision of, here’s what good AI governance would look like, here’s how we should understand the role of technology, here’s what we should be worried about with drones, and here’s what we shouldn’t.

You know, you’re one person with agency and ideas, which is incredibly valuable. Some of the challenge is when you start empowering groups — whether it’s governments or industry coalitions or others — to determine the guardrails, those get determined, but they don’t necessarily work.

So how do you square the, you’ve got good ideas, but you’re also highly aware of how limited or how problematic it is when even good ideas get implemented as law or policy or you name it?

Sarah Kreps: So I think one of the venues I so distinctly remember in the AI governance space that I was part of that made me realize not the futility, but just the challenge of addressing this question, was this big tech company that was doing some responsible AI stuff. They had 30 experts in the room, and we went around and each said what we thought was the most important issue. And there were 30 different issues, from deepfakes, to bias and discrimination, to labor market displacement. And what it made me conclude is that AI is such a broad and generalized technology that part of the challenge was that these are all 30-plus different problems, and that we were so at the beginning, the fledgling stages of even understanding this technology, that we almost needed to fracture and take it as subcommittees. Okay, this is the group that needs to focus on deepfakes. And now you’re going to focus on bias and discrimination. And these are all very different things.

So I think — and again, taking the long view from having looked at a longer history of technological innovation — that we are still so … even though AI has been around since the ’50s technically, in terms of the consumer and ubiquity aspect of AI, it’s basically like three years old. And so I think there was a sense that we needed to fix this right away without even understanding what we mean by AI and what the problems were, and that it was so heterogeneous depending on the issue.

And I think, I write about this in my book, about the European Union AI Act, that I think now largely looks like it was too early, and there seemed to be a virtue to taking a very preemptive, precautionary approach. But meanwhile these worst fears have not come to pass, but the European Union has fallen so far behind on AI, and AI has become a huge economic engine. By some statistic I read about last year, it was accounting for 90 percent of the United States GDP growth.

So that’s, I think, the dilemma. Not that there’s one right or wrong approach to this, but that it’s trade-offs, and that different people and different countries are going to weight these things differently.

Zachary Karabell: So final thoughts. If we’re having this conversation in — I was going to say 10 years, but it feels like five years is already the outer envelope of reasonable speculation given where these things go. But, are we having a radically different conversation? Are we having the same conversation with some different details?

The assumption is all this is going to move incredibly fast, and you and I both have lived through the birth of the smartphone, the efflorescence of internet web technologies in the ’90s, and all that is definitely rapid and quick.

Although, you know, I grew up in New York City. I lived for most of my life in a relatively Leave It to Beaver, Mayberry neighborhood. I don’t mean the neighborhood was like that, I mean the square footage was like that. I lived in a very small section of Manhattan for most of my life.

You know, most of the buildings, some of them are different. Human beings walking down the streets have different clothes. The cars look a little different. But the essential reality of human nature has not completely shifted. So I wonder if we’re still overdoing — yes, these technologies shape things and change things, but I don’t know that we’re going to be as radically other as we seem to think. I don’t know. Where do you go with all these thoughts?

Sarah Kreps: Yeah. No, I don’t disagree at all. I think that a lot of these technologies have kind of an S curve, hockey stick, whatever, where there is a steep part.

I don’t want to be falsely certain or, like I want to be humble with my predictions here, to heed your admonition. But I look at what’s happened since the end of, what was that, 2022 or 2023 when ChatGPT first came out.

Zachary Karabell: ’23, I think, yeah.

Sarah Kreps: And I think there have been huge bursts of uptake and improvement. I just have a hard time believing that we are still in the very steep part of this S curve. So my prediction would be that five years from now, even 10 years from now, our conversation would be recognizable in ways that would not have been true, let’s say, 10 years back. I really do think there was a before and after this commercial AI. I even feel like agents are not the game changer that the uptake of AI and Claude and these different tools were in that 2022, ’23, ’24 timeframe. So I mean, I guess we’ll see. We’ll have to meet back up and see what we’re talking about.

Zachary Karabell: And see what it is. You know, it’s funny, thinking about that made me wonder too. It was November of ’22, so almost ’23, that Chat came out with its first model.

All these things have clearly changed a lot of our lives between the ubiquity of the web, the smartphone as a compendium of human knowledge and a ubiquity of human connection at our fingertips with immediacy for almost everybody in the world, everywhere in the world. That has clearly shifted an aspect of human existence — our awareness of each other, our ability to be aware of each other across great distances in the moment instantaneously. You know, COVID as the first human global crisis experienced simultaneously with an awareness of how everyone else was dealing with it simultaneously. It’s obviously too soon to figure out what it all means, actually. We’re living in the midst of it.

My first trip to India, I was complaining to somebody that I had done no writing, and I was in my journaling phase, and this very odd but sort of famous wise guy who I had ended up sitting next to on the plane said, “You can’t write about India while you’re there. It’s like writing about a dream while you’re having it.” I just remember that very poetically.

And so trying to make sense of all this in our present is probably a fool’s errand. We won’t know till we know.

Sarah Kreps: Yeah, but I think that’s where actually going back and looking at historical patterns can be really helpful. And there are a lot that I don’t cover in my book, but I think about something like the iPhone compared to a non-smartphone. That’s the sort of before and after.

And yeah, it improves dramatically, but now everyone laments, like, is the 17 that different from the 16? Was it that different from the 15? And even with nuclear weapons, I don’t want to dismiss the qualitative, quantitative difference between a hydrogen bomb and an atomic bomb, but I would still submit that the biggest change, the step-function change, was between having a nuclear weapon and the world before that. So I think a lot of technologies have that flavor to them.

And I think that’s true with drones as well, that the conversation — and again, I’ve been working on this for many years — even though these new Iranian low-cost loitering drones are sort of different, they’re very recognizable to what the U.S. was using in the early 2000s. And the biggest difference was weaponizing the Predator, not these iterations that came after.

Zachary Karabell: I want to thank you for a really cool, wide-ranging, unusual conversation. I very much appreciate your own journey of getting to a point of investigating your own assumptions of doom, which does not mean that you’ve stopped looking at all the challenges and problems. It just means that the perspective shifts, which is what I’m trying to do with these conversations. So I certainly appreciate that.

Sarah Kreps: Well, you’re doing it really well, and I appreciate being part of that conversation.

Zachary Karabell: So I want to thank you all for listening. As always, I know you all have a choice of what to do with your time, and choosing to do this is an honor and a privilege, and I hope you will keep coming back. Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your pets. They too can enjoy it when you are not.

Always interested in feedback. Go to theprogressnetwork.org, and there is a tab there.

You can email me directly through The Edgy Optimist site on Substack. Please sign up for that newsletter as well.

Thank you to the team at Kaleidoscope for producing this and to my team at The Progress Network for also making this possible.

And we’ll talk to you next week.

What Could Go Right? is produced by The Progress Network and Kaleidoscope.

Watch the podcast on YouTube.

Follow us on X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok: @progressntwrk

Plus: India is on its way to becoming the first major country in history to industrialize using solar energy; Hungary’s new prime minister has proposed a constitutional amendment that would effectively bar his authoritarian predecessor Viktor Orbán from ever returning to power; and a 28-year-old woman from Chicago’s South Side underwent a successful quadruple organ transplant—only the sixth of its kind in the United States.

Watch the full episode below:

All episodes of the What Could Go Right? podcast are available here.

Transcript

Emma Varvaloucas: Ebola is making headlines again, but there are some silver linings that you might not be seeing in the news. India is on its way to becoming the first major country to industrialize using solar power. Hungary’s new proposed constitutional amendment effectively bans dictators. And a cutting-edge medical story out of Chicago.

Welcome to the What Could Go Right? Progress Report, where we dive into all the good news that you probably missed because it was buried under the barrage of bad news. Let’s get into it.

The last few weeks for global health have been… how do I put this? A dumpster fire and very triggering. Not triggering in the way that a text message from your ex is triggering, but triggering in a way that very frightening headlines hinting at the next global pandemic is triggering.

And while hantavirus hysteria has chilled out as the situation stabilizes, another virus is taking its place in the news cycle. Earlier in May, news hit of the third-largest Ebola outbreak in history. So far, more than 200 people in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, also known as the DRC, are suspected to have died from the virus in connection to this outbreak.

Now, if you’re thinking, “Ebola, that thing we were all freaking out about in 2014?” Yes, that Ebola. It hasn’t gotten a lot of news coverage in the last few years, but there have been multiple smaller flare-ups in Africa since then. There’s a reason why those flare-ups have been small. After a massive outbreak in Western Africa that lasted from 2014 to 2016 and killed more than 10,000 people, the world developed and stockpiled the very first Ebola vaccines.

They worked so well for a while that people, including me, wondered if the era of large Ebola outbreaks was over. Yeah, that take aged like milk, because now a rare strain, Bundibugyo, is causing major problems, and unfortunately, those vaccines that I mentioned before weren’t made for it. Even worse, it’s spreading in a conflict zone with an already weakened healthcare system that was victim to the double whammy of last year’s aid funding cuts.

Listen, I know this is the Progress Report, where you come to get good news, not where you come to rethink getting back on your anti-anxiety meds. So I promise by the end of this you will certainly not be thinking about that.

Okay, here come the silver linings. This is far from the first time that the DRC has had to deal with Ebola. Per The New York Times, Congo’s health minister pointed out in a press conference that the country has been able to contain 15 previous outbreaks of Ebola without vaccines. So they’ve got experience on their side. And yes, Ebola does generally have a high fatality rate, but the Bundibugyo strain seems to be less deadly than the more common Zaire one.

My goal here is to transform all of you from nervous Nellies into cool, calm, and collected Carolines. Is it working? Okay, I’ll keep going.

It’s not just the DRC that is taking action. After all these outbreaks, I imagine that the international community leaps into a lab coat, gloves, and face mask faster than you can even say Ebola Bundibugyo.

And now that the outbreak has been declared, they have. Scientists alongside the World Health Organization are testing strain-specific medications and working day and night to launch clinical trials and experimental treatments. The first is remdesivir, which is a general antiviral. It has been tested before in other situations like the COVID-19 pandemic, if you remember that one, but it has only ever been somewhat effective.

Now, there is another one that is a bit more novel and exciting, MBP134. I know, it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, but… It’s an antibody mix developed specifically for Ebola viruses, and funded, by the way, by American federal research dollars. It works fabulously in monkeys, but its effectiveness in humans is yet to be seen.

Its maker has already shipped over some doses for use in high-risk individuals. So we’re gonna keep our eyes on how that plays out, and we’re hoping that these treatments can help protect and save more lives. A few vaccines for Bundibugyo are in the pipeline, but it’s going to take months to prepare them.

And meanwhile, the Africa CDC is considering trialing a vaccine that targets the Zaire strain. Whether it’ll act against Bundibugyo is 50/50. But the overall takeaway here is that while this current outbreak is definitely bad and is gonna grow for a while before it slows down, there is a lot that has been learned in the past which, odds are, fingers crossed, now going to have a positive impact on the trajectory of this outbreak.

Dr. Amanda Rojek, a health emergencies professor at Oxford’s Pandemic Sciences Institute, made the same point to CNN: “This is not the same situation as 2014.” And if you’re outside the regional area, meaning the DRC and Uganda, you can breathe easy. Ebola requires close contact to spread, and the WHO has set the global risk as low.

Chat, we are not cooked.

Before we get into our shorter stories, here are some numbers that will make you smile. 2017, the year that global sales of combustion engine cars peaked. Soon you’re gonna get a gas-powered car and people are gonna be like, “That was so 2017.”

26, miles traveled by NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars as it continues to collect data, and that’s basically the length of a marathon. I wonder what its time was.

$25,000, amount that 11 endangered US sites representing the country’s promise of equality will receive for preservation. $25 million, the cost of a high-tech maternal care center in Sierra Leone that is expected to curb the country’s maternal mortality rate, which is one of the highest in the world. More than 600, the number of generic drugs added to Trump Rx.

And here are our quick hits for today.

First up, India is on its way to becoming the first major country in the world to industrialize with solar power. In northwestern India, on the border of Pakistan, lies the Great Rann of Kutch. I love that name. It sounds very majestic. It’s the largest salt desert in the world, and it’s soon to be home to what’s expected to be the largest renewable energy project in the world. Building it has been far from easy. Workers have complained about the harsh environment and working conditions, but despite that, by 2029, about 60 million solar panels will cover the 280 square miles of Indian desert.

To put that in perspective, that’s roughly the size of the Caribbean island, Dominica, or the city of Lexington, Kentucky. So how much power will a plant like that generate? 30 gigawatts. That’s enough to power the entire country of Austria. Austria runs on India. Okay. Not literally, but maybe climate activists can take a note from the marketing execs at Dunkin’ Donuts. I think it’s a good idea.

Anyway, as Fred Pierce points out in a piece for Yale e360, the news of the solar revolution in India is really surprising. This is a country where 10 years ago, the government was obsessed with industrializing with coal, and if you uttered the words solar power, you might as well have been speaking another language. And no, not one of the 121 major Indian languages.

But something shifted in the last decade, quietly, and now with incredible force. This volcano of solar power is ready to erupt. Okay, I can’t front with you guys. That’s really a better metaphor/pun for geothermal energy, but we tried to come up with a solar energy pun, and just everything we thought of was super lame, so forgive me.

The point is, the hope is that by 2050, more of India’s energy will come from renewables than fossil fuels, which is wild considering that they’re in the midst of industrializing, and that has only ever been done before in history using dirty energy, like coal. If you thought India was only known for mouthwateringly good food, soon you’re gonna know them for being one of the most creative and innovative countries at the forefront of the climate revolution.

So, here’s the main thing. If India continues down this track, it could prove that it is possible to build a powerful economy and raise standards of living while also moving towards a sustainable energy future, and potentially giving other countries a blueprint to follow. I, for one, am very excited to see this solar project in full force. Powerful stuff. Ah, there’s the solar power pun. I knew we would get there.

Next up is a story out of Hungary. If you caught our first episode of the season, and if you didn’t, you can go back and listen to it now, you’ll remember that Hungary just got a new prime minister, specifically this very good-looking prime minister. What? We were all thinking it.

Peter Magyar has been in office for a few short weeks, and he’s already proposed a constitutional amendment that would cap prime ministers to eight years in office. Bold move to effectively term limit yourself almost immediately after being sworn in. But the real target of that amendment is his predecessor, Viktor Orbán.

You might have heard of him. Rigged elections, packed courts, inspired far-right politicians in the United States, targeted government critics. Yeah. So by most accounts, textbook authoritarian wannabe. And in true authoritarian fashion, he overstayed his welcome. As in, he stayed in office for five terms totaling 20 years.

This new constitutional amendment would retroactively apply to any term served by prime minister since Hungary’s democratization in 1990. So what this means for Orbán is he’s effectively barred from returning to office. This is a direct result of Madyar’s two-year campaign which centered on restoring Hungarian democracy. You know, the good old days. And unlike a suspicious number of politicians, he actually seems to be doing what he said he was gonna do.

Magyar has a serious mess to clean up and a skeptical public to win back, but the progress and pace of these last few weeks show that he knows that. If the early moves are any indication for what Magyar has in store for us, Hungary might really be able to turn a corner.

And last but not least, some genuinely impressive news from the world of medicine. Jasmine Jones is a 28-year-old woman from Chicago’s South Side who was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis when she was five months old. It’s a genetic disease that can damage the lungs and other organs. Her doctors told her she’d need to do something pretty unthinkable: replace four of her organs at the same time.

In January, surgeons at the University of Chicago performed a quadruple organ transplant. She got a new right and left lung, kidney, and liver all in one 36-hour surgery. And guys, this isn’t like going for a hip replacement. This quadruple organ transplant was the first of its kind in Illinois and only the sixth in the entire United States.

And according to the Chicago Tribune, Jones had no clue how rare this procedure was until months after her surgery, which honestly might have been the right order of operations. Like, can you imagine going into a major surgery knowing only five other procedures of its kind have taken place? I’d probably make a run for it, but Jasmine Jones didn’t know, and Jasmine Jones went through with it, and the results have been positive.

She says she’s “feeling pretty good” about five months after the transplant. That feels like the biggest understatement of the year, but I will take it. I mean, this woman deserves a gold medal for going through what she did. And honestly, so do those surgeons. It’s an amazing feat for the medical field.

Transplant science is advancing faster than anyone could have predicted, and procedures that once seemed impossible are becoming real.

And that’s all for this week’s Progress Report. I hope these stories remind you that there’s so much good going on in the world, so it’s important to shift our focus away sometimes from all of the bad.

So if you got some value from this episode, maybe something you can bring up at your next park picnic, forward the show to a friend who could really use some positive news, or send it to the hypochondriac in your life that’s freaking out about Ebola. And make sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on your preferred podcast platform and leave us a review.

And if you’d like some more stories like this coming directly to your inbox, sign up for our newsletter. The link is in the description. Got a good news story that we should cover next week? Let us know in the comments. Thank you for watching, and see you next week on The Progress Report.

What Could Go Right? is produced by The Progress Network and Kaleidoscope.

Watch the podcast on YouTube.

Follow us on X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok: @progressntwrk

It has not been a good few weeks for global health. Just as the hantavirus situation stabilized, with no deaths reported since May 2, news came of the third-largest Ebola outbreak in history. So far, the World Health Organization (WHO) suspects that more than 200 people in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have died from the virus.

For years, the world’s first Ebola vaccines—which were developed, approved, and stockpiled around 2019–2021—worked so well that I wondered in this newsletter whether the era of large outbreaks was over. As one commenter put it, that take has “aged like milk.”1 I hadn’t counted on the perfect storm that’s going on right now: a rare strain, Bundibugyo, for which no approved vaccine or treatment exists, spreading in a conflict zone with an already deficient healthcare infrastructure that was further gutted by last year’s funding cuts to aid.

So, yes, a lot of factors are working against the speedy containment of the latest scourge. Health officials are further behind the eight ball because the virus had gone undetected for weeks. They do have one thing going for them, though: experience. The New York Times reports that Congo’s health minister, Dr. Samuel-Roger Kamba, “emphasized” in a press conference “that the country had been able to contain 15 previous outbreaks of Ebola without vaccines or treatments.” (Another plus: While Ebola generally has a high fatality rate, the Bundibugyo strain appears to be less deadly than the more common Zaire one.)

The international community has already leapt into action, to turn, as best it can, the situation into a testing ground for Bundibugyo-specific medicines. Alongside the WHO, scientists are working “day and night” to launch clinical trials for two experimental treatments. One is the broad-acting antiviral remdesivir; the other, a two-antibody mix developed for Ebola viruses—and funded by American federal grants for scientific research—called MBP134. It’s as yet unclear whether MBP134 is effective in humans, but it works great in monkeys. Its maker, Mapp Biopharmaceutical, has already shipped over some doses for high-risk individuals.

A few vaccines for Bundibugyo are also in the pipelines of various manufacturers, though none have been tested on humans, and it will take months to prepare them for use. Meanwhile, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) is considering trialing the vaccine that targets the Zaire strain; whether it will act against Bundibugyo is 50/50.

But vaccines or no vaccines, the world is still better prepared than it used to be, Dr. Amanda Rojek, a health emergencies professor at Oxford’s Pandemic Sciences Institute, told CNN. About a decade ago, more than 10,000 people died in western Africa in the largest-ever Ebola outbreak. Compared to then, we now have “ready surveillance systems, faster diagnostics, established ways of running clinical trials, and stronger international coordination.”2 The Africa CDC, for instance, has been catching some criticism for its delayed announcement of the current crisis, but that organization didn’t even exist until 2016.

It will likely take months for officials to put a lid on the spread, so we can expect that the outbreak will continue to grow before it slows. To say that many aspects of the situation are challenging would be an understatement, but those forces are not the only ones in play. And people outside of the regional area should not be especially alarmed; Ebola spreads through close contact. The WHO has set the global risk as “low.”

Before we go: The one-two punch of the hantavirus and Ebola outbreaks makes the annual Epidemics That Didn’t Happen report particularly well-timed. The viruses that break through get the news attention, of course, but no one ever hears when surveillance, detection, and containment work like a charm. For instance, we might well have heard about Ebola back in January 2025, when a nurse in Uganda came down with it, if health officials hadn’t immediately jumped on the case. You can browse all six stories from the report here.

—Emma Varvaloucas

Share

What Could Go Right? S8 E7: The Surprising Ritual Renaissance | with Bruce Feiler

What happens when the traditional ways we gather and mourn start to disappear? Bestselling author Bruce Feiler joins host Zachary Karabell to discuss his latest book, A Time to Gather, and explore the modern celebration recession. Instead of yielding to isolation, Feiler reveals a surprising grassroots renaissance of human connection happening right now. | Listen now

By the Numbers

2017: Year that global sales of combustion-engine cars peaked

26: Miles traveled by NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars as it continues to collect data (a marathon!)

$25K: Amount that 11 endangered US sites—representing the country’s “promise of equality”—will receive for preservation

$25M: Cost of a cutting-edge maternal care center in Sierra Leone that is expected to curb the country’s maternal mortality rate, one of the highest in the world

>600: Generic drugs added to TrumpRx

Quick Hits

🐯 A new satellite system can track “animal panic” from space at an unprecedented scale, a useful tool for cracking down on poaching.

⚡ Global electricity generation from wind and solar outpaced gas for the first time in April, according to a new report.

☀️ India is on the verge of being the first major country to industrialize with solar, analysts say, establishing a blueprint for other emerging economies.

🐠 Papua New Guinea is planning to protect a United Kingdom-sized area of its waters, prohibiting all fishing and destructive human behavior within the zone.

🍃 The largest clean energy installation in the US is coming online next month. The New Mexico wind farm will have the capacity to power one million homes annually.

🧑‍⚖️ Hawaii is poised to become one of the first states to require a judge to consider a child’s exposure to trauma before charging them as an adult. The bill passed without opposition and now awaits the governor’s signature.

🧬 A scientific team is close to performing the first study of in-utero gene therapy, to treat a rare metabolic disorder. It’s currently in talks with the FDA, and go-ahead is expected later this year or early next.

🫁 A couple of individual success stories from the frontiers of medicine: A cystic fibrosis patient from Chicago is in good condition months after receiving a quadruple organ transplant, one of only a handful that have been performed across the US. And, an AI-powered biomedical database saved a newborn’s life.

⚖️ Hungary’s new government has proposed a constitutional amendment to limit the time prime ministers can spend in office. It would, in effect, bar former PM Viktor Orbán from retaking power.

👀 What we’re watching: A July court case will decide whether Botswana becomes the second African nation to achieve marriage equality.

💡 Editor’s pick: The heroic actions of healthcare workers in Africa deserve more attention than they get. (NYT $)

Subscribe now

TPN Member Originals

(Who are our Members? Get to know them.)

• The saddest countries all speak English | TFP ($) | Arthur Brooks

• We’re here to live life, not optimize it | Life with Machines | Baratunde Thurston

• Where are the Republicans who put America first? | NYT ($) | Thomas L. Friedman

• The DOJ’s anti-weaponization fund | Tangle | Isaac Saul

• The price of mythologizing Putin, and some resistance lessons from Ukraine | Lucid | Ruth Ben-Ghiat

• How to give a commencement speech about AI without getting booed (too much) | Faster, Please! | James Pethokoukis

• Seven ways to avoid losing your job to AI | TFP ($) | Tyler Cowen

• Supreme Court’s ‘do nothing’ philosophy threatens voting rights | WaPo ($) | Theodore R. Johnson

• Nothing beats polarization like civics education | NYT ($) | Danielle Allen

• A black Helen of Troy? Fine. A white Obama? Not yet. | NYT ($) | John McWhorter

• The absurd misunderstanding fueling the debate over The Odyssey | The Atlantic ($) | Thomas Chatterton Williams

Feiler shares deeply personal stories, from navigating his father’s funeral to establishing a meaningful family ritual following the recent loss of his sister-in-law. Karabell and Feiler also discuss the dual nature of social media, highlighting how it acts as an amplification tool that helps democratize new traditions, like hospital honor walks for organ donors and even Taylor Swift-themed divorce parties.

While acknowledging the very real threats of loneliness and the isolating effects of our digital lives, Feiler explains why he remains optimistic about our collective future.

Watch the full conversation below:

All episodes of the What Could Go Right? podcast are available here.

Transcript

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network. In a world full of noise and a world full of armageddon porn, how do we take a different view on the human condition at a time when, admittedly, people are feeling, it would appear, pretty grim, and are losing faith in institutions, are losing faith in communities, and may even be losing faith in themselves?

And yet, is that really the whole story? Are we in the midst of a recreation, even in the midst of a dissolution? I’m going to talk today to somebody who has been traipsing around the world and observing the human condition from a whole series of angles, and this question of not just what are we losing, but what are we finding? What are we gaining? So I’m going to be speaking with Bruce Feiler, who has a new book out, and I’m going to hold up the book. I wanted to do this in real life. Hold up an actual book. Look, it’s an actual book. It’s called A Time To Gather: How Ritual Created the World — and How It Can Save Us. A modest, modest statement, a modest promise.

So Bruce has written a lot of books. He and I have known each other for an inordinately long amount of time, and we’re going to have a conversation about ritual, but we’re also going to have a conversation about the pressing question of this season of the podcast, which is, what are we missing by only looking at the downside? What are we not seeing by assuming the worst? So Bruce, hi.

Bruce Feiler: Hi. Nice to see you. I love that introduction. It captures everything that I know and love about you and have for a long time, and I actually think it’s crazy relevant to the topic we’re about to talk about.

Zachary Karabell: Well, that’s a wrap. Thank you so much for joining us all today. We’ve had a great time. Please go buy the book. It’s called A Time To Gather.

So, gratuitous softball question: Why this book? Why now?

Bruce Feiler: Well, let me answer that question by using the frame that you just used. Are we in a period of collapse, or a period of renewal? So the short answer to your question is 21 years ago next week, as we tape this conversation, my wife Linda and I went from being empty nesters to full nesters in 32 minutes.

We have, as you know, identical twin daughters, and 18 years after that, we became empty nesters, and we went from full nest to empty nest in 32 minutes. We dropped our girls off at college, and we came back to Brooklyn, where we lived, and I walked into my home and I had this feeling that I’d never had before, which is that I felt homesick in my own home.

And my first response was, my gosh, don’t use that word. That’s what kids are supposed to feel when they go to summer camp. What I was going through is a certain period in my life of loss and re-imagination. My dad had just died. My mom was aging. My kids are off to college.

Suddenly, we need to redefine our marriage, which had our kids at the heart of it. And I had been writing, as you know, for 10 years about life transitions, right? Life is in the transitions. A book I wrote called The Search about work transitions, and I thought, I’m ready for this. What I need is a ritual.

And that’s when I stumbled into the story that in forty years of writing books professionally is the greatest story that I have encountered, and one I’m a little shame-faced that I didn’t know before, and that has to do with how we hold together. So, to now bring it to the frame you used at the beginning of this conversation, we know that ritual works. For 300,000 years, the initial human act was when someone died, we’re going to get together, we’re going to bury them. Religion did not create ritual. It’s the other way around. So humans have been using ritual before we were anatomical humans.

So for 100 centuries, that’s 10,000 years, in any culture anywhere in the world that we’ve looked, people have used ritual to connect us in times of change. What do I mean by that? When someone comes in the group, like a birth, like a wedding, when someone leaves the group, like a coming of age, a funeral, when someone gets sick or moves, people reconstitute the group with a ritual.

Until this century, when we’ve abandoned them, and that’s the loss part of your frame. No one’s having birth rituals anymore. No one’s having coming of age rituals. As you know, in 1960, 90% of human adults married. Now that number is below 50% for the first time. And also, no one’s having funerals anymore, which was the shocking thing to me. In 1970, 5% of Americans were cremated. Now it’s 65%, going to 80%, and only one in five has a funeral or a ceremony of any kind.

So we have abandoned the traditional way that we’ve held together. That’s what I call the celebration recession. That’s the loss, the falling apart, the giving up of traditions that you alluded to at the top of this conversation.

But then at the same time, all of these new ways of gathering and meeting are arising, and some are silly, promposals and gender reveals, but some of them are profound, like not just marriage, but divorce, not just fertility, but infertility, not just becoming an adult, but entering aging. So there is this renaissance of ritual around the world. That’s the story that I stumbled into and I wanted to tell. And you said to travel, so 16 countries, six continents, three years of joining these rituals and trying to figure out: Is there a blueprint of togetherness that can hold us together?

Zachary Karabell: I mean, that’s one of my favorite aspects of what you look at in this, which is, you start with what is not obvious but is intuitively clear, right? All the things that we don’t do, that we have lost in losing communities. I think we’re probably beyond peak nostalgia for small-town America, when Bowling Alone came out 20-plus years ago.

Bruce Feiler: In 1999, 2000.

Zachary Karabell: We’re deep into the — social media has, I guess to use the ritual thing, put the nail in the coffin, a ritual that we no longer have anyway. And yet what you show is yes, but. Like, okay, that’s true. But we’re missing the green shoots while we’re mourning all that we’ve lost, and that’s not serving us either.

Bruce Feiler: Well, I think that’s right, and that’s what’s great about what you’re doing on this podcast and in The Progress Network in general. It’s, what are we missing in the doom and gloom? And my joke about this is we’ve thrown out the baby shower with the bathwater. That’s my pun for it. But I think you’re exactly right.

So what is lost? To be very precise about it, what is lost is top-down, institutionally mandated, patriarchal, hierarchical, pre-scripted life rituals. No one wants those meaning-free gatherings where you have no say in it.

One of my favorite chapters in this book is, I went to Ireland. I went to 10 funerals in a week in Ireland. And the traditional Irish wake, where the ladies from the neighborhood show up and wash the body, and then it’s in repose, and then it exits, that’s not happening anymore. But nor is the traditional Irish Mass. So I went to 10 of these funerals. Half of them took place in churches, and the way that the Catholic Church ran the Mass for a long time is, it was not about the deceased. It was about the life of Jesus, and it was about honoring that, and there was no personalization. And people want the personalization. So the one I went to, the guy was a Liverpool football fan, right? So they had the scarf, they had the soccer ball. The family stood up and talked about his life, which had not been done for the traditional funeral for 2,000 years. The personalization. So that’s what people want: bottom-up, bespoke. Not only does the ritual need to be personalized — and you mentioned social media, by the way. People get these ideas from all over. That’s another thing about social media, is that people go — I was in Vegas. I went to six weddings in a day in Las Vegas, as you know. And the wedding designer I was talking to said she has a rule. If someone comes in and says, I want to do the sand ceremony thingy, she has a rule that if you say “thingy,” that means you saw it on the internet and we’re not doing it. So what’s a sand ceremony thingy? You and I are getting married. You have a vial of sand, I have a vial of sand. There’s a third empty vial.

Zachary Karabell: I thought you’d never ask.

Bruce Feiler: But we go back and forth and we make it. And I was in Chile, actually on my way to the Andes and then on my way to Easter Island, and I was at a big event sitting next to a guy who just got married and he said, yeah, of course we did a sand ceremony.

No one even knows where this came from, but people are seeing it on the internet, and young people especially want their rituals to pop on the internet so that their friends pay attention.

So even social media, with all its destructive forces and algorithmic division, also is serving to democratize these rituals as people suddenly have access to what others are doing far outside of their own tradition.

Zachary Karabell: We’re in peak social media dystopian view, and everybody you talk to, there are two conversations now, maybe there are three. There’s Trump, there’s social media and there’s AI, and they’re all bad. Meaning the conversations are all bad, no matter what you think about any of these things.

And in the social media one, we’re kind of losing the fact that there are all these things that people discover, and discover of community. There was that brief halcyon moment where social media was that thing that was going to bring communities of interest together.

Bruce Feiler: Yes, yes, yes.

Zachary Karabell: It was going to remove isolation.

Bruce Feiler: The teenage jugglers, which I was, in Savannah, Georgia. There were no jugglers in Savannah, Georgia. I could have found a community of jugglers as a kid if that had happened.

Let me just say two things about that. Thing number one is that all of those problems, ritual is the answer. If your problem is loneliness and isolation, ritual is the answer. If your problem is political division, ritual is the answer. If your problem is AI, ritual is the answer. Because it’s basically URL or IRL, and that to me is the tension. And what we’re seeing, what I say in every conversation I get into about AI, is that there is going to be a human response to it.

I was on TV recently and an interviewer said to me, oh, 5,000 people lost their jobs from AI last month, and there’s a Goldman report this week, as we tape this conversation, 30,000 people a month losing their jobs to AI or whatever.

In the 19th century, a third of Americans lost their jobs because of the Industrial Revolution. Twenty-five million people left rural areas and went to urban areas, and another 25 million came from Europe as immigrants.

And if you look at what we think of today as the institutional kinds of rituals, everything about a wedding was invented at the time. Queen Victoria wore the first white wedding dress. The registry came up with commercialization, the shower, the photo, all of that popped up. Whenever there is this kind of dislocation, there is a human response, and I think that what’s happening now is that human response.

So let’s just tell another example of a story that was fed by social media. So my book opens. I interviewed 100 ritual designers. The best single story is at the beginning of A Time To Gather. A woman named Missy Holliday, she’s in a small town in Ohio, father’s the mayor and fire chief, her mother teaches Presbyterian Sunday school, a service-oriented family. She grows up and gets married, moves to Indianapolis, becomes a nurse. She comes back on Super Bowl weekend, and her sister says she’s getting engaged the next week. Gets into a car, drives to work. It snowed the night before. She wraps her car around a tree.

So the family goes and rescues her to take her to the hospital. They come in and the next morning she’s had two brain death tests. She’s an organ donor. We’re taking her, goodbye. Wrenches the family apart. And this woman says, I don’t want this to happen to any other family. She quits her job. She joins the donor support network in Cincinnati, and she realizes there’s this tension between and among the families, the hospital and the donor organizations, and she said what they need is a ritual.

The organs are donated not in the room, but in the OR. It’s a surgery after they’re declared medically dead. So she puts the body in a gurney. They put her phone with a Spotify account, the first family picks “Annie’s Song.” They push the gurney into the hallway. The entire hospital staff, busy saving people who are sick to prevent them from dying, has stopped to honor this dead victim who is donating his organs. They stand there with flameless candles. They push the body down. Everybody pays tribute. They say goodbye at the operating room door. She calls this an honor walk, and she makes a rule. No one can have a picture. But she makes an exception with the widow of the deceased.

The next morning, Missy’s phone blows up. “How do I do an honor walk? How do I do this? How do I do that?” The woman took that picture, posted it on Facebook. It got two million likes.

There are now 50 donor support organizations in the country. They all do honor walks. Dozens of countries around the world. They have a quarter of a billion views on YouTube.

And it’s an example. This was a thing. The institutions never did this, religious institutions, civic institutions. This is an individual that says, here’s a pain point. I want to help solve it. Social media helped spread it. It brings comfort and connectedness in a horrific time for a family.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, and that’s such an important point about social media. It’s an amplification tool.

Bruce Feiler: Yes.

Zachary Karabell: It can absolutely amplify all that is the worst and the ugliest and the most destructive, but it can amplify all that is the best and the most connective.

One of the things I’ve been noodling around with the past couple of years, somewhat to my surprise, is one of the reasons why I’m less pessimistic about the American and even the global present is because I’m much more negative about the past.

And by negative about the past, I mean I’m much more acutely aware of just how ugly the human legacy has been. Also how magnificent it’s been. But meaning, that gives less credence to the idea of — contra Dickens — we don’t live in the worst of all possible worlds. And we probably don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, but it might be the Sydney Carton, it’s the worst of times and best of times simultaneously.

But I wonder about this. You made a comment just before that there was a ritual framework that was patriarchal.

Bruce Feiler: Yes.

Zachary Karabell: It’s also true there was a ritual framework that was matriarchal. Young women becoming a woman, always within a female sphere.

Bruce Feiler: Birth happening at home. It then gets hospitalized. Now we sort of seem to be going back to hospitals being more humane. I like this train of thought, so keep going.

Zachary Karabell: But there was also a rigidity to that ritual. It wasn’t an opt-in, right? And if you tried to opt out, you did so at great personal peril. It was part of the lattice of things that at least a lot of contemporary society decided were doing harm to the human spirit and not enlivening it. So how does one distill out those factors?

Bruce Feiler: This is a great question, I think, and you framed it so very well. Let me work my way to answering that question by first giving some basic definitions of what we’re talking about here.

So what is a ritual? A ritual is a shared unnecessary act that makes us feel at home. It’s shared in the sense that it connects us. It’s unnecessary in the sense that you don’t have to get down on one knee to get engaged. You don’t have to wear black to mourn. But these are unnecessities that become social necessities because we’ve agreed on them. And it’s fundamentally an act. It’s a doing. It’s not a telling.

But the most important part — and in fact, what I’m adding to this definition — is, go back to the homesickness. I felt homesick in my own home. It restores a sense of home when we feel that we have lost it. The reason that’s relevant to what you said is that a lot of the rituals that the institutions did not observe were ones that did not fit the institutional narrative. I call them the shadow rituals. Not just marriage, but divorce.

My wife Linda, whom you know, her favorite chapter in this is the Taylor Swift divorce party. So there’s a woman who grew up, both of her parents got divorced. She’s like, I’m not going to get divorced. She got married, had two kids. You can imagine where this story goes. She gets divorced on Long Island, and what did she do? Her husband moves out, takes half the stuff. She takes the rest of the stuff, puts it in the middle of the living room and on the dining room table. Her sisters come over, they donate everything. She comes home, and she says — this is the moment — You know what I need right now? I need a registry. So she forms the world’s first divorce registry.

“I need the help now.” What does she do? She goes online. Actually, what happens is she goes into AOL chat rooms.

Zachary Karabell: Kids, there was a thing called AOL chat rooms.

Bruce Feiler: So she goes onto AOL chat rooms and starts saying, my husband’s doing this. Is this normal? My husband’s doing that. Is that normal?

And the women say, no, that’s not normal. My husband’s doing that. And then older women got on and started saying, you know what? My husband was doing that, and I lived with it for a long time, and you don’t have to be unhappy. So there is community forming exactly at the moment you feel most isolated.

So she starts this registry, it takes off, and then she realizes that’s not enough. She needs to de-stigmatize the divorce. So she says, who’s the queen of breakups? Taylor Swift. So she writes a blog post about a Taylor Swift divorce party with “Shake It Off” cupcakes and “we are never, ever, ever getting back together” — I’m not looking at you as an expert in Taylor Swift lyrics — and the whole thing goes crazy viral.

My favorite chapter perhaps, is late in the book. It’s called “The Garden of Lost Children,” and it’s about something that organized religion — let’s remind, organized religion comes very late in the history of ritual gathering. We have ritual for 300,000 years. We have organized religion for 2,500 years. And so it basically takes it over in an incredible coup, expands it. Five of the seven sacraments are about rituals. This ritual calendar gets introduced by these organized religions of all varieties. But they didn’t celebrate divorce. Maimonides, the greatest Jewish thinker, if a child dies within 31 days of being born, it’s as if the child never lived. No funeral. St. Augustine, Catholic law until the late 20th century: if you were not baptized, then you could not be buried in a Catholic cemetery. So bereft fathers, after their wives give birth to a stillborn child, would carry that child to the end of the town and bury them in homemade graves, often underneath abandoned churches in what were called eavesdrop funerals because the water would come down and they would hope it would baptize their child. And the entire town would follow them. There have been scores of these found across Ireland called cillíní. And they are examples that humans were reacting to the experience, even though their institutions did not honor it.

And now what we do, now that being in an institution is no longer mandatory, millennials and Gen Z are saying, I’m having a double mastectomy. My institution doesn’t have one. I talked to the first woman who entered a Jewish cemetery, who wrote the Jewish ritual around miscarriage or stillbirth. So basically everyday people are saying, I’ve got a pain. I need it now. I’m going to do it, and I don’t need your validation, my parents, my grandparents, my neighbors, my institutions. I want it now. And that’s the great opportunity of this renaissance of ritual around the world.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. And I always feel like that’s the challenge when one legitimately nostalgizes something, the awareness of, there was a time when, there was a time when we celebrated communally. There was a time when local communities, by dint of just the human existence, were in touch with the cadences of nature. And so you celebrated the harvest, and you celebrated the planting, and you celebrated the change of seasons. You celebrated life. You celebrated death. You did so both within an institutional framework and a pre-institutional framework, because the origin of a lot of those rituals is the natural world and being in the midst of it.

And yet if you were in a 1950s American idyll, the Leave It to Beaver town that we all romanticize, that was great as long as you weren’t gay, as long as you weren’t a woman advocating for working outside the home, as long as you were not an African American, as long as you weren’t a Native American. The list of exclusionary “as long as you weren’t” was long.

And while I am not saying this as a way of denigrating the beauty of the human spirit that was engendered by a lot of this, and again, go around the world and pick your correlate, right? Hindu caste systems that were rigid, and still are to some degree. But you can’t just go, I wish we had that, without recognizing that that came with a set of baggage.

Bruce Feiler: My favorite story that exemplifies the point you just made is the story of jumping the broom. So jumping the broom: There were examples even in the ancient world of poets talking about jumping a broom being a symbol of marriage. But jumping the broom becomes a popular way of marking marriages essentially in the British Isles in the early modern period. And it was specifically designed for people who were unchurched, non-legal, non-normative in some way. And jumping the broom goes essentially from poor whites in the British Isles in the 19th century, jumps the Atlantic, and enters the world of enslaved Africans in the antebellum period before the Civil War.

So again, unchurched. They’re not legally allowed to marry, but they want to marry. And half of weddings of enslaved people in the 19th century were marked by jumping the broom. This is from a scholar who went back and looked at all of these diaries of enslaved people.

After the war, it becomes less popular. First of all, in Reconstruction, if that was the way you had marked your marriage by jumping the broom, then you were not allowed to have inheritance, or a pension if you had been in the military. So the formerly enslaved rushed to have traditional legal weddings, or church weddings if they were Christian. So jumping the broom fades from history.

Until in 1976, Alex Haley, in Roots, which spends an entire year on the New York Times bestseller list, he wins a Pulitzer Prize, and it becomes a TV series filmed in my hometown. I went to see the place where they sold Kunta Kinte into slavery. We skipped school to go in Savannah, Georgia. So it goes on the air. Eighty-five percent of households watch Roots, the biggest TV show before or since.

In episode 2, Kunta and Bell jump the broom, igniting a tradition of the idea that enslaved Africans invented this. Well, we now know they didn’t invent it, but it becomes popular. And there’s a woman who watches that as a teenager. She grows up, marries a photographer in North Carolina. They have a child. She has an accident. She has a Marcus Welby moment where the doctor comes in and says, we can’t do surgery on you, you are pregnant. So she can’t have the surgery. She’s lying in bed. She remembers watching episode 2 of Roots. She writes a small book, a 60-page self-published book called Jumping the Broom.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch — I’m telling this story because you’re such a media geek — it gets picked up by The Wall Street Journal, the AP, and USA Today. And she says, I know exactly what’s going to happen. I am going to be inundated by Black couples who want to jump the broom. But that’s not what happens.

The first call she ever got? A gay couple in Florida who liked the idea of a ritual for people who were not legally accepted at the time. Interracial couples. Intergenerational couples. So eventually the Black couples call, but jumping the broom suddenly, Oprah does it, The New York Times writes an article, there’s movies about it, plays about it. It becomes a symbol of weddings for people who were outside the system. It’s everything you were talking about, and now you can buy $200 heritage brooms. The whole thing.

And the reason it’s great to be a writer and stumble on these people and that they share their stories with me, she tells me that the child that she was pregnant with, she says to me, he’s... and then she kind of mumbles it. And I’m like, I didn’t hear you. She says, he’s gay. And I’m like, of course he is. That’s how the universe works. And now he’s a dancer and he performs jumping the broom.

It’s an example of these stories. There is no pure ritual. They change with the times, and now that we can design them from the bottom up, it gives us all permission to do that.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, and it’s amazing how quickly human beings create these rituals that then become kind of reified as if they always were.

Bruce Feiler: Yes.

Zachary Karabell: And then you forget. It’s so beautiful, the weaving of the history into that story, none of which is evident for the people performing the ritual today.

And the ahistorical nature of a lot of this, and the ease with which, particularly in the social media age where everything is moving so quickly, where something evolves, becomes a thing, and then suddenly it’s just a thing.

Bruce Feiler: Yes.

Zachary Karabell: It’s a thing you do. Well, I don’t know why we do it. We do it because we do it, because it makes us feel good. It makes us feel connected. It’s something we can collectively share. And in many ways we’re in this golden age of ritual creation, which I really got from your book. There’s this efflorescence of human beings just creating ritual, ritual, ritual, left, right, and center. And all you need, it’s like the Jewish thing, you basically just need a minyan for a ritual. You don’t need that many people to invent your ritual, celebrate your ritual, have your ritual, pass down your ritual, create a family one.

I feel like I didn’t do a good enough job creating ritual in a conscious way in a familial context, but I’m always very impressed with people who do so with the kind of discipline behind it. You need to repeat it. There’s a repetitiveness —

Bruce Feiler: Not necessarily. I would challenge that. A wedding, a funeral, they’re not going to repeat that. So I don’t think — there is a view about that. Look, I’ll make it easy. There are five things you need for a successful ritual.

Number one, you need a boundary. You need to create some sort of circle or sacred space. Outside we were that, inside we were this. Could be a candle, could be a room, could be a circle. Circuses have circles and trials have courtrooms and walls, trees, whatever. So you need a sacred space.

The second thing you need is stakes. We are here because someone’s welcoming in. We’re here because someone has died.

Zachary Karabell: Oh, I thought you meant actual —

Bruce Feiler: No. Well, steaks could be the first one, but you do not need red meat. And by the way, one of the problems people have with rituals is they don’t want to do the dishes. So maybe not having that would be helpful. But you need some sort of skin in the game, I call it. I went to this adolescent tooth-filing, where they file your teeth down in Bali. So you need some sort of sense of importance. It matters.

Number three, you need compromise. Back to the wedding. You and I are going to get married. Your want a big wedding, I want a small wedding. You want steak, and I want vegetables.

Zachary Karabell: I said we weren’t going to talk about this here.

Bruce Feiler: Yeah, okay. But the point is, that’s one of the reasons that people don’t want it. There is conflict. You believe in God, I don’t believe in God. All these things. But that’s the purpose of it, is to titrate the conflict. Because if we don’t do it when we get married, are we going to have kids? Are we not going to have kids? Who’s going to work? Who’s not going to work? Who’s going to do the dishes and who’s going to go do the shopping? So it’s a way to practice it. You need boundaries, you need stakes, you need compromise, you need empathy. You’re going through a difficult time or a joyful time, you want to share it with people.

And the last thing you need is a sense of hope. It’s a kind of utopian thing. This is the world as we want it to be. In psychology they talk about your best possible self. This is our best possible selves.

And this just happened to me. I think you know this, but if not, I’ll tell you. I just lost my sister-in-law after 10 months with leukemia 10 days ago, as we sit and have this conversation. I was told that Laura was going into hospice. Everyone’s coming to Atlanta to say goodbye. By the time I get there the next day, she had deceased. She had a brother coming from overseas, people were gathering from across the country. It was to say goodbye, and suddenly now we are in this moment.

Day 1, we kind of walk around. The body is taken to be cremated. We hug, we laugh, we cry, we eat. The next day my brother says, I think we should sit around and share memories of Laura. And I said, you know what? If we’re going to do this, let’s make a ritual. Let’s open the circle. We gathered in something approximating a circle. Their first piece of artwork was a piece of ceramics with a candle. So he lit the candle, told the story of the artwork, then everybody went around and shared. That’s the empathy part. We create the boundary. There’s the empathy. We figured out who wanted to speak or didn’t want to speak. That was the sort of figuring that out. And then we need to close the circle.

Laura had read my brother a rendition of The Owl and the Pussy-Cat from an antique version. So he pulled out the book. I read the inscription to him. I read it, and then I honored my sister-in-law and blew out the candle. People collapsed into one another’s arms. They were so grateful for it. And I talked to this designer who said, in these moments of change, we are borderless. We are liquid. We have no structure. You’re kind of wandering. You and I have been through a lot of difficult life circumstances together, had cancer and things like this. You’re drifting, and it creates a kind of vessel to hold the emotions.

A death doula said to me, trauma is when things happen too fast, too quickly, that you can’t process it. You know intellectually, but you haven’t embodied it. And what the ritual does is allow us to embody it, which helps us to go through it.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, it’s interesting. Talk for a minute about that in terms of, you know, your writing changed a lot, I think, in your life.

Bruce Feiler: Yes.

Zachary Karabell: And you’ve written a lot about your year-plus of cancer, and you really touchingly created this — for those who don’t know, Bruce wrote a book called The Council of Dads, where he wanted to make sure that your young children had father figures around them, and if it wasn’t going to be you, you were going to disperse it to a close circle of people.

I was not one of them, just so we’re clear. We were in a less intense phase of our long relationship. I’ve never really forgiven Bruce for that, but —

Bruce Feiler: As my wife likes to say, I like this idea, but she started rejecting my nominees. She would say, I like that person, but I would never ask him for advice.

Zachary Karabell: So nix on that one. So anyway, to be continued off camera. But you went from — there was a lighter quality to your books.

Bruce Feiler: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: And I don’t mean that in a negative sense.

Bruce Feiler: I was a circus clown.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. But you went around the world. You observed cultures. You wrote about it with a kind of hawk eye, but a detachment from. And your books since then, for the most part, have been much more about grappling with the process of being alive. I’ll just kind of use that as a general thing. And you wrote about transitions, from job transitions, you wrote about more global individual transitions, or things that happened in your book on “lifequakes” and then this book.

I’m assuming there was conscious intent behind that, but do you ever reflect on, not just the before-and-after tree of what you went through, but how it redirected you as a writer?

Bruce Feiler: I have a Substack, as you know, called “The Nonlinear Life,” and I was writing the story of my brother and his now-deceased wife, and I called him and said, I just want to give you a heads up. I’m writing about this, and I want to make sure you’re okay about that. And he said, yeah, I always say that some families have secrets and our family has you, and you tell the secrets.

I mentioned in joking that I was a circus clown. I did write a book called Under the Big Top about my year in the circus in my 20s. What I have found in my life — there was a moment where I, as a circus clown, collided with an older gentleman who was stilt-walking, and he fell from his stilts, and I had a slight injury. It was a horrifying experience, and my initial instinct was, don’t write about this because it’s too painful.

And in every moment in my life when something has happened to me that I’ve been ashamed to tell or afraid or worried what people would think about me, running into the fire has been the most meaningful thing for me.

There’s a story in this book. My book Life Is in the Transitions opens with the line: “I used to have a saying in my life that phone calls don’t change your life until I got a phone call that did.”

It was from my mother saying, your father’s trying to kill himself. My father had never been depressed a minute in his life until he got Parkinson’s, until he got depressed, and he tried to take his own life six times in 12 weeks. And it was that impulse that he’d lost control of his life story. And I didn’t want to tell this story. I was too ashamed and too afraid. And when I did, it turned out that everybody else had these moments when this happened to them. And that propelled me into this work I’ve done of collecting and analyzing 500 life stories of everyday Americans.

So when my father died eight years later, after I’d sent him an email every Monday morning for eight years to tell a story in his life until he finished a 65,000-word memoir weeks before he died, I flew back home to Savannah. We were going to bury my father in famed Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia, kind of a classic expression of the rural cemetery movement in the 19th century, when they made cemeteries beautiful, took them away from churches, out into parks where people would go and picnic.

And we were in a conversation with the rabbi about how to run the funeral. And my mother says, my mother deep into her 80s at this point, she doesn’t like throwing dirt on the coffin. She finds it barbaric. So my mother says she wants yellow long-stemmed roses.

My sister says, that’s too Hallmark. The dirt’s the best part of the funeral to me. I want that, and I don’t like the roses. So they’re kind of going back and forth. And so I’m like, rabbi, I’ll call you back. And I then proceeded to middle-child my way through a compromise, because as I said, rituals are about compromise rehearsal.

I was like, okay, Mom, what are you after? And Kat, my sister, what are you after? Can we come up with a compromise? And so what we did was — I was like, she lived with the guy for 62 years. If she wants yellow stem roses, I’m not going to tell my mother no. So we got two dozen long-stem yellow roses. We didn’t do dirt. My dad loved to walk on the beach. Tybee Island, Georgia — one of my girls is named Tybee. We got little bags of Tybee Island sand, and we gave people the choice.

And by being personal in telling this story, first of all, I’m saying, I’m not wagging my finger and telling you what to do. I’m saying, I’m like you. I’m struggling. But this is how we work.

A year later, I was in Ireland. I took an Uber to a funeral in a church with the head of the Irish Funeral Directors Association. And in the end she says, how are you going to get to the cemetery? And I’m like, I don’t know. She’s like, ride with me. And I, not thinking, said yes, at which point she opened the door of the hearse, popped up the jumper seat, and I rode to the cemetery next to the reposed life of Marjorie Burke.

And when we got there, there was a short service. In Ireland they bury people in the same graves for space and cost reasons, so they don’t use coffins or caskets with steel as we do here, because it won’t disintegrate quickly enough. They lowered the body into the arms of her husband, the only man she ever danced with, as the daughter said, and everybody got a long-stem yellow rose and threw it in.

And I’m sitting there and I’m bawling, because I’m at every funeral I’ve ever been to and every wedding I’ve ever been to, and it was a reminder that these are universal experiences, that it’s the oldest human algorithm.

Zachary Karabell: So I want to go from sublime to mundane for a minute. Maybe not mundane, but there’s one aspect of the book that is very Mary Roach-esque, and it’s all about the body modification part of ritual. You alluded to one of them earlier with the teeth filing in Indonesia, where I think all of us — my reaction the minute I hear the words “teeth filing” is to viscerally cringe at the sense-thought of that pain. But talk a little bit about that as an aspect of ritual that we don’t, at least in American society, easily embrace. Pain as a ritual, and permanent body marking as ritual. Now yes, there’s a whole world of tattooing in the United States.

Bruce Feiler: Losing your tooth and bringing in the tooth fairy, that’s a ritual of coming of age around teeth. Putting braces around adolescence.

Zachary Karabell: Well, you lose a tooth whether you want to or not. It’s not an inflicted ritual.

Bruce Feiler: Okay. Justin Bieber wearing $25,000 grills to his wedding to Hailey Bieber, decorating your teeth gold.

Zachary Karabell: I’m glad — it’s good you knew that little piece of pop culture there.

Bruce Feiler: So I thought, yeah, we all do this around teeth. We’ll do this around our body. Tattooing, henna — you’d be surprised. Because we sacralize the things that are most intimate to being alive. Breathing, seeing, sex, defecation, giving birth, the body.

I talked to a woman who is a professor at Vanderbilt who talks about rituals among the disabled community. Getting her first wheelchair. Living independently for the first time. Being fitted for a new walker. Things that we might not think are moments of transition that they want to mark collectively.

I have friends who have used doulas for losing a job, for getting fired, for shutting down a company, for moving. Whatever moment of transition it’s in, whether it’s bodily, whether it’s emotional, whether it’s work, whether it’s familial, these are the moments where we feel most alone and scared and afraid. Because another new thing that’s in my writing that wasn’t in the past is digging into the social science. And what the science shows us is that rituals regulate our emotions. They synchronize our heartbeats. We breathe together. We walk at the same pace or we sweat at the same velocity. And so what these rituals do is connect us biologically, emotionally, and all that helps us feel more connected.

Zachary Karabell: So is there a difference between ritual and ceremony, or are they —

Bruce Feiler: Here’s how I would put it. When I got into this, I was obsessed with these questions. There are different types of rituals. There are civic rituals like coronations and inaugurations. There are calendric rituals, as you said — the harvest, the maypole, midsummer. There are daily rituals like handshaking and bowing and namaste. And then there are these, what I call life rituals, which are these moments. And then what’s the difference between a tradition and a ritual and a habit?

I can geek out on all of that, but where I’ve ended up — and maybe the biggest change I went through while working on A Time To Gather — is the enemy’s in our pockets. The enemy is coming at us all the time very quickly.

They did these studies where they would set up accounts as teen boys, and within eight minutes they’re getting stereotypes, and within 13 minutes they’re being fed misogyny, and within an hour they’re being bombarded. We have to switch from, we do rituals four times a year or five times a year, whatever Arnold van Gennep said 120 years ago when he invented rites of passage. We need to move from rites of passage to bites of passage, and we need to move to this idea that we need a ritual state of mind.

And you and I both have young adult kids. They’re home. When we’re home, we need to jump at it. We can’t say, sorry, we can’t do this until you find a spouse. We need to do them whenever, wherever, because the algorithms are coming at us. Ritual is the oldest human algorithm. At this point, it’s the only thing, what did I say? “How ritual created the world and how it can save us.” It’s the only thing that’s going to hold us together.

Zachary Karabell: And on that question — held together or coming apart —

Bruce Feiler: Yes.

Zachary Karabell: I started with a softball question. I’ll end with a softball question. Are you more acutely aware of the coming together, or are you more acutely affected by the coming apart, when you travel to multiple countries, different societies, obviously the United States included?

Bruce Feiler: You used the word “green shoots,” and I think that’s right. I think there are three ways of looking at this story.

There’s either the celebration recession is real, and the coming apart cannot be stopped, and this is just a sidebar. That’s one response.

The other response, to use the language of worlds that you’ve traveled in, is that this ritual renaissance is a dead cat bounce, which is the Wall Street term for something that’s basically collapsing. There’s a bit of a blip up, but it’s going to continue to go down.

Or it’s that the ritual renaissance is the story, that these are green shoots.

So what do I believe? I believe it is real, what’s happening. It’s happening among men. It’s happening among women. It’s happening among old people. It’s one of the few things that bridges the religious, the nonreligious, and the I’m not spiritual, but I’m religious crowd.

I spent a lot of time in organized religion. I wrote five books about religion and contemporary religion and spirituality. The smartest people I know who are in that world are ritual entrepreneurs. And it’s old and young, so it bridges everybody. At the same time, it’s green shoots, and we get to decide. I believe that what I see among millennials and young people, the return to online dating, the going to bars to have lectures, going on retreats, everywhere, I see it. So I think the green shoots are becoming greener, and they’re becoming taller. But ultimately, I think we have a choice.

The greatest spiritual leaders, you’ve written a lot about religion. It’s one of the things that we both share. Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, you’ve got a choice, life or death, whatever. We have a choice. It’s virtual or it’s ritual. It’s URL or IRL. And I think if we want to preserve human relationships, choose ritual. It’s the way home.

We get to decide if we water these green shoots, and I feel more confident than ever that it will happen, but the choice is still up to us.

Zachary Karabell: I want to thank you for all of that — the book, your life, your wisdom, your lack of wisdom, your willingness to learn.

I think this question, which we’re just going to keep coming back to, I’m going to keep coming back to, Bruce I’m sure will keep coming back to in his writing — what is the elemental power of the human spirit in a world of noise that amplifies a perception of chaos, juxtaposed to the incredible human need to create some degree of order? Which was true 300,000 years ago. David Deutsch made this comment about the nature of human beings in a state of nature, and that the natural world was profoundly threatening to human life. So it’s not as if Mother Nature kind of embraced humans and now we have a modern world that threatens us. Humans have been striving for creating zones of connection and safety in a world that has felt profoundly threatening. The nature of those threats has changed. It used to be disease, it used to be the elements. Now it’s much more likely to be other humans, or the things that we’re doing to the environment. But the reality of threat remains. The nature of the threats has changed.

And our need to create “us” in the face of that remains really palpable, and has then developed this other dimension as we talked about in terms of social media.

But I think the thing that people can really learn from what you’re providing is that that need is as powerful as ever, and as evident as ever, even if it doesn’t look yet like what we think it looks like, because we’re living in a present of creation.

We can look back at the past as static. We don’t know what our present will create as future stasis. And it’ll be fascinating to look back 100 years from now and read the book and see which of the things that you discern now became rituals across generations, because some of them will.

Bruce Feiler: Yes, absolutely.

Zachary Karabell: And I think that too, just remember that we are in this constant process of creation and destruction, and indeed these rituals celebrate both. So I’m just going to leave it at that.

I want to thank Kaleidoscope for producing. I want to thank my team at The Progress Network for facilitating. I want to thank all of you for listening and watching and being and participating.

Please send us your thoughts. Send Bruce your thoughts. We’re both easily reachable throughout the airwaves, the internet waves, the URL, less in IRL, but we’ll leave that for another time.

And I hope to have you back next week. I obviously value the time. It’s all precious time for each one of us, so the fact that you’re using it for this is a privilege and an honor. So thanks so much.

What Could Go Right? is produced by The Progress Network and Kaleidoscope.

Watch the podcast on YouTube.

Follow us on X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok: @progressntwrk

Plus: some scientists are calling this the biggest advancement in cancer treatment in 15 years—a drug called daraxonrasib which is nearing FDA approval and substantially extends the lives of pancreatic cancer patients; Brazil has officially begun demarcating over a million acres of protected land for an uncontacted Indigenous tribe in the Amazon; and Oklahoma became the 17th U.S. state to ban child marriage, ruffling some feathers.

Watch the full episode below:

All episodes of the What Could Go Right? podcast are available here.

Transcript

Emma Varvaloucas: American dads are working less and spending more time at home. A drug for a particularly deadly cancer is the first to substantially extend the lives of patients. Major progress for one of Brazil’s indigenous peoples and its rainforests, and one southern US state just banned child marriage, leaving some people a little angry in the House.

Welcome to the What Could Go Right? Progress Report, where we dive into all the good news that you probably missed because it was buried under the barrage of bad news. If you’re new here, I’m Emma Varvaloucas, and I’m the executive director of The Progress Network. Let’s get into it.

Rewind the tape to the 1970s. Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” is playing from the radio, and mom is getting her undergrad degree and interviewing for jobs—and no, it’s not for the secretary position.

Let’s skip ahead to the 1980s. Jane Fonda’s workout is playing on VHS. Mom is hanging up her apron and slipping on something a little bit more comfortable. Not like that, you freaks. It’s a padded shoulder suit and a bold chunky necklace. At least I hope it was comfy. Probably was a little itchy… Anyway, power dressing was in, and that style was reserved exclusively for women. After decades of working in the kitchen and taking care of the family, women were starting to nab real opportunities in the workplace.

The economy was booming. For the first time, you could be a wife, mother, and a careerist. And what started to happen? The hours women work started to creep up to men’s working hours. This era, because of how intensely and quickly it transformed the American household, is known as the quiet revolution.

That trend continued into the ‘90s, but at a slower pace. I guess Hit Me Baby One More Time was just not hitting in quite the same way. And by the late 2010s, that progress had basically stopped. Kaput.

Then something unexpected happened: the pandemic. And I definitely don’t need to paint a picture of that for you guys ‘cause, yeah, we don’t need to re-traumatize anyone here.

But during it, there was another quiet revolution happening. Except this time it wasn’t women working more. It was men working less, and specifically fathers spending more time cooking, cleaning, and on childcare. This revelation comes from research by Ariel Binder from the American Institute for Boys and Men.

And check this out. The change is especially striking among college-educated fathers, who between 2019 and 2024 cut their paid work hours by six per week and raised housework and childcare by more than four. Anyone remember that 1983 movie, Mr. Mom, with Michael Keaton and Teri Garr? Well, that’s what was happening amidst the toilet paper rampage and the anti-vaxxer movement kicking into a gear I didn’t even know existed.

What caused all of this? You might think that it was because of the normalization of remote work, or maybe you’re thinking that it was the men having a hard time finding jobs. But my man Ariel B. ran the numbers, and that ain’t it. What happened was actually a massive voluntary realignment of gender norms.

At least, that’s what we suspect. Non-college educated men are also putting in more housework and childcare time. But since their working hours declined less than their college educated counterparts, they pulled the extra time for homemaking from what they’d previously spent on leisure and relaxation. Meaning, housework suddenly went up against Call of Duty, and housework won.

Men may be living a quiet revolution of their own, a shift away from their breadwinner identity and towards something that’s becoming more and more valued: being a husband and a father. Now two people scold their Gen Alpha kids after too much iPad screen time. Mom is done being the only bad cop.

And guess what? This isn’t just happening in America. It’s happening across Europe, Australia, Canada, Japan. Rich countries, in other words. I, for one, am very curious what really caused this huge priority readjustment. What was it about the pandemic? The crisis of childcare caused by lockdowns? Our close brush with mortality? Let me know your theories in the comments.

Before we get into our shorter stories, here are some numbers that will make you smile.

31, that’s how many countries have eliminated the eye disease trachoma. Tunisia is the latest. And if you remember from a previous episode, we literally just announced number 30. Countries are getting rid of trachoma as fast as American dads are picking up a broom.

40%, the drop in new HIV infections worldwide between 2010 and 2024.

52.7%, the share of EVs exported from China in April, beating traditional cars for the very first time.

And 100, the number of dams removed in the US last year, reconnecting nearly 5,000 miles of waterways, a record.

And here are our quick hits for today. First up, a drug for pancreatic cancer that is the first to substantially extend patients’ lives. Pancreatic cancer is one of the most dismal diagnoses in medicine. Only 3% of patients whose cancer has spread survive five years. For decades, experimental drugs flopped. Researchers had largely given up.

Now, a drug called daraxonrasib—say that five times fast—is nearing FDA approval. It’s the first treatment to substantially extend patients’ lives, a median of 13 months versus less than seven for chemotherapy. How does it work?

The drug targets a protein inside cells called KRAS, and when KRAS mutates, it’s bad. It fuels nearly all pancreatic tumors. Researchers have called it a greasy ball that is basically impossible to destroy because there’s nowhere on its smooth surface that a drug can attach itself. But it turns out where there’s a will, there’s a way. Daraxonrasib gets around the greasy ball problem by gluing itself, so to speak, to another cell protein, and together, those molecules surround KRAS and shut it down.

I can’t emphasize enough how big of a deal this is. Some scientists are calling it the biggest advance in cancer treatment in 15 years since the arrival of immunotherapy. Just listen to this story. In 2023, Rhea Karras, who was then 64 and a retired lawyer in Palos Verdes, California, got diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer.

She was told she likely had just months to live. But thankfully, soon after, her oncologist told her about a promising experimental drug, derux- Ugh, dara- daruxan, dara- rox, daruxan-ras, daraxonrasib. I really did just say that five times fast.

She joined the trial, and now, three years later, she’s still taking her pills every day.

It’s not all peachy keen. Rhea deals with side effects like fatigue, nausea, digestive problems, but her cancer has shrunk, and she’s still alive. Next month, she plans to travel to Hawaii with her family. She told The New York Times, “I’m living a pretty good life, and I didn’t expect that.”

To top it all off, the method that this new drug uses may also work for lung and colon tumor patients. A pretty good week for scientists and drug researchers, I’d say.

Next up, a story out of Brazil. The country has officially begun marking protected land for the Kawahiva people, an uncontacted nomadic tribe that lives in the Amazon. It’s taken 27 years, and finally, the day has come. The demarcation of one million acres of protected territory in northwest Brazil was confirmed by the National Indigenous Peoples Foundation last week.

The Kawahiva people are one of Amazon’s most vulnerable nomadic hunter-gatherer communities. For decades, they’ve been threatened by farming, land grabs, illegal mining, and logging. But the cool part is, is that some isolated indigenous peoples are showing signs of not only surviving, but thriving in the Amazon.

And by the way Indigenous regions in the Amazon specifically have recorded the lowest rates of deforestation in recent years. And Brazil’s other tropical rainforest, the Atlantic Forest, has recorded its lowest deforestation rate in 40 years, although that rate is still outrageously high. A lot of that is due to Brazil’s current president’s policies, so let’s hope things continue to progress through the next presidential election and following it. We’re keeping our eyes on you, Brazil.

And last up, Oklahoma is the 17th US state to ban child marriage. It’s the first to do it this year, not including DC. This law requires anyone getting married to be over the age of 18, no exceptions. Seems reasonable, right? You might be wondering, how are people under 18 getting married anyway?

Well, current state law in places like Alabama, New Mexico, and even California— shocker I know—allow minors to get married with the consent of a parent or a guardian. And if you’re under 16, you need the authorization of a court.

If you’re icked out thinking about a teenager marrying a balding man in 2026, same here, dude. And if you’re thinking that no parent would ever do that to their kid, think again. Not to mention that these exceptions open loopholes to human trafficking and other really nasty stuff.

And I mean, if you can’t vote, if you can’t buy a house, if you can’t even buy a pack of cigarettes or a beer, should you really be allowed to get married?

The representative who authored this bill, Nicole Miller, doesn’t think so. She says this law will strengthen the institution of marriage by ensuring those entering a binding contract are ready for it. The law passed through the Oklahoma Senate unanimously, but it was met with some disagreement from House Republicans, specifically Representative Justin Humphrey, who seems like the topic hit a little too close to home.

This is what he said: “I know lots of people, and I have people in my family, that were married at 16 and 17, and guess what? They remain married until they’re dead. So are you saying that they should not have had the opportunity to marry?” No, my friend, we’re just saying they could have waited a year or two.

But the ladies in the House stood their ground. They pointed out one of the most important reasons for passing this law. It protects minors from being stuck in toxic and abusive relationships, or even just relationships they don’t wanna be in anymore, because you do need to be at least 18 to file for divorce on your own.

The law goes into effect November 1st in Oklahoma, and we’ll see if the rest of the 33 states follow suit. It might make you feel better to know that advocates have been on a roll the past decade or so making sure that that happens.

And that’s all for this week’s Progress Report. I hope these stories remind you of all the good going on out there in the world, so it’s important not to be blinded by all that’s bad.

And if you got something of value out of this show, maybe a nugget you can share at your next BBQ cookout, share this show with a friend who could really use some positive news. And if you’d like more of these stories delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for our newsletter. The link is in the description.

Got a good news story that we should cover next week? Let us know in the comments. Thank you for watching, and see you next week on The Progress Report.

What Could Go Right? is produced by The Progress Network and Kaleidoscope.

Watch the podcast on YouTube.

Follow us on X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok: @progressntwrk

The 1970s and ’80s were a transformational period for the American household. As women increasingly exited the traditional role of housewife and entered the workforce for good, the time that women and men spent working versus homemaking began to converge. By 1992, the gender gap in hours spent at a formal job had shrunk nearly in half.

Famously dubbed the “quiet revolution,” this era was unique both because of its rapid pace of change and the novel shift in women’s identities. For the first time, they could be a wife and mother and a careerist.

But the workplace vs. household time convergence between the genders never quite, erm, reached equilibrium. Though it did continue into the millennium—albeit more slowly—by the late 2010s, it had largely stopped.

Then the pandemic happened.

In a new paper, Ariel Binder, a research fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM), documents a shift during the Covid years that was even speedier than the quiet revolution’s. This time, however, it’s not women working more that has driven the trend. It’s men working less (and for fathers in particular, increasing time spent on cooking, cleaning, and childcare). The change is especially stark among college-educated fathers, who between 2019 and 2024 “cut their paid work hours by six per week and raised housework and childcare by more than four.”

As Richard Reeves, a member of The Progress Network and president of AIBM, put it on a podcast, this is the “biggest increase in the amount of hands-on fathering . . . in half a century.” Millennial dads now spend as much time taking care of their kids as moms did in 1985.

After reading all that, I suspect you may have some hypotheses about what’s going on. Perhaps it’s an economic difficulty story: Men today struggle to find employment, and less time working is just the unfortunate byproduct. Or perhaps, more positively, it’s about improved work-life balance, after the pandemic shot remote working into the stratosphere. No commute equals more time with junior.

Those are good theories—and wrong ones. Binder’s number crunching found that those factors explain “very little.” And while it’s too early to say for sure what his findings do mean—and even whether the trend will persist—what they are consistent with is a massive voluntary realignment of gender norms. Non-college educated men, for instance, whose working hours declined less than those of college-educated ones, pulled their extra housework time from that spent previously on relaxation and leisure. Men may be living a quiet revolution of their own: from breadwinner to the now more strongly valued identities of husband and father.

Pondering American fatherhood’s transformation since the Silent Generation, economic analyst Aziz Sunderji writes that it “might seem like a violation of tradition.” But, he argues, “The working-husband-and-housewife norm is not a biological inscription in our genes. It is an invention of the Industrial Revolution.” Neither is it a strictly American development. As Sunderji notes, fathers’ childcare time is “surging” across Europe and in other rich countries, too.

Indeed, it’s telling that Binder found that the most well-off fathers—those with the resources and flexibility to decide how to spend their time—increased homemaking hours most. Dads seem to be more involved in family life now more than ever because they want to be.

Future research will have to answer some lingering questions, but I am especially curious what it was about the pandemic, if not remote work, that triggered such a priority readjustment. Was it the crisis of childcare caused by the lockdowns? Our close brush with mortality? Something else? Let me know your theories in the comments.

—Emma Varvaloucas

P.S. Did you know this newsletter exists in podcast form as well? Catch our latest episode here. Two centuries after France’s second colonial period began, the government is finally letting art and artifacts looted from its former colonies go home.

Share

What Could Go Right? S8 E6: Real Progress: Why We Ignore How Good We Have It | with Nick Gillespie

Why does historic abundance breed widespread cultural anger? Nick Gillespie, editor-at-large of Reason magazine and host of the Reason podcast, joins host Zachary Karabell to unpack the great conundrum of the 21st century: why humans have more security and financial means than ever before, yet feel increasingly dissatisfied. | Listen now

By the Numbers

31: Countries that have eliminated the eye disease trachoma; Tunisia is the latest

40%: Worldwide drop in new HIV infections between 2010 and 2024

52.7%: Share of EVs exported from China in April, surpassing traditional cars for the first time (WSJ $)

100: Number of dams removed in the US last year, reconnecting nearly 5,000 miles of waterways—a record

Quick Hits

💊 A drug treatment for pancreatic cancer is the first to substantially extend the lives of patients—and its novel approach may work for other cancers, too. The manufacturer is now trying to make it freely available to certain patients.

🌲 Brazil has begun to officially mark protected land for the Kawahiva people, an uncontacted, nomadic Amazon tribe whose survival has been threatened by armed groups interested in illegal mining, logging, and other activities. (Related: Deforestation rates in Brazil, while still outrageous, are at a 40-year low.)

👁️ Scientists have managed to get mouse eyes to photosynthesize, a process that could one day help soothe ocular maladies such as dry-eye disease. “This is very exciting, even if it’s a bit crazy now,” the study’s co-author said.

🏠 More zoomers are buying homes, outpacing even millennials. The share, though still small, is growing, and buyers are less likely to use help from parents.

🚫 Virginia has banned the sale and manufacture of certain semi-automatic firearms, joining 11 other states. Lawsuits loom, but similar legislation has survived court challenges in the past.

⚖️ As the topic becomes less taboo, 26 US states since 2019 have enacted menopause laws, which run the gamut from mandating insurance coverage for treatments to workplace accommodations.

🙅 Oklahoma is now the 17th state to ban child marriage. There has been a sea change regarding the issue in the US over the past decade.

🍟 The prevalence and effectiveness of GLP-1 weight loss drugs is forcing fast food joints to rethink menus. With restaurant visits down, some companies are shrinking portions and promoting healthier options. (WSJ $)

🧬 A small study suggests that a single infusion could suppress HIV for years, using the same immunotherapy technique that works against blood cancers like leukemia.

🪱 A new, better treatment for the neglected tropical disease river blindness has begun its real-world rollout. What’s more, the drug was developed by a nonprofit.

🛰️ A combination of satellites and AI is allowing poverty researchers to gather accurate data down to the municipal level. It’s a valuable alternative to surveys that can be too expensive or too slow.

👀 What we’re watching: A bill just passed in Hawaii is a shot at limiting “dark money” in American politics while sidestepping the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United that legitimized corporate personhood.

💡 Editor’s pick: The worst-case climate scenario is dead. What does that mean?

Subscribe now

TPN Member Originals

(Who are our Members? Get to know them.)

• Pay attention: Essential advice for the class of 2026 | The Atlantic ($) | Jonathan Haidt

• Inside the mind of an internet troll | TFP ($) | Arthur Brooks

• Trump’s China pragmatism is welcome | WaPo ($) | Fareed Zakaria

• Shmoderation is the future | Slow Boring | Matthew Yglesias

• NATO, please help. Trump has no strategy for Iran. | NYT ($) | Thomas L. Friedman

• Apocalypse no: The AI jobs narrative is BS | No Mercy/No Malice | Scott Galloway

• Are we ready for a new voting rights movement? | The Renovator | Danielle Allen

• Something big is happening on campus | The Atlantic ($) | David Brooks

• My dad gave me three pieces of advice. This one surprised me. | WaPo ($) | Theodore R. Johnson

Moving past abstract data, Gillespie shares his own personal history as the son of a high school dropout from a working-class white ghetto in Hell’s Kitchen. He contrasts his own path of white-knuckling student debt payments with the unique anxieties facing modern generations. And they ask the question, what does the world look like post Trump season two?

Watch the full conversation below:

All episodes of the What Could Go Right? podcast are available here.

Transcript

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, and as is likely obvious by now, the host of What Could Go Right?, which is my weekly podcast where I talk to scintillating and interesting people about scintillating and interesting things — or at least that’s the conceit and that’s my hope. We’ll find out if it is merited by the following conversation.

If you were an alien and looking at the planet — well, first of all, you wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference between any of us, and you would be confused at the constant incessant squabbling, let alone wars. But if you were looking at the United States, you would probably assume that everybody was either a Democrat or a Republican and was deeply at odds with each other, and everything was divided along absolute, clear, binary partisan lines. And yet we know statistically and observationally and from polls that that’s absolutely not the case. So we’re going to use this as a starting point: the assumption of partisanship may simply be a story. And in the What Could Go Right? vein, it may be a story that is constantly self-reinforcing — an idea of complete and utter division that is actually at odds with the reality that we find ourselves in.

And in that spirit, I’m going to talk to somebody who’s been thinking about this for years and years and years. I don’t mean that, like, he’s so old. I just mean he’s been cogitating about these things for a long time, and that is Nick Gillespie, who is editor-at-large of Reason magazine, and the host of the Reason podcast. We’re only having him on because his podcast is probably bigger than this podcast now, and it’s kind of a one-hand-washes-the-other situation, where there’s really never any sincere engagement of ideas. He has had a rock-and-roll life. He’s a quirky dude who’s been characterized as a libertarian, but I think has probably simply been marching to the beat of his own drummer, or singing to the lyrics of his own song.

I’ve got to read this line because you can’t really pay for publicity like this — or for all that I know, Nick did pay for publicity like this. “Nick Gillespie is to libertarianism what Lou Reed is to rock and roll, the quintessence of its outlaw spirit.” I really want someone to define me as the quintessence of anything.

Nick Gillespie: No, that is just a self-licking ice cream cone. It’s really fantastic.

Zachary Karabell: It’s seriously good, man.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, it is.

Zachary Karabell: All right. So I’m going to start and ask you a question that I’ve been asking a lot, and it’s in line with a lot of the writing you’ve done and thinking you’ve done, that never before in human history have more people on the planet had more of what human beings from time immemorial crave and need — caloric abundance, physical security, a certain amount of voice. Even our authoritarian societies these days, with the exception maybe of North Korea, there’s more individual security and freedom, more financial means and leisure time. And you could argue that at the same time never have more people had more — and been more pissed off. And the question today, I feel, of the 21st century is: how does one explain that seeming conundrum? Meaning that more has not led to satisfaction. That abundance isn’t creating a feeling of, hey, we got this.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. I mean, I agree with you. This is the question of our time. There’s a demographer at Brookings Institution named Homi Kharas who, about 10 years ago, wrote a book and started writing about the global middle class, in which he said that sometime around the mid 20-teens, more than half of the population of the globe had discretionary income, after they cover all their stuff, and that this was unimaginable at the start of the 20th century, even at the end of the 20th century. And how is it that in America — and I think this is broadly true of North America and Europe — people seem to be less and less happy? And there are two things I want to kind of footnote before I suggest the main reason I think this is happening. One is that when you look at things like Gallup polling going back 50 years or more, when people are asked, how are things going in your life? Are you doing pretty well? Between 70 and 80 percent of Americans typically say, you know what? Things are going pretty well for me.

Zachary Karabell: And you have that about education. You’ve got that about your congressional rep. It’s like, “I hate them, but I like him.”

Nick Gillespie: Right. Yeah. And then when they ask, well, what about the direction of the country, or how’s the country going? And then there is a steep divergence.

And that’s kind of fascinating, and it’s worth thinking about that. Like, how are we all thinking we’re doing well, but this society is going to hell?

But I think more broadly, and this goes to that question of a global middle class, we have not been taught, and I’m not talking about, like, evolution, it’s just that in our lifetimes — I was born in 1963, so I’m a very late Baby Boomer, Gen X person — we were not taught to live in a post-scarcity world. I certainly wasn’t. And we are not psychologically equipped to deal with a choose-your-own-adventure world.

I have two adult children, and I have a four-month-old, and I think when I look at the ways in which my generation has raised children, we have simultaneously told them all things are possible and that this is the most terrifying of all possible worlds. So choose whatever you want, but don’t fuck it up. And we have just created a mass kind of psychosis where it’s almost impossible to be happy with any individual choice people make, or to believe that you deserve your fate, that you deserve your good luck, and that the world is going to keep moving forward.

Zachary Karabell: You know, I’ve also thought a lot about the yes-but problem. So if you articulate problems — of which there are many, manifold, and constant, like, there’s still too many neonatal problems in underserved communities in the United States, or literacy post-COVID, all these negatives — you can state those facts and people will engage those. If you state a constructive fact, like there is now early childhood education in New Mexico that’s free — I mean, nothing is free, everything’s taxed now — every one of those statements has to be followed by, yes, but there’s also still all this.

Nick Gillespie: Right. Yes, but there were starving children in China, when I was growing up, which was one of the yes-buts and things like that.

Zachary Karabell: And you were told to finish your food because there are starving children in China.

Nick Gillespie: That’s right, yeah. None of it made sense then, but I totally agree with you that one of the things that we are incapable of as a society — and I don’t want to be glib about this — but we can’t acknowledge progress. So material progress and moral progress. And it’s like, when you look back over the past decade, politics have become insane in America. And we’re talking just after Trump released an AI slop generated image of himself, which he’s taken down, as Jesus ministering to somebody who looks like Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, and then said, well, no, I wasn’t Jesus. I was just a doctor, because I make people feel better.

Like, we live in a truly insane, deranged political world, and yet even after COVID, even as we are going through multiple wars at any given moment, median household income in real terms is higher than it’s ever been. People, in most profound ways, are doing better than ever, and we cannot even see that because we are arguing over ridiculous small ball stuff.

Zachary Karabell: And you do then have this whole progress movement, which I’m aware of. You have people like Hans Rosling, who’s passed away, but he’s the progenitor of his own institute, and then Our World in Data, which has been compiling all this. And people like Steven Pinker, who’s part of The Progress Network.

So there’s clearly data out there that indicates this. The other real conundrum, right, is that data in the face of feelings — feelings always win. So if someone feels like the world is messed up and you quote statistics to them—

Nick Gillespie: Right —

Zachary Karabell: They will not only not believe you, but they are likely to get angry.

Nick Gillespie: I tend to agree with you, and certainly in the moment, you’re never going to win somebody who has cancer when you tell them, oh, you know what’s great, though, is that if you were nine other people, you would be surviving, right?

But over time, I think some of that changes, and I think what we’ve done is just, everybody’s up at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, right? And we have to come up with our own meaning on a daily basis, which is very hard to do.

On the other hand, I do think that people do respond to facts, and people respond to history, and I think one of the things that is most lacking in our contemporary society — and this is me being a very old man — is that people don’t remember history.

And I think one of the reasons for that is because at least since the end of World War II, we’ve lived in a mass abundance society. And so when you talk to people who are two or three or more generations removed from the ghettos, removed from poverty, even in America, people don’t ever care about the past.

I feel lucky. We’re in midtown Manhattan. My father was born in Hell’s Kitchen to Irish immigrants in the ‘20s. I am one generation removed from a working-class white ghetto where he had very little to look forward to. That sense of history helps me navigate, like, I don’t want to blow this because I am living a life that my parents literally could not understand. My father didn’t even graduate high school. When I went to college, he was like, oh, that’s great. Where is that? And when I got a doctorate, they were happy for me, but literally, I was living in another universe. And we take that kind of abundance for granted, and we devalue it.

Zachary Karabell: So I’m going to be the contrarian to this one, which is, I don’t think people are particularly amenable to facts, not just in the moment, but in general. I think over time societies are amenable to facts and analysis. And I don’t think Americans ever really knew or respected history. They knew or respected certain glib narratives of what America was that you ingested in your civics class in high school or that you learned from a kind of facile textbook that told a story that we wanted collectively to be true. So I’m not as on top of the —

Nick Gillespie: If I may. I’m thinking of it more — it ends up having a social effect, but it’s a personal narrative. If you can remember bad times, or if you are living with somebody who is like, wow, I didn’t think I would ever own a car, and now I own two. It’s not the textbook history. And it’s interesting, when people say, oh, well, the solution to everything in America is to teach civics. Nobody ever was like, by the way, not only were the founders beautiful and fresh-smelling people, and yeah, they had some problems, but they were great. Nobody ever said, like, most of the people in their world lived horrible, desperate lives, of barely having enough calories to conceive, to have children, much less flourish.

Zachary Karabell: This book that I just finished, which is oddly enough about a multi-thousand-year history of corn as a technology we eat — the amount that Americans, particularly outside the East Coast, were drinking in the 1820s and 1830s —

Nick Gillespie: It’s amazing.

Zachary Karabell: They’re essentially drunk all the time, right? Because they often used alcohol as a source of non-toxic water. But they were just drunk all the time. So you have a temperance movement not because you’ve got a bunch of ninnies who are like, we shouldn’t drink. You have a temperance movement because everybody’s drunk.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, and it’s also you realize, if you’re a little bit wasted or a little bit buzzed, you’re not going to be productive, even apart from technology. My brother, who’s a couple years older than me, he graduated college in 1981, and he got a job at Graybar Electric, which was one of the original tenants of Rockefeller Center. I don’t even know if it still exists, but it’s not what it was. But he had a mentor there who was going to sell electrical conduit and everything, and he went to lunch with his mentor, who had three martinis, and he was like, wow, that is amazing. And then after lunch, he went to the guy’s office to ask him a question, and he was just sacked out and snoring. You know, if you drink a lot, you’re not going to be very productive.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, the martini glasses were small. It was more like one and a half martinis.

Nick Gillespie: I don’t know. All I’m saying is, we can argue whether it’s progress or not, but it’s certainly different. Americans today have, compared to 50 years ago, drink less, they do drugs less, or intoxicants less, and we’re more productive. That’s probably not, you know, just a vague correlation.

Zachary Karabell: I think part of it, though, is everybody sets their set point to their highest memory. There was an old joke that everybody remembers their lowest costs and their highest income as being simultaneous.

And then you do have the issue that we live in our moment. We don’t live in comparative time. So when I was giving a lot of speeches, I would kind of use — I’ll do this game with you. Levittowns. The burgeoning of the American suburb, car class post-World War II, starts in Long Island and then makes its way elsewhere. And a Levitt house was the dream of a returning GI or a young aspiring family. How big do you think a Levittown house was?

Nick Gillespie: Oh, they were like 700 square feet or something.

Zachary Karabell: They were like 750 square feet.

Nick Gillespie: It’s amazing when you look at pictures of them. And of course it’s also interesting that they became modular homes almost, where if you go to the original Levittowns or early — I grew up in New Jersey. I was born in Brooklyn, I grew up in New Jersey in a town that was started in the 17th century, but blew up in the ‘50s, starting in the ‘50s and onward. And the houses that I grew up in, you have to look to find that nucleus because people added on as they got wealthier.

Zachary Karabell: But if you tell people that, and where the average house size now is over 2,000 square feet, and has electronics and TVs, and that a Levitt house had an icebox — didn’t even have a refrigerator — and the car was a jalopy in the driveway that got eight gallons to the mile and didn’t have seat belts, but it did have ashtrays, so at least you could kill yourself —

Nick Gillespie: Well, they had their priorities.

Zachary Karabell: There were things you did, and things you did. But even if you recognize intuitively, like, wow, we’ve come a long way materially, people, I think legitimately, say, well, there has been progress, and therefore just noting it doesn’t change what’s broken in the present.

Nick Gillespie: I agree, but I feel like a lot of the anger and discomfort in contemporary America — and I think a lot of it is generational and it’s to be expected, and in many ways it’s to be encouraged — but younger people, I remember having an argument with a Gen Z, a Zoomer, who was 25 years old, and they were like, I should have a house by now. And I was like, what world did you grow up in where a 25-year-old has a house?

And this is something where, talk to your parents about when they got their first house, or your grandparents. And it’s not to say just shut up and take it and you’ll get yours when the old people die, at all, because this is the flip side. We’ve made a lot of progress, but progress should continue. But a little bit of perspective, I think, would really be helpful in making people be more realistic about what’s going on in society.

And then more importantly, how do you make smart decisions if I’m 25 and I’m at the start of my career. I have so many options. How do I narrow them down? How do I find out what’s the Venn diagram of the things I like, the things I’m good at, and the things people will pay me for? And start to create a process, because we are in a place where everybody expects everybody to be equal automatically, and I think that really becomes corrosive.

Zachary Karabell: It’s funny, you wrote recently about something that feeds this narrative, particularly in kind of millennial and Gen Z land, and I guess now Gen Alpha land. It’s getting a little hard to do the whole generation thing.

Nick Gillespie: There was a while where people were starting to talk about a generation called Gen Beta, and it’s like, don’t do that.

Zachary Karabell: Skip to the next Greek letter. Go to sigma or theta. Just don’t do beta.

Nick Gillespie: I don’t even know what comes after alpha and beta. And you don’t want an alpha and beta generation simultaneously because that’s stacking the deck in a really unfair way.

Zachary Karabell: But there’s this narrative, certainly a Bernie Sanders one, certainly a progressive one, of young people drowning under a mountain of student debt. And there are big figures to show it. I don’t know if it’s like a trillion dollars or it’s more than that.

Nick Gillespie: It’s usually cited somewhere between $1.6 and $2 trillion in student debt.

Zachary Karabell: But then when you look at that data granularly, which I know you’ve done, a massive amount of that debt was accumulated by for-profit schools, which were often scams —

Nick Gillespie: Actually not so much. But it’s mostly graduate schools.

Zachary Karabell: That’s what I was going to say. It’s a combination of the for-profit schools, like Grand Canyon University, and then people doing very expensive master’s degrees.

Nick Gillespie: Or getting an MD, because people who get MDs generally take out a couple hundred thousand in loans, because they know once they get the degree they’re going to be able to pay it back very quickly. And, it’s cheap. The student loans, one of the reasons why people want them is because they’re not dischargeable in bankruptcy proceedings for a while, but they’re also unsecured loans that are usually sub-market rate. What’s interesting is when you look at student loan data, wealthier households tend to have carried more student debt because if nothing else, the parents are saying, take out the money and then we’ll invest it, and it’s at a low market interest rate, so we’ll do better in the market with it.

Zachary Karabell: But this is one of these other areas where you have this conversation and you say, look, the bulk of the debt is not being held by four-year college undergraduates.

Nick Gillespie: Right. The data points are worth coming out. In the article I wrote recently, in the class of 2024 undergrads, 47 percent of students took out loans, which is less than most people would think. And it’s actually been trending down, the percentage of undergrads who borrow in order to go to undergrad. And the average amount was about $30,000, which works out to around $300 or $325 a month as a repayment. So it’s kind of like a car payment. Maybe you drive a used car, or you inherit a car, or you don’t have a car.

But considering that a college degree correlates with making over a million dollars more in your lifetime, it is a pretty good bet, if the only thing standing between you and college is taking out $30,000 in loans while you’re an undergrad that you’ve got to pay off, it’s a good bet.

Zachary Karabell: So all true, but there will be many people, assuming they’re listening to this conversation, or many people who listen to that, who are 25 years old who go, “Give me a break.” You’re X age. You’re well past that. You don’t understand the world. You don’t understand how hard it is. I don’t really believe those numbers. My friend Joey’s got $72,000 in debt, can’t find a job, living in his parents’ basement.”

The emotional experience and the physical, literal experience of a set of people is always going to — this gets back to, are people amenable to facts, right? And I’ve had the experience of trying to have this debate, where the statement of that is heard as kind of the following: “Wah, wah, wah, wah. You’re a ninny and should shut up about your problems because I don’t believe they’re real.”

Nick Gillespie: And it’s also the “wah, wah, wah,” which of course is calling back to the Peanuts specials. And if you ask most people under 40, they really don’t know who Charlie Brown is.

Zachary Karabell: So they think the “wah, wah, wah” is actually even more pejorative and not a reference.

Nick Gillespie: Well, have you had any success in talking to people? Because you realize of course in a debate nobody’s going to back down. But over time — and I paid for my undergrad, as well as my MA. I have two MAs and a PhD, and I covered it all.

Zachary Karabell: Me too. Except I have an MPhil and not — and an MA.

Nick Gillespie: And the extra MA is on the way to the PhD.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, they just sort of hand it to you as a kind of — it’s a candy.

Nick Gillespie: It’s an amuse-bouche.

Zachary Karabell: This was the we’re-going-to-compare-degrees-size portion of the conversation.

Nick Gillespie: Your degrees are better. No question, I’m sure.

Zachary Karabell: Certainly more expensive.

Nick Gillespie: But the important thing is, I went through this. I know what it is like to be white-knuckling every month, a student loan payment, and the one thing I know about the student loan payment with everything else, it’s like, if you screw that up, your credit will be wrecked for the rest of your life. I had shitty jobs. I had to patch together gigs here and there and things like that, so I know that it’s difficult.

But I also know the difference between me and my high school graduating class, only about 40 percent of whom went on to some form of college immediately, is the college degree. And it’s not simply a signaling device. I majored in English and psychology, which are both pretty useless. They were great. It was exciting. I became interested in the world. Things opened up to me. I’m happy to talk to people about student debt. I guess my main point is, they’re not going to agree with you in the moment, but I think a lot of people understand, yeah, this is actually a pretty good deal.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I mean, I’ve certainly talked a few younger people off the ledge of fear around just taking on some student debt in that twenty to thirty thousand dollar range, of saying not all debt is bad. This is a legit investment in the future. This is likely to make sense going forward. Totally different than taking on $200,000 of debt for an MFA.

Nick Gillespie: That’s right. Or $200,000 for a house that you’re not going to be able to really afford, or all sorts of things, right? Or $200,000 in credit card debt for meals. If you’re not building any human capital —

Zachary Karabell: Consumption debt versus investment debt, basically.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. And this goes to part of, I think, one of the problems in contemporary society and in a wealthy society. Nobody in America — and my degree is in American literature, and my PhD is from the University at Buffalo, which was SUNY Buffalo when I went there. And I went there mostly to study with Leslie Fiedler, who’s one of the great wild men of American literary and cultural studies. And I raise that partly because he was interested in showing how society worked, how people moved up and down ladders, and showing a means of ascent.

Ben Franklin is like this. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is the first how-to book in American literature. Like, here is how, I was the seventh son of a seventh son, here is how I made my way in the world, and you can do it too.

I think one of the problems with an abundant society is that people immediately want to start pretending that they were always rich, or they were born this way, and they don’t want to share their grubby climb up the greasy pole, which is a terrible metaphor, obviously. I was not attentive in the rhetoric classes. But the more that we can tell people, this is how things work, and here are different models of success, here are different models of making your way in the world, and it’s not all pretty, and it’s not all guaranteed — I think we will have a richer society, both emotionally as well as financially.

Zachary Karabell: You do know that some of your lines are also music lyrics entitled “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son,” “Born This Way.” It just kind of works out that way. Granted, they took it from the same sources you were quoting, but —

Nick Gillespie: A lot of things come back to Ben Franklin, right? He’s a phenomenal person to think about.

Zachary Karabell: So you’ve thought about this too. I mean, there is a global dimension here. There’s the affluent society issue, which is certainly true of Western Europe, right? I mean, when you look at Western Europe and go, Jesus.

Nick Gillespie: Oh, man. I’m so glad all of my grandparents left. My mother’s parents were from southern Italy, my father’s parents from what became the Republic of Ireland. They left before it was such. When I’ve gone there, I’m just like, oh my God, thank you for leaving.

Zachary Karabell: But the affluent part is undeniable, right? I mean, Italy too. If you’re going to just deal with quality of life, you’re not working bare-knuckled anymore. You are taking August off, and that’s true of the middle class. This is not a privileged thing in these societies. But that doesn’t preclude those societies from having the same degree of agita and anxiety and anger.

Nick Gillespie: Well, and it’s also because it’s declining, right? I mean, same thing in Japan. My stats may not be correct anymore, but as of recently, Japan is the only OECD country that has fewer people than it had in 2000. And in many ways, it is the canary in the coal mine.

Zachary Karabell: Japan’s the future.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. And Japan has a tremendously wonderful quality of life for the people who are alive now, but you can see it kind of degrading over time.

Zachary Karabell: Well, but that gets to our question before. I once wrote this piece about Japan of, if Japan is our collective future, you could think of worse things. Meaning, in the great arc of human existence, if a highly affluent, literate, low-crime, well-fed, aesthetically pleasing, very little civil strife society is your worst-case scenario, most generations of humanity would’ve taken that one to heart.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, absolutely. But of course, and this is where I suppose I am an American exceptionalist, that America is not Japan, and America is not Europe. And now you’re forcing me to question whether I’m living a nostalgia act here. But the America that seems to be great, and the America that draws people from all over the world, and excites people and produces the popular culture, as well as the technology that seems to make the world a better place — we need to do better than that.

We can’t preserve a slowly declining standard of living for most people. We need to be growing. And I feel like one of the ways that we can do that is by reminding people of the recent past, not 250 years ago.

Which, by the way, the bicentennial — which I assume you remember, right?

Zachary Karabell: Tall ships, going down the Hudson.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, and I grew up in Middletown, New Jersey, which is near Sandy Hook, where the tall ships docked, and weighed anchor, and the Polish ships came a year late, which was a big joke at the time. But the bicentennial was a flop from a money-making point of view, because nobody cared.

Nobody cares about the 250th anniversary. So let’s just talk about the 70 years since the end of World War II, or even the past 50 years, or what comes after the Baby Boom and Gen X fade from the stage.

I think we need to be having a more productive conversation about how you make your way in the world, and then what kinds of large-scale regulatory and public policy issues make it more likely that we’ll produce more wealth and include more people.

Zachary Karabell: And I wonder what you think about this, because you’ve thought and written a lot about — you know, libertarianism is both a nonpartisan, i.e. not Democrat or Republican, but it’s also a different view of the role of government in relation to individuals and freedom.

Nick Gillespie: Well, the way I think about it is as a pre-partisan kind of philosophy. I’m a libertarian with a small L. I always typically vote for the libertarian presidential candidate. I don’t think I’ve ever actually joined the party. But small-L libertarianism is pre-partisan, and I know libertarian Democrats and libertarian Republicans. These terms really have worn out. They don’t make sense anymore, like “big government.”

Somebody like Ronald Reagan described himself as an FDR Democrat, or a New Deal Democrat, in the ‘80s. And he talked about how his really terrible Social Security reforms, which jacked up FICA to the current levels, he said that was his greatest accomplishment, was saving the solvency of Social Security for a generation or so.

Well, this is the new thing, which you’ll probably enjoy. There are a small number of libertarian academics, mostly in England, who are talking about how Friedrich Hayek and Michel Foucault actually have a lot in common. And one of the things that they share — and Foucault, it’s translated in various ways, but it comes down to, we are always governed too much, and he thinks particularly in politics, there should be fewer laws, and they should be applied equally to people, but there should be fewer of them, which is kind of Hayekian or liberal, where you just make a basic matrix of, okay, this is what’s allowed, this is what’s not allowed, and then you let people figure it out as much as possible. And that is certainly the way I feel about politics, and I think that can take a Democratic version or a Republican version, and unfortunately it’s in very short supply in either party.

Zachary Karabell: So you do have this system, which we loosely call capitalism —

Nick Gillespie: Well, I would actually say it’s liberalism, which just means limited government, maximum autonomy, individual autonomy, and freedom of association. And the economic application of that is something like free enterprise.

Zachary Karabell: And that system — at least globally, right? Because we live in a capitalist world.

Nick Gillespie: Right. Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: China included. Which has clearly led to abundance globally, materially.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, absolutely.

Zachary Karabell: Clearly not led to human satisfaction commensurate with —

Nick Gillespie: No, no, no. It’s the one thing it doesn’t deliver.

Zachary Karabell: And seems to be more and more divergent. And there’s that whole — I don’t remember who it was, who talked about the income rising makes people happier to a point, and then plateaus —

Nick Gillespie: I think the first one was Richard Easterlin.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, the Easterlin Paradox. Which people have also said maybe is wrong or right. But the idea being, rising incomes create contentment to a point, and then it ceases to —

Nick Gillespie: It either stops to increase or it actually starts to decline.

Zachary Karabell: And we certainly see the decline now. Rising incomes, declining contentment globally.

What do you think of this? I’m going to do my question of, here’s my pet theory, which is, much of the discontent around the world, which has outlet — meaning the one thing about phones and social media is that everybody has a voice. No one may listen, but everybody has a voice. Never before have more people been able to both articulate their discontent with things as they are, articulate their passionate desire for better governance, better society, things being improved. And never before have more people believed that they have the right to do so. And to me, I actually find that unbelievably heartening at a human aggregate level.

Nick Gillespie: I totally agree with you. Quiet desperation is out, and the only reason it was there is because nobody had an outlet, or it was hard to reach an audience. I think it’s also worth saying it might be oversold, because when you ask individuals, how are you doing, they tend to say, pretty well. In most international surveys I’ve seen — and I haven’t looked at the methodology of this — America and Europe are really low in terms of overall happiness.

I’m also, I was raised Catholic, so I’m not sure that happiness is a good thing. That may not be what we’re after, and it may be that feeling put upon, or feeling like you’re getting ripped off, or you still have something to prove, is one of the ways in which you actually live the life that you want, which is one about action and accomplishment or achievement or attempt rather than satisfaction.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I don’t know if it’s about happiness as much as the absence of a roiling, angry discontent. There’s some Goldilocks between la-di-da and everything sucks.

Nick Gillespie: Well, and also being able to enjoy what you have. This is something I think about a lot on a more personal level. My parents grew up poor, and then they ascended the lower ranks of the middle class after World War II. But because of the circumstances in which they were raised, and psychologically, they could never really enjoy it, because they didn’t think they deserved it, and they thought they were going to be unmasked as not belonging. So it’s one version of a classic American story where they were very fastidious in how they presented themselves, because if my father wore the wrong tie or the wrong shoes with something, he would be kicked out of whatever place he was masquerading as middle class.

So there’s that too, of where yeah, you should never be satisfied, but also, goddammit, enjoy the luck that you have for being born in this time and in this place and doing something with it.

Zachary Karabell: There too, you did it again. That’s like a line from Hamilton. “I’ll never be satisfied.”

Nick Gillespie: Well, it’s funny. I’m a Burr-ite. I love in William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain, there’s a long essay about how Aaron Burr is the real individualist American. And it’s so funny, it’s like an Amiri Baraka answer play to Hamilton written 100 years before it came out.

Zachary Karabell: Wow. So you’re like Burr got the short shaft historically.

Nick Gillespie: Oh, definitely. Although I still think Gore Vidal’s Burr is better than Hamilton the play, but obviously the masses have spoken, and 50,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong.

Zachary Karabell: That’s a good one. I like that.

So on the libertarian part again, because it’s interesting for the United States, one of the really striking things about our moment contemporarily is just how prominent the courts have become. Now partly that’s a response to the Trump administration’s attempts elastically to expand the boundaries —

Nick Gillespie: And also Congress’s complete abdication of anything other than showing up to pick up a paycheck every couple of weeks.

Zachary Karabell: But you do have this phenomenal rise of the courts as a central, if not just adjudicator, but actually determiner of things. And one thing that’s kind of going on in the Supreme Court, back to the nonpartisan, meaning it doesn’t easily fit Republican or Democrat — I’m not talking about Alito and Clarence Thomas, who clearly are in their own world of anger and angst and therefore very predictable.

Nick Gillespie: And Catholicism. And Alito is from Trenton, New Jersey, so yeah, he’s got a lot of grudges.

Zachary Karabell: And he is acting upon them on a regular basis. But you do have this kind of interesting narrative, back to what you were saying, that the administrative state has gotten too big and too unaccountable, trying to pare it back.

Nick Gillespie: And Trump — Steve Bannon, who is what Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, such a liar that even when he uses the word “and,” “if,” or “but,” those are lies.

Zachary Karabell: Sorry, that was a famous line, for those of you who don’t know, where there was a defamation suit and these two critics in the ‘40s —

Nick Gillespie: Wonderful literary feud.

Zachary Karabell: — said every word that Ms. Hellman says is a lie, including “and,” “if.”

Nick Gillespie: And she said it on The Dick Cavett Show or something, right?

But in any case, the point is that Steve Bannon had said that Trump was going to deconstruct the administrative state, and that’s why you should support him. And Trump is — that would be like saying Charles I of England was going to end God’s appointed kingdom in England or something. It’s the exact opposite.

Zachary Karabell: Although there is this problem of the court trying to do that, but the sequencing is off. Meaning, they’re simultaneously trying to end the independent administrative state and give the president more power over the executive branch without actually defanging the administrative powers that have been ceded by Congress.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. Well, this is so banal, I’m embarrassed to even say it. Obviously the constitution and the founding are spectacular and wonderful, et cetera. But I don’t think anybody expected Congress to be so out to lunch for so long. And I have to admit, I don’t exactly understand how that happened to the extent that it has, and it’s not a Republican or Democratic thing. It is an institutional problem. And as a result, I don’t see how that changes.

So I think you’re pretty much right, because in the end, it’s going to be Congress that reins in the administrative state. The Supreme Court can say, no, you can’t do this, but that only gets you so far.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, and it’ll be interesting to see what the next wave is. So in this vein, do you see any hope of an actual third-party movement? We’re recording this, for those who know, on the heels of Viktor Orbán losing in Hungary.

Nick Gillespie: Good for Hungary.

Zachary Karabell: To a party and a person that didn’t exist a year ago. Which is the same thing that happened in France with Macron. It’s the same thing that happened in Argentina with Milei, where you basically have a political movement that forms out of nothing and storms the gates, as it were.

Nick Gillespie: I wish something like that was likely to happen. The Democrats and the Republicans have been the major parties since before the Civil War, or the Republicans right around that period, and I don’t know that that’s going to change. What the parties stand for can change dramatically, and Trump is a great example of that, the Republican Party that he is leading. And when you have people saying, it’s just amazing to me, like a line of free market economists who worked at places like the American Enterprise Institute who are now saying, you know, when you think about it, tariffs are totally consistent with free markets and everything that I’ve said as a laissez-faire economist for my entire life, until I got within a whiff of power. It’s stunning how quickly Trump has completely drained the Republican Party of its last 50 or 60 years of rhetoric, maybe going back to Barry Goldwater. Grover Cleveland did something similar with the Democratic Party. If you look back at the Democratic Party that Grover Cleveland became the head of, and was pretty successful, like Trump, he won two terms, not continuous terms, but he was free markets, he was pro-civil rights to the extent that those existed, he was anti-tariffs, he was anti-imperial, anti-empire. You could see a figure emerging in either of these parties who really kind of changes what that party stands for in a profound way. I don’t know who that person is right now.

Zachary Karabell: Your analogy, of course, makes Joe Biden Benjamin Harrison.

Nick Gillespie: That’s right. He just needs the beard.

Zachary Karabell: The beard would’ve helped, actually.

Nick Gillespie: One of the other lines of work that I have done, and this started, God, these are like olden times, when George W. Bush left office, I was given the opportunity to write the critique of George W. Bush the day before Karl Rove — if you remember, Bush’s brain, wrote his hagiography, which was really pornographic about how everything was better now that Bush, who was leaving office with like 25 percent approval ratings at the time. But one of the things that I harped on when Bush was leaving was that the decline in trust and confidence in institutions, particularly politics, particularly the federal government in America, had been in an almost straight-line decline from the early ’70s, when Gallup started tracking it, to Bush, and it’s continued to go down. And this is something that affects politics profoundly, but it’s something before politics. This is something that worries me.

And in a way, Trump is delivering on his promise to burn everything down, including belief that the government or the state is legitimate and should be followed or taken seriously. But I don’t know what you do to turn that around. I don’t want a state that is able to dictate every part of my life, but I want a state that has a certain amount of capacity to be effective and efficient and to be seen as legitimate.

Zachary Karabell: You want a more competent, less expansive state.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, pretty much. And along with saying to people, you have it so good. Don’t blow this opportunity. And how do we figure out how to make better choices in our lives because we have so many of them. The flip of that is how do we create better institutions — primarily government, but also the Catholic Church, which has not accounted for itself in a way that it’s declining. Charities, the United Way never accounted for itself since a major scandal. We don’t believe in as many things as we used to, and part of me likes that because I’m antinomian and I like the idea that authority needs to earn our respect. But it’s terrible to live in a world where you can’t trust anything or anybody.

Zachary Karabell: We’re going to be unpacking Trumplandia for a really long time. And the second season of the Trump show is nastier, more vicious, more chip-on-shoulder. What you said about Alito — never have so many people with so many grudges assembled in one place. That I think alone is the defining characteristic of the second season of the Trump show.

Nick Gillespie: And I think coming on the heels of Biden and the way — I did not like Biden, and I’m still getting smacked in the head on social media for saying, between Harris and Trump, I’ll roll the dice with Trump. I would rather have him win than Harris. It has not worked out well. Biden was bad when he showed up in 2021, but then the way he left, I think we need to understand what’s going on where you have somebody who is mentally diminished, who was going to run again, probably conceivably could have won. He was an idiot for doing that debate. Thank God that he did. But how does that happen? Both in terms of media watchdog stuff, but also the people around him. Who cared about the country? Who was putting the country first?

Zachary Karabell: We’re beginning to think about this question of what comes after the second season of the Trump show. And in spite of the fears of endless Trump and rigging the elections for the Republicans, which I think is mostly a hysterical fantasy or nightmare, as the case may be — not impossible, but that doesn’t make it probable. You are left with this question of, we’ve got a whole series of problems. I think there’s a constructive reality of Trump having been the articulation of the dark American id that’s always been there.

Nick Gillespie: Or the shadow self.

Zachary Karabell: Right. If we’re going to use the way we grew up in new-agey ‘60s—

Nick Gillespie: Well, and it’s also fascinating because it would be one thing if Trump was Richard Nixon, who had grown up poor and on the outside. But he was the son of a multimillionaire, and he’s the ultimate insider.

Zachary Karabell: But this question of, what is the United States on the other side of this? I grew up, and I think probably shared with you, a feeling of the self-satisfying mantras. There’s a difference between the pride that you express of being an American and being the children of immigrants, and this country having a lot to offer, and the move into a kind of self-congratulatory hubris that was very much characteristic of the United States essentially from the end of World War II. We went from an existential victory over both an economic crisis and a World War crisis to a constant evocation of our own greatness. Except for this weird moment in the ‘70s. Except in the ‘70s, we did the same arrogance, which is instead of the best, we were the worst. So there was no balanced articulation.

Nick Gillespie: I think there was a little bit of a synthesis in the ’90s. There was a moment after the Cold War before we became hubristic again, particularly in terms of foreign policy, where we were like, oh, you know what? We can kind of navigate this better than we did in the ’70s or certainly in the ’60s with organization men running everything.

Zachary Karabell: So where do we go from here as you think about it?

Nick Gillespie: Well, it’s funny. When you started to say, the second season of the Trump show, I was thinking, okay, what do TV shows do when their ratings are sagging and the franchise is about to end? They always bring in an adorable moppet, like Cousin Oliver on The Brady Bunch or something. Or that horrible kid on whatever became of All in the Family, Archie Bunker’s Place, you know?

And part of this will be solved by millennials and Gen Z, because boomers and Gen Xers, we’re never going away obviously, and we’ll live rent-free in our children and grandchildren’s heads for a long time. But we are not going to be the ones dealing with this. And that does not make me sleep any better, because in many ways I think millennials and Gen Z, part of the problem is that they’ve learned the meta-lesson, or the meta-message, the meta-narrative we were sending them, which is you’ve never had it so good, and by the way, the earth you’re inheriting is uninhabitable. Of course millennials and Gen Z are mad and angry because we’ve taught them that you have everything we never had, which is a mantra from the Greatest Generation, and by the way, it’s all ending because of global warming or because of racism and homophobia, et cetera. All of which is, in a documentable way, better than it’s ever been. Less of a problem.

So I don’t know. But I think one of the ways to think about this is to try and find out what happened in moments within the past 100 years of a kind of renewal of American spirit. And to go back to my parents, they were both raised poor. My father fought in World War II. He was shot. My older uncle, he was an Italian American whose father had left Italy partly to avoid getting embroiled in World War I, who was then very proud that his son was going to invade Italy. He was in the invasion of Italy. But when World War II stopped, they were like, okay, well that’s good. We’ll still be poor because the Depression didn’t end with World War II. But at least people won’t be dying as much. And then by 1950 things had cranked up and they didn’t think about that anymore. There was something new in the air that really started a lot of very positive things.

And I think about this more because this was in my lifetime, what happened between ’78, ’79 and maybe ’81, ’82, where whatever was going on, the beige Me Decade and the national malaise of Jimmy Carter, and it wasn’t just him, it was the end of the ’70s, and it wasn’t Reagan just being sunny and optimistic, but American society restarted in a way that gave us a long boom, which we’re out of now, and we need that.

So I know it’s possible, but I don’t know exactly what it is. But I think a big part of it is reminding ourselves the lessons of history and of recent history, and of the idea that people do better when they are given more choices and they are held responsible for those choices, and that we build institutions that are accountable to people and kind of fess up when they screw up.

And this is the libertarian in me — we need to be more comfortable with more ways of being in the world because all of our gods are dead. You’re going to have to create that meaning again and again and again, and let’s figure out how we do that without driving each other insane.

Zachary Karabell: Well, on that ecclesiastical Joseph Campbell valedictory note, everyone should listen to The Reason Podcast, read Nick’s columns. You’ve got a Substack. Everybody’s got a Substack.

Nick Gillespie: A podcast, a Substack, and children. I guess that one’s the rare thing, though, right?

Zachary Karabell: So thank you.

Nick Gillespie: Thank you.

Zachary Karabell: Feedback is always welcome. Go onto the progressnetwork.org site and click on the feedback tab, and I will take it in and listen and respond to it.

I want to thank the people at Kaleidoscope for producing. I want to thank my team at The Progress Network for continuing to do the work they’re doing, and I want to thank all of you for your thoughtful attention.

And we’ll be back with you next week.

What Could Go Right? is produced by The Progress Network and Kaleidoscope.

Watch the podcast on YouTube.

Follow us on X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok: @progressntwrk

Plus: all 50 U.S. states have now enacted rape kit reform, cutting the national backlog in half; violent crime in major American cities is falling faster than you might expect; and a new drug is doing something doctors have never been able to say about ALS — it’s making some patients actually improve.

Watch the full episode below:

All episodes of the What Could Go Right? podcast are available here.

Transcript

Emma Varvaloucas: Cultural artifacts in France are finally going back to where they came from. A huge win for sexual assault victims in the United States. ALS is proven to be treatable with the help of a breakthrough medication, and America is apparently getting a lot safer.

Welcome to the What Could Go Right? Progress Report, where we dive into all of the good news that you probably missed because it was buried under the tsunami of bad news.

If you’re new here, I’m Emma Varvaloucas, and I’m the executive director of the Progress Network. Let’s get into it.

So, cultural artifacts. I know, not exactly the opener that has you white-knuckling your armrest, but stay with me, because what just happened in France is actually a pretty big deal. Back in 2017, shortly after starting his first term as President of France, Emmanuel Macron traveled to former French colony Burkina Faso.

While he was there, he stood in front of hundreds of students at the University of Ouagadougou and said, “African heritage cannot be solely in private collections and European museums.” The crowd gave him a standing ovation right then and there, and he vowed to make returning African cultural property to the continent one of his priorities.

The next year, his government issued a report that shocked many in the museum world, calling for the permanent return of looted art. And then nothing happened for over eight years, which, to be fair, tracks with how these things usually go. But here’s what makes it especially frustrating. During those eight years, France wasn’t completely averse to the topic of restitution.

There were conversations, and in some cases action, on returning art looted from Jewish families during World War II, and even human remains from other countries. Slow steps, but steps.

Last year, France returned three human skulls to Madagascar, kept in a Paris museum for 128 years after being looted during a colonial massacre. One was believed to be the skull of a Malagasy king, decapitated by French troops and brought back as a trophy. A trophy. That sat in the National History Museum along hundreds of other human remains from Madagascar. That is horrifying. But when it came to returning cultural artifacts to former colonies more broadly, the answer was a firm and furious “no.”

Because this stuff has been taboo for a long time, especially inside art institutions. We’re talking about places that are celebrated globally, that draw millions of visitors, and bring in enormous amounts of money. Some 90 to 95% of Africa’s cultural heritage is held in major museums outside of Africa. France alone holds at least 90,000 objects from Sub-Saharan Africa in its national collections, objects taken by armies, by colonial administrators, by so-called scientific explorers during the French colonial period in Africa.

And look, if you want a reference point for just how charged this conversation gets, remember that scene in the 2018 blockbuster Black Panther, where Killmonger walks into a British museum and grills the museum director?

[video clip]

Varvaloucas: If you forgot, Michael B. Jordan’s character and his team then take over the museum, break the glass, and take the artifacts back, essentially doing what the colonial European nations did to their colonies across Africa, South America, and Asia.That scene hit so hard because it wasn’t fiction. It was just someone finally saying the quiet part out loud, loudly, in a Marvel film.

The pressure hasn’t only been on France, by the way. Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and even Switzerland were all under scrutiny after Macron ignited a firestorm in 2017 with his comments.

And then some of those countries actually started to do something about it. Over the past few years, tens of thousands of objects have been repatriated, like Nigeria’s Benin Bronzes, a massive collection of plaques and sculptures that were taken during the British raid of Benin City in 1897 and ended up everywhere from Germany to Scotland.

In fact, the art world has been having its own reckoning recently that has led to the return of unethically acquired items in general, from artwork stolen by the Nazis that ended up with private collectors, to a dinosaur fossil taken from Brazil. Things started getting so competitive that people started calling it the Olympics of Restitution, and this might be the only Olympics where the gold medalist has a storm of angry people chasing them.

But despite all of Macron’s nice words and a few items that they sent back over the years, France was mostly sitting twiddling its thumbs. Why? French law prohibited anything in the public collection from leaving France. But then, in early May, a new law passed unanimously through both houses of the French Parliament.

This new law creates an exception for France to return cultural property that was unlawfully taken, and I quote here, “by theft, pillage, or gift, obtained by coercion or violence.” It covers a very specific window of time, 1815 to 1972. Those dates are not random. 1815 is when the Second Treaty of Paris ended the Napoleonic Wars, and France’s second colonial empire began.

1972 is when the UNESCO Convention on the Illicit Trade of Cultural Property came into effect—essentially the moment the international community agreed, at least on paper, that this stuff shouldn’t be happening anymore.

Now, does this cover France’s first colonial empire? No. Is that a little convenient? Yes. I’m sure that date range was very, very carefully negotiated. And it’s probably also worth mentioning that the move comes at a time when France is trying to reestablish its economic and military presence on the African continent. But honestly, we take what we can get. It’ll be very interesting to see what happens later this month when the law is expected to go into effect.

Hopefully, it’ll move the needle closer to justice for former European colonies. Thoughts and prayers for the future of the British Museum.

Before we get into our shorter stories, here are some numbers that will make you smile. 104,000, that’s the number of museums worldwide, up from 22,000 in 1975. One, the cost in euro of university student meals in France now offered to everybody, regardless of income. 10%, Colombia’s multidimensional poverty rate, down from 30% in 2010. And 2032, Germany’s likely exit from coal, earlier than the set deadline.

And onwards and upwards to our quick hits. Here they are for today.

First up, all 50 states, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico have enacted rape kit reform laws, slashing the backlog in half.

If you’ve ever watched Law & Order: SVU, you know Mariska Hargitay. She’s been playing badass detective Olivia Benson for two decades, our queen of the Special Victims Unit. And if you’re not a Gen X or Millennial woman who’s basically watched all 593 episodes, not me, guys, not me, the Special Victims Unit focuses on victims who are vulnerable, high-risk, or targeted by sexual offenses.

But what you might not know is that Hargitay didn’t just fight for justice in the TV show, which is the longest running TV show in history. She’s been fighting for it in real life, too. When she started on SVU in 1999, she began receiving letters from survivors. She trained as a rape crisis counselor after that, and learned that every 68 seconds, someone is sexually assaulted in the United States.

That statistic, along with all her work on and off camera, motivated her to start the Joyful Heart Foundation to support survivors of domestic violence, child abuse, and sexual assault. And when she learned in 2009 that there were hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits sitting in storage across America, evidence from real survivors just sitting on a shelf, she didn’t just tweet about it.

She started the foundation’s End The Backlog initiative, and she spent 16 years pushing for reform. Now, you might be wondering, “What is a rape kit?” Well, these deeply important kits are a collection of DNA evidence removed from a sexual assault victim. Now, why would they be sitting there rotting away? The reality is that a lot of sex crimes units are under-resourced and understaffed.

It’s expensive to test the kits, and wait times are long. Sometimes detectives don’t think testing the kit will be valuable, or they deem a victim to be less than perfect for whatever reason and don’t feel that the case merits further investigation. Hargitay’s Joyful Heart Foundation campaign focuses on breaking that cycle with the six pillars of rape kit reform, things like mandatory testing, statewide tracking systems, and the right for survivors to know where their kit is in the process.

And amazing news. Last week, Maine became the 50th state to enact at least one of those pillars. Now all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico have some kind of rape kit reform in place. As of the latest count, 21 states have enacted all six pillars, and 13 have cleared their backlogs entirely. After fighting for this for nearly 20 years, this is an incredible milestone.

Congrats, Captain Benson, a true she-ro. And of course, this is a big moment for sexual assault survivors across the US as well.

Next up, is America getting safer? Apparently it is. You might have heard differently, but violent crime fell sharply across the largest US cities in the first quarter of 2026. This continues a nationwide decline that began after crime spiked during the pandemic.

Here are some of the stats. Homicides dropped 17.7%, robberies fell about 20%, rapes declined 7.2%, and aggravated assaults decreased 4.8%. Before you angrily comment, “That can’t be true, that’s not what’s happening in my town or my state,” it’s very possible it’s not. This is data from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, and it’s looking at the rates in the nation’s biggest cities.

But the data shows that many urban areas have become significantly safer over the past two years, beginning in the second half of Biden’s presidency and continuing under Trump. Despite what politicians might want you to believe, the great American crime decline probably doesn’t have that much to do with politics. In fact, no one really knows why it’s happening, although I have a theory… smartphones.

Last, a breakthrough for ALS that’s showing the world that it is treatable. ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, is one of those diagnoses that until very recently basically meant a countdown to the end. The disease paralyzes you, steals your ability to walk, speak, breathe, and kills most patients within five years.

There have only ever been two approved treatments that do anything meaningful, and neither of them stops the disease. They just slow the clock a little. So when doctors say a drug is making some ALS patients improve, not stabilize, not decline more slowly, but actually get better, that’s not a small thing. That’s a sentence that hasn’t really been uttered before.

The drug is called tofersen, made by Biogen and marketed as Qalsody. It targets a specific genetic form of ALS caused by a mutation on the SOD1 gene, which accounts for about 2% of ALS patients. Not a whole lot of people, but a new study following patients for about three years found that nearly 20% of them showed improvement in breathing, strength, and function.

Even the patients who didn’t improve were declining significantly slower than expected, especially those who started treatment early. One of the doctors running the trial put it best, “It tells us that ALS is treatable.” That’s an enormous shift, especially for families who spent generations watching ALS take the people they love. Feels like a lot could go right.

And that’s all for this week’s progress report. I hope these stories remind you that there’s a ton of good going on out there in the world, so it’s super important not to be blinded by all of the bad. So if you got some value from this show, maybe something that you can bring up at your next NBA watch party, send this show to someone who could really use some positive news.

And make sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on your preferred podcast platform and leave us a review.

What Could Go Right? is produced by The Progress Network and Kaleidoscope.

Watch the podcast on YouTube.

Follow us on X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok: @progressntwrk

Something that gets lost in the inequality discussions that define the zeitgeist in places like the United States is just how much the world as a whole has been equalizing. In the past few decades, while the haves and have-nots kept drifting farther apart at home, the globe was becoming increasingly characterized by an enormous class of have-enoughs, as traditionally poor countries industrialized and became, if not rich, richer.1

Despite what the Notorious B.I.G. had to say about the matter, more money in fact can mean more benefits. There are those much celebrated in progress circles, such as the ones in healthcare, education, and infrastructure. And then there are those that are harder to quantify and so frequently get short shrift, like in culture. Since May 18 is International Museum Day, I figured it was the perfect time to talk about one underdiscussed cultural benefit in particular: the great global museum boom.

It’s a story of mass democratization of the arts that has happened at breakneck speed, and it’s one hardly anyone knows. According to UNESCO, in 1975, there were 22,000 museums worldwide. Today, there are 104,000—an average addition of more than 1,600 new museums per year.

Museums 2.0

Museums have never quite shaken their reputation as existing for the privileged few. First created in Renaissance Europe as a place for royals to show off their collections, by the 20th century, museums were still relatively rare outside of Europe and the Anglosphere, and in many places were considered a relic of colonialism.

The museum boom was kickstarted in the mid-1970s by Paris’ Centre Pompidou, Europe’s first collection of contemporary art, and continued to surge through the ’90s. But building remained concentrated in areas of the world long accustomed to museum-going. That finally changed this century, when the Middle East, Asia, and South America began to play some serious catch-up.

The United Arab Emirates, for example, continues to work on the world’s largest cultural district, Saadiyat Island (“Happiness” Island) off the coast of Abu Dhabi; it is already home to several museums, including an outpost of the Louvre, and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is set to open this year. Meanwhile, China went on such a spree that between 2010 and 2024 it debuted a new museum every day and a half on average.2

Even governments with considerably fewer resources are joining the parade. The opening of Uzbekistan’s first permanent contemporary arts museum, for instance, was planned for the spring of this year before being delayed by the Iran conflict. And in countries where public investment is limited, private money has filled the gaps. In Southeast Asia, the MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and the Ilham Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, are just two of the private museums that large-pocketed enthusiasts have bankrolled in recent years; Central Asia just got its first, the Almaty Museum, in Kazakhstan.

Interest is in such boundless supply that it has shaken up most-visited museum lists long dominated by European blockbusters such as the Vatican. After its opening last year, the Grand Egyptian Museum, outside of Cairo, saw numbers that rivaled the British Museum’s, according to The Art Newspaper’s annual visitor-number survey. Mexico City’s Museo Nacional de Antropología, meanwhile, had a record 5.1 million visitors in 2025, edging closer to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the most popular museum in the Western Hemisphere.3

In general, things are looking good everywhere. After bottoming out during the pandemic, international museum attendance—although it varies country by country and museum by museum—has returned to normal, and even better than normal. “A raft of new museums have opened in the last few years to great success—not just in the Middle East and East Asia, where demand seems almost unlimited,” The Art Newspaper sums up, “but also in highly museum-dense cities like London and New York.” Several more are expected in 2026, including Dataland in Los Angeles, billed as the world’s first museum of AI arts. (Those prone to motion sickness should exercise caution before visiting its website.) This year will also bring a host of special expansions and reopenings, including of the Mosul Museum in Iraq, which ISIS ravaged in 2015.4

Temples of Belief

The democratization element of this great global boom cannot simply be explained by a “more money, more museums” math, though. New and old institutions alike are contributing to a perspective shift that de-centers the West and compensates for the sins of its past. The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, for instance, focuses on West and South Asian and North African art. And throughout Africa, as a new generation of scholars, artists, and curators presents an alternative history, writes Najlaa El-Ageli, museums are pushing past their reputations as “white elephants, run by eccentric colonialists . . . and primarily visited by foreigners.” Meanwhile, more and more museums are repatriating objects looted during the colonial era and reconsidering presentation and programming influenced by bygone attitudes.5

Bringing together a collection of objects from the past to be passed on has one more particular long-term benefit. As author of The Museum: A Global History Krzysztof Pomian once described them, museums act “as a temple of belief in the future.” That so many more people are visiting those temples than even 10 years ago bodes well.

—Emma Varvaloucas

Share

What Could Go Right? S8 E5: The Case for Not Knowing | with Simone Stolzoff

What happens when our biological need for certainty clashes with an increasingly unpredictable world? Simone Stolzoff, author of How to Not Know, joins host Zachary Karabell to discuss why our modern intolerance for uncertainty is fueling a global anxiety crisis. Rather than seeing the unknown as a threat, Stolzoff argues that uncertainty is the fundamental birthplace of scientific breakthroughs, original art, and human progress. | Listen now

By the Numbers

1: Cost, in euros, of university-student meals in France, now offered to all regardless of income

51: Number of countries that have eliminated maternal and neonatal tetanus since 1999

10%: Colombia’s multidimensional poverty rate, down from 30% in 2010

>45%: Recycling rate in Shanghai, a city leader in China’s move to go zero waste

2032: Germany’s likely exit from coal, earlier than the set deadline

Quick Hits

🏺 France has passed a landmark law making it easier to return artwork and cultural artifacts taken during the colonial era. Strict prior legislation meant few pieces had ever been repatriated.

📉 Homicides have fallen 40% year-on-year in Jamaica, with the total number falling below 700 for the first time since 1993. Citizen tipsters have made the difference—and they aren’t even collecting the reward money.

☕ Scientists agree: Coffee really is good for you! Its nutritional benefits are increasingly coming to light as quality continues to improve during the era of globalization.

😊 A new technique to treat depression gets at the issue the other way ’round: instead of trying to make people feel less bad, it may work better to make them feel more good.

🌍 Seabed marine life has resurged in Scotland since protections against bottom trawling and dredging were put into place a decade ago.

📉 Violent crime continues to plunge in American cities in early 2026, extending a nationwide decline that began post-pandemic.

🧬 Mounting evidence suggests that a new drug can treat a genetic form of ALS, not just slow its progression—a gamechanger for a disease that usually kills within years.

💊 A hair loss pill that actually works: The results of a late-stage trial were described as a “massive breakaway” from expectations. Existing options cause concerning side effects or don’t last.

⚖️ Maine will begin tracking sexual assault forensic examination kits so that victims can be kept up to date about their status. All 50 states have now enacted rape kit reform laws, slashing the nationwide backlog in half.

💯 Connecticut has mobilized a citizen’s assembly to loosen decades of gridlock around property taxes. The initiative—which tasks 100 randomly selected citizens with shaping public policy—is only the third of its kind convened in the US.

☀️ One of the UK’s largest community-owned solar parks is planning to install battery storage, which would be a first. We didn’t even know this was a thing!

👀 What we’re watching: Brazil is looking to shorten its workweek from six days to five, and Ghana is calling to criminalize “sex for jobs” demands.

💡 Editor’s pick: As Russia stumbles on the battlefield, is Vladimir Putin losing his grip on the country?

Subscribe now

TPN Member Originals

(Who are our Members? Get to know them.)

• Men teach, too | Of Boys and Men | Richard Reeves

• Seniors aren’t living on ‘fixed incomes’ | Slow Boring | Matthew Yglesias

• If OPEC falls apart, it’ll cost us all | NYT ($) | Jason Bordoff

• The Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act deregulates democracy | WaPo ($) | Theodore R. Johnson

• The Voting Rights Act changed America. Now, it can change. | NYT ($) | John McWhorter

• Succession: The Trump drama | Lucid | Ruth Ben-Ghiat

• Trust the markets, not the headlines | TFP ($) | Tyler Cowen

• The AI boom needs their land | Life with Machines | Baratunde Thurston

• The G2 world | Diane Francis | Diane Francis

Stolzoff and Karabell explore how to navigate everything from the climate crisis and the AI revolution to high-stakes parenting and career choices through the framework that the false certainty we cling to might actually be detrimental to our success.

While acknowledging the hard truths of today’s world, Stolzoff explains why “action absorbs anxiety” and makes the case for diversifying our identities so we remain adaptable in the face of an unwritten future.

Watch the full conversation below:

All episodes of the What Could Go Right? podcast are available here.

Transcript

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network and the host of this podcast, where I talk to interesting and scintillating people about interesting and scintillating things, or at least I hope so. And one of the topics that has fascinated me and animated some of my worldview for years and years and years and years is the very human desire to know the future, this kind of need for certainty about future outcomes that is almost always flying in the face of the inherent uncertainty about most future outcomes.

Granted, there are some outcomes of actions that feel fairly certain. If you step off a curb into a deep hole, you’re probably going to fall into that deep hole because of gravity. But many, many aspects of our lives, if not most aspects of our lives, are shrouded in uncertainty that we as human beings try always to ameliorate or compensate for with false certainty about future outcomes, because it gives us some sense of security.

I was most struck by this in years of working in the financial world, where people would come for advice and want the assurance that if they invested their money right now, that in the future that money would grow or be preserved. There is nothing more terrifying than investing because of that uncertain outcome that maybe you’re going to lose your money.

Maybe entering a new relationship or a new job has some of the same, “Oh my God, am I making the right decision?” And so we all have to grapple with this in our own lives, and then we deal with that societally and socially. Are we collectively making the right decision? Do we support this politician or not? Do we like that company or not? All of these things we try to know future outcomes, even though those future outcomes are unknown, and we have yet to find a good way to deal with uncertainty in a world where we’re all cleaving to the desire for false certainty.

So today I’m going to speak with someone who, to my delight, has written a book about this, a book that I have been waiting for.

His name is Simone Stolzoff, and he has written a book called How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World That Demands Answers. And under that general rubric, we’re going to talk about some challenging topics like climate change, like COVID, like how do you run a business? How do you decide whether to take that job? How do you figure out how to parent your children? All of these things fall into the category of we want the right answer, but is that right answer actually available to us? Or do we just have to surrender to the unknown and the fact that we cannot control the future?

Oh, and we’re also going to talk about death, and I am really excited to be having this conversation, or at least I am fairly certain that I am really excited to be having this conversation. But it may turn out that my certainty about that excitement was misplaced. Let’s hope not.

Simone, I am certain of very few things in the world, but I’m 100% certain that I am really jazzed to be having this conversation with you. I’m really curious. I know you talk about this a little bit in the book, but given that not everyone listening to this will have read the book, where did you get into this idea of, we are collectively as humans in our current moment in society not adequately recognizing our zealous and often problematic devotion to certainty?

Simone Stolzoff: Well, there’s the political answer, which is that in many ways our world is more uncertain than ever. There’s been some data that has showed that the five highest measurements of uncertainty since a few studies began in the early ‘80s have all occurred in the past five years. So you think about the pandemic, the wars and shifting tariff policies, et cetera.

But this also comes at a time when our tolerance for uncertainty is in decline. From the rise of mobile phones and the internet, I think lots of people have created the expectation that answers should be readily available. Maybe 10 years ago, I might’ve been okay not knowing the name of a given actor, and now I feel this almost involuntary need to reach into my pocket to find out. And so those are sort of the trends. There’s this sort of rise of uncertainty, decrease in our tolerance for uncertainty, and so many people are feeling anxious.

But there’s also the personal answer, which I actually don’t write about as much in the book, which is that I had an inciting incident for myself, which is, I was 28 years old,

I was writing for The Atlantic, a trendy magazine, and a recruiter reached out to me from this design firm, and I found myself at this career crossroads where there are these two potential paths unfolding in front of me. One was sort of Simone the journalist, the other was Simone the designer, and long story short, I was completely insufferable.

I was miserable trying to figure out my mind, trying to choose between these two paths. I asked everyone I knew. I asked my Uber driver. I asked my yoga teacher which job I should take. And in some ways it’s like, world’s smallest violin, the agony of deciding between two attractive job offers.

But in other ways, I realize now in retrospect that I was looking for certainty where there was no certainty to be found. I thought that if I just banged my head against the wall at the right angle, I would somehow know what my career will look like for the next 10 years. And I came to write this book because of my own discomfort with uncertainty.

Zachary Karabell: Did you make the right choice? By the way, for those who don’t know, Simone went to a firm called IDEO, which is one of the coolest design concept firms in the world, and they’ve created some of the more iconic things including, I think, the Swiffer.

Simone Stolzoff: Well, we worked on the Dyson. We worked on the first Apple mouse. It really had its foundation in product design. But to your question of whether I made the right choice, the answer is I don’t know. You can never sort of fully play out the counterfactual of the road not taken. And so part of my goal with the book is to help people get more comfortable making choices in their life in spite of the doubt, in spite of not knowing, and being able to persist nonetheless.

Zachary Karabell: I spent years in and out of the financial world. One of the things that is absolutely true of the financial world and financial advice is people wanting some certainty of, if I invest my money here, will I make money? Will I preserve my money? They want the certainty of future outcomes. Understandably, right? You want it because it’s risky, or it’s scary, or you don’t want to lose. So how do we offset that very human tendency, which is, I don’t want to make a decision and have the negative consequences lead me to second-guess and feel like I made the wrong decision?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah. I mean, financial is probably one of the better examples of where people want a false sense of certainty, even if it isn’t actually accurate. There’s this one study that I write about in the book that I think is illustrative, which is these research participants were given either a fifty percent chance of receiving a painful electric shock or an a hundred percent chance of receiving a painful electric shock, and those with the fifty percent chance were far more stressed than those that had the hundred percent chance. We would somehow rather a certain bad thing happen than have to deal with the ambiguity of not knowing.

I mean, I think the most basic answer is that we have no choice but to live with uncertainty, whether it’s uncertainty in the markets or uncertainty about the future of your career or uncertainty about the world that your kid will inherit.

Part of what it means to be human is to have to make choices and to persist in the fog. I think the problem occurs when we grasp for these false senses of certainty. The pundit on TV that says, “This stock will definitely go up or down,” or the self-help guru that says, “If you just follow my 10-step plan, I’ll guarantee that you go to heaven.”

And this urge to find certainty is biologically wired within us. You can imagine one of our ancestors hearing a rustling in the bushes, and if they don’t know the source of that noise, that uncertainty could be lethal. The problem is, in today’s day and age, so many of us are looking for certainty where it doesn’t exist, whether it’s through our politicians or our financial advisors or the self-help gurus on Instagram.

And so the goal of the book is really to help people understand that not knowing is not necessarily a problem to be solved. And rather than try and reach for false senses of certainty, we can learn to get more comfortable with that which we don’t know.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. This idea of, people will prefer a false sense of certainty over actual uncertainty is, you kind of come up against it over and over again. I wonder what you make of this. So one of the conceits of doing The Progress Network, doing this podcast called What Could Go Right?, for me, foundationally, was the work of this theoretical physicist, David Deutsch, who wrote a book called The Beginnings of Infinity. And in it, he defined optimism versus pessimism. And he basically said, and this is a paraphrase, and it may be a self-serving paraphrase, but it’ll work for this interview, that optimism is not the certainty that the future will go well. It’s the humility that we don’t know future outcomes, that there’s a huge spectrum. Karl Popper talked about this too, that the pathways of the future are infinite, and that we have a role in the present in shaping them. But that pessimism is often the hubris — and I’m using the word hubris because you use it in the book — that we can know future outcomes and that we do. So I mean, I wonder, does that resonate with you in terms of how you think about these things?

Simone Stolzoff: I love it. Yeah, you can kind of think about uncertainty as this inflection point, where right now, the most common reaction to uncertainty is fear.

It’s to see uncertainty as a threat, to think, “If I don’t know, then that means that things will necessarily go bad,” and we have this natural tendency to catastrophize or think about all of the worst-case scenarios. But what I try and argue, and I think this is very much in line with The Progress Network and what you’re trying to do with the show, is that uncertainty is also the birthplace of possibility. It’s also the precursor to things going well. And if you think about any sort of scientific breakthrough or generational company or even a genre-busting original piece of art, they all came from someone’s willingness to get to a point where they didn’t know what was to come and to continue on.

There’s an example I really like that I actually don’t write about in the book. It comes from this entrepreneur who in the early 2010s had this gaming startup called Tiny Speck, and it was sort of the darling of Silicon Valley. Everyone thought it was going to be the next big thing, and it raised tens of million dollars before it launched. Its launch was covered in The New York Times. It had all of these active players from the get-go. And yet, less than two years into building the company, the entrepreneur did something that other people thought was crazy, which is he decided to shut the game down. He offered to make his investors whole. He gave his employees the opportunity to leave, and then with the employees who were left, he said, “Okay, let’s pivot. Let’s try a completely different product in a completely different industry.” While they were building the game, they had this internal communication tool that they had built as a team to help collaborate across different offices, and that tool became what we know today as Slack. And that entrepreneur was Stewart Butterfield. And of course, Slack sold for, I think, almost 30 billion dollars to Salesforce.

But I think it goes back to your definition of optimism. Butterfield didn’t know that the future would necessarily turn out rosy, and of course the fact that the company succeeded is a nice bow on the case study, but what he was willing to do is turn toward his uncertainty and be willing to explore what this new opportunity might provide. Without being willing to turn toward what he didn’t know, he wouldn’t have been able to discover the possibility. It’s what statisticians often call “transcending a local maxima.” Often we’re sort of standing on top of a peak, and we think we’ve reached the top, only to find out that around the corner there’s an even higher peak that we could reach. But in order to reach that higher peak, we need to be willing to descend the mountain. And I think that’s what optimism allows us to do.

Zachary Karabell: Okay, well, what about the people who will hear that story and say, “That’s only a good story because it turned out well, because he pivoted to Slack as opposed to pivoted toward the company imploding?” Because the thing that people don’t like about uncertainty is not that it’s uncertain that you might succeed beyond your wildest dreams, it’s that you might fail commensurate with your deepest fears. So what do you say to people about that?

Simone Stolzoff: Of course, those are both part of the possibility landscape, right? But often what keeps us paralyzed, what keeps us from even stepping towards the unknown at all, is the fear trumping the possibility. And rather than be this sort of ideal of, “Oh, you’ll always turn out well,” understanding that, yes, there is the risk, but there’s also the possibility of reward, is our way of balancing the scales.

Zachary Karabell: Are we still allowed to use the word “trumping” as a verb? Is that, is that kosher?

Simone Stolzoff: I think so, in certain environments, and it’s a podcast, so we can edit it out later.

Zachary Karabell: That’s right. May or may not make the final cut.

Let’s talk about, I think, a controversial aspect of this. One of the sacred cows of probably our communities is that there is a clear and present danger that man-made climate change represents the greatest, not just existential, but actual threat to human life on the planet in the 21st century, and that we are headed down a perilous path of much more accelerated global warming than is tenable, and that if we don’t do something right now, a series of increasingly catastrophic things will happen in terms of our lived environment.

Those statements are statements based on science, but said with a great deal of certainty about future outcomes. So how does that fit? What do we do about the way in which our understanding of what is a threat is predicated on certainty of future outcomes?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah. I am glad you asked. I talked to a few climate scientists and also climate psychologists for the book, people who help people manage the anxiety of climate change, especially young people.

And the thing I learned is that the thing that will help address the climate crisis is also the best thing to help manage your anxiety, which is taking some sort of action. There’s this common phrase in the psychology community that action absorbs anxiety, and so through the doing is how we get more clarity.

Now, with something like climate change, yes, the forecasts are a lot of doom and gloom. I don’t want to just have my California paint over all of the bad things that are potentially waiting for us on the horizon. But the thing that will give you as an individual hope, is thinking about this whole tapestry of climate solutions and then thinking about the one string that you might be able to pull on.

This isn’t to say that if you just recycle, the world will magically fix itself. But understanding how you might be able to play a role and not let your anxiety about what the future might hold keep you from doing anything. And so in my mind, optimism isn’t necessarily the idea that the world is headed towards a more beautiful place or that the future is necessarily better than the present, but it’s this idea that we all have agency to help shape what that future becomes.

I think one of the best examples for not wanting to have a fixed idea of the future is that if you want to change the world, you shouldn’t want the future to be already written. You want to be able to write your part in it, and that’s what I think about in terms of the climate movement is, you have to be part of that solution even, and especially, if you are sort of down or feeling a little paralyzed by the size of the problem.

Zachary Karabell: I think it’s Karl Popper who said something like, “The pathways of the future are infinite, and it is up to each of us not to prophesy doom.” And he is basically saying in a more elaborate mid-20th century European fashion exactly what you just said. That it’s kind of incumbent on us to write the future. It’s not written.

I do want to push on this, though, because clearly there are certainties that are certain, right? If you hold your hand over a flame, you are within a realm of almost-certainty to get burned. If you jump off a cliff, you are within a realm of almost-certainty to plunge to your death. We kind of think the sun is, quote unquote, going to rise tomorrow. We now know, of course, the sun doesn’t rise. The Earth just makes its way around the sun and rotates accordingly. But for better or worse, we kind of say it will rise tomorrow barring something catastrophic, in which case it won’t really matter that it won’t because we won’t be around to witness its absence. Those are certainties, or at least those are as close to certainties as we can get, and you’re clearly not arguing in your book that there are not certain things that are certain, right?

Simone Stolzoff: No, not at all. And in fact, having certainty about some aspects of your life makes it easier to hold uncertainties in others. Getting clear on what those facts are, or the fact that you are committed to live in a particular place or you’re committed to a particular partner, actually makes it easier for you to hold uncertainty in other facets of your life. This isn’t a book where I’m advocating for the sort of full anarchy mode of just, turn toward uncertainty, look for chaos wherever it may lead. It’s an argument for the value of not being hubristic, of not deluding ourselves into thinking we can be certain about things that we can’t. But that is different from thinking that we can’t be certain about anything.

Zachary Karabell: So I’m going to keep going on this climate change problem insofar as it relates to the matrix of your book. And for those listening, I am not questioning the science, I’m not questioning climate change. I’m questioning the dotted-line assumption of where this all ends up. Now granted, it is a dotted-line assumption of where all things end up if we don’t do things to change that trajectory.

But isn’t that the problem of a lot of scientific hubris or a lot of human societal hubris, which is, we extend the “all things being equal” argument into the future as if there will not be multiple new variables and countervailing factors, when observably, if you look at the past, that’s kind of always been the story of human existence on the planet, which is things have never just been all things being equal. So why should it be the same for the arc of human-caused climate change?

Simone Stolzoff: You kind of hit the nail on the head there, Zach. In many ways, the way that scientific institutions lose credibility or trust is being overconfident in things that they don’t necessarily know to be true and presenting them as certainties as opposed to probabilities, or things that come with their own confidence intervals.

I think AI is another great example of this. I feel right now we’re in this moment where we have a tendency to either lionize or villainize this technology. And half of the entrepreneurs say it’s going to lead to this age of creative expression where all rote tasks will be automated, and we’ll be able to write poetry and leap around in fields.

And the other half say, class warfare is inevitable, and it’s going to lead to this growing resentment of people who aren’t able to take advantage of this wave, and the robots are going to show up with pink slips. And the truth is, one, the truth probably lies somewhere in between those two poles. You know, there is a middle path.

And two, to your earlier point, there will inevitably be black-swan events or things that we can’t anticipate that will change everyone’s idea of these sort of linear predictions and extrapolations into the future. And we shouldn’t have the hubris or the overconfidence to think that what we know today is all that we’ll ever know, and that the graphs and forecasts that we make in 2026 will necessarily be borne out exactly as we predict.

Zachary Karabell: Let’s talk a little bit about that in terms of jobs, because you did an earlier book called The Good Enough Job. Somehow I kind of love the German title of the book, of Dein Job ist gut genug! I don’t know why I like that. It’s just, somehow, I think we should all refer to that book by its German title. You wrote that a bit before the crescendo of “AI is coming for your jobs” had reached its current fever pitch, but that does raise this question of, what’s the purpose of a job? Are we basically working to live, or are we living to work? And one of the utopian promises of AI was that it would liberate people from crappy jobs. One of the dystopian fears of AI is that it will eliminate jobs that people otherwise actually want to do. How much of this do you feel is temperament? How much of this is, some of us are glass half full, some of us are glass half empty, as opposed to there’s a right way or wrong way of looking at this?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah. Upton Sinclair said something like, “You can’t convince a man about something when his job depends on him not understanding it.” I think there’s a lot of sort of built-in biases and incentives that influence people’s views on this. I mean, the truth is that no one really knows what AI will do to jobs over a longer time horizon. And the sort of most accurate view, I think, is to not try to forecast or project into the future.

The argument in my first book was really about the value of diversifying our identities, treating work as part of, but not the entirety of, who we are. And it wasn’t on either pole. It wasn’t saying that work is a necessary evil. It wasn’t saying that work is necessary in order to self-actualize. It was saying that work is a great contributor to identity and community and purpose, but it shouldn’t be the sole contributor to those things in your life.

And I actually think that same sort of diversification argument is very relevant when it comes to uncertainty. If we can’t know exactly what the future holds, we can treat our life like an investor and have sort of a diversified portfolio of meaning in our life, have a diversified portfolio of options and sources of community. And rather than making one bet or putting all of our chips on one particular future, we can understand that a more broad foundation of who we are allows us to be more resilient and adaptable in the face of change.

I think often, because I wrote a book about work, I’m asked at talks to give my predictions about how AI will impact jobs, and what I really want to say is, you know, throw my hands up and, even the chief economists at these frontier labs are really pulling things out of a hat. We don’t know what the long-term consequences are going to be.

But the advice is to focus on the realm that we can control. Separate the sort of macro trends that you have no influence over from the micro things that are actually in your sphere of influence. And do things like try to get to know the tools themselves so you can be proximate to what is maybe causing you a lot of fear. Try to position yourself to be indispensable in your company. But also try not to be overly wedded to any particular vision of the future. That’ll make you more brittle or fragile or susceptible to be blown over by a strong gust of wind.

Zachary Karabell: So we talked a bit about the, at least as it applies to science, we talked climate change, the hubris being a problem of the certainty matrix. Probably could’ve said some of the same thing about COVID in 2020. Meaning, too much hubris about certainty kind of undermines even the underlying validity of the message, or it changes the equation for how people are going to hear it.

But what’s wrong with a little bit of the comfort part? You talk about one of the reasons people like certainty is because there’s a comfort that comes with it. You know, we do this when we raise kids. There’s a certain false certainty that we allow for that is staged, right? We don’t plunge a 4-year-old into, “Sorry, you’re going to die,” or “Life is pain. Get over it.” We tell stories that allow for a gentler glide path into some of the difficulties of life. We tell ourselves stories about a new job, that it’s going to be the perfect job. We tell ourselves stories about a new relationship, that it’s going to be wonderful. And often those things are true, and as we know observably, often they’re not. But if we go with the often they’re not, that often precludes constructive action. It’s some of the comfort, right, of telling ourselves a story about the future that may not be certain, but we’ll go with that certainty because it propels us forward. So is that a problem?

Simone Stolzoff: The problem is when comfort comes at the expense of learning and growth. If we stay stuck in our bubbles of comfort and never expose ourselves to things that might make us uncomfortable, then we’re never expanding our horizons. I think a good example is someone who is stuck in a job that they know isn’t right for them, or someone who’s stuck in a relationship that they know isn’t right for them, but values the comfort of the status quo over the potential threat of the uncertainty of leaving that job or leaving that relationship.

I don’t think comfort is a problem in and of itself, and there are certainly benefits to the sort of climate-controlled rooms and comforts of daily life. And yet, if we are too comfortable, if we’ve just exploited all of our preferences, it, one, makes us ill-prepared for the inevitable moments in our life where we’ll have to be resilient or bounce back. Two, it keeps us from knowing whether there’s something that’s better out there for us. I think about someone who always orders the same thing at the restaurant and never knows that there’s a dish down the page that they might like better. And three, I think part of what it means to be in a collective society means addressing your discomfort head on. I think one of the reasons why we are so polarized right now is that people aren’t willing to face the discomfort of a conversation with someone who maybe voted for a different person than them, or face the discomfort of what it would mean to actually expose yourself to the type of risk of, say, being young and striking up a conversation with someone that you don’t know whether or not they like you. And so comfort can be a great blessing of the world, but it also can come at the cost of our ability to learn and grow.

Zachary Karabell: The role of a writer is always to take a step out and comment upon, but you’ve also been involved in a firm. Companies and reporting structures demand that you meet your goals. You set your goals, and then you meet your goals. That’s kind of a flag of future certainty, maybe short term. If companies were to embrace some of the mantras that you are laying out, and mantras which, by the way, personally I love and I think are vital and important, what would that look like, and how would that shape things, and would it work?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah. No one wants a leader that just throws up their hands and says, “I have no idea what the future holds.” I think we need to be willing to make bets on the future. In my mind, what a progressive leader espouses is someone who’s willing to admit what they don’t know, admit what experiments they’re running to try and figure out that information, and also be clear about what it is that they do know. I think that IDEO is a great example. We did product innovation consulting, and we didn’t necessarily know at the beginning of a project what we would build, because the whole idea is that we do this sort of human-centered design. We go out into the world, we talk to users.

And the metaphor that I really like that was told to me by one of my former bosses is that being an innovator is sort of like sitting in a rowboat on a lake that’s shrouded in heavy fog. You might not be able to see very far in front of you. You might not be able to know exactly where you’ll end up, but you have two jobs. One is to have faith that you’ll eventually reach land, which I think in some ways is sort of the MO of a show like yours. And two, you have to keep rowing, and it’s through the rowing that the clarity emerges.

And so if I were to think about maybe a more accurate CEO earnings statement, it would be less about 10-year projections of exactly where we know the market will go. It’ll be about, this is what we believe. This is sort of our confidence interval associated with it. This is how certain I feel about this particular bet or this particular future, and this is the way in which we are running experiments while staying open to the fact that our beliefs might change over time. So rather than sort of the blind faith that a guru might try to instill amongst its subjects, I think the best CEOs or leaders instill a type of conscious faith. Which is to say, they are inspiring enough to put a bet on because of their willingness to separate what they know and what they don’t know.

Zachary Karabell: It’s funny, when you were talking about the boat analogy, I had this flash of Magellan talking to his nascent crew or trying to recruit a crew. Like, we’re going to just set off. We’re going to circumnavigate a world that until a few years ago all of you thought was flat anyway. We’re going to go out there, there being who the hell knows where, and observably from other people who’ve tried to do similar things, most of you aren’t going to make it. But come! Come with me.

And that’s a very different worldview and mentality than you would find in early 21st century United States or Europe. Meaning, talk about an embrace of radical uncertainty. Of course, I guess we could look at it by saying, the certainty of near death being, not precluding embracing the fact that maybe something else could happen.

You open this a little bit like, there’s a cultural moment, that we have become dependent on false certainty. Do you feel this has just radically changed over your lifetime, our lifetimes, slowly over the centuries? Because again, clearly generations of humans were able to exist under conditions of much more radical uncertainty. Maybe because they just had no choice, right? Certainty was not an option.

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah. And even humans today, I would be loath to give a copy of How to Not Know to someone who’s fighting on the front lines of the Ukraine war right now. Like, there are levels to this, and if you were living in Florence during the Bubonic Plague, you might sort of scoff at contemporary notions of what it means to live in uncertainty.

But that doesn’t change the sort of felt experience of uncertainty. I think part of that is due to the information economy that we live in. We can now track the real-time changes of a conflict happening on the other side of the globe, or put a tracker on our children and have the expectation that we should always know where they are. And part of that is just the way in which our expectations have risen, where we believe that certainty is more possible than ever because we have these tools to forecast.

Zachary Karabell: And COVID was a profound example of that, right? We were able to track, morbidly, who was dying where, in what micro part of a city, in what country, and then compare them as if somehow this was going to give us absolute clarity about policies we would’ve had, as opposed to every other point in human history where when disease befell society, it took a long time, if ever, and probably never, before you figured out just what had happened and maybe what you could’ve done about it.

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, and I think this is one of the things that Fauci has written about and said that he sort of regrets from the early days of the pandemic, is having to give people a certain policy recommendation and project that he is more certain than he is. Things like mask mandates, or standing six feet apart, or washing our groceries, what have you, they were all born, in some ways, out of politicians’ or leaders’ need to give people a toehold, to give people something that they can be grounded in in spite of the not knowing. But the problem is, when you rush to make policy decisions about, we must wash our groceries, or we must make sure that we’re not touching banisters because COVID can spread on the railing in the supermarket, it erodes trust over time.

And I think that’s the risk of being overly certain or overly confident. I actually think some of the AI CEOs and leaders in the space are showing some humility when it comes to their projections of the future. Certainly you see Dario from Anthropic saying, “Okay, fifty percent of entry-level jobs will disappear in the next five years,” or some of these more extreme claims.

But even as a technology itself, the people working in these labs don’t know exactly how it works. And so I see a little bit more sort of measured optimism coming out of Silicon Valley these days than maybe you’d see in the Mark Zuckerberg and the birth of the iPhone days, about how we are changing the world and techno-optimism, it’s inevitable that everything is going to get better. I do think the sort of measured approach of, we only have so much control and it’s incumbent on us now to be thinking about these risks is a welcome balance to some of the sort of blind optimism that you’d see coming out of some of these CEOs in the past.

Zachary Karabell: Well, it’s interesting. In Dario Amodei’s twenty-five thousand thirty-word piece in February of 2026 about his view of the landscape of AI. But he was also highlighting risks more than opportunities, and he had a whole section of the risks of the unknown unknowns as opposed to risks one could forecast. That was in the context of, there are even worse things that could happen that we can’t even fully foresee. It was less about, there are all these great things that could happen that we couldn’t fully foresee. I’ve wondered about the collective certainty about negative future outcomes that seems to be nearly ubiquitous. There’s not that much techno-optimism. I mean, maybe there is amongst a group at dinner in Pasadena. But in general, you wouldn’t exactly call our current culture techno-optimist. You would call it techno-pessimist.

Simone Stolzoff: There’s a term for this, which is called “bracing for the worst,” which is basically when we don’t know exactly what the future holds, it is somewhat psychologically adaptive to imagine the worst-case scenario and then hopefully be pleasantly surprised.

So the canonical example is you’re sitting in class, the teacher is passing back the tests, and you think, “Oh, I failed. I’m definitely failing this test.” And that sort of little story that you tell yourself is a way of emotionally preparing for you to get the actual result, and then hopefully you’re pleasantly surprised.

The problem is when that sort of bracing for the worst turns into catastrophizing, where all you can imagine is the worst-case scenarios, and that becomes a source of paralysis where you’re not even willing to make a move. There was this one psychologist I talked to for the book that really changed my mind on these things. He said when people are really intolerant of uncertainty, they tend to have one of two responses. One response is the one that we probably would anticipate, which is people become obsessive information gatherers. So you’re in a store, you’re trying to buy a pair of jeans. If you’re really intolerant of uncertainty, maybe you try on every single pair of jeans in the store before making up your mind. But there’s also another response, which is, people can become very impulsive, which is its own sort of avoidant behavior. You just buy the pair of jeans in the window because you don’t have to wrestle with the uncertainty of whether it’s the right one. And I think a more adaptive point of view is some sort of middle path where maybe you try on three pairs of jeans and figure out which one you want to wear.

And so I think that’s the problem with the sort of hyper-doomerism or bracing for the worst and only anchoring yourself in the worst case scenarios, is it doesn’t allow you to see the sort of other side of the uncertainty coin, which is what might emerge if you’re willing to put yourself out there, if you’re willing to see a more optimistic future.

Zachary Karabell: It’s funny, I was thinking, and kind of back to the COVID part, because there was also a part which we all did, and I certainly did obsessively, which is, because we had all this information at our fingertips, we had the corpus of human existence. We had all this real-time data. And those of us who were so inclined spent a lot of time trying to get as much data as we could about COVID. Who was it harming? What ages would it likely harm? What demographics? What preexisting conditions? What countries’ policies seem to be working or not working? And doing all this in kind of real time. And I think that probably falls into your category of control, right? That we somehow felt that if we could just assemble enough real-time information, then maybe the real world consequences of this could be ameliorated or avoided or changed. Certainly, during the Bubonic Plague or during The Great Flu of 1919 to ‘21, that just wasn’t an option, right? We didn’t have that transparency, didn’t have that information, so you couldn’t really exert that control. And I wonder, looking back, was that control — did that do us any particular good, or did it both psychologically make it worse and made no difference whatsoever about the outcomes?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, I think about this a lot in the context of parenting. I recently became a father for the first time. There’s such a tendency to gather information as a way to exert control onto a situation that you might have less control than you think. There isn’t always a one-to-one input to output when it comes to babies and raising kids of you’ve put in so much effort, and you don’t necessarily get the same rewards.

And I know just recently, thinking about something like sleep training, I felt this tendency into myself where I just wanted to read every single book about sleep training, and read every article and consult three different experts, rather than actually kind of getting into the arena and trying things out.

And I think that the problem with that tendency to gather endless information, is when you spend all of your time reading the reviews for all the plastic water bottles that you might be able to buy on Amazon is, it’s costly. It’s costly in terms of how much time you spend doing it, it’s costly in terms of mental health, and it’s ultimately costly because the opportunity cost of whatever you choose becomes that much more apparent. It’s really easy to sort of play your own devil’s advocate. And so I think a lot about this distinction that is often attributed to Jeff Bezos about the difference between one-way door versus two-way door decisions. One-way door decisions being the harder decisions to reverse, and two-way door being the decisions that you can make, and then if you realize that you’ve made a mistake, you can course correct or sort of walk back through the door.

I think today so many of us try to make two-way door decisions using a one-way door decision analytical framework. And we sort of over-engineer our own decision-making.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, parenting is absolutely the most pure and often the most fearful iteration of that, right? Like, I’m going to make the wrong decision, and that wrong decision is going to be irreversible, right? So parenting unfolds culturally as an endless series of one-way door decisions, when in fact, as I’m almost certain you will learn as a parent, it’s an endless series of, two, three-way, one day you’re stuck in a room with no exit, the next day there’s only doors. It’s continually confusing, but it’s rarely, this one decision is going to determine everything that follows. But it’s presented as if, right?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah. I think there’s a great analog in career choices. I think so many people sort of white-knuckle-grip decisions about what job to take, myself included, because we believe that the future will be completely determined by this one decision you make, fully discounting our ability to course correct or the things you might learn even if you go down the wrong path.

And I think that is sort of where certainty rears its ugly head, is if you think you can be certain about these decisions about the future, it puts an incredible amount of pressure on you to get things right, as opposed to the empowerment that comes from the knowledge that you can make the decision right, as opposed to needing to make the right decision.

Zachary Karabell: That’s a good way of putting it. I think about this a lot in terms of, I mean, you’ve thought about this in writing books and picking a book topic, and sometimes you’ll tell people you’re writing a book, and it will feel like this decision of great gravitas, and it is. It’s a commitment of time and energy and life. For myself, I always said to people, and I always said to myself, “Hey, it’s just a book.” It’s not your life. It’s not going to determine — I mean, it may determine in constructive ways the arc of your life. It’s much less likely, actually, to determine in destructive ways the arc of your life. So it’s a lot of upside. It’s not a lot of downside. But it’s just a book.

And one last thing I want to touch on, which is very apropos all of this, which is particularly in a world of AI and personalized medicine, is this sort of move toward, particularly right now amongst elites in Silicon Valley, this longevity movement. Because one of the only things that we do know for certain, at least observably, is that we’re all going to die. We don’t know when we’re going to die. There’s a new app called Death Clock, where you’re supposed to type in 29 variables, and it tells you... I found this incredibly creepy, by the way, it tells you when you’re going to die, and then it gives you a program to extend that. Talk about trying to give people a certainty to the day. And you have this whole movement and people spending millions, if not more than that, on how long can we live? How much longer can we live relative to what we might have been living, which actuarily we know collectively, but none of us know individually. Is that in the kind of hubris and control matrix that you’re talking about? Have you thought about this given that you live in the heart of all this?

Simone Stolzoff: I think about it in terms of control all the time. Death is the one certainty that we all share, and yet we don’t know how or when it’s going to happen, which is one of the greatest sources of anxiety in people’s lives. And there’s a huge cost in this sort of death-denying culture that we live in. And it doesn’t even have to be the Bryan Johnson extreme, sort of don’t die movement.

But without reckoning with our mortality, we lose out on the clarity of how we want to live. Not to say that taking two dozen supplements every morning, and then doing red light therapy, and then going in your cold plunge, and then going to your longevity doctor is a waste of time in and of itself. The sort of philosophical underpinning of this whole movement is often denial of the very fact that makes our lives meaningful, which is to say, that because we know our time here is finite, it can be an incredibly clarifying force of how we want to spend it. But if we are under the false impression that we can live forever and we’re going to spend all of our energy trying to extend that potential end date as much as possible, we lose out on the benefits of the stakes of knowing that we won’t be here forever.

And so I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to increase your health span, or try and think about how you can use some of these tools to make you more comfortable or to keep your body functioning at a high level for a longer period of time. But I just think that this whole movement of trying to live forever is most costly to the people who are most invested in it, which is the people who are denying the most basic fact of our existence, which is the fact that we’re going to die. Not to mention all of the practical costs of living in a culture where we think we’re going to live forever, and so we don’t prepare for death, and we often leave our loved ones to clean up the mess after we’ve gone, and the enormous red tape that you must go through if you haven’t thought critically about the fact that you’re not going to be here forever for your loved ones and your extended family.

I just think this longevity movement is completely misguided, and people spend so much time on maybe trying to increase the one percent difference here and there, whereas the baseline things about what makes us healthy, like having a social life and eating well and exercising, are not too complex, and they don’t need entire industries to be engineered around.

Zachary Karabell: So what about this world of like hard-charging — and this segues a bit with the book you did, The Good Enough Job — hard-charging people, hard-charging companies, hard-charging states and politicians, societies over time that have been fueled, and change has been fueled, and innovation’s been fueled, and discovery’s been fueled, by a set of people willfully, hubristically, controllingly believing that they’ve got the idea. They’ve got the key, the secret to tectonic change that’s going to make them rich, that’s going to make all of us wealthy, healthy, strong, successful. And that if you adopt a more balanced philosophical, almost Zen-like humility, letting go, relinquishing control over the unknown, that may create a degree of inner peace, but it will freeze or halt or enervate or undermine all of those powerful forces that I just talked about that seem to fuel so much of what human beings do.

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, it’s a beautiful question, and maybe part of Elon Musk’s hubris is what allows him to send rockets into space. I think it’s, again, a case of not being fully on one extreme or the other. One other example of someone who is completely connected to a vision of the future is any cult leader ever. It’s this peddling of an idea that if you just follow this particular protocol, I can guarantee you to get to heaven, or to have financial success, or whatever dream you might want to accomplish. And the allure is that it’s attractive to outsource your worldview, to buy one off the rack, to just follow someone else’s plan for how the future might go.

The problem is it’s easy until it isn’t, until your fixed idea of the future comes crashing down into the messiness of reality. And so I do think we need some of these visionary leaders to take bold bets on the future or just declare we’re going to go to the moon before we’ve actually done so before.

But it has to be balanced out with an openness to be able to change your mind based on changing information. And I think that’s what’s special about this moment. It’s just the pace of rapid change, and if you declare as the CEO of Blockbuster Video, that people are going to continue to rent VHS’s forevermore, that is the type of hubristic thinking that can keep you from seeing the market or the world or the conditions change around you.

So I think we need a bit of both. I don’t mean to poo-poo people who want to change the world, but hopefully it’s with a level of humility that allows them to see the reality as it emerges.

Zachary Karabell: I’ve got to admit that I occasionally miss Blockbuster Video. I miss being able to go into a store, trying to figure out what you’re going to watch, the uncertainty, the unknown of, is the movie you want going to be there? Is it not going to be there? Are you going to have to find a movie you didn’t think you were going to watch? Is it going to be terrible? Are you not going to watch a movie at all? All that was kind of fun.

Simone Stolzoff: Totally. That’s the magic. That’s the serendipity. That’s the surprise. And now it’s the opposite, where you watch the trailer, and you read all the Rotten Tomato reviews before you even step into the theater, and it creates a little bit less of that potential magic or delight.

Zachary Karabell: And there’s infinite choice and no scarcity, which is a whole other question about what do we do about all that.

I want to thank you for your insights and your time. What’s next? I know this is what’s next. But when you think about your next few years, you’re a new parent, you’ve written a couple of books that have caught fire, have you found your groove? What do you think?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, I think it would be antithetical to my thesis to say I know exactly what’s to come. But I do love the process of writing books. I feel very grateful. And even living in one of the most expensive cities in the world as a writer, I do get that sort of doubt, or the creeping in of, should I be optimizing for financial stability? Should I go join OpenAI and become a marketing guy to find some of the comfort in knowing exactly where my next paycheck is going to come? But the thing I always come back to is, part of the fun of being an author or being self-employed is the figuring it out, and I am not quite willing to leave this pathless path quite so soon. I don’t know exactly what the topic of my next book will be, but I hope it’s something that follows my curiosity and I stay open to seeing where my curiosity takes me next.

Zachary Karabell: Pathless path, good phrase. Nicely done. Thank you, Simone.

Simone Stolzoff: Thanks for having me, Zach.

Zachary Karabell: Well, as expected, my false sense of certainty at the beginning of the conversation that I was going to like that conversation in this case proved to be true, but don’t let that be a guide for future certainty.

I want to thank, as always, Kaleidoscope for producing these episodes, and I want to thank my team at The Progress Network for supporting all of it, and I want to thank all of you for listening and for your time.

Please send me your comments and your ideas. Go onto theprogressnetwork.org website or to my Edgy Optimist Substack and send me a note via that way. Comments, criticisms, suggestions, all are welcome, and your time is valued. And we’ll be back with you next week. Thanks.

What Could Go Right? is produced by The Progress Network and Kaleidoscope.

Watch the podcast on YouTube.

Follow us on X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok: @progressntwrk

Plus: The United Kingdom passes a genuinely radical generational ban on smoking; the US Senate unanimously bans members and staffers from betting on prediction markets, after some were caught betting on their own races; and Meta inks a deal to beam solar power down from space.

Watch the full episode below:

All episodes of the What Could Go Right? podcast are available here.

Transcript

Emma Varvaloucas: The deaf will hear and the blind see. That’s not a Bible quote, that’s our first story, and it’s one of the most extraordinary things happening in medicine right now. We’ve also got: Big Tobacco loses big in the United Kingdom. The US Senate actually agreed on something. And Meta’s plan to beam solar power down from space. Are we about to have Pluto-powered light bulbs? Maybe.

Welcome to the What Could Go Right? Progress Report, where we dive into all of the good news that almost all of us miss because it was buried under the tsunami of bad news. Let’s get into it.

On April 18th, there was an event in Los Angeles that you might not have heard about. It was the 12th annual Breakthrough Prize Awards, also known as the Oscars of Science, because the scientists also want to have their little red carpet moment, okay? And I think they deserve it. And to make things interesting, the winners don’t get little golden statues. Oh, no, six teams walk away with $3 million each.

One of the prestigious awards in life sciences went to Katherine High, Jean Bennett, and Albert Maguire. That’s the scientist team behind Luxturna, which is the first gene therapy to restore vision in blind people. There are more than 100 people in the United States blind as of a few years ago who can now see.

And I don’t mean that in a cutesy like, “Oh, they got a stronger glasses prescription,” kind of way. These are people who are born with a rare condition, Leber congenital amaurosis, or LCA, that causes total blindness by early adulthood, and now they can see. How does it work? Let me break it down.

The therapy replaces a single defective gene, one that normally helps the retina respond to light. It’s a one and done treatment, and so far it lasts. What’s even cooler is that nearly all eligible LCA patients in the US have now received the treatment. These kids can now attend regular schools, play outside safely at night, and in some cases even qualify for a driver’s license. One even became a horse trainer. That’s amazing and truly life-changing for these families.

Bennett and Maguire, by the way, are husband and wife. The couple that restores sight together stays together. Am I right? When they started this work to reverse inherited blindness back in the 1980s, they said it was like thinking that you wanted to go to the moon in 1950.

They spent years testing on mice and dogs, which they later adopted, by the way. The dogs, not the mice. I don’t know what happened to the mice, though. Are we worried about the mice? And then they were ready for human trials after the dog adoption at the turn of the millennium, which is where the third winner, Katherine High, came into the picture.

The three had to push forward very, very carefully with human trials because in 1999, a teenager named Jesse Gelsinger became the first person to die while enrolled in a gene therapy trial. All ongoing research was investigated, funding dried up, the whole field nearly collapsed. But a quarter century later, the gears have started turning again.

Bennett and McGuire’s work in particular has paved the way for more than 100 retinal gene therapy trials alone, and the FDA has now approved five gene therapies in total, including just last month, the very first one for genetic deafness, a drug called Otarmeni. Otarmeni targets a specific faulty gene that causes a form of hearing loss in about 50 newborns a year in the US. Small numbers, but for those families it is everything.

And more science good news! One of those other gene therapy FDA approvals is Casgevy, the first and only one to use the gene editing tool CRISPR. It’s a treatment primarily for the blood disease sickle cell, which affects millions of people worldwide.

Now, there is one enormous caveat here, and I’d be doing you a disservice not to name it: the price. Luxturna costs over $800,000 to treat both eyes, and that’s the cheapest of the five FDA-approved gene therapies, except one special case, which we’ll get into. Casgevy, the sickle cell disease treatment, costs over $2 million and has only been introduced in a handful of the world’s richest countries. In the US, it is covered by Medicaid in about 30 states, though.

Now, Otarmeni’s makers did something unusual. They’re giving it away for free, although they don’t control what doctors charge to administer it. The science here is genuinely miraculous, helping the deaf to hear and the blind to see. These are feats in my mind of biblical proportions, and there are more on the way, but making them accessible, that’s the next breakthrough that the world is waiting for.

Before we get into our shorter stories, here are some numbers that will make you smile. Over 2 million, that’s the number of electric vehicles now on the roads of the United Kingdom. 42%, the drop in teen pregnancy rates worldwide since 2000. Apparently, we’re all watching 16 and Pregnant, and it did the job it was supposed to do.

About 7 in 10: Americans who trust vaccine scientists, similar to trust in scientists generally. Listen, that was a lot better than what I was expecting. 21 new adult cheetahs spotted in Iran, plus six cubs this year. And 475: days AI can spot pancreatic cancer before it appears on scans. And onwards and upwards to our quick hits.

First up, the United Kingdom passed a landmark piece of legislation. It’s a generational ban on smoking. This one is genuinely novel. They’re not just raising the smoking age. The law permanently bans anyone born on or after January 1st, 2009 from ever legally buying tobacco products. And imagine if you were born on December 31st, 2008. You must be so happy right now.

The idea is that slowly, slowly, one day, no one in the UK will be able to legally buy cigarettes or vapes. The UK is trying to create a smoke-free generation, which sounds almost too ambitious, but the early evidence suggests it might actually work. And maybe not surprisingly, this law is pretty popular and drew support from conservative, labor, and liberal Democrat voters. I think probably everyone shares the same feelings of dread and anxiety watching their kids sleep with their candy-flavored vapes instead of a stuffed animal.

Next up is another legal win, except this time it’s a ban coming from the US Senate. The Senate unanimously passed a resolution to ban members and their staffers from betting on prediction markets.

This came after—and I want you to really sit with this—a flurry of bets placed right before the start of the Iran conflict, and after some politicians were caught betting on their own races. One of them was apparently doing it to make a point, but the others, not so much.

Now, before you go feeling sorry for all those poor politicians, don’t worry. As we can tell from this administration, there are still plenty of ways to be in political office and line your pockets.

The resolution passed unanimously, which in the current Senate feels like a small miracle of its own. We finally found something that everybody agrees on. Stock market next? Anyone? Guys?

And finally, a story that feels a little out of this world. Stay with me. Meta has inked a deal with a satellite startup to transmit light from space directly into solar farms on the ground. Why, you might ask yourself? Well, solar collectors can work around the clock if you put them into space, because there’s no night up there.

And this startup thinks it can get around the regulatory risks by using near-infrared light rather than a high-powered laser or a microwave beam, which is what people have tried in the past. Meta is just trying to power their energy-sucking data centers, but I do love the thought of our light bulbs, microwaves, and TVs one day being powered directly from space. Maybe this is the way we finally start communicating with those aliens.

And that’s all for this week’s Progress Report. I hope these stories remind you that there is so much good going on in the world, so it’s important not to be blinded by all of the bad, although maybe scientists can reverse that too.

So if you got some value from this show, maybe something you could bring up at your next Met Gala fashion critique, please send the show to a friend who could really use some positive news. And make sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on your preferred podcast platform and leave us a review.

And if you’d like more of these stories delivered right to your inbox, sign up for our newsletter. The link is in the description. Do you have a good news story you’d like to see covered next week? Let us know in the comments. Thanks for watching, and see you next week on The Progress Report.

What Could Go Right? is produced by The Progress Network and Kaleidoscope.

Watch the podcast on YouTube.

Follow us on X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok: @progressntwrk

There are more than 100 people in the United States, blind as of a few years ago, who can now see. I don’t mean that in a cutesy “they got a stronger glasses prescription” kind of way. These people were born with a rare condition, Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), that causes total blindness by early adulthood.

In 2017, a medicine called Luxturna, which restores the vision of LCA patients, became the first gene therapy approved by the FDA for an inherited condition. It works by replacing a defective gene that normally produces a protein that the retina needs to respond to light. Just shy of a decade later, as the husband-and-wife scientist team behind Luxturna accepted a life sciences breakthrough prize at the “Oscars of Science” last month, nearly all eligible LCA patients in the US have received the treatment. Luxturna isn’t a cure, but as the prize page reports, these children can now “attend regular schools, play outside at night, and in some cases even qualify for driver’s licenses.” The treatment is one-and-done, and, so far, it lasts.

Luxturna isn’t the only gene therapy in the news lately. In April, the FDA also approved the first gene therapy for genetic deafness: Otarmeni, which, like Luxturna, targets a faulty gene. Both treatments affect small numbers of people—Otarmeni treats a form of hearing loss that afflicts about 50 newborns annually in the US—but they are small miracles in that they are an option at all, as gene therapy research had slogged uphill for decades.

For instance, when breakthrough prize winners Jean Bennett and Albert Maguire, respectively a molecular biologist and an ophthalmic surgeon, began trying to reverse inherited blindness in the 1980s, it was a monumental challenge—“like thinking you wanted to go to the moon in 1950,” said Maguire. After years of testing on mice and dogs—which the couple later adopted!—they were finally ready to undertake human trials at the beginning of the millennium.1 But that was a precarious time in the field; after teenager Jesse Gelsinger became the first person to die while enrolled in gene therapy research in 1999, all ongoing trials were subject to investigation and funding dried up.

A quarter-century later, research gears are whirring again. Bennett and Maguire’s work paved the way for more than 100 retinal gene therapy trials alone; hundreds in other areas start up every year. In addition to Luxturna and Otarmeni, the FDA has approved three other gene therapies—including Casgevy, the first (and only) to use the editing tool CRISPR, a treatment primarily for the blood disease sickle cell.2 It affects millions worldwide, but Casgevy has been introduced in only a handful of the world’s richest countries.3

Helping the deaf to hear and the blind, see are feats of biblical-level proportions, and more are on their way. But they come with one enormous caveat: the price tag. Luxturna costs over $800,000 for treating both eyes, and that’s the cheapest of the FDA-approved five, barring Otarmeni. Because of the small patient pool, Otarmeni’s makers opted to do something unusual: give it away for free, although they don’t have control over what doctors charge to administer it.

So while these scientists more than deserve the awards they’ve been given, making these treatments accessible is the next badly needed breakthrough.

—Emma Varvaloucas

Share

What Could Go Right? S8 E4: Why $6 Gas Isn’t the End of the World | with Jason Bordoff

What happens when the global energy supply faces its greatest disruption since the 1970s? Jason Bordoff, a leading energy expert and former advisor in the Obama White House, joins host Zachary Karabell to navigate a world where the Strait of Hormuz is closed and gasoline prices are soaring. | Listen now

By the Numbers

>2M: EVs in the United Kingdom

42%: Drop in teen pregnancy rates worldwide since 2000

~7 in 10: Americans who trust vaccine scientists, similar to trust in scientists generally

21: New adult cheetahs spotted in Iran, plus six cubs, this year

475: Days that AI can spot pancreatic cancer before it appears on scans

Quick Hits

⚖️ Virginia has passed a paid family leave law, bringing the count to 15 states. It’s the first in the South, raising hopes of a nationwide shift.

🧬 It looks like CAR T-cell therapy works for autoimmune conditions, too: Clinical trials for the approach originally developed for cancer are underway around the world; the first treatments could be approved as early as next year.

🎭 AI actors and writing won’t be eligible for an Oscar, says the academy, presumably introducing an incentive for filmmakers not to use it.

📉 Burkina Faso is reporting an unprecedented decline in malaria rates, with deaths dropping by 44%, largely due to new vaccines. Meanwhile, the first malaria drug for babies, a major public health milestone, has been approved by the WHO.

⚕️ Ozempic generics have arrived in Canada, the second country after India to introduce them. Meanwhile, the first controlled study of the drug’s effect on heavy drinkers found that it helped reduce their alcohol consumption.

🏭 France has announced a comprehensive roadmap to phasing out all fossil fuels by 2050, fresh off the first international talks on the topic that brought together nearly 60 countries.

🔋 Australia’s grids are changing as battery capacity booms, reducing the need for gas and lowering electricity prices across most regions.

🛰️ Could we generate solar power directly from space? Meta thinks so. It just inked a deal with a satellite startup that plans to transmit near-infrared light to on-Earth solar farms, sidestepping riskier ideas such as high-powered lasers and microwave beams.

🚫 The US Senate unanimously passed a resolution to ban members and staffers from trading on prediction markets after a flurry of bets before the start of the Iran War and wagers on pols’ own races. Stock markets next, anyone?

🔬 Two pilot studies are showing promise in advancing women’s health: a noninvasive scan to detect endometriosis years earlier and a treatment for pre-eclampsia that slows its progression—and that is not an emergency C-section.

🚭 Two encouraging pieces of legislation from the United Kingdom: a generational ban on smoking and the pardoning of women previously convicted of an illegal abortion.

🩸 First responders in the Mountain West are now carrying whole blood, which can help stop bleeding and jumpstart recovery. It’s not a new idea, but its comeback has a bittersweet provenance: Veterans suggested it after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

🙅 Maryland is the first state to ban grocery stores and third-party delivery services from using dynamic pricing, a practice that uses customers’ personal data to set prices. And Minnesota is the first to ban “nudification” apps, which use AI to “undress” people in images.

👀 What we’re watching: The Trump administration is trying to help low-income Americans fund their retirement.

💡 Editor’s pick: To compete with Chinese EV manufacturers, Ford had to blow up something it once pioneered: the assembly line.

Subscribe now

TPN Member Originals

(Who are our Members? Get to know them.)

• ‘Be not simply good. Be good for something.’ | Breaking the News | James Fallows

• Trump is finally fading | Yascha Mounk | Yascha Mounk

• The everything, everywhere, all at once corruption story | Tangle | Isaac Saul

• The unruly states of America | Diane Francis | Diane Francis

• The world hedges its bets on America | GZERO | Ian Bremmer

• The great Black GOP exit from Congress | WaPo ($) | Theodore R. Johnson

• Durable hope | The Preamble | Sharon McMahon

• The one tax the rich can’t escape | The Atlantic ($) | Richard Florida

• Not so dire straits | The Edgy Optimist | Zachary Karabell

• What Gen Z’s nostalgia is really telling us | Flourishing Friday | Clay Routledge

• USAID spending at the country and sector level: What happened in FY 2025? | CGD | Charles Kenny

The conversation moves past the immediate panic at the pump to look at the future of how we power our lives. Bordoff shares personal stories of his father’s Brooklyn gas station in the 1970s, contrasting that era with today’s physical reality of the shale revolution. The discussion focuses heavily on the innovation frontier. Bordoff and Karabell explore whether new technologies like advanced geothermal, modular nuclear power, and even fusion can finally deliver on the promise of universal energy abundance.

While acknowledging the hard truths of climate change and the energy needs of emerging markets, Bordoff explains why he is betting on policy and technology over pessimism.

Watch the full conversation below:

All episodes of the What Could Go Right? podcast are available here.

Transcript

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? Where we look at, yeah, what could go right? Because we’re living in a world where everybody’s looking at what could go wrong. And right now, prices at the pump are soaring. Gasoline is above $5 a gallon in most parts of the country, $6 if you’re in California. It can feel like both the economy and inflation are spinning out of control because of this.

The question is: What does this mean about energy? And today I’m going to talk to Jason Bordoff, who is probably currently the world’s leading expert on all of this. He has a remarkable background. He was in the Obama White House for four years on the National Security Council dealing with these issues. And one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation with Jason is he’s been around the conversations about what is government supposed to do in the face of these problems, and he has a degree of acumen and awareness about what’s going to happen with renewables, what’s going to happen with innovation, what’s going to happen outside the Western world, where you still have billions of people who are moving into the middle class and all that that entails.

But he’s also thought really deeply about, how do we think through these? There are solutions, or there are alternatives, that may change the arc of what we think. Jason is absolutely the perfect person to talk to.

Jason, it’s such a pleasure to talk to you today. The Strait of Hormuz is closed at this recording. It’s been closed for almost two months, and yes, it’s the greatest supply disruption since the 1970s. So I’m going to ask, if things are so bad, why aren’t they worse?

Jason Bordoff: They’re pretty bad in the rest of the world, but I appreciate the question coming from an optimist with an optimistic take on things. The energy market was pretty well supplied before this all happened. We were projected to have oil production this year that exceeded demand by something like two, three, four million barrels a day. We were in a looser place for a disruption to occur, and the United States is in a totally different position today than was true when I served in the Obama White House, you know, 13, 14 years ago.

I remember when Prime Minister Netanyahu came to the White House, as he apparently, according to reporting, just did a few months ago, to try to push the Obama administration to take much tougher action against Iran. Back then, the question was not military action, but economic sanctions. And the challenge, among others, that I was involved in helping with was, how do you take two and a half million barrels a day of Iranian oil exports off the market and not crater the U.S. economy in the process?

We’re now taking 14 or 15 million barrels a day off the global market. To be clear, to your question, that is causing real, severe economic pain, particularly in Asia, Southeast Asia, middle-income, lower-income countries, where they’re closing schools, reducing work weeks, rationing fuels, closing restaurants.

The United States is more insulated from that because of the physical reality of the Shale Revolution, where it now takes, evidently, two, three, four months for the pain in the rest of the world to make its way over here. It will. It will make its way over here. But we’ve seen this dynamic where the, quote, paper price of oil, the traded price everyone sees every day, is quite disconnected from the physical price of getting a barrel of oil tomorrow if you need it.

But that’s showing up first in other parts of the world and then making its way over here. We also use a lot less oil as a share of the global economy than we did several decades ago, and we should remember that using less energy in the first place is kind of Job One if you’re trying to make a more resilient economy, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that moving forward.

And the other thing to say, to our point about who’s feeling more pain and less, at some point the physical reality of losing 14 or 15 million barrels a day has to catch up. Prices have to rise high enough to destroy that much demand. In the 1970s, again, in past energy crises, the biggest consumers were large OECD countries. Today, the demand destruction is going to happen in lower-income countries before it happens here.

Zachary Karabell: We’re going to ask kind of a weird hypothetical here. So you were in the Obama White House, 2010, 2011. There was a brief crisis around Syria. There was Deepwater Horizon. You were in the room where these discussions happened.

If you were in a normal White House now, what — and I feel the need to caveat it with that, it’s a different process in the Trump White House, in the second season of the Trump show — what kind of conversations would you be having right now? If somebody were to say to you, “Hey, what’s the big deal? The world seems fine. I get that there are all these problems,” what would you be saying right now? Would you be saying anything internally different than what you currently say as a pundit in these things, as an analyst?

Jason Bordoff: I think, obviously, there’d be a bunch of conversations that I might be exposed to but would not be directly involved in with regard to military strategy and all the rest. But particularly from an energy dimension, first you would have — I don’t know if Trump did this, it doesn’t seem like it happened — you would have wanted to have conversations about energy impacts before striking Iran, anticipating that they would try to close the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation.

You can do things like quietly try to position tankers, which can be used as floating storage, outside the strait. You know how we had all those tankers stuck inside the strait? You’d kind of want to make sure, without signaling what was coming, to try to make sure as many as possible were on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz, as many as possible were filled with oil, you would try to have built inventories and resilience in advance of this by working with allies, not going it alone and striking it without consulting with allies, and maybe not even consulting with your own energy team. Again, I’m not exactly sure what happened. So those would be the conversations you’d have before.

The conversations afterward, a lot of those are taking place. It’s releasing strategic stocks, et cetera, but it should really be working more closely with allies. The thing about oil shocks throughout history, it’s not just this administration, is that politically, politicians have to do something, right? The problem is the options to deal with an oil supply shock range from ineffective to harmful. There’s not that many things that are super helpful and make sense to do.

You can release strategic stockpiles. Some of them are symbolic, like waiving environmental standards for summer gasoline blends and things like that. And then you put options on the table like whether we should restrict exports, or things that start to have significant downside effects, if they have some upside effects also.

Zachary Karabell: I thought we were doing a little bit of the reverse. Aren’t we now exporting more? I mean, some of these tankers are now showing up and —

Jason Bordoff: Well, basically market forces are determining that, so it’s not a government decision. But when you have shortages elsewhere in the world, there’s something like 100 tankers that are on their way to the Gulf Coast of the United States from Asia getting ready to fill up. And that’s why I said those physical shortages in Asia, we’re going to start to feel them more and more, because we’re part of an interconnected global market.

So that’s why it’s led some people to call for restricting oil exports, which is possible in the case of a national security emergency. The president can declare that. That might, in the near term, lower gasoline prices, but then you would cause U.S. producers to stop producing because the price would be low. You’d cause refiners to stop refining because they wouldn’t capture the same margins. It would be really disruptive beyond the immediate effect.

Zachary Karabell: You’ve talked a lot over the years about this sort of will-o’-the-wisp of not just energy independence as a concept, but also alternatives and a post-carbon, post-oil future. One of the things that you hear, of course, during an oil shock is a lot of people saying, “Oh, this is why we should move toward renewables. This is why we should lessen global dependence on fossil fuels because of these issues.” What do you say to those claims of, this is the proof statement for less oil?

Jason Bordoff: I think there’s a lot of truth to that, but it looks very different depending on where you are. Are you a large importer, or are you a large exporter? I mean, the Trump administration has a view, which I don’t think is entirely correct, but if you’re a huge petrostate and you’re the largest oil and gas producer in the world, what are we buying all this clean energy technology from China for, and becoming dependent on China for solar panels and batteries? We can produce all the oil and gas we need. I think there are reasons that is wrong, climate change being one of them, but not the only one.

By the way, this is the strategy China has pursued, right? China has a much greater share, something like a third relative to 20% globally, of its energy system that is electrified. Half of its new cars sold are electric cars. More so for energy security reasons than for environmental and climate change reasons, although there’s some of both, because they are deeply concerned about energy insecurity and being import-dependent for oil and gas, which they are. So their strategy has been to electrify as much of the economy as possible and then get that electricity from domestic sources. For them, that mostly means renewables and coal. So we should be clear, it doesn’t all move in a clean direction. Coal can be cheap and domestic and provide energy security if you’re in Indonesia or certain Southeast Asian countries like that.

If you’re in Europe right now, you had the shock of 2022 where you lost Russian gas. Now you’re like, maybe Qatari LNG is not as secure as it was. We’re a little bit worried about even the United States, because Trump is threatening Greenland, and are they going to be a reliable partner? And you’re feeling an oil shock. It would make a lot of sense for Europe to move quickly on energy efficiency and then to electrify the economy where it’s possible, like passenger cars and heating in the home.

It takes time. It takes capital. It doesn’t happen overnight, so it doesn’t help in this shock, but it helps prepare you for the next one. And then for Europe, that would mean more renewables, probably rethinking nuclear power and trying to get that electricity from domestic sources.

But if Europe goes in that direction, what do you need to do to electrify your economy in a continent like Europe? You need a lot of solar panels, a lot of batteries, a lot of critical minerals, a lot of electric vehicles. And so what’s interesting is to think in relative terms about energy security risk. People were deeply concerned in places like the U.S. and Europe about the fact that China dominates everything I just mentioned.

Zachary Karabell: Right.

Jason Bordoff: And the question is, how do we think about energy security risk of supply chains with products that produce electricity, not the daily flow of electricity from a place like China, and how does that compare to importing oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz?

Zachary Karabell: So how did you get into all this? Were you, like, in eighth grade, and you said, “Oh my God, the thing I wanna do with my life is be the world’s foremost expert on all things energy?” I mean, there’s a pathway here, I just don’t exactly know what it is.

Jason Bordoff: Yeah, I don’t know if we’ve talked about that before. Maybe it was in the blood to some extent. My grandfather owned a gas station in Brooklyn, New York. My dad owned a gas station in Brooklyn, New York.

Zachary Karabell: Did you pump as a kid?

Jason Bordoff: I mean, they would let me do that sometimes. But I have memories of going after school to the station and the repair shop that my dad owned, and heard his stories about people showing up with weapons in the 1970s to make sure that they could refill. I didn’t see that directly, but heard a little of those growing up.

I think most directly it probably came from my mom, more than anything else, to the extent there was a family dynamic. She was an immigrant and refugee to the U.S. from the Middle East. And I was deeply interested in that part of my background and her story.

Zachary Karabell: From where?

Jason Bordoff: From Egypt. So my master’s degree is in Middle East studies, and I think you can’t study the history of the Middle East without understanding the role energy plays, that’s why The Prize by Dan Yergin is so fascinating. And for me, if you’re sort of like, can’t decide what you’re interested in, you’re interested in everything from foreign policy to national security to economics to the environment, energy is all of those things in a way that almost nothing else is.

Zachary Karabell: It’s funny, I did the Middle East studies master’s degree as well, but I got really interested in religion and politics, and not at all interested in energy, weirdly enough. It never even occurred to me as a thing. So clearly, there’s a bit of an eye-of-the-beholder thing there.

How did you end up in the Obama White House? What was the pathway there?

Jason Bordoff: I always knew public policy was super interesting and had a passion for it. And honestly, that does come, I think, from sort of seeing, with my own family story and my mom coming to this country and my grandparents having to rebuild their lives after their savings being taken from them, the importance that charity played, but also public policy played, and public education, and how they came to this country, immigration policy, how they rebuilt their lives.

So I could just sort of feel viscerally growing up that good public policy made people’s lives better, and sort of always had an interest in serving in government as a result.

Zachary Karabell: And what surprised you going into government? Everybody has these visions of public service, which are important and, in many ways, legitimately noble. But then there’s also the reality of how government works. Capitol Hill is, I think, a much more messy experience than working in a White House, although today, who knows? What was a moment of, the reality of this is different from my image of this?

Jason Bordoff: I loved the four years I spent in the White House, and I’ve been lucky, as you know, to work with some pretty smart people at places like Brookings or McKinsey or Columbia University. But I’ve just never worked with such an exceptional group of people who cared as much about what they were doing and had the ability to work on something interesting every single day.

I think I was not naive, but there is definitely a lot of, maybe like in any company, internal political maneuvering, and who gets to be in the room for which meeting, to try to position oneself as the leader of an effort.

Zachary Karabell: You were shocked there was gambling in Casablanca?

Jason Bordoff: I’m not saying I was shocked, but I hadn’t sort of seen it up front. But mostly, that was the exception. I think mostly people were really trying to do good work on behalf of the American people, cared about what they were doing, cared deeply about problems like climate change.

The hard thing is how it gets worse and worse every year, it seems, but how difficult it is to get things done, right? I mean, we have a pretty dysfunctional political system in Washington. That’s more true today, but it was true then. But when you can get something done, like Obamacare, or the Inflation Reduction Act, or pick your example, the impact you can have on people’s lives is unmatched by almost anything.

Zachary Karabell: So devil’s advocate question to that. You have a period of time in the Obama White House. It’s an administration that is focused both technocratically and in vision about moving toward a more diversified energy future. You have a whole Department of Energy. You have a loan program that people like Jigar Shah led that was supposed to invest in a kind of post-carbon future. And as you said, you had a lot of really smart people dealing with this. Why was there such a backlash against so many of those policies?

Jason Bordoff: It’s a good question. I’m sort of reflecting on it in real time. We’ve obviously seen the political pendulum swing more sharply in both directions. I was working in government when you had Senator McCain and Senator Graham leading efforts to put climate change policy in place, like a cap-and-trade program. And you had an Obama administration that I think cared deeply about climate change and put the Paris Agreement in place, and recognized that it was probably a good thing on balance for the United States, rather than a bad thing, if we were a huge producer of the reality of today’s energy system. We might want it to be different in the future, but for a while it’s still going to be very heavily dependent on oil and gas. And if we’re producing that domestically, and maybe even exporting to allies, that’s better than if we’re importing huge amounts. And somehow you could hold both thoughts in your head at the same time. Two things could both be true at the same time. There’s a reality to the system today, and there’s a multi-decade process you wanna bring about to change it.

And I feel like both sides have gotten more in their camps and extreme. The environmental movement on one side, to sort of block every single oil and gas project, no matter where it is. I’m caricaturing a little bit. And on the other side, the Republican Party and parts of the oil and gas industry — and I don’t wanna paint with a broad brush, there are exceptions — have kind of moved away from the idea that climate change is a serious threat and we all need to acknowledge it and think about a long-term transition to address it.

Zachary Karabell: I wonder if part of it is — because if you look at the stats, oil production kept reaching new highs, domestic American oil production under Obama and Biden —

Jason Bordoff: You can’t tell which political party was in office if you look at oil production.

Zachary Karabell: But it’s almost as if, between the second term of the Obama administration and the one term of the Biden administration, domestic politics meant that Democrats were never going to trumpet that, right? They were never going to get on the campaign trail and say, “Look how much under my administration —”

Jason Bordoff: And from a political — I mean, it’s not my strong suit, I tend to focus on policy more than politics. But you might say, well, there was no upside, right? It wasn’t like you were going to win any votes in Midland, Texas, if I’m a Democrat and I wanted to say something nice about oil and gas. And maybe the reverse was true with where the Democratic Party and activists and the environmental movement were. So there may be a political explanation for what you’re talking about, but I think you’re right.

Zachary Karabell: Did you watch Landman?

Jason Bordoff: I did. It was great.

Zachary Karabell: Billy Bob Thornton playing the Texas Midland reminds me of this. If you haven’t watched Landman, I’m sorry, you’re just going to have to go with this, or just pause the episode and go watch Landman. But as a description of what that ecosystem and culture is.

Jason Bordoff: Well, look, you’re asking a Jewish kid who grew up in Brooklyn about what life is like in Midland, Texas.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, but you’ve spent some time.

Jason Bordoff: I have spent time there. I think there’s a sense of reality to it in terms of the swashbuckling nature of it, the risk-taking nature of it, the landscape of it, how it feels to sort of be at the club, maybe, in Midland.

I think it is a safety-obsessed industry, so the idea that a wellhead is going to explode because somebody takes a wrench and starts smacking something and it blows up — I mean, if you’re not holding the railing as you’re going down the steps in an oil and gas company, someone’s going to tell you to be really careful. So notwithstanding accidents that surely have happened, it’s a pretty safety-obsessed thing. Not everything is accurate.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, one of the reasons it touches such a nerve is it evokes this very American idea: we’re going to take risks, we’re going to be self-sufficient, we’re not going to be beholden to stupid bureaucracies and rules that don’t make sense, that aren’t rational, right?

Jason Bordoff: Well, that’s the nature of Texas, too, not just the energy industry. And I do think there’s a sense among many people in the industry — and it’s hard to paint with a broad brush, and some may be climate deniers, I know a lot of people in the oil and gas industry who take climate seriously — but a sense that, for the world as it is today, which still is using 80% fossil fuels globally, and you want energy prices to be lower, not higher, you want to produce, not be dependent on imports, a sense that this is a product that delivers benefits to people.

When Chris Wright, our energy secretary, writes in The Economist or talks about how there are billions of poor people in the world, and you need large amounts of energy, not small amounts of energy, massive amounts of energy — and we could put some numbers on that if you’re interested — to bring people out of poverty and give them meaningful levels of prosperity, even a fraction of what we take for granted, he is right.

The problem is, in my view, he doesn’t go to the next sentence and say, but there is a reality to the limit of how much CO₂ we can put in the atmosphere. And that is a problem, too. And by the way, some of those poor people are going to be the worst affected if we don’t deal with that, and we gotta deal with both of those problems at the same time. But I say that because I think a lot of people who work in this industry feel like they’re doing something that brings benefit to the world and to the U.S. economy.

Zachary Karabell: And we talked about this a little bit during the Biden administration, where there was a brief period in 2021 and 2022 where John Kerry, as kind of climate envoy, was going around to sub-Saharan African nations and other parts of the world saying, “If you don’t move toward a commitment to a decarbonized future by 2030, we’re not going to fund your loans.” And these countries were going, “Okay, how am I supposed to turn the lights on? We don’t have enough money to build our own wind turbines.”

Obviously, a lot of them turned to China because China was going, “Hey, if you need infrastructure for energy, here we are with zero-interest loans that come due at some point.” How does —

Jason Bordoff: And they were looking at a U.S. economy that still has 15% of our electricity coming from coal.

Zachary Karabell: So this is not a five-minute answer in a 45-minute podcast, but how do you square that circle? What is the answer to these conundrums? They don’t have the capital. If you’re Pakistan, they’re basically going to say, “Well, we got a lot of coal. Until there’s a cheaper or more available resource that we can use, we’re going to use the resource we’ve got.”

Jason Bordoff: Yeah, Pakistan’s a really interesting example because initially they had made a strategy to double down on liquefied natural gas, and then discovered that was pretty expensive and pricing was quite volatile. And then the government did what you just said, which is say, coal can be pretty cheap and a source of affordable, domestic, secure energy. So they went to China and asked China to build a lot of coal infrastructure, indebted, and then had to pay China back for those coal plants.

And what happened? It turns out that they’re having trouble paying that back because Chinese solar panels are so cheap in Pakistan that, not a government decision, but just businesses and consumers and households are saying, “The cheapest thing I can do is put solar panels up.” And so clean energy is growing really fast there because it makes a lot of sense.

Having said that, you are right that I think there’s sometimes too much happy talk or optimism, not to push back on that in an Edgy Optimist podcast, that you can pull billions of people out of poverty and do it all with solar and wind alone. Renewables will and should play an enormous role. In many places, they are the cheapest form of electricity. Let’s remember it’s electricity, and only 20% of the global energy system is electrified, so there are a lot of things that don’t take electricity.

But one of my favorite people is a friend of mine, Sunita Narain, who’s a leading environmentalist in India and cares a lot about local air pollution in India as well as climate change. She’s the first to say, of course India has to use natural gas as part of a multi-decade transition. It’s not the end state, but this is going to take time. And to a wealthy nation like the U.S. or European countries, she’s like, if we have a global carbon budget and we gotta hit a certain target and we want to limit emissions, maybe if net zero by 2050 means 2070 for us, then it means 2035 for you, because you caused this problem.

Now, that’s a hard reality, because no one really wants to accept that. But that is the kind of sense of hypocrisy and resentment that you increasingly hear from emerging markets around the world, which need a lot of energy to grow.

We often hear the statistic that there are 750 million people around the world who have no access to electricity. We gotta solve that problem, and we do. How much energy does that take? Electricity in those models of universal electricity access is typically defined by an amount of energy roughly equivalent to charging a few cell phones and turning on a few light bulbs.

If you wanna mechanize agriculture, move people from two-wheeled vehicles to four-wheeled vehicles, have refrigeration, have air conditioning, to have the prosperity level one-fifth that of Malaysia, it’ll be 10 to 20 times those kind of estimates of what it means to have universal electricity access. And again, that’s just electricity, nevertheless all the things we still need molecules for.

Zachary Karabell: It’s funny, I don’t view these issues as necessarily leading toward pessimism. I think it’s a question of calling, to be very cliched about it, a spade a spade, acknowledging what is real in the face of ideals without cleaving to those ideals so much that you’re violating reality as we know it.

And in that sense, recognizing things like, we’ve had this multi-decade, multilateral process, Paris, Kyoto, about emissions and accords, and they have done some good in highlighting the need for being attentive to the long-term consequences of how we use energy and how we extract it. But you’d also have to say, as a series of decade-long processes, they have at best had marginal utility in changing the arc of what would otherwise have been happening anyway.

And acknowledging that doesn’t mean you’re going, “Oh my God, it’s hopeless.” Acknowledging that goes, “Okay, that didn’t really work. It didn’t work to do whatever it said it’s going to do.”

Jason Bordoff: And it doesn’t help anyone to pretend this problem’s easier to solve than it is.

Zachary Karabell: And doubling down on it isn’t going to make it work better. So in the face of that, okay, what do we do? I mean, one of the things that’s emerging in the kind of unilateral hegemony of the Trump administration is these things ought not to be done because multilateral institutions create rules that nobody follows anyway. They ought to be done because different states have a different self-interest in doing them. India and Pakistan have an interest in having less pollution. The pollution in northern India affects 500 million people. It impinges on economic growth, blah, blah, blah. These are things that are more pragmatic and present. It’s not because a conference of 180 nations sits around for four weeks every three years and comes up with rules. So what does one actually do, given that people are, I think, interested in solving problems? They’re interested in technology, they’re interested in innovation, they’re interested in change.

Jason Bordoff: Well, there are no easy or obvious answers to that, or someone would have done it already. And actually, at the Center on Global Energy Policy, we just launched a major effort with The Rockefeller Foundation, which came out of conversations I had with Raj Shah just like this. And it was a high-level panel of former ministers, heads of states, on what we’ve called universal energy abundance. And the idea was to move beyond a discussion of electricity access —

Zachary Karabell: See, that’s very optimistic. Universal energy abundance. That’s great marketing.

Jason Bordoff: And the idea was, and Raj’s view as well, is if you really wanna meaningfully make a dent in global economic development and really improve the prosperity of billions of people around the world, energy is a massive piece of that. We should use energy efficiently for sure, but you’re talking about a lot more energy.

And not to elide the hard questions, which are, there’s a tension there between the fact that we gotta decarbonize as fast as possible. Solar panels can do a lot of that work, but probably not all of that work. And how do we grapple with that?

One of the things I’m interested in, that this panel will get into, is the frontier of new technology. Solar panels have come down 90-plus percent in cost, and they can play a big role now. What’s next on the frontier, whether that’s advanced geothermal, or advanced nuclear power, or battery storage —

Zachary Karabell: Fusion.

Jason Bordoff: I mean, fusion seems like it might actually be a thing. You wanna be sensitive to what you said a moment ago about people who’ve caused this problem in wealthier countries in the West coming to lower-income countries and saying, “Don’t worry, you’ll be fine because we’ll have fusion one day.” That’s not going to land well either. But I do think the innovation frontier is a really interesting piece to bring into this conversation.

I wouldn’t have spent 13 years of my life building an institute with the word “policy” in its name if I didn’t think policy was really important, and I still believe that’s true. Multilateral cooperation is still important. And we’re going to have to figure out how to overcome all the well-known barriers to finance that we all know about, currency exchange risk and political risk and other things, because there’s a lot of opportunity to invest in infrastructure, as is happening all around the world now.

Zachary Karabell: So why shouldn’t people, if they’re trying to figure out, “Okay, what do I do about this?” What would be wrong with placing your faith in techno-optimism? What would be wrong with saying, “You know, net-net, people have had these issues for the past 100 years, and something has kind of come along at each juncture on the way.” Maybe just as the tailspin, right at the very last minute, or just as you thought things were going to get worse. To some degree, there was a fear in the 1970s of peak oil. We’re having this conversation about, I don’t know, six weeks ago, Paul Ehrlich died, who had been famous for his prediction in the ‘70s that too many people were going to lead to global population collapse, that the carrying capacity of the Earth —

Jason Bordoff: Great book, The Wizard and the Prophet, that sort of helps people understand —

Zachary Karabell: Which Charles Mann wrote, sort of comparing that to Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution. The story of the past 40 or 50 years has been a series of fears that we are reaching a sort of peak that is going to be followed by a collapse of energy, of food, and that hasn’t happened.

And then to some degree, it’s worth asking whether the reality of climate change, notwithstanding the fears about what it augurs, may be similar to those. I don’t know. Or that we’re able to solve for it technologically more than we had anticipated, because you can’t really factor into your models — if you’re the White House and you just said, our 10-year forecast assumes a radical technological breakthrough in year six, you’d be laughed out of the room because people are like, “Well, maybe,” but there’s no way to factor that in. And must see a lot of this where you are.

Jason Bordoff: It’s the Shale Revolution, too. You wouldn’t have built that in, right? So I would say, again, this kind of trying to hold two thoughts in your head at the same time, which often in these conversations about energy and climate people have trouble doing, it’s like both-and. I think too often the conversation about techno-optimism as the solution doesn’t fully appreciate how much we can do with the tools we have now, which is a lot. Renewable energy today, getting even existing, current day nuclear technology up and running, storage is improving dramatically, electrifying more of the economy. Just build. Build, baby, build, rather than drill, baby, drill. You can do a lot today.

I don’t think that gets you all the way there. Some people will disagree with that and model a 100% renewable global economy. And to your point, there are a lot of exciting innovations that are around the corner. Some seem very close today, whereas they would’ve been wishful thinking 10 or 15 years ago. And now you’re talking about space-based solar or things that seem a little pie-in-the-sky today, but if you’re going to pull another few billion people out of poverty, you’re going to double or maybe increase 50% global energy use by mid-century, and you’re going to get to net-zero emissions, I think my best guess of what that world looks like is a lot of the tools we have today, but also some innovations that come that maybe we’re not anticipating, for sure.

Zachary Karabell: And what about the unsexy ones?

Jason Bordoff: And you don’t wanna bet on those things because it kind of takes the pressure off to do a lot of what we should do today. By the way, part of the answer to your question, too, which I think is also a dangerous thing to bet on, but we should obviously be thinking about because we’re probably already past one and a half degrees warming, is the way technology copes with the impacts of climate change, adaptation and geoengineering. We don’t wanna put all our eggs in that basket, but some of that is almost inevitable at this point.

Zachary Karabell: For years, within the environmental world, adaptation was a really negative word because people thought by focusing on adaptation —

Jason Bordoff: There’s like a moral hazard problem.

Zachary Karabell: Right, you were giving up. And of course now adaptation has become the absolute byword.

What about just efficiencies? Using the same stuff, but using less of it. So you’re using fossil fuels, but you’re using it more efficiently.

Jason Bordoff: I mean, Job One, as I think I said earlier, but if I didn’t, I should have, for decades, has been the low-hanging fruit. It’s hard to write — I spend a lot of time writing foreign affairs articles, and I hope some last, but the one that has maybe lasted in my field better than any other is Amory Lovins, 50 years ago, in Foreign Affairs after the Arab oil embargo, talking about the hard path and the soft path after the Arab oil embargo.

And we knew we had to do something about dependence on the Middle East for oil. There was a hard path, which was to figure out how to build massive engineering projects and break rocks all over the place and crush the Earth to pull more resources out of the ground. But there was a soft path, which is, people don’t really care how much energy they use. They care if their beer is cold and their showers are hot, and you can deliver a lot of that by using less energy inputs in the first place.

Electrification does a lot of that. Electricity is a much more efficient use of energy. That’s why electric cars in total use less energy. And the U.S. economy today has increased fourfold since the Arab oil embargo —

Zachary Karabell: And it’s energy efficient, right? Its energy intensivity is way, way less.

Jason Bordoff: Right. Energy as a share of the economy is much lower, so we’re in a better position to deal with the shock today.

Zachary Karabell: Andrew McAfee has written a lot about this. The more advanced the economy gets, the less energy-intensive it becomes.

By the way, great story about Amory Lovins, who started the Rocky Mountain Institute, if people don’t know, and was kind of an icon in the environmental world. I was at the first Clinton Global Initiative in 2004. It was very buzzy, probably in ways that a lot of people hate, and Amory Lovins was giving a talk about all of the things we could be doing, and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were there.

And I was sitting next to Brad Pitt at a table, and everybody’s talking. And at the end of this session, this group of people rushes from the back of the room, and Brad Pitt stands up, and he thinks they’re all rushing up to him to get his autograph, and they blow past him to get in line to get an autograph from Amory Lovins. And just in terms of the context of fame, because in that room Brad was just an actor, and Amory Lovins was the rock star.

Jason Bordoff: He was also opposed to nuclear power, so I don’t agree with him on everything. But there was a lot of wisdom in some of what he did.

Zachary Karabell: But he was one of the first people to really talk about adaptivity or the ways in which big companies — and you work with big companies all the time now, in ways in which the real orthodox of the environmental movement probably question, right? They’re like, “Well, why are you working for big companies?” How do you answer those criticisms, like you’re working with oil companies and you’re working with energy companies?

Jason Bordoff: Well, first, to be clear, the work of the Center on Global Energy Policy is completely independent of sources of funding, and there are tons of guardrails in place to make sure that is the case.

I think if you wanna build common ground where it’s possible and you wanna move collectively toward the kind of future where energy is affordable, where energy is secure, and energy is much lower-carbon and sustainable, you gotta find as much common ground as possible and bring diverse sectors together.

So we work a lot with the environmental activist community, and with environmental foundations, and with NGOs, and with energy companies, and with tech companies, and with utility companies, and with policymakers. If you just talk to any one of those groups, it’s hard to make progress because you kind of need them all working together to figure out how we’re going to move forward.

And a lot of those companies should be criticized when they do things that obstruct progress in the right direction. But it’s also where a lot of the engineering expertise is, a lot of the capital is. And when that can be mobilized, it can actually move things in a good direction.

Zachary Karabell: Well, Jason, I wanna thank you so much for your time today, for your work. Everyone should go check out — what’s the website?

Jason Bordoff: The Center on Global Energy Policy. You can just Google that, but it’s energypolicy.columbia.edu.

Zachary Karabell: Now you can OpenAI it, you can ChatGPT it. You can Claude it, you can Opus it, you can Sonata it, you can Perplexity it, you can DeepMind it. You can do all these other things other than Google it now. So I wanna thank you for your time.

Jason Bordoff: By the way, that’ll take a lot more energy if you do it that way.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, because then you’ll — we didn’t even get into the whole data center thing. You’re just leaving that. Pay attention to the center’s work, and then you can get into the whole problem of data centers. And meanwhile, use the AI stuff. I don’t care what he says. It doesn’t matter. It’s being built anyway. It’s not going to matter whether you use it.

I want to thank the people at Kaleidoscope for producing these episodes, the team at The Progress Network for supporting everything, and of course you for listening. Be back with you next week.

What Could Go Right? is produced by The Progress Network and Kaleidoscope.

Watch the podcast on YouTube.

Follow us on X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok: @progressntwrk

Plus: forty years after the worst nuclear disaster in history, wildlife is flourishing inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone; a Utah startup claims it has grown functional human sperm in a lab — a potential breakthrough for male infertility; and NASA is branching into the human organ delivery industry.

Watch the full episode below:

All episodes of the What Could Go Right? podcast are available here.

Transcript

Emma Varvaloucas: Welcome to the What Could Go Right? Progress Report, where we dive into all of the good news that you probably missed because it was buried under the absolute shit storm of bad news. Hey, if you’re new here, I’m Emma Varvaloucas, and I’m the executive director of the Progress Network, and here’s what we’re gonna be covering today.

You’ve probably heard of Chernobyl, which remains the worst nuclear disaster in history. And yet four decades later, something is happening inside of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone that nobody had planned for. Also this week, a startup claims to have grown functional human sperm in a lab, solar energy has knocked coal off of its top spot for the first time since 1919, and finally, a story about how NASA might become the DoorDash of human organs. Yeah, you’re gonna wanna stick around until the end.

There’s a lot to get into, so let’s dive in.

You probably didn’t expect the word Chernobyl to be in the same sentence as good news, but here it comes. 40 years after the worst nuclear disaster in history, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is experiencing a wildlife miracle—that’s extremely good news.

The zone is a radioactive no man’s land larger than Luxembourg. And yes, Luxembourg is small for a country, but that is big for an exclusion zone. It straddles Ukraine and Belarus, and remains off limits to humans. But wildlife, wildlife did not get that memo. Wolves hunt in the radioactive landscape alongside brown bears, who have returned to the area after more than a century.

Lynx, moose, and red deer have also populated the human-less region. And perhaps the most remarkable species there are Przewalski’s horses, a horse native to Mongolia and once at the brink of extinction, which were introduced to the region in 1998 as an experiment, and are now thriving.

Scientists are still studying what the radiation is doing to these animals over the long term. Like, some frogs have developed darker pigmentation, some birds in higher radiation areas show more cataracts. So of course, the story is complicated. But the zone’s lead nature scientist put it simply: “nature has effectively performed a factory reset.”

Here is one thing that is certain: wildlife has an amazing way of adapting and showing us resilience in a way that’s frankly inspiring.

It’s also worth noting that Chernobyl has very much so been in the news lately for its 40th anniversary, and not only for the wildlife story. Russia’s war on Ukraine has turned the exclusion zone into a military corridor, and Ukraine and the International Atomic Energy Agency are urgently seeking 500 million euros to cover repairs.

Progress comes in complicated shapes. But hey, the horses are doing really well.

Now, that story leads perfectly into our next one. After the horrific disaster of Chernobyl, people were scared of nuclear energy, understandably. I mean, a reactor exploded and sent radiation across an entire continent, so you can’t blame them.

That fear slowed the development of nuclear energy across Europe, but now, four decades later, nuclear is actually going through a revival around the world. And guess what? Renewable energy is having a moment. The reason? Well, for starters, the war in the Middle East. The think tank Ember just published its annual electricity report, and buried inside is a number that I think deserves a lot more attention than what it’s been getting.

In 2025, renewables accounted for 33.8% of global power generation. Coal came in at just under 33%, its lowest in history. Okay, now, I can already hear you. “Emma, .8%? Really? That’s it? That’s what we’re celebrating?” Yes, and here’s why. Coal has held the throne of global energy for over 100 years. In 1919, there was this brief moment when hydropower had a big year and usurped coal’s spot.

But then coal took the crown right back, and it sat there for over a century, through two world wars, the moon landing, the invention of the internet, and approximately 10,000 think pieces about the future of clean energy. This time though, the driving force is solar. Since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, solar has multiplied by 10 times.

It now generates 2,778 terawatt hours a year, roughly the total electricity demand of the entire European Union. In 2025, it out generated wind for the first time ever, and it’s on track to surpass nuclear this year.

There’s another milestone in here, though, that’s easy to miss. Last year saw an annual decline in fossil fuel generation, one of only five times that has happened in a century. The other four, economic crises and pandemics. Well, one pandemic in particular—you probably remember it. Last year, though, it happened because clean energy simply grew fast enough to meet all of the world’s new electricity demand, and that’s genuinely new.

Now, here’s a dose of honesty. That decline in fossil fuel generation was 0.2%, itsy bitsy by most metrics. The world still burns a colossal amount of coal, and that amount has basically plateaued and has not started to fall in any significant way, and global emissions are still rising. We’re at the beginning of a new era, not at the end of an old one quite yet.

But here’s why that beginning matters. Solar isn’t growing because of government mandates or climate guilt. It’s growing because it’s now cheaper to build a solar farm than it is to dig in the dirt or burn carbon, and most people, they’re gonna go with the cheaper option.

Also, geopolitics is doing something unexpected, accelerating all of it. The same way Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed Europe hard towards renewables, the current tensions around the Strait of Hormuz are triggering a worldwide sprint towards clean energy. I’m not saying we should thank Trump for starting all of that, but okay, silver lining for sure. Countries are falling over one another to buy Chinese solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles. Exports for all three of those hit a record high in March. And many countries, France, India, Turkey, to name just a few, have announced new clean energy investments in just the past few weeks.

So while it’s far too early to declare the climate fight won, we are at least nearing the time to anoint a new energy monarch. Long live King Solar.

Before we get back to our stories, here are some numbers that will make you smile.

930: miles the Chinese company CATL’s new EV battery can last on a single charge.

567 million: the number of additional people covered by essential health services since 2018. That’s according to the WHO.

3: European countries—Iceland, Portugal, and Norway—that have reached 90% HPV vaccine uptake in girls, which will essentially disappear cervical cancer in that generation.

And onwards and upwards to our quick hits.

Our next story is one that I debated how to introduce for longer than I would like to admit. A startup out of Utah called Paterna Biosciences, check the Greek reference there, says it has successfully grown functional human sperm in a lab and use it to fertilize eggs, producing visibly healthy-looking embryos.

I’ll give you a moment with that.

Okay, so scientists have been trying to do this, it’s called in vitro spermatogenesis, which is a very clinical way of saying making sperm in a dish, for almost a century. A Japanese team figured it out with mice in 2011, but human sperm, it turns out, is significantly more complicated.

Shocking, I know. But the Paterna scientists have cracked the code, or so they say, and here’s why this matters. Roughly half of all infertility cases involve male factors, and about 10 to 15% of infertile men produce no sperm whatsoever, and current options to help with that are extremely limited. The last resort is a four-hour surgery where doctors dig around and very rarely find a solution. Ouch.

Paterna’s version is a small biopsy at a doctor’s office. That tissue gets sent to a lab, they do their thing, and you get the sperm for somewhere between $5,000 and $12,000, which, yes, is a lot, but still less than a four-hour operation with no guarantees.

Now, the caveats, and there are several, which I feel ethically obligated to share with you before you text this to every man you know.

The findings have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and they have not been independently verified. Trials could begin as soon as next year, which means that even if everything is as Paterna says it is, we are still some time away from lab-grown sperm babies being born. And when they are, I bet they’re gonna have the most annoyingly symmetrical faces.

And finally, NASA is getting into the organ delivery business. Drone Dash?

The US organ transplant system has been under serious scrutiny in recent years. Reports of unsafe practices, poor quality control, and organs becoming unusable and getting lost in transit. I mean, I don’t know how you can lose something like that, but okay.

It got so bad that thousands of people actually removed themselves from organ donor registries over it, which is tragic by all accounts. So enter NASA, in a rather explosive and dramatic kind of way. The nonprofit that runs most of the US transplant system just announced a partnership with NASA’s Langley Research Center to study whether drones could fix all of this, and not in a casual, “Hey, what if?”kind of way. We’re talking advanced modeling, flight planning, and research into whether a human organ can actually survive drone transport. That last one seems pretty critical to me to figure out, so…

Drones, as you may have clocked, do not get stuck in traffic, they do not miss connecting flights. They do not accidentally leave a human kidney in a layover in Denver.

NASA has already done similar self-flying testing for air taxis, so the technical groundwork is there. Academic researchers have also been piloting drone delivery for a while, so this partnership could significantly accelerate the whole field. It won’t fix everything overnight, but given that the current system has driven people to opt out of donating altogether, NASA jumping in to save the day and potentially the lives of a lot of people is really good news, and potentially a much better use of their time than some other things that they may have been up to. Am I right? Make NASA useful again.

And that’s all for this week’s Progress Report. I hope these stories remind you of all the good that’s going on out there in the world, so it’s important not to get blinded by all of the bad. So if you got some value from this show, maybe something to bring up at your next paint n’ sip, send this show to a friend who could use some positive news.

And make sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel, follow us on your preferred podcast platform, and leave us a review. And if you’d like more of these stories delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for our newsletter. The link is in the description. If you’ve got a good news story that you’d like to see us cover next week, let us know in the comments.

Thanks for watching, and see you next week on the Progress Report.

What Could Go Right? is produced by The Progress Network and Kaleidoscope.

Watch the podcast on YouTube.

Follow us on X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok: @progressntwrk

The last time coal lost its lead as the world’s largest electricity source, the Bolsheviks were fending off a counterrevolution, the Treaty of Versailles was in review, and Congress had just established a national park in Arizona named for its big hole in the ground. The year was 1919, and as it happened, a banner one for hydropower.

Renewables wouldn’t overtake coal again for more than a century. In its most recent annual global electricity review, the think tank Ember reported that in 2025 renewables accounted for 33.8% of global power generation, edging out coal, at just under 33%—its first time below a third in history.

The change has most to do with solar’s breakneck expansion. Wind power is growing too, but at a pace that can’t compare to solar’s exponential rise: It has multiplied tenfold since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, to 2,778 TWh, or enough to meet the total electricity demand of the EU. The output, which was larger than wind’s for the first time in 2025, is set to outgrow nuclear this year as well.

Last year also saw an annual decline in fossil fuel generation, one of only five times that has happened in the past century. But it was the first time that the drop was the result of clean power growth and not a one-off shock such as an economic crisis or pandemic. Wind and solar together were enough to meet essentially all of last year’s new electricity demand, most importantly in China, the world’s largest emitter.1

This is real progress that marks, as the Ember report notes, an entry into “an era of clean growth.” But it is still only an entry. That decline in fossil fuel generation was an itsy-bitsy 0.2%. The world still burns a gigantic amount of coal, which having plateaued at a peak, has not begun to tumble. And global emissions continue to rise, if more sluggishly than in the past.2

Still, clean energy has moved from “ambition” to “structural reality,” says Ember, now that the falling cost of solar panels has made harnessing the sun a better economic prospect than digging in the dirt or burning carbon—and especially now that batteries are finally becoming cheap enough to store and deliver its energy 24/7 in the future.

And much like the 2022 invasion of Ukraine pushed the EU toward renewables, today’s brouhaha over the Strait of Hormuz is spurring—along with, yes, a short-term return to coal in some countries—a worldwide surge in clean energy. Countries are falling over one another to buy Chinese solar technology, batteries, and electric vehicles; exports for all three reached a record high in March. Several, such as France, India, and Turkey, have announced new clean energy policies and investments.

So while it’s far too early to declare the fight against climate change won, we’re at least nearing the time to anoint a new energy monarch: King Solar.

—Emma Varvaloucas

P.S. Some updates to last week’s edition on psychedelics and the Trump administration: Three treatments have received an FDA priority review voucher. And, it turns out Trump is moving on marijuana, too. Medical marijuana is to be reclassified as a Schedule III substance, and recreational marijuana could be next.

Share

What Could Go Right? S8 E3: Can We Achieve “Super Abundance” Without AI Doom? | with Sebastian Mallaby

What happens when the person building the world’s most powerful technology is just as worried about it as we are? Sebastian Mallaby, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Infinity Machine, joins host Zachary Karabell to pull back the curtain on Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind who is currently leading the global charge into artificial intelligence. | Listen now

By the Numbers

~930: Miles that Chinese company CATL’s new EV battery can last on a single charge

567M: Additional people covered by essential health services since 2018

3: European countries—Iceland, Portugal, and Norway—that have reached 90% HPV vaccine uptake in girls

30: Countries that have eliminated the eye disease trachoma; Australia is the latest

Quick Hits

☎️ The rate of suicides among young people in the US dropped 11% below projections after the rollout of a national suicide prevention hotline.

🤰 More than half of US states now cover doula care under Medicaid, up from just two prior to 2020. Studies show that doula support is associated with higher breastfeeding initiation and better postpartum care.

🪸 Coral reefs off a chain of Australian islands survived a massive heat wave intact, offering scientists clues to what might protect reefs elsewhere.

🦠 Scientists have discovered a new bacterium that may cause noma, a neglected, deadly tropical disease that affects children. The hope is that a simple gingivitis test could soon prevent the 90% mortality rate and lifelong disfigurement associated with the disease.

🌲 Rainforests can bounce back much faster than researchers thought. One, in Ecuador, recovered 90% of its biodiversity in just 30 years.

🧫 A startup says it has successfully grown functional human sperm in a lab and used it to make seemingly healthy embryos. Assuming the findings can be independently verified, the technique could help men with infertility.

🚗 Electric vehicles with sodium-ion batteries are set to go on sale this year, offering a shield against volatile lithium prices. Sodium is more globally abundant.

🫀 NASA is testing drone delivery for organs in an attempt to solve medical transport issues. Meanwhile, its Mars rover is collecting more evidence to suggest the planet was habitable around the time the Earth originated.

☢️ Four decades on from the Chernobyl disaster, nuclear is reviving around the world. What’s more, while radiation’s effects on wildlife are still being studied, many animals—including a rare horse—have thrived in the accidental rewilding project that is Chernobyl’s exclusion zone.

🧬 The FDA has approved the first gene therapy for inherited deafness—and the drugmaker is giving it away for free.

💉 Measles immunizations are skyrocketing in states experiencing outbreaks as anti-vaxxers undergo a measurable change of heart.

👀 What we’re watching: Mexico is about to open enrollment for its new universal health care service.

💡 Editor’s pick: Is the swagger of global strongmen fading?

Subscribe now

TPN Member Originals

(Who are our Members? Get to know them.)

• Debating democracy renovation | The Renovator | Danielle Allen

• Why Virginia went back on its word | WaPo ($) | Theodore R. Johnson

• Russia is ruined | Diane Francis | Diane Francis

• Theft is now progressive chic | The Atlantic ($) | Thomas Chatterton Williams

• The costs of Trump’s contempt are starting to show | WaPo ($) | Fareed Zakaria

• The White House correspondents’ dinner shooting | Tangle | Isaac Saul

• Cuba on the brink | GZERO | Ian Bremmer

• Where DOGE hit DC hardest | Slow Boring | Matthew Yglesias

• Republics demand loyalty to principles, not party | The Preamble | Sharon McMahon

From the “Ender’s Game” mission that drives Hassabis to the chilling logic of why machines might accidentally develop a “survival instinct,” this episode explores the mindset of the people shaping our future. Mallaby and Karabell discuss the “infinity” of data required to make these systems work and why the massive hunger for compute power is reshaping the global economy in real-time.

Drawing a haunting parallel to Alan Greenspan and the 2008 financial crisis, Mallaby asks a difficult question: Can “the man who knew” the risks actually prevent the catastrophe he sees coming? Together, they navigate the tension between pure scientific discovery and cutthroat Silicon Valley competition, the potential for a “Nuclear Non-Proliferation” style agreement with China, and the hidden dangers of the “open vs. closed” model debate.

Watch the full conversation below:

All episodes of the What Could Go Right? podcast are available here.

Transcript

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, and this is my podcast where we try to look at major questions of our day with an angle of what can go right rather than the constant, continuous angle of what could go wrong. And one of the things that we are all talking about these days is artificial intelligence, AI. It is almost impossible to have a conversation without it. And that is probably appropriate, given how clearly transformative this new technology is going to be. And we are at that turning point, that moment in time where we are all suddenly acutely aware of just how powerful this technology is, without having any idea just where this technology is going to lead us, or where we are going to take it.

In that light, we’re going to talk today with Sebastian Mallaby, who has a new book out called The Infinity Machine about Demis Hassabis, who is the founder of DeepMind, which is owned by Google and is one of the leading AI companies in the world. Sebastian has written widely. He’s been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize twice for two of his prior books about Silicon Valley, and also about Wall Street. He’s a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is an acute observer of some of the most important trends in our world today, particularly this nexus of money and technology, and he is the perfect guide to an imperative conversation. So let’s have it.

Sebastian Mallaby, it is such a pleasure to be having this conversation with you. I’ve loved all the books that you write. This one, of course, comes at a near-perfect moment in time in that it seems like there is no conversation where AI doesn’t become a central part of it. I guess let’s start with the really big picture, and then we can talk a little bit about Demis Hassabis in greater detail, given that that is the exoskeleton of the book that you wrote about AI.

But on this big picture question, where do you fall, given that there is a spectrum of The Terminator and AI is going to destroy all of us on one hand, the Geoffrey Hinton side, and there is, AI is going to be net-net the savior of humanity.

Sebastian Mallaby: I mean, the truthful answer is a slightly have-it-both-ways answer, because I think anyone reasonable looking at AI acknowledges enormous upsides, particularly for science and medicine, but then also serious downsides, particularly for cyberattacks, potential biological weapons that might be invented, and even sort of terminator risk, if the AI system turns against humans, which we can get into. It sounds crazy, sounds sci-fi. I didn’t really believe it at first, but in the course of reporting the book, I came to feel that it wasn’t something one should exclude. So I think both is the answer. And sorry if that’s boring, but that’s how I feel.

Zachary Karabell: Do you feel there’s a cultural moment that changes this? I’ve sometimes played with a thought experiment of, what if the 1990s tech media, Fast Company and everything that was touting the wonders of connectivity and the endless, boundless frontier of technology innovation in the 1990s, what if that had been the climate that we were introducing artificial intelligence? Surely it would’ve been mostly about the upsides, with not nearly as much consideration of the downsides. And it feels like today we’ve gone kind of to the other extreme, no?

Sebastian Mallaby: it’s an interesting counterfactual. I’d guess that there’s something deep in the Western psyche about Oppenheimer and the whole kind of nuclear experience, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, all of those moments when a new technology seemed to threaten human existence.

And I think that would still have been overshadowing AI, because it is so powerful and it could be used for such nefarious purposes. And if you think about just movies as a sort of measure of the zeitgeist, you go back to Stanley Kubrick, 2001, you know the computer terminator that wants to take over the world, you know, later on you’ve got the, literally, The Terminator movies.

So this is a very longstanding strand in science fiction, popular culture, the idea that the machines may one day come after us. So, yeah, I take your point. In the nineties, people were more bushy-tailed and bright-eyed about the prospects of tech, but I still think there would’ve been some queasiness.

Zachary Karabell: On that queasiness, what do you make of the proposition of, if the doomsayers are right, that basically AI is a new superintelligence that is going to run the world according to its own peculiar logic with a great degree of indifference to the human experience, it feels to me like the best we can do, is try to enjoy whatever precious few years we have left, because it doesn’t seem to allow for much course correction, or at least there’s no observable course correction, when you have sovereign governments like China, and to some degree some sui generis combination of the US government and Silicon Valley, all are plunging into this in kind of an arms race fashion. Then it’s either too late, in which case, why are we worrying about it so much, or the fears are overblown.

Sebastian Mallaby: I would say that the fears are not overblown, and let me just explain how I get to that. So, I thought at the beginning of my research, you know, I pitched Demis Hassabis for access in 2022, the week before ChatGPT came out. So it’s been three and a half, four years now. I would say that, you know, initially I just thought, well, of course these machines will be smarter than humans, but they don’t have an incentive to be antagonistic to humans.

You know, human beings have evolved over centuries, to pass on their DNA, to survive, and that survival instinct is massively strong. Machines are not the same. They’re not evolved. They don’t have a survival instinct. So why do we think they would attack us? And if they did, the human will to win would count for a huge amount in any contest.

And then I went to see Geoffrey Hinton, the academic father of deep learning. I went up to Toronto, sat in his kitchen for two hours, and we debated this. I was trying to get him to admit that some of the doomsaying that he’s been public with was exaggerated. And I talked to some of his graduate students. They would tell me that Geoff has always been pessimistic. His AI doomsterism is just an extension of what he used to say before AI became powerful about the fact that either the environmental risks, or maybe some bio weapon, would finish us all off. In some sense it’s a Rorschach test, and people’s own temperament gets reflected onto AI.

So I went with this mission to try to persuade him out of this doomsterism, and I challenged him on this point that, look, AI has not evolved to survive. And he conceded that. But he also said, look, it’s going to evolve because of what humans want from AI. And notably, if you imagine you have a very powerful AI and you fear that an enemy AI will attack it, you have to empower your AI with the ability to defend itself against a cyberattack. And a human is going to be way too slow in the loop. So you have to tell your AI, if you see an attack coming, defend yourself if necessary, counterattack, you gotta survive. And all of a sudden, you’ve given the machine a survival instinct. And so I think that’s right. I think that, and this comes up time and again in any debate about the use of AI in Iran or lots of applications, you want it to be agentic. You want it to do more things, because that’s useful. But then in giving it the autonomy to do more things, you do equip it with a sense of its own objectives and so forth. That’s why, you know, I’m not saying I get up every morning and worry about doom at all, I don’t do that at all, but analytically, intellectually, I can’t exclude this idea that the machines will not merely be cleverer than us, but also will have their own objective function and will want to survive.

Zachary Karabell: In the original Star Trek, there’s an episode called A Taste of Armageddon. Do you know this one?

Sebastian Mallaby: I don’t.

Zachary Karabell: Two planets have been fighting wars against each other for centuries and lobbing, I guess whatever the equivalent of interstellar missiles are, at each other. And at some point they decide that they’re doing such destruction to their cities and harm that they could simply wargame out each other’s attack via computers, I mean, they weren’t using the word AI then, and that they would then calculate how much life would be lost. And then each side would simply eliminate the number of people that the computer systems calculated and then preserve the architecture so that they wouldn’t have to rebuild their cities. They could just fight an endless war. And of course, it ends with, you know, Captain Kirk somehow ending this doom loop.

I mean, it just occurred to me in terms of the logic of what machines then tell you to do. But at least in those years, the perception was that logic would be bounded by whatever parameters human beings created. And I know you just said that the Hinton point is, you would’ve empowered those parameters, but having done so, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle, to use a much-overused cliche. I guess you can’t really overuse a cliche, the fact is it’s a cliche, therefore it is overused.

But this idea of we will create these parameters and then be unable to, I suppose, uncreate them, or stop them, right? That’s the fear. That once empowered, there will be no disempowering. That’s the HAL fear, that having allowed for something, the program itself will define its parameters. There’s been a few experiments, again within controlled conditions, I think Anthropic has done a bunch of this internally, of programs fearing they’re going to be shut down and then taking action to prevent human beings from doing that. Which is very much the HAL analogy, but actually experienced, right?

Sebastian Mallaby: Right. Yeah, you’re right. I mean there are those tests. For example, the system is told, we want you to complete this test and you know, if you pass it, we’ll know we’ll have to switch you off, and then it deliberately fails it. And you can see in the chain of thought that the failing is deliberate. And so that survival instinct seems to emerge without it having been programmed in.

There’s this famous paperclip thought experiment where the system is told, make a lot of paperclips, and then to maximize paperclip output, it decides that pesky humans who need the metal for something else should be eliminated, and so it kills all the humans.

I mean, that’s a very crude thought experiment and it doesn’t really bother me. What bothers me is not that killing humans emerges as a sort of byproduct of an objective function, because only really crude and stupid programming would fail to specify that certain sub-objectives are ruled out, and in fact, this has been in the systems at least since 2022, that you have a kind of set of rules which the system has to obey. And so when it’s trying to maximize something, it doesn’t suddenly kill everybody. And that’s pretty easy to address. I think it’s the looser sense of a purpose, you know, if your objective is your own survival, that’s the point where we’re in trouble.

Zachary Karabell: I think the fears tend to be the indifference factor, right? That this is going to be a superintelligence that doesn’t have antipathy to human existence. It just has indifference to it.

Sebastian Mallaby: So let me just tell you a story about Demis. So, Demis Hassabis read a lot of science fiction in his formative years. And among the authors he liked was Iain Banks, who wrote a thing called the Culture series. And in the Culture series, there are lots of different planets inhabited by a combination of humans and AI systems. And the AI systems have their own political intrigues, their own games they play, and so forth. And they’re perfectly happy, and they’re highly intelligent. They develop their own objectives, but they don’t bother humans ‘cause they’re too busy with each other.

And that was Demis’ vision for why you would have superabundance and human flourishing in the context of superintelligent machines. And I mean, you know, that’s possible, right? You could have very intelligent machines acting highly autonomously, but absolutely not antithetical to human survival or human interest.

In theory, that’s possible. It’s just that the kind of selfishness and egotism and survival bias of humans, if that specifically gets transferred to the machines, then they’re going to try and elbow us out.

Zachary Karabell: It’s funny, you begin the book about Demis talking about his love as a kid of Ender’s Game, which is another sort of famous sci-fi thing. And it occurred to me, as it has often, that the role of science fiction as an inspiring source or template for so many people who go into the tech world. We actually did an episode of What Could Go Right? last season about someone who’s looked at this kind of continually.

I wonder if you have any thoughts about that. Because it is fascinating, the degree to which an inordinate percentage of people who end up in these worlds, you know, tech worlds as engineers, computer engineers, were informed deeply by reading all these books, and watching these movies, and in many ways seem to have gone into their careers with either a conscious or unconscious dedication to making real the dreams, hopes, and fear that were embodied in this literature long before there was any technological capacity to make it real. But I mean, I wonder, have you thought about this as kind of an odd dialectic of, people read these books and then transform them into lived reality?

Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah, I mean, that’s totally true. You know, in my previous book I wrote about Silicon Valley through the lens of venture capital. And some of the people I got to know, like Peter Thiel and those around him, they choose Tolkien names for their companies and their imaginations are highly fired by science fiction.

And in some sense, if you think back to when DeepMind, Demis Hassabis’ company, was founded in 2010, it was pretty early, I mean, AI couldn’t even recognize the picture of a cat. That came in 2012. And so back in the day, there was not much science that you could hang your vision on, so you turned to science fiction. And indeed, there were these singularity summits, sort of gatherings of the faithful, the believers in AI, people like Ray Kurzweil, and so forth.

And they had this idea that powerful AI would come at some point, because they extrapolated the Moore’s Law trends and said, well, computers are going to be growing so powerful that it will approximate the power of the human brain. In fact, they extrapolated out to about now, to that point, and so they weren’t far off.

But having made that crude Moore’s Law extrapolation, they then had to imagine, well, what would this superintelligence be like? What would the world be like with that superintelligence? And there all the ideas came from science fiction, and it was out of that primordial soup, of science fiction mixed with science and these singularity summits and people who were kind of on the borderline between visionary and weirdo, that is where, you know, in 2010 Demis Hassabis went with his co-founders to raise the money for the Series A round of DeepMind. DeepMind arose out of that, because those were the only believers you could go speak to. And there’s a funny line where, Demis is cornered by a journalist, and he’s in San Francisco, and there are all these slightly kind of bug-eyed believers around him, and he’s asked, are you a singularitarian, Demis? And he says, hmm, it feels a bit Californian to me, which, I think, was a wonderful Britishism.

Zachary Karabell: Absolutely true. Did you read these books as a kid too, or no?

Sebastian Mallaby: No, not really. No. I did read Ender’s Game, because Demis required me to do so. In fact, before our first dinner, literally, he said to me, he said, look, if you wanna understand me, you have to read this book. And so I get the book. I didn’t really know what to expect, and I’m reading it, and it’s about this diminutive boy genius who literally saved the world against a space invasion. And there are these aliens, and they’re all wiped out by this kid, and he saves humanity.

And I mean, two thoughts struck me. First of all, is Demis really suggesting to me that he’s the savior of humanity? But also, even if he does think that, why would he tell a writer, like right off the bat? I mean, wouldn’t he be a little bit embarrassed by that?

No. Not embarrassed at all, is the answer. He gives me this book, we have dinner together, and he says, yeah, you know, I really identify with Ender, you know, it’s a mission, you gotta give everything to your mission. That’s why I stay up until four o’clock in the morning, thinking my thoughts about the future with AI, this is what drives me. I’m like Ender. Wow. You know, not a lot of people would confess to that sort of comparison, but you know, Demis, he’s perfectly happy to say, also, for another example, yeah, Isaac Newton and Richard Feynman failed at physics, and they didn’t really understand the full nature of reality. I wanna do better, so that’s why I’m inventing AI. I mean, he’s not your normal character.

Zachary Karabell: So speak a little bit about where DeepMind exists on the spectrum of this debate between those who are touting LLMs, large language models, which is the foundational basis of OpenAI, of Claude, of all the kind of artificial intelligence that most people interact with, or are aware of right now, and another set of people like Yann LeCun or Gary Marcus, who are arguing that those are not either the only manifestation we’re going to see of artificial intelligence, or the one that’s going to be most transformatively important. And there’s some palpable evidence, when you look at a lot of what China is doing, or a lot of what Chinese scientists and engineers are doing, where they’re focusing much more on specific AI applications rather than LLMs necessarily.

I recognize here too, there’s a bit of an inside baseball quality to that question, but it’s an important one in that all the money and all the spending, the huge spending in the United States on data centers that has become such a fundamental part of the American economy, the perceived future power demands of these data centers, both in China, the United States and elsewhere, really assumes the endless hunger of data that large language models will require rather than alternate versions of AI, of which there are many, but do not get talked about as much.

Sebastian Mallaby: There’s a lot in that. Maybe the piece I’m going to bite off is just this idea that there’s this crazy consumption of computer power and it’s demanding all sorts of new energy sources and is that really justified? And what I’d say is that the key insight about what artificial intelligence really is, is that it’s going beyond deduction.

Deductive systems are what we had before the AI explosion, and you could program a system to think logically and spit out logical conclusions in a kind of mathematical fashion. And what AI brings is an ability to reason, not through deduction, but through induction. In other words, looking at tons of examples and inducing some truth or some knowledge from lots and lots and lots of examples. And the key thing about induction is that you need a lot of data. Because if I observe 10 New Yorkers and their morning habits, I’m going to conclude that all human beings drink coffee in the morning. But if I observe a million, then I’ll realize the error, and I’ll recognize that that wasn’t true, and I’ll update my understanding.

So to do good induction, you need a ton of examples, a ton of data, in fact, almost an infinity of data. And that’s why I call my book The Infinity Machine. And so I think it’s kind of baked into inference, that you’re going to have better performance if you have more data, more examples, and you’ll just get smarter machines.

And so I think that’s one way of thinking about why the scaling laws have held, and every time we get to what people herald as a sort of ceiling on scaling, which we had kind of at the end of 2023, people starting to talk about the data wall — well, you’ve now fed the entirety of all the words on the internet into the system, so now you’ve hit the wall. No you hadn’t, because now the next thing was reasoning models, where you could scale the amount of time that they think for, and so all of a sudden you’ve got a whole new scaling law that applies. One last thing on this. There’s this notion that the American labs just throw tons of compute at it because they can, and so why would they bother to be more efficient with the algorithms and try to reduce the amount of compute needed. This is crazy. It’s a ridiculous argument. Of course the labs have a massive commercial incentive to spend less on GPUs. These things are extremely expensive. They’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars. If they could do it for a tenth of that amount, they would love to do it for a tenth of that amount, but they’re spending money on the compute because they really think they’re going to get much more powerful systems out of it.

Zachary Karabell: There’s also a kind of anti-Silicon Valley component of your book, and you’ve written a lot about Silicon Valley in the funding and then the creation of the VC model in an earlier book, The Power Law.

But in Demis there’s a certain amount of antagonism or, I dunno if antagonism is entirely the right word, but there’s definitely a degree of quizzical, negative questioning of a lot of the mentality that he perceives in Silicon Valley. I think you’ve shared some of that. From an outside perspective, it feels a little bit like one team criticizing another, but they’re all playing the same game. Maybe talk a little bit about that split, if it could be described as a split.

Sebastian Mallaby: You know, Demis, as you say, does spend a fair amount of time talking to me about what he hates about Silicon Valley. And when he says that, he partly means a kind of willingness to move fast and break things, you know, release models before you’ve really stress tested whether they’re safe or not, the kind of charge ahead mentality. The kind of canonical moment for that was when OpenAI decided to release ChatGPT when other labs, including DeepMind, had something they could have released, but they were just being more cautious about productizing it, because they thought it might hallucinate and so forth.

Well, you know, ChatGPT came out, it did hallucinate. It was toxic in some ways, but OpenAI hadn’t cared, it had released anyway, and then as a result, it got a massive brand advantage and a big head start in the competition over LLMs. So I think Demis resents that kind of willingness to shoot first and ask questions afterwards, that kind of careless willingness to release models that could be hallucinating or otherwise toxic.

So that’s part of it. But another thing is sort of more deep in his complicated personality, because half of Demis is a scientist, you know, he does have a Nobel Prize. We’re talking about a serious scientist here. And part of him would like to take a professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer spent their time, and indeed others who are kind of big in the Demis Hassabis firmament of all time greats. He would just love to go there and think, and be a professor, and think about theoretical physics, and other problems that fascinate him. But the other side of Demis is a super competitive capitalist operator who really, really wants to win the race. He’s the most competitive person I’ve ever met in my life. And so the Princeton professor side of him disdains Silicon Valley, ‘cause it’s full of noise as he calls it, and how can you think when everybody’s dreaming about jumping ship, leaving their company to do a startup, all this kind of stuff. But at the same time, Demis himself is quite happy to engage in commercial competition, and so I think he’s a bit schizophrenic on that one.

Zachary Karabell: On that, I wonder what you think of — so there was a movie a bunch of years ago called Ford v Ferrari, which is about Ford trying to build a racecar, and it plays up sort of radical cultural difference between the two companies. But at the end of the day, they’re both producing a racecar that races against each other in the same track. And I feel that way a little bit about these issues around AI, because if you are a non-software engineer who’s deeply immersed in this, and you use Claude, and you use Gemini, which is the Google tool, which is the creation of DeepMind, or you use OpenAI, or you use, I guess, there’s Perplexity, one of the newer ones — from a layperson’s user perspective, the user experience and the algorithm and the way it generates data, you’re like, these are doing a lot of the same things, even if under the hood they’re doing them differently. So how do we explain that?

Sebastian Mallaby: I think this gets back actually to a point you raised earlier and maybe I didn’t address then, which is how fatalistic should we be, that the technology itself will determine how it behaves, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And my view is, in the context of a race dynamic, it’s kind of true to say the technology determines the outcome, because if there’s a bad version of the technology, and you have many, many players in the race, there’ll be some bad players who produce the bad version, and if only because the leading players are being responsible and trying to do a good version, the ones who are not the leading players want to differentiate, and one way you differentiate is you create a kind of badass, evil version, which will appeal to a certain segment of the market. And we see that actually in the open versus closed debate on AI models. Some of them are proprietary, they’re closed, you can’t just download them into your computer and do whatever you want with them, and that’s much, much better for safety. And then the kind of follower companies, which is partly the Chinese ones, but also Meta, and Mistral in France. These guys produce open-weight models that people can do whatever they want with, and they can’t be closed down, even if they’ve started a cyberattack and they’re about to flood a city by disabling a dam, you can’t stop them, and that to me is nuts, that we allow that to happen. But it’s happening, and people produce these models because they’re trying to differentiate in a multiplayer race. But if you ask that question a different way and you say, hey, can one lab make its own model, less toxic, more toxic, more willing to answer any question or more guarded in the type of questions it answers, then the answer is yes, that now can make a difference. I take your point that to a user, the distinctions between different models may be quite subtle, but I suspect that over time, as these models become more specialized and there’s a kind of mature marketplace of different products, there will be a difference in the personality between an Anthropic model and an Elon Musk model, and I take those examples because probably at the moment, Elon Musk is the most keen on saying he has a non-woke AI, whereas Anthropic is the most keen on the kind of polite and safe AI.

Zachary Karabell: What about this open versus closed when it comes to China versus the United States? I mean, one of the ironies has been, at least on the face of it, many Chinese companies are producing what appear to be more open source models of their AI, as opposed to the proprietary models that characterize Google, Meta, et cetera. Now, a lot of people who know this quite well would say, the Chinese open source isn’t nearly as open source as it looks, and the proprietariness of the Western models is more open than it appears, but you do have this oddity of the country that is the most authoritarian and information control, is producing more, what are considered to be open source models. And the countries that are supposed to be more about the free change of ideas are producing more closed source ones.

Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that paradox. It’s worth thinking back to 2023, when there was this first kind of AI safety conference, which was held at Bletchley Park in Britain. And in fact that was Demis Hassabis’s proposal to Rishi Sunak, the British Prime Minister, that there should be this kind of safety gathering, and it included Chinese delegates, importantly. And so China showed up, it was a big jamboree, I’m not sure anything particularly was decided, but at least it was the beginning of an international discussion on governing AI. And there were follow up summits, one in South Korea, then one in Paris, and then the whole thing morphed into more about, how do we accelerate AI, as opposed to how do we govern it? And so the most recent iteration of these gatherings was in India, and that was all about, who’s going to win the race, not how do you control the race. So I think the point being here, that back in 2023, when the Bletchley Park one was held at Demis’ suggestion, there was an aspiration to talk to the Chinese about their open source models, and I think back in 2023, or even 2022, there was an opportunity to go to China and say, hey, you have a great technology sector, you’re going to get AI, but let’s just both make sure that it doesn’t proliferate in a crazy fashion to terrorists and rogue states. And if we join forces, the two leading AI powers, China and the US can together prevent open source from becoming widespread. And instead of doing that, the Biden administration chose to view China as the bad guy, and try to deprive China of AI by throttling its access to cutting-edge semiconductors for building AI, the NVIDIA sanctions. And, that hasn’t, I don’t think, worked in the sense that, China now does have strong AI. And so, I mean, I’ve debated this with friends who are people I respect, highly serious, intelligent people who were in the Biden administration and who have a different view to my one, but I think that there was a chance, and maybe still in the future will be a chance, to talk to China about the AI version of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Zachary Karabell: That would be quite compelling, in a world today where it seems like multilateral, multinational agreements are in short supply and ill favor.

Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah, totally. But let me — you know, 1962, a Cuban Missile Crisis, maximum tension between the US and the Soviet Union, and yet 1968, six years later, they do that deal. So even in the depths of the Cold War, some collaboration was possible.

Zachary Karabell: So you’ve written books, your past books have been about Wall Street, Silicon Valley, now this, all of which in many ways speak to the role of extraordinarily wealthy individuals and/or groups shaping society as we know it. And there is an element that gets understated in the AI conversation, and I’m not saying this from any kind of cabal conspiracy theory, I’m just making an observation that many of the people that you talk about in the book, including Demis, are certainly centimillionaires, some of them are multi-billionaires, which places them in the .00 whatever percentage of humanity. And there is a way in which these kind of money and power nexuses create their own reality distortion field. That is one of the reasons that people are particularly alarmed,

Sebastian Mallaby: I think, especially with AI, that’s true. So with finance, I kind of feel that you have very rich people doing stuff, which allocates capital in a certain way, but basically they’re trying to allocate it in a way that makes them a lot of money, and that tends to mean you give the capital to the people who are going to use it best and make a good return. And so the upshot is generally sort of productive, efficient economies. Now, of course, that all breaks down in 2008 with the crisis, and there are all sorts of complicated externalities, which we both understand, but at a high level, they’re not really changing the entire functioning of the society.

Whereas with AI, it is. I mean, it really is. It’s going to change how you bring up your kids. It’s going to change what job you can do. It’s going to change how you think of yourself as being a human being, when there’s a rival form of intelligence competing with you that’s in silicon — like these are super fundamental differences to the way we’re all going to live. And they’re being generated by a handful of labs, run by a handful of people. And so I think this is where the concentration of power does become a bit scary. It’s not that these lab leaders have total power of the outcomes as we’ve discussed, because there is a race dynamic and so that’s actually larger than them, and some of them, to their credit, and Demis Hassabis is certainly one, would like the governments to step in and exert control and regulate and insist on safety and solve the collective action problem that you have in a race. So to their credit, they don’t all just want to get richer and richer. And in fact, I pushed Demis on this pretty hard and he’s certainly not motivated by earning more money, that’s for sure. He is motivated by scientific curiosity and maybe ego, but not by money. And so I think more than with Wall Street, the AI race raises the issue you’re talking about, of rich people deciding how the rest of us live.

Zachary Karabell: Although you could say in 2008, 2009, into early 2000 teens, that many people would’ve thought about the financial industry, or would’ve said about the financial industry, much of what you just said about the tech industry, that it was a few number of people making hugely consequential decisions that were intimately shaping what people could do, how they could do it, and whether they could do it. So I think part of it is that people feel that there’s this huge gulf between their own lived experience and the lived experience of a lot of people who are shaping their lives intimately. And that’s always been true. It just, I think, creates a kind of a democratic tension, no?

Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah. And I think one other dimension of this discussion is that there are some screwups in the world, where you have powerful people, probably they are also rich people, who do something that causes terrible outcomes for ordinary people, for the majority of the society, and where you can also say, look. The individuals who made these decisions at the top of the system were dumb, and they screwed up, and they were probably also not just dumb, but kind of immoral or something, right? In that category, one might put the Iran War right now, and there were umpteen scenarios about how the Strait of Hormuz might be closed in the context of a conflict in the Gulf, and it seems that none of these were properly considered by the Trump administration before it went to war. So I think they are culpably ignorant in the way they’ve conducted themselves.

But then there’s a second category of screwup, which is more interesting and more subtle, and that is where the individuals in question are very thoughtful and they do consider what could go wrong, and they actually understand the doom scenarios or the downsides better than the rest of us, and yet they still walk into a mess. And I would put in that category, you know, I wrote a book about Alan Greenspan, which is my way of writing about the making of modern finance, and it ends in the apocalyptic 2008 crash, which happened right after Greenspan left office. And I called that book The Man Who Knew, because Greenspan knew that bubbles could disrupt the system. He had written his PhD thesis about that, he was more steeped in what bubbles could do than any of the people who criticized him after ‘08. And yet, even though he was the man who knew, he was not the man who could prevent that happening. And that was a deep, interesting sort of human tragedy story. It wasn’t that he was dumb or evil or anything. He just was in a position where he couldn’t stop it. And I think Demis is like that, too. I think Demis is a good person, and I stress test the character of people I write about very aggressively when I do these projects, because they talk to me for so long, I check quotes with them, generally they are furious, and there’s a lot of confrontation and stress and lawyers threatening me and all that. And you can judge by the quality of that stressful part what kind of a person you are really dealing with. And Demis came through that, he did make me talk to his lawyer, but he was quite reasonable in the end. And so I’m comfortable saying that he is a good person, because I’ve really been down in the pits with him. It’s not true of everybody else in this book, by the way. But in any event, you have a good individual, and yet he is building a technology that he knows to be dangerous. That’s a much more complicated, subtle kind of screwup and, and that’s what my book is really about.

Zachary Karabell: So let’s end where we began. There’s a bit of a cup half full, cup half empty human nature question here, which I circle back to a lot in my own writing and in this podcast. There’s a degree to which what you think of the unknown future is an extension of what you believe about the muddy present, and we’re all temperamentally somewhere on that spectrum of Eeyores versus utopians. And I gather in some of what you’re saying that you have become more sensitized to the downsides, even while being cognizant of the upsides. I don’t know where that fits with you temperamentally, you’re very even-keeled, and you’re far too English to really be able to tell from an American perspective what you think about anything. But there is that question of, are you genuinely concerned we’re, even with good intentions, going to do a kind of an Oppenheimer, right? To be fair, I think Oppenheimer and the nuclear scientists were acutely aware of what they were unleashing. Nobody was at a loss to recognize the dangers. It might’ve been more visceral when he does his famous line at the first successful test, I am become death, destroyer of worlds, which has become one of the great lines uttered by a scientist ever, kind of like, oh my God, what have I done. But have you become more acutely attuned to the downsides, rather than as acutely attuned to the upsides?

Sebastian Mallaby: I think that’s correct. I mean, I have become more attuned to the downsides and therefore I am both encouraged by the fact that I believe that Demis Hassabis is a good person who would like to do his best to make this turn out okay, but I’m discouraged by the lack of political action, both from governments in the US and China. I was actually in China for eight days this month because my book came out first in China, China always does everything faster, and I was encouraged by the fact that there is an elite conversation amongst research computer scientists and also industrial leaders who run AI labs at companies like Ant Financial, and they do talk about safety a lot. So I think it’s possible to talk to China at some point about AI safety, but in the absence of some discussion and some agreement on vetting models before they come out, and avoiding powerful open-weight models that terrorists could use as they wish, I think in the absence of those fixes we’re headed for some sort of catastrophe, and then we’ll have a policy response. And I’d rather avoid the catastrophe.

Zachary Karabell: One certainly would. I think I’ll take the over on your under, which is that we will have, and I’m sure already have had, a series of perilous near-misses relative to that catastrophe, but that some of the greater questions that have bedeviled us, of personalized medicine, individual discoveries of proteins that fit a particular disease profile that would’ve been way too expensive to develop under current models can be done, or will be able to be done, that some of the issues of climate change and technologies that could ameliorate those, some of the drudgery of work, not just the elimination of work or jobs that people like, all of these things are part of the utopian vision that I do think, maybe because of human nature to be highly attuned to risks and much less willing to give credence to the hopes, those things, I believe, will be palpable and evident and transformative in a really positive way, without in any way poo-pooing the degree to which the risks you talk about are kind of equally palpable. And this is one of those, like, well, we’ll see.

Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah. All true and all fair. Thank you for taking the optimistic side to balance my darkness.

Zachary Karabell: Well, I think everyone should read the book and come to their own determination. This is one of these topics where, it’s not just that we’re all entitled to an opinion, but in many respects, how we perceive the future, right, acting on fear is never a particularly good thing. Acting with an awareness of risks is always a good thing. Everyone should read the book, and thank you so much for adding to that conversation.

Sebastian Mallaby: Thank you.

Zachary Karabell: So with that, thank you for listening. We’ll be back next week. Please send your comments and let me know what you think, and let me know what you want me to talk about at theprogressnetwork.org or to my Edgy Optimist through substack.

Thanks for your time.

What Could Go Right? is produced by The Progress Network and Kaleidoscope.

Watch the podcast on YouTube.

Follow us on X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok: @progressntwrk