I have to be honest about something that is a great source of personal shame: I am really, really bad at taking time off of work.

Despite working at a company with unlimited PTO, the last time I took a weeklong vacation was about a year ago, making me a walking cliche of the American who never goes on holiday. You could argue that the reason is cultural, that the Protestant work ethic has me in a chokehold. But I think the root cause is much simpler: For something allegedly relaxing and fun, vacations require a lot of planning and even more money. The price of flights is up, hotel rooms aren’t cheap, you need to factor in the cost of meals, and even that corny souvenir shot glass isn’t going to pay for itself. 

Hannah Sampson, who writes about travel for the Washington Post, says one answer is to take a staycation. “It’s taking the time to do things you normally wouldn’t do in your regular life and put on hold all of the burdensome things that you would do in your daily life,” she told Vox. “You’re enabling yourself to discover something that you might have taken for granted.” 

Plus, she says, a staycation can be “really fun and rewarding while also being budget-friendly and hopefully allowing you to put money aside for the bigger trip that you want to take sometime.”

So how do you make the most of a staycation? And how do you keep your typical day-to-day life from creeping in? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Sampson, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

It sounds like the key to a successful staycation is all about mindset. How do you achieve that mindset shift?

The way to really get into the staycation zone is planning and preparing and getting yourself hyped for what you’re going to do. This is something that I love about going on vacation and it applies to staying home too. 

Read reviews for places that you might want to go. If you’ve picked a restaurant, look at the menu and start to drool over what you’re going to eat. Think about your favorite bookstores or paths or discover a new corner of your neighborhood that you want to explore in advance. The anticipation of that experience will give you that vacation high. 

It’s so hard though, because you’re around the house. How do you make your home feel a little more special?

I think we all got too much practice on this during the pandemic, but there are a lot of things you can do to change the vibes of your house. I have a candle that’s national park-scented, so it’s piney. In my house, we do a lot of things like use audio to set the mood. I have small kids, so we’ll play audio of a ride at Disney World or just ambient sound from a park that we like. 

During the pandemic, my husband and I meant to spend our anniversary at the beach where we got married, but I was pregnant. We couldn’t travel. So we found a webcam that showed the sunset on that beach and we got takeout. It was really sad, but we watched the sunset.

It’s sad, but it’s also quite sweet. It’s like, “We’ll bring the beach to us.”

Exactly. And it was a beautiful sunset.

For me, one of the challenges of a staycation — and for all vacations, if I’m honest — is not letting real life creep in. And that’s beyond taking time to do administrative tasks around the house. That Slack goes off. I get that email. A news alert goes out and I’m just like, “Well, what if I just take a little gander?” How do you keep from letting that happen?

Unplugging is so hard. You could have a couple of small kids and teach them to tell you to get off your phone, which mine have learned to do. My husband actually has a Brick device, which locks your phone for you. The discipline is real there. 

It takes work to force yourself out of that constant need of scrolling through TikTok or just seeing what’s up at work. You don’t need to be on there. If there’s an emergency, they know how to reach you at work. So trust that process. Be super in the moment with whatever you’re doing because you need that mental break, even if you haven’t gone somewhere. 

You need to make the most of the time that you have, especially if you’re taking vacation time and spending it at home. Vacation time is a precious resource that you should be using to the best of your ability. 

Of all the extinction-level threats vying for our attention, AI, climate change, and nuclear war tend to get most of the airplay. But Annie Jacobsen thinks biological war should be near the top of our mental list of doomsday scenarios, too.

She should know — Jacobsen has carved out a unique niche as America’s foremost reporter on the ways we could end the world. Her bestselling 2024 book Nuclear War: A Scenario terrified readers and experts alike, and has been optioned by Hollywood. 

It was while conducting dozens of interviews with high-level government sources for Nuclear War that Jacobsen was told repeatedly that biowarfare should be her next focus.

She took their advice. Her gripping new book Biological War: A Scenario follows a similar ticking-clock format that shows, step by step, just how a humanity-threatening man-made biological catastrophe could play out. (Spoiler alert: not great.)

The result feels like dystopian science fiction, albeit the kind that comes heavily footnoted with government studies that come to similarly grim conclusions. The fact that tech CEOs are also sounding the alarm that advanced AI could make creating killer germs even easier only adds to the growing sense of anxiety. And this book has also been optioned by Hollywood for a TV adaptation. 

Jacobsen sat down with Today, Explained host Noel King to talk through the plot of her nightmare scenario, why we’re still developing biological weapons despite the clear risks, and what needs to happen to avoid disaster. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

How does your book start?

The inciting incident in the book is an accident at a Biosafety Level 4 lab, shorthand BSL-4, in Siberia called Vector. And it’s an actual BSL-4 lab, the highest classification. … And there was an actual accident, an explosion there in 2019. 

In that real-life incident, a deadly pathogen was not released that we know of. But of course, in Biological War: A Scenario, a deadly pathogen is released. And it’s a form of pneumonic plague, which is a nightmare pathogen and sits at the top of the Tier 1 select agent list of the CDC. And so in the first act of the book, I show the scrambling of the intelligence community and the Defense Department, trying desperately to determine if something got out and what it is. … The release of the pathogen widens, and so once you have escape. You do not have mitigation, which has to happen in the first 24, 48 hours. Now you have a situation which is unstoppable.

You say this is now an unstoppable scenario. What is it?

A plague itself, of course, conjures up images and ideas of the bubonic plague of the 14th century, the Black Death. That killed between one half and one third of Europe. The bacteria is called Yersinia pestis. And pneumonic plague is the airborne version of plague. The problem with an airborne pathogen is that because the delivery system is the human lungs, it can move very quickly from a scientist in that lab who now has Yersinia pestis in his lungs out to the general public. And that is precisely what happens in the scenario.

How does it spread from there? The city where this BSL-4 lab sits isn’t Moscow. What happens once the pathogen is in the lungs of the people who work in that lab, or the janitor who was cleaning it that night?

That’s right. Well, suddenly it’s in everyone’s lungs, and those people go out into their community. And even though Koltsovo, the science town where Vector is located, is a small town, it is just 12 miles from Novosibirsk, which is the third-largest city in Russia. And, also, there happens to be in this scenario a group of international hunters on a hunting trip in that area who come across a dying scientist in the snow. One of them gives him CPR, being the Good Samaritan that he is. And lo and behold, those travelers suddenly are now getting on an airplane in Novosibirsk, flying home to where they reside in five or six of the continents.

What makes this form of plague so novel, so dangerous?

I pull this information from actual facts of the Soviet Cold War-era biological weapons program that we know about from Soviet defectors. And I want you to keep in mind: This is 40 years ago when gene editing was in its infancy. But there are two things specifically that the Soviet bioweapons engineers did to plague. 

Their idea was to create a super plague weapon. And one of them has never been revealed before. They were working to insert the gene for euphoria into the plague pathogen. … When you get a disease, a pneumonic-type disease, pneumonia, tubercular, you want to go home and get under the covers because you feel terrible. And when you do that, you’re infecting a lot less people than you would if a gene for euphoria had been inserted into the pathogen, which would make you feel terrific, which would make you want to go out and socialize with people, perhaps even go to a crowded disco. 

And the other thing that the Soviet scientists were working on was a way to defeat medical countermeasures, but with an added component of psychological distress. They inserted a gene into the pathogen that would be triggered by the taking of antibiotics. And that second pathogen would give you encephalitis, which is a swelling of the brain. The psychological part of it, according to the Soviet scientists, was that they wanted the last thought of the person dying of what they thought was pneumonic plague, but would in fact be encephalitist to be, “My government and Western medicine has failed me.”

Those of us who try to remain optimistic think there’s a way to stop it. In the movies, there’s an outbreak, then the government gets it under control, and okay, maybe a lot of people die, but we’re all right. That is not where your book is headed. How does your scenario end?

So in the book, I take readers from outbreak to anarchy in six days. Anarchy is what will happen according to Pentagon war gaming and pandemic planning. And this is because fear of infection becomes a secondary weapon, if you will. People begin to behave like they are about to die, which is most certainly underpinning everyone’s mind. And so after those first six days, the Principals Committee, the President’s Biodefense Committee, must make a decision. The president has to declare the Insurrection Act, which allows the military to step in as a law enforcement agency. 

“Imagine the president — with a few Secret Service outside the door, the military aide with the nuclear football — sitting alone in a room wearing a gas mask.”

What happens to the president really blew my mind as a reporter. He goes somewhere in the United States very far away from everyone. Because the idea, the goal, is to make sure that the president doesn’t get the airborne pathogen in his lungs. So maybe I’ll leave you with an image. Imagine the president — with a few Secret Service outside the door, the military aide with the nuclear football — sitting alone in a room wearing a gas mask.

In the book, the people who survive are the ones who have gas masks. Everyone else is gone.

And look, we hope we never get to that, by all means. But yes, the Pentagon has issued 1.7 million gas masks to its military personnel. And that is a spooky thought in and of itself, coupled with the idea that the military is predominantly male. There’s something like 17 percent women in the military. And so, unlike the Nuclear War scenario in which I had science-based nuclear winter theory to work from, in Biological War, nothing has been written on the science record about what it might be after. And so the one imaginative part of the book is the very end where I write about biological twilight. … And it is a very, very ugly world.

Let’s back up. We did outlaw biological weapons at some point, right?

That’s right. Very mysteriously in 1969, President Nixon just unilaterally declared that the arsenal was going to be destroyed. At the same time that all of the nations of the world were working to sign this treaty called the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty, which would outlaw bioweapons. Soviet Russia at the time signed it but immediately began work on an illegal biological weapons program that was colossal. And this went without notice, without any idea really by the CIA and the Pentagon all the way until 1989, when one of the Soviet scientists named Vladimir Pasechnik had a crisis of conscience and he defected and he told British intelligence all about the program.

Where have we seen biological weapons used?

Maybe the most important example of a biological attack in the past, certainly here in the United States, are the anthrax attacks, which occurred right after 9/11. Weaponized anthrax was sent through the mail to US senators and a number of media outlets. So five people ended up dying; 22 got sick in four states. But that really kicked off what can be considered the biological military-industrial complex, if you will, which led to this buildup in BSL-4 labs around the world today. There are 110 BSL-4 labs around the world. There are more than 3,500 BSL-3 labs.

Your book has a map of where those labs are, which I found weirdly comforting, mainly because I don’t live too near any of them. If one of these things is going to be released, either accidentally or deliberately, where is the threat coming from? A rogue nation? Terrorists?

Certainly, bad actors getting a hold of a biological weapon was the great concern of the post-anthrax situation. And that is why so much emphasis was put on bioterrorism. Now I avoided that specifically in the book. … And I didn’t even have an attack. Rather, I had an incident. I had a lab leak because I have learned in the decades since that really is the greatest concern. So many of these BSL-3 and 4 labs are in places without a lot of security, including in countries where there are wars going on.

Could somebody be making a biological weapon in a basement somewhere, off books?

Absolutely. And another disturbing document I came across, unclassified in the Pentagon, was a threat spectrum that showed weapons of mass destruction in terms of destructiveness. And of course, nuclear weapons sit at the far end of the spectrum. They are the most destructive. But very close behind were biological weapons. And even more startling was the notion that biological weapons present the greatest overall threat. 

Nuclear weapons have an extremely high barrier for entry. You have to have fissile material. … You have to have a weapons delivery system like an ICBM or a submarine. … That creates a situation where most nuclear weapons, all nuclear weapons, if you will, are in the hands of a command-and-control system within a nation. 

Biological weapons have no such barriers. In fact, the barriers for entry are getting lower literally by the day. You now can have a situation where someone with very limited knowledge of biology can create a biological weapon in their basement with the use of computational systems like an AI system, for example.

Your book reads like a thriller. How much have you exaggerated? How much have you novelized in order to hold our attention?

Everything in the book is based in science fact, meaning all of the facts, all of the figures. I write a hundred or so pages of notes in the back of the book for readers to be able to answer the question that you are asking me. … In the notes, you can find that answer.

Did any of those people give you good recommendations for how to avoid a disaster scenario, or at least how to avoid these things proliferating?

Well, you know, the ticking clock scenario that I write has an even more urgent ticking clock, which is the public’s pressure on lawmakers to absolutely do something about this nightmare scenario before it happens. Look, we have a world right now where you have the CEOs of the largest AI companies in the world admitting publicly that the lane of bio mixed with AI is of their top concern. You don’t hear that about nuclear. You hear that about bio.

How do you sleep through the night?

Anyone who knows me personally can vouch for the fact that I am an optimist at heart. I really believe that information is king. Once you know things, it gives you a lot of power. Perhaps that’s whistling by the graveyard, but that’s what works for me.

Do you have a biohazard suit?

I do not. I do not. But I do have a few gas masks. I must tell the truth.

With the 2026 midterm elections quickly approaching, President Donald Trump’s war with Iran is ongoing and gas prices remain high. 

Americans are taking note: On this week’s episode of America, Actually, host Astead Herndon visits Allentown, Pennsylvania in the state’s bellwether Seventh District, to hear how persistently high gas prices — almost $4.20 per gallon in Pennsylvania — are showing up in residents’ lives. Many said the economy and prices were at the top of their list of issues, and laid the blame at Trump’s feet.

Still, gas is just one expense of many, for voters who are likely also feeling the pinch with the cost of groceries, housing, electricity, and more. So how much power do gas prices really have to shape the outcome of an election — and, potentially, a presidency? And after decades of renewable energy growth, technological disruption, and new existential worries, why are gas prices still so core to the American political conversation?

To learn more, Herndon spoke with Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. They discussed the history of gas prices as a salient political issue, why Americans feel high prices so acutely, even compared to other commodities, and whether voters are ever willing to overlook gas prices when they go to the polls.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

When did the price of gas become such a political weapon in America? Does this date all the way back to the Model T?

It really dates to the 1970s. That’s when the United States will have two energy crises, in 1973 and 1979, and the price of gas becomes a huge political issue for Americans. It affects presidents, it affects Congress, and it becomes a manifestation in that decade of the problems facing the country.

I think that’s when we start to realize we don’t have unlimited resources and it’s gonna be a political problem.

Can you go in more detail about that? What happened in the ’70s to make it so clear to Americans that this party might not last forever?

Production of oil here peaks in the late 1960s, early 1970s, and then in 1973, OPEC, which is the cartel of oil-producing countries in the Middle East, imposes an embargo on the US because the United States had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War. And as a result of the embargo, prices go up and supplies go down, and that’s when Americans start to face gas lines.

Then, in 1979, we have another round of this after the Iranian Revolution, and that leads to even bigger gas lines and more stringent rations and government mandates in ’79, and many people think it really helped bring down Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

Carter in 1979 is really reeling from what Americans experience. And it’s not simply gas prices, it’s waiting in line for gas. It’s hearing that you could only buy gas on certain days. It’s reading stories about people stealing gas and violent clashes occurring over getting this commodity. 

There’s a lot of things that go into the mix with Carter — the hostages in Iran — but certainly his difficulty dealing with this fundamental is a big part of what happens in 1980 when Reagan wins the presidency.

Of course, presidents have little control over the global price of oil, yet they are blamed for it seemingly every time. How have politicians and particularly presidents dealt with that reality, considering the price at the pump is so important to their political futures while not always in their control?

In the ’70s they tried with legislation. Carter pushes legislation that deals with energy, but it’s limited in its success. Americans want a lot of oil and it was hard to get them to conserve.

He put solar panels on the White House. There’s really not much that presidents can do. We have the strategic reserves. And other than that, I think presidents just wait it out and hope the timing works in their favor and the gas prices go down again.

Is there an example of a president who beat the gas prices trap? Do we have any example of someone successfully convincing the country, “Hey, look away from the price of the pump”?

I think we have presidents who say, “Just look away for a little while,” and when reelection comes around again, they’re doing better. Even President George W. Bush struggled with some of this after 9/11 and after the war started. But in the end, he doesn’t make an announcement about it so much as focus on other issues such as national security.

And now we see how prices fluctuate, so you just wait for those moments.

Why is it always gasoline rather than other commodities when we think about the priorities for the electorate?

There’s a few things. One is that, historically, the automobile really symbolizes American freedom and American consumption. And so when something impinges on our ability to drive a lot…

Second, it’s a price you just see. It’s just very visible when it goes up or down, more than groceries even.

I think that kind of recurring image for people becomes very politically potent if that number gets too high. So it’s a real struggle, but it’s also symbolically right in front of us. And these days, I think even more so now than in the ’70s or ’80s, it’s become something that the reporters and the media track.

I want to talk specifically about this summer. We’ve crossed $4/gallon again this summer, the highest since 2022, and this time it’s pretty clearly tied with the ongoing war in Iran.

Donald Trump has tried to make the argument that some short-term pain at the pump is worth a long-term national security focus. But his energy secretary said pretty clearly that gas won’t be back to $3 until 2027. Obviously, that puts us after the midterm elections. It sounds like he’s running the exact playbook you just told me has never worked, which is to get people to just pretend this is not happening.

What have you thought about how the president has handled the spike in gas prices?

In part it strikes me as a president who doesn’t really care about the fate of his party. I think it’s a big issue. I think most Republicans understand that. And it’s tied to a war that really doesn’t have public support.

It’s a war without the kind of clarity that many people felt after 9/11 with Afghanistan, and Iraq for a while. It’s the worst of all worlds. And so I think he’s really fumbled on this issue, and there was part of him that hoped people either wouldn’t care even if they noticed, or somehow the prices would diminish. It’s certainly not looking that way.

Some of the biggest names on Google's AI team got new jobs this week. In some cases, including for legendary Googler Jeff Dean, those jobs are no longer at Google. Given that Google's models seem to be behind the best of what's coming out of anthropic and OpenAI, is this a sign of Google in turmoil? Is it about Demis Hassabis wanting something more interesting to work on than virtual assistants? Or is there something else entirely happening here?

On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay and David start by discussing the leadership shake-up at Google, the state of the AI race, and whether Google is actually set up to succeed here. They also t …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Democratic socialists keep winning primary elections, and Democratic voters are trending in the same direction: Recent polling suggests that a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults now identify as democratic socialists. Most recently, Abdul El-Sayed, who does not identify as a democratic socialist but was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and supports policies like Medicare-for-all, won a fiercely fought Democratic Senate primary in Michigan. 

As democratic socialists gain ground in Democratic politics, President Donald Trump and Republicans have attempted to conflate democratic socialism with communism (though allegations of “communism” are hardly new territory for Trump). At the same time, recent reporting has pointed out that, in fact, there are some members within the Democratic Socialists of America who openly identify as communists.

To help us understand what communism actually is and its history in the United States, Today Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Maurice Isserman, a history professor at Hamilton College. Isserman has written extensively about the history of communism in the United States, including in his latest book is Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

Define communism for me. 

Communism began as a split off from the socialist movement. It was inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917. And it is in favor of a total transformation of capitalist society with the government — the state — owning and operating what communists would call the means of production: factories, transportation, and so forth. It also believes in one-party rule. So for 75 years or so, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union allowed no competing parties to exist within that country.

There have been communists in the United States of America before. What is their history in this country? 

The American Communist Party was founded in 1919, right after the First World War.

And it was, again, inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. It seemed to point to a way out. The Bolsheviks came to power, remained in power. And so communists or would-be communists in the United States, in Europe, elsewhere said, “Well, if they can do it, we can do it too.” So an American Communist Party was founded in 1919 — small, isolated, mostly immigrants, but it gained strength in the course of the 1930s during the Great Depression.

Why did they gain strength during the Great Depression? 

Because capitalism seemed to be failing and communism seemed to be the wave of the future. The other factor leading to the increase in communist influence was that fascism was rising in Italy, in the 1920s, in Germany, in the early 1930s. And it seemed as if there was a stark choice facing the world: either fascism or communism. And many people in the 1930s said, “Well, let’s support the communists to beat back the threat of fascism.”

Did elected communists get anything done in the United States?

Well, there were very few elected communists. In the 1940s, there were two communist members of the New York City Council, but that was about it in terms of open communists being elected to office. Their influence was seen more behind the scenes in the labor movement, in organizing the big new industrial unions of the 1930s, and organizing so-called front groups, anti-fascist groups, anti-racist groups, and so forth. And the party was never huge. At its height at the end of the 30s, it had perhaps 75,000 members in a country then with a population of 130 million. Its influence extended beyond its own membership, but it was still very much a minor party — growing, but minor.

Why did communism fail in the United States of America? 

One reason was that it was repressed by the government pretty much throughout its existence — in the first Red Scare immediately after the First World War, and then again in the second Red Scare, which we commonly refer to as the McCarthy era in the late ’40s and through the 1950s. Communists were sent to jail for advocacy, for simply saying that they favored communism.  

But it also failed because of its rather slavish obedience to the dictates of Soviet leaders. When the Soviet foreign policy changed from anti-fascism and anti-Hitlerism in the mid- to late ’30s to a kind of de facto alliance with Hitler from 1939 to 1941, the American Communist Party obediently followed that line. Then Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and the Soviet Union swung back to anti-fascism. Well, [the American Communist Party] made that turn too. But all of those turns gave the communists a reputation as an organization that did not really exist to serve American interests, but rather to serve Soviet interests.

We know from reporting that’s been done that there are people within the DSA who identify as communists. Can you help us understand who these folks are within the organization and what they actually believe?

There are a number of left-wing factions. There’s a group called Red Star. There’s another one called the Marxist Unity Group. There are three or four of them that work in coalition. They’re rivals, but they also work in coalition to control, by a narrow margin, the national leadership. One of the members of Red Star is a co-chair of the organization. 

These people make no bones about their belief. They’re not secret communists infiltrating. They describe themselves as being inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution or being inspired by Maoist China, or they call themselves Marxist-Leninist. So they’re quite open about it, and that comes out of a different political tradition, an antithetical tradition to democratic socialism. 

They have a different ultimate strategy in mind, which is not to work within the Democratic Party as AOC is committed to do, as Zohran Mandami is committed to do, but rather they want to split and start an independent revolutionary socialist party, which will run against both Democrats and Republicans, which is a strategy that has been tried an infinite number of times in the past by various groups of leftists.

Is this a Red Scare, or is there something to be scared about here?

It’s definitely a Red Scare. Trump and his allies don’t have a lot going for them in this election cycle. They’ve got an unwinnable war going on. They’ve got gasoline prices skyrocketing. Trump is even underwater on immigration, his signature issue. So what do you do in that situation? You create a boogeyman, or try to. And the difference is that most Americans under the age of 45 have no memory whatsoever of the existence of the Soviet Union as a threat to the United States. 

When you launch a Red Scare in 1919, well, there’s communist Russia. When you launch a Red Scare in the 1940s and ’’50s, well, there’s the Soviet Union. There’s a real threat. I mean, they have missiles and so forth. 

Who’s supposed to be the foreign threat today controlling the actions of these American communists? Cuba? Cuba can’t even keep the lights on for its own people. It doesn’t have missiles. It’s not going to invade the United States or its allies. So I think this is an attempt to launch a Red Scare using DSA as kind of a boogeyman. But DSA, again, is not one thing. It has the ‘left wing of the possible’ Democratic socialists, who I would say include such figures as Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And then it has, unfortunately, some would-be Bolsheviks, so it’s really a question of which DSA is going to prevail in the long run. 

Which one do you think will prevail in the long run?

I’m a historian. I’m very good at predicting the past, and I’m terrible at predicting the future.

Today, I’m talking with Gaby Del Valle, a policy reporter here at The Verge, about the growing backlash against AI data centers. 

Gaby recently reported a fantastic piece about Hernando County, Florida, where last month the county commission unanimously approved a yearlong moratorium on data center construction. She attended a protest there organized by a group called Humans First, a conservative grassroots movement focused on combating AI data center build-outs. 

You’ll hear Gaby explain that it was part of a bigger, broader, and bipartisan opposition to data centers. Not only as physical buildings, but as infrastructure that powers an AI boom that takes local jobs and fills feeds with slop.

Data center construction has become a proxy for the public’s feelings about AI: something physical they can aim their fear and frustration at — and even create enough pressure to stop through community organizing and protests.

So I wanted Gaby to talk me through what these protests look like on the ground, from voters whose party affiliations have typically aligned them with big business. You’ll hear Gaby say data centers are scrambling party lines, turning diehard Trump voters into protesters who care about left-coded issues like groundwater contamination and forever chemicals. 

It’s a confusing time, and data centers are going to play a major role in electoral politics going forward. So I suspect this won’t be the last we hear from Gaby on movements like Humans First.

Okay: Verge policy reporter Gaby Del Valle on the bipartisan data center backlash. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Gaby Del Valle, you’re a policy reporter here at The Verge. Welcome back to Decoder.

Thank you. Happy to be here.

I’m excited to talk to you. You were on previously with our friend Alex Heath, but this is the first time I’ve gotten to talk to you in Decoder. I think the story you just wrote about data centers and conservative backlash in Florida is just a real preview of what tech policy going into the midterm elections is going to be like.

You were just there. You talked to a bunch of people who are protesting data centers. It is a real alignment scramble in terms of our politics. Tell us what you found.

What I found was people are really, really, really, really mad. And the reasons why they’re mad are different depending on the community, but they’re also all the same, if that makes sense. They have localized concerns. They were telling me Florida’s really humid. It doesn’t make sense to build a data center that needs to be kept very cool and dry in such a humid place. A lot of them were concerned about their groundwater. They were concerned about PFAS getting dumped into the water.

But I’ve also talked to people in Arizona who have the opposite concern. Arizona is not very humid. Arizona’s very dry. And they’re also like, “It doesn’t make sense to build a data center in the desert.” So whatever your community is, you’re like, “It doesn’t make sense to build a data center here because of X reason,” basically.

The thing that really strikes me in reading your piece and hearing about the other reporting you’re doing for pieces to come is that data center build-outs and data center protests do not neatly map to the usual right-left culture war alignment that we have seen play out for so long. And I’m curious about your view on that. Why can’t Elon Musk just command his army of followers to be pro-data centers?

This is so interesting to me. So this is a little bit of backstory that’s going to answer your question. The woman who organized Humans First, which was bipartisan and now is focusing only on organizing conservatives, was an early founder or organizer with the Tea Party way back when. And this has a similar vibe to me. It’s not a left-right thing. It’s a populous technocrat divide.

You’re seeing that on the right and the left. So for example, at the Abundance Conference last year, it was center-right to center-left-ish. And everybody was pro-nuclear, pro-AI. And we were hearing that, “These things are here to stay. We have to figure out how to do it smartly.” At the same time, the populist left and the populist right are both skeptical of tech development, to put it lightly.

That skepticism plays out across a number of dimensions. I couldn’t help but be struck as I read your story by how many strains of conspiracy thinking there are about data centers.

I’m curious if they’re just visible. They’re so big, and they require so much development and so much build-out that you can just glue any concerns you have onto them. “This big thing is happening, and I don’t feel any control. And I’m also worried about 5G, Chinese government interference, and X, Y, Z. And I can just point it all at this very big thing by which there’s a process to say no. I can go to my local town board meeting and literally say no.”

I mean, I think that’s part of it. It’s interesting because I think there’s a spectrum of conspiratorial thinking to, I guess, misinformed thinking on the water use question. We now know that they don’t use as much water as we previously thought, et cetera, et cetera. But on the far end of the spectrum, one of the people I talked to told me that cattle born near data centers are all stillborn. I tried to track that down. I was like, “Where did this come from?” And it was one farmer in Texas who claims he had one stillborn calf on his cattle farm.

So that got spun out via the internet rumor, social media mill. I think that’s part of it. There’s this issue of social collapse that comes out once you talk to people a little bit. One of the women I talked to said, “I had this friend. ChatGPT told her she couldn’t be friends with me anymore.” You have all of these stories of people harming themselves, going off their medication, or whatever because they’ve been talking to a chatbot and it goes awry.

I think this gives people a feeling of control. Where I can go to my community board meeting or my council members’ meeting, and I can say, “I don’t want this big building that houses the scary thing that is fracturing my community here.” So it’s not just the actual building. I think it’s a broader backlash to generative AI and to LLMs specifically.

One of my ideas that I’ve been pushing on lately is that the AI products are not winning over hearts and minds in the market. So if the data centers just said Netflix on them, maybe people would like them more.

But instead, that’s where the slop is coming from, and it’s why the jobs are going to go away. It’s also where Mark Zuckerberg is just going to get even wealthier. Is there a dynamic of that — that people just don’t like the thing that the data centers make?

Yes, absolutely. They don’t like a lot of the things that the data centers make. It’s not just AI. I think AI is a big part of it, but this is a little preview of a different story I’m working on… In Tucson, there’s a data center project that’s getting built out. The people I talked to there said, “Yeah, this might be an Amazon Web Services facility, and Amazon works with ICE.” So this technology is fueling mass deportations through, not directly, but creating the non-sexy infrastructure that surveillance is built on.

There are two things to it. Part of it is a NIMBY, “I don’t want this thing in my backyard, literally. I don’t want my town to get polluted. I don’t want this. I don’t want that. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want the noise pollution.” And then the other part is, “I do not like what this big building represents and what it has wrought on society.”

Does that cut across bipartisan lines? Or is that more culture war coded?

It’s both. It cuts across culture war lines in that people have different concerns about what LLMs do. So one woman I spoke to was talking about the fracturing of social bonds. On the construction front, she was like, “We’re a rural-ish community. We don’t want this big blight on our nice rolling hills.” So that’s a right-coded thing. And there was a lot of anti-development stuff that is neither right nor left. 

On the left, I would say there’s similar culture war concerns, but it’s… I don’t know if this is necessarily a culture war concern, but fueling deportations. Both sides, I think, are concerned about the job losses because of AI. And both sides have caught on to the fact that these facilities don’t really have a lot of long-term job prospects. There’s the big construction boom. There’s an HVAC situation. But to actually maintain these facilities, it doesn’t require that many people.

I think people have caught onto that. The promises of the AI data job, or that the AI boom will lead to jobs related to data centers, are not actually true.

Yeah. At most, it’s a few hundred jobs for each of these facilities, at least in the data centers we have now. Why do you think some of the protests make national news? The Kevin O’Leary data center in Utah is a national story. Maybe it’s just because he’s a cartoon character.

And then there’s a new project in Georgia where there might be a huge OpenAI facility that seems to go under the radar. There are all of the projects in Florida that you are reporting on, but don’t seem to be explosive in the way that some of the other ones are.

Yeah, I think that’s a good question. There was one in Florida that was explosive, and it was just because it was near Mar-a-Lago. I think that one pretty obviously made the national news because it’s related to the president. I honestly think a cartoon character at the center of it is the deciding factor a lot of the time on whether it’ll become a national story or not. And then also the numbers. The Utah one, I don’t remember off the top of my head how big it’s supposed to be, but it’s supposed to be huge. So then that becomes a proxy for all data center development. 

They’re being planned everywhere. And I think what’s so interesting is that the backlash exists everywhere too. I relied a lot on, for example, the Tampa Bay Times to figure out the background for this story. They’re on top of it. They’re going to these meetings and watching people get yelled at and asked, “Did you sign an NDA? Yes or no?”

Do you think the local governments are being responsive? You’ve now gone to some of these protests; you’ve talked to people on the ground in various counties across the country. The basic unit of democracy is supposed to be your local government because you know those people and you can yell at them in the grocery store and the town board meeting. 

We’re seeing there’s a wall going up in some of these cases where the local governments are saying, “No, we have to do this development. This is the only economic development available.” And the people are saying, “No, we’re going to throw you out.” Do you think local governments on the whole are being responsive or not responsive at all?

I think it really depends. In Hernando County, they did pass a moratorium. There are a lot of counties in Florida where moratoriums have passed. But in Tucson, again, the city government is responsive to what the people want and the county government isn’t, and they’re at odds with each other. There are all these videos of people yelling at their representatives about NDAs again. And then them being like, “We cannot say whether we signed an NDA,” which is an answer, but whatever.

I think it really depends on a lot of things. How small the communities are, for one. How vulnerable the people in office feel to getting voted out, I think, is another big one. In Florida, the Republican primary for governor, I think, might be affected by this issue. The primary is in a few weeks and the front-runner, Byron Donalds, has taken a lot of money from the AI industry and data center development groups. And people are mad. People are really mad. 

He was endorsed by Trump, and everyone I spoke to, as proud Trump voters, said things like, “I don’t understand why Trump would endorse him. I’m not going to vote for him.” One woman I talked to who told me she was opposed to everything Democrat said she would vote for a Democrat or an independent if Donalds won the primary. And Donalds has also changed… not his stance on data center development, but the way that he talks about it in response to a lot of this backlash.

How has he changed the stance? How is he talking about it now?

He says his vision is to make Florida the financial capital of the world. And to a lot of people, that would sound great, but these people are really upset by this, both because they… I mean, there are a lot of other things at play here. Housing costs in Florida have gone up exponentially. Not only in big cities like Miami, but in the suburbs of Tampa, for example. Housing prices have shot up to levels that I, as somebody who grew up there, just don’t understand. I literally can’t wrap my head around it.

So I think a lot of the backlash to development and to data centers is also related to people’s cost of living going up and to these, in their words, outside developers coming in and changing a community that’s already changing. He has since said that we need data center development, but we need to do it responsibly. 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is another great example of this. He supported a bill that would require data centers to pay their own utilities and also let counties require them to use reclaimed water, which would address the water issue. But the Tampa Bay Times reported that he also supported legislation that gives massive tax breaks to data centers. And that he pushed to amend that law, which I think was signed in 2017, to only apply to hyperscale data centers, which are the ones that people have problems with.

The people I talk to, they know that there are currently data centers in Florida, and they’re smaller. There are no hyperscale data centers, but there are around one hundred smaller ones for Netflix or whatever. And they’re okay with that. One woman I talked to works in IT. She said, “I understand that data centers are a boogeyman, and we need them for stuff. But I don’t want this massive facility using all of our power, emitting these frequencies, et cetera, et cetera.” Another thing that I think is really interesting-

Wait, can you just explain what “emitting these frequencies” means?

[Laughs] Just the noise. I talked to these guys at the Border Security Expo who work for a data center company, and they all live in Virginia. Even they were like, “Yeah, it sucks.” They said, “I hate walking around my neighborhood because I just hear it all the time.” And they work in data centers. I don’t think she meant 5G. 

It’s a real element of this, right next to China being a villain of whatever persuasion you need China to be a villain for. Again, there’s just a piece of all this where it’s a big thing that you can stop. The power of NIMBYism can stop this. Maybe we can’t stop everything else. We can’t stop Facebook from doing targeted advertising that feels like it’s listening to you. No one knows how to stop this. It’s bad. We don’t like it, but no one knows how to stop it.

“I can stop this building from being built” seems like it not only scrambles our culture war lines, but it’s scrambling politics, too. Byron Donalds saying he wants Florida to be the financial capital of the world. One, it’s very funny in that he has to contend with the existence of New York, London, Beijing, and Amsterdam. Go down the line. 

There are a lot of places that can compete for that title where Miami might not be in the running. But doing it via building data centers is not the path to that result. It’s just a bunch of economic development that might result in some short-term gains.

It feels like people have clocked it, and they’ve clocked that it’s a thing you can stop. I’m curious if there’s anything else. You’ve spent a lot of time covering the right, and I wonder if there’s anything else that scrambles the lines like that. Because in almost every other case, “let’s build stuff, let’s tear down the White House and build a ballroom” is fine. Building things is better, and it is coded in one side of the culture war.

Yeah. I mean, this is, again, so Florida specific, but it really surprised me how much of the politics around this were scrambled. One of the women was talking about this ballot initiative that’s going to pass. It’s going to give more tax exemptions to homeowners, which I feel is a standard Republican thing — lower taxes for homeowners. People would like that.

She said, “This is terrible. It’s going to deprive county governments of funds that they would otherwise get from homeowners, which will then entice the counties even further to have data centers come into our communities.” So she was thinking of the second- and third-order effects of this, even though that’s a pretty populist initiative. But yeah, it’s all so scrambled. 

How do you see the scramble inside of the right and then carrying over to the populist left? The idea that a bunch of billionaires threw all of their weight behind Donald Trump in 2024, and that led to, I don’t know, a bunch of podcast bros throwing their weight behind Donald Trump in 2024. There was a cultural wave of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and the All-In podcast about building and tech and the future. It feels like that has come to one kind of end.

I don’t think that that wave is driving the culture anymore because of the backlash to AI. We can all see the college students booing at graduation. If the backlash is there against the data centers, against AI taking the jobs, against billionaires in general, what does that turn into on the right? Because that was the animating force of the right for so long.

I think that is still an open question. I think the question is whether this backlash is strong enough to shake people’s other partisan concerns.

If you’ve got a Democrat candidate who is anti-data center development, but also not super gung-ho about deputizing all Florida police officers to do ICE arrests, where does that leave someone who supports Trump’s immigration policies but doesn’t want a data center in their neighborhood? I don’t know. I think that’s what the party is struggling with right now.

I mean, I think Trump is this perfect avatar for people because he somehow stands for anti-elite sentiment, but also for hard work and capitalism. He’s just this perfect blend of, I don’t even know how to describe it. He contains multitudes, I guess. And nobody else can contain multitudes like him. They don’t have the juice. They just don’t have it.

Can I make the argument?

Yeah.

I think I can make the argument. I grew up in Wisconsin, which has many similar dynamics to maybe Florida, in that people in Wisconsin remember a time when there were big factories. In the town I grew up in, Racine, there used to be a Case factory that made tractors. There was a Chrysler factory in Kenosha that made Jeep Wranglers. This is a real thing that occurred, and all those things are gone. 

So Trump would promise all of this huge economic development that basically looked like manufacturing. I think what his version of this, even with tariffs, was, “We will bring manufacturing back to all of these places. And that manufacturing will require a lot of hard work, but there will be dignity in that hard work.”

At the end of it, you’re going to get to point to a Modine air conditioner and be like, “I made that thing. My community made that thing.” I think that is very seductive. I mean, Trump spent years promising that we would build iPhones in America, and that’s Wisconsin and Foxconn and all this stuff.

Maybe none of those things were ever going to come true because that’s not how anything gets made anymore. And that’s not even the kind of work people actually want to do in America anymore. But you take all of that energy, and you’re like, “Actually, what we’re going to make is data centers.” And no one can see at the end of that, “I made a Jeep Wrangler.” They get to see that Elon Musk got richer; they just lost their jobs, their children feel like they have no future, and their feeds are full of slop.

And I feel like something gets disconnected in the multitudes where you can tell everyone, “Yeah, the best I can do for you is make you the world’s richest factory foreman.” So people are like, “That sounds awesome. That’s better than whatever nonsense I’m doing online.” But you can’t be like, “I’m going to make Sam Altman richer,” because that doesn’t mean anything to anyone. All of this construction doesn’t do anything for anyone.

I look at the backlash, and all I see is that a lot of people across the political spectrum have come to that realization. You can tear down our communities to build bridges and factories, and you can pollute the skies with smokestacks as long as we all get jobs. But if you’re going to do all that and all I get is more AI-generated movie posters on Amazon Prime whose price keeps going up every month, screw you. And I’m wondering if that connection is… That’s my guess. I’m wondering if you see any hints of that connection in your reporting as you talk to all these people.

I think so. I think the Florida version of making a Jeep Wrangler is like, there were orange groves and cattle ranches, and now there are not. I used to drive past an orange grove when I was a kid. That orange grove is gone. It’s a Publix now. There was an old cow field. Now that’s a mall.

On the one hand, that’s what people want. People want consumption, but they also, at least in Florida, liked thinking that they lived near an orange grove. Like, “Oh, maybe the guy’s using tons of pesticides. Maybe the orange grove is worse for your health than the data center.” I don’t know. I don’t have the stats on this. But you could see the tangible effects of what your economy was producing.

Now it’s just like, “There’s a building that none of us can go in. It makes a horrible noise. And I think it’s drinking all my water?” And then it’s also making your kids dumb and alienated, and making everybody lose their jobs. People don’t like that.

Again, these aren’t Luddites. The woman I talked to said, “I found out about the Humans First organizing [efforts] via Facebook. I know there’s an irony in that. I know there’s an irony in me working in IT and opposing this data center.” They’re not dumb. They understand that all of these things that we’ve built our lives around require something to power them. They just don’t want that something to be within driving distance of their house. They want it somewhere else.

And it’s unclear where that somewhere else should be apart from space.

Apart from space.

That is a very different episode of Decoder. But that’s one answer the industry has: “These people, their stupid concerns are too annoying. We’ll just put the data centers in space,” and maybe they’ll solve that problem. Who knows?

The other answer is, “We’ll just horsepower over their concerns. This is too important. We’re going to do it anyway. And maybe we’ll just subsidize a bunch of education in some community. Maybe we’ll just pay a bunch of extra money. Maybe we’ll pay for everyone’s electricity.”

I don’t know if those have gotten any traction. Is there anything that the tech companies or the neoclouds could do in these communities to overcome the objections? Could they just pay for healthcare? Or is that just a non-starter?

I don’t know about paying for healthcare, but something that I didn’t include in the piece,  because it was extremely dry and very technical, was that the small protest ended with about an hour and a half long presentation from a land use expert on how to write local zoning ordinances to prevent hyperscale data centers from being built. It was really specific stuff, like “You could have them on multiple small parcels of land.” It was really dry. “You could require them to use this amount of reclaimed water, et cetera, et cetera.”

I think what people want more than the data centers not being there is a degree of community input on how they’re built — if they’re going to be built. I think if they got that, they would maybe not be pacified, but they would at least not feel like there’s a big external force coming in and steamrolling their community, especially when they already feel like that in every other aspect of their life.

This is the thing that I’m most curious about. So much of our politics and our culture has been nationalized. Everything happens at the national level. The fact that the mayor of New York is a national political figure is at once very silly and also just the funniest thing that has happened in a long time.

Data centers are very local. They’re happening to people in their backyards, and a data center being built in Florida, Georgia, or Tucson has nothing to do with me in New York. It’s far away enough.

Maybe what you’re hearing from everybody is just, “Somewhere else, and as we get to somewhere else, I won’t care.” But it is very local. And then it is very in person. People are going to the meetings; they’re encountering one another. There have been stories of bridges across party lines from people who would never like each other normally because they both hate the data centers.

Is there an element of a return to actual local politics and actual community building here that could be catalyzed by opposition to data centers?

I really think so. Again, I’m talking to organizers in multiple states who are going to these community, town council, or county council meetings and yelling at their representatives. And sometimes it’s hundreds of people. I think this is maybe a weird analogy, but it reminds me of the local backlash to right-wing organizing and local education policy, which is where a lot of the anti-trans backlash started. You’d go into the school board, and you’d be like, “I don’t want this gender stuff being taught to my child. I don’t want my kids to know that slavery was bad.”

I’m not comparing them in terms of value judgment. I just think it’s at a level of local engagement that is at the same time a national issue. It’s these really, really, really localized policies that may end up driving, if not national policy change and national policy discussions, but at least national political vibes. Whoever wins the Democratic and Republican primaries and runs for president in 2028, what are they going to be saying about data centers? I don’t know, but I know it’s going to be informed by what happens this year and next year.

I’m actually very curious how Trump handles it. As you said, he contains multitudes. He’s very good at reading his own base. It feels like the Trump base is very much polarized around data centers. There are a lot of people who love Donald Trump but hate data centers. And then there’s his money, which loves the AI build-out and loves data centers. That is a fracture as deep as anything.

A lot of those folks will say, “AI just has a marketing problem. If only we could convince people of the benefits of this build-out and the super intelligence to come, they would be on board.”

The best marketer they could have for that would be Donald Trump. But he doesn’t seem to be willing to make those claims at the level that they might need. And certainly he is very attuned to his base hating AI. How do you think he’s going to play it? And how do you think the MAGA coalition will respond to it?

Okay, so do you remember when Trump was talking about H-1B visas? Or not even when he was talking about it, but just the whole swirl around what we’re going to do about these?

Yeah.

Trump said, “I think we should stamp an H-1B visa to every foreign student’s college graduation diploma.” And I thought, “What are you talking about? Your administration is charging $100,000 for these visas.” He kept saying things like, “These kids are really smart. We need them in America building chips.”

I think he’s just going to do it like that. The thing about Trump is that he can say literally whatever, and he can do literally whatever, and the people who like him will continue to like him. Sometimes they’ll be like, “Oh, well, I don’t like this particular policy of his. I don’t know why he endorsed this candidate,” but they’re still going to back the guy.

But enough to split the difference on this issue? In every other issue, he could polarize the electorate, and he would get there, but, “I’m going to put a data center in the backyard, and it’s going to make that noise.” Maybe not enough.

But the thing is that they don’t see it as coming from Trump. They’re thinking, “These companies are coming into our community.” And if you connect the dots, it’s like, “Who supports those companies? The president. Who is giving the president a lot of money? All these different companies.”

That’s not how people see it. They see it as these tech oligarchs who are just disconnected from politics and disconnected from anything because of all their money. They don’t see that as having a connection to the president. Instead, they see that as having a connection to the governor, to the board of commissioners, or whatever. But Trump is floating above it all. I don’t know why.

Well, I’m curious, and maybe we should end it here. The Florida gubernatorial primaries are coming up. If Donalds loses, even with that Trump endorsement over the data center issue, do you think that will be a signal or a predictor of what will happen in the midterms?

I think it would be a massive signal, if only because Donalds is polling so much further ahead than everybody else. He’s the clear frontrunner, and the lieutenant governor who’s polling second is also pro-data centers. If any of the anti-data center candidates win the Republican primary, that is going to be huge and completely unexpected by everybody in the state. But it could happen. Crazier things have happened.

We’re going to be doing a lot of coverage of this in the months to come, especially ahead of the midterms, because this scrambling of party lines, this scrambling of the culture war, seems very important. The politics we’ve had for so long, they don’t seem like they can hold up to everyone hating the same thing.

Maybe that’s all America needs. It does seem like every American hating these big buildings that make loud noises might be the thing that unifies us, which is good or bad. You can make your own decisions, but I can’t think of anything else. There’s nothing else that’s cutting across party lines this way. Can you?

Literally nothing. Nothing at all. And it’s cutting across party lines, I think, not just in that people hate it, but I had these deeply conservative women talking to me about local environmental and ecological issues. They were talking about pesticides and forever chemicals in their water, which you wouldn’t expect looking at Republican politics five to 10 years ago, that this is where we have ended up.

We’re still doing climate change hoaxes at the national level, and on the ground we’re talking about pesticides. There’s something there.

Gaby, we’re going to have to have you back as the story develops and certainly as we go into all these elections. Thank you so much for being at Decoder.

Yeah, thanks for having me. This was fun.

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Over the next 20 years the United States will see a massive transfer of wealth as boomers leave trillions of dollars to their children as they pass away. A contingent of those children are asking, “What if we got that money, now?” Millennials and Gen Z want to be able to take advantage of the money they stand to inherit before their parents pass away. While a majority of parents actually do help their kids, many with the means are surprisingly reluctant. 

Bill Perkins argues that these parents should let it all go. Perkins is an entrepreneur and the author of the book Die with Zero. He argues that the money would be better spent while your children are young adults rather than in their 60s when they may already be set up financially. Perkins joined Today, Explained co-host Noel King to explain the philosophy behind his book and why the best time to give is now. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What you’re essentially saying is before you pass on from this earth and leave your kids a big inheritance, maybe instead give that inheritance away sooner.

If you’re going to leave money to your kids, you should be thinking about what’s the right amount. That’s probably the first thing that people think about. But one of the things that people don’t think about is when is the right time? And I argue ferociously that it is not when you die. It is actually well before you die. So that gift makes the maximum impact on their lives.

So you would be agreeing with the millennials who are feeling some kind of way about their parents sitting on the inheritance for now and waiting until they pass on. You think that the youths have a point?

Oh yeah. I’m their best friend. I am definitely their best friend. When you leave an inheritance to someone, you’re trying to have maximum impact on their lives so that they may be able to enjoy it. And that time is not at 86 or 60. The time that they can convert that capital into meaningful experiences at the greatest rate without that much decay is between 28 and 33. 

Why is that? What’s happening between 28 and 33?

The sharpest and the biggest calculator you will ever be is at 28. And you reach physical maturity at 33 and then it plateaus and declines. And so what that means is that your mental acuity is declining and your physical abilities are declining at various rates, which means that your ability to convert that money into experiences that you enjoy or can do decline as you age. Most of your life is still ahead of you. At 60, most of your life is behind you.

Are you literally advocating “die with nothing”? Or are you saying, “Hey boomer, maybe have a responsible cushion and give your kids the rest.” What are the mechanics of this?

I am arguing to get as close to zero as possible. Knowing that there are uncertainties in life, that’s going to be probably an impossible goal — especially the biggest uncertainty, when you’re going to die. The uncertainty around what things will you be doing later in life besides hanging out and maintaining yourself. But this is an iterative formula, and if you are not on autopilot and you deeply think about it, you can be more efficient with the allocation of your resources and how you split those things up.

There’s a mathematical reality to some of this. If you’re a boomer and you’re sitting on money, you invest it. Having that money compound over 15 or 20 years, you could be giving your kid, when they are 60 or 65, just an enormous sum of money versus a much smaller sum based on how investment works when they are 33. What do you think about the argument that it’s better math to wait?

I would say that they’re not truly understanding the purpose of the money. Would you give your kid who’s 30 a rattle or a binky? So the understanding of the purpose of the money is for them to have a fulfilling life, not to have a bunch of zeros. And so what matters is how do they convert those zeros into a fulfilling life? And so because you decay — that’s the unfortunate part of having a human body — and then you eventually die, the ability of you to convert that money into the adventurous life or fulfillment that you choose declines with age. And you could just have a thought experiment. How much would you pay of your net worth to be 30 again? 

Jesus. One hundred percent, and I’m not 65.

Exactly. And so you can easily see that I’m not going to make enough capital to make up for the difference in age, right? Because that money helps make the life.

We know that this is a very hard conversation to have. It’s hard for parents to talk about not being here. It’s hard for kids to approach this without seeming greedy. How do you suggest families broach this conversation?

The one thing I don’t tell people is whether you should be leaving an inheritance or not. That’s up to you. There are some people who are just like, “All my money is for me. The kids, I gave them an education or gave them whatever they need, a shot in life, and they have to go make their own way.” That’s one. But those who intend to leave a gift, once they’ve thought deeply about it, I think they will come to the logical conclusion that it’s not a bequest. It’s an inheritance and that there’s a better time. And so in my mind, it’s a gift of love. It’s a gift of opportunity. It’s like, “Here you go. I’ve been fortunate in my life to be able to pass on the gift of choice. And here’s this capital and here’s some wisdom that comes with that.” But again, that’s me, not you.

The International Criminal Court is in the trenches right now.

Last week, its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, was voted out of his position. In a first-of-its-kind vote, 82 member states decided that he engaged in misconduct and a serious breach of duty. The vote comes after he was accused of sexual misconduct by a female colleague at the ICC, which Khan has denied.

It’s a mess, and it’s hitting the ICC at an inopportune time. On top of this internal turmoil, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently launched an all-out attack on the court.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this month, Rubio wrote that the Trump administration’s goal is to “dismantle the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary,” citing the possibility that the court could “target” American citizens, such as Border Patrol agents or US soldiers.

The US is not a member of the ICC, and has a history of wariness about the organization.

Beth Van Schaack previously served as the US ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, a role that led her to work directly with the International Criminal Court. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the decades-long tumultuous relationship between the US and the ICC. And they discuss whether, if the ICC is now weaker than ever, the Trump administration can actually break it for good.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

If the International Criminal Court is charged with dealing with people who have allegedly done very bad things and then trying them, why is the United States not a member?

The United States signed the treaty in the waning days of the Clinton administration, but never submitted it for ratification to the Senate. And one of the concerns is that the final treaty allows for jurisdiction over individuals who may commit crimes on the territory of state parties. And the United States has always been concerned about that principle because we have troop commitments.

Supporters of the court have always said the United States and its personnel are vulnerable regardless of whether you join. If US personnel are committing crimes on the territory of state parties, which we saw in Afghanistan, the response is to do those cases domestically and there’ll be no occasion for the International Criminal Court to consider those matters.

There’ve been peaks and valleys in the relationship between the ICC and the United States. So we’re in a frankly pretty deep valley right now with this new campaign that Secretary Rubio announced.

But back in the Bush administration, there was also very acute concern and it stemmed from this Afghanistan investigation. The Bush administration and Congress both put in place measures that they thought would be protective of US servicemembers. So that was one valley.

Now what’s interesting is in the second term of the Bush administration, many of these measures were dismantled because the Bush administration realized that the court was doing important work in some areas where it also cared about justice — in particular, Darfur.

Then, the Obama administration announced a reset in its relationship with the court, and that’s where I entered the picture. The Obama administration directed various executive agencies to look for ways to support the court where the work that it was doing was consistent with US policy.

Then, we had the first Trump administration, which reversed course almost immediately and eventually imposed sanctions on senior figures, including the prosecutor herself and one of her key aides.

Then, we get to the Biden-Harris administration. They pulled down those sanctions and again launched a reset of the relationship. At that point, there were a number of situations where the court was working, including following the brutal war of aggression by Russia against Ukraine.

Here we saw a remarkable rise of bipartisan support for the work of the court. You had senior Republican figures in Congress supporting the court. The late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) led a resolution that was supporting justice in Ukraine. Secretary Rubio, then Sen. Rubio, joined that resolution. There was new legislation passed that made it easier for the United States to support the work of the court.

Of course, with the second Trump administration, we have reversed course again, and in particular with Rubio’s announcement.

Well, let’s talk about the reversal. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is at one point on board with the ICC, and then recently he vows to dismantle it. What happened here?

It’s not clear what the precipitating event is, to be honest. There is no existential threat at present. Obviously, there’s always the concern that this is some kind of a distraction because matters are not going well in Iran and with respect to the economy — that this is something to pull eyeballs away from those matters onto something that he can look tough in. Is this just kind of red meat for anti-multilateralism or is there something that is not made public that is happening?

Is there anything actually that Marco Rubio or anyone else in the United States at the highest level could do to the International Criminal Court to put an end to it?

The International Criminal Court is part of a larger system of the rules-based order that we’ve been trying to build since World War II. Almost all of our friends and allies are members of this court and they care deeply about its success. They are committed to seeing a system of international criminal justice. So, no is the answer. The United States alone cannot dismantle this court.

Now, it can injure the court and it has already done so. There are already eight ICC judges, including judges who hail from some of our closest allies — France, for example — who have been subjected to brutal sanctions. They can’t use credit cards that pass through New York. They can’t make reservations online because of financial sanctions. They can’t travel to the United States because of travel bans, et cetera. The chief prosecutor and two of his two deputies have been sanctioned. Non-governmental organizations that are involved in human rights in Palestine have been sanctioned and a UN figure has been sanctioned. Those measures are already in place.

What his most recent campaign seems to announce is some diplomatic move to try and convince states to leave the court or to cease their cooperation with the court. And we have seen in recent days a couple of states announcing that they were withdrawing. These are mostly states within Africa, but also Venezuela, subject to investigation by the prosecutor’s office. The United States can certainly injure the court, but there’s no way that we could dismantle the court.

Most Americans don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the International Criminal Court, but they may know it because lately, it has gotten a lot of attention that the court has issued an arrest warrant for [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has said he would like to see Netanyahu arrested if he comes to New York.

Mamdani has said he does not have that power. He cannot order the NYPD to do it, but he would like for it to happen. What are the chances that Benjamin Netanyahu comes to the United States and is arrested?

Pretty close to zero, if not actually zero. This is a matter of federal law and international law. And the Headquarters Agreement between the United States and the United Nations, which placed the headquarters of the UN in New York, basically gives certain privileges and immunities to individuals who are coming to New York to attend official functions.

New Yorkers are a feisty bunch. So when word is out that Benjamin Netanyahu is in New York, can you imagine the protests that would happen? Can you imagine the embarrassment that he might experience when he’s supposed to be giving his remarks at the General Assembly High-level Week where all the heads of states convene to deal with transnational issues and his motorcade is ensnarled in protests protected by the First Amendment, calling for his arrest for various international crimes? If I were his lawyer, I would say, “There’s no chance you’re going to get arrested.” But honestly, it could be a miserable visit, given all of the strong support for accountability in this matter in the United States.

This is a lot of drama for a body that for a long time seems to have avoided a ton of very public drama. So who gets hurt in all of this? Is it the court? Is it the US and its reputation? Where do you think this leads?

Unfortunately, I think everyone comes out not looking great here. The court needs to put in place measures to be able to receive those complaints by witnesses, whistleblowers, victims themselves, process them quickly, but also fairly to all parties involved. The United States looks terrible as well, launching a campaign like this against an international organization whose mandate it is to deliver justice for the worst crimes known to humankind.

The internet may no longer be solely the domain of humans. Last week, OpenAI disclosed an “unprecedented cyberincident”: An experimental AI agent successfully hacked its way into the open internet.

Specifically, the agent was assigned a task; in order to complete it, the agent broke out of an isolated research environment and hacked into a third-party platform called Hugging Face. It’s a move that many experts deemed inevitable, given the speed and scale of advances in AI technology — and it raises serious questions about AI safety.

But for Konstantinos Komaitis, a senior fellow with the Democracy and Tech Initiative at the Atlantic Council, it wasn’t the unexpected behavior of the AI that was significant. It was what that behavior could mean for the internet’s fundamental, decentralized infrastructure and whether it would spur calls to build new barriers against autonomous AI agents. 

Komaitis argues that such barriers are not the solution, however. He spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about why an open internet is actually key to combating AI cybersecurity threats.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

So most people see that this happens and they think, “Oh no, AI went rogue. How long before it kills me?” You see that this happens and you start thinking about infrastructure. Tell us more about why you were thinking about infrastructure in light of this AI agent breaking containment.

The internet was never designed with full security in mind, right? 

When you’re creating a decentralized system, you cannot possibly foresee every security or vulnerability that might come up. But because you have a system that is based on building blocks, you have the extraordinary capability of actually addressing security issues as they come up through those building blocks without breaking the whole system down. 

And of course, the other thing that this does is that it pushes you towards collaboration, because when you have so many building blocks, you cannot possibly possess all the knowledge for each building block. So you’re bringing literally everyone to try to address these problems. 

Take the internet, for instance: We have spent decades addressing those vulnerabilities and developing mechanisms to authenticate users and devices, encrypt communications, mitigate distributed attacks, coordinate incident response, and of course share threat intelligence. 

Now, what is new with agentic AI is not that simply the malware is better or the phishing attacks are more sophisticated. It’s the emergence of systems that can actually discover vulnerabilities across thousands of systems. They can reason about alternative paths to an objective. They can adapt when they’re blocked. They can chain together legitimate internet services in unexpected ways. Then they do that while they’re operating continuously at machine speed. And this is really at a scale that the internet is not ready to necessarily cope with. 

Effectively, the internet’s openness becomes both a strength and a vulnerability. So the internet was optimized for interoperability, and AI now is optimized for exploiting that interoperability.

And what scares you the most about that? What do you think is most vulnerable to threats?

The fact that we do not have the appropriate mechanisms and institutions to be able to deal with that. I come from the internet world. I’ve spent 20 years of my career defending the open internet and discussing it in international fora. And one of the things that a lot of people underestimate about the internet is how valuable trust is as a property within the system. 

We are talking about networks that exchange data literally based on trust. So what really concerns me right now is that in many ways, we are asking 21st-century AI systems to operate on 20th-century assumptions about trust. And unless we figure that out and we realize it, we will continue having these problems. And of course, the knee-jerk reactions that are coming with this, which are, “Let’s fragment the internet, let’s restrict it, let’s restrict access, let’s take control over it.” That is never the solution.

What do you see as the solution?

Effectively, we need to build institutions that are trusted and are able to cope with those incidents as they happen. Because right now you have OpenAI and you have Hugging Face telling everyone, “Don’t worry, we’ve got this.” And we don’t know; they might have this. But at the same time, I cannot help but wonder. And many, many other people have wondered whether, actually, this is very good PR for these companies and especially for OpenAI.

OpenAI just went to the world saying, “We have developed one of the most powerful LLMs, and we realized that it behaved the way it behaved, but don’t worry, we are going to fix this.” And in this current climate and in this current timing, I am not sure that this is enough. You need institutions that are much more transparent, much more accountable, and much more collaborative across the board.

You want institutions to step up and essentially serve as a watchdog. Help us understand which institutions, because in the United States, famously, our government has done very little to regulate tech.

First of all, we need to stop thinking of institutions as necessarily government-affiliated, right? Or that they are the outcomes of government initiatives. There can be in collaboration with governments, but one of the things that the internet has taught us is that institutions that are built through a bottom-up coordinated process have the tendency of actually being more agile and able to deliver some of those things that we’re talking about. 

So take, for instance, again, open standards. The internet’s open standards are not created by any agency, government or private. It’s created by institutions where engineers from all across the board and all over the world gather together and create those standards.

That’s reminding me of the original design of OpenAI to be this not-for-profit company that had everyone’s best intentions in mind, that could do something idealistic and moral and ethical because all of the profit-minded companies weren’t going to. And now look at OpenAI. Their not-for-profit arm is an afterthought, and they’re chasing profits. 

Do you think it’s practical to leave this to institutions? Because what we’ve seen so far is that institutions bend toward capitalism.

It really depends on how you build the institution, right? It really depends on what sort of guardrails and checks and balances you have around it. In order to build an institution, you need to really know what you want to achieve. You need to have a north star. 

One of the reasons the internet worked was because everybody disagreed, but they agreed on the common shared goal, which was to connect people across the world. For AI, we still do not have that northern star. And once we get it, that’s when you start the building of those institutions in order to facilitate this and bring everyone together.

For me, it is very important for everyone to understand that keeping an open internet is really more important than ever, especially as AI agents become increasingly capable. Because it is tempting to think that the answer to new AI risk is literally ‘build more barriers.’ But the internet’s greatest strength has always been its openness. So the challenge today is not that the internet is too open; it’s that its trust architecture was designed for a world in which humans or software directly controlled by humans were the primary actors. 

Now, it’s being challenged by this agentic AI that introduces a new type of participant — systems that can reason and plan and act with limited human oversight. So we need to evolve our understanding of trust and what it means online. And that will require a lot of work because, as you know very well, Sean, it’s very difficult to build trust, but you can break it within seconds.

Last week, the Trump administration announced a landmark civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia. The deal would allow the kingdom to develop nuclear power using American technology and could eventually pave the way for uranium enrichment on Saudi soil. But the agreement must first undergo congressional review — and survive President Donald Trump’s social media feed.

When the Trump administration announced its agreement, it made no mention of the possibility of normalizing diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. But that omission and the possibility that Saudi Arabia could eventually enrich uranium alarmed Israelis — and Trump quickly threw in both conditions in a Truth Social post.

The chaos around the agreement comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heads to Washington, DC, this week to meet with Trump. The Saudi deal — as well as growing friction over differences on the goals and trajectory of the renewed US war with Iran and frustration in Washington over Israeli military operations in southern Lebanon — will undoubtedly be topics.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswame spoke with Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at the Israel Policy Forum, about the relationship between the two countries and its leaders ahead of Netanyahu’s visit. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What are we expecting from the meeting between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump?

I suspect this will be among the most tense meetings that they have had because there are a number of issues on the table where President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu are on different pages. The issue that they used to be on the same page about was Iran, and I don’t think that is the case anymore. 

As we’ve seen the Iran war unfold, the Israeli view is still the view that they had at the outset of the war, which is that this is necessary to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, with its ballistic missiles, with its proxies. And ultimately what the Israelis wanted to see, and what they still want to see, is a different regime in Iran. President Trump may still share those goals, but it’s pretty clear that, as the war has not gone the way he anticipated, he’s looking for an exit strategy and his main focus is the Strait of Hormuz, which is not something that the Israelis care about at all. 

I think at this point, when Prime Minister Netanyahu arrives at the White House, he’s probably going to try to convince the president that the original goal should be on the table, that the US and Israel should keep going, and President Trump seems to have a different view of things.

And now we have this new deal with Saudi Arabia. Was Israel taken by surprise by the deal? 

It absolutely took Israel by surprise. When the deal was announced on Wednesday, it was a deal to provide Saudi Arabia with nuclear power and nuclear infrastructure. There was no mention of Israel. There was no mention of normalization. There was no mention of anything outside of the bounds of a nuclear agreement. 

President Trump on Thursday put out his Truth Social where he said that the deal is absolutely contingent on Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords. And what’s curious about that is that when the deal was announced, there was no mention of it, and the deal was actually signed. So either the president is intending to change the terms of the deal after it’s been signed, or he’s willing to back out of it if this new condition is not met. 

Or, and I suspect that this is the actual answer, he will secure some sort of commitment from the Saudis to examine joining the Abraham Accords at some point down the road when Israel has met a number of conditions and there’s been progress toward a Palestinian state. And if that is how it unfolds, it will leave the Israelis behind. And I think this comes as a pretty big shock to [Israel] given that President Trump’s previous policy was that a deal between the US and Saudi Arabia would involve normalization.

Was Netanyahu himself surprised by this deal? 

I think he must have been surprised by this deal. It is true that Trump and Netanyahu have seemed to have had a very cushy relationship, not only during this term, but during President Trump’s first term as well. But it’s not a relationship of equals.

We’ve seen President Trump — particularly over the past few months, I think in response to criticism here in the United States over the role that Israel and the role that the prime minister may have had in convincing President Trump to go to war — repeatedly talk about the fact that he is in charge, that Prime Minister Netanyahu is going to do what he says, that he is the decider and Prime Minister Netanyahu is not. 

I do think they have a good relationship, but President Trump, at least publicly, seems to be signaling that he is in charge and he wants everybody to know that. I think that Prime Minister Netanyahu undoubtedly is feeling some stress in this relationship. And when he shows up here tomorrow, he’s going to do whatever he can to try and repair any rifts that there are.

Israel wanted this war, but hates this deal that the president may very likely complete with Saudi Arabia. Did they miscalculate somewhere in here? 

I think the Israelis have miscalculated in a number of ways. And the biggest is that consistently since 2017 or 2018, you hear Israeli officials, political officials, security officials, even ordinary Israelis, talk routinely about President Trump being the best friend that Israel has ever had and exhibiting a faith in President Trump that he will never do anything that will hang Israel out to dry. 

And a lot of what they’ve done has proceeded on that assumption. And even though everybody is aware of President Trump’s transactional nature, even though everybody is aware that he is relatively volatile, that he slips on policy issues all the time, the Israelis had this faith that they would always be an exception to that rule. And I think what we’re seeing is that they’re not necessarily an exception to that rule. 

And it’s important to stress that when it comes to this Saudi nuclear deal, the problem for the Israelis is not just that it was signed without any hint of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia being part of the deal itself. It may open the door for countries that have signed more restrictive agreements in the region, like the UAE, to do the same. And ultimately, all of this is a bet that the trajectory of Saudi Arabia is going to continue, that it’s going to continue modernizing, continue becoming more moderate and pragmatic, and continue improving relations with Israel. 

If that’s not the case, once you’ve handed the Saudis a nuclear program, that’s irreversible. People shouldn’t forget that Iran’s nuclear program started off as a civilian nuclear program that the United States provided for it under the days of the Shah. So for Israelis, the normalization part of this is absolutely worrisome, but the deal itself is problematic too. And I think that’s where the Israelis are feeling panicked.

Medicine has come a long way. We are living longer than ever, we have eradicated diseases that once seemed like a certain death sentence, and new improvements  are constantly being made to our quality of life. But despite all the advances, there’s a huge gap in women’s health. “I think there’s such an interconnectedness between society, culture, medicine, and science,” Dr. Elizabeth Comen told Vox. She’s a medical oncologist who specializes in breast cancer and an associate professor at NYU Langone. She says medicine often mirrors what’s happening in society at large. “For many societies across the globe, women did not have equal agency or power over their bodies, and that’s really reflected in the history of medicine.”

It’s reflected in medicine’s present, too. The share of women with heart disease in the United States is rising, there’s a cultural backlash and skepticism surrounding birth control, and almost half Americans are turning to social media influencers (many of whom aren’t credentialed) for medical information. 

Why is there such a disconnect when it comes to health care for women? And what will it take for it to end? We find out on this week’s episode of Vox’s weekly call-in podcast, Explain It to Me.

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Evans, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

We are at this point where we know more about our bodies than we ever have before. Sometimes you go to the doctor, and it feels like they’re still catching up on some pretty basic aspects of women’s health. Why does it feel that way?

Because it’s true. It takes a long time for medical science to catch up with the glaring gaps in our healthcare system. The gaps are not just about the obvious women’s health issues. We focus a lot on breast cancer. We focus a lot on reproductive function or our gynecological needs. But the gaps exist head to toe from our neurologic care, our gastroenterology care, how our hearts function, how our immune system functions, how our joints function. The gaps are real, and the experiences are real.

Can you walk me through some of the history? What did it look like to study women’s health before the 20th century? What were we dealing with?

When we think about modern medicine today and these specialties of urology, gastroenterology, they really didn’t exist before the 1900s at all; those are relatively new concepts. For much of the history of medicine, at least in the Western world, the idea was that, at best, we were small men and, at worst, there were many ridiculous diagnoses like hysteria and a long legacy of dismissing women’s medical needs because we were largely not taken care of by women. Those women that were caregivers in the history of medicine, whether it was the midwives or other types of healers, were largely pushed out of medicine as it became codified, and the idea of medical science really came to rise in the late 19th century.

So, I’m guessing that they weren’t really talking about menopause at the time, let alone perimenopause.

Perimenopause wasn’t even discussed. That’s a relatively new term and new part of our lexicon when it comes to lay discussion and the public at large. With respect to menopause, one of the famous physicians, Roger Wilson, wrote a book [called] Feminine Forever and referred to women going through menopause as vapid cows. He was the one that advocated in the 1960s and 1970s for women to be on hormone replacement therapy. But understand that, in the 1850s, it’s not like people really were wildly aware of what estrogen, and testosterone, and progesterone did. These are all relatively new ideas — the concept of hormones and how they can travel in our body. And again, we have a long way to go.

I read that women were rarely included in clinical trials until the National Institutes of Health mandated it in 1993. I find that so surprising. Why were women missing there? 

Well, these studies were not designed with women in mind. Some of the massive cardiology studies for drugs that we use day in and day out were done on thousands of men and not women. There is so much to that history, including the animal models on which many of these drugs were developed. In order to develop a drug, often, they are developed on mouse models first. It wasn’t until 2016 that you were even required to state the sex of the mice that you were studying. In many of these instances, female mice were not even included in drug development.

Oh my gosh — even the mice? How were these hormones marketed to people when hormone replacement therapy first became a thing?

It depends on which advertisements that you look at. If you look at advertisements of women in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, a lot of women were being prescribed anti-anxiety medicine. “Can’t manage your household at home? Don’t want to take care of your kids? Here’s what will sedate you and at least make you able to prepare breakfast for your husband.” It’s really shocking, and yet, not that surprising. If you look at Instagram today, are we really that far off from what gets marketed to women? Women sink billions of dollars probably into sham supplements and sham treatments, because they don’t feel cared for when they go to the doctor. And what fills that space? A lot of people trying to market things that have no proven evidence.

I think it’s really interesting that, at one point, hormone replacement therapy was this big thing, because I feel like growing up in the ’90s and 2000s, hearing women who are older than me speak, they were kind of anti-hormones. How did the pendulum swing that way?

Well, the pendulum has swung in wildly different directions. At first, it was: Every woman needs to be on it. And there were wildly successful sales. Then, there was the women’s health study that exaggerated the risk of breast cancer. Understandably, women were terrified. They were told by the media and by reputable scientists that these risks were significantly high and that they could not be on it, and we didn’t leave them with any alternatives. Now, we’ve become much more granular about what we know and what we don’t know, but I still think we’re far behind on the science. There’s still a lot that we need to learn, but, fortunately, an understanding of the prior studies and what their limitations are has come to light.

There are all these gaps in trust and treatment. There’s going to be a fair amount of snake oil out there, but are there ways that this moment is actually driving better treatment for women?

I’m so grateful that we’re talking about it, but I am terrified of what I see from influencers on Instagram. People can fake their knowledge. There’s so much fake imagery and information that is out there. I wish that we could invest this in quality science, which is long and laborious and painful at times but gives us the quality answers that we need. Every day, I see the consequences of fake information online, whether it’s an incredible loss of financial resources or just wasting money so that you could buy a nice pair of shoes. That would make you feel better than the ridiculous thing online that’s over promising and under delivering. The fear mongering is out of control.

What do you think it will take to trust their doctors again, rather than turning to the treatments they’re being sold online that might be dangerous? What will it take for them to feel good about the interactions they’re having at the doctor’s office? 

I think it’s going to be really challenging. We can’t blame patients, because we’ve done them a disservice. Medicine has fragmented the care of many patients — not just women, but men as well. We have to build a health care system that allows for time to be with patients and really hold space for them. I think that’s where the trust is really going to be built, because, at the end of the day, despite all the technology that’s available, medicine is about human to human care. That is what everybody wants to be treated as: a human to be seen and heard in the ways that you can’t just reduce a body to biology.

The gerontocracy is real: The median senator is 64 years old, and 20 members of Congress are over 80. One legal scholar called it the “old-igarchy.” It seems the combination of President Donald Trump’s recent 80th birthday, the sudden death of Sen. Lindsey Graham, and the currently unknown health status of Sen. Mitch McConnell has called collective attention to the advanced age of our elected officials — and with good reason. 

So this week, I talked with Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina on his 86th birthday. And I wanted to (delicately) ask a question that’s been brewing in my head since the whole fiasco with then-President Joe Biden: Why don’t the oldheads want to retire? 

Over a long interview, I asked the House Democratic leader about generational change, shifts in the electorate on corporate PAC money and artificial intelligence, and whether he thinks there are any lessons to learn from the 2024 election.

On the question of age, Clyburn told me, “I know people who are 66 years old with much less energy than I have, and none of the experience that I have.” Clyburn said he would also be open to a recently proposed law calling for members of Congress to take cognitive tests, though he dismissed the idea of term limits or an age cap. 

Here’s what else I learned: 

1. They aren’t giving up power because they don’t want to

That’s the whole thing. The reason the boomers (and Clyburn’s Silent Generation) won’t step aside isn’t that no one has asked. It’s that they don’t want to. And for Clyburn, I think the armor doubles as the blind spot. When I asked about younger generations being distrustful that older politicians can deliver, he invoked his grandparents, saying, “Don’t worry about what people call you. It’s what you answer to that’s the issue.”

And while that is wisdom, hardened over the decades, I don’t know if it works as well as a leadership philosophy. Stay the course and ignore the criticism can also be read as ignoring electoral feedback. “I don’t react to that stuff,” Clyburn said, when asked about calls for generational change.

2. Clyburn says what the establishment thinks: It’s the voters’ fault

Clyburn articulates the core view of establishment politics as cleanly as anyone: There is nothing much to change. He doesn’t believe the party made significant errors in 2024, and he doesn’t take the primary results in New York City, Colorado, and elsewhere to be anything other than a flash in the pan. Pushed on what political lesson he took from an administration built to stop Trump that ended with Trump back in office, he went to turnout: “When the white vote turned out 71 percent two years ago, and the Black vote turned out 59 percent, you tell me whose fault that is.” Asked directly whether the argument was that Black people let Kamala Harris down, he didn’t hesitate: “In many instances, absolutely.” 

At its heart, this is a philosophy that blames the voters and insulates the party establishment from reflection. 

But this is also why the next round of primaries is so important. It’s easy to file New York, Colorado, or Graham Platner’s rise in Maine as one-offs — local flukes, not an overwhelming trend. But the Michigan and Wisconsin primaries are coming, and those are the ones that decide whether this gets treated as a pattern. The temperature of the freakout is still yet to be set.

3. He defends the establishment’s alliance with the Congressional Black Caucus

The moderate wing of the Democratic Party is held up, at the grassroots, by Black voters — particularly in the South. Clyburn knows that, and he defended both the alliance and the corporate policies that tie them together. 

Clyburn holds that taking corporate dollars is necessary for minority candidates who don’t come from family wealth — “I would challenge you to find me one single vote I have ever cast that pharma supported and my constituents didn’t.” He deferred to a pro-Israel colleague, Rep. Gregory Meeks, on questions of Israel: “I’m guided by Gregory Meeks.” He made no apology for backing Andrew Cuomo over Zohran Mamdani in this year’s New York mayor’s race — the same Cuomo he’d said should resign in 2021.

I asked him what Black communities have gotten in exchange for that loyalty. His answer was an agenda: “What did we get out of our support for Obama? What did we get out of our support for Biden?” And that’s a real answer. But I think there’s also another one underneath it.

I see Clyburn’s actions through the context of changing power within the Democratic Party, just as much as what’s going on outside of it. The Black political class, specifically, is invested in holding its own position against the party’s rising coalitions, immigrant communities in particular. That’s part of what’s at the heart of Clyburn’s endorsements of Cuomo and Haley Stevens in Michigan, and even the recent fight over which states should vote first in the Democratic presidential primary. 

Find the full episode — including a bonus segment where Clyburn defends the party’s approach to Israel — wherever you get your podcasts.

Last week, House Democrats voted on an amendment that would have cut $3.3 billion in annual US military aid to Israel from a State Department funding bill. The amendment was brought to the floor by Rep. Thomas Massie, an outgoing Republican from Kentucky. It failed 314-104, but 103 Democrats — nearly half of the House Democratic caucus — supported it, signaling a significant shift in the party’s longstanding support for aid to Israel.

In 2024, a similar vote came up in the House to cut military aid to Israel. Then, just 37 House Democrats voted for the measure. Now, two years later, 103 House Democrats voted to cut funding. That shift in support was accelerated after the October 7 Hamas attacks and Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza, which has killed large numbers of Palestinian civilians. The debate is also playing out in Democratic primaries across the country. In New York and Colorado, Democratic socialist candidates who have sharply criticized Israel and opposed continued US military aid recently won House primaries.

Historically, Jewish Americans have overwhelmingly identified with and voted for the Democratic Party, while Democratic lawmakers have generally supported Israel and US military assistance to the country. In 2016, the Obama administration signed a 10-year memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Israel, committing the US to seek $38 billion in military assistance for fiscal years 2019 through 2028. Congress must vote to approve this funding, so the shift in Democratic support of Israel could have real consequences.

There is still a very strong support for Israel among many House Democrats, but the shifting views are notable. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries opposed the Massie amendment, arguing that it was overly broad and could jeopardize humanitarian assistance. But in a letter addressed to his House colleagues he also called for a “major reset” in US policy toward what he described as Israel’s “far-right Netanyahu government.”

Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Democratic Rep. Brad Schneider, who represents Illinois’s 10th Congressional District, and remains a strong supporter of Israel.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

Can you walk us through last week’s vote? You voted against the measure to cut aid to Israel, and a lot of your colleagues obviously did not. How did that play out for you?

Growing up in the ’60s, ’70s, and for the last 65 years, I fundamentally believe that the US-Israel relationship is important. I also believe that the aspiration for peace in the Middle East, not just between Israelis and Palestinians, but broadly throughout the region, is something that is in the United States’s interest and the interest of the people in the region. So this is not a new issue to me, and it’s something I thought long and hard about. 

Tom Massie doesn’t believe any of that. His intentions with this amendment were anything but pure. It was hastily crafted and poorly written. And one of the biggest issues with it is not only does it [not] address this 10-year memorandum of understanding, something negotiated by President Obama eight years ago, but there are also two years left on the MOU. 

It was a messaging bill and nothing more, and it was a negative message. I voted no because I think if we’re going to move toward peace, we need to do so in a constructive way. A lot of my colleagues were saying we need to send a message to the Netanyahu government.

“I have to hold onto that optimism for the prospects of peace because the alternative is too dark.”

I’ve been extremely critical of this government, their failure to address the settler violence in the West Bank, the failure to plan for a day-after in Gaza following what was a horrific war. If we’re going to move towards peace, if we’re going to find a path where Israelis and Palestinians can live side by side and the region can have the peace they deserve. Because we’re not just talking about Israelis and Palestinians; there’s progress being made between Lebanon and Israel in giving Lebanon, the people of Lebanon, the liberty and freedom they all deserve. 

Can I ask you if you still take money from AIPAC? And if so, how much?

I appreciate the support I get from people who care about the issues that I advocate for. So people who are pro-Israel, pro-US-Israel relationship are likely to support me because I’m pro-US-Israel, pro-US-Israel relationship. I’m also pro-addressing gun safety and reducing gun violence in this country. So I get the support of those groups. The support I get doesn’t determine my positions. I think my positions determine who supports me. 

Has your position on Israel shifted at all since October 7th, or at any point in your political career? And if so, can you tell us how?

So my position hasn’t changed because I’ve always been committed to promoting peace between Israelis and Palestinians and finding a path where both can live together, which I believe ultimately is two states: a Jewish democratic state of Israel, and a Palestinian state living side by side. My frustration with the current Israeli government has grown and continues to grow. Every conversation I have with them, whether it’s the US ambassador to Israel, whom I’ve had the privilege of working with many times, or my meetings with Prime Minister Netanyahu. I’ve had an engagement with the prime minister going back now for almost 30 years. But in the last several years, every single conversation I have with them talks about the need to address settler violence, the need to get humanitarian aid.

One of the things that I am proud of and will say loudly and proudly is that immediately after October 7th, as the war began, my team and I worked hard to push for humanitarian aid into Gaza to do everything we could to make sure that the civilians who were always caught in the middle of any war wouldn’t suffer more than they did. And the suffering was horrific. And I did challenge Israel when they made what I’ll call ill-conceived, ill-advised, in some cases illegal decisions to deprive humanitarian relief from entering Gaza. We pushed hard, and we worked with the Egyptians to get the Rafah crossing open. We pushed the Israelis to open the Karam Shalom crossing. And to not just get aid to those crossings, but get aid into and across the territories within Gaza.

Why are you so optimistic about the situation? 

I am always going to be optimistic. I have to hold onto that optimism for the prospects of peace because the alternative is too dark. And let’s separate the issue for folks living in the region and the folks living here. And for the Israelis and Palestinians, these are two peoples who are totally traumatized — traumatized not just over the last couple of years, but for decades. So I recognize the trauma that Israelis have and are experiencing, and I recognize the trauma that the Palestinians have and are experiencing. And that’s part of what I feel is my obligation: to hold onto that optimism and speak to a better future and work to try to find ways to bring the parties on both sides of the issue together to make the hard choices and take the risk to get to a path to peace.

So the reason I’m holding onto optimism — and it’s not 24/7; I have my moments when I am down and where I feel like the hill we’re climbing is just too steep — is you take a deep breath and you dig deep, and you say, I can’t give up on hoping and working towards peace because otherwise peace is never going to happen. And I want to find people who are like-minded.

And that is not just on the Israeli side of the equation. We have to find people on the Palestinian side, and for those on the Palestinian side, we have to find Israelis. And I meet, and I spend time with them on a regular basis. They come to my office. When I’m in the region, I talk to them. We have to strengthen and empower those voices who believe that peace will only come when the Israelis see the Palestinians as a people worthy of engagement and a shared future, and the Palestinians see the Israeli as a people worthy of engagement and a shared future, and recognize that until they get there, there’s no future for either side. We’ve got to have a path where both are pointing in the same direction.

Fermented food is the hottest new trend in the halls of the White House. Members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet are reportedly walking about with jars of sauerkraut in the hopes that it will give them glowing skin and tiny waists. 

Wall Street Journal’s Liz Essley Whyte told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that “Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Vice President JD Vance are all on this eat-a-lot-of-steak-and-sauerkraut diet.”

So, should we all be eating jars of sauerkraut? Or are ferments just the new Florsheims?

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Is there a name for this diet?

Kennedy calls it the carnivore diet. I think people mean different things when they say that, but for him, it includes a lot of yogurt, a lot of kimchi or sauerkraut, a lot of steak, a lot of eggs. Kennedy now travels with sauerkraut. His wife has said that he has asked her to carry it in her purse for him, and she has said, “I actually cannot,” which is an amazing phrase. It seems they all think their skin is glowing, and people online have commented that JD Vance is looking good.

Are we sure it’s not Wegovy?

We don’t have any public knowledge of that, but we do know that he is eating eggs, sauerkraut, pickles, blackberries, and raspberries for lunch pretty often — and beef and lamb with sauerkraut for dinner. Then, when he’s on Air Force Two, he snacks on beef jerky and maybe eats a hamburger with cheese, no bun, and a side of fermented vegetables.

Now that you’re mentioning the full spectrum of JD Vance’s diet, it’s kind of reminding me of their new food pyramid. Is this part of that?

Earlier this year, Kennedy and the other health officials like to say they flipped the food pyramid. They recommended a lot more fruits and vegetables, red meat — which was controversial — and whole grains, and whole milk, that kind of thing. They also, and for the first time in the nation’s dietary guidelines, recommended fermented foods, which was something that was actually agreed upon by a lot of people, and they thought that was a good part of this, even if they had qualms about the red meat recommendations, because those can introduce more cardiac risk and risk of bad cholesterol.

How widespread is this in the White House? Does it go up all the way to the top, to the president?

Given what we have seen of his recent public dieting, I don’t think so. At the Knicks game, he was eating pizza and french fries, and, you know, he still has his Diet Coke button on his desk where he just pushes it and a Diet Coke comes. Kennedy said, once said on a podcast about him, “I don’t know how he’s alive.” 

Does the science back this up, or is this some kind of quackery that ferments can make your skin healthier and help you lose weight?

I don’t think there are a lot of good studies that show exactly that sauerkraut can help you lose weight, but there have been a number of studies that have shown health benefits. Researchers have generally agreed that sauerkraut and other fermented foods can help with digestion and inflammation. There was a 2025 study from UC Davis that suggested fermented cabbage could protect your gut and protect against illness. Basically, they found that the intestinal cells do better with sauerkraut. They help maintain the integrity of those intestinal cells. And, in general, that has a lot of other good health effects. Mainstream scientists, dieticians, are pro-fermented veggies. This is not something that is hotly debated.

Most people in the scientific community are realizing there’s a lot of good fresh science out there about how important your gut really is in your overall health. The part of the diet that is a little more controversial is the focus on red meat. Obviously, that comes with some cardiac risk and some cholesterol risk. That is why when the new dietary guidelines came out and recommended more of that for Americans, that part, in particular, made some dietitians a little upset.

Do you think fermented foods could help people with this parasite that gives you explosive diarrhea?

I personally have not seen any studies on whether fermented foods help with explosive diarrhea, but let me know if you find one.

AI was supposed to make our lives better. Instead, it’s made many of us scared and angry. Communities are protesting against the building of new data centers — the warehouses of IT equipment powering the AI buildout — across the country, and increasingly they’re winning. And polling shows most Americans think AI is moving too fast.

So how did public opinion on AI curdle so quickly? Jasmine Sun, who reports on the industry from San Francisco, argues that the backlash treats AI less as a technology and more as a political project. “The debate was not about like, is ChatGPT useful to me?” Sun told me during a taping of Vox’s The Gray Area. “The debate was actually something more like, there are these big corporations and unaccountable billionaires…coming into my city, coming into my life and changing it without having any sort of democratic input?”

Filling in for Sean Illing, I talked to Sun about the rise of “AI populism,” the parallels with the Industrial Revolution, and how the backlash could crash into the 2028 presidential election. 

As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday, so listen to and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.

You’ve been writing about a phenomenon you call AI populism. How would you define that? What is AI populism?

I define AI populism as a worldview where AI is not seen as an ordinary technology, but specifically as an elite political project to be resisted. I came to the term while thinking about the AI backlash and the reasons people are increasingly anti-AI — whether that’s LLM slop, whether that’s Waymos in their city, whether that’s a new data center project. One thing that occurred to me was that a lot of times the debate wasn’t about whether ChatGPT is useful to me, or whether Waymos are safer than a human driver. The debate was actually something more like: There are these big corporations and unaccountable billionaires who are coming into my city, coming into my life, and changing it without any democratic input.

When I talk to people who are opposing AI in various ways, they seem more concerned with this concentration-of-power, anti-elite dimension — which is where I take the word “populism” — rather than classic AI safety concerns, which are more about the technical characteristics that might introduce risk.

You wrote a piece that touched on some of this but went to a darker place — “AI populism’s warning shots” — and you wrote about actual shots. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was targeted by a Molotov cocktail and a shooting within the span of a couple of days. There was an Indiana councilman who voted for a data center and woke up to gunshots at his home and a note reading “no data centers.” Why do you think of those incidents of violence as warning shots of something to come?

It was pretty scary. I’m no Sam Altman fanboy, but it’s terrifying that assassination attempts are showing up in response to people’s worries about AI. One factor is that we’ve been seeing a rising wave of political violence and support for political violence in the US, especially among young people, over the past few years — the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting, the Charlie Kirk shooting. Increasingly, a lot of disaffected, maybe nihilistic young people are turning toward political violence as a way to express political beliefs they don’t feel they have other channels for. Or maybe that person is just unwell. But I do expect to see more of it, because my theory of political discontent is that if people feel they have institutional channels to bargain for their rights — if they feel the democratic process is working, or they’re part of a union and believe their union leader will go bargain about how automation shows up in the workplace — they’ll most likely go through those channels.

When it feels like the official channels aren’t working, opposition becomes much more diffuse and volatile. That’s part of why, in creative communities, you’ll see people witch-hunting each other over AI use. I think we’ll see more political violence against people seen as AI leaders, or as supporting AI leaders.

That’s really scary.

Yeah, I’m quite worried about it. But again, my sense is that it comes from a feeling of — what else is there to be done, when you have this level of concentration of wealth and power, and there’s no democratic input right now into how AI is regulated or built?

It’s like a jump straight from complaining at your community meeting about the data center to an act of violence.

I was talking to some friends about this. During the 20th century in the US, there was a wave of factory mechanization and automation, but unions were really strong — often when a company said, “We’re going to bring in these machines,” they’d sit down with the factory union leader and say, “Okay, you can bring in the machines, but we’re going to couple that with a wage increase,” or a 35-hour workweek, or earlier retirement. There was a channel to make a deal about how automation would show up in your workplace. That meant people were more likely to accept it as something lifting all boats. I don’t think that’s happening now — most of the industries affected by AI aren’t organized in labor unions, and the democratic channels are questionable at best.

It’s like when people have agency to be part of the transition, the process goes a lot smoother. Is there a historical analogy for a technological change that didn’t allow for input from the people involved? I’m thinking of the Luddites.

The Luddites are a good example. When the automated looms were introduced, there was a lot of violence against the looms. The book I’d really recommend here is Carl Benedikt Frey’s The Technology Trap. He’s an Oxford economist who studied a ton of historical examples — in Europe, in China, all over the world — including the Luddites and 20th-century automation. His central question was: In what contexts do workers successfully stop automation, and in what contexts do they allow it to be introduced? How does the political environment, or the balance of power between people and their leaders, change the outcome? He found that when automation was introduced alongside social welfare policies — a higher minimum wage, some form of redistribution — people were much more willing to accept it, which is fairly rational.

I want to talk about Silicon Valley’s understanding of this backlash more generally. You’re painting a pretty dark picture, and you’re right in the belly of the beast in San Francisco — I’m sure you talk to people involved with AI every day. Is there a moment when it clicked for them that this backlash is real and something they have to take seriously? Or has that happened yet?

I’ve definitely noticed a huge difference, over the past six months, in how seriously people in Silicon Valley take the AI backlash.

Like what?

People just talk about it more. I’d bring up AI populism to people last year, and they’d normally say, “It doesn’t matter — technology always introduces some discontent, people get annoyed but they get used to it, like the internet.” That was the standard reaction last year. Not anymore. I think part of the reason OpenAI and Anthropic have felt pressure to introduce economic policy proposals around job automation is that they’re seeing how worried people are. The data center moratoriums and the broader data center backlash have been surprising and meaningful in getting AI leaders to recognize they have both a messaging problem and an actual problem with the product and the technology they’re introducing.

A lot of the increasing opposition to AI in Washington has caused people to see this too. At first, Trump — as you mentioned — was very pro-AI. He and David Sacks were accelerationists; they wanted AI to go faster and to block attempts at regulation.

He was the AI czar.

“The moratoriums, the regulation fights, even the booing at graduations, the literal assassination attempts — people in Silicon Valley have become much more worried.”

He was the AI czar — he’s no longer the AI czar. But it turned out a lot of other constituencies, both on the left and the right, were pretty opposed. For example, Trump and David Sacks tried to introduce a big federal bill that would preempt all state-level AI regulation — no state could regulate AI for 10 years. They tried to sneak it into a big omnibus bill so no one would notice. But members of Congress realized it was happening, and — whether for kid-safety reasons or frontier-safety reasons — people said, Wait a second, the idea of preventing any state from regulating AI for ten years is crazy. A lot of people organized in Washington to successfully stop that preemption. I think that showed the scale and bipartisanship of a coalition that was very keen to make sure it stayed possible to regulate AI was underestimated. As a result of all this — the moratoriums, the regulation fights, even the booing at graduations, the literal assassination attempts — people in Silicon Valley have become much more worried.

China is our big competitor in the AI race, and it certainly has all the conditions for a populist pushback to AI — youth unemployment is really high, and AI technology is in some ways more advanced at taking over real-world jobs. I was watching a video about fully automated factories and a robot pharmacist. You’re one of the rare American tech reporters who gets to spend time in China, and you wrote a piece that surprised me — you found there wasn’t really a populist backlash to AI there. Why not?

I was really interested in this question, and I was finishing my New York Times piece while in China for a few weeks, talking to both AI people and non-AI people. The main reason there’s not a big populist backlash in China is that there isn’t a lot of social unrest or populist backlash against anything — the entire MO of the Chinese government, the No. 1 priority, is domestic social stability. Any whisper of protest gets shut down; that’s why they have such strong speech controls. So one factor is that China doesn’t have much of a culture of resistance in general, whether in workplaces or politically. I’m not saying no one dissents — but it has a cultural effect too, because people don’t see it as useful or as an option. When I ask family members of mine in China about AI, sometimes they’re annoyed about specific things, but fundamentally, the idea of opposing AI is seen as almost unimaginable.

The other thing about China is that if you’re middle-aged there, you’ve lived through so many political, economic, and technological revolutions in your lifetime. When I was a little kid visiting Shanghai in the mid-2000s, there were no high-speed trains — now China has some of the best high-speed rail systems in the world. Technology has always gone hand in hand with dramatic economic advancement, with being lifted out of poverty. The modernization process has been aggressive and disruptive, but it’s not something the party has offered opportunities to resist, and it’s something most Chinese people still see as an inevitability that was mostly good for most people — because incomes did increase by dramatic amounts alongside the technological change. So I think people have a similar attitude toward AI: It’s much less about “Can I stop the AI wave?” and more “How can I take advantage of the AI wave to get ahead economically?”

We were just talking about this deep pessimism about what technology can bring us here in the US. I think a lot of people look around and think: We don’t have a cure for cancer yet, but we’ve sure seen our lives get worse in a lot of ways because of technology, social media, whatever. That pessimism probably fuels the backlash to AI, the skepticism about whether it can ever deliver on its promises. And that experience just isn’t the same in China, or probably much of the rest of the world, where technological progress has been faster and more concrete in people’s lives.

My 90-year-old grandfather said he’d love an elder-care robot to help him do tasks around the house so he doesn’t have to rely on his kids — he wants more freedom and mobility. It’s seen more as a tool to help individual goals. Even with the robot factories or pharmacies — one thing that struck me visiting a robot pharmacy was that the PR people happily said, “Yep, we’re doing these robots because human workers take too many smoke breaks and bathroom breaks and take too long.”

You’d never say that in the US, but they’re probably thinking the same thing — they just don’t say it. The other thing they mentioned is that this lets the pharmacy operate 24/7, because a lot of people need medications in the middle of the night and want to order via the DoorDash equivalent. There was actually a labor shortage before — Chinese workers weren’t willing to work night shifts — so these pharmacies are offering real consumer surplus. A significant percentage of orders come in overnight, when no other pharmacy is open. And with the factories, part of the issue is that Chinese workers, especially young people, don’t want to do factory work anymore.

“I think the 2028 presidential primary and election is really where I expect AI to become a centerpiece of the conversation.”

That anecdote gets at the promise and peril of AI, and the role of the backlash movement — which I’m still wrestling with how I feel about. On the one hand, I want to live in a world where cancer gets cured, where we live in an era of abundance, where things are cheap and easy to make because factories can run all the time with machine workers who don’t require anything — I want the future we were promised, of flying cars and everything working well.

But I also don’t want to lose my job, or see humanity wiped out by an angry machine god. Because we don’t really know what’s going to happen yet, it’s hard to work out my own feelings about the pushback here in the States — what’s appropriate, and what’s holding us back from real advances in our lives.

Totally, I agree. I like Waymos — I think they’re safer, and I’d prefer a safer robot car driv[ing] me around instead of me driving. I’m not a good driver; no one should let me drive. So I wrestle with some of the same things.

To close out the conversation — let’s come back to the United States. AI populism is brewing as a political force. We’ve seen it show up in a couple of races so far, but it’s early. We’ve got the midterms, then the presidential election. How do you think it’s going to affect American politics this November, and in 2028?

My sense is that this November, it’s going to be more about state and local races where AI really shows up. I’m going to spend some time in Michigan and Wisconsin this summer touring some of the data center sites facing the most opposition — those states also have contested governor and Senate races where AI and data centers have become a core issue, so I’m interested to learn more there. I think the 2028 presidential primary and election is really where I expect AI to become a centerpiece of the conversation — especially if we start to see some of the employment impacts people are expecting. As soon as we see something like a 2 percent rise in unemployment, if that happens, I think people will be very upset, and we should expect a ton of focus on the issue.

The other thing I’ll note is political opportunism — you’re already seeing a bit of this, where politicians are likely to raise the salience of AI above where people might ordinarily care about it, because it’s become a convenient boogeyman. It polls so poorly, people are so anti-AI and anti-data-center, AI billionaires are so unsympathetic, that no matter what your policy program is, AI is a great reason to push it. I think a lot of politicians who are being clever about this are going to move AI to the center of the conversation, raising its salience to manufacture urgency for proposals they’re already excited about. That’s definitely something I’m watching for 2028.

Have you noticed there are a lot of professional basketball players named Jalen? Well, it’s not just the NBA: There are a plethora of Jalens in the NFL, and even the NHL has one. How did this name get so popular? Did all their parents watch basketball in the 1990s and fall for Jalen Rose?

There are many ways names come about, and according to Cleveland Kent Evans, there is something unique about naming traditions in the United States. Evans is the former president of the American Names American Name Society, and he writes a column for the Omaha World Herald nabout what names are popular, and why.

“In American culture, individualism is so strong. What I hear most often from parents is we want to find a name which is different, but not too different,” he told Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.  “A lot of people are picking names which are unusual to them because they don’t know anybody their own age or their parents’ age with the name.” 

So what makes some names go mainstream, and what outside factors play a role in what parents choose? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me.

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Evans, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

So we have this very American individualized outlook when it comes to names. I would love to get into how other social factors shape how we name people. How does race shape our names?

The African American community has had a very different experience with naming since the 1960s. If you go back before the 1960s, unfortunately prejudiced racist people, one of the things they used to see about Black people was that they have funny names.

Statistically, before 1960, that wasn’t really true. It was like Black people had names that were like 1 or 2 percent more unusual than white people. It was very small. What happened in the ’60s as part of [the] Black Power [Movement], they turned what had been a negative into a positive. Many Black people said, “We are the people who give our children unique names to show how much we love them, to show how valued they are.” And that’s when you got the tradition of creating new names. Instead of the individual names necessarily being what went through fashions, it was the syllables they were made out of. In the ’60s and ’70s for girls, the most common prefix was law. And so you had Lakeisha, Latasha, Latoya. Then in the ’90s, the most popular prefix was Sha. And so you had Shanisha, Shaquita.

“Just like there is no such thing as the perfect parent or the perfect child, there’s no such thing as the perfect name.”

How does class show up in the way we pick names?

People who are highly educated want new names for their kids, but for them, they have to find something that has a history in the culture. They’re the ones that go back and revive the old names, while blue-collar people are more interested in stuff which is new — things which are newly invented or things which have not been girls or children’s names until recently. 

How do names become popular?

Things do not go from zero to top 10 overnight. But what happens is you often have what I call the Hollywood feedback loop. Screenwriters in Hollywood tend to be college educated. They often are going to give their characters names which are too young for them because they name their characters like they would name a kid. The screenwriters name characters and that presents the name to the whole population. Then all of a sudden it shoots up. An example of something changing social class that way was Tristan. Tristan sort of first came up among more educated people. There was a character in the original All Creatures Great and Small. Then you have the movie Legends of the Fall, which comes out with Brad Pitt playing the character Tristan. All of a sudden the name shoots up. It was not just the educated people who were naming their son Tristan anymore very suddenly at that point. 

Are there any other examples?

One of the hugest increases just because of television was a few years ago. About 2008 there was a program on one of the cable TV networks called 16 and Pregnant. One of the first babies born on that show was a boy named Bentley. The name Bentley for baby boys was one of the fastest growing boys’ names ever. It went from almost nothing to within about three years being the 75th most common name for boys in the US.

Do people ever see naming their children as a way to break from their past or from their culture? 

If you look at the immigrant groups that came from Europe in the 19th and the early 20th century, it was very common for the immigrants to want to give their kids quote “American” names. They would tend to pick things which they heard in the neighborhood. Then as the ethnic groups become assimilated, one of the ironies of that is that the grandchildren or great grandchildren of the immigrants go back and they say, “Well we want to revive our ethnic names.”

The first group that did that was the Irish. A lot of Irish people came over and they quit naming their kids things like Bridget. Then a lot of them wanted to bring back Irish names like Kevin. And then because they were doing it, those names started spreading to the whole whole country. So today Kevin is not an especially Irish American name. There are many, many Americans who have no Irish ancestry who are named Kevin. 

What advice do you have for people out there who are like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to name this kid. What am I going to do?” How should people be approaching it? How should they be thinking about it?

Well, I think first of all, they shouldn’t worry about it too much. I got a communication from a woman who had an uncle who she really loved and really admired, whose name was Floyd. She said, “Can I really name my son Floyd? Won’t he be teased too much?” I told her, “Look, you really love this uncle. What you do is you name your son Floyd, but then from the very beginning, you tell him why you named him that and why his great Uncle Floyd was a marvelous person and why you loved him so much and make him proud of it to protect him from the teasing.”

Just like there is no such thing as the perfect parent or the perfect child, there’s no such thing as the perfect name. There are lots of different names that would work equally well for your child and you shouldn’t think that you have ruined their life by giving them the wrong name. 

The Democratic Party is at war with itself, and nowhere is the fight clearer than the Michigan Senate primary. On one side: Rep. Haley Stevens, backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the establishment, who says the left is too untested and too extreme to win a general election. On the other: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the former public health official who wants to blow up the whole premise of the question.

More than $40 million in outside money has already poured into this race — a big chunk of it from pro-Israel groups lining up against El-Sayed — because it’s less a Senate primary than a proxy war for where the party goes next. And at the center of it sits that dreaded word: electability. 

That term has become a catch-all used by Democrats to encapsulate whatever approach they think has higher odds of winning the general election. 

This week on America, Actually, I sat down with El-Sayed about what his theory of electability actually means. 

Here are three takeaways from our conversation:

1. His electability pitch is an “America First” argument  

El-Sayed takes the two things his critics treat as liabilities — his opposition to US support for Israel and his populism — and fuses them into a single kitchen-table argument: money going abroad is money not going to you. Anti-war politics and affordability policy become one and the same.

“My priority is money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for all. That’s what I’m campaigning on,” he said. That reminded me of a similar argument I heard from Darializa Avila Chevalier, the socialist candidate who won an insurgent congressional primary in New York City. 

“Kids need glasses, kids need schools, kids need functional infrastructure,” El-Sayed continued, fleshing out his case. “And I’m gonna find the money that we’re sending to do heinous things to other people and keep it here.” 

He says that pitch appeals to a broader swath of the electorate than the traditional left: Voters, he says, feel that the government is making them “unable to afford my groceries, unable to afford a home… and then [it is] sending my money abroad telling me that somehow that’s in my best interest?”

2. He rejects the left-right dichotomy

El-Sayed also repeatedly rejected the left-right spectrum entirely. His read on Michigan isn’t that voters keep lurching between extremes — it’s that they are searching for a fresh type of politics, which neither traditional party was offering. Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, Donald Trump in that cycle’s general election, Joe Biden in 2020, Trump again in 2024. It’s not whiplash, he argues. It’s hunger. And that hunger reorganizes the whole map.

“If Michiganders wanted moderate[s], why would they have elected Donald Trump twice?” he asked. 

“The better way to think about our politics is top-down: people who are locked out versus people doing the locking out. And if you’re on the side of the people doing the locking out, you’re going to have a really hard time in our politics right now.”

With this framework, El-Sayed thinks he can create a greater contrast with Republican nominee Mike Rogers than his Democratic counterpart can. 

“Both Mike Rogers, the Republican, and Haley Stevens, my opponent in this primary, have been on the side of the people doing the locking out,” he said. “They take their money and do their bidding.”

3. The moderates are in hiding 

The Stevens campaign rejected multiple requests for comment — which is becoming a bit of a trend on the Democratic establishment side of the party’s civil war. If you want to bash the left, they’ll talk. But if you’re interested in their vision, they are much less willing to be forthright. In some cases, it seems like the moderate lane of Democrats is downright scared of its own shadow. 

But that’s also a political strategy. Stevens and her allies at groups like Third Way are making a bet: that if they can turn the race into a verdict on El-Sayed himself — the Hasan Piker streams, the old campaign clips, the loose-cannon caricature — voters will get nervous and retreat to the safe choice. 

El-Sayed said the approach was an insult to voters: “It’s interesting taking political advice from a shop that exists specifically to launder old ideas and make them seem new again — and then, like, fail miserably at that.” 

New episodes of America, Actually are in your feed every Saturday. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or in the Today, Explained feed.

On  a recent episode of Today, Explained, I explored Donald Trump’s ongoing succession wars, and whether the president that’s upended the Republican Party is taking an active role in deciding who might replace him. 

The short version: The race to inherit MAGA, already underway, runs through Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Trump has every incentive to keep everyone guessing about how it ends. 

As a guest host of Today, Explained, I talked to my former colleague, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who has covered Trump for years, and recently released a new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, which she co-wrote with Times reporter Jonathan Swan. 

Here are three things that stuck out: 

1. It’s Vance’s to lose — but it’s not a given

“Vance is the presumptive frontrunner right now, and it’s hard for me to see who else that could be,” Haberman said. Rubio, Donald Trump Jr., and the Turning Point network have all signaled they’re lining up behind the vice president as Trump’s heir. Rubio has gone as far as telling Vanity Fair that if Vance runs, “he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him.” 

But being the frontrunner isn’t the same as having been anointed. Regime Change lays out real fault lines between Trump and his vice president; over the Iran strikes and the Epstein files, Vance repeatedly landed on the opposite side of the president. On the decision to go to war, Haberman reported, Vance “was the only one who really argued forcefully with the president,” and “it cost him with Trump.” 

That offense could be remembered when the next Republican primary arrives. 

2. Trump plans to stick around

The biggest obstacle to a clean handoff may be that Trump doesn’t want one. “Trump doesn’t want to cede the stage to anybody,” Haberman said. “The second that he anoints somebody or backs somebody or whatever, the clock starts ticking on his own relevance.”

And there’s nothing in his history, she added, to suggest he’ll ride quietly into retirement: “There is nothing in his history that suggests that he’s just going to go off and do paintings like George W. Bush.” Whoever wins the Republican nomination in 2028 should expect Trump to still be standing next to them — and still expecting credit.

3. Trump still dangles Rubio over Vance

Even with the field seemingly settled, Trump keeps reminding Vance that it isn’t. The most vivid scene in Regime Change comes from an October dinner in the White House Blue Room, with Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. executives at the table alongside the Vances and Rubio. Trump turned to Murdoch and asked what he thought of JD. “JD has the potential to be great,” Murdoch offered — a pointed answer from a man who had tried to talk Trump out of picking Vance in the first place. “Thanks a lot, Rupert,” Vance said.

Then Trump asked, “Well, what about Marco?” Murdoch’s reply, according to Haberman: “Marco is brilliant.” After that, Haberman says, the table got “uncomfortable.”

There’s no evidence Rubio is actually running — “quite the opposite,” Haberman said. But Trump has always pitted rivals against each other, and by Haberman’s account, he simply has better personal chemistry with Rubio than with Vance — a striking turn given the “Little Marco” cruelty of 2016.

So will Vance get the endorsement he needs? “I think anybody who is counting on Donald Trump’s anything often ends up pretty disappointed,” she said. 

There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Scientists have started calling it the “Godzilla El Niño.”

The nickname comes from actual climate researchers, which should tell you something; they are not generally in the habit of comparing climatic systems to mega-monsters. What’s building in the eastern Pacific right now is a surge of ocean warming that is likely to make 2027 the hottest year in recorded history, possibly by a lot. The median projection puts next year at about 1.7 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average. The high end gets close to 1.9, which, until recently, was a number climate models saved for the late 2030s.

David Wallace-Wells has spent a decade thinking about what numbers like that mean for the people who have to live under them, first in his 2017 essay “The Uninhabitable Earth” and the 2019 book that grew out of it, now as a writer and reporter at the New York Times. In a recent piece for the New York Times, Wallace-Wells made the case that 2027 could work as something stranger than a disaster forecast: a preview of everyday life in about 2035. It could be a full year lived at a temperature we weren’t supposed to reach for another decade: fire seasons, atmospheric rivers, disrupted monsoons, strained food systems, and all. 

What’s less certain is if any of this will change our politics. Americans tell pollsters they’re more worried about climate change than ever — more than after Katrina, more than at any point in the Bush, Obama, or Biden years — even as elite discourse on the subject has been waning. Meanwhile, the green transition keeps compounding. More than 90 percent of the new energy capacity built in America last year was green — and under an administration doing its best to stop it.

Sean Illing talked through all of it with Wallace-Wells for this week’s episode of The Gray Area. When Sean asked whether 2027 will be a real test of how much climate disruption we can manage, Wallace-Wells doesn’t blink: “I think it’s going to be a test on that score, which we will fail.” 

So yes, it gets dark. But, it also ends with the most convincing case for hope on climate I’ve heard in a while — and I write a newsletter that goes looking for good news every week. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Just about everybody has heard the term El Niño, but most of us — myself included, until very recently — don’t really know what it is. So let’s just start there. What is an El Niño?

It’s a climatic event that happens irregularly but pretty often — usually about every three or four years, sometimes as infrequently as every seven — in which you get a burst of warmer-than-normal temperatures in the coastal Pacific, off the coast of South America. And that has a lot of amazingly global consequences, in ways that are not intuitive to most normies.

So, in this case, you tend to see a lot more rain across the western US. You tend to see a lot less rain across Brazil and the Amazon. You see disruption to the monsoon season in South Asia; a similar disruption to rain across the Sahel and sub-Saharan Africa; and, typically, a suppression of hurricane activity in the Caribbean. Which is all to say: It’s a global disruption to the basic normal patterns that we come to depend on, but the disruption isn’t all in one direction.

At the global level, it makes things hotter — and the one that we’re seeing forming this year may be a record-setting one. I think the best way to think about it is just like we shook up the whole planet’s climate system, and we see a lot more disorder than we see in non-El Niño years.

What is particularly scary about this El Niño? Why do scientists seem to be alarmed?

There are a few different components to it. The first is that we are going to experience it at a much higher baseline of global average temperature than has ever been experienced before. Given that we are warming the planet quite rapidly, just about every year is warmer than just about every year that came before. We’ve normalized it so much that we don’t raise our eyebrows when we set new records for global average temperature. But novel events like an El Niño are happening on top of that baseline.

The things that terrified us into action not that long ago are now our inevitable future.

But another reason why scientists are concerned is because it is a super El Niño. Some of them are even calling it a Godzilla El Niño, which is to say the boost that we’re going to see because of this event may be bigger than any similar event ever observed in modern history.

That’s particularly alarming, because the El Niños of the late 1870s produced perhaps the most human suffering that the modern world has ever experienced: famines that killed tens of millions of people all around the world, from Africa to South Asia to China. I don’t want to suggest that this El Niño is capable of producing that kind of suffering. Obviously, 2026 is a different world than 1878, but it gives you a framework for how the consequences of an El Niño may filter through our political world if, over the next year, we see significant crop failures in multiple parts of the world, which is maybe even more possible because there’s a fertilizer shortage as a result of the war in Iran.

We probably will be able to respond to that such that 10 or 50 million people don’t die, but there will be considerable political disarray that results: bread riots, political protests, civil unrest, perhaps in multiple parts of the world. I’m not saying that’s inevitable, but it reminds us that a huge amount of what we take for granted as stable features of modern life is nevertheless subject on some level to disturbance by the climate system. And this climate system this year is winding up to really give us quite a wallop.

You write that next year, 2027,could be a preview of what everyday life will be like in a decade or so. Talk about that.

So, here we are in 2026, and the global average temperature is about 1.5°C above the preindustrial average. It doesn’t sound like very much, and on any given day that kind of effect is basically imperceptible to the average person. But it is a global average, and it hides a lot of extremes.

Our elite discourse and our elite policymaking has somehow decided to treat those anxieties as irrelevant.

It is also right about what we agreed we would try to limit warming to in the Paris agreement in 2015. We said we would definitely keep warming below 2 degrees, and we would do everything we could to keep warming close to 1.5 — a number that came from emerging science and emerging political sense among the world’s most vulnerable countries that 2 degrees wasn’t enough. That 1.5 degrees was itself going to be quite difficult to manage, but anything north of that was going to be quite catastrophic.

When we signed that agreement just 10 years ago, we were not yet north of 1 degree of warming. We are now, in the long-term average, somewhere about 1.3 or 1.4, [with] a single year at 1.5. And we are heading quite rapidly not just past the more ambitious goal we set for ourselves but toward the less ambitious one: 2 degrees. It now seems, practically speaking, inevitable. We’re heading toward a future that we defined as unacceptable.

And when I say that, I don’t just mean that the scientists at the IPCC defined it as unacceptable. When they published their research into the difference between those two levels that report was the event that gave us the huge global climate awakening of late 2018, 2019, into 2020. It’s the reason we know who Greta Thunberg is. It’s the reason we heard of Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise. It’s the reason we started talking about a Green New Deal. All the lip service that presidents, and prime ministers, and CEOs paid to climate change in the years that followed came out of a report that was basically saying, “We need to limit warming below 2 degrees.”

And we now know that we will be heading north of 2 degrees. The things that terrified us into action not that long ago are now our inevitable future.

Is it your belief that 2027 will be a real no-bullshit test of how much climate disruption we can effectively manage at this stage?

I think it’s going to be a test on that score, which we will fail. And the question is what impact that makes socially and politically. We are already seeing every year, in countless ways, how poorly prepared we are for the climate present, but most of the time it isn’t producing the kind of political and social response that I would like to see. And I worry that the basic pattern is going to continue, even into a much warmer future, where, rather than changing course and designing a much more responsive and resilient future, we will just find ourselves defining more and more suffering as acceptable and normal as the cost of going about our daily lives without being too preoccupied by the course of climate change.

A decade ago, a lot of people — myself included, I guess — really did believe that extreme weather would eventually force climate action. Can we just say by now that that theory has failed?

People are complicated, populations are complicated, and politics is complicated. I think of this story going back to Katrina, which was an eye-opening event more than 20 years ago now. It seemed, for a time, to mark a high point in American climate concern. It helped discredit the presidency of George W. Bush, gave us an upsurge of climate urgency and the election of Barack Obama — who said this would be the moment we looked back on as the moment the seas slowed their rise and the planet began to heal.

“We have imposed on ourselves and our future much more suffering and difficulty than we needed to, because climate change will be that disruptive.”

We’re going to be muddling through, and the future that we live in as a result will have a lot of bad stuff in it and a lot of good stuff in it.

We’ve seen a bunch of climate disasters just in the United States since then. Again and again, there’s a period of intense national focus and, then, a kind of withdrawing from the story of climate change. But that narrative — that we keep getting knocked back on our heels by climate disasters and then forget about them entirely — is also too simplistic. Looking at the headlines, you might think that everybody moved on from climate. The truth is that when you look into the survey data, we’re basically at the highest point for climate anxiety that we’ve ever been. Americans are more concerned about climate change than they were in the aftermath of Katrina. They’re more worried than they were at any point in the George W. Bush presidency, the Barack Obama presidency, and the Joe Biden presidency.

So, we have an interesting political story here. We’re telling ourselves that the country has moved on from climate. But, in fact, at the level of individual people — how they feel about their lives, the lives of their communities, and the future of their country — they are just about, if not more, worried about climate impacts than they’ve ever been before. And our elite discourse and our elite policymaking has somehow decided to treat those anxieties as irrelevant.

But the question is not whether they’re worried. The question is whether they’re worried enough to actually sacrifice anything in order to make headway.

You often hear from people who think we needn’t worry as much about climate change that most Americans are not willing to pay, say, $10 a month to take action on climate. In some ways, I feel like that’s a way of weaponizing American entitlement against one particular set of policy crusades. But the other thing I would say is that it’s not the case that we need to shoulder burdens in any meaningful sense to take action.

Solar power is dramatically cheaper than any fossil fuel alternative that’s ever been produced — at least by the levelized cost of electricity, which has been the industry standard for a generation. That measure is misleading, because it only accounts for the marginal cost of electricity and not the overall cost of a system; you get more solar when the sun’s shining and more wind when the wind’s blowing, so you have to build out around that to have a reliable supply. But because batteries have now made the same dramatic improvement in their cost that solar did a decade ago, you can use very cheap batteries to even out the distribution of solar and wind power. And that means the overall cost, according to recent research, of renewable power is now lower than any alternative system. We know those price declines are going to continue for renewables, and we know that they will not decline for fossil fuels.

I’m not an economic determinist — politics plays a huge role here, as does culture — but look at the United States right now. We have a president in the White House who is remarkably opposed to renewable energy. He has done an awful lot to try to kneecap the development and rollout of renewables in America. And, yet, last year, when he returned to office, more than 90 percent of all the new energy infrastructure built in America was green. For every unit of new fossil fuel infrastructure we were building, we built nine times as much green energy. This year, the share is going to be even bigger. It’s expected to be 93 percent, which is about what it is around the world entirely.

And with the Iran war, we see many countries around the world looking at the logic of their dependence on fossil fuels and thinking, “Why would I depend on international actors to continuously supply a power source at prices that they determine when I can do a one-time importation of green energy infrastructure and then collect the dividends in the form of sun and wind, which never stop and are domestically controlled?” If you’re talking about this as a race, it seems obvious that the green stuff is winning. The problem is that it’s not winning nearly fast enough to avoid some of these quite scary climate outcomes.

David, I feel smarter at the end of this conversation, because I know more, but I do not feel more optimistic about tomorrow. Do you have any good news that we can dip out of here with?

The world is full of good news. I can be the famous optimist David Wallace-Wells. Just on climate stuff: The green transition is proceeding at a breakneck pace, much faster than even its biggest boosters said was possible 10 or 15 years ago. The battery revolution changing the economic calculus for renewables is really profound. It means that we can probably, in large parts of the world, do 100 percent renewable power, which many people said was going to be completely impossible. And even before we get there, we are already dealing with free electricity in the middle of the day in sun-rich parts of the world. In Australia, they’ve literally passed a law promising citizens that, for several hours every day, they will be guaranteed free electricity.

And that’s just power. With the EV rollout that we’re seeing all around the world, you never have to go to a gas station ever again, because you just charge up at your house. Whenever we electrify anything, it gets dramatically more efficient. And we’re cleaning up air pollution, which is a much larger threat to human flourishing on any conceivable timescale than climate change is. Today, somewhere between 5 and 10 million people are dying every year from air pollution, but we’re past the peak of that. We’re drawing it down. There’s a lot of progress that is really wonderful and worth celebrating.

So, I don’t want to give the sense that, for all of my political despair, and for all of what I would call my climate realism, we are all doomed in some meaningful way. We’re living in an incredibly messy world. We have imposed on ourselves and our future much more suffering and difficulty than we needed to, because climate change will be that disruptive. But that challenge is a political one, it’s a social one, it’s a technological one. And while we are not pursuing each of those paths optimally, in my view, we also shouldn’t assume that we will fail each of those tests like we’re getting a zero.

We’re going to be muddling through, and the future that we live in as a result will have a lot of bad stuff in it and a lot of good stuff in it, which is, of course, human nature and human history. One hopes along the way we will wake up a little bit more — not just on climate, but on politics and governance. My hope, when I’m feeling optimistic, is that these stories are playing out on long enough timelines that we have at least the opportunity to take control of our climate system, our economic system, and our political system in ways that have eluded us in the past.

Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.

In 2024 the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, led by Sir Keir Starmer, won back the prime minister’s office after more than a decade out of power.

He told a jubilant crowd: “Change begins right here!”

Starmer was right that British voters wanted change; unfortunately for him, they pretty quickly wanted him out too. Starmer is stepping down on Monday — making him Britain’s sixth prime minister in less than a decade. 

“We’re just not used to this,” Tom McTague, editor of the New Statesman magazine, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. “We sort of prided ourselves on being this island of stability in a crazy world…and now we have become Italy only with bad weather and worse food.”

McTague talked to Rameswaram about why Starmer flamed out so fast, the far-right candidate angling to take the top job, and why the incoming prime minister, nicknamed “the King of the North,” might be Labour’s best shot at turning things around.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Why is Britain on its way to a seventh prime minister in a decade?

We are living through very, very weird times here in Britain. We’re just not used to this. We sort of prided ourselves on being this island of stability in a crazy world — we could smugly look out on countries like Italy or Australia as they churned through their prime ministers, and we just held steady with Margaret Thatcher for 10 years or Tony Blair for 10 years. Now we have become Italy, only with bad weather and worse food.

I think, big picture, we’re actually not that different to the rest of the Western world in this regard, in that all of the same reasons that cause disquiet in the United States or in France or in Germany are the same kind of reasons that are causing political disquiet here. Immigration, poor economic growth, living standards not improving as quickly as we’re used to, inflation post-pandemic — all of that comes together and it creates similar forces that you see in the US. So we have electoral coalitions, the rise of people who can communicate super well on social media in the new age who grab hold of attention.

It’s just that what is happening here is happening in our parliamentary context rather than a presidential context, where you elect a president and they are there for a full term whether they’re unpopular or not. Here, if you lose the confidence of the public or the confidence of members of parliament, then suddenly you can be out on your ear within weeks or months.

Let’s talk about the last time there was a major shift. It was in 2024 when voters had become wary of the Conservative Party in the UK, and that’s when they elected the Labour Party and its leader Keir Starmer into office?

They elected them with a landslide — an astonishing majority in the House of Commons, enough to basically do whatever they wanted. But I think once he’d got into power, he didn’t really know how he wanted to change the country. He stood on a manifesto of “change,” in quotes — it was a kind of hopey-changey thing, without much substance to it.

In one sense, he was quite a small-c conservative man. He wanted to just get this thing working again, and he thought you could do that through sensible, incremental, rational, technocratic change. And I think that analysis has proven fundamentally flawed.

What follows Keir Starmer? Does the Labour Party retain control of parliament?

Yes. So the Labour Party fundamentally has kicked out its own prime minister. It’s based on the fact that he was deeply, deeply unpopular in the country, and they thought if they hung around with this guy any longer that they were all screwed, basically, and that they would all lose their jobs. That’s the reason why he’s been removed from power. He lost the support of his members of parliament and his cabinet, who eventually turned on him and looked to the man who’s going to replace him — a guy called Andy Burnham, who is the mayor of Greater Manchester.

Tell us a bit about him. I mean, they call him the King of the North?

Yeah, like the Game of Thrones stuff — he’s going to sort of come down with his, I don’t even know what they’re called, White Walkers, is it, or something?

The North of England is, I guess, the equivalent of the Rust Belt Midwest kind of vibe. It’s seen as a place that is a bit more down to earth, a bit more post-industrial. It’s got more economic problems — it’s a place which used to be rock-solid Labour but has moved to the right. And so I think there is an opportunity here for Andy Burnham to win the next election and stick around for a bit longer.

You talk about leaders in the UK thus far having lacked a mandate or perhaps a broad vision for the country. I wonder if the person who has those things right now is Nigel Farage. Could you tell our audience a bit about him?

Nigel Farage was the man that was introduced to America by Donald Trump as “Mr. Brexit.” He is the figure on the populist right of British politics who has stood outside of the Conservative Party — the traditional party of the right here — and challenged it for not being conservative enough, for not being patriotic enough, for not being tough enough on borders and immigration.

All of the things that happened to the Republican Party from the Tea Party or from Donald Trump — it’s just that he did that from outside of the Conservative Party. And he is a kind of charismatic figure, a very good public speaker, very hard to pin down, speaks kind of fluently and off the cuff.

He was finally elected to the House of Commons at the last election for his insurgent populist party called Reform UK. And from that position, he has taken the party into the lead in the polls. But something else is going on now, where because he is a prospective future prime minister, he is facing a level of scrutiny that he hasn’t faced before.

So all sorts of stuff is going on in British politics, which sounds completely wild.

People are looking at this situation — this run of prime ministers, this ascendancy of Nigel Farage — and they say the UK has become ungovernable. What would you argue the situation is, Tom?

Look, I would argue that it’s parliamentary democracy at its messy kind of fundamentals. Britain is a country, like many countries in Western Europe, which is struggling to work out how it’s going to make its way in the world in the 21st century, in a world where so many of the assumptions which we have come to take for granted no longer appear to be holding.

A United States that is a trusted ally — that is changing. Free market economics, global free trade appears to be ending. And you add into that social media, the AI revolution, all of this. It feels like the turmoil in British politics is just a reflection of a kind of turmoil in the world and in the global economy. You can see the same sorts of questions going on in Canada and in Australia and France and Germany. And I don’t think anyone really has the answers yet, and Britain certainly doesn’t.