Adam Tooze

You sometimes sound to me like somebody who's just on psychedelics.

So describe to me from where you were four or five years ago, the Adam Tooze writing Deluge and Crashed and your pandemic book.

What are some things you saw or some numbers that have passed through your chart book?

What helps you convey the sort of portal your own thinking has gone through?

on China's centrality and power and what it means to absorb that into your view of the world and its order.

I think I have this number in my book.

They've built something like 23,000 miles of high-speed rail while we were failing to build the 500 miles of the California project.

So the analogy you're making here, you mentioned the Russians in World War II, you know, as people know, there is no winning World War II without...

So the analogy here is to climate.

And if you want to, quote unquote, win the climate change fight, it would require...

Making China central.

But the way they describe it to me is not that they don't think there's a political bargain to be made.

They actually believed, I think, going up to Joe Biden, that it would be losing a key level of geopolitical power to see this to China, that they think there was power in this.

You don't buy that.

I think the Jake Sullivan camp had a view that it was more important to maintain power over China than to accelerate the green transition.

Yes.

But they were not the ones driving the policy.

They were not calling the shots, no.

And so this brings me to something I was asking you at the beginning, which is,

What do you think the Trump administration believes power to be based on?