Heather Cox Richardson

I like Manifesto.

Always a pleasure, John.

Heather.

John.

So let's start with the place it's always important to start, and that's that the future is unwritten.

We are writing this story, and we are doing it.

And one of the reasons that I think people like you and me reach for the people around us is because ultimately this is an extraordinarily –

human process.

The people in the past did the same thing.

Yes, though, I feel as if, like you seem to feel, that we are heading toward some kind of a cataclysm soon.

And that, I think we should maybe unpack a little bit about what's going on there.

But

Again, to reach back into history, we are not the first people who are approaching a catastrophe without really being able to understand what is going to happen or what it looks like.

And I always think of the fact that years ago, I went to write a piece on the great crash of 29.

And I thought, you know, everybody's done the, you know, the economics and everybody's done this and everyone's done that.

What am I going to do?

So I went back to a newspaper from the time and read the night before to see what it looked like on the verge of it.

And it's really interesting because it was the opening night of the opera in New York City.

And so you had all these stories about the people in there.

you know, beautiful coaches and the, you know, the guys with the uniforms and the people wearing diamonds and going in and going to see the opera.