What Happens if the U.S. Defaults?

Instead, I'll open with some preliminary thoughts about American business and American government, as it relates to the conversation I had with Lloyd Blankfein. Last year, the Trump organization licensed a Florida company to sell a Trump band branded mobile phone. The promise phone would be encased in gold and carry an American flag on the back. The sellers advertised that the phone would be proudly made in the United States of America, a patriotic alternative to Apple phones and Samsung phones.

Some five hundred ninety thousand Trump believers are reported to have paid a hundred dollars each to secure their Trump phones, according to the International Business Times. Things rapidly went wrong. The phone delivery date was pushed back and pushed back and pushed back again, from the original late summer twenty twenty five to december twenty twenty five, then to twenty twenty six. The made in USA commitment vanished from company promotional material.

One reporter from four hundred four Media noticed recurring charges from the company on his credit card statement. In April 2026, the Trump phone company updated its terms and conditions. The hundred dollar deposit was now redefined as a conditional opportunity, meaning not a binding sales contract. Fifty nine million dollars was collected from trusting Trump supporters.

Will they ever receive anything in return? Will deposits be refunded, if not? Will the Trump organization retain its licensing fee? These kinds of events are raise doubts about American business. When the family of the President of the United States engages in commercial activity in ways that raise question of about good faith and about other intentions.

Um it redounds not just against that family, but against the whole structure of American business. And we have seen so many of those doubts raised through the Trump years by people around, near and including the President of the United States himself. Crypto schemes, the ballroom, the reflecting pool, so many. And all of this feed into a moment of doubt about the worth and value of what American business does. Now I need to make clear here, I'm a very old fashioned Reagan Romney Republican.

Who believes in the value of what orthodox of what business pr people produce? Most people in business are seeking to meet the needs and wants of their customers and are looking to benefit themselves by benefiting others. And to get rich in the way that American business leaders have so often gotten rich, by giving people what they want, cheaper, better than they had it before. Socialism, in my opinion, means poverty and oppression.

The reason socialists in politics so often have to insert the adjective democratic before the noun socialism is because they know well That socialism in as it has really been practiced in the real world, socialism just as such means tyranny and oppression and work. So I am on in in this regard, completely on the side of the business leaders we will be like those we'll be hearing from today.

But it is no there is no mistaking that the pessimism and discontent out there in the world are qu bringing into question these values that I share with America's business leaders. And that these feelings, if they are to be prevented from having doing real harm to the American political economy, these feelings need to be recognized, acknowledged, and in some way redressed.

Either by timely action against those who in some way take advantage of customers or or by sharing benefits more broadly through the American spectrum spectrum of incomes and opportunities so that all people feel that it doesn't matter what your neighbor has, what you have is enough. Your health care is secure, your opportunities to rise according to your talents and your efforts, those are open to you, and a better life awaits for your children and grandchildren.

One of the places where the question of capitalism, American capitalism, has become more intense is with the accumulation of public debt. Now, again, I'll declare my view here. I'm with Alexander Hamilton that under the right conditions, a public debt is a public blessing. Public debt creates safe assets that can be used to back all kinds of enterprise.

If you've ever bought a life insurance policy, you know, you pay in your money at regular intervals, expecting that your heirs, your loved ones, will at some point in the future get a benefit from the money you have paid in. You need to know that the people who are taking your money have a safe place. to store and increase the value of the money of the premiums you pay. And the foundation of any such scheme and many other schemes.

Uh to protect to uh move economic activity from the present into the future, to offer the trust of the future to the activity of the present is through abundant supplies of safe assets of which public debt, American public debt above all, is the foundation.

So a public debt under the right conditions, a public blessing. But under the wrong conditions, the public debt ceases to be a safe asset. If there's so much public debt that people begin to question whether it can ever be repaid, or at least replay repaid in non-inflated dollars. Then the public debt becomes a public currency. Now, under the Trump administration, we have seen an extraordinary accumulation of public debt.

And this is not like the last two bursts of public debt increase. There was a big burst of public debt during the financial crisis of two thousand eight, two thousand nine. Well, no surprise that in the middle of a terrible recession, re government revenues go down, government spending goes up, and the government borrows.

That's normal. Nor is it a shock that during a terrible pandemic like that of 2020, again, government revenues collapse, government expenditures rise, there's a big increase in the public debt.

But in times of reasonable prosperity, like those which prevailed from the end of the financial crisis, uh in 2010-ish to the uh pandemic, and that have prevailed since the end of the pandemic, that is a time to reduce the burden of public debt and stabilize the public finances so that the value of the future of the currency in the future will be protected.

Instead, the Trump administration has been running deficits of nearly two trillion dollars a year and rising in times of reasonable prosperity because they don't tax properly and because they spend recklessly in good times. So that became one of the foundations of my conversation with Lloyd Blankvine, and that is the reason why it was such a first question that I asked.

How does a stable commercial enterprise society maintain the trust of its people if it cannot bring its public expenditures into some kind of balance with its public revenue? From that springs inflation, from inflation springs a sense of ripoff and cheat and f and uncertainty. Um that demoralizes everyone and especially the young who look at a longer term future where they say, How do I buy a house? How do I form a family? How do I rely on anything if even the money itself can't be trusted?

There are other instances too where we discussed.

If most people if so many people not most people, but so many people think that the benefits accrue only to a few, they are wrong in that belief. The benefits accrue broadly. But beliefs don't have to be true to motivate action. False beliefs. False beliefs can be as destructive as true beliefs. False beliefs can be more destructive than p true beliefs. If enough people believe they're being ripped off, uh the consequences are just the same as if they're being ripped off in reality.

So that w those are the things I wanted to discuss with one of the most visible and formidable representatives of American financial capitalism. You'll decide for yourself how well I did.

Blankfein was born and raised in the public housing projects of East New York, Brooklyn. His father worked as a postal clerk and his mother in a department service. He got his first chance when accepted at Harvard at age sixteen. He is also a graduate of the Harvard Law School.

In twenty twenty six, Blank Fein published his memoir, Streetwise, getting to and through Goldman Sachs, which became a New York Times bestseller. And I'm very grateful he joins me in person today. This is our first this is the David From Show's first in person conversations.

Government is acting in arbitrary and capricious ways. The United States is at war in the Persian Gulf. Oil inter oil shipments are interrupted and a big chunk of oil that the world relied on is missing from world markets. Prices are rising. And yet the job reports aren't bad. Wall Street seems happy. Was everybody wrong about everything we thought we knew?

The basic system of ours is right at the core, is correct at the core. I mean, we have a system where, you know, we don't have central p centralized planning. And I know we don't generally have state capitalism, although I think based upon some that I've read your writings, maybe some way we're veering towards it t you know, at least the incremental steps because, you know, when the government takes little pieces of companies, maybe it sort of feels like that, but it's really not like that.

million millions of decision makers at the uh at the coal face, uh and uh also a system that if it isn't better at identifying the best opportunities it's the best and most ruthless at getting rid of bad decisions that have been made. Now that's the operating system. If we're looking at the software part of it, like where are we today, um, there's a lot of very big positives to the system.

where we like growth to be a little higher, but it's pretty good. We like inflation a little lower, but it's not off yeah, it's certainly not off the rails. Those are those things are generally good. And into this very generally very good mix We have the stimulus of the you know, the bill. We have part of that bill is giving people greater tax uh

Yes, exactly. Uh people are getting more money back from the government that they you know, because of their overpayments. You have the hyperscalers in d uh collectively investing in research. Countries don't do this. In collectively in research

Cl close to three quarters of a trillion dollars, all of which is stimulative for the economy. Now it may beg the question of how much of this spending will we will have to be written off because it's in the wrong direction, that's still an open question that people are debating now. But nevertheless the stimulus

the stimulus is there. So this you could find things wrong, but I will tell you, certainly in the short term and in now, there's a lot of stimulus going into an economy that's pretty good. And by the way, you can't really talk about the good economy

without acknowledging the caness of it. You know, the K where this, you know, K has arrows going up and you know, the leg going up and a leg going down. Because I'd say the economic system has done a very, very good job of creating the wealth And maybe you could debate whether it's done a very good job at distributing it because part of the polarization that we see in this in society writ large is the polarization in the out in the outcomes of the economy, because you have people with assets.

And people who have positions in the in the stock market are getting richer because of the inflating of those asset prices. And if you don't have asset prices, you're not getting richer and you're contending with the accumulation of prior inflation. So if you say the economy is going really, really well, you have to take into account that a lot of people listening may not think it's going so well because it's not going well for them.

the way you one would like it resolved. In other words, a capitulation by Iran will throw in where it may be resolved because somebody decides to blink on our side and dead but in other words

You know, y again, I don't adopt the characterization that this is stupid or not stupid. I'm just saying that the consequences, the second order consequences of what's being or what's being attempted here are so bad that the market is is making a bet. Or is looking through the moment. By the way, as it does many times when you're dealing with geopolitical circumstances.

like the Gulf W the the earlier Gulf Wars where, you know, it's very, very big disruption and the disruption ebbs quickly. How much of your

Activ how much of your you know, your activities do do you just completely revamp because something that you regard as temporary? I'm tempted to say transitional, but that that word has been overused in the past with respect to other other inflationary problems that we've had. But The basic thing that's going on is there's a lot of positives for certainly the markets. probably the economy. And then you have the issue of which whose economy, you know, in this bifurcated kind of polarized moment.

And that's it's a gap in the current year. In the in the last fiscal year that was about one point eight trillion. In the current year it's on its way to being two trillion. It's growing and growing and growing. Even before the Iran war, uh we were at two trillion. We m it will certainly be above that. And No one in Washington seems to regard this as any kind of any problem worth getting out of bed five minutes earlier to think about.

at a time when tax revenues should be pretty high'cause ever you know,'cause people are earning money. This sh and we're not you know, up until this moment we haven't been in a big war. You know, there's there's no crisis moment that's compelling us to spend more than we have. It should be the opposite. This would be the time when we should be harvesting grain and putting in a silo for a rainy day and somehow we're behaving w

more irresponsibly than in the worst rainy day we've ever had. And so it's a it's a very bad situation. And yet Other people are willing to finance our debt for us, des dollar being a reserve currency. And so I remember that, you know, I'm reminded of that quote.

How did something happen bad? Slowly then all at once. At one point somebody may decide that we're too irresponsible, that they're not gonna finance our debt, that the US will def you know, may default. And I I'll explain what that means.

The United States borrowed an enormous amount of money to fight and win World War II and was left with a l an unprecedented level of debt in the American economy at the end of that war. And then over the next forty years, or nearly forty years, to nineteen eighty, uh that that debt was paid down more rapidly, partly because the economy grew bigger so the debt seemed smaller in contrast, partly because

There was genuine repayment, partly because there was inflation that devalued the debt that there was, and the level of debt relative to the economy hit its basement in about the year nineteen eighty.

Picks up a lot after the financial crisis, picks up enormously after the pandemic. But now we're in, as you say, s pretty steady times, no external shocks, nothing except what the United States is doing to itself. And yet it is running deficits as b as big as during the global financial crisis, not as big as during the pandemic, and pushing debts to level pushing its debt to level

that is nearly equivalent to the level that we saw last during the pandemic. And no one seems to be doing anything about this or caring. And as we move into the current election cycle, we just hear more plans to spend more and have selective tax cuts for each party's favorite interest groups. No tax on tips, no tax on seniors. Pretty soon there'll be like a handful of W two earners paying all the tax.

And the reason why we're in this s this situation, we're sitting here, you know, having a perfectly good conversation as opposed to being, you know, c you know, c curled up in a fetal position in the corner. is that with a reserve currency in the world, people, you know, other countries keep most of their reserves in dollars, thereby financing or bad behavior.

um our lack uh you know undisciplined behavior. And that's why I say slowly then all at once. What c what ca how is how does this go wrong?

is what will those dollars be worth? So the way the US defaults on its debt is not by saying, I'm not gonna pay you back those dollars, just leave the printing presses on for a little longer. I'll pay you back your dollars. The question is what will those dollars be worth?

And so that's how we default. We default by inflating the currency and paying dollars back that don't carry the purchasing power that they had when they lent us the money. If people start to see that, if our creditors and we're a debtor nation. When our creditors say that, they either won't lend or they will lent only by exacting a very, very high yield, like if you were, you know

if you were uh lending money to to your dissolute brother in law, you'd prefer not to lend him anything in the first place. But guess what? You might

You know, you might do it at a very high interest rate, which you probably won't pay anyway. Or and so that's that's how that's how the US defaults, which by the way, this is not what you ask. One of the reasons one of the many reasons why you need an independent Federal Reserve is because our creditors are relying on the Federal Reserve to make to preserve the integrity of the dollars that they lend to us.

In the past, the dollar is the reserve currency because our economy is the biggest. And by the way, in some ways, the size of our debt. Is creating the liquidity in our debt. And so people are going along. People are anxious about it, but you know, so far, so

Uh that um is the p you know, I I wouldn't be subject to their reserves. It's you know, pract you know, it's a managed currency to begin with. Maybe they'll make a decision to manage it down or up. Not quite the same thing as the as the dollar. Euro, again not big enough, has its own issues. So the I think the dollar is with us for a long time, uh, to come. But still, at what price do people lend to us? Because you could still if people saw an inflationary

run at the dollar, that would be very adverse to our interest and by the way create higher deficits. You know, one of these things, you know, there are virtuous cycles and vicious cycles. If people thought that we're inflating the currency, interest rates would go up. And what does that mean? It means the deficit gets bigger.

predictable or only good surprises or mostly good surprises, predictable interest rates. And now we're on this this upward tilt. And that's one of the things that is squeezing the ability of younger people to buy homes because

Who cares what the house costs? What you want to know is what do I pay every month? And and that that becomes more and more as interest rates rise higher. And uh do you think we're in a period where that's going to just be as big a trend up as it was a trend down during your active life? You know.

And so you you know, you really, you know, if you wanna look at an interest rate that the market sets as opposed to what the Fed sets, you have to look at longer term interest rates, you know, ten year interest rates. And, you know, something in the scheme of things in my lifetime, given that I got out of school in the late seventies.

uh and hit the market when uh short term interest rates were in the teens and not even oh you know, not even the low teens necessarily and longer term rates are much higher. You know, intra you know, a ten year a ten year bond at uh a ten year at um you know four and a qu you know, four thirty or four and a quarter as we sit here and and and look at it. Doesn't seem crazy, but that's what I mean. It's slowly then all at once. We're spending so much time focused on it.

And it's very important and you'd want the want you know, you'd want people to deal with it, but it's not top of mind because like a lot of other problems, it's clear but it's not present. Yeah.

is that it's very hard to get uh people to do painful things preemptively to avoid more pain down the road. It's very hard to get politicians or even human beings in general, if I can include politicians in the general rubric of human beings. It's very hard to get people to act and sacrifice to avoid a bigger sacrifice in the future. It's just not in our you know it's not in our gene uh genes. And so I think it would be great uh you know, I wish we weren't tilting at windmills.

to say this, but it feels a little bit like getting people all popped up on this. At some point when we have a kind of a debt crisis and people are unwilling to fund the debt, except at back to twelve percent you know, super high interest rates. Then of course we will deal with it. I'd say when if if uh you had a you if you had a series of bad auctions of US Treasuries. and people

You know, there was a spike in f of inf inflation when they put tariffs because tariffs were perceived to be inflationary. There'll be when oil went up, it went but not again, not that much. People the market isn't as concerned about it as you would like the market to be.

all people thought about at that period was inflation. This was during the early days of Volcker and before he had his effect. And by the way, the belt tightening that went on killed a lot of people. And it just was really, you know, terrible, you know, raising rates to the point and choking it up because it was a stagflationary moment. We decided, I think appropriately for the moment,

to deal with the inflationary part of it, not the stagnation part of it. So rates were being brought up at a time that we wish growth was higher, so it had the effect of closing off with little of the the n the growth we weren't having was even taken down e even a notch because of raising rates and that discipline was opposed. That's a long time ago now. For a long time after that, the memory of that was so seared

that we envoy we avoided a lot of these inflationary pressures because nobody wanted to live through that again. Now it's lost to the memory of man how bad inf you know really hyperinflation could be on the country. I hope we don't relearn it. But chances are, in order to deal with it, we may find ourselves in that kind of a moment. Or maybe some responsible political pol look.

Whatever you wanna say. Bill Clinton, you know, kind of raised taxes, did what he have to you know, no p no politician wants to

Everybody wants to spend money because you want to, you know, heap largesse on the population when you're, you know, when you're in charge. You want them to be happy or not sad. Belt tightening makes people sad. Giving them money makes them feel happy. It takes a lot of discipline. I got, you know, you know Bill Clinton wasn't the most disciplined politician in a lot of ways, but he was very disciplined with respect to managing the economy.

Overwhelms the stockpiles and the United States is going to have to replenish. The Trump administration is on its way to an unprecedented peacetime military budget, and even the next president. It's probably going to say the cost of pr protecting all the people whom the United States has promised to protect and not to shrug that off as the Trump people's own right to, that's going to be expensive.

But we started the conversation by pointing out that we're running these massive deficits at a time when you wouldn't think there was a reason to have deficits. You think this would be a time we'd otherwise be closing the deficits. That's not because they can't the world is in a bad place. It's good the world is a relatively good place.

with us having a lot of anxiety. And I could tell you, when I was living through the Clinton years, it may not be in hindsight that bad when you look back, but on any given day I was I was as nervous as anybody. Yeah.

forms of relief for very specific groups. And uh but politically that's super efficient because it does it doesn't cost so much fiscally to give a r remit or respite to a particular targeted group of people. They really appreciate it. But you end up with a tax code that makes decreasing sense and it makes it harder and harder to pay the bills. So we see that politicians have discovered that r that it's much more politically efficient rather than offering uh

And I remember I got out of school in and you know, in the n early nineteen eighties we were doing the tax of the t it was called the tax code of nineteen fifty four as amended. There's like thirty some it's very hard to revise the tax code. It's a it happens like

religiously like almost every forty years or so, because that's how long it takes for people to get up the gunk gumption to go attach this you know, to attack the Leviathan and all the people who've invested it. Don't get don't get me wrong, when I say these things, I look I I'm in the markets. I ran a very big firm through stressful moments in this. If I seem to act serene to you about the deficit, it's just because I have to deal with the world as it is all the time, every day. I don't get

over elated and I don't get over, you know, miserable. You know, I know why we're going through what we're going through. I know where the stimulus is coming from. And um if I were king of the world I might have a different set of policies. But I'm g I'm grappling this and I try to explain why we are where we are and you know, even what I might do to get out. I would like to see the budget more come into balance and one of the things I would say about it to anybody is say,

What are you gonna do when we have a problem? When we have to spend to solve problems? What if we had another, you know, another COVID or another global financ you know, financial where something really had to take out? What if we had a war? Of real principles. That were you know, that was more global than just of a fairly localized moment that the one we're in. Look, it's very severe, it's very extreme, but it's not World War Two.

What if we had any of those things? We c we should this would be the time that we should be husbanding our resources. We should be putting grain into the silo, not taking not taking the reserve grain out of the silo.

Um but you say one of the reasons that the polarization why is polarization bad? And one important reason that it's bad is it makes it hard for people to get together um to d debate in an open way and to agree in a consensual way on solutions to problems. At a different time in the nation's life, more people would have agreed to recognize this problem.

You know, so far there's been a hundred percent of our conversation and so it wouldn't be normally a hundred percent of my conversation if I w if I were as an observer of the markets and the economy and things that are you know, that that I would like that if I were king of the forest I'd like to sort out first.

It's we're taking a lot of risk with the deficit because like I said, there'll be a tipping point. They don't advertise it in advance. They don't give you like we do when you do a podcast, they'll give you ten minutes notice when it has that. They don't give you ten minutes notice before it gets to the tipping point. And so I agree it's a very big problem and I am glad that it is the highest prior I wish it was the highest priority of at least a portion of our government.

with my you know, with my sister, her baby, my grandmother all in a two bedroom or you know, in a two bedroom apartment. So I I I didn't think that uh in the humble brag competition of who, you know, who is more you know, more humble. I thought, you know I thought I had the I thought it it wasn't good, but I had the better of a worse situation.

I thought I was middle class. It was later that I found out I wasn't middle class, but I thought it was middle class. I think I think 85% of the country thought they were middle class. And that's you know, that's part of the thing. Part of it is because even people at the bottom of, you know, the economic system

got you know, had a lot of you know, had a lot of stuff. There was public housing, you know, there was public housing to uh to move into. Um and there was also opportunity. People perceived there was mobility. A lot of people today still perceive that there's a lot of mobility and some people perceive that there's none. And the answer is, in my opinion, they're both right. That again, it goes to the K shape of things. If you're a middle class kid who has

opportun you know, to go to um to go to um you know and you went to you went to college and you you know y you can figure out a s the system, it's never been easier to start a business. You can you know, you can be an entrepreneur. You know, in the old days you had a Think of how much money you'd have to borrow. Where would you get it from? Think of what it costs for technology and your rent. Today you have we you can get your office at WeWork, you can get your technology from

Amazon. There's a whole venture community that's dying to give kids wearing jeans and looking scraggly all sorts of money if you're in that category. But if you're growing up in the projects and you didn't go to college and you don't have access to the venture community or this or that or you don't know your way around, it seems hopeless to them.

the when you listen to people under thirty five and especially under thirty, you hear a a s a pervasive despair even from those with college degrees will say Um, I can't buy a house. I can't get married, I can't I can't form a family. I'm not sure I want to form a family in this uncertain world.

Um and and I feel we're all go we're I feel we're all about to be replaced by robots anyway. And uh the at least the the approved style of public rhetoric in twenty twenty six is pessimistic and fearful in a way that is is very different from what from the dominant forms of public rhetoric that prevailed 10 years, 20 years, and certainly 30 and 40 years.

Ki kids were getting shot on can you know, while I was in school, kids were getting shot on the campus of of uh Kent State and Jackson State. Kids to avoid the draft were going to Canada. You know, in the late in again in the late sixties, early seventies, you know, you had Czechoslovak you know, yeah you know, you had political assassination.

And when we marked the bicentennial of the country in nineteen seventy six and I c I can remember it too, um, the mood then was and America had been through a lot. Vietnam, Watergate, uh At the what was at that point the worst recession the country had had since World War II, urban riots not so far behind, crime, inflation, and the other.

that many people can vote one way in nineteen sixty four and eight years later vote the exact opposite way, that doesn't happen anymore. That's what I mean by polarization. It's not that people were then were fearful and anxious, but the idea of saying I'm branded as a c a believer in such and such a point of view That's I think that's a good thing.

that you you could go to the regatta and believe in the t the twenty th anniversary of the country. We're now at the two fiftieth and the signature event to mark the two hundred fiftieth is going to be an em a mixed martial arts fight on the White House lawn. Uh there are no events that speak to a broad sense of national purpose. And and again, when you talk to young people, including those with objectively a lot of advantages.

You hear a mood of gloom that you did not feel when you were saving your money to go see the big ships in nineteen seventy seven.

So, you know, people are different things at different time. No no no one of us represent the m the mood of the and again, I don't wanna keep going on about this. All I'm saying is So you're making your point, I'm making my point. We have challenges today. They're not the same, but they rhyme. They're different times. We're worried about different kind you know, different things. But you know, today we may be worried about, you know, militant Islamic system.

And when I was growing up we were getting under literally getting under desks because we were worried about the communists nuking New York City. I mean literally we had dog tags in public school and th you know, getting under desks to take air raid drills. That was a source of anxiety for me when I was growing up that we seem not to have today.

I'm just saying there's always challenges in every era. Now the only point of saying this is not to say we should all go to sleep. We have to wrestle with our challenges. And I think one of the biggest challenges today is that in a society where everybody is going to be across the spectrum, we have the way I'm using the term polarization, where there are people who are clear winners and other people who are losers are not happy

You know, not happy, cheerful losers who think they just think that the deck was stacked against them and it's rigged, and that's a bad way to have a country.

Price of wood the the the you know, the financial sector is not gonna be in as good repute. And if things were halcyon and wonderful, they would be.

Sometimes it looks chaotic, sometimes it's, you know, horrible. We have show trials. Congress looks, you know, will cross-examine someone who I think doesn't deserve that kind of treatment and respond and blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, you can go on and see this stuff. But we generally deal with our problems. They're exposed. It looks terrible. I could see, you know, the economy of the America because of that.

Even when we're ground zero for the problems that are in the world'cause we cause them. We're the ones who get out of it the quickest. We deal with our you know, we we deal with our problems and move on. There are a lot of problems today. I think we're gonna deal with it and move on and certainly better than any other developed country or any other system that's around. And if again, if I could push buttons and change things, there's a lot of things I'd change. But if you ask me

Would I take where we you know, our system today versus another one? Hands down, I take our system. If you're asking me a different question and go in a different direction, would I take these times versus other times that I've lived through and and read about. Very hard to make those. It's like trying to decide whether who was better or Will Chamberlain or Michael Jordan. You know, you pay comparing athletes from different eras and different generations.

The past is the past. It's resolved. You can never be a as afraid of the past, knowing'cause the past has ended. It's the present that generates anxiety. So of course Everybody's visualizing that the pac sentimentalizes the past, but one shouldn't. And the fact is that whatever challenges we're facing today. We have faced the equivalent and gotten through them before and we'll get through these ones with our system.

Thank you so much for watching or listening to this week's David Frum program. As ever, the best way to support the work of this program, if you're minded to, and to support the work of all of us at the Atlantic, is by subscribing to the Atlantic. And by liking and sharing this program and other Atlantic uh social media pro uh video programs through social media to your friends, anyone you think might be interested. Again, thank you for watching.