It was my fault.

It was my fault.

It was a two percent moral victory, it was a two percent moral victory, I think. Yeah, it's good to be here.

It's good to be here.

Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's good to be here.

Thanks for having me.

It's good to see you again.

It's good to talk.

How are things in Virginia? So on there's not sort of the sort of the sort of freaking out that you're seeing in New Jersey or anything like that? Okay. So it sort of came out of the headlines that we all saw earlier this week when the national debt, I think, went up to $38 trillion.

And more than that, it seems like we're adding to the debt at a faster clip than we ever had before and also faster than anyone expected.

And I do think it's the case that right now and for a long time,

Americans haven't really cared about the gap between our revenues and our expenditures

and what that's doing to the debt.

But eventually we're going to care.

And so I was trying to sort of think through.

You could just write a piece saying,

hey, guys, these are the dangers.

But I didn't really seem like that would hook people the way I wanted to hook them.

So I decided to write it sort of as a retrospective,

something in the New York Times or maybe in the economist from the future,

2039,

sort of looking back over what the consequences of this might be, not just economically, but also in terms of our foreign policy, the rest of the world, and also our domestic politics.

...