So, yeah, we thought we'd do, we'd return to a few subjects that we've kind of talked about in the past. Some of them repeatedly, some of them we talk about in private, but we thought we'd share them again with you all today. Those topics, just so you all have a preview, one will be climate and climate activism. One will be John Maynard Keynes, one of Adam's intellectual heroes, fair to say hero, I think, hero. And then also the UN. Obviously, it's UN week here in New York. And it's been a hell of a lot of traffic on the streets, if anyone's ventured out. We thought we'd talk about the UN and specifically the idea of cosmopolitanism, which the UN stands for. So, you know, some things that broadly have to do with economics. We'll see how much. But yeah, to start off with climate. We talked about climate just a couple weeks ago on the podcast. And it was a long discussion, but we even then got cut off. Like, we had to end the episode. I felt like we were in the middle of the discussion. We were talking about actually we were talking about a book that I just wrote. By the way both of our books are available here. Bookseller came here, check them out. They're available here. I guess we'd both be able to sign them if you're interested. But we were talking about this book that I wrote about climate activism and the limits of climate activism, whether climate activism is helping promote progress and how much of a difference, how much democracy can solve the issue of climate change, whether democracy can solve the issue of climate change. And then we kind of got cut off. And I had a question after we got off the call, which I realized I didn't ask, which is, Adam, whether you are an activist yourself. You care a lot about climate. You talk a lot about climate. You talk a lot about a lot of issues that we talked about on this podcast about politics and progressive issues and progressive economics. And we all know where you stand. But are you an activist? I actually don't know the answer to that, and why or why not. Yeah,

the question brought me up short, in that I'm not sure how I even feel about the question, or trying to decide whether I am or not, and that sent me down a rabbit hole, because I got to wondering why it was that I found it so hard to decide whether I was, you know, an activist. You're sitting on a therapy session now. Whether that label is really right. And so I began to wonder whether it had to do with age, not in the sense that I'm too old to be an activist, but in the sense that my sense of what activism is might be historically, might be epochal. So then I ended up going down the rabbit hole of the etymology of the word activist, which is really interesting, it turns out, because the first uses of the word activist, or activist activism, in the mid 19th century, they come from chemistry. It's actually something about elements. Some elements are activists. Some elements exhibit activism in the sense that it's particularly reactive. And then the next set of usages are to do with pragmatic philosophy, i.e. philosophies which say that we only know through action on the world. And then the first use of a political use of activism is actually during World War I, and it's the folks who were being activists in the name of their neutral countries joining the central powers, i.e. Germany, Austria, Ottoman Empire, against the Entente. So in Sweden, the first usage was in modern Sweden as a political term. It's not until the 1920s that activism really begins to be identified with politics at all. And then it's a more general sense almost of state activism, so state interventionism. And it's not until really late in the day that it acquires the specific connotation that it has in modern America today. And that really helped me because if you'd asked me in the 80s when I was most politically engaged, I would never have referred to myself as an activist. I would have called myself a militant or a party worker.