A Historian’s Look Into America’s Future

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Zachary Karabell: You’ve written a lot about the effects of social media on our current generation. What are they?

Garrett Graff: My hope is that the younger generation, as they grow up will because they grew up with this, be more skeptical and be better prepared to confront the flood of bad information that we see swamping the internet all over.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined by my co-host, Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network. Network and What Could Go Right? As you know, if you’ve been listening, and as we hope you will know if you keep listening, is our long form podcast where we talk to scintillating people about issues of the day that are trenchant and are vital. I like the word trenchant. I think I might use it again during our conversation. We’ll see. One thing we try to do is say, look, there’s a lot that’s going on that’s bad in the world, but there’s also things that are going on where human beings are trying to make a better future. And we also try to look at the past because part of the past tells us not where we’re gonna head, and not a chart to the future, but a learning of where human beings have also gotten things wrong.

And what I mean by wrong is wrong in their expectations, wrong in their assumptions, because they’re living through the present and they don’t know what’s gonna happen. We are everyday living through our present. And many of us, I think, at least given the nature of public discourse, think that we know what’s gonna happen.

And right now, in many societies, we think that what’s gonna happen in the future is gonna be bad. And one thing we try to do on What Could Go Right? is say, Hey, wait a minute. We don’t actually know, and we should stop for a moment and consider alternatives. And right now, the alternatives that we’re not considering the most are the positive ones. A very good job considering the negative one. So Emma, who are we going to talk to today?

Emma Varvaloucas: So today we’re going to talk to Garrett Graff, who is a journalist and a historian, and honestly it’s hard to sum up all of his work in just a few senses, but he has written several books about history to government secrecy and government dealings, about 9/11, Watergate, UFOs, their doomsday plans, you name it.

And his writing has really appeared everywhere that you can think of from Wired to the New York Times. So. We are gonna talk to him about a few different topics today. A couple of them he covers as the host of the Long Shadow podcast, namely the rise of the internet and social media. We’re also gonna be talking about gun violence and some of his work about government secrecy and trust. So lots of stuff to talk about. Are we ready?

Zachary Karabell: We are, let’s talk to Garrett Graff. Garrett it is such a pleasure to have you on What Could Go Right? You and I have gone way back to Politico days. You have gone on to be a unique practitioner of the craft of oral history in the great tradition of Studs Terkel, although I think he was a bit more of an activist, and you’re a bit more of a, a chronicler, but still, actually, why, why don’t we talk about that? You are unusual in that and for those who dunno, maybe you could explain just like what oral history is as a, as a way of telling the past and what led you into that, given that it’s not as if there’s a plethora of people out there doing this, but you are and doing it at a very high level and to great, great effect.

Garrett Graff: It is, as you said, sort of something that I have stumbled into a little bit as a first, a magazine writer and, and now a book writer. It started for me with a piece that I wrote in 2016 for the 15th anniversary of 9/11 about being on board Air Force One with President Bush. The piece was called The Only Plane in the Sky.

I went back and interviewed something like 27 people who were around the president that day to try to tell the story of that day and the sort of eight or 10 hours of George Bush’s day on 9/11 through the voices of the people who were around him. That magazine article grew into a book that came out in 2019 that was called The Only Plane in the Sky that pulled together the voices of about 500 Americans as they had lived 9/11 morning to night, coast to coast.

Then in the year since I did a, a book about an oral history about D-Day called When the Sea Came Alive, and actually have in August coming out my third volume of book length oral history called The Devil Reached Toward the Sky, which is an oral history of the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombings.

To me, there’s a unique power that comes with telling oral history and you know, these are stories that I take these quotes from interviews and newspaper articles and and memoirs and oral histories to weave together all of these quotes of these participants to try to tell these stories in the voices of the people who.

Part of the power of that is that it helps you understand what these events were like to live for people who did not know what the outcome of these experiences actually was. I think one of the challenges of narrative history, and I’ve written plenty of narrative history in my life as as you have as well, Zachary, I think there’s a tendency sometimes to make.

History seeing neater, cleaner, simpler, and more straightforward than it actually felt like to anyone who lived them. If you look at 9/11, for instance, you know, it’s almost 25 years ago, there’s an entire generation now, almost 40% of America who does not remember 9/11 and have learned about it only in history books.

And the story that they learn is. The whole thing begins at 8 46 in the morning with the first crash into the first tower. The whole thing is over 102 minutes later. There are four hijacked planes. 3000 Americans die. It’s Pennsylvania, it’s New York. It’s Washington. And for those of us who were alive that day, that’s not the day that any of us actually lived.

You know, we didn’t know when the attacks began. We didn’t know when the attacks were over. We didn’t know for most of the day how many attacks there had actually been. You know, we didn’t realize what the death toll was going to be. I mean, the first day estimates were, you know, 10,000, 20,000, maybe even higher.

I mean, New York City on 9/11 ordered 10,000 body bags because they think that that’s what the death toll at the Twin Towers is going to be. And we also didn’t know what. What would come next? We didn’t know that the whole thing was over in 102 minutes. We didn’t know what would come that afternoon, what would come September 12th, what would come in October, what would come in 2002?

And so to learn 9/11 in the history books, you miss the fear, the confusion, the trauma of living through those events. What I think that means is you miss why America responded in the way that America did. You know, we responded to 9/11, not out of the facts of 9/11, but out of the emotions of 9/11.

And you know, that’s true in, in D-Day, where you see, we view history in this huge. Triumphant thing. You know, one of the greatest events in human history and when you hear the voices, when you read the letters of the participants, you know, the paratroopers as they’re heading over the English channel that night, the troops in, in the landing craft heading into the beaches, you know, they don’t know that they’re gonna be part of some historic triumph.

You know, they’re scared. They’re wondering whether they are. Able to live up to their expectations for themselves and their comrades expectations. You know, whether they’re going to be able to survive and function in combat in this Manhattan project book about the atomic bomb. You know, one of the things you really get in telling the story again through the first person experiences of the people participating is.

The irony of how the bombs end up being used on Japan to end World War II, but what motivates all of the scientists involved in Germany is the fear of Adolf Hitler getting the bomb first. You know that these are for the most part. European refugee scientists, I mean physicists and scientists and chemists who have fled fascist Europe to come to the United States on the verge of this breakthrough in nuclear science in the late 1930s and realize, you know, if Hitler gets this bomb first, like democracy and freedom might be over like Europe, may never be able to be liberated.

I’ll say, you know, reading the voices and the chapter about what it was like watching fascism descend across Europe in the 1930s. Right now, here in America in the summer of 2025 I is pretty chilling and pretty scary.

Emma Varvaloucas: I’m going to maybe leave that bit of an ominous cliffhanger

Garrett Graff: Sure, sure, sure. Yeah.

Emma Varvaloucas: where, where it lies.

Garrett Graff: People know how World War II turns out.

Zachary Karabell: I mean that’s the comforting thing about history, right? We know, we know the outcome retrospectively, and the people in it didn’t know the outcome going forward, and that’s always the rub of the present. And that does Garrett cut both ways in terms of our present, in that we have the both, the virtue of being able to look back and see how things evolved. But we also have the danger of assuming or being very human about it, which is that we want patterns in the present. We wanna have a sense of where we’re heading. ’cause there’s something comforting about it. Even if where we think we’re heading is very bad, there’s something comforting about human beings craving some degree of clarity and certainty. Business says this all the time, I don’t care what the outcome is, I just wanna know what it is and I can plan accordingly. We also need to be careful of what you just said in the present, meaning. We may think we know how this is all gonna play out and we may have past patterns that look or rhyme or feel similar, but then again, we may be reading our present completely wrong in light of a past that we now know.

Garrett Graff: Absolutely, and as someone who writes about this sort of set of very tragic topics, 9/11. The atomic bombings. I think that’s one of the wonderful aspects of your show as well. You know, the sort of Madeline Albright philosophy of being. Optimist who worries a lot and that I’m a very happy person day by day.

And you know, very optimistic about the world. And you know, to me the story of America is the story of a country that generation after generation gets better. And that does not mean it is linear. That does not mean that progress is steady. But that sort of, the Promise of America is one that decade by decade and generation by generation strives to live up to.

It’s always an imperfect creed of a country where all people are created equal. And you know, that doesn’t mean, uh, unfortunately, that that will always continue. It is up to us in this generation. I think to keep that work underway, even amid very dark patterns of history unfolding around us.

Emma Varvaloucas: What’s your view about Generation Z and Generation Alpha being able to continue that work forward? The one thing that I’m worried about when I look at the mental health data. Uh, is how that’s also related to a complete lack of belief that the United States will continue on its path to progress or the world.

It’s like, seems like a very cynical and apathetic generation more so than younger generations normally are. I’m wondering your thoughts about that, especially considering some of the conversations we had before the podcast began around Gen Z, growing up with 9/11, with school shootings, with other things that have kind of defined that trauma of that generation.

Garrett Graff: Yeah, And part of the challenge is Gen Z is not wrong. Right. They are the first generation on track to not be better off than their parents. And you know, that’s a huge shift. We have sort of watched since. The 1980s, this split in the. Sort of economics of our country. And, Zachary has covered it really well and written about it over the years where, you know, we are not a country where a rising tide lifts all boats anymore.

And, you know, I’m, I’m slightly oversimplifying, you know, complex economic generational trends here, but the rising income inequality of the last 40 years, I think has stretched America. Politically to a breaking point where you have younger Americans sort of looking out at, I think sort of particularly the boomer generation and saying, you know, you guys got to climb this ladder because of this great American system of education and government investment in communities.

And during your time in power, you have done nothing but wreck that ladder for everyone coming up behind you. And you know, I think they see that in a. Generation that, you know, sort of refuses to get out of the way in terms of governing, you know, in the gerontocracy of both parties of Congress particularly, I think true in the last generation of democratic talent that you’ve seen, but you know.

In 1997, we had a president who was born in 1946. In 2007, we had a president who was born in 1946. In 2017, we had a president born in 1946, and in 2027, we’re going to have a president born in 1946. That’s not a recipe for sort of a healthy democracy handing off to new leaders with new ideas.

Zachary Karabell: We should do a T-shirt 1946. A good year for presidents or something like that. This question of doing better, doing worse gets reinforced of course. And you’ve been doing a lot of work recently on social media and, and that whole ecosystem, right? Of particularly of youth. I think you do a deeper dive in terms of the stories than Jonathan Ha who does is much more doing the meta analysis of the data, but there is also an echo chamber that gets created in that world, so that. One of the things going around TikTok, Instagram, et cetera, land is reinforcing those stories, right? The market goes down and you suddenly get a lot of content saying just so when you thought it was safe to go back in the economic waters. And then there’s a story about the job market for 2025 graduates that gets picked up and echoed and echoed and amplified and amplified. While those stories are true, right, they’re, they’re one aspect of a kaleidoscope of truisms in that some of these metrics don’t always account for cost of living and living standards. Some of them do. Certainly, it’s true in most major urban areas in the United States and Europe. The cost of living has gone up way, way, way faster than the ability of anyone in particular to afford it. But that’s not necessarily true once you get outside of these vibrant urban centers. I mean, there’s not really one story here, but. Problem of social media amplification is that it tends to amplify one story at one time. So how do you, how do you think about that too in that Yeah, it’s, it is absolutely true.

The reason why Zohran Mamdani won in New York in the Democratic primary was he put a really palpable court amongst 20 and 30 somethings, many of whom are college educated, who are struggling to live in New York City because New York City is unaffordable. If you’re 20 or 30 something, what do you make of this issue of. The one story problem or the one reality problem that social media in particular enhances.

Garrett Graff: In some ways, this was the question that I, I think, led us to focus this season of the history podcast that I do long shadow around this question of sort of the rise and fall of the internet. You know, I, I’m someone who. Spent a lot of my career, particularly early on in technology, in the sort of media journalism circles at a moment where we thought that the internet was gonna be a really great thing, you know, that it had this, you know, promise early on in the nineties and early two thousands.

It was gonna democratize information. It was going to, you know, bring us together. It was, you know, going to be good for democracy. It was gonna topple dictators all over the world. You know, this was gonna be the end of authoritarianism because no, you know, no authoritarian regime could withstand the power of, you know, these united voices and the transparency that the internet allowed.

As we sit here in 2025, this tool that was supposed to bring us together has in many ways, you know, driven us apart and, you know, polarized our country in a way that we haven’t seen in modern times. And it has, you know. Flooded us with misinformation and disinformation. It has created these echo chambers of hate and racism and misogyny that, you know, drive a lot of people sort of out of the conversation online.

And I think has actually enabled the rise of an authoritarian far right in the United States in ways that our media establishment has not yet really reckoned with. I think that the thing that you’re sort of talking about, Zachary, and the thing that we sort of ended up exploring across the, the seven episodes of this season is these were more conscious choices by social media companies than I think most people realize that, you know, what social media companies understood or came to understand was.

If they wanted to be profitable, they needed user engagement. And what drives user engagement is not things that make us happy. It’s things that make us angry and that you are more likely online as a user to engage with content that enraged you. That it didn’t matter whether that was information that was true, it didn’t matter whether it was information that was taken out of context.

You know, nothing is better at taking things out of context than a 15 second web video, and yet sort of the more the company’s prioritized. Divisive content, the more profitable it was for them. You know, ultimately Facebook got to the point where in its social media algorithms for its newsfeed, the dislike button, you know, the angry button was worth four to five times the algorithmic value of the like button.

The things that enraged you online, you got to see more of them and you know, that was good for Facebook’s profits, that was good for Twitter’s profits. And I think where we sort of lost control of a lot of this was, you know, in these very conscious decisions by these companies to prioritize profit. The, you know, what was actually good for humans?

Emma Varvaloucas: There’s also no, like, for lack of a better term, filter for idiocy like. Right, but I mean, on social media, it’s crazy how, how viral some of these completely baseless things go. Right? Like when we were in the midst of like a three day period where social media was very convinced that we were heading into World War III because of the bombing of Iran.

There was a post, I saw 11 million views of this guy insinuating that American soldiers were about to be deployed because he was seeing videos of them being served like steak and lobster dinners. 11 million people saw that video. And assumed based on God knows what, that it was correct. I think they just assumed it was correct because everyone has this feeling that governments are doing things behind our backs that we don’t know about.

Which brings us, act brings me to a question I wanted to ask you. That’s another like overarching question about your work. You’ve done a lot of writing books and otherwise just about like government dealings, right? UFOs, the doomsday plans that we don’t know about. Hillary Clinton’s email servers having spent a, a large amount of time, like really looking into what the government might be hiding from us versus like, you know, all the stuff that you can dig up about them. Where do you come out on the, on the trust question.

Garrett Graff: It’s a really good question and, and you’re right, it gets at the heart. Of a lot of my work. I wrote a book about Watergate, did a book about our Cold War nuclear plan, wrote a book about UFOs and the, you know, government search for alien life. And then in my magazine work I have covered a lot of federal law enforcement and the intelligence community and the defense world.

And I think that there are sort of two things that that really sort of stand out for me, which will sound a little bit mutually exclusive as I lay them out, but, but I don’t mean them to be mutually exclusive. The first, which is, I think the challenge that we have lived through this winter and spring is that.

Government is far more important to our daily lives than we understand it to be. And good government done well by well meaning and caring and thoughtful people is for the most part, pretty boring. And that’s a really good thing. I think as we have seen DOGE rampage through all of these government agencies, you know, many that most people have never heard of over the course of the spring.

We’re talking here in the start of July, where, you know, USAID sort of appears gone for good. Now, you know, we’re really gonna miss a functioning government when it’s gone, and I think we’re gonna start feeling that this summer in ways that we can’t really predict and are going to regret when it begins to hit us.

The second thing is, the reason that I am not a believer in grand government conspiracies is, is. That. I think the challenge of government conspiracies is that they presuppose a level of competence, foresight, strategy, and planning that is not on display in most of the rest of the work that the government does.

And you know that’s true about 9/11, that’s true about UFOs. You know, that’s true about a lot of the allegations of the deep state that. You know, you hear out of the sort of far right MAGA media ecosystem, and I think by the way, in a weird way, you’re sort of starting to see some signs of that in weird places this spring.

As folks like Kash Patel at the FBI and Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the FBI sort of get into these institutions after being people who. You know, have really gotten to where they are sort of made their careers on the backs of government conspiracies only to sort of get inside and be like, oh, actually these places are, you know, not places that are capable of pulling off the grand conspiracies to, you know, cover up the Epstein files in the way that we thought that they were.

In some, you know, very weird ways Dan Bongino, you know, sort of conspiracist podcaster extraordinaire has made some of the most responsible comments of anyone in this Trump administration over the course of this spraying by, because, you know, he’s gotten into these, into this role at the FBI and finds himself under enormous pressure.

From the MAGA media ecosystem to, you know, blow the lid off all of these conspiracies. And he’s like actually looking at and reading the files and he is like, oh, turns out there’s no conspiracy here. And like, I don’t know how to convince you guys that there’s no conspiracy here, but like if anyone was gonna blow the lid off the conspiracy, like I would have and you know,

there’s nothing here.

Zachary Karabell: Isn’t that what conspiracy theorists then say, well of course. I mean

Garrett Graff: Yes.

Zachary Karabell: gonna be no evidence in the files. ’cause they would’ve covered it all up and erased it and put in fake documents and, and it almost, I mean this is the thing about deep conspiracy theories, right? There is almost no way to invalidate a deep conspiracy theory because the entire point of it is, it’s so well done that you can’t unpack it.

So there who. who. reacted to the revelations of the Epstein files with exactly what I just said, which is of you. See, they, they, they buried it. They proved it. And now even the people who are on the other side have somehow been co-opted.

Zachary Karabell:  yeah.

Garrett Graff: And that’s exactly where, you know, again, I think this comes back to sort of some of the same themes that we’ve been talking about, you know, media literacy and civic literacy and the challenges of a public who is. You know, been primed by American culture now for 40 years to embrace COism.

And in a weird way, you know, I wrote, as I said, this book about Watergate in in 2021, and then in 2023 I wrote this book about UFOs, which turned out to be a very appropriate sequel for a book about Watergate, because really America’s obsession with UFOs is the story of what happens in a post Watergate of America when because of Vietnam and Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, and the church Committee and the Pike Committee.

You see America lose trust in government and sort of come to this stunning realization of like, oh, presidents will lie to us, which was, you know, hard to imagine from where we sit now in 2025, but like that was a big part of why it took so long for Richard Nixon to face articles of impeachment was because you would have members of Congress, members of the Democratic Party who would like literally say, well, he’s the president.

He would never lie to the American people. So if he says he wasn’t involved in Watergate, he was clearly not involved in Watergate

Emma Varvaloucas: Now it’s just, of course, all the politicians and presidents are lying to us. What else would they be doing?

Garrett Graff: Yeah, and, and by the way, I think one of the things that we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks with the fallout of the bombing of Iran is what happens when you have presidents and administrations lie to the American people routinely, which is. You know, we have sort of no reason to trust Donald Trump or Pete.

Marco Rubio. About the damage assessments and intel assessments about what has actually happened to Iran’s nuclear program because they’ve done almost nothing but lie to the American people about everything else since they came into office. And so now when you have a moment where you really, really want to be able to trust your defense secretary, we have sort of no track record doing so about sort of why he is worthy of our trust.

Emma Varvaloucas: Before we let you go. I wanna make sure that we get to talk about gun violence a little bit. It was the focus of one of the previous seasons of the Long Shadow, which is the podcasts that you run. I’m really curious, after doing a deep dive on the topic, what, what do you feel like is missing in the national conversation? Like what were the things that you learned about that were surprising to you?

Garrett Graff: One of the things that stood out for me that I was surprised in reporting out this season about gun violence and and gun policy is I think that there’s actually more reason for hope around gun violence and gun policy in our country than I would have told you originally when we started reporting that season.

You know, this is a uniquely American problem. You know, there is no civilized country in the world, you know, no advanced modern economy in the world that has anything like the gun violence problem that the United States has. The mass shootings are sort of one end of the spectrum, but they’re the part that grab headlines, but they are a very small percentage overall of American gun deaths.

And the honest answer is like most gun deaths in America are really local family tragedies. And you know, they are suicides, they are domestic violence, they are children being killed accidentally by other children or, or, you know, shooting themselves accidentally with guns that have not been properly secured.

Much like social media. The problem of gun violence in America is one that has been a very conscious series of choices by local, state, and federal lawmakers and officials to steadily loosen gun laws across the last 40 years. You know, much of it driven by advocacy. From the NRA much of it being driven by sort of the warm embrace of gun ownership by Republican lawmakers.

The loosening of things like stand your ground laws and open carry laws, but as we have seen a generation come into American politics in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Who have lived the effects of that violence. Students who have grown up in the era of the school shooting and in lockdown drills, they don’t wanna live like this anymore.

And I think you are seeing some semblance of sanity that. We don’t as a country have to live like this. I think that’s an area, you know, maybe not with this administration, but maybe over the arc of the next 10 years, over the next decade, you know, I do actually have some optimism that there’ll be more common sense gun regulation, and particularly sort of a set of gun policies where there’s actually pretty broad based agreement around better enforcement and rules.

Emma Varvaloucas: Well, certainly the NRA is a shell of its former self too, right? So that’s a big development.

Garrett Graff: It is, it’s not unrelated in some ways to the success that the NRA has had. You know, there’s sort of a weird countercyclical aspect to America’s obsession with guns where year by year, all of the statistics show that there are fewer and fewer Americans owning guns. But those who do own more and more of them, what actually turns out to be true is that democratic presidencies are the best way to sell guns because they scare the far right into buying more guns.

And you know, the Obama presidency was really the era when you saw just gun purchasing go wild in America, and it has never really returned to, you know, what it was before.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, that’s wild. More, much more cynical, right? In that there’s the same dynamic that you just described with social media, right? You find kind of what works liminally, and then you keep pushing that button, pushing that button harder because it’s in your interest to do so. And so if you’re a gun manufacturer or gun lobby, separate from whatever ideology you are putting forth about the Second Amendment and Second Amendment absolutism, you also have a deep pecuniary and immediate interest in doing whatever you can to get people to buy more guns ’cause you’re in the business of selling

Garrett Graff: Absolutely.

Zachary Karabell: You know, this is just one of these areas between regulatory capture and marketing and the whole thing where that becomes a very toxic brew that’s unique to the United States. And maybe we’re over, as you just said, maybe we’re somewhat over focusing on these incidences of gun violence. What I mean by over focusing, I mean that there’s a particular mix of America. America’s always been a much more violent country than most places, maybe not than some places in South America. The Western Hemisphere has been more violent in terms of per capita murders than other societies. And guns make it easier to do that.

And you know, teens can be violent and if they have easy access to guns, they’re gonna be presumably more violent and more able to do harm. So. That’s all sort of part of that particular mix.

Garrett Graff: And that’s where sort of, in some ways, like the answers to this are, you know. Semi straightforward, which is like gun locks would actually make a really huge difference in America’s gun problem. Red flag, mental health laws of, you know, being able to, you know, remove guns from the possession of people who are in mental health crises would make a really big difference.

And things that stop will short of jack booted thugs kicking in your door to pry your AR-15 from your cold dead hands. You know, actually could really do things that save thousands and thousands of lives in America every year.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I think I read about the, who was talking about this, the Swiss cheese method, right? Like if you put a lot of these barriers in place, like it’ll sink the number of fatalities and, and accidents that like go through all the holes of the Swiss cheese. And a lot of the, a lot of the layers of the cheese are things that are in bipartisan agreement.

Zachary Karabell: Garrett, I’m sure we could give them the range of your work and the trenchantness of those subjects. We could talk for a long time, maybe not as long as one of your oral history books, but a long time. Again, you’ve just, you’ve carved this delightfully eclectic career, but really focusing on people’s voices in a way that in some sense is. Very much in tune of the spirit of the age. I mean, if, if you think about what ties some of this together in terms of social media and everybody has a voice and everybody has a platform, then also writing history by honoring those voices and the multiplicity of them. Because the other thing which we didn’t get into about oral history is it, it honors voices. It doesn’t just get away from some of the. The challenges of narrative history, which is that there’s a need for it to be a neat narrative. That’s just the reality you tell beginning a middle and end. There’s a story, it has an arc, and then you fit the stories and the details into that arc. And one of the virtues, as you described of oral history, is that you allow for these voices, many of whom were not pointing in any particular direction ’cause they didn’t know the story, they’re living the story. And in many ways, the cacophony of social media and the chaos of the moment in an information age. Is like living through your own version of present tense oral history. I, I think people would absolutely benefit from picking up any number of your books separate from the subject, right? Just for that tapestry of lived experience in the present is messy, unknown, unclear, fraught. History is neat, even if it’s ugly and, and terrible. It’s, and the present is messy and the future is unknown and again. That should give us pause in that our rush to certainty in the moment that we think we know what’s gonna happen. Clearly if you read any of your books and listen to any of what you talk about isn’t true. ’cause people think all sorts of things while they’re living through a moment that turn out to be completely, utterly astonishingly wrong and felt palpably right

in the moment. So go by a Garrett Graff book. Your titles are great too. I have total title envy. You have great book titles. I have really crappy book titles.

Garrett Graff: That’s actually not true. And Emma, you, you don’t know this, but Zachary does know this, that my first book, The First Campaign, which was this 2008 presidential race, was actually a response to Zachary’s book, The Last Campaign about the 1948 campaign, which is still sitting here on my bookshelf. And I think it’s sort of one of the great books about American politics. So you, you at least have good enough titles that they have inspired, literally my titles –

Zachary Karabell: That’s good to know. I will, I will take that compliment and, and try to integrate it into my, sorry, sense of self. Check out the new season of Garrett’s podcast Long Shadow, Breaking the Internet available wherever you find your podcasts. And look out for his upcoming book as well, so thank you.

Garrett Graff: Thank you guys. This was great.

Emma Varvaloucas: Oh, thank you, Garrett.

Zachary Karabell: You know, I think some of what I was saying at the end to Garrett is our outro. It’s like, this is great. Doing this oral history does allow for certain humility about the present, but because it shows you just how uncertain, messy, and unclear the past is, and I, if there’s anything I wanna leave with, it’s that kind of observation of take a deep breath.

Not because you should calm down, but just because we just don’t know.

Emma Varvaloucas: And also that our predictions of the future get less and less accurate the farther out. Out. We try to go, right, and there’s that infamous study that even professional forecasters have less accuracy than a dart throwing chimpanzee. So we’re not particularly good at reading the tea leaves.

Zachary Karabell: And nor are professional forecasters ever really held to account for the complete inaccuracy of their forecast, nor are the dart throwing chimpanzees, but. Subject for another show. So we wanna thank you for listening to this episode of What Could Go Right? Thank you to The Podglomerate for producing, and Emma for co-hosting and all of you for listening.

We value your time. We value the fact that you have chosen to spend it with us and we hope that you will continue to do so. So we will be back with you next week.