What Happens if the U.S. Defaults?

24:15defaults, which by the way, this is not what you ask.

24:18Lloyd Blankfein: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 preserve the integrity of the dollars that they lend to us. Well, you've been in markets for a long time and you've seen a lot of those creditors close up. Why do they do it? Well, first of all, where else would you put your money? Where are you going to preserve value? You're going to preserve value and put it into Bitcoin, Chinese yuan. Believe me, if they could – if our creditors could find something that would preserve value in the same way, be liquid and be big enough for their reserves, they would do it.

24:57Lloyd Blankfein:People – the world has tried to design systems, SARS. I can think of things that were done 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 good. So you're saying they might want Swiss francs, but there aren't enough. They might want to buy physical goods, but those can be hard to sell. When you buy art and keep your reserves in art. Well, you can go buy farmland or gold or something physical.

25:34Lloyd Blankfein:You want liquid reserves that you can liquidate and use and spend when you need to spend it. And so what currency are your debt instruments going to be in? You could borrow from the Chinese. I'm not sure that the central command economy of China that is – I wouldn't be subject to their reserves. 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 dollar. Euro, again, not big enough, has its own issues. So I think the dollar is with us for a long time 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.

26:20Lloyd Blankfein: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. Well, most of your career was lived – was conducted in a period in which interest rates steadily trended downward. Not every single day, not every single week. But by the end of your career, interest rates were a lot lower than they had been at the start of your career. And for people who belong to that generation, we got very used to predictable or only good surprises or mostly good surprises, predictable interest rates.

26:55And now we're on 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 that becomes more and more as interest rates rise higher. 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?

27:14Lloyd Blankfein:You know why interest rates could go down because things are very great and there's no inflation or they can go down because we're in a recession and things are bad and so interest rates go down. It's not always – interest rates sometimes are not the cause of things. They're the outcome from things that happen. And so a lot of times in this period, interest rates were low because times were bad, not because times were good. And so, you know, you really, you know, if you want to 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, 10-year interest rates.

27:45Lloyd Blankfein:And, you know, something in the scheme of things in my lifetime, given that I got out of school in the late 70s and hit the market when short-term interest rates were in the teens and not even, you know, not even the low teens necessarily and longer term rates are much higher. So a 10-year bond at 4.30 or 4.25 as we sit here 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 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.

28:25Yeah. Well, it is clear and present in one way, which is the housing cost. That's how most people experience interest rates is mortgages are more expensive. Monthly payments are higher. Younger people. When you came out, when you hit the market, what was your first mortgage? Well, I didn't buy a house until 1996, so I didn't do it when I was younger. If I had been buying when I came out of college, it would have been, what, as you say, in the mid-teens.

28:50Lloyd Blankfein:Okay. Well, guess what? It's like five or six. So it doesn't – it's not – in other words, we're not there yet. Now, it sounds crazy when I hear myself say it. He said, but the point is not to get it to a place where it's crazy high, but it's just not hypercritical now. One of the problems in our system is that it's very hard to get 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.

29:29Lloyd Blankfein:It's just not in our – it's not in our genes. And so I think it would be great – 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 that back to 12 percent of super high interest rates, then of course we will deal with it. Where would a crisis like that start? Who would pull the starting pistol? I'd say if you had a series of bad auctions of U.S. treasuries and people aren't buying. Who's on the other side of that auction? Who would be the first to panic?

30:09Lloyd Blankfein:Not a question of panic. People make an assessment and say, you know, what kind of interest rate do I need to get to justify the risk of getting back with dollars that don't have the same purchasing powers of the dollars that I'm lending? And so they make an assessment and they want higher. As soon as you see, you know, there was a spike in inflation when they put tariffs because tariffs were perceived to be inflationary. They'll be when oil went up. But not again, not that much. People, the market isn't as concerned about it. as you would like the market to be at the moment. Well, there were moments during the early parts of the Trump tariff plan in April of last year where there were auctions where suddenly there were no buyers, at least very briefly.

30:51And the Japanese in particular panicked and other people just, we are so worried about the outcome for the U.S. economy. We just don't want your bonds at all. Now, that didn't last that long and it looked scary. It was alleviated within days. But is that what something could look like?

31:05Lloyd Blankfein:I would say that that wasn't that scary and it didn't last that long. look, the way to solve the problem is through inflating the currency and other things are happening, external, you can get to a point where that's the only thing that people think about. I grew up, when I started in the markets, I started in the late 70s, early 80s during the hyperinflationary period. 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 terrible, raising rates to the point of choking it up because it was a stagflationary moment.

31:45Lloyd Blankfein: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 growth we weren't having was even taken down 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 avoid 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 and 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 look whatever you want to say, Bill Clinton, you know, kind of raised taxes, did what he have to do.

32:39Lloyd Blankfein: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. Bill Clinton had an advantage that the next president won't have, which is he was president during a time of a very benign international environment.

33:10He was able to not only, the spending he reduced was often defense spending. And from the perspective of 1995, that didn't look like a crazy thing to do maybe, but we live in a time where the international situation is getting worse. We've all discovered that we're shooting off missiles at a rate that overwhelms the stockpiles. 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 is probably going to say the cost of protecting all the people in the United States has promised to protect and not to shrug that off as the Trump people's own right to do.

33:43That's going to be expensive.

33:45Lloyd Blankfein:I'm not sure the world is that bad. You know, we're living with the anxiety of it going off the rails and getting a lot worse. And of course, something in the past can't get worse because it's resolved and on the shelf. 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 the world is in a bad place. It's because 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 as nervous as anybody.

34:21Yeah. Well, let me ask you about the things that the politicians you see do. And I think you point out you were like one of the few, maybe the only Goldman CEO who did not go to Washington afterward?

34:35Lloyd Blankfein:Well, most of my predecessors went into – public service oriented. They went into government. I'd say my immediate predecessors were Hank Paulson, John Corazon. He didn't go into Washington. He became a senator. Steve Freeman, national economic advisor. Whitehead, deputy secretary of state. Bob Rubin, obviously, secretary of treasury. So yes, a lot of people went into the government. So you see politicians close up and personal? Yeah. And sometimes friendly like all those people and sometimes in an adverse situation. All right. So now the current crop of politicians, Republicans as you would expect, Democrats too, have decided that what the situation calls for is more tax relief.

35:19That is the big idea of stalking both parties but not the general kind of tax relief that Ronald Reagan proposed or George W. Bush or even Paul Ryan and Donald Trump in 2017. but highly targeted, highly specific forms of relief for very specific groups. And politically, that's super efficient because it doesn't cost so much fiscally to give a 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 it's much more politically efficient rather than offering – Yeah, yeah.

35:57Lloyd Blankfein:I don't know why – who likes this stuff? Of course it's bad. I'm trying to gauge your state of war. They're called tax expenditures. Tax expenditures shouldn't be good. It should be a neutral tax, whatever neutral is, and that people will fight over that. But to me, a tax – giving somebody tax relief is just as bad – is the same thing as writing a check to them out of tax revenue. I remember – I was a tax lawyer in my prior life. I went to law school and I practiced tax law. and I remember I got out of school in, and, you know, in the early 1980s, we were doing the tax, it was called the tax code of 1954 as amended.

36:36Lloyd Blankfein:It was like 30 some, it's very hard to revise the tax code. It happens like religiously, like almost every 40 years or so, because that's how long it takes for people to get up the gumption to go attacks this, you know, to attack the Leviathan and all the people who've invested it. Don't get me wrong. When I say these things, Look, 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 miserable. I know why we're going through what we're going through.

37:13Lloyd Blankfein:I know where the stimulus is coming from. And if I were king of the world, I might have a different set of policies. but I'm grappling this and I try to explain why we are where we are, 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 going to 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, you know, financial, it was something we really had to take out. What if we had a war of real principles that were, you know, That was more global than just a fairly localized moment that the one we're in.

37:54Lloyd Blankfein:Look, it's very severe. It's very extreme. But it's not World War II. What if we had any of those things? This would be the time that we should be husbanding our resources. We should be putting grain into the silo, not taking the reserve grain out of the silo. Well, you say you have to take the world as it is, accept the world as it is. And, of course, we all must do that because it's a big world and we're just small individuals. But if individuals are collectively going to try to change the world, they need to have an accurate sense of how urgently the world needs changing and how far the world deviates from the state it should be in.

38:28Lloyd Blankfein:My guess is that you're a top decile person concerned with the deficit based on this. Yes. Okay, you got it. Are you not? I'm not sure. It's not the tippy-tippy toppest of my mind. And I would say a bigger problem in the country today is the polarization and how people poll in terms of people who think the economy is spectacular and people think it's terrible and the consequences to our political system as a result of that. I think that's a bigger problem at the moment. So, I mean, but that's OK. People have different impressions of things. Yes. Well, we're measuring on two scales now. So not what is our single biggest problem, but of those who are – you said if you were to take 100 people and divide them according to who's in the top 10 of the most worried about the deficit and the debt especially, I would – yes, I probably would be in that top 10.

39:18I agree with you. That may not be the most urgent problem. But you said 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 to debate in an open way and to agree in a consensual way on solutions to problems that at a different time in the nation's life, more people would have agreed to recognize this problem.

39:41Lloyd Blankfein:Yeah, and it generates extremism on the left and extremism on the right. There's a lot of bad things that come out of it. But I'm not trying to rank – I could agree with everything you say about the deficit. I just – so far there's been 100 percent of our conversation and so it wouldn't be normally 100 percent of my conversation if I were as an observer of the markets and the economy and things that are – that I would like – that if I were king of the forest, I'd like to sort out first. All right. So be king of the forest. Sort them out. No, no. I just gave you another example. There's a lot of things.

40:14Lloyd Blankfein:But don't think from this that I'm serene and a positive that I really am enjoying. I'm enjoying these deficits. And it's – we're taking a lot of risk with the deficit because, like I said, there will be a tipping point. They don't advertise it in advance. They don't give you – like we do when you do a podcast. I'll give you 10 minutes notice when it has to – they don't give you 10 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 priority. I wish it was the highest priority of at least a portion of our government.

40:45Yes. All right. Well, let's talk about other things that are – we're meeting in New York City. the center of American financial activity, historically a great center of concentrated wealth. There now is a mood in this city and elsewhere in the country of fear and resentment of that concentrated wealth. Goldman Sachs often becomes a symbol of that. You became a symbol.

41:08Lloyd Blankfein:Which is pretty funny for a guy who grew up in the projects. That's one of your great lines to your Twitter friend, Bernie Sanders. Oh, yeah, because when we went back and forth, he was talking to me like I was the fattest of the fat cats. And based upon where he grew, he grew up in a much nicer neighborhood than I grew up in in New York City. And I really – my dad worked nights at the post office and we lived in public housing with my sister, her baby, my grandmother, all in a two-bedroom apartment. And so I didn't think that in the humble brag competition of who was more humble, I thought I had the – I thought it wasn't good but I had the better of the worst situation.

41:55But that mood that you saw in those exchanges and I guess that's now a decade ago, it's now much more intense. Yes. We have a mayor of New York who's actually doing media events in front of the dwelling places of individual business leaders and sort of stoking – Doxing. doxing and we have seen the head of a health care company be assassinated to a terrible head of a family with leaving behind a wife and children and yet like social media invites all kinds of bad responses but there seems to be a not inconsiderable number of people who took some pleasure or at least celebrated or at least excused that terrible crime is is that mood on your list

42:34Lloyd Blankfein:of things to worry about you know there's a lot of different ways that people express express the polarization. You know, the economy, you know, it's rigged, you know, society is rigged. What does that, what does it mean rigged? It means it's, it means it favors some people, not favors over. There's a, that's polarization by a different name. Yes. I would say generally, look, one of the things when I, when I grew up, I'd say one of the, what I thought was one of the geniuses of the American culture was that I thought I was middle-class. It was later that I found that I wasn't middle-class, but I thought it was middle-class.

43:03Lloyd Blankfein: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 move into. And there was also opportunity. People perceive 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 opportunity to go to um to go to um you know and you went to you went to college and you you know you can figure out 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 a cost for technology and your rent.

44:01Lloyd Blankfein:Today, 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. Well, a lot of people who did go to college, it feels so hopeless. I don't know if this is just what we hear and we don't hear from the people who are doing the things you say, but starting enterprises and so on.

44:35But among those who seem politically fluent, politically active, whose words carry across the media that exists today, that when you listen to people under 35 and especially under 30, you hear a pervasive despair, even from those with college degrees will say, I can't buy a house. I can't get married. I can't form a family. I'm not sure I want to form a family in this uncertain world. And I feel we're all – I fear we're all about to be replaced by robots anyway. And at least the approved style of public rhetoric in 2026 is pessimistic and fearful in a way that is very different from what – from the dominant forms of public rhetoric that prevailed 10 years, 20 years and certainly 30 and 40 years.

45:17Lloyd Blankfein:No, I'm just going to – just a slight challenge just because I think it's just important because sentiment changes. When sentiment shifts, it erases your memory. When I got out of school in the – I graduated from college in 75. So that was in the run-up. What was going on in the world then? It was still the Vietnam era. Kids were getting shot on – while I was in school, kids were getting shot on the campus of Kent State and Jackson State. Kids, to avoid the draft, were going to Canada. You know, in the late, again, in the late 60s, early 70s, you know, you had Czechoslovakia, you know, you had political assassination.

45:55Lloyd Blankfein:But that's a different thing. Those were bad times too. Yes. We always had challenges. Of course that's true. And I would agree objectively that some of the challenges of the past, especially that period, were worse. That's all I'm saying. It wasn't like those were halcyon times and today we have challenges. No, I'm not making that point. I'm making this point. You tell in your book the story of at a time when you didn't have a lot of money. you saved up what you had to go see the sailing ships at regatta in New York Harbor for the bicentennial in 1976. And when we mark the bicentennial of the country in 1976, and I can remember it too, the mood then was, and America had been through a lot, Vietnam, Watergate, what was at that point, the worst recession the country had had since world war two, urban riots, not so far behind crime, inflation.

46:39Lloyd Blankfein:The Vietnam era was a, was a firm more, was the country more polarized during the Vietnam era or today? Oh, today. Really? Yeah, for sure. I'll give you a data point. Nixon and all those Doonesbury cartoons with the gun emplacements in front of the White House and all that kind of stuff. So in 1964, the country votes 60-40 for Lyndon Johnson. And in 1972, the country votes 60-40 for Richard Nixon. So now there are a lot of new voters coming in. But there's that kind of massive swing where that many people can vote one way in 1964 and eight years later vote the exact opposite way. That doesn't happen anymore.

47:12That'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 believer in such and such a point of view, that's, I think, contradicting.

47:21Lloyd Blankfein:See, I remember construction workers beating up kids who were protesting the Vietnam War. That to me is polarization. Those people had voted Democratic six and eight years ago. The only point I'm making here is the predicate of your question seems to be, this is a much more challenging time than we've lived with previously. Sorry, I haven't expressed myself. The predicate of my time is it is in many ways a less challenging time. But when you listen to young people in today as compared to then, as objectively challenging as the times were then, that you could go to the regatta and believe in the 200th anniversary of the country.

47:56We're now at the 250th. And the signature event to mark the 250th is going to be a mixed martial arts fight on the White House lawn. There are no events that speak to a broad sense of national purpose. 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 1976?

48:19Lloyd Blankfein:By the way, I didn't save it. My employer in Kansas City sent me there. But, I mean, you know, I barely remember what I thought at the time, but you remember what I thought at the time. I read it. No, but I didn't say it. I wasn't expressing a view of the mood. You know, when I got out, you know, just like anything else, I had my anxiety. And also, I'm in a different place. Maybe I was more anxious then because I was a kid trying to make my rent. And today I'm not trying to make my rent. It's easy for me to make my rent today. I don't have rent today. I own where I live. So people are different things at different times.

48:55Lloyd Blankfein:No one of us represent the mood. And again, I don't want to 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 things. But, you know, today we may be worried about, you know, militant Islamicists. 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, you know, getting under desks to take air raid drills.

49:29Lloyd Blankfein: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, 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.

50:06Well, let me ask you this comparative. The beginning of your career in 2000, your leadership role in 2006, when you became one of the most visible faces of representing American financial engineering, American capitalism, did you feel that the person who's in that role in 2006 has equal respect in the society as the person who has that role in 2026? Or has there been a deterioration of how many Americans feel about the leaders of their economy, especially the leaders of the financial economy?

50:34Lloyd Blankfein:It's been tough economic times. Just like you lose a war, the military is going to be in ill repute because you're supposed to win wars, not lose them. And if we have a global financial crisis, the people who are managing the economy are not going to look good to the general public. And if we have a situation now where you talk about the deficits and you talk about people can't buy homes and you talk about price, the financial sector is not going to be in as good repute. And if things were halcyon and wonderful, they would be. Well, the financial markets are doing well. I'm just trying to imagine.

51:04Lloyd Blankfein:Again, only doing well for people who are participating in the financial markets. Okay. I will end here with this final word. As you look forward and assess reasons for hope and reasons for apprehension about the American project, which mood is uppermost in your mind and can you explain why? Well, look, I'm an optimistic – I'm a markets guy so I had to deal with the real politic of things and the real thing. But I also went to work every day no matter what happened, no matter what it said in the newspaper. So I'm an optimistic person who has to deal with reality. So my basic mood about the American project is that sometimes it looks chaotic.

51:44Lloyd Blankfein:Sometimes it's horrible. We have show trials. Congress looks – we'll cross-examine someone who I think doesn't deserve that kind of treatment and respond and blah, blah, blah, blah. You can go on and see this stuff. But we generally deal with our problems. They're exposed. It looks terrible. I could see the economy of the America because of that, even when we're ground zero for the problems that are in the world because we cause them, we're the ones who get out of it the quickest. We deal with our problems and move on. There are a lot of problems today. I think we're going to deal with it and move on and certainly better than any other developed country or any other system that's around.

52:23Lloyd Blankfein:And 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 our system today versus another one? Hands down, I take our system. If you ask me a different question and go in a different direction, would I take these times versus other times that I've lived through and read about? Very hard to make those. It's like trying to decide whether who was better, Will Chamberlain or Michael Jordan. You know, comparing athletes from different eras and different generations. The past is the past. It's resolved. You can never be as afraid of the past knowing because the past has ended.

53:02Lloyd Blankfein:It's the present that generates anxiety. So, of course, everybody's visualizing it. It 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. Your memoir is Streetwise. You published it this very year. It has received great acclaim, great reception, and thank you for joining me today on The David Frum Show. Okay, thank you very much, David.

53:37A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer, Charlie Warzel, onto The David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show, Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time.

54:14It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

54:53We'll see you next time. wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much to Lloyd Blankfein for joining me on the David Frum Show this week in person from New York City. I wish to speak a word of personal thanks to all those viewers and listeners who reached out to either to me or to my wife, Danielle, to share your solidarity and your sympathy after our discussion last week of her new memoir, Dispatches from Grief, A Mother's Journey Through the Unthinkable. Your words of kindness truly touched both our hearts and we are grateful. Thank you so much for watching or listening to this week's David Frum program.

55:28As 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 video programs through social media to your friends, anyone you think might be interested. Again, thank you for watching and listening this week to The David Frum Show. See you next week. Bye-bye.

56:10This episode of The David Fromm Show was produced by Nathaniel Fromm and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew Edwards. Claudine Abad is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

56:53affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.