DEBATE TRANSCRIPT:

Jake Tapper: Welcome to the CNN Presidential Debate. I’m Jake Tapper.

Dana Bash: And I’m Dana Bash. Let’s get started.

Tapper: We’ll begin with the economy. President Biden, since you took office, inflation has slowed but prices remain high. What do you say to voters who feel they are worse off under your presidency than they were under President Trump?

Biden: Look at what Mr. Trump left me when I became president. We had an economy in free fall. Everyone was unemployed. Thousands were dying of Covid, it was like a zombie apocalypse, and Trump was just drinking bleach. Then I came to office and put the pieces back together. We brought insulin shots down to 15 dollars. Senior citizens pay no more than 200 dollars a year for healthcare.

Tapper: Mr. Trump?

Trump: We had the greatest economy in the history of this world or any other world. There are some great fictional worlds out there, like the Emerald City, which by the way has a great economy, but not as good as ours. No economy had ever done as well as ours did when I was in office. Everybody was amazed by it. All the other countries said they wished I was their president. In Asia or Europe or Peru, go ask them and they’ll tell you how amazed they were by the job I did. Inflation is killing us.

Biden: A better economy than the Emerald City? I don’t know anyone who thinks that. My friend who I talked to the other day doesn’t think that. He said you were a worse president than Herbert Hoover, and that’s saying something because Herbert Hoover could give a rat’s ass who shows up at the local gooseberry growing contest. I don’t know what happened at last year’s contest but those are some good gooseberries. When Trump was president we were still killing people in Afghanistan. I’m the only president where no one has died anywhere in the world.

Tapper: Mr. Trump, you say you want to extend the tax cuts you put in place. With the U.S. facing trillion dollar deficits and record debt, why should top earners and corporations pay even less in taxes than they do now?

Trump: The tax cuts are why we had the greatest economy in human or animal history. I was just about to zero out the debt when Covid hit. So instead I made the vaccine, and it was a tremendous vaccine, and then he took over and did a very poor job. When I was president the whole world loved America and admired me. Now we’re a disgusting piss-covered Third World country.

Biden: I’m going to fix the tax system. We have a trillion thousandaires in this country—excuse me, a million trillionaires. Billionaires pay only $150 in taxes. I paid more than that when I worked at Padula’s ice cream stand when I was 15. I paid the taxes I owed. If billionaires paid their fair share we’d be able to wipe out the debt. We’d be able to pay for childcare, eldercare, healthcare. We’d be able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with, dealing with everything we have to do with everything that we have to be able to deal with.

Trump:

Tapper:

Bash:

Biden: The.

Trump:

Tapper:

Bash:

Biden: We finally beat Medicare.

Tapper: For fuck’s sake. Okay let’s talk about Roe v. Wade.

Trump: Everyone wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade, and I mean everyone. And I did that. These people are sick. They want to abort eight-month fetuses. Nine-month fetuses. Newborn babies. Older fatter babies. Boddlers. Toddlers. There’s no one these people won’t abort. President Biden tries to abort his political opponents. It’s a disaster.

Bash: President Biden?

Biden: It’s ridiculous to say everyone wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade. I didn’t. My friend didn’t. The women didn’t, including that one who was murdered by an immigrant. He went to the funeral. But here’s the deal. There’s a lot of women raped by their in-laws, by their spouses, by their brothers and sisters, by their children and grandmothers, it’s ridiculous, I saw this one video where the pool boy came into the house looking all sweaty and asked for a glass of water, and you know how that goes, you’ve seen the videos, and then they can do nothing about it and they try to arrest them when they cross state lines.

Tapper: President Biden, on the issue of border security, a record number of migrants have illegally crossed the southern border on your watch. Why should voters trust you to solve this crisis?

Biden: I hired more border patrol. I hired more asylum officers. This is why there are no more illegal immigrants. He put babies in cages. I’m going to continue until we get the total initiative relative to what we’re going to do with more border patrol and more asylum officers eating a salami on Wednesday.

Trump: I have no idea what the fuck he said at the end there and I don’t think he knows what he said either. Look, we had the safest border in the history of borders, and then he just opened them right up. He opened them to prisoners and lunatics and rapists and child molesters and terrorists and wildlings and white walkers. These are not good people. We had the safest border in history according to border patrol who, by the way, endorsed me for president, I won’t say that here but they endorsed me, I won’t talk about it but it was Brandon, Brandon from border patrol endorsed me, I won’t mention his name here but it was Brandon R. Knight who lives at 246 Longmeadow Drive in El Paso with his dogs, beautiful dogs by the way, it was the safest border and now we have the worst border in history. And these migrants are staying at the best hotels, great five-star hotels, while our veterans are on the street because he hates veterans.

Biden: Okay everything he just said is a lie. For example, I don’t hate veterans, I’d give my life for a veteran. I’d give a veteran a handjob in a Denny’s bathroom. We’ve done more for veterans than anyone in American history.

Bash: Let’s talk about Russia and Ukraine. Former President Trump, Vladimir Putin says he’ll only end the war if he gets to keep some of Ukraine and Ukraine stops trying to join NATO. Are Putin’s terms acceptable to you?

Trump: Our veterans can’t stand Biden. They think he’s the worst commander-in-chief that we’ve ever had. They wouldn’t take a handjob from him in a Denny’s bathroom even if they were desperate. If we had a real president, Putin never would have invaded Ukraine. And Hamas never would have attacked Israel. When I was president, Hamas liked Israel. You know those silly little caps Jews wear on their head? When I was president, Hamas wore those caps too. Out of respect for me. President Biden is like a Palestinian, and not one of the good ones either, he’s a bad one, he’s a weak Palestinian, he’s not even one of the scary Palestinians, he can’t even yell “Allahu Akbar” correctly and the other Palestinians can’t stand him, they can’t stand this guy.

Biden: I’ve never heard so much malarkey in my life. I’m a great Palestinian.

Bash: Former President Trump, would you support the creation of an independent Palestinian state to achieve peace in the region?

Trump: I make great deals. I made great deals as a kid. As a teenager. As an adult. As an old man. I made NATO put up biyyons and biyyons of dollars. I told them, if you don’t pay, I don’t play. And you know what happened? Biyyons and biyyons of dollars came flowing in the next day. But now we’re paying everyone’s bills again.

Tapper: Mr. Trump, I want to talk about January 6^th. After you rallied your supporters that day, some of them stormed the Capitol. As president, you swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. What do you say to voters who believe you violated that oath on January 6^th and worry that you’ll do it again?

Trump: Let me tell you about January 6^th. On January 6^th, we had a secure border. On January 6^th, we were energy independent. On January 6^th, somewhere out there, a little boy had his first hamburger because we had made America great.

Tapper: Please answer the question.

Trump: I had nothing to do with anything that happened on On January 6^th. Even Nancy Pelosi said that. She said, “President Trump had nothing to do with January 6^th, it was all my fault.”

Biden: He’s a convicted felon.

Trump: His son is a convicted felon.

Biden: He had sex with a porn star in the other room while his wife was giving birth. He has the morals of an alley cat.

Alley cats: wtf

Trump: I didn’t have sex with a porn star in the other room while my wife was giving birth, she had sex with me.

Biden: He said fine people on both sides.

Trump: No I didn’t.

Biden: Yes you did. He said Hitler has done good things.

Trump: Only some.

Bash: President Biden, black Americans are struggling. What do you say to black Americans who are disappointed you haven’t made more progress?

Biden: I’ve helped black Americans in all kinds of ways. It’s inflation that’s hurting them, not me.

Trump: You caused the inflation.

Biden: I know you did but what did I do?

Bash: President Trump, will you do anything to slow the climate crisis?

Trump: The blacks love me. They made me an honorary black.

Bash:

Trump: When I was president, I had stopped climate change. I had the best environmental numbers in history.

Biden: I passed the most extensive climate change legislation in history. Blacks love me. I built labs in historically black colleges so they could do science like white colleges.

Trump: Illegals are destroying our country.

Biden: And by the way.

Biden:

Tapper: Mr. Trump, the average cost of childcare in this country has risen past $11,000/year per child. In your second term, what would you do to make childcare more affordable?

Trump: He’s the worst president in this history of this country.

Biden: He’s the worst president in this history of this country.

Trump: He’s the worst president in this history of this country.

Biden: He’s the worst president in this history of this country.

Tapper: Mr. Trump, the question was about childcare.

Trump: He’s the worst president in this history of this country.

Biden: He’s the worst president in this history of this country.

Tapper: Mr. Trump, what will you do to address the opioid crisis?

Trump: China.

Tapper: Mr. Trump, what will you do to address the opioid crisis?

Trump: Illegals are killing this country.

Tapper: Mr. Trump, what will you do to address the opioid crisis?

Trump: Democrats pay too much for hostages. I pay almost nothing.

Bash: K. President Biden, frankly you’re old as cock. How do you address concerns about this?

Biden: I used to be young. America is a great country.

Bash: Former President Trump, you’re also appallingly old. How do you address the same concerns?

Trump: I just won two club championships. To do that you have to be smart and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way. He couldn’t hit a ball 50 yards. I have the body and mind of a 23-year-old.

Biden: I’m a six handicap.

Trump: My tits you are.

Biden: I’m an eight handicap.

Trump: I’ve seen your swing.

Bash: Mr. Trump, will you pledge to accept the results of this election and say political violence of any form is unacceptable?

Trump: Of course political violence is unacceptable. I hated when Nancy Pelosi ushered in all those people to the Capitol on January 6^th. I’m running because he’s the worst president in the history of this country.

Bash: Mr. Trump, will you pledge to accept the results of this election?

Trump: Putin never would have attacked Ukraine if I had been president.

Bash: Mr. Trump, will you pledge to accept the results of this election?

Trump: If the election is fair and free and I win of course I’ll accept the results.

Biden: Whiner.

Trump: Complainer.

Tapper: It is blessedly now time for the candidates to deliver their closing statements. Time for the big, lofty, heartfelt speech.

Biden: I didn’t raise taxes on most people. He instituted a 10% tariff, which is the same as raising taxes. He wants to make it so we can’t negotiate with big pharma companies. We got it down to $35 for insulin, which is $20 more than I said earlier in the debate, and a $2,000 cap for senior healthcare spending, which is ten times the figure I said earlier tonight. That’s huge progress in just a couple hours.

Trump: This guy sucks. All he does is let people pour in over the border. We’re living in a hellish rat’s nest. No one likes you. No one respects you. God I’m good. No one’s ever seen anything like it before. We live in a shit country. Because of you, I need to make America great again again.

Bash: Thank you I guess.

_______

More places to go:

Presidential debate transcripts from 2020 and 2016

My book about how our politics got to this state

The American Presidents: Washington to Lincoln

_______

If you like Wait But Why, sign up for our email list and we’ll send you new posts when they come out.

To support Wait But Why, visit our Patreon page.

The post The 2024 Trump-Biden Debate appeared first on Wait But Why.

This post was originally published in The Free Press on October 14, 2024.

Last night, I received two texts from Bari Weiss: 

Any interest in writing a short piece about that jaw-dropping launch?

And why you brought your daughter to see it?

The first question is an easy one. I’ve been fascinated by space ever since I gained sentience sometime in the mid-1980s. I had the order of the planets down by age four, and a few years later I could (and did) tell people that you could fit a thousand Earths inside Jupiter and a thousand Jupiters inside the sun.

I remember being amazed watching videos of the moon landing—but also confused. The cars, telephones, TVs, and computers of my childhood were worlds more advanced than anything my parents had as kids. But with space, the normal order of things was reversed: My parents grew up exhilarated by Apollo missions to places no man had gone before, while I was watching the space shuttle take astronauts a little hop above Earth’s surface to do some technical work on the International Space Station. I remember feeling a deep envy of people who were around in the 1960s. It didn’t make sense.

The problem turned out to be this:1

People living in the 1960s thought the moon landing was just the beginning. By 2024, they’d have imagined, there would be a permanent moon base, lots of space tourism, and even people walking around on other planets.

As it turns out, the 1960s were a fluke. It was the height of the Cold War and “desperate times call for desperate measures” justified all kinds of unusual behaviors—including spending five percent of the federal budget to one-up the Soviet Union in the space race. That brief spike in space expenditure put a man on the moon, captivated all of humanity and reminded us of what’s possible when we put our minds together.

Then the Cold War moved on, shifting its tensions to other arenas. Space became less of a critical mission and more of a fun hobby. What had been five percent of the federal budget in the mid-1960s dropped to one percent by the mid-1970s and 0.5 percent in recent decades.

Any hopes I had that the U.S. would decide to become rad about space again were dashed in 2011, when the space shuttle program was shut down for good. Now we couldn’t even launch astronauts into low Earth orbit. When we wanted to send Americans into space, we had to politely ask Russia to do it for us.

I get it. We have many more pressing needs than space. A politician campaigning today on dedicating five percent of the budget to space would be laughed out of the room.

It’s just that it’s such a shame. The moon landing was a tantalizing glimpse into the incredible potential of our species—and a frustrating reminder that without desperate times, that potential remains largely untapped.

Then came SpaceX. I first heard about it in 2012 when 60 Minutes did a segment on the company. Over the next few years, I watched as SpaceX kept defying expectations, successfully launching progressively bigger and more legit rockets into orbit.

In what is still the most surprising day of my life, one day in 2015 Elon Musk reached out to me, said he had read my recent blog post on AI, and asked if I’d be interested in writing about SpaceX. Over the next few months I visited the SpaceX facilities, looked at their rockets up close, interviewed dozens of their engineers, and talked with Musk about the big vision for the company. I wrote about it all in a big blog post.

At the time, SpaceX was singularly focused on one of the space industry’s holy grails: rocket reusability.

Imagine if every commercial airplane flight ended with the passengers parachuting to the ground and the plane crashing into the ocean. With every plane flying exactly once, a brand-new plane would be needed for every flight. Tickets would cost millions of dollars, limiting air travel to billionaires and governments. 

Until recently, that was how space travel worked. Every rocket flew once, making space available only to billionaires and governments. What if, somehow, rockets could be like planes, ending each mission by landing instead of crashing the rocket? Each rocket could be used hundreds of times instead of once, dramatically cutting down the price of space travel and revolutionizing the industry.

In late 2015 a SpaceX rocket launched, sent its payload into orbit, and for the first time in human history, came back down and landed. I watched from SpaceX headquarters. The cheer was so deafening you could feel the vibration move through your body. In the face of a million doubts, SpaceX showed that a private company could not only launch rockets but do it better than any government ever had. Soon, the U.S. government was using SpaceX, not Russia, to launch its astronauts.

But reusability was just a stepping stone on the way to SpaceX’s real mission: colonizing Mars. If you have critical information stored on a hard drive, it’s common sense to back up the info on a second hard drive. That’s how Elon Musk views humanity. We currently have all our eggs in one planet. To give our species the best chance of survival in the long run, he believes, we should live on multiple planets. We’re fortunate to have another potentially livable rocky planet nearby. Why not try to use it?

Bringing people to Mars requires a rocket far larger and smarter than any we had ever built. So SpaceX built Starship, a beast the height of a 40-story skyscraper.2

To make trips to Mars affordable, the rocket has to be reusable, which means this thing has to land. So SpaceX got busy innovating, designing a system to catch the landing rocket between two giant arms. Last week, SpaceX announced that on Sunday, October 13, they would perform Starship’s fifth test launch and, for the first time, attempt to catch the gargantuan rocket on the way down.

I knew one thing: I sure as shit wasn’t going to miss this. I made arrangements to travel to Boca Chica, Texas, to watch.

So the answer to Bari’s first text was easy. I love writing about anything related to space. Yes. 

But how about the second text?

And why you brought your daughter to see it?

Let me first say that “daughter” is generous. What I have is a little two-foot-tall, 19-month-old gnome. Many times over the course of the weekend journey, I asked myself the same question. Why did I decide to bring a toddler with me?

I asked myself that question at 6:30 a.m. Sunday morning while making the 30-minute walk down the beach from the hotel to the viewing spot, which would have been much easier without lugging a fussy, under-slept, 27-pound medicine ball with me—all for something she won’t begin to understand or appreciate or remember.

We arrived at our spot and waited. Then, suddenly, the bottom of the rocket exploded into color. The launch began in silence for a few seconds while the roaring sound zipped along the water toward us. Then it got loud. My daughter hated it, saying “No?” repeatedly, which is her way of pleading with me to make it stop. 

But soon, like everyone else, she was staring wide-eyed at the flying skyscraper as it bored its way upward through the thick atmosphere, painting a beautiful strip of vivid white and orange cloud across the clear sky. Way above us, we watched it separate into two little dots: The spaceship heading around the world with plans to crash into the Indian Ocean, and the rocket that was—somehow—turning around and coming back toward us.

I can say with confidence: Watching a skyscraper falling from the sky is one of the most surreal things I have ever seen. Noticing my daughter still fixated on the cloud, I redirected her attention to the falling rocket. Near the ground, with a new streak of fire shooting out of its engines, it slowly hovered its way over to the tower and into the gentle embrace of the robot arms. The crowd roared. My wife, who gives one percent as much of a shit as I do about space, was in tears.

It’s hard to wrap your head around SpaceX’s mission. If they actually succeed in putting a single human on Mars, let alone their goal of a million people, it will be one of the major milestones in not just human history but life history—on par with the moment animals first began to walk on land. Whether or not they end up pulling it off, space is officially exciting again.

But the reason rocket launches make people emotional isn’t about that. It’s the feeling of swelling pride that comes from being in awe of your own species. It’s the feeling of hope that comes from being reminded of our insane potential when thousands of people work together toward a goal. It’s the happy version of the post-9/11 feeling of wanting to hug every stranger you see.

These emotions are especially refreshing at a time when we’re surrounded by their polar opposite: the pessimism and petty cynicism that pervade our age of suffocating tribalism.

As the father to a smiley little gnome, I desperately want to shield her from the negativity that will swirl around her as she grows up. I won’t be able to do that. But what I can do is continually redirect her attention to the rocket, showing her all the ways our species is incredible. I can use “rocket launch emotion” as a parenting compass and try, as many times as I can, to give her experiences that fill her with that particular magical, high-minded feeling.

If along the way I also train her to be my little space nerd friend, all the better.

_______

If you like Wait But Why, sign up for our email list and we’ll send you new posts when they come out.

To support Wait But Why, visit our Patreon page.

_______

More Wait But Why space nerdery:

How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars

The Fermi Paradox

4 Mind-Blowing Things About Stars

The post Why I Lugged My 27-Pound Toddler to a Rocket Launch appeared first on Wait But Why.

Back in 2023, I wrote a post about having my first baby and all the things that confused me about doing so.

Earlier this year, it happened again. Just like that, I was back here:

On one hand, now time doesn’t exist at all.

On the other hand, the second child is…easier than the first.

But I’m not here to talk about the new baby, delightful and obese as she may be. Today, I report to you from the depths of toddler parenthood. I always thought two-year-olds were basically unconscious blobs with a cold, but it turns out they’re actual people you can get to know. Having now spent some time cohabitating with one, I’ve made the following discoveries:

1) You can be simultaneously completely obsessed with and dramatically bored by the same person.

Sometimes when I’m working in my office, my daughter will toddle in, run over to me, and give me a hug. It is by far the best part of my day. Her smile fills me with utter joy. Her little voice is sent straight from heaven. I feel the purest possible love for her.

It’s just that I also find her groundbreakingly boring. A five-minute hangout is one thing, but when I’m deep in an afternoon with her, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion than that I’ve spent my last three hours with a person whose IQ is 20.

2) Toddlers are dicks.

It’s well-known that toddlers transform into mid-20^th-century totalitarian dictators at the drop of a hat.

But they’re dicks in less obvious ways too. The other day, my toddler was playing with Legos. I sat down next to her and asked her what she was building, and she said, “Daddy needs to work in his office?”—an unsubtle hint that I should leave her the fuck alone.

Or the times I cook a whole thing for her with care and love and she refuses to take a bite, making me feel cluey for myself.

Most recently, I made the mistake of telling her my age, and now she says “Daddy is 43” like 30 times a day, constantly filling me with existential dread.

3) No one wants to see videos of someone else’s toddler.

Toddler parenthood is a reality distortion zone that makes it hard to remember that most people find your toddler breathtakingly uninteresting.1

Friends who have kids the same age as yours are kind of in a cohort together, so parents of toddlers often end up with a whole throng of toddlers in their lives. Amongst my cohort I’ve both been an offender and frequent victim of toddler-video-showing. It’s part of the tax we all pay.2

I try to at least minimize the fallout from my end.

4) Someone else’s toddler can ruin your week.

5) Toddlers are geniuses who are also very dumb.

If I took my daughter to China for a year, and we just lived there with no language instruction, I’d come back knowing approximately six Mandarin words and she’d be fluent. It makes no sense to me that toddlers just learn a language by hearing the language, but somehow they do. They’re weird freak geniuses. But then she says stuff like “would you like a strawberry?” when she wants a strawberry, because when we say “you,” it refers to her, so she now thinks “you” is a synonym for her name, which is very unimpressive.

Likewise, the other day I read her a new book for the first time, and then the second time I read it to her, she stopped me in the middle to correct something I said. It turns out I had accidentally skipped a word, which she knew because she somehow memorized the whole book on the first read. But then we’ll pick up another book and she’ll stare at the page for a million years looking for where Curious George is “hiding” even though he’s obviously right the fuck there.

6) Toddlers have a highly inaccurate worldview.

We sometimes take our toddler to story time at the library, where the librarian reads a book to a bunch of kids. The first time we took her, she decided to take matters into her own hands and, mid-story, went and sat in the librarian’s lap. The issue is that she hadn’t quite figured out that the world does not exist entirely for her benefit.

It’s understandable. You’re born into the world and for the first few years, everyone you see smiles and waves at you, so you overestimate your importance. Only slowly do you learn what’s really happening.3

This is part of the broader phenomenon of a toddler not really having any idea what’s going on. They don’t know about death, or money, or history, or sex, or the Big Bang, or basically anything about reality. They just emerged out of nowhere and started being, which for some reason doesn’t strike them as weird or confusing.

(A good “do you have any idea what’s going on?” litmus test is: If you’re walking down the street and an elephant flies down from the sky, hovers ten feet above you and says hello in a silly cartoon voice before flying off, would you be like “OH MY GOD WHAT JUST HAPPENED” or would you shrug and be like “I guess that’s something that happens”? If the latter, you have no idea what’s going on. Most two-year-olds fail this test.)

7) Toddlers are both the funniest and least funny possible people.

My daughter is remarkably unfunny. Once when she dropped something, I said “kerplunk,” and she found it fucking hilarious. For the next ten minutes, she kept picking things up, dropping them, and saying “kerplunk,” hysterically laughing each time.

But unintentionally, she’s a comedic genius. When I was in her way recently, she said, “Can you get out of space?” which my wife and I now say to each other whenever we want the other to move. Another time, we had to rip a band-aid off her leg, after which she said, “I am so perfectly sad,” and now my wife and I say that anytime we’re unhappy about something.4

We’ve also discovered an amazing hack: you can just teach a toddler to say whatever you want. We taught her to say “mamma mia” whenever she falls over, which I highly recommend to other toddler parents.

8) Toddler parents have very strong opinions and everyone is very judgy.

The problem is, for every strong opinion, there’s an equally strong opposite opinion.

I’ve taken to accepting that I’m messing up all kinds of things, and mainly just try to have fun with my little friend. To the extent that I have a strategy, it’s basically:

• Spend lots of (phone-free) time with her
• Show her that the world is a fun and fascinating place
• Encourage her to reason from first principles
• Don’t interrupt her when she’s focused or daydreaming; help her learn to be entertained by her own mind
• Refrain from imposing lots of little rules, but where there are rules, be firm about them
• Build problem-solving confidence, teaching her to become a person who says “I want to figure out the directions” instead of a person who says “let’s just ask someone”

Toddler parents can take solace in the fact that parenting probably matters less than we think it does. Rather than try to shape our little two-foot-tall companions, we should help guide them to become the best version of who they already are.

Anyway, gotta go. Time to read Squeak the Mouse Likes His House for the 57^th time.

___________

More tales from fatherhood: 10 Thoughts from the Fourth Trimester

My favorite toddler books: Flotsam, Little Fur Family, The Giant Jam Sandwich, Little Owl’s Night

If you’d rather read about something other than my fat babies:

The Marriage Decision: Everything Forever or Nothing Ever Again

Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think

Why I’m Always Late

_______

If you like Wait But Why, sign up for our email list and we’ll send you new posts when they come out.

To support Wait But Why, visit our Patreon page.

The post Tales from Toddlerhood appeared first on Wait But Why.

Ever present in my mind is The List: the countries I still haven’t gone to that I most want to visit.

Ethiopia is on The List. So is Indonesia. And South Korea. And Madagascar. And Taiwan.

Early on, my wife and I pledged to visit two new countries every year, and we mostly pulled it off. Then came Covid, followed by two babies, and we fell off the wagon.

This year we remembered that we were gonna die at some point and decided it was time to get things going again. We dusted off The List, picked a country that’s been at the very top for years, tossed the kids to the grandparents for a week, and headed off to Bhutan.1

Bhutan, if you’re not familiar, is a tiny 800,000-person country squashed between two behemoths.

Bhutan was unified in the 17^th century after millennia of existing as a collection of warring tribes. In the time since then, it has somehow avoided being annexed by China or India. Today, it is the world’s last Buddhist kingdom, and I can confirm that it is both very Buddhist and very kingdom-y. Temples are everywhere, and the people are highly superstitious—our tour guide seemed to constantly be remarking about good luck and bad luck, promising omens and inauspicious riverbends. (The temples are beautiful, but so are all the other buildings. All architecture in the country, from the airport to the shopping centers, has a uniform Bhutanese style.)

The king is universally beloved and, at least the way they tell it, an exemplary ruler. A typical story we heard: 50,000 people work in the country’s tourist industry, all of whom were suddenly out of work during Covid. So the king gave these families $120/month, enough to get by on until the industry came back. He paid this out of his own pocket, nearly to the point of personal bankruptcy.

(Of course, I was also told in North Korea that it was only by the grace and courage of their magnanimous leaders that the people were prosperous and free, unlike their unfortunate South Korean cousins suffering under American occupation. But the situations are wildly different and I am inclined to mostly believe what I heard in Bhutan.)

Sadly, Bhutan’s way of life is threatened now as many of its young people have left to find opportunity elsewhere. The king is attempting to fix this with plans to construct Gelephu Mindfulness City, an economic hub which will center around innovation, while preserving Bhutanese tradition. It looks like it’ll be incredible, though I was told not to hold my breath as it will probably not be finished for 20 more years.

All of this is to say that Bhutan is a special place—remote, mysterious, and breathtakingly beautiful. Which is why it was always prominently on The List.

A trip to Bhutan is better shown than told, so I kept most of the details to this video:

_______

More posts from The List:
Siberia
Tokyo
Nigeria
Iraq
Greenland
North Korea
And The genie question

_______

If you like Wait But Why, sign up for our email list and we’ll send you new posts when they come out.

To support Wait But Why, visit our Patreon page. (During this book-writing phase, I’ve been doing mini-posts every Friday for patrons.)

The post The sights and sounds of Bhutan appeared first on Wait But Why.