The White House cannot stop fighting with the pope.

On Tuesday night, Vice President JD Vance — who converted to Catholicism in 2019 — accused Pope Leo XIV of not understanding the Church’s stance on war, saying it was “very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” Later in the evening, President Donald Trump continued to berate the pope for not supporting his strikes on Iran.

In Leo, though, they’ve found a feistier opponent than they might have expected. He calmly held his ground, hit back with some jabs of his own — he called the Trump-owned platform Truth Social’s name “ironic” — and, perhaps most importantly, has brought support to bear from prominent right-leaning Catholics in the US. The top Senate Republican sounds unnerved. Trump, who is used to quickly cowing nonpartisan public figures into a more conciliatory stance, is not winning this time.

This isn’t the White House’s first run-in with a pope. Trump, and sometimes Vance, were in a long-running conflict with Pope Francis going all the way back to the 2016 Republican presidential primary, when Francis indirectly suggested that Trump “was not a Christian,” because of his focus on “building walls…and not bridges.” Back then, even Trump’s fellow GOP primary contenders, including Catholics like then-Sen. Marco Rubio, backed him up.

As a result, Trump might be surprised by how much stronger the backlash is this time. Even before he doubled down on his initial Truth Social attacks and posted a controversial (and sacrilegious) AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, many of his usual allies, including conservative Catholics, were calling him out.

“The statements made by President Trump on Truth Social regarding the Pope were entirely inappropriate and disrespectful,” the Catholic Bishop Robert Barron, a member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission who is popular with conservative Catholics, said on X — a statement emblematic of right-leaning Catholics’ responses. 

Why is the current spat so different? A lot of it has to do with Pope Leo, who starts with a much stronger base of support from American Catholics on the right. After years of sparring with Francis, Trump and Vance may find they’ve messed with the wrong pope this time. 

Traditionalist and conservative Catholics in the US trust Leo a lot more than Francis

Since assuming the papacy, Leo has shown himself adept at leveraging the optics of his office, winning over critics, and building popular appeal to strengthen his hand — all moves that Trump would surely recognize. 

A lot of the goodwill on the right toward Leo has nothing to do with US politics, but with matters of faith: internal Vatican debates about doctrine and the role of the papacy. He’s made significant inroads with traditionalist and more orthodox Catholics, who were far more suspicious of Francis’ approach, and they’re more inclined to take his side as a result.

When Leo was elected pope, American Catholics, who lean more theologically and politically conservative than in other parts of the world, weren’t sure what to make of him. He wasn’t one of the so-called frontrunners, so his election shocked the world.

He was the first American-born pope, from Chicago, but like the Argentine-born Pope Francis had spent decades in Latin America, where the Church had a reputation for sometimes challenging capitalism from the left. He came from the Augustinian order, a more hermetic and austere tradition, as opposed to the more visible and liberal-leaning Jesuit order that trained Francis. Though elevated by the “liberal” Francis through the Vatican hierarchy, Leo was well-liked by both progressive, conservative, and traditionalist clerics in the Church.

Traditionalist and conservative Catholics were cautiously optimistic, and soon saw signs that Leo was rewarding their faith in him. They cheered on his restoration of the elaborate, grand, traditional symbols of the papacy, which Francis had disregarded. During his first public address, he gave a blessing in Latin — traditionalists strongly opposed the Church’s 20th-century turn away from the language — and wore the more traditional garb of the pontiff, including a red mozzetta, or short cape, (as opposed to Francis’s simple white attire).

These and other symbolic moves were a sign that “at the very least he is intentionally not following directly in the footsteps of Francis” the conservative Catholic editor-in-chief of Crisis magazine, Eric Sammons, said at the time.

And sure enough, the overtures that followed allowed a lot of traditionalists to breathe a sigh of relief. Leo was, at worst, a centrist: traditional in style and conservative in dogma, even if he carried on Francis’s tradition of Catholic social teaching. He did not immediately wade into social and cultural debates, instead prioritizing thinking on artificial intelligence, economic justice, and respect for human rights; he spoke spontaneously less often than Francis, who was known for his off-the-cuff remarks; and he did not antagonize those supporters of the Traditional Latin Mass.

He moved back to the pope’s apartments in the Apostolic Palace, which Francis had abandoned during his papacy, and picked back up old traditions, like carrying a cross through the Colosseum on Good Friday this year — something Pope John Paul II used to do. Even now, Catholic observers look for clues and signs of Leo’s theological and stylistic leanings: looking to see what vestments he wears, what regalia he bears, and who he promotes.

And perhaps most importantly, he seemed willing to reconcile and repair differences between promoters of the traditional Latin Mass and the dominant vernacular Catholic tradition that Francis promoted. Leo has gone so far as to allow discussion of the Latin Mass during gatherings of cardinals, opening up the possibility that previous restrictions might be reexamined, and called for “generous inclusion,” of its supporters, though he has reminded traditionalists not to allow their support for the Latin Mass to become a political tool.

A common knock on Francis in America was that he earned praise from secular liberals, but not new converts to counter shrinking Church attendance in the US. Leo is benefiting from the opposite trend: The American Church, in particular, is seeing a cultural revival: Young Catholics are filling pews in big city parishes and posting their experiences online. Catholicism, and its traditional aesthetics, is trendy again. Converts and baptisms are rising again, albeit slowly. Clergy and Catholic influencers are more vocal. And Leo is part of that revitalization.

The Iran war has actually divided conservative Catholics in the US

It’s not just Leo’s base of support that’s coloring the reaction to his argument with Trump; it’s also the issue that’s at the center of it: the war in Iran, and the rising use of military force more broadly. 

Republicans and Democrats have grown used to ignoring or explaining away certain conflicts with the Church that fall along partisan lines — immigration for Republicans, abortion for Democrats. President Joe Biden was denied communion at one South Carolina church over his support for abortion rights, which fit into a longstanding debate about how to punish pro-choice Catholic politicians.

But Leo is speaking up over an issue that is actually dividing conservative Catholics: the joint US-Israeli war in Iran. Polls show disapproval by Catholics of both Trump’s handling of the war, and the fact that the war is even happening — both departures from the double-digit margin of victory Catholic voters gave Trump in 2024, according to exit polls.

These splits aren’t just theological; they also run into cultural and political divides within the party. But Vance’s leaked reservations about the war and the resignation of Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center and a conservative Catholic, show these tensions are present even within Trump’s own White House. 

Francis was seen as the aggressor in his fights with Trump

As mentioned above, popes frequently take principled stands on issues that are divisive in US politics. But they typically try to avoid getting caught up in spats with politicians and keep their critiques more generalized.

As a result, when Francis took on Trump, it was seen by many as a violation of what religion professor Stephen Prothero termed “an unspoken gentleman’s agreement in American politics” that the Catholic clergy steers clear of domestic campaign issues.

In case you need a refresher, back in 2016, Francis took time as he was wrapping up an apostolic visit to Mexico to comment on the news of the day. This was the peak of Trump’s anti-immigrant, nationalistic, “build-a-wall” upstart campaign for the Republican nomination — and just days before the make-or-break South Carolina primary — and Francis injected himself right into the middle of it. 

Though he didn’t use Trump’s name, he responded to a question about the candidate by saying that “a person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.” The comments were seen as a direct attack on the candidate. 

Francis came from Argentina, where the Church played a bigger role in commenting on politics, and perhaps didn’t realize how far he was going. He had a knack for spontaneity, which sometimes led him to weighing in on issues on inopportune moments. And perhaps he was a poor fit for doing politics in a polarized time: In singling out a border wall rather than Trump’s more unique takes on moral issues, he named a position widely backed in some form by Republican politicians and even some Democrats. 

Regardless of his intent, it triggered a wave of criticism from Republican Catholics: Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio sided with Trump over the pope: “We should have a strategy to secure our border…that’s not an un-Christian thing to do,” Bush said, while Rubio made the case that sovereign countries have “a right to control who comes in, when they come in and how they come in,” just like Vatican City. 

And of course, Trump fired back, accusing Francis of being a Mexican “pawn” and warning that the Vatican would be “attacked by ISIS” if he were not elected president. And so kicked off the tense and standoffish relationship between the pope and Trump.

By contrast, while Leo has proven willing to respond to Trump, the “feud” this time only really began when Trump launched a lengthy personal attack against him on Truth Social.

In Francis’s case, it also didn’t help that he had already earned skepticism on the right by 2016 for his other forays into politically fraught topics, which made them less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. His frequent focus on the poor, on immigrants, on the persecuted, and more progressive or nuanced takes on controversial issues like homosexuality, climate change, abortion, and capitalism, all opened him up to attack and dismissal from politically conservative Catholics. 

Taken together, you can see two very different popes: Francis was a trailblazer, but a controversial leader who was viewed as more antagonistic toward politicians and issues conservative American Catholics cared about. Leo has been seen as more temperate and moderate in his stances, giving him more influence when he chooses to speak up, which he has chosen to do on an issue in which he could actually project some sway. 

Trump paid no obvious political price for his fights with Francis. Whether that changes with Leo, either for Trump or for his successor, he’s picked a far tougher foil this time.

Americans are getting crankier about paying taxes. 

Most people don’t enjoy paying Uncle Sam, but for much of the 2000s and 2010s, a sizable percentage of Americans thought that the amount of federal taxes they paid was “about right,” according to Gallup. But recently, the share saying their taxes were “too high” has been climbing; last year, nearly 60 percent of Americans said they pay too much.

Call it the Great American Tax Revolt, or maybe the Third American Revolution. Whatever we label this anti-tax wave, its effects are already rippling out across the country. Republicans in red states are slashing property taxes, or threatening to eliminate them entirely. Even some Democratic lawmakers are proposing massive tax cuts to be paid for with tax increases on only the very richest. 

All of this reminds Isaac Martin, a professor of urban studies at University of California San Diego, of the battle over Proposition 13: a 1978 California ballot measure that capped property taxes statewide, setting off a chain of fiscal and social consequences that the state is still grappling with. 

“I think the history of California really teaches us that you can want your government for free, but you can’t get it for free,” Martin told Today, Explained co-host Noel King.

King and Martin talked about the history of property tax in America, the story of Prop 13, and what California’s experience suggests about where the rest of the country may be headed. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What was going on with taxes in the 1970s?

There was what we call now the property tax revolt, a major grassroots movement of protest against local property taxes. It was a nationwide thing. It happened in communities all around the US, but people really remember the events in California because Californians at that time, in 1978, amended their constitution to limit the property tax. And that tax limitation, which they called Proposition 13, then became national news and had all kinds of impacts in and outside of California.

I lived in Los Angeles for a couple of years and I remember Proposition 13 being a big topic of conversation, but not everyone will know of its history. Why does Prop 13 matter? Why is it such a big deal?

Proposition 13 is a big deal for a few reasons. The first is that it very dramatically changed the state’s tax structure. It said local governments cannot levy any property tax in excess of 1 percent, so it capped the property tax rate at 1 percent. 

The second and more important thing it did is it put an annual cap on the amount that the assessed value of your property for tax purposes could increase from year to year. Even if your home was appreciating in value very rapidly, as far as the local tax assessor was concerned, it wasn’t actually going up more than 2 percent per year in value. And that, among other things, constrained the finances of local governments in California. 

It also gave property owners a tax break that grew over time, the longer they stayed in their homes. It was the beginning of a real cascade of similar changes to California law, including later initiatives in the 1980s that said that the tax break you have on your home because you got in early, you can pass that down to your children. You can pass that down to your grandchildren. That’s one reason why Peter Schrag, who was the [opinion] editor of the Sacramento Bee for many years, said in the 1990s, Listen, we now have a hereditary aristocracy of property in California.

The story of Proposition 13 in California matters for at least a couple of reasons. One of those reasons is that it’s a real cautionary tale that you can really lose something very valuable if you allow your anger at taxes to take over and you don’t think carefully about what to do with that anger. As I understand it, it’s a story of the simplest, worst solution to a real crisis.

Where did [Prop 13] come from?

First off, property taxes have always been a mess in America. Property taxation is the oldest tax we have in the United States. It predates the republic. And until the middle decades of the 20th century, the property tax was still being administered as if we were in the horse-and-buggy era. 

The people who were in charge of figuring out how much your house or your business was worth for the purpose of taxing it were political animals, and they didn’t tend to have much expertise in actually appraising property. Instead, what they would do is just kind of write down from year to year, Oh, we wrote down this number for your home last year. Let’s write it down again this year.

They were giving away these kinds of informal tax breaks to people in a way that was often also very political. They might trade a low assessment for bribes. They very commonly traded low assessments for votes. And in the 1960s, led by California, many states then began to reform how they administered the property tax. They brought in computers, they professionalized assessment, and suddenly for the first time, many, many property owners, especially homeowners in the United States, started to get taxed on the actual values of their homes for the first time. And it turned out they didn’t like that.

It was a cause of an incredible freak-out — people petitioning to abolish the property tax. One of the most colorful figures in the movement was a real crank named Howard Jarvis, who was a Los Angeles entrepreneur, a kind of serial entrepreneur, who first in the late 1960s campaigned to abolish the property tax and got nowhere with it, but did get enough traction that he decided it was worth continuing to try. 

He teamed up with a used car salesman named Paul Gann, and took inspiration actually from the Los Angeles property assessor, who was also arguing for property tax reforms, a guy named Phil Watson, and wrote a limitation — a state constitutional amendment to limit taxes — that became Proposition 13. They collected more signatures than any ballot initiative in the history of California. And in June 1978, a majority of the voters went for it.

Why did a majority of voters go for it? Was it hard to convince people?

Jarvis wrote later in his memoir that the best argument was simply to go up to people and say, Sign this, it will lower your property taxes.

All right, so the upshot is what exactly? What happens after voters say, Yeah, this is what we want.

Quality of services in many cases declined. It’s clear, for example, that there was a shift in fire protection away from professional fire departments and toward volunteer fire departments in some parts of the state. 

It hurt the schools. School finance has continued to, of course, increase in California as it has elsewhere in the US, but California used to be at the top in terms of quality of education in primary and secondary education and in terms of school spending. And now it’s definitely not.

It has hurt the quality of infrastructure — potholes in the roads, response times of first responders. It has shifted the state tax structure onto income taxes, which means that the tax system in California is really swingy — in a boom, a lot of money might flow into the state’s coffers, and in a recession, the state budget really suffers. During the financial crisis, this meant that local governments that could no longer rely on a lot of property tax revenue were especially vulnerable to bankruptcy.

It has also created all kinds of unfairness — new unfairness, rather unlike the old system. Now you might actually pay a lot more tax than somebody else in your neighborhood who has an identical home worth the same amount of money, just because they bought their home earlier than you did. And they might agree that that’s unfair, but they might not vote to change it because it’s an unfairness that allows them to stay in their home.

You’re aware that Americans are growing irritable about paying taxes, and I wonder whether you think it’s fair to look at California and see a warning about where the rest of the country might be headed?

I do. I mean, I think the history of California really teaches us that you can want your government for free, but you can’t get it for free. The lesson here is that we really value, and should value, a lot of the public services and public goods that our governments provide. That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t operate efficiently, but it does mean that when you think about how much you’re willing to pay for them, you also have to pay attention to what you’re willing to give up.

When it comes to exercise, so many people — beginners; die-hard enthusiasts; reluctant participants; and everyone in between — are searching for holy grails: workouts that involve the least amount of time and effort and offer maximum results. 

We live in the most scientifically advanced age of fitness. Exercise is a multibillion-dollar industry, and a lot of that money is spent on new research and development of new technology. If there were an easier way to get the benefits of a squat or a pull up without having to actually do a squat or a pull-up, you’d think we would’ve found it already. 

Despite the absence of a magic pill or a one-minute, low-impact total body workout that will burn fat, build muscle, and prevent all serious health problems, the industry is full of savvily marketed plans and potions, promising the world for just a little bit of time and work.

The latest trendy regimen to fall into this category is the cardio workout known as 12-3-30. Devotees say that 12-3-30 lives in that ideal intersection of minimal effort and maximum results. 

Could this be true? Have we unlocked exercise’s biggest secret? Or is this yet another lie perpetrated by Big Treadmill?

The coaches and personal trainers I spoke to said 12-3-30 is a net positive. People moving their bodies is generally better than people not moving their bodies, and anything that gets folks exercising is a good thing. But they also believe that 12-3-30 offers a look into how people have traditionally thought about exercise as being complicated, and how much simpler it can be.     

What is 12-3-30?

No one alive today can truthfully claim they invented walking uphill. But fitness influencer Lauren Giraldo is largely credited with rebranding this physical act as 12-3-30. Giraldo posted a YouTube video about 12-3-30 in 2019; in 2020, she claimed that walking on the treadmill at a 12 percent incline at the speed of 3 mph for 30 minutes helped her lose 30 pounds and keep the weight off. In an interview with Good Morning America, Giraldo said she began using the 12-3-30 formula because it was a way to work out that wasn’t intimidating.     

The nice thing about 12-3-30 is that it’s simple. There are a finite number of settings on a treadmill, and the most difficult thing about this routine is remembering which number goes where. The incline is set at 12. The speed input is where the three goes. And 30 is the number of minutes needed to complete this ritual. 

“12-3-30 works for what it was designed to do: a low-impact cardio workout that’s easy to repeat,” Charlee Atkins, a certified personal trainer and the founder of the guided exercise app Le Sweat, told Vox. “I’d categorize 12-3-30 as LISS, or low intensity steady state cardio.”

Atkins explained that 12-3-30 and other LISS routines are effective because they allow you to get your heart rate up with relatively lower effort and less wear and tear on your body than something like running. This makes 12-3-30 particularly attractive to beginners, folks coming back after an injury or extended break, and anyone who wants to do the recommended amount of cardio for better health but doesn’t want to make it their full-time job. 

James McMillian, a certified personal trainer and president of Tone House, a strength and conditioning facility in New York City, agreed with Atkins that 12-3-30 is good for a lot of people. Because it doesn’t require a particularly high skill level and is relatively easier on joints, its barrier to entry is lower. People turned off by more challenging forms of cardio, like running or group cycling classes, may find 12-3-30 more doable, which could lead to more consistency. 

“You’re walking at an incline, so your heart rate stays up, you’re burning calories, and you’re getting some lower body endurance work in without beating yourself up,” McMillian said. “The more you remove friction, the more people stay consistent.” 

I tried 12-3-30 at the gym this week and was surprised: I didn’t expect walking at this seemingly measly pace to be difficult enough to work up a sweat. Yes, 12-3-30 is super simple (almost annoyingly so), but it’s not really something you can coast through either. The pace is just a smidge above a brisk walking speed, the kind you would use to pass someone lollygagging in front of you on a sidewalk. The incline feels like a steep-ish hill. And while it certainly isn’t as challenging as the spinning or HIIT classes that I’ve taken, I did work up a sweat. (I generally don’t trust treadmill calorie counts but, for what it’s worth, the machine told me I had burned 390 calories.)     

The experts I spoke to told me that to really get the most of the workout, you shouldn’t hold on to the treadmill’s hand rails. If you take that advice, it makes for a cardio experience that’s uncomfortable enough that you actually have to pay attention (I couldn’t text or scroll on my phone while doing it) but wasn’t impossible to finish either. 

While experts I spoke to said that 12-3-30 isn’t a magic bullet and strength training might be more beneficial if your goal is getting stronger or enhancing athletic performance, there’s also a saying in the industry that the best workout is the one that you actually do. 12-3-30 is plan that a lot of people can perform consistently. By that standard, it’s a good one. 

How much of 12-3-30 is just great marketing? 

While effectiveness and consistency are crucial components, perhaps the biggest factor when it comes to 12-3-30’s popularity is that it’s easy to sell. 

“12-3-30, it’s like the $5 footlong,” Bobby McMullen, a personal trainer and founder of the fitness app Adonis, told Vox. McMullen’s app matches clients with personal trainers based on goals, budget, and location, and he spends a lot of time thinking about how to meet gym goers where they’re at. 

McMullen pointed out that workouts like P90X and Hard 75 become immensely popular in part because of how they’re packaged. It turns out that some people enjoy when their workouts, like their sandwiches, feature a numerical identifier. Branding matters, in part because partaking in the hot, number-named workout that everyone else is posting about can be a form of motivation. 

“It sticks with you, so you know exactly what to do,” McMullen said. “You press a few buttons, you don’t change it for 30 minutes. It’s just a very catchy viral workout.”

McMullen and the other experts I spoke with noted that the gimmick of 12-3-30 also works because of the simple fact that many people go to the gym and either don’t know what to do or want/need to be told exactly how to use their time. Working out is an escape for a lot of folks, and who wants to think when they’re actively trying not to think?

Unlike the allure of bootcamps and other workouts that are proud of pulverizing you, 12-3-30’s charm is that it’s supposed to be easy enough — something that a wide swath of people can, in theory, accomplish. Its approachability is its strength, and a big part of why it’s so popular. McMullen said that one could even customize the program, and tinker with the speed to make it as easy or as difficult as needed. (But, he said, “going steeper is crazy.”) 

“Moving your body at all is a win, and I will not, nor should any trainer, pooh-pooh any sort of overly marketed three-number system that gets you to move your body,” McMullen said, adding that the most important thing about 12-3-30 is that it’s showing people that working out doesn’t have to be as complicated as it seems. 

“Whatever you can fit in is better than nothing,” he said. “If it’s all you have time for, run up that hill like Kate Bush, baby.”

Or, you know, walk.

In 1964, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke predicted that computers would overtake human evolution.“Present-day electronic brains are complete morons, but this will not be true in another generation,” he told the BBC. “They will start to think, and eventually, they will completely out-think their makers.” 

Daniel Roher opens his new documentary The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (2026) with this cheerful prophecy. And in the hundred-some minutes that follow, he tries to make sense of a technology that, by his own admission, he does not understand — and a world that is rapidly being changed by it. Explaining that he conceives of AI as a “magic box floating in space,” he enlists the help of experts to provide him with a crash course in what, exactly, AI is. 

Roher’s real concern, however, isn’t so much about the workings of AI — though some of his subjects do attempt to explain them for him — but whether it might displace us, as Clarke’s prediction suggests it will. 

While making the film, Roher learns that his wife Caroline is pregnant with their first child. He tracks his wife’s pregnancy and the birth of his son in parallel with the advent of AI. It’s a smart choice that builds on a fear all parents share: What sort of world are we making for our children? And behind that question is another, vibrating in anxious silence: What happens after our offspring replace us? This twinned existential angst drives his efforts to hear from the doomers, the techno-optimists, and the in-between “apocaloptimists” whose ranks he ultimately joins. 

The AI Doc, as its sweeping title suggests, wants to shape and lead the narrative around AI. It’s certainly set up to do that — Roher is fresh off an Oscar win for his documentary Navalny, and the film opened in nearly 800 theaters, which counts as wide-release for a nonfiction title. The final product is indicative of the ways that public attitudes around AI are in massive flux. Roher hopes to reach people of my grandmother’s generation who conflate AI with smartphones and spellcheck, as well as people who don’t seem to care whether a video was AI-generated. 

But I think that this documentary has come too late to steer the conversation, something the film itself acknowledges. For all its transformative potential, AI isn’t actually unique among emerging technologies yet — it has not been cataclysmic or ushered in a golden age of prosperity  — but Roher and many of those he interviews tend to treat it as a radical break with all that has come before. As a result, they tend to fixate on the binary extremes of doom or salvation. It’s an approach that reinforces our own helplessness in the face of AI-driven change, while also muddying our understanding of what we might yet be able to do as we seek to adapt, mitigate harm, and shape the world that AI could otherwise truly start remaking.

For good and for ill

Roher, contemplating his child’s future, opts to hear the bad news first. Tristan Harris, the cofounder of the Center for Humane Technology, doesn’t mince words: “I know people who work on AI risk who don’t expect their children to make it to high school.”

Many of the film’s other interviewees are similarly gloomy. Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI,” for example, argues that as AI becomes smarter, it will become better at manipulating humanity. But no one is more pessimistic than Eliezer Yudkowsky, the well-known AI doomer and co-author of the controversial book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. As the title suggests, Yudkowsky believes that superintelligent AI would wipe out humanity — a position that he stands by and lays out for Roher. 

Turning his back on these storm clouds — and taking the advice of his wife, Caroline, who tells him that he needs to find hope for the future — Roher tunes into the chorus of AI optimists. They tell him, variously, that there are more potential benefits than downsides to AI; that technology has made the world better in every way; that this will be the tool that helps us solve all our greatest problems. Not to mention: AI will bring the best health care on the planet to the poorest people on Earth, extend our healthspan by decades, and enable us to live in a postscarcity utopia free of drudgery. Oh, and: We will become an interplanetary species, all thanks to AI. 

These promises initially reassure Roher, perhaps because he seems easily led by whomever he’s spoken to most recently. It is Harris who ultimately convinces him that we can’t separate the promise of AI from the peril it presents. The conclusions that result will be obvious to anyone who’s thought about these issues for more than a moment or two: If AI automates work, for example, how will people make a living? 

It doesn’t help that many of the most invested players reflect on these questions superficially, if at all. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tells Roher that he’s worried about how authoritarian governments will use AI — a claim that is followed in the film by a cut to images of Altman posing with authoritarian leaders. Other tech CEOs fall back on PR pleasantries in response to the filmmaker’s questions, and Roher too often goes easy on them, never diving deeper when they admit that even they aren’t confident that everything will go well. That these are the leaders of AI companies racing against each other to make the technology more and more advanced does little to inspire confidence.

(Some of the techno-pessimistic people interviewed for the documentary have expressed their strong displeasure with the final result.)

“Why can’t we just stop?” Roher asks these tech CEOs. He’s told that a moratorium is a pipe dream: Many groups around the world are building advanced AI, all with different motivations. Legislation lags far behind the rate of technological progress. Even if we could pass laws in the US and EU that would stop or slow things down, says Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, we’d have to convince the Chinese government to follow suit. 

If we don’t create it, the thinking goes, our enemies will. It’s best to get ahead of them.

This is, of course, the logic of nuclear deterrence: If we don’t mitigate the risk of ending the world through mutually assured destruction, there’s nothing stopping someone else from pressing the button first. 

An apocalypse in every generation

The atomic comparison is apt, if only because Roher sees the stakes in similarly stark terms. “Will my son live in a utopia, or will we go extinct in 10 years?” he wonders aloud. It’s a question that’s central to the film. But he never really sits with the more likely scenario that AI will neither lead to human extinction nor end all disease and drudgery. Every generation faces the specter of its own annihilation — and yet the ends of days keep accumulating, no matter how close the doomsday clock gets to apocalypse.

The point, then, isn’t that AI won’t be bad for us, but that by framing the question in strictly utopian or dystopian terms, we miss the messy reality that lies between hell on earth and heaven in the stars. Although The AI Doc tries to chart an “apocaloptimist” course between two extremes, it doesn’t grasp the real stakes. AI doesn’t really create new risks as such — it’s a force multiplier for existing ones like the threat of nuclear warfare and the development and use of biological weapons. The chief existential risks of AI are human-made and human-driven. And that means, as Caroline says in the film’s ending narration, “We get to decide how this goes.” She’s right, but her husband never seems to understand how she’s right. 

Like too many Big Issue Documentaries, Roher’s film is heavy on problems and light on solutions. It does offer some, calling for international cooperation, transparency, legal liabilities for companies if something goes wrong, testing before release, and adaptive rules to match the speed of progress. But just as this is a strictly introductory course in AI — one that will probably irritate those who’ve already moved on to AI 102 — these recommendations are only a starting point. For Roher, they offer reason to be hopeful. For the rest of us, they’re just the beginning of an opportunity to meaningfully steer the course of our future.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

There’s a technology sitting idle in garages and driveways across America that provides a solution to its own potential problem. As more and more electric vehicles tap into the grid, their giant batteries add to the system’s load. Timing is also a challenge: When people get home from work and plug their cars in, so too is everyone elsewhere switching on their own appliances, like washing machines and ovens and such. 

But instead of being burdens to the electrical system, a clever trick is putting EVs on a trajectory to help save it. More models feature the ability to send their energy back to the grid in times of high demand — a trick known as vehicle-to-grid, or V2G — forming a vast network of backup power across a city. As demand wanes through the night, they charge up, ensuring an EV owner has enough juice to get to work in the morning.

However, a new study warns that for V2G to fully compensate for all those batteries plugging in, the technology needs an assist, in the form of infrastructural improvements like new transformers and transmission lines. That will create a more resilient system and encourage the growth of renewable energy. “You have to upgrade your power system as soon as possible,” said Ziyou Song, an energy systems engineer at the University of Michigan and co-author of a new paper describing the findings. “V2G is really helpful, for sure — 100 percent. But just to some extent, V2G itself cannot resolve the charging demand of so many electric vehicles in the future.”

For this study, the researchers modeled scenarios for the San Francisco Bay Area, projecting how quickly EVs and solar power will be adopted — that is, how much demand will be put on the grid as renewable energy increases. Drilling deeper, they also projected where and when EVs might charge. (As with any modeling, there are some uncertainties here: EV adoption might happen slower or faster than expected, for example. The loss of federal tax credits for buying the vehicles might be reducing demand, but on the other hand, the gasoline price shock from the Iran war might drive more folks to go electric.) They also considered what it would cost to upgrade the grid over the same period. 

All told, the modeling found that the cheapest option is to proactively upgrade the grid in anticipation of these changes, instead of doing so in phases over time in reaction to them. Then, as more EVs plug in, the vehicles will be able to draw enough power without the system straining. And with V2G, they’ll form a fleet of batteries that grid operators can tap to meet demand. In other words: EVs can help stabilize the grid, so long as they’re equipped with the technology to provide power in addition to taking it. “V2G plus the proactive power system upgrade will address the entire issue,” Song said. 

This, in turn, can help smooth the “intermittency” challenge of renewables. Any grid must constantly balance the amount of electricity it’s generating with what its customers need at any given moment. With fossil fuels, utilities can just burn more gas or coal as demand rises. But renewable energy works differently, because the sun isn’t always shining and the wind isn’t always blowing. That’s why utilities are investing in batteries that store that power for later use: at one point late last month, they met 43 percent of demand in California, or six times the output of Hoover Dam. 

The promise of V2G isn’t that it will replace battery farms, but instead to essentially break them up into smaller ones spread across town. If the sun goes down at 5 pm when everyone is getting home and demand is rising, a utility can call on its battery facilities, but also on EVs, to send electricity into the system. (Anyone participating in the program would be paid for that juice.) Alternatively, those vehicles can electrify individual homes, divorcing those abodes from the grid, further reducing overall demand. All of this is good for EV owners, too, as they’re not drawing electricity when it’s most expensive. It wouldn’t just be passenger vehicles, either: Pilot projects are turning electric school buses — and their jumbo batteries — into reliable assets for the grid.

In these early days of V2G, utilities are still working out how to incentivize EV owners to participate, and how much to compensate them for sending power to the grid. The idea is to reach a sort of critical mass, where there’s enough people involved that it won’t matter if some folks choose to opt out. “When you’re operating 3,000, 30,000, 300,000, then any individual customers having different behavior won’t matter,” said Chris Rauscher, vice president and head of grid services at the battery storage and solar company Sunrun, which has been running V2G pilot projects.

The idea is to turn a vehicle from a depreciating asset into a source of income for the owner. One wrinkle, though, is that V2G could reduce the lifetime of a battery, due to the extra cycles of charging and discharging. Still, utilities are already repurposing old EV batteries — which need to be replaced when they drop to 70 to 80 percent of their original capacity — as stationary assets on the grid. “That’s a good way to keep getting value out of them,” said Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez, director of the Renewable Energy and Advanced Mathematics Laboratory at the University of California San Diego, who studies the grid but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “The program could even swap the battery for the EV owner. So, say, if you sign up for this pilot where you provide V2G services, after three years, we replace your battery with a new one.”

This tech can be paired with another powerful technique for supporting the grid, known as active managed charging. This opt-in program uses algorithms to stagger when EVs charge at night, instead of them all drawing power at 5 pm. When participants get home, they plug in, but the electrons might not flow until midnight, when most folks are asleep and not using much energy. The system also recognizes when an EV owner leaves for work in the morning, and how much battery they need, so charging switches on with enough time to spare. 

Still, even combined, active managed charging and V2G alone can’t fix the grid of tomorrow. “We have to upgrade our power system as soon as possible,” Song said, “because V2G is not a silver bullet.”