David Letterman Goes to India | Years of Living Dangerously

[Music] I wonder how many people you can get in one of these. It's like you're outside of a sporting event or something is about to take place, because you have people arriving and coming and going. I've never seen anything like this. I've seen guys at Grand Central Station taking a bath, and that's fine; I got no problem with that.

We're here in the Delhi Metro. We've got trains flying past us during our interview. Welcome to India! There you go. We're spending the whole day with an energy expert, Dr. Araba Go, and we are using the city itself to illustrate an interview. This is an interview we could have done in an office, sat down, talked for an hour, and gotten it done. Instead, we're running all around the city and really trying to bring everything that we're talking about to life.

So this is going to be about 500 lights, right? You know, cooling systems, fans, all around the station. It seems to be a very difficult sell in my country. We started off showing him a solar system at a subway station, and then we took a ride all the way through town. We talked about India's energy challenges. We know we are going to be the largest country in the world in terms of population and the second or third largest economy in the world. So we’ve got to have an energy system that provides for the people and for the economy.

We got here in the old part of town, and they looked around. He was a little taken aback by the electricity wires all tangled up. "Honest to God, what is that?" Those are electricity wires. This infrastructure has not been upgraded for a very, very long time. "Isn't that like, Dave, are you done with the wiring? Well, should we have a guy come out and look at it?" "No, it'll be all right, right?" I think Dave is in shock.

I asked him, "Are you overwhelmed?" and he said, "Yes, in a good way." You know, everybody says New York has an energy, not like this. What I notice here, whatever the electrification situation is, it has not impeded this hyperactive level of commerce. Here is a country, the world's biggest democracy, going to be the world's largest population, making this democratic choice that we're going to have a cleaner energy system. That's the best message Dave can take [Music] back.