Kind: captions
Language: en
Democrats still think the currency of
politics is money and the currency of
politics is attention. And that's a huge
difference between the two sides right
now. I think the steelman is very easy
to make here. Department of government
efficiency. That sounds like an
organization that's needed if government
is inefficient. And one of the themes of
our book is just how inefficient
government can be. Not only at building
houses, building energy, often at
achieving its own ends. building
highspeed rail when it wants to build
high-spe speed rail, adding affordable
housing units when it wants to afford
add affordable housing units. You know,
I love Ezra's line that we don't just
need to think about, you know,
deregulating the market. We need to
think about deregulating government
itself, getting the rules out of the way
that keep government from achieving the
democratic outcomes that it's trying to
achieve. This is a world in which a
department of government efficiency is a
godsend. We should be absolutely
obsessed with making government work
well, especially if we're going to be
the kind of liberals who believe that
government is important in the first
place. In my lifetime, the Democratic
Party has never been
as internally fragmented and weak,
leaderless, ruerless as it is right now.
Now, it won't stay that way. You cannot
change American politics. You can't
change Democratic party if you're not
willing to upset people. Donald Trump
reformed the Republican party by willing
people to fight Republicans. He ran
against George W. Bush, against Jeb
Bush, against Mitt Romney, against the
trade deals, against a bunch of things
that were understood to be sacred cow.
Somehow this guy ran like right after
Mitt Romney and John McCain while
attacking Mitt Romney and John McCain,
right? If you are not like the
Democratic party does need to change. It
needs to attain a different form because
the Obama coalition is exhausted. It's
done. It's not going to be able to do
that if it doesn't have standard bears
who are willing to say we were wrong
about some things. We have to change our
views on some things. We have to act
differently and speak differently. When
Elon takes over Tesla, when Elon is at
SpaceX, when Elon's at X, I would
imagine, and you know this better than
me because you know him. And maybe most
importantly for the purposes of this
part of the conversation, you know the
people who work for him. I'll bet if you
ask the people who work under Elon at X,
Tesla, SpaceX, they say, "I know exactly
what Elon wants. This is his goal for
the Super Heavy rocket. This is his goal
in terms of humanoid robots. This is his
goal in terms of profitability of
Twitter and the growth of our
subscription business and how we're
going to integrate new features."
There's a probably a really clear mind
meld right now. I have no sense that
there's a mind meld. And in fact, I have
the exact opposite sense that rather
than an example of creative destruction,
which would be a mitzvah of
entrepreneurship, we have an act of
destruction destruction. We have
destruction for the sake of destruction.
It's much cleaner to me from an
interpretive standpoint to describe Doge
as an ideological purge of
progressivism performing an act of or
performing the job of efficiency rather
than a department of actual efficiency
itself. The following is a conversation
with Ezra Klene and Derek Thompson. Ezra
is one of the most influential voices
representing the left wing of American
politics. He is a columnist for the New
York Times, author of Why We're
Polarized, and host of the Ezra Klein
show. Derek is a writer at The Atlantic,
author of Hitmakers and On Work, and
host of the Plain English podcast.
Together, they've written a new book
simply titled Abundance that lays out a
kind of manifesto for the left. It is
already a controversial, widely debated
book, but I think it puts forward a
powerful vision for what the Democratic
Party could stand for in the coming
election. If I may, let me comment on
the fact that sometimes on this podcast,
I delve into the dark realm of politics.
Indeed, politics often divides us. and
frankly brings out the worst in some
very smart people. Plus, to me, it is
frustrating how much of the political
discourse is drama and how little of it
is rigorous, empathetic discussion of
policy. I hate this, but I guess I
understand why. If the other side is
called either Hitler or Stalin online by
swarms of chanting mobs, it's hard to
carry out a nuanced discussion about
immigration, healthcare, housing,
education, foreign policy, and so on. On
top of that, anytime I talk about
politics, half the audience is pissed
off at me. And no, there is no audience
capture. I get shit on equally by
different groups across the political
spectrum, depending on the guest. Why? I
don't know. But I'm slowly coming to
accept that this is the way of the
world. I try to maintain my cool, return
hate with compassion, and learn from the
criticism and the general madness of it
all. Still, I think it's valuable to
sometimes talk about politics. It's an
important part to the big picture of
human civilization, but indeed, it is
only still a small part.
My happy place is talking to scientists,
engineers, programmers, video game
designers, historians, philosophers,
musicians, athletes, filmmakers, and so
on. So, I apologize for the occasional
detour into politics, especially over
the past few months. I did a few
conversations with world leaders and I
have a few more coming up. So there will
be a few more political podcasts coming
out in part so I can be better prepared
to deeply understand the mind, the life,
and the perspective of each world
leader. I hope you come along with me on
this journey into the darkness of
politics as I try to shine a light in
the complex human mess of it all, hoping
to understand us humans better, always
backed, of course, by deep, rigorous
research and by empathy.
Long term, I hope for political
discussions to be only a small
percentage of this podcast. If it's not
your thing, please just skip these
episodes or maybe come along anyway
since both you and I are reluctant
travelers on this road trip. But who
knows what we'll learn together about
the world and about
ourselves. This is the Lex Ruben
podcast. To support it, please check out
our sponsors in the description. And
now, dear friends, here's Ezra Klene and
Derek
Thompson. You are both firmly on the
left of the US political spectrum. Ezra,
I've been a fan of yours for a long
time. Uh, you're often referred to, at
least I think of you as one of the most
intellectually rigorous voices on the
left. Can you try to define Can you
define the ideals and the vision of the
American left? Oh, good. We're starting
small here. And maybe contrast them with
the American right. Sure. Um, so the
thing I should say here is that you can
define the left in different ways. I
think the left has a couple fundamental
views. One is that life is
unfair. We are born with different
talents. We are born into different
nations, right? The the luck of being
born into America is very different than
the luck of being born into Venezuela.
Um, we are born into different families.
We have luck operating as an ominant
presence across our entire lives. And as
such, the people for whom it works out
well, we don't deserve all of that. We
got lucky. I mean, we also worked hard
and we also had talent and we also
applied that talent. But at a very
fundamental level that we are sitting
here is unfair and that so many other
people are in conditions that are much
worse, much more precarious, much more
exploited is unfair. And one of the
fundamental roles of government should
not necessarily be to turn that
unfairness into perfect equality, but to
rectify that unfairness into a kind of
universal dignity, right? So people can
have lives of flourishing. So I'd say
that's one thing. The left is
fundamentally more skeptical of
capitalism and particularly unchecked
forms of capitalism than the right. I
always think this is hard to talk about
because what we call unchecked
capitalism is nevertheless very much
supported by government. So I think in
in a way you have both like markets are
things that are enforced by government.
Whether they are you know how you set
the rules of them is what ends up
differing between the left and the
right. But the left is tends to be more
worried about the fact that you could
get rich uh building coal fired power
plants, belching pollution into the air,
and you could get rich laying down solar
panels, and the market doesn't know the
difference between the two. And so
there's a set of goals about regulating
the the unchecked uh potential of
capitalism that also uh relates to sort
of exploitation of workers. Um there's
like very fundamental questions about
how much people get paid, how much power
they have. Again, the rectification of
economic and other forms of power is
very fundamental to to the left. When
you think about what the minimum wage
is, I am a successful podcast host. When
I go into a negotiation with the New
York Times, I have a certain amount of
market power in that negotiation because
other firms want to hire me. When you
are a minimum wage worker, um the reason
we have a minimum wage is in part to
rectify a power problem. A lot of
workers do not have market power. They
do not have a bunch of job
opportunities. They are not working with
firms. Um and by the way, without
certain kinds of regulation, those firms
would cartilize and make it so they can
hold down wages anyway. So trying to
rectify power imbalances is I think
another thing folks on the left take
more seriously. That would be a start of
things that I think broadly unite the
maybe let's call it the intuitions. Um,
I want to say that's a podcast answer,
not a book. I'm sure I left a million a
million things out here, but but I'll
start there. I mean, there's a lot of
fascinating things there on on the
unfairness of life. That could be the
interperson unfairness. So, one person
getting more money than another person,
more skills or more natural abilities
than another person. And then there's
the just the general unfairness of the
environment, the luck of the draw, the
things that happen. all of a sudden you
cross a street and the car runs a red
light and runs you over and you're in
the hospital. So that unfairness of life
and in general I guess the left sees
there's some role or a lot of role for
government to help you when that
unfairness strikes and then maybe
there's also a general notion of u the
size of government. I think the left is
more comfortable with a larger
government as long as it's effective and
efficient at least in its that's
certainly true in the last 100 years. Uh
it was New Deal liberals who enlarged
the government in the 1930s. It was
Republicans who acquiesced to that
larger government in the 1950s and then
starting in the 1970s 1980s it's
typically been conservatives who've
tried to constrict governments.
Sometimes they failed um while liberals
have typically tried to expand certainly
taxing and spending. Well, one thing
that I was thinking as Ezra was talking
and I was just writing this down because
I thought Ezra's answer was really
lovely, but like at a really high level,
I thought maybe disagree with this. I
thought about distinguishing between
liberals and conservatives based on
three factors. What each side fears,
what each side values, and what each
side tolerates. I think liberals fear
injustice and conservatives often fear
cultural radicalism or the destruction
of society and as a result they value
different things. Liberals I think tend
to value change and at the level of
government that can mean change in terms
of creating new programs that don't
previously exist. It's typically been
liberals for example who've been trying
to expand health coverage while
conservatives have tried to cut it back.
Just in the last few years, it was Biden
who tried to add a bunch of programs,
whether it was infrastructure, the chips
and science act, the IRA, and then Trump
comes into office and is unwinding it.
And then I also think they tolerate
different things. I think liberals are
more likely to tolerate a little bit of
overreach, a little bit of radicalism in
terms of trying to push society into a
world where it hasn't been. Well, I
think conservatives are more likely to
tolerate injustice. they're more likely
to say there's a kind of natural
inequality in the nature of the world
and we're not going to try to
overcorrect for it with our policies.
And so I think that even at a layer
above what Ezra was articulating with
the um the policy differences between
liberals and conservatives, there's
almost like an an archetypal difference
between what they fear and value and
tolerate. um liberals fearing injustice,
seeking change, tolerating sometimes a
bit of what people might think of as as
overreach, while conservatives fear that
overreach, value tradition, and often
tolerate injustice. The the only thing I
I I would say is that I do think this
sort of the left likes big government,
the right likes small government
oversimplifies. The the left is pretty
comfortable with an expansive government
that is trying to correct for some of
the the imbalances of power and
injustices and imbalances of luck I
talked about earlier. The right is very
comfortable with a very powerful police
and surveillance and national security
state. Uh I always think about the uh
sort of George W. Bush era although
right now with ICE agents hassling all
kinds of green card holders you can use
you can think about this moment too. But
the rights view that on the one hand the
government is incompetent and on the
other hand we could send our army across
oceans invade Afghanistan and Iraq and
then rebuild these societies we don't
understand into fully functioning
liberal democracies that will be our
allies was an extraordinary level of
trust in a very big government. I mean,
that was expensive. That took manpower.
That was compared to we're going to set
up, you know, the Affordable Care Act in
America. That took a lot more faith in
the US government being able to do
something that was extraordinarily
difficult. But the left has more
confidence in the government of the
check. And the right has more confidence
in the government of the gun. You're
right. There's some degree to which what
the right when the right speaks about
the size of government, it's a little
bit rhetoric and not actual policy
because they seem to always grow the
size of government anyway. They just
kind of say small government, but they
don't. It's, you know, in the
surveillance state, in the in the
foreign policy, in terms of military
involvement abroad, and really in every
every program, they're not very good at
cutting either. They just kind of like
to say it. Cutting is really hard. If
you government spends trillions of
dollars and if you cut billions of
dollars, someone is going to feel that
pain and they're going to scream. And so
you look at defense spending under
Reagan, you look at overall spending
under Reagan. Reagan might be one of the
most archetypally conservative
presidents of the last 40, 50 years. He
utterly failed in his attempt to shrink
government. Government grew under
Reagan. Defense grew. All sorts of
programs grew. So I think that one thing
we're sort of scrambling around in our
answers is that at a really high level
there are differences between liberalism
and conservatism in American history.
But often at the level of implementation
it can be a little bit messy. Even
Bush's foreign policy that Ezra was
describing sort of from a big sense of
American history is very like Wilsonian,
right? This sense of like it's America's
duty to go out and change the world or
to use a current example McKinley or or
McKinley, right? And a lot of people
compare um Donald Trump's foreign policy
to Andrew Jackson. This sense of we need
to pull back from the world, America
first, we need to care about what's
inside of our borders and care much less
about what's outside of our borders.
Sometimes the differences between
Republican and Democrat administrations
don't fall cleanly into the lines of
liberal versus conservative. Um because
those definitions can be mushy. All
right. So to descend down from the
platonic ideals of the left and the
right, who is actually running the show
on the right and the left, who are the
dominant forces? Maybe you could
describe and you mentioned democratic
socialists, the progressives, maybe
liberals, maybe more sort of mainstream
uh left and the same on the right with
Trump and Trumpism. So on the right,
it's pretty straightforward at the
moment. The right is composed
differently than it was 10 years ago.
But the right is run by Donald Trump and
the people who have been given the nod
of power by Donald Trump. So that is
right now Elon Musk. But Elon Musk's
power is coming from Donald Trump. That
is, you know, maybe in some degrees JD
Vance, maybe in some degrees Russ V,
maybe sometimes um, you know, Homeman's
over at uh, DHS.
the right beneath that the Republicans
in Congress are extraordinarily
disempowered compared to in other
administrations. They are sort of being
told what to do and they are doing what
they are told. Republicans in Congress,
Senate Republicans, they didn't want
Pete Haggsf. They didn't want Cash
Patel. They didn't want Tulsi Gabbard.
They didn't want RFK Jr. Nobody got
elected to be a Republican in the Senate
hoping that they would confirm Robert F.
Kennedy Jr., a member of the Kennedys, a
Democrat who is pro-choice and running
as a Democrat two years ago for HHS. But
Donald Trump told him to do it and and
they did. So the the right has developed
a very very top- down structure. And one
of Trump's talents, one of the things
that makes him a disruptive force in
politics is his ability to upend the
sort of coalitional structure, the
interest group structure that used to uh
prevail. Um you know, the Koch brothers
were the big enemy of the left, you
know, 1015 years ago. The view is that
in many ways they set the agenda of the
right. The Koch brother network is much
less powerful under Donald Trump because
he just disagrees with them and has
disempowered them. Not to say none of
their people or none of their groups are
meaningful at all. They are, but you
wouldn't put them at the forefront in
the way that you might have at another
time. Right this second, uh we're using
the left, but Democrats are in
fundamental disarray. There is no
leader. Democrats, Senate Democrats, uh,
decided to vote for the contining
resolution avoiding a shutdown, or a
critical mass of them
did. Uh, Hakee Jeff, the leader of the
House Democrats, and Chuck Schumer, the
leader of Senate Democrats, are in
bitter disagreement over whether or not
they should have done that. Democratic
leadership, isn't even united on the
single biggest point of leverage they
might have had. They disagree over
whether or not it was even a point of
leverage. Outside of them, the party is
no leader, which is fairly normal after
a pretty crushing defeat. Uh but there
isn't the next in line. Uh so you know
you go back right and it was pretty
clear that you know after Barack Obama
it was going to be Hillary Clinton.
After Hillary Clinton it was either
going to be uh Joe Biden or Bernie
Sanders. Bernie Sanders had come in
second in the primary. Joe Biden had
been the vice president. You often have
a presumptive next nominee who the party
can look to for a kind of leadership.
Even after 2000 Al Gore was still giving
big speeches. There was a question about
Al Gore running again. There is no
presumptive in the Democratic party
right now. You can't turn around and
say, "Oh, it's going to be Pete
Budachedge. It's going to be Josh
Shapiro. It's going to be Gretchen
Whitmer." Absent parties are given
force, modern parties, which are are
quite weak by historical standards.
Modern parties tend to be given force by
a centralizing personality. Donald Trump
being a very strong example of that on
the right, but Barack Obama was the the
person who held together the Democratic
party for a long time.
In my lifetime, the Democratic Party has
never been
as internally fragmented and weak,
leaderless, ruerless as it is right now.
Now, it won't stay that way. There's a
rhythm to these things. There'll be a
midterm. They're probably going to pick
up a bunch of seats in the midterm. Um,
if that means Hakee Jeff becomes speaker
after the midterm, he's going to have a
much louder voice because he's going to
have power. Uh, it's going to be a
harder road for Schumer to get back to
the majority because of the Senate map.
and then we'll start having a primary uh
on the left and you'll begin to see
voices emerge out of that. But right now
the you know the Democratic party it
doesn't have points of power. There's
simply outside of you know at the
national level there is no Democrat who
wields control over a branch of
government, right? They don't have the
Supreme Court, they don't have the
House, they don't have the Senate, they
don't have the presidency, and they
don't have a next in line. So you're
you're looking at a you're looking at an
organization without any of the people
in a position to structure it. And the
the head of the DNC, the new head Ken
Martin, doesn't have power in that way.
So it's uh they're pretty fractured. You
were you got a lot of criticism for
this, but you were one of the people
that early on said that Biden should
step down. Why is the Democratic Party
at this stage in its history so bad at
generating the truly inspiring person?
to me personally, you know,
AC is an example of a person that might
be that person. You should have her on
the show. What I would watch that
definitely. But, you know, I really try
to and we'll talk about this. I try to
do like 2 three hours and there's a
hesitancy uh on the left especially to
do these kinds of long programs. I think
it's a trust issue. I'm not exactly sure
what it is. 80% of the people on the
show are leftwing. I'm pretty good faith
and I try to bring out the best in
people. Have you invited her? Is that
what you're saying? Yeah. Yeah. We'll
see what happens when when people get
closer to 2028.
Sure. Maybe people begin taking taking
that you know Bernie's up there in age
so he can't, you know, he can't do it
anymore. Why is the Democratic party so
bad at generating I don't think it's so
bad at generating them. I think that it
was it turned out to be bad at
generating them this year. Look, like I
yeah, as you mentioned, you know, back
in February 2023, I was somebody who
came out and said like Biden can't run
again. This isn't going to work. And my
view, and that was really what that set
of pieces was about. Um was about the
argument that even though Biden was
clearly going to win the primary, that
there was still time for Democrats to do
something the parties had done in the
past and have an open convention. And
you could structure the leadup to an
open convention in a number of different
ways, right? You could have something
like a mini primary, but but basically
you'd have Democrats out in the media
out giving speeches and their ultimate
audience would be the delegates, the
delegates at the Democratic National
Convention. And and my hope was through
that you would find the person for this
moment. The thing for Kla Harris that
was really difficult was she was for
another moment. She was picked by Joe
Biden in 2020 amidst um just a very
different political equilibrium, a sense
that you had a a transitionary moment
between two versions of the Democratic
party. Maybe Joe Biden reaching a little
bit back to the past to these sort of
lunch pale, you know, bluecollar
Democrats. Joe from Scranton was a big a
big part of the Joe Biden appeal. But
also Biden never has a chance if he's
not Barack Obama's vice president. And
so you have this sort of weird set of
historical factors like operating at the
same time. There's a desire for
stability and experience amidst the
chaos of Donald Trump and the pandemic.
There is Biden as Obama's vice president
who nevertheless did not run in the
election after Obama. Um I think a lot
of people look back at 2016 and think,
you know what, if Biden had been the
candidate, he would have beaten Trump
and we would live in a different
reality. And then Biden chose Harris as
an effort to shore up his own uh at
least assumed weaknesses, right? He's a
white man in the Democratic party at a
time when the Democratic Party is
diversifying. And when the view of how
you win elections is you put to is you
put back together the Obama coalition.
And the Obama coalition is young people.
It's uh you know voters of color um and
it's enough working-class white voters
and then college educated white voters,
right? That's the Obama coalition. And
so Biden picks Harris, you know, for
different reasons. My view at that time
was I was sort of a Tammy Duckworth
person and thought I should have picked
Tammy Duckworth. Uh but but there are
different people out there and then the
kind of moment that Harris was running
in just sort of dissipates. Um first she
has a particular background from
California where she's a tough on crime.
Her book is called Smart on Crime
Prosecutor, but she runs in the
Democratic party at a time when it's
turned on that kind of politics. people
want a lot from her personally, but they
don't want a sort of prosectoratorial
uh character. So, she sort of abandons
that and never, I think, really finds
another political identity, certainly
before she begins running, you know, in
in 2024 that works. But she's a talented
debater. Um she's a very talented
performer on the stump, but she doesn't
really have a theory of politics and
policy that she's identified with. But
she's a way for Biden to signal that he
understands that him being, you know, in
2020 a 78-year-old white guy, he
understands the future is not him or at
least not just him. And he's sort of
trying to make a coalitional pick that
uh speaks to his own, you know,
potential weaknesses. I think by 2024,
you have two problems, right? Once he
only steps down, what is it June? Like
they are weeks from the DNC. They don't
have time anymore for an open
convention. You now have the B
administration is very unpopular for a
number of reasons, but particularly
inflation, cost of living. So now you
have Kla Harris running with a sort of
anvil of being associated. It's a Biden
Harris administration. Um she doesn't
really have a lane on cost of living.
It's not something she's known for
working on in the Senate. It's not
something she has a bunch of great ideas
about. Not something she's great at
talking about. It's probably not the
candidate you would pick for a cost of
living election. And she's had no time
to build that out, right? Maybe if she
had been running in a primary for, you
know, a year and a half, having to fend
off Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders
and Pete Budajedge and whomever else,
she either would have figured out how to
do it, right? Primaries are periods of
education and learning for the
candidates, too, or they would have
found somebody else who could do it. Um,
but she doesn't get any of that, right?
She's thrown into the game with 3 months
to go. So, you know, they picked the
candidate in 2020 who won. Whether you
think Biden's inspiring or not, he was
probably he was a reasonable pick for
that moment. He should have never run
for a second term. and he sort of
implied to a lot of people that he
wouldn't. And then the the handover to
Harris was a very difficult handover to
a candidate who didn't go through any
kind of selection process for the moment
in which he was running. We'll see what
they do in in 2028, but the the
consequences of of what they did in 2024
have been severe. There's two really big
questions on the table that I think
click together in an interesting way.
You asked one, why did Trump win? and
two, why do Democrats have this certain
communication style that might make them
less interested in coming onto an
unstructured three-hour conversation
with you? Let me try to tell a story
that connects them. I think Trump's
victory in 2024 was overdetermined.
There are a lot of factors here. Number
one, if you look internationally,
incumbents lost all over the world. They
lost in the US. They lost in Europe.
They lost in pretty much every developed
country at rates that we really haven't
seen in 50 years. And that's largely
because the inflation crisis that came
after CO created an absolute disaster
for incumbent establishment power.
People couldn't bring prices down.
Voters were furious and they were
destroying establishment orders all over
the world. Democrats happen to be in
power and as a result they got the brunt
of it. That's number one. Number two, if
you look at elections over the 21st
century, two things are true. One,
almost every election is unbelievably
close. For reasons that I'm not sure I
entirely understand, the parties have
gotten really good, historically,
bizarrely good at getting each group to
come to the polls with about 48% such
that every election is a battle over the
next 1.5%. And in a world like that,
little thermostatic swings are very
important. And what we've seen over the
last few years, and there's this theory
about thermostatic public opinion in
American politics that says that what
often happens in politics is one party
has a very compelling message of change.
They become the establishment and then
they become the victims of exactly the
weapon that they marshaled that then the
next outroup party says, "We have a
theory of change and we're going to
throw out the bums." And the next party
comes in and they overreach and then
they lose. in a worldview of
thermostatic change and every election
is very close, you tend to have
elections swinging back and forth. So,
um I think that also explains why
Democrats and Republicans have struggled
to hold on to power for 6 year, 8year,
12-year terms the same way they did say
in the 1930s or 1960s. But finally, you
have to look at what kind of character
Donald Trump is and what kind of a media
figure he is. We were just talking off
camera about how every age of
communications technology revolution
clicks into focus a new skill that is
suddenly in critical demand for the
electorate. Right? The world of radio
technology is a world in which Franklin
Delano Roosevelt can be powerful in a
way that he can't be in the 1890s. And
then you have the 1950s. Dwight
Eisenhower in 1956 I believe was the
first televised um national convention.
famously the 1960 presidential debates
between JFK and Richard Nixon. Take an
election that is leaning toward Nixon
and make an election that's leaning
toward JFK because he's so damn handsome
and also just electrically compelling on
a screen. We have a new screen
technology right now which is not just
television on steroids. It's a different
species entirely. And it seems to favor,
it seems to provide value for
individuals, influencers, and even
celebrities and politicians who are good
at something like livewire authenticity.
They're good at performing authenticity.
As paradoxical as that sounds, Trump is
an absolute marvel at performing
authenticity even when the audience
somehow acknowledges that he might be
bullshitting. He's just an amazing
performer for this age. And it speaks to
the fact that he seems to be, to borrow
Ezra's term, remarkably disinhibited in
front of every single audience. There
doesn't seem to be the sort of
background algorithm in his head
calculating exactly how to craft his
message to to different audiences. He
just seems to be like a livewire animal
in front of every audience. And I think
that compares very distinctly to the
democratic character of bureaucratic
caution in our age. And there is an a
really important distinction between
this vibe of the Trumpian ruler and the
vibe of the rule follower. And the vibe
of the bureaucratic rule follower is a
little bit afraid of unstructured
conversation is always performing the
background algorithm of how do I
communicate in a way that balances all
of the coalitions on my side because if
you look at the Democratic party right
now to compare to the Republican party I
mean in 2015 I think there were four
political parties in America. There was
MAGA, there was the center right, there
was the Bernie wing and there was the
Biden Clinton Obama wing. And what
happened is that Trump killed and
skinned the center right and is now
wearing it as a hat. The entire
Republican party is Donald Trump wearing
the skins of the old center right, the
Romney wing. And the Republic and the
Democratic party is still a fight. It's
exactly what Ezra described. It's a
jungle. And maybe there's something
about that jungle nature of the
Democratic Party that is making some of
its leaders perform the sort of
coalitional calculation when they're
communicating such that it makes them
less interested in appearing in settings
that might cost them that might not
benefit them in exactly the sort of
pre-calculated way they have to get
their message across. And so there's not
necessarily a whole lot of empirics to
that theory. I'm a little bit going on
vibes here and maybe Ezra sees some
flaws to theory. It's an age of the
vibe. It is the age of the vibe. Yeah,
exactly. I'm trying to perform the live
wire authenticity that I'm describing,
but but I I do think that might begin to
explain why you, Lex, might be picking
up on a difference between the political
vibes, an eagerness and a willingness on
the one hand to have kind of
unstructured and even chaotic
conversations and a care on the other
side about not letting conversations
become too unstructured or too careless.
Can I build on that? I know we're
supposed to talk about abundance, but I
I want to talk about this.
There's an abundance of time. An
abundance of time. We're on the Lex
Freedman show. So, uh, two or three
things. One is Democrats still think the
currency of politics is money, and the
currency of politics is attention. And
that's a huge difference between the two
sides right now. So, what did Kla Harris
come in and do? She came in and raised a
shit ton of money, right? Like a billion
dollars in, you know, record time.
Basically, she had more money than
Donald Trump did and used it to try to
buy attention. What it meant for
Democrats to be good at social media is
to have a good social media team. People
in your office somewhere in your
campaign headquarters who put out cool
things on social media, good memes and
and you know, good advertisements so on.
What it means on the right to be good at
social media is to be you personally
good at social media. You're Vivc
Ramaswami, you're JD Vance, you're
Donald Trump, you're Elon Musk. And what
you understand is you are the product.
What it means to be good at attention is
you are good at attention. Now Harris, I
think was actually better at some
dimensions of this. They were just
slightly older dimensions than people
always gave her credit for. Hell of a
performer on the stump. She was way
better on the stump than people realized
she would be. And a good debater. She'd
always been a good debater. She trashed
Donald Trump in that debate. But she
does not do social media herself at any
level, right? Because she's not going to
take risk. Democrats, most Democrats
still live in a world where the thing
that they are optimizing for in
attention is to not get negative
attention. And what the Trumpist wing of
the Republican party understands, and
this is truer for them than it probably
would be for Democrats, because for them
the media is the enemy, or at least the
mainstream media is, etc., but is
that attention, a volume of attention is
itself good, and you can only get a
critical mass of it if you're willing to
accept negative attention. Agenda
control doesn't come from positive
attention. It comes from conflict. You
get agenda control by doing things the
other side disagrees with. So, they
enter into functioning agreement with
you to keep the thing you're doing at
the front. Now, that doesn't make you
highly popular. Donald Trump is the most
unpopular modern president at this stage
of his presidency except for Donald
Trump's first term. It took, I think
Nate Silver said it was 221 days for Joe
Biden's net uh favorability to go
negative. It's taken something like 55
days for Donald Trump to do the same. So
what Donald Trump is doing does not
optimize for favorability. It does not
optimize, by the way, for big wins.
Democrats feel like they got trashed in
in in 2024. And in a way they did. But
Trump's popular vote victory was the
smallest popular vote victory since 2000
when uh Al Gore, you know, beat George
W. Bush by 17 dogs and three old men or
whatever it was. And so attention works
really differently. And while I don't I
think some of the like you know the
Rogan of the left discourse has been
frankly overstated because honestly the
the most parsimmonious model of 2024 and
2020 is in 2020 you have a 4848 nation
something like that or maybe you have
something that's more like a 49 Democrat
47 Republican nation and in 2020 because
of the pandemic uh Donald Trump suffered
a let's call it a 2.5 point incumbent
penalty. People were mad about the
pandemic. They're mad about things being
chaotic. So, he loses 2.5 points. That
gives, given the natural split of the
electorate, Joe Biden a 4.5 point
popular vote victory. In 2024, people
are mad about uh inflation. They're
somewhat mad about the border. You have
a 2.5 point penalty applied to the
incumbent administration. Now, it's
Harris. And you get a 1.5 point popular
vote victory for Donald Trump. I
genuinely don't think, and this held
internationally too, right? All right. I
generally don't think you need a lot
more to explain the election right now
than that. But you do need something
more than that to explain Donald Trump's
now since 2016 almost decadel long
dominance of all attention in American
politics. Starting when he came down the
golden escalator in 2015. Donald uh
Donald Trump American politics from 2015
to 2020 when Joe Biden won was about
Donald Trump. Then from 2020 to 2024
when Joe Biden was president, it was
about Donald Trump. And then from 2024
on, it's about Donald Trump. Joe Biden
was an intentional
void. Be it his age, be it their
strategy, they agreed that the topic of
the nation should be Donald Trump,
right? When he went back to begin his
campaign in 2024, he goes to Valley
Forge and gives a speech about January 6
and Donald Trump, right? It wasn't about
his own achievements. It was about
Donald Trump. Joe Biden didn't do the
Super Bowl interview, right, in 2023.
That's when I did my thing about this is
not going to work. like probably because
at that point he was not capable of good
extemporaneous, you know, interviews. I
mean, I think that was my view of them,
right? That the revealed thing here was
that they didn't trust him to do
interviews. I didn't have some inside
information about anything. I just
looked at what they were doing and what
they weren't doing. They're behind in
the polls. They weren't doing things
like the Super Bowl interview. If you
can't turn your candidate into the
product, if you don't trust your
candidate to be the product in an
election, you're fucked, right? And so
that was that was to me the tell. Um,
but attention is the coin of the realm.
Now, there are better and worse ways of
doing it. I don't think Donald Trump is
doing himself huge favors right now. I
think they had there's a path they could
have walked to be a majority party. I
think that if he was more restrained,
more inhibited, if he was able to not do
a bunch of things that are mobilizing
opposition to
him, you know, you could talk about what
they would or wouldn't achieve that way,
but I think they could be in a much
stronger political position. That would
make them stronger for the midterms. It
would eventually make, you know, JD
Vance stronger as a successor. I think
they're running a very high-risisk
strategy that has a very reasonable
chance of you know if they don't make a
you know what I would call like an
autocratic breakthrough they might yeah
they might completely blow up their own
movement right it's all very high risk
so for them like for everybody for
everything what makes them good at
politics is also what makes them bad at
politics but for democrats the caution
the sort of bureaucratic culture the
fear of saying anything that will make
anybody mad it is optimized for a
different attentional error era. And one
of the things I am watching when you
were saying about leaders, one of the
things I'm watching in in in the people
coming up, the the ones who want to run
in 2028 is who seems like they have
adapted to this era, not in the way
Trump did or Vance did or Musk did. I
think they're going to need something
different. They fully represent the
Twitter era of politics. I mean, Musk
bought Twitter. Uh they're they're sort
of allin on what politics right now,
what online politics feels like. I think
the thing that will come next is someone
who's able
to synthesize both the lessons of it and
the feeling that we all have that it's
kind of sick and poisoned, right? That
Twitter's not a good place. X is not a
good place. Tik Tok politics is not a
good place, that we're all being turned
on each other. Somehow you need to be
authentic and authentically angry at
what we've all become in the way that
Obama ran as a political reformer who
hated the red and blue cut of America
who hated what political consultants and
pollsters were doing to us. You're not
going to have somebody who just echoes.
There's no not going to be there will be
no Joe Rogan of the left. There will be
no Donald Trump of the left because the
left is different than the right. But it
will have to be something authentically
of this era, but also authentic to the
backlash to it, which I think as we
enter into this period where the
president and everybody around him fully
embraces this attentional economy, I
think people are going to want something
different from the from this attentional
economy in four years and be okay with
the negative attention that comes with
being authentic. You're going to have to
have some of it, right? You you you
cannot change American politics. can't
change Democratic party if you're not
willing to upset people. Donald Trump
reformed the Republican party by willing
people to fight Republicans. He ran
against George W. Bush, against Jeb
Bush, against Mitt Romney, against the
trade deals, against a bunch of things
that were understood to be sacred cow.
Somehow this guy ran like right after
Mitt Romney and John McCain while
attacking Mitt Romney and John McCain,
right? If you are not like the
Democratic party does need to change. It
needs to attain a different form because
the Obama coalition is exhausted. It's
done. It's not going to be able to do
that if it doesn't have standard bears
who are willing to say we were wrong
about some things. We have to change our
views on some things. We have to act
differently and speak differently. Is
there a degree to which the left
uh uniquely attacks its own more
intensely than u maybe uh other parts of
the political spectrum? It's possible.
You know, you go back to the model that
I gave you of 2015 where there used to
be these four large parties, MAGA,
center right, center left, and left.
Right now, the Republican party is all
MAGA. So, there is no coalitional fight
to be had. It's all Donald Trump. And if
Donald Trump wants to name a former
left-wing environmentalist to be be the
HHS secretary, everyone says, "Okay,
that sounds like a fantastic idea.
That's exactly who we were going to
nominate, too." Thank you, Donald.
That's wonderful. tip of my tongue on
the on the Democratic side. There is a
fight and it's happening right now and
our book is trying to win a certain
intral coalitional fight about defining
the future of liberalism in the
Democratic Party. So, I'm not of the
left. I'm certainly not of the far-left.
I have centerleft politics and maybe
even like a center-left personality
style, if we can even call it that. But
I do not begrudge the left for fighting
because there's a fight to be had. In
many ways, I think sometimes they see
I'm not endorsing this. I'm I'm
describing it. I think they see their
nearterm
opposition as not always the Republican
party but as the forces in the
Democratic party that are in the way for
them controlling one of the two major
parties in this country. And so they do
have an oppositional style and maybe
that's personality based. They are
fighting the center left. They are
criticizing the center left consistency
consistently.
But I want to be good faith about this
even though I don't share their politics
and say that they're they're doing it
because they're trying to win power on
the left of center. And so that's why
they're criticizing the way they are.
Now, our book and much of my writing is
an attempt to do a little bit of a of of
a very specific dance. Ezra touched on
this, I think, really beautifully. We're
in an era right now of
anti-institution politics,
anti-establishment politics, and
Democrats are at risk right now as being
seen as the party that always defends
institutions, the party that always
defends the establishment status quo.
And that is an absolute death nail, I
think, for this century's angry
anti-establishment politics. So what
we're trying to do is essentially say
here's a way to channel the anger that
people have at the establishment but
toward our own ends. Right? We believe
that we have answers on housing and
energy and highquality governance and
science and technology. Really good
answers that are fiercely critical of
the status quo in Democrat-led cities
and Democrat-led states. Um we're trying
to be oppositional in a way that's
that's
constructive rather than just
destructive. Just to put a nice pretty
bow tie in the whole thing, let me ask
for
advice. What do I need to do for AOC to
do a three-hour interview with me, Ezra?
From your throne of wisdom. I I that I I
don't think I know how you get AOC
herself to do it. Um I I would not I
would not pretend to know her offices or
her particular views on this. I do think
though
that you can see different Democrats
taking on different kinds of risks.
Right now we're sort of in the age of
Gavin Newsome starting a I mean Gavin
Newsome is the governor of California
and he's spending some percentage of his
time doing a podcast with Charlie Cook
and Michael Savage and Steve Bannon.
Gavin Newsome realizes that one lane for
a Democrat is to be high risk and
talking to virtually everybody. I think
Pete Buddhajed in a different way is
somebody who wants to take uh media
risks. Now I think he's going to my gut
on him is he's going to hold his powder
a little bit. So he'll probably want to
do the Lex Friedman podcast assuming he
runs in 2028. In 2027
Judge, right? I think a lot of them are
trying to figure out what is the lane
for right now and there's a lane for the
next two years and there's a lane for
the two years after that and you're
going to see a lot of people begin to
blanket media in the two years after
that. Now, that'd be interesting. I
would be curious to know, would Hakeem
Jeff come on and do your show right now?
That'd be interesting. I mean, would you
do it for four hours? I don't know. Uh
the the 4h hour ask, the 3 to four hour
ask somebody who also books politicians
is hard. I have trouble. I like to book
people for 90 minutes to two hours. And
I tend to negot be get negotiated down
to I try not to go under 75 or
65. But even as somebody I think well
regarded in that world, you know, it's
very very very hard for me to get
politicians to sit for 2 hours. I don't
have the sense that the three-hour ask
is a big ask because of scheduling. I
think they it still is grounded in the
fear of saying the wrong thing. I just
think they're used to something else,
right? I think that when you talk I mean
they are scheduled by schedulers, right?
that if you talk to them yourself, if
you end up having a personal
relationship with Wes Moore of Maryland,
and he wants to do your show, he will
tell his scheduler, I want 3 to four
hours to do the show. But the scheduler
is used to a world, the staff is used to
a world where nobody gets 3 to four
hours for the boss. Reporters don't,
donors don't, policy staffers don't. So
then when some interview comes in and
they say, "Hey, I want 3 to four hours."
The answer is no because culturally it's
not done. You need Donald Trump himself,
uh, Pete Booty Judge himself, AOC
herself, to say to their staff, "No, no,
no. We're making time for this, right?
Because it's not how they make time for
things normally." I don't know how much
it is fear. I do think they're unus. But
I suspect a lot of it is simply booking
culture. Uh, like I run into it, too.
They're not used to saying yes to 3 to
four hours for anything. It's not that
they don't have it. They have 3 to four
hours if their kid is having a
graduation, right? I mean, they're human
beings. they can make time, but um but
it would have to come in a way from
them. My sense is this is part of the
the Rogan, it's very unclear because
there are very differing stories on what
happened in the Rogan Harris
negotiations, but it does seem that time
was one of the the sticking points. It's
also possible that you're going to find
as you try to interview Democratic
politicians that the exact same thing
that happened with tech CEOs is going to
happen among Democratic politicians. You
interviewed some tech CEOs and then they
did a great job and their friends were
like, "You were fantastic on the Lex
Freedman podcast. That was such a great
thing that you said in, you know, minute
97 and then there becomes a bit of a
meme that you can create really high
value moments for yourself if you appear
on Lex's podcast and then it becomes
less risky for the next marginal CEO to
say yes." And I think right now what
we're talking about fundamentally is not
physics, it's culture, it's just norms.
I think there's a fear of low expected
value if you're a highranking Democratic
politician and maybe you do a podcast
like this. What if I say the wrong thing
and it goes viral and my bookers and my
agenda people and myself just feel
terrible for the next few weeks cuz all
we see on Blue Sky and X is just people
hating. But if you get one interview
that goes well, if you talk to Wes
Moore, let's say, and there's a 5-minute
segment where he articulates some vision
of liberalism in the 2020s that everyone
says, "My gosh, that is the best
possible articulation of what the
Democratic party can stand for the next
four years that I've ever heard."
Suddenly, what's happened is that
appearing on the show becomes massively
derisked. And in fact, the risk veilance
entirely switches. We are leaving
dollars on the floor by not appearing on
this guy's podcast because I'm AOC. I'm
a sensational communicator. If Wes Moore
can do it, I can do it even better. And
so I think to a certain extent there's a
little bit like of a of a riot theory
phenomenon here. The person who throws
the first stone in a riot has to be very
courageous. The person who throws the
hundth and first stone in a riot doesn't
need to be courageous at all. And there
might be a little bit of that going on
that people need to see proof of high
expected value before it breaks what
we're acknowledging to be a bit of a
communications norm on the left. That's
a really convincing and powerful theory.
I think I want to push back on it
because
uh so what's what's going to happen for
example this very conversation you're
both going to come off brilliant. Well,
we're we're barely like 50 minutes into
a 4
hour material next. It's it's all
straight downhill. But what people will
tired, they'll listen to this and
they're like, "Well, that's Ezra. Like,
he's brilliant." They're going to be
worried about their own candidate. If
AOC comes off brilliant, they're not
going to be thinking, "Oh, this is a
place to be brilliant." They're going to
be like, "Well, that's cuz AOC is
brilliant, but my candidate is not." It
still boils down to the caution. I've
had a lot of Republican high-profile
Republican people reach out to me. They
don't give a shit. They're just like,
"Whatever, I'll come." People on the
left, I've had two people who I respect
deeply and
admire express caution about the
previous people I've interviewed and not
wanting to come on. Well, that's a thing
the left has to get over. Yeah. like
what that that's a very important
cultural they they began to do a thing
where spaces were verboden because it
had platformed so and so and I think
that culture is changing I think they
realized I mean that they abandoned huge
vast swaths of significant culture
because like they wouldn't go places
it's crazy like you have to the idea
that you only go where people agree with
you is genuine lunacy I I don't want to
act as your booker here um and 20, you
know, 2020 candidates are what they are
and they each have their own press
strategy. But I would say like I'm doing
this myself on my show. I like I don't
think the best people to get right now
in the Democratic party are the seven
people who lead the polls. Like I'm
looking for people who will think out
loud. Like I just had Jake Aenclaws on.
He's like a not that well-known House
member from Massachusetts. I just think
he's a guy who thinks out loud. Um I am
uh booking someone else right now like
that. Two more people like that frankly
who are neither of them. They're like
the net like I could get like a bigger
name. I'm more interested in people who
are thinking like one reason I think
Bernie Sanders always did everything. Is
to him the thing he was really doing was
he had something to say. The point of
almost everything for Bernie Sanders is
to be in a place where people can hear
the thing he has to say. And a lot of
politicians don't have that. Right. The
point of anything is what it does for
them in the polls. What it does for them
with the donors, how it repositions
them. I'm interested right now at this
moment because it's not 2028. It's not
2027. There's no Democratic primary
happening right now. The idea that
you're going to like pre-run the
Democratic party is stu or primary is
stupid. We don't even know what the like
we might be in World War II, right? We
have no idea what, you know, we might
have g, you know, AGI. Like the things
that the 2027 primary might be about,
the kinds of scandals that might have
erupted by them are totally different.
Whereas, you know, the reason I have
people on is because they are saying
something. They're a live mind in the
moment that has a perspective on this
that um that that you want to hear. And
so I would look for that. And I think a
lot of people who are not, you know,
there are people who are trying to
protect something, protect a standing in
the polls, protect a sort of coalitional
set of allies they currently have. And
then there are people who are, you know,
trying to just be heard. Um, again, a
lot of Bernie Sanders's culture, the way
he does media is now Bernie Sanders is
Bernie Sanders. He didn't used to be. He
wasn't in 2015. Even like when Bernie
Sanders ran for president in 2015, it
wasn't initially a big deal. It was
like, "Oh, bummer. Elizabeth Warren
didn't run for president." Was a feeling
of most people on the left. And so
Bernie Sanders was a guy who's been
saying the same thing for decades, but
in the wilderness, and nobody was
listening. Yeah. And now he still has
the instincts of somebody who understood
that like the most important thing was
to find a place where people were
listening, where they would let you talk
and even better let you talk for a
while. I think the candidate who's going
to do well in 2028 is going to have an
instinct like that. But I but even right
now I think the question is one of my
big questions as I'm booking for my show
is
just I want someone who has a
perspective on this moment who feels
like they have had a thought that is
about right now and who we are right now
and what the story of America is right
now. I think what's really important is
what Ezra said. It's about having
something to say. I we wanted to talk to
you and talk together about how much we
wanted to talk to you cuz we got
something to say. You know, we we wrote
a 300page book about how much we have to
say. We love going on podcasts and
television shows and radio and then
doing live events to tell people what we
have to say. We think this idea of
abundance isn't just important for
redefining what the American left means.
We think that the outcome of thinking
abundantly about housing and energy and
science and technology is what politics
is all about. It's about giving people
the good life and we think this is the
path toward it. So certainly one thing
that's profoundly motivated us is having
something very concrete that we just
want to get out there in the world. Like
my sense as a writer, as a thinker, is I
want my software running on as many
pieces of hardware as possible. I want
to get my ideas out there as much as
possible. And who gets credit for them
and where the idea goes and that's
that's all secondary. I believe in ideas
because they're important. And so I want
to talk to people who have large
platforms about those ideas because how
else is the idea getting into the
mainstream except through those large
large platforms. Um that's how broadcast
technology works in the first place. So
maybe one thing that you're touching on
is a little bit of ideological
ambiguity. Maybe a part of this is this
sense that people don't know exactly
what it is they have to say for 3 hours.
All all I all I can say for sure is that
we know there's also a reality and I
mean the book is trying to enter into
this reality. I think one thing you're
saying is that people have coded you
and so Donald Trump is really excited to
do it and maybe loving politicians are
not. Uh one thing that we think is that
we're in a period of realignment. Uh the
last chapter of the book we talk about
an idea that is picked up from a
historian named Gary Gartol which is
idea of political orders. And political
orders are periods that have a sort of
structure of consensus and a structure
of a zone of conflict, but it's more or
less agreed on by the two sides, even if
only tacitly. So you have a new deal
order. New deal order is founded by FDR.
It is entrenched when Dwight Eisenhower
accepts the New Deal as part of the the
US proving that it can treat workers
better than the Soviet Union. So those
are sort of right there the three uh the
three ingredients typically of an order.
You have a party that starts it a
opposition party that accepts key
premises right now doesn't come in and
say we're going to roll back the whole
new deal and it's often held in place by
an external antagonist in that case the
Soviet Union. You have then you have the
in the 70s stagflation the Vietnam war a
series of problems that the New Deal
order no longer seems able to handle. So
you have the rise of what he calls the
the neoliberal order. And the neoliberal
order is if you're going to choose a
founder, it's going to be Reagan on that
one, right? It's much more about
markets. It is very concerned with
things like inflation. And it really is
entrenched by Bill Clinton. You know,
the era of big government is over. And
partially, it's entrenched also by the
fall of the Soviet Union, right? The
fall of the Soviet Union is like this
proof point that every that the the the
sort of capitalists were right, that
markets are the way of the future.
Government does not know what it's
doing. and and that becomes like the
governing set of assumptions. And so
there are arguments about what the
markets should be doing, right? You
know, Obamacare is about creating sort
of markets in health insurance, right?
You can use markets for very progressive
ends. Um we want to use markets for lots
of progressive ends. But the neoliberal
order basically collapses amidst a
financial crisis and climate change and
China. And those are the three things
that that that sort of gel but but also
separately we think kill it which is the
neoliberal order does not have an answer
to the financial crisis and it botches
in many ways the answer to the financial
crisis puts too little demand into the
economy lets um a sort of recession
linger and a very slow recovery linger
for too long. It doesn't know what to
say really about climate change. Markets
have made a lot of people rich by you
know doing a lot of things that are very
very damaging for the environment very
damaging for the future of the human
race potentially. And you have the rise
of China and the neoliberal order said
you integrate China into the global
economy. You bring them into the WTO.
You trade with them. You help them build
their industrial base. You help them
pull their people out of poverty. Which
that part is good. And they will become
more like the West. They will
liberalize. They will have a free press.
They will the the richer we make China,
the more China is going to become like
us. And that proves totally wrong.
Right? China becomes more authoritarian
over time. But it also sort of develops
an industrial base. It becomes uh as it
does not become more like us becomes
dangerous. You know, at least in our
view, right? You don't want to ever have
a conflict with a another country who
you've outsourced your key industrial
base to. And so you have to sort of
follow that order. And and then again
here things that would have been
ridiculous at one point in American
politics become possible. Bernie Sanders
is one of them, right? The idea that
you'd have somebody a self-described
socialist running for president and
coming anywhere near the Democratic
nomination that was unthinkable in 2004
and by 2016 it almost happened. And
Donald Trump is another thing. Donald
Trump runs like headlong into the
failures of neoliberalism in the
Republican party. He runs against trade.
He runs against a sort of Paul Ryan more
open immigration. George W. Bush and
John McCain were both very big on
liberalizing immigration policy. um he
runs against the Iraq war and you know
sort of foreign adventurism and there's
a sort of isolationist instinct that
coexists very awkwardly now within a
territorial expansionist instinct but at
least in 2016 it was more isolationist
and so Donald Trump and his sort of
re-imagining of the Republican party as
a right-wing populist uh more like sort
of some uh Christian Democratic parties
in other countries you know up in that
quadrant of socially conservative um
economically populist uh that that
becomes something that's possible, but
nothing has found an equilibrium, right?
Nobody's agreed to the other side's
premises. There are certain ones that
people are agreeing on. Both the
Republican and Democratic parties have a
very different view on China now. Uh
right, like Biden kept a lot of Trump's
uh policies on China and actually
strengthened them. And now Trump is
building on that aggressively again. Uh
but in terms of the other things, there
isn't agreement about what the next
period in American politics should look
like. And that's one reason I think it's
very dangerous both as a a question of
media strategy but also as a question of
politics to code people, places,
platforms too tightly. Republicans and
Democrats aren't going to get along in
Congress. That that has to do with I
think the incentives of Congress. My
first book is called Why We're
Polarized. It's about those almost
hydraulic incentives for partisanship.
But in terms of what is the meaning of
my podcast, of Derek's, of yours, of Joe
Rogan, of Theo Vaughn, of Call Your Call
Her Daddy, um, of a million different
places that, uh, are not well coded. It
that's, I think, very up for grabs. I
mean, Elon Musk was an Obama era liberal
in 2012. I mean, I think his his
personal process of radicalization is
not going to unwind itself, but a lot of
the people who Democrats are like, "All
these billionaires are rightwing now."
No, people are just uncertain. I mean,
some of them are a little bit afraid,
but people are uncertain. They're moving
back and forth. The sort of texture of
it is unsettled and it's going to take
time. These transitionary periods, I
mean, they can go very badly, too, but
they take time. And I think people who
are clinging to old certainties about
what tells you which side folks are on.
My sense is a lot of people who are very
open to MAGA in 2025 are going to feel
very differently about it in 2028
depending on how they do right if they
do great then they're going to entrench
but if they don't then a lot of people
became maga curious uh are not going to
be magic curious anymore but they're not
going to want the last Democratic party
either. I was making this point to
someone the other day about uh why the
Democratic party's embrace of the Liz
Cheney style independent didn't work. Um
Liz Cheney of course being a you know
Dick Cheny's daughter Republican but but
what what Liz Cheney the never Trumpers
were were a way of reaching out to who
the Democratic party thought the
independents were. But the key thing
about an independent to a political
party is not that they don't like the
other party. it's that they're an
independent because they also don't like
your party. And so finding a bunch of
people who are meant to be messengers to
them about why they shouldn't like the
other party, it's fine. But what you
need to do is explain why they should
like your party. You need to have some
message. You need to accept some fault.
You need to think about what it was
about you that drove them away. One of
our like deep views about politics right
now and and not politics policy the the
the texture of the economy of the
country is that the last period in
American politics in the economy was
about demand. The fundamental problem
coming out of the financial crisis was
demand. We had too little demand in the
economy. Behind that too little demand
in the economy was this other thing that
was building up which was a cost of
living crisis. Housing was getting super
expensive. health care uh uh in certain
ways energy but energy is more
complicated in ways we can talk about
elder
care higher education right this is a
point my wife is a journalist at the
Atlantic Annie Lowry with Derek and she
wrote this piece on in 2020 early 2020
right before the pandemic that went very
viral called the affordability crisis
and it sticks in my head because she's
writing at a time when people were
saying the economy is great everything's
great like you looked at measures of
consumer confidence in 2020 February of
2020 terrific
She's like, "So, how come if the economy
is so great, everybody I talk to is so
upset?" And she's like, "Look, like
people are making more money than ever,
but it's getting eaten up and eaten up
and eaten up by these things they really
need that keep getting more expensive
even as consumer goods get cheaper. Then
the pandemic hits, the problem becomes
CO. But then you have inflation and
inflation moves a problem of the
economy, the fundamental problem
everybody's paying attention to from the
demand side. How do we get more people
at work? How do we get them to spend
more money to the supply side? We don't
have enough, right? We have a
constriction of semiconductors of used
cars and then eventually everything,
right? Everything is getting more
expensive and we do get I mean, we'll
see what happens with tariffs. We do
get, you know, by 2024 the rate of
inflation under control, but prices are
still much higher. And now people are
paying real attention to prices. And the
affordability crisis, which again is a
cost of living crisis, which have been
growing for a very long time, is now at
crisis levels. And it becomes the
substance of politics. People, you know,
you had all these Democrats saying, I
don't know what the problem is. Like
inflation has come down to whatever it
was, 3 to 4% in 2024. And they're right
about that. But one, the price level of
everything remained high, but two,
people were now like, "The fuck is
housing so expensive for like I'm never
going to be able to afford a home. Like
my parents went to public university
debtree. I could never do that.
And what we've done is fail. I mean,
Democrats in this case, Republicans
haven't done that great on it either.
But in blue states, Democrats have
failed on cost of living. The reason
California, Illinois, New York are
losing hundreds of thousands of people
to Florida, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, is
that they've failed on cost of living.
It is too expensive to live there. And
the reason they failed on cost of living
is supply. We They did not make enough.
They actually made it too hard in many
cases to make enough of the things
people needed. Some of those are
straightforward like we didn't let
people build enough homes. Some of them
are more like we've made it too
expensive to build public infrastructure
like highspeed rail or the second avenue
subway. Some of it has to do I think in
the long run with with innovation and
and the relationship between Democrats
and technology. But one of our views is
that there are other things in politics
that will matter too. But we are in a
period where the cost of living, supply,
affordability is the fundamental
economic question. Donald Trump himself
has said he won because of the price of
groceries. He's got this very funny
quote where he's like, "Nobody said I
don't have a Donald Trump impression,
but he's like nobody ever used the word
groceries in politics before I I did."
Well, it'd be good if he then wasn't
making it more expensive, but Democrats
believe his weakness is cost of living.
They're probably right, but they don't
have a strength on it. And the key
question our book is trying to refocus
politics on is how do we make more of
what we need? How does government either
organize itself or organize markets to
create more of what we need? And how do
we admit as liberals times when we've
put the we've made it so the government
makes it too hard to make more of what
we need? I'll say one last thing in this
pretty long answer. I thought one of the
most important things that has come out
recently is a piece in foreign affairs
by Brian De who's a former uh head of
Joe Biden's National Economics Council
and De helped negotiate every major bill
Biden passed. It's a very
straightforward piece about what it is
Democrats have not done to make it
possible to build at the level of their
goals. And he says things like we should
just remove federal funding from cities
that have highly restrictive home zoning
codes. He says we should have a goal for
how much nuclear we build in the next 10
years. We should be trying to reach a
goal of new nuclear capacity. It's a
very very important piece because de is
right at the center of democratic
policy. Instead of retrenching he's like
okay we didn't get there. What do we do
now to make it possible to get to the
place we promised you we can go?
And uh we should say that the book
you've mentioned which I've gotten a
chance to read and I think it's
incredible. Highly recommend. It's
called Abundance. I uh think of it as a
kind of
manifesto for what the left would
represent in the coming years. So I
think people should read it uh from that
angle. And both of you have been writing
about this topic sort of from different
angles for a while. I think in uh 22
Derek, you wrote an article
uh on this topic of abundance titled the
simple plan to solve all of America's
problems. And Ezra, you wrote an article
in 21 supply side progressivism titled
the economic mistake the leftists uh
finally confronting. and you've just
described laid out this more progressive
perspective on supply side economics
that you're presenting in
abundance. I was wondering if you could
kind of give the the broad
highlevel explanation of this idea of
supply side uh progressivism. Well, my
piece about the abundance agenda which I
wrote in 2022 uh started with me
standing outside waiting for a COVID
test. And this was a period where 2
years after the pandemic started, CO
tests were still being rationed. And it
was like 21 degrees outside and I was
getting very very frustrated about the
fact that still we seem to have a
scarcity of COVID tests. And as I'm
sitting outside just, you know, freezing
my ass off and just getting really mad.
I'm thinking, you know, it's not just CO
tests. We've had scarcity. Uh we also
had a scarcity of co vaccines early on
in the roll out which created this
really discombobulated scheme for
distributing the early co vaccines. And
then also you go earlier into March and
May of 2020 and we had a shortage of PPE
equipment for our doctors to remain safe
as they were taking care of a pandemic.
And I thought, you know, it's
interesting that this entire experience
of the pandemic has essentially been
defined by this concept of scarcity. And
as I zoomed out a little bit, I thought,
you know, it's not just the pandemic.
It's really so much the 21st century
economy that's been defined by scarcity.
Ezra beautifully described the degree to
which housing unaffordability has become
the economic problem of our time. You
know, in the history of political
orders, each political order is in part
defined by the internal crisis. The
Great Depression springs new
neoliberalism. Stagflation springs
neoliberalism. Now, we're in this molten
moment where we're waiting for the new
political order to emerge. And it's
going to emerge because of the lever,
because of the power of housing
affordability. You have to solve that
problem. If you want to solve the
problem of American anger about prices,
and part of this is just pure
arithmetic. If you look at any family's
budget, the biggest part of their budget
in any given year is the part that goes
to rent or mortgage. It's housing,
housing, housing. And housing connects
to everything else. It connects to
innovation. You want cities to elomerate
to bring smart people together. Housing
relates to all sorts of other
affordability. Like if you care about
the cost of child care or elder care,
you want to make it cheaper to house
institutions, buildings that can care
for children, which means you want to
bring those rents down. And so I thought
as I'm zooming out on this concept of
scarcity in the 21st century, we have
chosen to make housing scarce in some of
the most productive cities and states
often run by Democrats. We have rules,
zoning rules, historic preservation
rules, permitting processes,
environmental reviews, laws that we
created that have gotten in the way of
making abundant the most important
material good there is, which is
housing. And as I kept sort of working
myself into a lather and getting mad
about the world, I thought, you know,
it's actually not just housing. It's
it's clean energy, too. You know,
there's lots of environmentalists who
are on my side and believing very
fervently in climate change who've made
it very difficult to site solar panels
or site solar farms or to raise wind
turbines or to advance geothermal or to
accept nuclear power. We have chosen to
make clean energy scarce as well. And
then finally, the ultimate boss of
scarcity was the pandemic itself, which
constricted the the supply of all sorts
of goods around the world, setting the
price of everything to the moon. And
that's why inflation wasn't just an
American phenomenon, not just a North
American phenomenon, it was a global
phenomenon. And I thought, what we need
to solve for this crisis of penumbal
scarcity is an abundance agenda, an
approach towards solving America's
problems that puts abundance first. And
Ezra and I have a very focused
definition of abundance. We believe we
say in the first page of the book um uh
America needs to build and invent more
of the things it needs. Um we believe
that housing is critical. We believe
energy is critical. We talk a lot about
science and technology. But we really
put government effectiveness at the
heart of this because one really deep
vein of our book is a criticism of where
liberalism has gone wrong in the last 50
years where liberalism has gone from in
the New Deal era a politics of building
things. I mean FDR and the progressives
transformed the physical world not just
with infrastructure projects but with
building roads, the highway system under
Dwight Eisenhower. He changed the
physical world during the decades the
1930s to the 1950s. But in the last half
century, liberalism has become very good
at the politics of blocking rather than
the politics of building. And if you
look at the way that liberals define
success in the last few decades, it's
often about success defined by how much
money you can spend rather than how much
money rather than how many things you
can actually build. I mean, you look at
the fact that, for example, in the book,
we have so many examples. California
authorizes more than $30 billion to
build a highspeed rail system, which
basically doesn't exist. I mean, just
last week, the mayor of Chicago bragged
that they spent 11 billion building
10,000 affordable housing units. That's
$1.1 million per affordable housing
unit. That's absolutely pathetic. We
have a story in the book about a $1.7
million public toilet built in San
Francisco. $1.7 million for a toilet
because of all of the rules that get in
the way and raise the price of building
public infrastructure like public
bathrooms in San Francisco and
California. So, liberalism, I I'm I'm
worried over the last 50 years, has
become so good at the politics of
blocking and the politics of associating
the money authorized as success rather
than what you build in the physical
world that we've lost sense of material
abundance of how importance how
important outcomes are and not just
processes. And so this is a book that's
trying to nudge the Democratic party
back to what we think are in a way
historically its roots, thinking about
what Americans need and making it easier
for government to act efficiently to
provide them. And that really does I
think begin with housing and energy. Is
there a tension
between kind of uh the left the
progressive wealth redistribution kind
of ideas with the idea of building
that's primarily uh sort of getting out
of the way and letting the market get
the job done. Let's say two things on
that. So one, we think there's a real
tension between equality,
redistribution, and constricting the
supply, specifically housing. So
housing, by the way, I I would love to
understand this. That's that's the big
problem. Housing housing and energy, I
think, are the two most significant that
we focus on in the book, right? Housing
and clean energy. We don't have housing.
We don't have enough clean energy. I
would added things to that. uh public
infrastructure. We don't really focus
that much on education, but we could uh
and we could talk about that. Um
immigration is probably there for me,
too, and we talk about that a little bit
in the book. And we do talk a lot about
how to pull innovation forward from the
future. But when you ask about sort of
redistribution, I really think this is
an important point because there's a
great new paper by David Schliker and
I'm so sorry cuz I'm forgetting his
co-author. They're law professor. So
when they talk about the victory of
gentry law, we used to have a law that
was very dynamic when it came to
property and land was very different
than how things were in Britain. And
over time, you know, sort of back half
of the 20th century, we moved American
law to be much more for what they call
the gentry. We moved it much more
towards protecting those who currently
have things, right? And we do that
through a million things, covenants and
HOAs and all these sort of contracts who
make people enter into so they can't
even build on their own land. But one of
the things that just happens when you
constrict the supply of housing is that
people who got in when the getting was
good, you know, I mean, it's a classic
story in New York, in LA, and in SF, you
know, you bought a place in 1977 for
$220,000 and now it's worth $2.7 million
and maybe you'll pass it on to your kids
or you sell it, but the working-class
families can't afford to live there
anymore, right? So, that's not even a
question of redistribution. Sometimes
what you need in order to create the
possibilities for opportunity and
mobility is enough supply of the thing.
At the same time, we don't think like
that redistribution is the problem here.
I'm pro redistribution. I'm pro more
redistribution than we currently do. But
to give one example the way these can be
great
tastes in the book at some great length
um the story of operation warp speed.
And here you have in the mRNA vaccines
uh technology that was critically funded
by public money specifically DARPA at
different points. Then um hastened you
know after co government through
operation warp speed under Donald Trump
you know really tried to clear out
regulatory croft move these things
really fast but the demand on the side
of the public for having funded so much
of this having made so much possible was
that when these vaccines hit they were
going to be free. maybe the most
important medical advance of that entire
era. And it wasn't going to be like
OAMPic say where it's, you know, $15,000
for a year of doses, right? It wasn't
going to be only available to the
richest people at the beginning. We were
going to try to give it to everybody
sorted by need to the best that we could
and it would be free. Now, you're not
going to do that with everything, right?
There are places for the price signal to
to actually function and where it can
function to then bring on more supply
later. And you know, there's all the
econ 101 stuff that we all know. But
there are a lot of places where uh
redistribution and supply increases go
hand inand another good example I've
done over the course of my career a huge
amount of work on health insurance
reform and universal healthcare and
let's say you got you know Bernie
Sanders had become president in 2016 and
had swept in a huge democratic majority
and they passed Bernie's singlepayer for
all plan which was by the way much more
expansive than any existing singlepayer
plan in the world right it covered much
more than Canada's or the UK's or
anybody else if If you had done that,
what you would have needed immediately
was a huge supply increase in healthcare
because you would have had a huge demand
increase. What happens if you make
healthcare free, people are going to use
more of it. Um, if you make insurance
much more widespread, people are going
to go to the doctor more often. Well, if
you don't have enough doctors, you don't
have enough nurses, you don't have
enough surgeons, you need more. We
constrict the supply of all those things
using residency rules, using um, you
know, nursing rules, immigration rules,
who can practice as a nurse
practitioner, what can a nurse
practitioner actually do? you have to be
attentive to the supply side even if
what you're doing is aggressive
redistribution. Now, there are places
where these things don't conflict. Like,
I'd like to see a much expanded child
tax credit. And I don't think that has
like I don't think that has a big supply
side implication one way or the other.
But on a lot of the things we're talking
about, even if what you want to do, and
it is often what we want to do to do
more redistribution, if you're
redistributing some kind of thing that
gives you access to a good or a service,
you need to expand the good or the
service. We do rental vouchers. Giving
people rental vouchers in the San
Francisco housing market, unless you
build more housing, just creates
something that our friends at the Niscan
Center call disease socialism, where you
are increasing demand for good at which
you've constricted supply. If you do
that, you're just going to drive the
price up. To some degree, that's at
least part of the story of higher
education. We give people Pell grants.
We give people all kinds of subsidies
for higher ed, but we have not done
nearly enough to increase supply or
regulate um the way in which colleges
just then pocket part of that money. And
so they're building these fancy gyms and
they're competing with each other, but
they're not actually increasing uh the
supply of slots. It's certainly not the
level we want them to. So there's a lot
here where I think it scramles
traditional categories. Uh you cannot do
effective redistribution in ways that we
would like to see them done and many
people on the left would like to see
them done if you're not taking supply of
the thing that you're subsidizing
seriously. If you think about it from a
first principal
standpoint, you know what? If what if
what you wanted to do was to bring
American poverty as close to
0.0% as you possibly could. You got a
bunch of smart people into a room. You
said, "What can we possibly
do?" In my opinion, the answer would
include a lot of what's are sometimes
called demand side policies, a lot of
redistribution of income. The child tax
credit, I think, would be essential.
Expanding the earned income tax credit
would be essential. Expanding cash
welfare might be essential. Certainly
redistributing income from the rich to
the poor would be essential. These are
demand side policies. They're tax and
spending policies. But if you only
approach this subject through the demand
side, you will utterly and categorically
fail. Because like we said, housing is
the biggest part of a typical family's
budget. And if your only policy on
housing is to increase housing vouchers
without increasing the supply of
housing, macroeconomically speaking,
there's only one direction for housing
prices to go and it's straight up to the
moon. You're not actually bringing
housing prices down. You're just
subsidizing a constricted market and
therefore creating enormous inflation.
You have to solve some of these problems
on the supply side. And one of the
conceptual scoops that Ezra and I are
trying to work out for the left, for
liberals in America, is to get people to
ask the question, how do we solve this
problem with supply? Housing is a
crisis. How do we solve it with supply?
Energy is a crisis. How do we solve it
with supply? Medical innovation,
scientific discovery is a massively
interesting phenomenon. We don't even
understand how it how it exists really.
like how do great discoveries actually
happen? Is there a supply side policy
for that as well? That's the question
we're asking over and over in the book.
So, at the end of the day, demand side
progressivism and and what Ezra calls
supply side progressivism really are
peanut butter and chocolate. They are
two flavors that go beautifully well
together. But here's the problem that I
think your question was putting your
finger on. I think a lot of Americans
don't believe that these things work
together because what they see is a
liberalism that just taxes and spends
and Americans don't see the benefits of
that spending. The Biden administration
authorized $42 billion to build rural
broadband in America. Practically none
of it was built. Authorized $7.5 billion
to build EV charger stations in America.
Practically none of it was built. How
many tens of billions of dollars have
been authorized to build highspeed rail
in California? practically none of it
exists. You you can't write it. So the
problem is when the the reputation of a
tax and spend liberal makes contact with
the fact that people don't see the
results in the physical world. Like
where where's my money going? I have in
my head something like this idea of what
I call equinox liberalism, which is to
say there's some forms of liberalism
where it's very expensive, but you see
what you're getting. Like when you spend
$270 to go to Equinox for for the month,
right? It's a really expensive gym bill,
but people who go there seem to love it.
They're like, "The the equipment is
always free. Everything is clean. I go
into the locker room, there's a bunch of
KE's lotions to like put on my face
after I shower. I am getting exactly
what I'm paying for. Yes, I'll pay out
the nose for a gym because I love seeing
that money going to work." And in places
like Sweden, Denmark, citizens seem very
happy. They're paying much higher taxes
than people are in America, but they're
seeing where the money is going to work.
The problem with a liberalism that
blocks rather than builds is that people
don't see the money going to work. All
they see are the dollar signs being
spent by government and then they walk
out of their house and they see
collapsing infrastructure and they see
crime and they see housing prices going
to the moon. And so they think, "Wait,
this social contract is broken down.
You're asking for equinox prices, but
you're giving me a shit ass gym, and
that's unfair." And so what we're trying
to say is, I mean, in a very serious
way, because I'm not trying to be
flippant about about gyms, in a very
serious way, what we're trying to say is
a part of this problem is that you
Democrats have looked so hard at the
demand side of the ledger, that you've
forgotten how powerful the levers are on
the supply side. And if we can just pull
those levers on housing in particular,
we can bring down the cost of living and
people might even support the tax and
spend model more because they'll feel
like they're participating in equinox
liberalism and not its opposite. Can we
zoom in on the housing problem? Can you
explain the housing problem and what's
the importance of housing in
uh in in in the quality of life in the
flourishing of the nation of the United
States in general? And what is broken
about it? Let's say the second part of
the question first. What's so important
about
housing? We're talking about life. And
even at a higher level, we're kind of
talking about freedom. Like the freedom
to live where you want to live, the
freedom to feel like the good and
achievable life is actually good and
achievable. This is profoundly a
question of housing. Um, there's this
great paper that was written several
years ago called the housing theory of
everything by Bowman Southwood and I
forget the other guy's name, but they
made this really beautiful point that no
matter what you care about in terms of
public policy or politics, housing
probably makes contact with it. If you
care about innovation, innovation, as I
said, it's about getting people together
in a city where they can work together.
That's about housing density. If you
care about child care costs, that's
about bringing down the cost of
buildings. That's also about housing. If
you care about being able to live near
your friends and family, this is also
profoundly a question of housing. So,
when we talk about housing over and
over, we're not just talking about the
four walls and roof and and and uh and
floor. We're talking about what housing
means to people because housing is life.
And right now, what we very clearly see
in the data is that Americans are
leaving expensive cities and states that
tend to be run by Democrats and they're
moving to areas that are sunnier, that
are cheaper, and are often more likely
to be run by Republicans. And this is, I
think, because starting in the 1960s,
1970s, you had this era of blockage
points in housing. We started seeing
zoning regulations. We started seeing
historic preservation rules. We started
seeing laws that made it easier for
citizens to sue to stop a new
development from going up. Essentially,
new tools were invented to empower
people's natural conservatism. You know,
for hundreds of years, people might have
always felt like I kind of want my
neighborhood to stay the same. Like that
might have been something that like the
Neanderthalss were feeling. But only in
the last 50 years have we really
outfitted human beings with a weapon to
go along with their biological
preference for the familiar such that
they can utilize it to stop the change
of the physical world around them. And
so we've seen the rise of what is
commonly called nimiism not in my
backyard the rise of a movement to stop
the development of new housing around
where they live. And so what you see in
the data is according to one study that
was reported on by Yonyi Apple, my
colleague at the Atlantic, if there's a
city with a 10% increase in the
progressive vote share, there's a 30%
decline in the number of houses that are
permitted. For some reason, it does tend
to be these areas that are more
populated by progressives that have more
of these choke points. Some of this is
just historical quirk, but some of it
is, I think, maybe the character of a
certain kind of liberal, maybe often an
older
liberal who believes that preserving the
physical environment is the good. That
the best thing you can do for the planet
is to stop things from changing around
you, stop things from being built. And
that's an old-fashioned version of
environmentalism that we're trying to
turn the liberals against because really
we see the challenge with climate change
is not how do we get everybody to stop
using electricity electricity. How do we
get people to stop using any power or
jewels or electrons that come from n
from natural gas and oil. We want people
to recognize that if the people want to
lead modern lives and they're going to
continue to demand modern lives and so
we have to use clean energy technology
to allow them to live those lives. That
means you have to build an absolute shit
ton of nuclear energy, solar and wind
and geothermal and nuclear and maybe in
the near future even fusion. It requires
an attitude of being excited about
building new things rather than a
liberalism that seeks always to block
changes to the physical environment
around them. So I think that what we're
trying to do is to allow people in a way
to meet processes and outcomes. I think
liberals want housing abundance at some
in in in in some part of their brains,
in some part of their hearts. I think
they want the price of housing to go
down. But there hasn't quite been a
really clean articulation of a a a
mindset or paradigm shifting argument
that gets them to see how the processes
that we've created go so dramatically
against the outcomes that liberals want.
And we're trying to say here's a new
process. Here's a new question you can
ask yourself. How can we solve the
housing problem on the supply side? And
also uh solving the housing problem is
one of the mechanisms to lift people out
of poverty. So there's a lot of goals
that align well with the liberals. You
write about cities. Cities are where
wealth is created, not just where it is
displayed. They are meant to be
escalators into the middle class, not
pen houses for the upper class. So the
housing problem we're talking about
specifically or most importantly is in
urban areas. Yeah, this is something
that you spend a lot of time thinking
about for the book. There's a lot of
land in the United States. And sometimes
you'll hear people say something like,
I've heard this a lot. Well, not
everybody can live in San Francisco or
Venice in Los Angeles or, you know,
Manhattan or Brooklyn or
whatever. And fine, right? Not everybody
can. That's
true. The problem is
that cities are engines of opportunity
and economic dynamism.
I mean, as you know, you know, better
than we do, the frontier AI labs in the
US, basically all of them outside of
China exist in 50 square miles in the
Bay Area. There's not one in New York.
There's not one in Dallas. There's not
one in Chicago. There's not one in
Austin. There's not one anywhere but in
the Bay Area. But the the key thing is
that there is huge spillover from these
hyperdynamic industries. Be it finance
in New York, be it tech in San
Francisco, be it uh culture in Los
Angeles, you make a lot more money being
a barber near Google than you do being a
barber in, you know, rural Arkansas. And
this is the ancient pathway to mobility.
people who are poorer and work in the
service sector, they move to richer
areas where they're part where the
productivity is higher and thus the the
the sort of money spreads around. And if
you look at American mobility and
opportunity over the 20th century, about
a third roughly on on on some
calculations just comes from this people
moving to richer areas. And if you look
in like the last 20-ish years, 30-ish
years, you see this extremely steady
process of income convergence as people
move towards richer areas begin to throw
itself into reverse because it used to
make sense for the janitor and the
lawyer to move to New York City. But now
it only makes sense for the lawyer too
and the janitor leaves because you can't
support yourself and your family and
live in a home and have a reasonable
commute being a you know a janitor
working in Manhattan. Now, obviously,
some people do it and it's often very
tough and they live very far. Uh, it's
very hard in San
Francisco. You can't look at cities
as well, that's just where the rich
people are. And that's a problem that
many Democrats now have. I mean, Michael
Bloomberg famously described New York
City as a luxury good and luxury goods
cost luxury prices. And that's true in
the sense that New York became a luxury
good, but that's a problem. Like that is
a terrible prominent inversion of what
the city is. You know there's this
famous advice possibly apocryphily from
Horus Greley who's a kind of you know
early American newspaper publisher and
political candidate but he says like go
west young man go west right that the
opportunity is out in in the west where
the lands are open. It's never been true
including for him. That guy moved from a
rural area to New York City and that's
how he became famous and he ran a
newspaper and he ran against Ulyses
Srant in a presidential election. The
cities are the frontier. The cities have
always been the frontier. Not of the
land, but of the economy. Because the
frontier of the economy is where ideas
are produced. And ideas even now, even
the age of remote work, are produced in
the big cities where people live
together and they compete with each
other and they cooperate with each
other. And so if you gate the cities, if
you make it impossible for someone
making 50,000 bucks with two kids to
live in the city, then what you've done
is you've actually closed the American
frontier. You've forced them into lower
productivity places. their children are
less likely to grow up around, you know,
the the sort of inventors in the cities.
There's really amazing research from Raj
Cheddy and others. Basically showing
that kids, no matter what they are, no
matter what income class they're in,
they are likelier to grow up innovating
and patenting in the innovations of the
place around them, right? Smart kids
don't just grow up and innovate in
anything. You know, if they grow up in
the Bay Area, they innovate in
technology as Steve Jobs did and Wnjak
did, right? Because they just like lived
around those people. And that is true in
many many many different things. And so
when you gate the cities, it's not
housing is almost too small of a thing
for what we're talking about. We are
talking about if you can live next to
economic opportunity. We are talking
also about if you can put the people
together who will create the next era of
economic opportunity. You know, right
now the Bay Area is still in some ways
drafting off of back when it was cheap.
Uh a lot of the people we're talking
about who have made amazing things
there, they started in the Bay Area when
you could afford to live there. It
wasn't always like this and it wasn't
that long ago that it wasn't like this.
And now fine, you can go there if you
have money or you have a great job offer
from Google or Apple or
whomever. But over time, you need the
ferment. I have like a personal interest
in reading memoirs and noticing if the
memoir is really a housing story. One of
the ones I like about this Moby his the
electronic uh musician, his first
memoir, which is great. It's a memoir of
a certain era in New York. It's a
housing story. He was just living next
to a bunch of other musicians in cheap
ass housing. I just read uh Meet Me in
the Bathroom by Lizzie Goodman, a sort
of oral history of of the as rock
revival in New York City. A housing
story. They could afford to live here,
right? I I read I've read a bunch of
these in San Francisco, too, where
people just like they're functionally
squatting, right? Like like the the ess
the San Francisco ferment, its
queerness, its openness and tolerance of
new ideas. It's sort of like it's home
of the psychedelic counterculture that
intermixed with the defense culture that
created Silicon Valley, right? You've
read probably is it Frederick Turner's
um from cyber cult from counterculture
to cyber culture. That was a story of
cheap housing. These you need to allow
people to be around each other to mix
each other. If it if only one type of
person can afford to be there, it
becomes a monoculture over time. And so
it's not just housing. This is about the
geography of economic innovation and
opportunity. That's why it's so fucking
important. Yeah. I mean, that's so
brilliantly put that, you know, the the
economic dynamism and the intellectual
dynamism that makes America, I think,
the greatest nation on earth, uh, is at
the core housing story. It's like you
have to live near the the place where
there is turmoil and turbulence
intellectually and economically
speaking. And so like you want to be
able to move there and like be part of
that culture, part of that economy and
part of that like how you raise your
kids and culturally what you want them
to study, what that you want them to do.
Yeah, that's fascinating. So what uh how
we solve the housing problem? Is it just
remove as much regulation as possible?
Like get out of the way? There's
certainly a lot of regulation that you
want to get out of the way. I mean, you
look at California, for example, you
were just giving a a beautiful summary
of just how important it is for people
to be able to move next to economic
opportunity. If you look at the number
of houses that have been permitted in
the state of California over the last 40
years, it's basically just a squiggle
line down. Like the tragedy here, just
to put a really fine point on it, is
that the city wasn't gated by geography
or by destiny. We or by technology. We
know how to build apartment buildings.
Yeah. Yeah. Elijah Otis invented the
elevator in like the 1850s. This is not
exactly a breaking technology. We chose
to do this. We wrote these laws. We are
we people are filing these lawsuits. We
judges are accepting these lawsuits and
determining that this building can't be
built. This is entirely self-inflicted.
And it's why over and over again in this
book. We call it a manufactured
scarcity, which is like a little bit of
a funny term. How do you manufacture the
absence of something? No, a manufactured
scarcity means you didn't have to do
this. A this is a humanmmade rule whose
purposeful goal was to make it harder to
add to the supply of something. And in
this case, especially since the 1960s,
we have made it purposefully difficult
to add housing supply and the outcome
just follow the process. You see housing
supply decline often in the richest
cities and these states that are
governed too often by progressives. How
do we undo it? Yes, a huge part of it
exists at the layer of law, right?
California is already trying to change
its laws, right? End single family
zoning, make it easier to add accessory
dwelling units called ADUs. We're
changing this at the at the level of
law. But one thing I'm very fixated on
is making sure that we also communicate
to people that it has to be changed at
the level of mindset and even at the
level of political courage. Because
here's like a model of what often
happens. You're the mayor of some city
and you want to add a housing
development of let's say 500 units,
right? 500 apartment unit building is
going to be set up by some developer and
there's a city council meeting to
determine whether or not this apartment
building is going to be built because of
loss aversion and because the people who
tend to go to city council meetings are
older and richer and homeowners. Guess
what the overwhelming volume of reaction
is in those city council meetings? It's
a lot of people who feel like they have
something to lose saying, "You cannot
put up this building. You cannot add
these apartments. It's going to ruin the
character of the neighborhood. It's
going to create traffic. It's going to
be like a head an eyesore because I
don't like buildings that are that
tall." Any number of excuses can come
out of like the Pez dispenser of
excuses. You take care of one, there's
going to be another that comes to the
surface. And so what often happens is
that these mayors or these people
sitting on the city council will look
out into this room of 50 people saying
no, no, no. And they'll say, I'm going
to represent the feedback that I see and
I'm going to vote no on the addition of
this housing build on on the addition of
these housing units, the addition of
this apartment building. Where political
courage comes into play is the ability
to say, you know what, I want everyone
here to know that I hear you. I'm
listening to you and I represent you and
so I'm grateful that you showed up to
the city council meeting. But for every
one person here who says they see a
benefit to adding a new apartment
building, I know that there are 10,000
people in the city that didn't have the
wealth or the knowledge to be here at
this meeting and they're going to
benefit from more housing because that's
going to bring down their housing costs.
And I represent them as well. I don't
just represent, you could say, the
circle of care that I can see right now.
I also represent the circle of voters
that we can't see right now who are in
the city or who are in the state or
might even want to move to the state but
currently can't because housing prices
are too high on account of housing
supply being restricted. And so one
thing we're trying to get liberals to
have is a sense of political courage to
stand up against this very visible
nimism and say we represent interests
that aren't necessarily visible at this
city council meeting. We represent the
larger interest of housing abundance. So
we're going to always default to saying
yes rather than default to saying no
just because the people who happen to
come to these meetings are nimbies. Want
to add a wrinkle on regulation and
deregulation. So, we were talking about
coding earlier. Who gets coded as
rightwing, who gets coded as leftwing.
Deregulation is a word that is highly
coded as rightwing. The rightwing wants
to deregulate, right? They want the the
government to stop regulating the
market. It's fine. Um, in many cases,
the government should deregulate parts
of the market. In many cases, it should
regulate parts of the market more. What
we don't talk about enough is how much
the government regulates the government
and how badly it needs to deregulate the
government. So I have many uh more left
friends and they'll come to me or
they'll critique me and they'll say this
all is fine but what we really need in
this country is public housing or it's
been rebranded social housing. It's
fine. Singapore huge amount of social
housing, right? They do a great job with
it. One of the things we go into and and
and this book is a manifesto on some
level but something we really try to do
is take you into the gritty, grimy,
frustrating details of how policy plays
out on the ground. what actually happens
after a bill passes and why we get the
outcomes we do because often it's like a
bunch of decisions made after everybody
stopped paying attention. So, one of the
things we we pay some real attention to
is the part of the kind of housing that
people on the left all agree on is
affordable housing through government
grants, right? The government says, "Oh,
we're not just going to have market rate
developers coming in building more
luxury condos for the children of the
upper class. We're going to build
affordable housing for, you know, people
who should be in this city, um, but
otherwise couldn't couldn't pay enough
to be here. California, uh, I could give
you two different examples, but let's
look at Los Angeles. I'm from outside
LA. Uh, and they have something I always
forget if it's measure H or measure HH,
but, uh, but California LA voters pass a
bond measure, uh, about a billion
dollars, a little bit more, I think it
was, to build affordable housing. Six
years later, when I'm writing about
this, they have built a couple thousand
units at an average cost of six to
$700,000 a unit. So, it's like it's
costing more to build housing under this
affordable housing bond measure, which
they have agreed to pay for um than it
is to buy a home market rate in Denver.
Denver's a nice Denver is a nice place
to live. So, why what had happened?
Well, it turns out that when you trigger
the public money in Cal in in various
cities, these are city ordinances often,
but not always, and you use these public
grants and you cobble together the
different grants you need to build an
affordable housing complex, what you've
done is layer onto yourself a huge
number of rules that the market rate
developers don't have to follow. You're
either using union labor or paying
prevailing wage. You're building to
higher green building codes. Um,
oftentimes, by the way, to get through
the kind of planning board meetings that
Derek is talking about, you've made a
bunch of concessions on the design, you
know, is there going to be parking in
it, you know, security, things like
that, um, you have to often agree to
who's going to be in the home. So,
you're you're getting, you know, there's
a thing in the Measure H stuff where,
well, they wanted it to not just be the
taxpayer money. They also wanted
nonprofit grants so the money would go
further. So, you're trying to get these
other grants, but these grants are to
house homeless veterans. So, now to open
the thing, you need to find these
homeless veterans. you need to go
through extra disability accessibility
reviews. And of course, we all want
these things to be accessible, but they
already had to comply with the American
Disability Act, but now you're doing
another disability act review in the
city. And they come in, they say, well,
you know, your doors are a little bit
not as wide as we think. So, you got to
make all your doors 3 in wider before
you can open up. And that adds time and
that adds cost. You have these
subcontractor rules, right? This is now
I'm using an example from San Francisco,
but you had a preference initially for
minority based sub subcontractors that
became illegal. became small businesses,
but that meant it had a preference
against the bigger contractors who were
more efficient at building
housing. In order to use public money
and then very much in in order to build
public housing directly, it ends up
being more expensive and slower than
market rate. And that is a choice. We do
not have to try to solve every problem
in society through an individual housing
project. Building affordable housing is
hard enough. It's not impossible, but
it's difficult to do. You do have to
talk with the neighbors, right? It's
never it's never going to be trivial to
build 500, you know, 500 unit apartment
building, but instead we layer on all
these external and and additional agenda
items. I call this everything bagel
liberalism cuz like, you know, you
sprinkle just enough on the bagel and
it's great, but if you saw everything
everywhere all at once, you put
everything on the everything bagel and
it becomes a black hole from which
nothing can escape. And so the the need
to deregulate government, right? Why? I
I I saw um some of Elon Musk's uh
marathon appearance on your show and he
talks about highspeed rail in California
and the thing he says there that it's
functionally illegal to build highspeed
rail in California. I got 100
disagreements with Elon Musk right now.
That's not one of them. It's
functionally illegal to build highspeed
rail in California. Like I went out I
tooured the highspeed rail. I've done a
lot of reporting on that. You can't
build it affordably. You just can't on
time. Like they they have no way to get
the money to build the rest of it. It's
not going to happen. And it's not going
to happen not because you can't build
highspeed rail. Europe builds highspeed
rail. Japan builds highspeed rail. China
builds highspeed rail. And it's not
because of the private market like we'll
only build luxury highspeed rail. It's
because we have so heavily regulated a
public project that you can't finish it
and you definitely can't bring it in on
time and affordably. And so I I really
would like to de like uncode
deregulation because yeah, there's
places where I would like to regulate
more. I don't want you to be able to
build a coal fired power plant in
America. I just don't want it to be
possible. I think it's bad. But I do
want it to be possible to build
high-speed rail and affordable housing,
including through the public market. And
one thing my friends on the left, I
think, really underrate is how hard
they've made it for the government to
act. They believe in government, but if
you believe in government, then you have
to make it possible for government to
complete projects. You have to make it
possible for um the people who work for
government to apply their own genius and
initiative. They have to have agency. Uh
I always say that like we're sort of
trapped right now between a government
between a party that wants government to
fail and a party that won't make
government work. And like we would like
like we are like we are trying to push
this idea that the thing we want is a
capable government, a strong government.
A government that when it promises it
will do something, it actually does and
gets it done. And that requires not just
deregulation of the private sector,
though sometimes it does require that.
It requires deregulation of the
government itself. I love this question
of deregulation. Um, but I also
sometimes find it very frustrating
because sometimes I find that people's
sense of regulation is so specifically
coded. Regulation is just rules. If you
change the word from regulation to
rules, I think it'd be easier for people
to see some rules are good and some
rules are stupid. We all understand that
in life. That's what regulations are.
They're just rules. And sometimes they
give us exactly the outcomes we want.
And sometimes they give us the outcomes
we would never hope for. And here's a
good example. You go back to the 1940s,
1950s. America was fucking
disgusting. Disgusting. The air and the
water was horrifying. In 1943, residents
of Los Angeles woke up to a smog that
was so black they thought the Japanese
had launched a chemical attack against
America. In New Hampshire, ne in the
rivers next to textile mills, sometimes
the rivers themselves would run green
and purple and red depending on what
textile colors were being dumped into
the river. You had the Ohio River on
fire in the 1960s, 1970s. The world of
mid 1900s America was truly sickening
and it made people sick. And so we
passed a raft of environmental rules and
some of them achieved exactly what we
wanted. the air we breathe and the water
we drink is cleaner because of the Clean
Air and Water Acts. We did extraordinary
things with this era of regulation. Some
of these regulations were about outcomes
that the Clean Air and Water Act
regulates specific pollution levels in
the air and the water or the emissions
coming out of tailpipes. Some of the
regulations though were about process.
NEPA is the National Environmental
Protection Act and it among many other
things empowered individuals and
citizens to sue the government and
organizations, businesses to stop
construction or fill out environmental
reviews to prove that their construction
wouldn't would meet muster, wouldn't
degrade the the the environment um too
severely. This opened the door to an
infinitude of lawsuits to wrap up any
effort to build anything in red tape
forever. So, fast forward to
2021, the year or sorry, the month after
Nuome signs Gavin Newsome, Governor of
California, signs the law to end single
family zoning in California. Seems like
a massive win for the pro-ousing yimies
of California. The month after that law
was passed, the board of supervisors in
San
Francisco decided to rule against an
apartment building that would have added
500 total units and 100 below market
rent units. So something like public or
social housing that was going to be
built on a Nordstrom parking lot, just
about the best possible place you could
add housing in the world, a Nordstrom
parking lot. because the builders, the
developers didn't file the appropriate
paperwork under environmental review. So
this is a world in which the most
housing starved city in America is being
starved even more of housing because of
the expression of or the power of the
instrumentalization of a rule passed the
1970s that has allowed people to sue to
stop the physical world from being
changed. And I think it goes back to
this idea that like sometimes the
solutions of one era can become the
problems of the next generation, right?
It was really good to pass the set of
environmental bills that we did in the
1960s and 1970s because it addressed the
extremely real problem of air and water
and land being degraded by industry. But
we're in a new world and the problem
environmentalism today is in part a
problem of global warming. And we have
to build not only dense housing but also
clean energy. And the same rules that
were designed to help the environment in
the 1960s and 1970s are sometimes
ironically used in a way that hurt the
environment in the 2020s. And that's one
reason why we as liberals need a
paradigm shift. Okay. You said a lot of
really interesting insights there. So
one, if I understood correctly, that
regulation of
outcomes is it more a good idea than
regulation of process cuz regulation of
process is where you can breed a lot of
basically the lawyers show up. The other
insight is if we get rid of 99% of
lawyers, the world would be a better
place. There's a lot of jokes around
that. I don't know. I don't know if you
agree, but that I definitely wouldn't
say 99%.
982.3 in the 80s. Okay. Majority of
them. No. Uh they're they're simply
there to take advantage of the the
rules. We talk a lot about a book. Um I
don't know if you've run into this one,
but it's by Manser Olsen, who's sort of
a founder of public interest economics,
and it's called The Rise and Decline of
Nations. This is a like a very famous
book. Libertarians love this book. Um
and I love this book. It's not right
about everything, but its fundamental
question is how come after World War II
did the completely destroyed, bombed out
countries of Germany and Japan. You
would have thought they would be just
screwed. And instead, they both become
growth miracles. They both do much
better than the UK, which you know was
on the winning side of the war. Why? and
and
also stable societies over long periods
of time develop something that is very
difficult to develop and very important
to to develop which is bargaining
organizations right collective action is
hard it is hard to form an organization
it is hard to make that organization
persist but if you can do that in an
atmosphere of stability then over time
that organization will tend to entrench
its power right think about ARP or the
chamber of commerce or um certain unions
or you know uh uh so you know the
national manufacturing council etc the
business roundt you know they're not
that powerful when they start but over a
long period of time they become really
powerful and they start to pass laws and
make themselves more powerful and so on
there's a lot you can say about this
insight but my favorite part of Olson's
book and one that I I don't think people
emphasize enough is this insight he has
which is that over time countries will
begin every country has a kind of form
of natural selection within it and that
form of natural selection will select
for people with the skill to navigate
best navigate the kind of economy that
country has. So if you're in China right
now and China is in its developmentalism
phase, you really want to be in civil
infrastructure, right? It is great to be
a civil engineer in China, great to be
working on semiconductors in China,
great to be doing all this stuff in the
physical world. But America, you know,
as a as a a kind of price of our
affluence and our success, we've become
a country, and this happens to a lot of
countries where negotiation is really
important. And a country in which
negotiation is really important is going
to over time start developing a
preference for lots of lawyers, people
in finance, management, consultants
because it is society that requires
continuous what he calls complex
bargaining. And I think this actually
explains a lot. Patrick Collison, we
quote him in the who's a found the CEO
of Stripe, you know, brilliant tech guy.
Here's this point that he made in an
interview with Noah Smith, who's a a
blogger and economist where they were
talking about highspeed rail and and
sort of Patrick makes this point. He's
like, it's just tough to be a highspeed
rail engineer in America. You're going
to have a much easier time working in
the digital space. And so the digital
space becomes a kind of frontier of last
resort. And so people want to build
things go into into bits and bites, not
into atoms, right? To to use the old
kind of Peter Teal cut. And I think
there's something to that. It's not that
lawyers are bad. Um some of the people I
love in most in this world are lawyers
and many lawyers do amazing amazing
work. But one reason we've selected for
so many lawyers and America has a lot of
lawyers is we became a society that
needs a lot of lawyers because we are a
society that is stable, affluent, and
we've become like very into bargaining.
You know, Donald Trump is a real estate
developer. That's a relational business.
The way real estate development works in
this country, the reason you don't have
all that many huge firms building
housing in many many states
simultaneously is it requires a lot of
relationships in the individual city
you're in. And so, you know, if you read
say Maggie Haberman's great biography of
Don of Donald Trump, Confidence Man,
which focuses a lot on his time as a
real estate magnet in in New York, you
see like Donald Trump doesn't build a
ton of stuff in other states. He
actually builds in other countries
sometimes or more to the point he puts
his name on things built in other
countries, but really what he did was
built here. And he built here through
his relationships with the New York
political system. And so over time,
societies that make building and
construction and creation, something
that is the output of
negotiations rather than like very clear
standards and rules where if you've done
it, you can just do it. You get a lot of
lawyers. You get a lot of management
consultants. You get a lot of finance
people because that's what society is
selecting for. That's what you've made
it possible to have agency and freedom
in. That's what you need to do to to to
do big things. Um, this is coming from
Nick Bagley who's a a University of
Michigan law professor. But between
Walter Manddale and Tim Walls, there's
not a single person on a Democratic
presidential ticket who didn't go to law
school. Not one. Like the Democratic
Party in particular is a party of
lawyers. And lawyers look at things
through the legal perspective. And the
legal perspective is that government is
legitimate by following process. And
Bagley's point is that government
attains legitimacy at least in part
through outcomes. And when you prize
process so high over outcomes, you think
you're acting legitimately, but actually
what would have made you legitimate in
the view of the people is that you built
the thing you told them you were going
to build. You made it possible to live
affordably in the city. And so you have
this sort of movement then over time to
populist strong men who say I alone can
fix it because they've kind of given up
on this procedural liberalism like that
didn't deliver for them. So you keep
telling them you know we're the ones who
know how to run government and they
don't see it and eventually somebody
else comes and says I'm going to bust
through the walls of this thing like the
Kool-Aid Man and they win. So speaking
of the Kool-Aid Man
I see what you're about to do.
Yeah. I'm so transparent. It makes me
think I'm uh a robot built in a lab
somewhere. Sam Alman once said to me, he
said, "Well, aren't you just a
reinforcement learning system with
energy running through it?" Yeah. It's
like, I'd like to think not, but
maybe. Uh so on the Kool-Aid man uh I
was wondering if you could maybe steal
man
uh the case for and against Elon Musk
and Doge because you mentioned all of
these regulations, all of this
complexities that get in the way of
building. It seems like a uh bold human
like Elon is required to break through
the regulation. put that on one side and
the other side I read somewhere that
abundance is kind of the anti-d doge
uh so which to me it seems like there is
conflicting ideas but there's also
alignment so maybe can we break all that
I think the steel man is very easy to
make here department of government
efficiency that sounds like an
organization that's needed if government
is inefficient and one of the themes of
our book is just how inefficient
government can be not only at building
houses, building energy, often at
achieving its own ends. Building
highspeed rail when it wants to build
highspeed rail, adding affordable
housing units when it wants to afford
add affordable housing units. You know,
I love Ezra's line that we don't just
need to think about, you know,
deregulating the market. We need to
think about deregulating government
itself, getting the rules out of the way
that keep government from achieving the
democratic outcomes that it's trying to
achieve. This is a world in which a
department of government efficiency is a
godsend. We should be absolutely
obsessed with making government work
well, especially if we're going to be
the kind of liberals who believe that
government is important in the first
place. So that to me is the sort of
pillbox version of a steel case for a
department of government efficiency.
Wait, before you do the anti- case, can
I offer a different steelman, please? I
think the Steelman case for what Doge
is, right? Rather than what it pretended
to be, is
that the government is an interest. The
the the bureaucracy, the deep state, the
rules, the regulations, and it's not
about efficiency. Never was. You
wouldn't do this if it was about
efficiency. That it's zerobased
budgeting. That you're breaking the
thing. You're turning it on and off.
you're firing massive parts of it
because the only way to make change
within it possible is to delete what
currently exists whether it was
efficient or not. You would never
actually know that if you had it all
come and present its case for efficiency
or something. You never know. You get
turned around whatever that the the only
way like the problem with the government
is there is no actual competition. the
department of education doesn't get out
competed by the um you know the agency
of education which is started up you
know three years ago or something and
because of that the only way to make
possible radical change is to bulldoze
the thing that currently exists and then
once that is done you can begin to
rebuild you can you know if you've fired
half the department of education then
you can start rehiring your people and
they will actually do what you want if
you have shown that you can delete every
regulation or just not follow it, then
you can begin deciding which ones to
actually follow. If there is no
department of USAD and you've moved back
under state, then you can tell state
what really to fund in terms of foreign
aid. Right? There's a a theory here, I
think, that was never about efficiency.
It was about deletion. Um he's not
trying to make things run a little bit
better. He's not trying to lower the
overhead cost of government. That the
theory is that in the first term, the
bureaucracy impeded Donald Trump. It
didn't listen to him. Bureaucracy is
supposed to be limbs of the president.
The only way to make the federal
government a neural link of Donald Trump
himself is to destroy the federal
government and then rebuild it as that
thing. I think if you talk to people at
Doge or talk to people who are authors
of the project of project 2025, who are
at Heritage, who are chiefs of staff of
the people working for Heritage, if you
have a truth serum conversation with
these folks and you say
defended this is what they're saying.
You're saying something metastatic has
grown inside of the government. Not just
over the last few years under Joe Biden,
but over the last few decades, maybe
going all the way back to FDR and even
Woodro Wilson. We have allowed an
administrative state to accumulate like
barnacles on a ship around the executive
branch. And it's keeping the executive
branch from being able to translate the
democratic will into policy because
there's never any president who is
purely elected by the people. they're
elected into an office that is already
pre-contaminated by the bureaucracy
itself. And we're trying to take all of
that away. We're trying to I mean, this
is this is very just explicitly the case
they're going to make trying to make
government more democratic, not less, by
allowing the democratic the elected
president guide in a or lead in a pure
way. Okay. So, as you said, two things.
One is the steel man and then at the end
there there was a non-steelman. So the
the first part is cutting removing as
much as possible to see what's actually
needed. That's seems like one of the
ways to figure out what's actually
needed is by removing it. And then
there's the second thing is that you
mentioned so that you can install the
people that follow your policy. What I
disagree with you that that wasn't the
steelman. I mean I think you have to
listen to them to do the steelman,
right? I don't think the steelman is
imaginary. If you read the um the OM
regulation that froze funding, it said
explicitly that the government has to
reflect the will of the people as
expressed through their choice of
president. If you read anything Russ has
ever said, they have the unitary
executive theory. I'm not saying it's
right or wrong. I I if you ask me to do
the non-steelman, which I would love to
do too, it is not my view that the
steelman case of this is to make the
federal government fully responsive to
Donald Trump, but the steelman case for
what they are doing as expressed by
them. And I think like a steelman
reflects like I mean I have talked to
these people, right? Like I'm telling
you what they tell me on some level. Um
the Sealman cases they believe like as
Derek said a minute ago this has become
non-democratically responsive like and
the way it becomes democratically
responsive is deeply responsive to the
president. The president represents a
different politics than Joe Biden's
politics. And so if you have a state
filled with liberal civil servants who
don't want to do what he says that is a
violation of small D democratic
principles of how the government should
be run. I I think if you don't like it
that's fine. But I do want to say like I
actually think that is that is the
steelman. He's not they're not doing
this for no reason. They have an
intention here and I think you know the
whether you like it or not sort of
depends on whether or not you like their
view. Okay. Well, I don't like it
because it cuts my ear in a certain way
that one of the criticisms I have for
Donald Trump and and the Trump
administration is there's a natural
circles of sycopanty that forms and
favor you know every president has their
personality and psychological quirks and
and I think he is one of the people
where favoritism is more likely to
develop. So when you choose who to
install as the head of whatever
organization,
uh so if you fire everybody and rehire,
the rehiring process is more likely uh
to have people that just said nice
things about about Donald Trump in the
past versus a meritocracy based system
that these people are really good. Lex
AOC should definitely come on this show.
Well, she she has her own, but the ideal
the steelman to me about not maybe what
Elon is is doing is in order to have the
best people in the world doing a great
job at every part of government, you
have to figure out I mean his first
email of like what have you done this
week? There's the if we just steal man
everything he's been doing which is like
let's find the productive people that
show up to work that love what they're
doing that are actually sort of amazing
of what they're doing. I mean how would
you solve that problem? From his
experience in business it's painful but
effective to just fire almost everybody
and then rebuild from there and
continuously do that. And as a the
result, as long as everybody's aligned
on a mission is you're simplifying over
and over the system. So it's more and
more and more effective. Now like how
would how else would you approach um we
could start now criticizing how how
would you make government more efficient
if not by the way that they're doing it?
Yeah. Can I steal man to the other side
now? Sure. Um okay.
You wouldn't do this. You wouldn't do
this. So, let me say a couple things.
One is that efficiency only makes sense
when yolked to a
goal. So, when if Elon Musk came in and
did this at Tesla, Musk had a goal for
Tesla. It was to build the electric
vehicle of the future. SpaceX, he had a
goal for SpaceX. We know what the goal
for SpaceX is. in some long-term way go
to Mars, but in some short-term way, you
know, cheaper orbital travel, you know,
a cheaper orable orbital shipping,
reusable rockets, etc. We know what the
goal for Solar City was. In a way, and I
do think sort of the purchase of Twitter
is late Elon, which becomes a much more
political set of goals, but but
nevertheless, um, in a way, at least
there's an expressed idea Twitter,
right, which is the the return of free
expression. I think it's really
important if you are steel manning or
any kind of manning is is being is
really asking and like listening to what
people are saying their goal is because
efficiency does not exist in a vacuum,
right? The a state that is efficient at
building dirty energy and a state that
are is efficient at burning clean
energy. They're they're sort of they
could be opposite versions of each
other, right? You have to be you have to
be optimizing towards something. You're
an AI guy. You have to optimize towards
something. And the goal I I I find
myself really consistently frustrated by
conversations about Doge that treat
efficiency as some free floating thing.
Or I sometimes will hear people say to
me, very smart people have said to me,
"Oh, what Doge is really doing is
stripping the government down to studs
so it can put AI into it because Elon
believes in AGI is coming soon and you
need to make a government capable of
using AGI." And I always say to them,
okay, AI towards what? towards what
value function towards what prompt are
you inserting at the at the base level.
Sorry about that.
Um and I think a few things become very
clear. One is that it is towards Donald
Trump. It is his movement. Elon Musk
serves at his pleasure. Elon Musk has
said that he would like to himself
chisel Donald Trump's uh face into Mount
Rushmore. He said he loves Donald Trump
as much as a man can love any other man.
He believes in Trump, right? I think you
have to take him at his word. Or maybe
you think he's very cynical and he's
saying all that to curry favor in a
sickopantic way with Trump. But at some
point Elon Musk does not serve with any
kind of independence. If Trump says your
power is gone, his power is gone. He's
an outside he's functionally an outside
adviser to the government. So then you
you really do I think have to listen to
what Donald Trump has said, what Russ
has said. And they believe that Trump
represents something fundamental. His
movement represents something
fundamental that has been suppressed in
American life. Okay. I think if you were
doing something the the best cases I've
seen for Elon are a zerobased budgeting
case. You're trying to break everything
down to studs and then it needs to
rejustify itself. He did this at
Twitter. The engineers had to come in
and justify to that to his people what
they were actually doing. But that
wasn't how those emails worked. We all
know this, right? He doesn't have a
staff capable of seriously working
through and then following up on emails
from two million government employees
about what they did that week and then
really checking, well, did they do it
well? Like was the thing accomplished?
Right? Like that's not how you do that.
Like what he's got 50 people a do
nothing. Um if you want to do zerobased
budgeting it has to be against a
criteria. So coming in and gutting USID
some things USA ID does are just
extraordinary. Right. PEPAR nobody
anywhere thought PEPAR was not a an
efficient program. PEPFAR is maybe the
highest value thing that we have ever
done in the US government to save human
life through foreign aid. I mean just
bluntly it's a George W. Bush program.
It saved a generation of people from
dying of HIV AIDS. They just turned it
off and they didn't have somebody come
in and justify the PEPAR funding. They
just turned it off as they turned all
these different things off and have
never given people a serious effort to
come back in and say, "This is what we
do." They just fired half of the people
at DOE. DOE is, if you look at it, DOE
has the lowest staffing level of any
agency, but the fourth highest
appropriation, and it administers the
more than $1 trillion um higher ed. It
is in overhead terms one of the leanest
of all the agencies alongside Social
Security agency. They didn't tell those
people like what they wanted out of a
DOE of half the size. They didn't let
those people come in and argue for their
jobs. They're just cutting things and
they're not explaining at any point at
any level what they want to do with
them. I'm And then I will also say what
they're doing is probably illegal.
Right. Just this week or last week, a
judge said that um about 26,000 people
need to be rehired by the federal
government because their firings were
illegal. And now that's going to go up
to the Supreme Court and we'll see what
John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett say,
right? That that that that game is not
done yet. But they have Congress. I am a
person who believes we needed civil
service reform. Too hard to hire, too
hard to fire, too hard to manage. and
they could have gone to Congress and
frankly at the beginning Roana and a
bunch of Democrats that they wanted to
work with Doge. Democrats were defeated.
If you had wanted to build some amount
of like political, you know,
bipartisanship, it was there to do,
right? Like the Democrats voted for the
Lake and Riley bill, the hardcore
immigration bill, they were ready to
deal, but they didn't want to do that
because it is fundamentally for them
about political control. And this is my
stalemate case for the action. This is a
case. I believe what Elon did at Twitter
was not make Twitter more efficient.
It's not like a better product now. It's
a different product. What he did was he
made it controllable. What he did at
Twitter was he went into something that
he where he thought the people disagreed
with him and he broke it until he had
actual operational control of the thing
and they would do what he wanted them to
do and then he can move it in his
direction. What they're doing in the
federal government and this is what
Chris Rufo wanted to do. It's what Russ
wanted to do is make the thing
controllable. And what they want to do
with that control, I don't even think
they fully know. But their view is that
the federal government is like a um it
is the capital city that they have
conquered and now they need to turn it
into something that they can actually
use. And the in order to do that, I mean
Russ said you need to traumatize the
civil servants, right? That was his
word, traumatize the civil servants.
When you know Elon Musk talked about
USA, he said it's all worms, no apple.
We're going to feed it to the wood
chipper. This isn't the language of
let's see who's really doing a good job
here and who's not. This is a language
of conquering. This is the language of
destruction. And they have not
articulated new better goals for it. And
nor are they starting with the parts of
the government where I think you would
start with like what do they want the
education department to do? Like I'm a
professional political journalist. I
talk to people in the Trump
administration. I can't tell you what
they want out of it. Aside from the fact
that they don't like it and they think
it's like a hot bed of of other people's
power, I can tell you what some
conservatives have written about it, but
the administration itself has not
articulated goals. So like what I think
their their view is right now is they're
breaking the thing and trying to make
the people who would be oppositional
either like leave or go into hiding and
then they're going to figure out what
they want to do with it. But like right
now they're in the period where you have
to sack and then like later on you can
build yourself your monument monuments
and turn the civil service to your to
your own ends. That is my like I don't
think it's still I just that is what I
think is going on. I I think that's an
uh from a certain perspective accurate
and insightful description. If we just
look at
Twitter you said that he didn't make
it more efficient. He made it more
controllable. Let me just describe just
because I I know the engineers inside
Twitter well which which we could argue
that the government is very different
than a company. That's an important
argument there. With Twitter, the
culture that's there
now. People are really excited to work
there and to be productive there.
Engineers. Elon is really good at
finding people that are there extremely
good at what they do and are there to
give everything and the resulting thing
this machine that is created all
barriers removed you create beautiful
stuff it's not like uh move fast and
break things this very cynical
perspective on it no you everybody loves
what they do are good at it and are
really rapidly figuring out all the
multitude of problems that arise in that
and so it just creates It's a c it's a
different culture, a culture of
productivity and it's not like some
negative uh boys club or there's all
kinds of negative perspectives you can
take on those things. No, it's it's a
positive culture of productivity.
Controllable side also really important
to understand and that could be taken
advantage of in a really negative way
especially in government. But you should
say on some of the most successful
software
projects there is a level of control
required to like open source projects uh
Linus Tovald the head of the uh that
heads up the Linux kernel there has to
be what's often called the the
benevolent dictator for life there there
has to be a
controllability to the machine of this
extremely productive efficient team to
work together. Now, those are
engineering projects. And the problem
with government is you get elected new
dict benevolent dictators for life that
come. They're often not benevolent. And
they're often not benevolent. And they
all convince themselves they're
benevolent. You know, I'm sure Hitler
thought he's doing the right thing, the
good thing, the benevolent thing in his
worldview. Every single dictator does
that. Yes. So, that's a problem. But in
order to be efficient, there has to be
some level of controllability and there
has to be I think to to back to go back
to the steel man, you have to have a
culture of productivity that I'm not
sure I've had um quite a bit of
experience with DoD and DARPA through
from the academic side just everything
is so bureaucratic and slow. That's a
different culture. So you know part of
the destruction is in reestablishing a
culture and yes make it more
controllable so you can be efficient. We
still need to define what the outcome
is. Productivity and service of what?
Efficiency and service of what? And I
think the justosition of the private and
public sectors is really useful here.
Private companies, publicly traded
companies have the benefit of tight and
quantifiable feedback loops. Are you
making more money this quarter than you
were last quarter or less? How's
consumer feedback? Do people say they
like the product more? Are you getting
4.8 on your reviews or 4.6? The feedback
loops are very quantifiable and they're
also very, very quick. You know exactly
when you're doing a good and bad job.
And so the KPIs are so cleanly drawn
that people are aligned in their sense
of we are moving forward or moving back.
Right? I don't think government has done
this at all under doge. In fact, I think
some in some ways goals that you could
clearly identify as being good are being
torn down. And this is why again it's so
useful to be able to articulate goals in
politics because without an articulation
of goals, you don't know whether the job
to be done is to take something away or
to add something. And right now the
answer from Doge is to take away, take
away, subtract everything, break down to
studs, as Ezra said. But let's take a
really really concrete example here. The
FDA, right? Doge just laid off dozens of
probationary employees, so upwardly
mobile, recently hired, often very
young, nicely credentialed employees at
the FDA as a part of its slashing of the
federal workforce. One of the big
problems of the FDA is slow approval of
phase three clinical trial drugs. Right?
Everyone in this country who believes in
science and technology wants the most
lifesaving drugs to be brought into the
public marketplace as soon as possible
and competed against with other drugs so
the price comes down and helps to extend
people's lives and health spans. I think
everyone agrees that is an outcome worth
fighting for and if they don't certainly
Ezra and I are willing to say that's an
outcome that we want that is that's what
we want from our science policy. What
happens if you cut probationary
employees at the FDA? The FDA doesn't
become more efficient, it becomes less
efficient because the same amount of
work spread over fewer people means
longer delays in terms of approving
phase 3 clinical trial drugs and
deciding whether or not to approve them
for public consumption. So in this
really really clear and very specific
example, I think we can see the problem
with not having articulated goals. You
don't know whether the job to be done is
to take away employees or to add them. I
think if instead what Doge had done is
come in and say, you know what, Elon
Musk and a bunch of other people from
Silicon Valley, one thing we take very
seriously is the importance of
scientific and technological progress.
Because if you look back over decades
and centuries, what distinguishes our
generation from every other generation
in terms of its health and its power is
science and technology. And we want to
infuse government with a sense of
science and technological progress. And
to that end, one thing we want to do is
to have a smarter and more efficient FDA
so that people can experience
life-saving medicines. I think what you
would do is research the bottlenecks
that exist to American science and
pharmaceutical policy and say we should
hire more people at the FDA to
accelerate drug approval, decide which
which drugs are to be rejected and which
drugs are to get the FDA label. That is
the opposite of the Doge approach. And
this really, I think, puts a fine point
to the problem of a Doge without goals.
When Elon takes over Tesla, when Elon is
at SpaceX, when Elon's at X, I would
imagine, and you know this better than
me because you know him. And maybe most
importantly, for the purposes of this
part of the conversation, you know the
people who work for him. I'll bet if you
ask the people who work under Elon, Ed,
Tesla, SpaceX, they say, "I know exactly
what Elon wants. This is his goal for
the Superheavy rocket. This is his goal
in terms of humanoid robots. This is his
goal in terms of profitability of
Twitter and the growth of our
subscription business and how we're
going to integrate new features. There's
a probably a really clear mind meld
right now. I have no sense that there's
a mind meld. And in fact, I have the
exact opposite sense that rather than an
example of creative destruction, which
would be a mitzvah of entrepreneurship,
we have an act of destruction
destruction. We have destruction for the
sake of destruction. It's much cleaner
to me from an interpretive standpoint to
describe Doge as an ideological purge of
progressivism performing an act of or
performing the job of efficiency rather
than a department of actual efficiency
itself. I want to say because I really
want to emphasize that it has goals. The
goals are clear on some level and they
have to do with centralizing power. So
let me take out something that's not
Doge because this is I think an
important place where you see what the
the effort is. One of what is Congress
for? Not just Democrats in Congress who
are in theory right now the opposition
party but but Republicans in Congress.
Congress is this aggregation of
information from different places in the
country who have chosen representatives
to represent them in Washington. Right?
That's how the system works.
One of the things that has really cowed
congressional Republicans, it is a huge
gra like sunlight gravitational force
now on Capitol Hill is that Elon has
made it known that any House or Senate
Republican who defies Trump on a key
vote, cabinet nominees, the CR, that
kind of thing. He will dump 50 to$100
million into a primary. It's no money at
all for him. It's lethal for them.
Right? This is well known. He has said
this like personally to some of them,
right? It's been well reported. This is
probably why Jody Ernst vot voted for
Pete Hegsth. Well, what's achieved by
this? I think it's like an interesting
question because Republicans in theory
are allied to Donald Trump, right? He's
the the nominee of their party and they
don't all have like literally the same
view of him. But I think you might say
from one perspective, there is a value
in the system in there being checks and
balances. There's a value in the system
in the system having to absorb other
kinds of information. Now, we already
don't have the checks and balances we
once had or thought we would have in
this country because we have
nationalized political parties instead
of, you know, uh, branches of government
that that sort of compete, you know,
with ambition checking ambition. And
I've done whole shows on this and we can
talk about that if we want, but we we do
have political parties and political
parties are themselves institutions that
aggregate different kinds of
information. in order to try to come to
some outcome that is a better outcome
because more information is surfaced. I
think Donald Trump would be in a
stronger position for him if Senate
Republicans could have done what they
actually wanted to do and not confirm
RFK Jr. not confirm Tulsi Gabard, not
confirm Pete Haggath, not confirm Cash
Patel and Don Mino, right? That's
actually a huge amount of risk the Trump
administration has taken on. If they had
named a sort of normal figure to HHS and
then there's a measles outbreak. Well,
measles outbreaks are tough. Like,
that's a hard thing. If you name RFK Jr.
and there's a huge measles outbreak,
you're really going to get blamed for
that because people are ready to blame
you. If there is a domestic terror
attack after you've put Cash Patel,
who's quite unqualified, in charge of
the FBI, and they've sort of launched a
war internally against the FBI, which
they see as a hot bed of anti-Trump
sentiment, and the FBI in the sort of
internal chaos misses some things, and
you have deaths on American soil, that's
a huge amount of risk you've taken on. I
mean, the guy they fired, Chris Ray, he
was Trump's appointee. It wasn't some
Democrat. Trump named him in his first
term. But Elon, right, what he did here
was he created a kind of death star of
primary money. And he has said that like
if you cross Trump in Congress, even as
a Republican, you're done. Like between
Trump's control of attention and loyalty
and my ability to outspend you, like
you're
toast. I think what that reveals is that
what he wants is for power to be
centralized under Trump. We've been
talking about through bureaucracy, but
he also wants it to be true in Congress.
I am not a Donald Trump fan, but
obviously other people are Donald Trump
fans, right? Obviously, I think at this
point Elon Musk is a Donald Trump fan,
but much of the country thinks this guy
is great. And I think we should take
what they are doing at word and deed.
The point of Donald Trump is that Donald
Trump is right about things. We should
give him power and he should use that
power. My sense is you have some mixed
feelings about him, but not everybody
does. and the this sort of very
consistent application of authority
across the people he's named JD Vance
the difference between Mike Pence and JD
Vance is JD Vance said explicitly in the
whole runup to the vice presidential
sweep stakes that his view of what went
wrong in the first administration is
between the bureaucracy and the staff
too many people were trying to inhibit
Donald Trump and that what he would do
is tell Trump that like he's got to get
rid of these generals and he's got to
get people who will do what Trump
actually said. The view of Trump's fans,
the view of his allies, is that the
first term didn't go well enough because
they had too much opposition from
Republicans in Congress who talked Trump
into things they should have talked him
into and too much opposition from the
civil service and even from Trump's own
staff. I think a very simple heristic of
why these terms are so different is that
the most important member of the Trump
family, Trump aside, in the first term
was Jared Kushner and maybe Ivanka and
the most important member of the family
in the second is Don Trump Jr., Right.
Kushner brought in a bunch of
inhibitors. He brought in mainstream
figures like Gary Conn and and and you
know Kushner represented other parts of
society that you know were sort of mixed
on Trump and they wanted him to do
certain things and not others and there
was a maybe a productive tension. Um
McConnell you know was majority leader.
He was more powerful than th is. Paul
Ryan was speaker. He's more powerful
than Mike Johnson is. In the second term
you have Donald Trump Jr. who brings in
much more right-wing figures. Who's much
they're accelerators not inhibitors.
accelerationists in many cases
explicitly. You have Elon Musk who
believes like the likeliest problem is
Trump doesn't go far enough fast enough.
And you have a weak Republican Congress
that is further cowed by Musk's money.
The it could be good or it could be bad.
But the Curtis Yarvin take that we need
a more monarch-like figure is clearly
being tested out. Like the view just as
you said about software engineering
things is that you often need a
benevolent dictator. Now I don't think
Trump is benevolent. Other people do.
But the view that what is being
attempted here is something much more
centralized in its power, I think is
actually a shared view of what's going
on. It's like a consensus reality we
have, not like an argument over reality
we're having. Do you think there's some
degree to where if you trust in the
system of democracy, which I do, and
there's some people and we'll talk about
them who one of the main criticisms and
concerns of Donald Trump was he's going
to break democracy. But if you trust
that democracy holds, isn't this an
interesting
experiment of how when everybody's
aligned, aggressive cutting of
regulation and the number of people is
an experiment of like, okay, let's see
what this does to a really overbloated
bureaucracy that's become extremely
inefficient. And by the way, so I have
an optimism about it that matches the
the vision of abundance in the book that
once you do the creative destruction,
then you start to really be able to step
in and have a clear vision of like,
okay, housing, how do we what are the
policies to solve housing? But I do
think the first step that's needed is
the destruction. Asra said, we're sort
of speedr running a particular
experiment here. Yeah. Of what does
executive power look like if we do away
as much as possible with checks and
balances. And I would submit that we're
already starting to get some feedback
loops from the market. The stock market
is not the economy, but it is a very
clear voting mechanism. And what's clear
is that many institutional and retail
investors think that the current
economic regime is pushing us toward a
recession that we don't have to have.
Right? Donald Trump has insulated
himself from any feedback loop or any
sense of criticism that his tariff
policy might not be the best course of
strategy for American industry or global
relations. And as a result, what we have
is, I think, fairly described as a kind
of purposeful chaos. I mean, what other
term can you use if a tariff is being
announced at 9:00 a.m. and then taken
away at 3:30 p.m. and then 10 days later
announced at 9:37 and then renegotiated
at 2:45? This is not a principled theory
of the perfect tariff level on
international trade. This is, I think,
much more parsimmoniously explained by
just an expression of Donald Trump's
personality. This is a New York re real
estate guy. He loves making big awesome
pronouncements and then using those big
awesome pronouncements in order to
negotiate little one-on-one dealings
where he can rest for himself a personal
sense of power or money or pride. Right?
Announcing these tariffs in a in a in a
sort of chaotic way forces world leaders
to get on the phone with him and say,
"Donald, what can I give you to bring
down the tariff?" Right? This is
personality standing in for politics in
a way that's totally unmolested by
anybody else's sense of, hey, that'll
maybe chill it on the tariff policy.
Hey, let's maybe slow down on the
deportations. I'm not so sure about this
particular move over here. Instead, you
have an executive branch that's just a
full manifestation of Donald Trump's
mind. and and and I and I do think that
the early returns, if you look at
consumer sentiment, if you look at the
stock market, if you look at the 10-year
yield, you have a range of, let's call
them, aggregated economic information
telling us that the economy, consumers,
employers, investors do not like what's
happening now, which is going to be a
really interesting test case. Donald
Trump's first four years in office,
right? Love him or hate him, were four
rather successful years of economic
growth. Low unemployment, steady growth,
low inflation, pretty much every
economic indicator in the green. We're
already in the red in many of the
economic indicators that never even
blinked yellow under his first
administration. And I personally don't
think it's a coincidence that you're
getting these red indicators at a time
when Donald Trump is having an entirely
different experience of being president
where there is no minut, hey, maybe
let's cool it off in the tariffs. The
one more thing I would add here is you
said, you know, maybe maybe Trump's
presidency is a kind of right-wing
abundance, right? I think that's that's
it's a worthy question, right? Is Donald
Trump just doing his own version of
abundance and we should even if we
disagree with his process ideologically
sort of root for the outcomes that are
that are likely under it? Here's why I
don't think
so. Let's say that you or just someone
as a as a conservative shares our view
that they want housing to be abundant. I
think what they should really root for
is to reduce the tax of forb building
and make it easier to add housing units
cheaply. Well, houses are made out of
materials. Two of the most important
materials in home building are soft
lumber and drywall. Soft lumber we
import from Canada. Drywall, one of the
key ingredients we import from Mexico.
One of the first things that's going to
happen if you raise 25% tariff on lumber
from Canada and drywall from Mexico is
that the cost of housing is going to go
straight up. And this isn't my personal
opinion. This was a March 7th memo sent
by the National Association of
Homebuilders essentially in a kind of
controlled panic saying, "Please don't
do a tariff policy like this. You're
going to screw over homebuilders." Even
though, ironically, you Donald Trump
were elected by Biden to Trump voters
who were mad about the price of housing.
So, I am not in the moment optimistic
that his centralizing style is going to
be economically useful for Americans,
whatever their interests. My sense of
the early feedback and of the early
returns is that he in fact does not have
a very clear and beneficial economic
agenda. He has a personal agenda. He
likes taking phone calls from
international leaders and working out
little deals with them. I don't think
that's in the larger interest of
economic growth and certainly I don't
think it's in the specific interest of
reducing housing prices. Okay, there's a
lot to say there. So uh first of all can
we separate the uh sort of abundance and
doge those efforts from tariffs
uh I don't know who agrees with
terrorists tariffs don't make sense to
me economically I maybe you can explain
who agrees or likes the terrorists on
the right or the left you see my point
that well that point also to comment on
it I mean the one of the mechanisms by
which bureaucracy forms is a kind of
polite civility and a structure and a
process. There is a argument to be made
and I'm not saying Donald Trump is that
person, but there's some qualities there
of picking up the phone and calling
Putin. Uh that goes against all the
process. Uh some of the most successful
peace negotiations
uh throughout history broke process.
It's uh just spoken to Modi. You know,
there's a process. You're not supposed
to meet with Pakistan or whatever for
India. You just screw it. I'm going to
go to a wedding, a Pakistan wedding of a
high up official. I'm going to do do
these things that are very Trumpian.
Break the rules. Okay. Now, that, you
know, in a perfect world, some of that
is good matched with principled policy
that's uh surrounded by a large number
of experts that actually understand that
policy. Okay, I can criticize Trump all
day, but I'm just saying that there is
some degree to the picking up the phone
and talking to leaders and playing the
in the morning say one thing, in the
evening another. That could be part of a
principled chaos. I think the important
part of madman theory is that you're not
actually a madman. You just got to
convince people you are. Yes. Yes. Look,
I don't think I am in agreement that we
should talk to everybody. People I don't
know how many Yeah. I don't know how
many people followed the 2008 election
closely who are watching this. There's a
big fight in that election between
Clinton and Obama about should you
negotiate with your enemies and Obama's
view is we should we should talk to
anybody and Clinton's view was more
nuanced than that right certainly we
shouldn't at this juncture and during
his presidency Obama did a deal with
Iran on on the the nuclear question he
negotiated with Cuba right he had very
direct negotiations with Russia um he
did it importantly unlike Donald Trump
without alienating all of our
traditional allies. One of the things
that I think is important to say about
Trump is that the the difference between
Trump and say Biden or Trump and Obama
is not that Trump will negotiate with
Putin and Obama wouldn't. It's that
Trump is realigning our alliances. He
doesn't really seem to want to negotiate
with the Europeans or at least he wants
to do it from a more hostile position.
He wants to make Canada the 51st state,
not treat it as a longtime ally. The the
thing here is not that Trump is
negotiating with our perceived enemies.
These are his perceived allies and he's
turning our traditional allies into
perceived enemies. So with him I think
it's important like I am very much on
the view of you talk to everybody and it
was my view going back you know for some
years that like that it was clear that
the B administration needed to be
pushing for negotiations over Ukraine.
There was not going to be some endgame
here where Ukraine got all of its
territory back.
But but but
but I don't think it is reasonable to
look at what he is doing and say that is
the norm that he has broken. The idea
that we should have negotiations. I mean
many different presidents have done many
surprising things and he's rolled back a
bunch of those things. You know
Republicans have been very unfriendly to
the opening that began with Cuba, right?
And that was like a big deal in American
foreign policy. Something Obama did
against very heavy criticism. something
that cost him and cost Democrats in
Florida and and and among Cuban voters
in the following election. So one I I
just don't think that that's that
unusual of a thing with Trump. I also
just want to say with the tariffs, you
sort of wanted to cut the tariffs off
from Doge and cut the tariffs off from
this broader agenda. And one reason I
don't is that I think the way to
understand tariffs, look, you can be
accomplishing many different things with
tariffs. one thing which was a theory
that that you heard from some people
around Trump and and and sort of fit
what he said on the campaign trail which
was Trump's position on the campaign
trail was that he was going to lay down
10 to 20% tariffs on all imported goods
and 65% tariffs on imported goods from
China. So, I think that's a bad idea for
a bunch of different reasons, but what
that is is a stable change in the cost
structure for all corporations and all
trade. And then different players can
make different investment decisions in
the long term based on this new cost
structure. What he's doing, as Derek
said, and I've had these funny
experiences where I'm literally doing a
podcast with a tariffs expert and I'll
be talking about like the auto parts
problem and then my producer be like,
uh, he just, you know, delayed the
tariff on the auto parts. what he's
doing with these tariffs that you move
on and you move off and you negotiate
over endlessly. And I've been told this
again by people around him is their view
is that America had leverage it wasn't
using and tariffs in particular are a
form of executive control. Trade deals
need to be negotiated and uh ratified
with Congress. Trade deals are are are
something you have to do with the rest
of the system. But tariffs are something
Trump can do unilaterally. And one thing
Trump wants is control. That is the
through line of virtually everything in
his politics. Tariffs are a
leverage-based form of foreign policy.
They are America has the biggest economy
in the world. That anybody who's going
to get into a trade war with us is going
to suffer worse than we will. And
there's something where the president
can use the tariffs because of authority
granted by Congress some time ago for
other purposes. He can use them with a
huge amount of discretion. And so you
can use them on the one hand to say well
I think that we've lost too much
manufacturing and the dollar is
undervalued in other places and so or
overvalued rather and so we want to use
tariffs to to to make the cost structure
differently so that people have to
locate more of the supply chains and the
intermediate manufacturing in the United
States. But you can also use a tariff to
say Colombia has to take the people
we're deporting and they have to take
them in chains, right? And Donald Trump
is doing both things. And the reason I
think it's important to keep those in
mind is that what Donald Trump wants,
what connects a lot of different things
is that he wants leverage over things.
He wants I think it connects to Eric
Adams. And you were sitting here talking
in New York City. Eric Adams is a
Democratic mayor, right? Donald Trump is
no truck with Eric Eric Adams, right? He
did not support Eric Adams. Eric Adams
is not his natural ally. But what he had
over Eric Adams, he realized, was a
leverage that he could get the the cases
off of Eric Adams and then get Eric
Adams in his pocket. So Donald Trump
stepped in to save like the like the
Democratic the corrupt Democratic mayor
of New York City because not because
they have a a deep ideological alliance
but because then Donald Trump would have
power over New York City and its policy
that he wouldn't otherwise have. The
thing that connects Trump is a very old
school politician. He's very relational.
He's very 19th century. He's looking for
the angle. He's very zero sum. He's
looking for things that give him power.
Doge is a way of getting power over the
bureaucracy. tariffs are a way of
getting power over the international
financial system and foreign policy and
breaking sort of traditional alliances.
Maybe in his mind even getting Canada to
become the 51st state. Maybe getting
Mexico to change its immigration policy.
Use trying to weaponize the Justice
Department against Derrick Adams as a
way of getting power over Democratic
mayor. Some of what they're doing with
grants and money is a way of getting
power over sort of other institutions in
American life. Again, you could think
it's bad or you could think it's good,
but it is coherent, right? I think it's
bad, but it is coherent and the people
who think it's good think it's good for
Trump to have power. Again, with the
Eric Adams thing, they were very
explicit about this, right? They said
that it is worthwhile for the president
to negotiate over his policy objectives
and to trade things to get his policy
objectives uh more fully carried out.
And so, Eric Adams went from saying New
York City would be a sanctuary city,
they'd aggressively carry out
deportations. You can think that kind of
transactionalism is fine. And I think in
this case, given that it's about
corruption, it wasn't. But the idea,
Trump's idea, that the problem is that
the president doesn't wield enough power
here, the way he does in Russia, the way
he might in India, the way he might in
China. Trump has spoken very openly of
envying some of the powers these other
people have. I think it's a consistent
governing philosophy that needs to be
taken as that, right? I think sometimes
you describe one of the difficulties
Trump poses is sometimes if you just
describe what he's doing I think quite
neutally. People say, "Oh, you're
criticizing him. You're anti-Trump." But
I I'm just describing what he's doing.
You could think it's good or it's bad,
but like the fact that he wants to
arrogate power and find points of
leverage and tariffs are one. What he's
doing through Doge is another. What he
did with the DOJ is another. It's all
very consistent. Um, the question is
really then just whether or not you have
what your normative view is on Trump
having that much power. Yeah, I have a
question about Doge. But before that,
I'll just say that I don't
think Donald Trump should have that much
power. Um, because I think to this day
my biggest criticism and concern is that
he is a person that denied the results
of the election. And so,
uh, I'm unwilling, you know, I like
George Washington. I like people that
have the skill, the ability, the track
record to walk away from power. And a
person who's
uh, unwilling to accept reality and is
willing to bend reality to uh, maintain
a grip on power. Uh, even if what
they're trying to do is really good,
maybe making a government more efficient
makes me very concerned. But on the
topic of Doge is more on the Elon side.
If we can sort of combine Doge and
abundance as a
topic, if Doge
succeeds, the effort, let's just forget
Doge, but the effort of making
government more efficient, what does
that look like um before the next
election and after the next election, if
we can just look at success? I know I'm
jumping again, but I'll do something
quick and then pass to you. I from my
I'm not a huge fan of the experiment
framing because amidst this experiment
people are uh through USA ID as my
colleague Nick Kristoff has documented
and and potentially further and
otherwise will die lose homes be scammed
by things so I'm I feel like
experimenting with government at that
level is very dangerous
but if assuming democracy survives
um Democrats if they're going to make
the government work again are going to
have to become less rulebound than they
were. Uh I have this line that the
problem with the personality type of the
right is it's autocratic now and the
problem with the personality type of the
left is it's bureaucratic and I don't
want to see things going either to where
Doge is in terms of I think there's a
fundamental lawlessness to it but I also
don't like the aims of it but I don't
want to see things where Democrats were
which is such
unfathomably cons which is such respect
for process that they will put the
process ahead of getting their own
things done. They will listen to any
lawyer with any super intense
interpretation of of any law and that'll
turn them all the way back. What Doge
has demonstrated is that the room for
movement inside the American government,
inside the state, is much wider than
anybody gave it credit for. Both
Republican and Democratic
administrations. It may not be as wide.
It probably isn't legally as wide as
what Doge is trying to do. And that's
why they're losing all these court
cases, but it is wide. And you could
also use Congress, right? You could pass
statute to make it wider. And you
should. There is no abundance agenda
that works if the Democratic Party is as
rulebound and as process obsessed as it
was in the last 10 years. It doesn't
work flatly. Right? That is why so many
of the stories we tell in the book are
about process gone. Not just it's not
process gone wrong because it's doing
exactly what it was intended to do, but
it is process that has become
antagonistic to the promised outcomes.
And so I do hope there's a kind of, you
know, thesis, right? All the
institutions are great. Democrats are
the defenders of government.
Anti-thesis, the government is a corrupt
cesspool. It's a, you know, it's a ball
of worms and it has to be destroyed and
taken over by a by a benevolent or
non-benevolent dictator. And synthesis,
which is that the government's process
has made it not a functional state. It's
non-responsive in many important ways.
And it needs to be fun like reformed at
a quite fundamental level but in a way
that is lawful in a way that is
thoughtful in a way that is running
experiments. It gathers information and
then can make adjustments in a way that
is respectful of the human lives that it
touches and affects in a way that is not
hostile to the goals of good government
but is more committed to them than it is
committed to the process that government
has erected and evolved over time. As
you articulated the principle
beautifully and just to put some meat on
the bones, abundance is about being
incredibly concrete about what you want
to accomplish in the world. Then it's
about understanding how to accomplish
that. A a fa a stage of the process that
I think Doge has entirely skipped. I
don't think there we've reached the
stage of understanding. We've destroyed
and then maybe it's sometimes promised
to understand the thing that we've
destroyed after the fact. You want to
set goals. You want to understand how to
meet those goals and then you want to
meet them. And the problem with
liberalism of the last few years and
last few decades is that it's become dis
we've become disconnected from outcomes.
Really really crystal clear example. So
Joe Biden in 2021 signs the bipartisan
infrastructure law and he and Pete
Buddhaj call it truthfully one of the
most important infrastructure bills
passed in the last few decades. $1.2
trillion to do exactly what Ezra and I
want to do to build in the world.
There's a piece of that law that's a $42
billion program called BEAD. Stands for
broadband equity access and deployment.
I think $42 billion to build rural
broadband. Fast forward to 2024.
Practically none of it is built. We're
now four calendar years after it was
passed. And the program is at this point
it seems like it's going to die and
they're just going to transfer the whole
thing to Starlink. So why right we want
to understand why does government fail
to achieve its outcomes and how can we
learn from those failures to allow
government to succeed at its outcomes.
Well you look into it and it turns out
that in order to take this $42 billion
and send it to the states the states had
to go through a 14stage process in order
to get the money. First, the FCC had to
draw a map of the places where America
needed more rural broadband. And then
there was a challenge period where
people could question the map. And the
FCC would remake the map. And then the
challengers would re sue them to change
the map again. Then the states had to
file a letter of intent and a 5-year
action plan and a funding program. All
of which could be subject to their own
challenge periods. And in each of these
challenge periods, the Commerce
Department is going back to the states
and saying, "We really like your 5-year
plan, but your your workforce
development program didn't pass this
matrix of uh equity, and you didn't
reach out to the right biders over here,
and if you try harder to reach out to
more people who just aren't white men to
be your employees, that would be
fantastic if you could put that into the
new um edit that you submit to us." And
of course, there delays because every
state has to do its own programs. The
Commerce Department is backed up, yada
yada yada. to get to a point where out
of 56 states and jurisdictions that have
applied to begin the 14-stage process,
by the time the Democrats lose the
election in November 2024, three out of
the 56 have passed all 14 stages. And
very little of the money has actually
been spent because of all the problems
that Ezra and I have discussed about how
hard it is to build in the physical
world. $42 billion therefore dies upon
contact with planet earth. That's not
government achieving its goals. And a
doge that we were sort of you know
dwombitates of in this parallel universe
is one that would try very clearly to a
articulate a goal. What are we trying to
do here? We're trying to build rural
broadband. Why? Because we think
connectivity is incredibly important to
the economy of the future. It helps
people's health. It helps the economy of
rural areas. Let's build rural
broadband. two, what are the roadblocks?
What are the bottlenecks? What's hard
about taking a pot of money that exists
in Washington and actually creating
broadband networks in rural Kentucky?
Let's understand what those roadblocks
are so that we can do two things. We can
take away the things that need to be
taken away to accelerate the program and
maybe we can add new policies that will
accelerate the spending because bottom
line, we want to make a difference in
the world. That's a world where
government is, to borrow Ezra's
language, deregulated itself. It's
easier for the government to achieve its
goals. I think that it's really
important at the level of sort of of
principle here that liberals fall out of
love with this procedural fetish that
has dominated the left over the last
half century and fall back in love with
outcomes to be ruthlessly obsessed with
how liberalism has failed and how these
kind of failures aren't just
technocratic stories to tell on a
podcast. I think this is fundamental to
why Democrats are losing the the
communications war in an era of
anti-establishment and anti-institution.
We find ourselves in the reflexive
position of having all the cranks, so to
speak, having left the Democratic party
and we're the ones who defend all
institutions. We're the ones who defend
the establishments. We're the ones
saying government can only do good. But
as a result, we lose the ability to talk
to people about how government fails and
how they can see that failure and how
sometimes they're literally leaving
cities and states run by Democrats
because that failure is so effing
obvious to them. So this isn't just
about the bead program. It's not just
about 14step programs. It's not just
about rural broadband. It really is
about a higher level principle of
political communication. How do you
develop a liberalism that in an age of
anti-establishment anger both reflects
that anger and channels it for proactive
purposes by not just doing destruction
destruction but creative destruction.
So, first of all, beautifully put and
second sort of the big thing that Doge
did is make this a sexy topic to discuss
and then you can tear down Doge with the
way they're doing it, say it's wrong,
criticize, but then people are all of a
sudden more and more caring about uh the
efficiency of government and educating
themselves, learning about it, and it's
creating a culture of transparency to
the whole thing. So now you can swoop in
with a book like abundance and like
describe here's how to do actually how
to have a clear mission and metrics how
to solve these problems. But like that
allows as opposed to have this culture
of process. Uh it me personally, one of
the things that really frustrates me
about this world is that uh the
bureaucracy of that kind of process,
especially because everybody, at least
in the United States, is just all so
fucking polite everywhere about the
whole thing. They're all so nice to you
as they're doing the process about every
single thing. They're just like they're
this is and and then the you have to
call from 9:00 to 5:00. there's hours
and let's schedule a meeting in 3 weeks
from now to discuss this document so we
can have another document and all of a
sudden the big dreams and the visions,
the hopes that people have invested in
in building a project that's an
incredible project dies. It's not just
the waste of money. It's the the
possibility of a beautiful thing that
could have been built never gets built.
You you're retracing Ezra's lovely line
about how the character of the right
these days is autocratic and the
character of the left can be overly
bureaucratic. I hope there's a middle
synthesis lane here where there's a
political identity that believes in
efficient bureaucracies. Sometimes it
actually does take a lot of people to
get certain things done. But you really,
I think, need to have an eye toward
institutional reform. This is a theme of
our book that we haven't talked about as
much yet, but I think it's so important
for abundance to believe that each
generation adopts is passed down
institutions that were created for
different eras, different decades to
solve different problems, right? That's
how you get an environmental revolution
in the 1960s that solves the problem of
clean of dirty air and dirty water, but
leaves us with a set of norms like NEPA
that make it impossible to add clean
energy in our generation. just a a
tragedy um of unintended outcomes. And
to narrow this down to, you know, a
world that I know you care a lot about,
there's a chapter in our book about
science policy and the history of the
NIH. And the NIH really comes into its
own after World War II. And it is
immediately this beautifully funded
crown jewel of biomedical research. Just
the federal government irrigating
university researchers studying cancer
and heart disease and brain science and
everything else. I mean practically
every single scientific breakthrough in
the US in the last 70 years at least has
bears the fingerprints of NIH but the
NIH is also a bureaucracy and like every
bureaucracy it has accumulated a set of
processes and habits that it's the
people most affected by it scientists in
America told us and will tell anybody
else who's listening has flaws according
to some surveys 40% of the time that
scientists are working today in America
they are filling out grants and doing
paperwork, not doing science. That is
astonishing. I mean, as we say in the
book, imagine if we discovered that one
year there was a virus that broke out in
the American academic scene such that
our scientists suffered from chronic
fatigue disorder between January and
June every single year. They just
couldn't work. We'd be like, "This is an
absolute sha. We have to fix this
problem." This problem exists. It's our
own bureaucratic rules. It's the rules
that we wrote that's slowing down
science. So what should we do? I don't
think we should tear down the NIH. I
don't think we should slash and burn
grants as we're currently doing in the
administration. I think we should
understand what's broken and be clear
about our desired outcomes. My desired
outcome for science is that we produce
and pursue high- risk, highreward
science under the theory that almost no
important breakthrough is going to be
obvious before you discovered it. If
it's obvious, you probably already knew
it. So why is it some new science? You
should want to incentivize scientists to
ask their biggest, most curious
questions in a high-risisk, highreward
environment. And right now, the NIH
doesn't do that. The NIH for a variety
of reasons, whether it's aspects of the
peerreview process or just assumptions
that scientists have of the system is
too incrementalist. It funds older
researchers and it wastes a lot of
scientist time with bureaucratic
paperwork and cludge. We'd love to
reform it. We have ideas for reforming
it. But if liberals don't use the
language of and act on institutional
reform, we will allow institutions to
grow old and sclerotic and piss off
Americans and they'll vote for people
who come in with a wrecking ball to tear
it down. Right? So, it's that's why I
think it's so important for abundance
liberals like us be very clear about our
goals, our outcomes, and exactly what we
want to accomplish because I think
that's the only way to really see how
and why institutions that are all around
us truly do need reform. Listen, I hope
uh I hope your book becomes the
manifesto of the Democratic Party. It's
a beautiful vision. I'm a little bit
skeptical because of the momentum of
bure bureaucratic thought, but I'm
nevertheless remain hopeful. Um, I have
to ask this. I'm a fan of both of you.
In the interest of
time,
Ezra, you had an intense debate many
years ago
uh, with Sam Harris. Okay. So, you're I
would say, like I said, I'm a fan of
both of you. You're both intellectually
rigorous people. So, it was the debate,
the contentiousness of it was was both
sad to me, but also just a fan of you
and and uh since I admire your
intellects, it's just fun to watch what
is it uh Godzilla and King Kong fight.
Uh I wish there was more of it. I wish
you would do his podcast again and
debate it more on some other topic and
argue. It's just great. Anyway, uh you
know in some time has passed in in what
was this eight years ago now? Yeah.
2018ish something there. Yeah. The
battles you have fought over the years
that's just lot lot of chapters. Lot of
chapters. Yeah. This is like several
chapters ago. Um but you know uh in the
interest of camaraderie what do you
admire uh most about Sam Harris? Oh
that's not a hard question. If you go
back, if you listen to that debate on my
show at Box, I
introduce Harris on like this specific
conversation he had with Charles Murray
about race and IQ, but he's good on
meditation. He's good on psychedelics.
He's good on consciousness. He's good I
don't know if I said AI back then,
though. I think he's good on AI. I
always felt in that without going like
back into the wayback machine that Sam
really thought like he really somehow
got where I was wrong and I thought I
offered like a lot of POS like tries for
deescalation and you can he did me
weirdly the favor of publishing our
whole email correspondence and I think
if you read that you can see that like I
was not angling for a fight here. Um
what I admired about him since I think
the thing that he's been good on is he's
been very independent. So Sam at that
time there was sort of the emergence
around then of this thing that people
then called the intellectual dark web
and it was like Sam and the Weinstein
brothers and Ben Shapiro and um I forget
who was part of it and as a bunch of
those people I think I mean it kind of
split up over time but Harris has done a
good job not falling into conspiracy as
the Weinstein brothers did not letting
um his anger at the left blind him to
the fail failures of the right. He's a
guy, you know, I guess both for better
and for worse, as we all are, but he is
perfectly willing to stand alone in a
crowd. Like, I haven't listened to that
much of his stuff lately, but my sense
is he's been like quite cleareyed from
my perspective on Donald Trump. So, like
I don't think Sam, my view is not that
Sam Harris is in general a bad actor. It
just isn't. Yeah. He's been like uh
difficult to categorize and fearless
about it. meaning like he doesn't um he
deliberately resists audience audience
capture. So yeah, which is a hard thing
to do. I think I saw a clip of him on
this show sort of like going after Trump
and it became like a big whole thing.
Yeah, I mean he's been very consistent
on that. Let's let's try to find the
interesting uh thing here. I actually
had a while back a podcast with Richard
Hire. He studies intelligence and it was
a very
detailed non-policy
uh discussion about IQ tests and all
that kind of stuff and there I
did I tried extremely hard to be very
nuanced cuz that felt like an
uncomfortable topic back then. It
doesn't feel so uncomfortable now. Do
you think the Overton window has
expanded? Do you think the kind of
things we're willing to talk about now?
I mean this has to do with the Trump
moment also. I think the place where the
topic seems to me to have changed in my
ambient awareness of it is two things.
One is a sense of the Flynn effect which
is yeah it's hard to individually change
your IQ but there is a very well
doumented effect and I talked to James
Flynn before I talked to to Sam. Um
there is a very well doumented effect
where IQ's have been rising over time.
There's good evidence now that that has
stopped. Um again this is ambiently my
sense right? I've read some things like
in passing I have not I did not come to
this podcast preparing to talk about IQ
or I would have prepared very carefully
and then there was an interesting FT
article just the other day that was like
have we passed peak human intelligence
and my sense is not is it that that
wasn't about IQ although again like I
don't remember exactly what was in it I
kind of glanced at it and put it aside
to read more later but that literacy
scores are going down a number of test
scores are going down and the the sort
of sense of the piece was that we are
making ourselves stupider by endlessly
staring at screens and social media,
which I think is probably right. Um I
I've had this sort of line since
becoming aware of that piece in my head
that uh we spend a lot of time talking
about how to get smarter and not enough
time talking about how to avoid getting
dumber, but we do a lot of thing that a
lot of things that we think make us
smarter like I would say having social
media on our phones cuz like oh you're
getting all this information all the
time that in fact make us dumber. uh
because it's not just that the
information is bad, but the lack of
concentration, the constant distraction,
the sort of lack of focus. And so my
sense is that there is a different kind
of conversation here. I'm not sure it's
really an IQ conversation, but that
there is a sense that we
are
inflicting a possibly global, certainly
societal cognitive wound on ourselves,
right? That's what John Height's book is
a little bit about, right? That's sort
of more coming at it from a behavioral
standpoint. But we have, you know, the
Flynn effect reflects, right? This is
how James Flynn would would uh describe
it. The Flynn effect reflects societies
putting on, as he I think put it, the
scientific spectacles. You create
societies where we prize things like
reading, abstract intelligence, symbolic
logic. You teach people in them a lot
and we get better and better and better
at doing it. And I mean, reading changes
the brain. It changes the physical
structure of the brain. are hijacking
parts of the mind and meant for other
purposes to to do this kind of
interpretive work. But it's of course
possible just as we became society
connected and then made more and more
widespread technologies like literacy
that changed our brains and led to the
increase in this thing we call G, right?
G intelligence and decreases in other
things, right? Like I'm really shitty at
knowing which direction I'm going into.
the sort of part of my brain that does
navigation is terribly atrophied
compared to somebody in a in a more um
in a society that did not have Google
Maps. Uh it's entirely possible to go
too far in that, right? It's entirely
possible to move on to technologies that
begin to to to weaken that. I have this
concern very profoundly about AI by the
way which obviously you have a lot of
your roots in and I have a there are
parts of AI I'm very optimistic about
but my biggest concern about AI is we're
going to make ourselves much stupider
without realizing it because the things
that are easy to automate in AI which is
like getting the AI to summarize the
reading of something or getting AI to
write the first draft of something
that's where all the intelligence
happens in my view um I think you know
one advantage I have over a lot of other
podcast host those who superficially do
what I do. Probably this is true for
you. I'm sure this is true for you. I
know is that I really do do the reading.
No summary is equivalent to me doing the
reading and sitting there and making the
associations myself and spending the
time in the book and then like sort of
thinking about what it brought up in me.
I write the first draft. Chachi PT
cannot write the first draft of my book.
The first draft is fucking hard to write
and it's often hard because like it's
completely wrong, but not because it's
narrowly wrong. Right? Chachi P will
never tell you that the problem with
what you're trying to do is you're just
trying to do the wrong thing. It'll
never tell you if you tell it to write a
first draft that's the wrong direction
for this draft. Some part of you has to
know it. And often the problem is you
just haven't done enough reporting,
haven't done enough research. And Chad
GPD can't tell you that either. And my
worry for my kids, my worry for society
is creating
technologies that make it incredibly
alluring to automate the part of
creation that is most difficult, most
laborious, and most likely to lead to
genuine insight and the sort of
sharpening of your own mental acuity. I
mean, we better fucking hope the AIS can
autonomously make innovations cuz we're
going to stop I really we're going to
stop being able to. Yeah, I definitely
think and all that is brilliantly put I
I definitely think that social media is
making me dumber. Like I if I spend a
week checking social media versus
reading books,
I'm just distinctly the quality of my
thoughts, even the same content. I don't
read things anymore as much as I can on
like a screen. I print everything out
and I sit at the table and I read it. I
can read it on my iPad. I read it at my
laptop. I print it all out because my
attention is different. And the same
goes for AI. Whether we're talking about
this kind of uh research, uh it's more
distinct and rigorous in the other space
that I do every single day is
programming. I'm definitely becoming a
worse programmer by using AI offloading
because it actually works really well
there. I'm becoming worse at creative
thinking at what you're saying, writing
the first draft, which require that
skill, that first little leap, that
little mini leap into the creative
genius that we all do every single day.
Uh AI is not able to do that and it's
definitely dulling that. All right, we
covered a lot of ground today. What
uh on the note of optimism, what gives
you hope about the future of this great
nation of ours, the future of America
looking out in the next few years, in
the next few decades, centuries when we
colonize the s the solar system and
beyond or we could just stick to the
next couple decades. Sure. Um, you know,
despite the fact that our book is a deep
diagnosis of modern liberalism with a
ton of criticism of the last half decade
in politics, I am at root a profound
optimist about everything. Uh, like just
at a at a general personality sense,
right? Like to a certain extent, a
question like this is attempting to
elicit a little bit of what can be
considered analysis of the world, but
you're also eliciting what is
fundamentally like personality, right?
like what what makes you
optimistic? I've just always been a real
optimist. Um I'm optimistic about
science and technology. Um especially in
the realm of um biomedical science in a
big way. I think if you look at what's
happening right now in mRNA cancer
vaccines in CARTT cell therapy for you
know redesigning tea cells to attack
cancers if you look at the GLP-1 drug
revolution and some of these studies
that have been done on the fact that
GLP1 drugs while they you know were
initially synthesized from lizard venom
to help people with type 2 diabetes turn
out to have these effects that seem to
reduce bodywide inflammation that not
only rewires our minds and makes it
easier for people's desired sense of
moderation to be actual iz. So people
who want to eat more fruits and
vegetables seem to find it easier to eat
more fruits and vegetables when they're
on GLP-1 drugs, but also because there's
probably a lot of neurological issues
that are fundamentally issues of
inflammation, including maybe dementia
and Alzheimer's, we might have
accidentally from the tongue of a lizard
a partial medicine for Alzheimer's
disease. The ability of science to
connect these dots in the cosmos just
absolutely thrills and fascinates me.
And I hope that we get better at making
those connections. And while I have a
lot of fears about AI, many of them
shared by Ezra, I am really interested
in the possibility of AI being useful
for synthesizing large bodies of
knowledge to allow people to make
cross-domain comparisons. I think a lot
of inventions in tech history are
essentially ingenious recombinations of
ideas. Like to a certain extent, you
look at something as fundamental or
archetypal as Thomas Edison inventing
the incandescent light bulb. What did he
do? He just tested 10,000 different
materials and figured out that actually
it was like a very special kind of
bamboo that burned for the right amount
of time and said, "Boom, I did it. I
made the incandescent light bulb." the
ability to have a
machine syn or accelerate the degree to
which we understand what those 10,000
materials can do or synthesize knowledge
so people can combine it and say we're
going to take a little bit of um you
know crisper over here and a little bit
of cancer science over here to develop a
gene therapy that targets a particular
inhibitor that allows the immune system
to attack a protein that is explicitly
related to pancreatic cancer. I do
absolutely believe that we might be on
the doorstep of those kind of
breakthroughs. And that makes me
incredibly optimistic cuz I think at
base it's like, you know, what's life
about, right? What's abundance about?
Why housing and energy? Well, because we
think they're fundamental to living a
good life. You need a place to live. And
people deserve the freedom to live where
they want to live. Energy is what powers
the entire economy. And more energy
would power technologies that we can't
even imagine or are just beginning to.
Whether it's supersonic flight powered
by clean fuel or fusion technology that
basically gives us infinite solar
energy, the sun's actual energy in a
particular location. I mean these these
are beautiful things that can happen. Um
but also I think the good life is about
is about health. It's about health and
it's about the wealth that comes and the
freedom that comes from from finding
health in your own life. And I do I am
incredibly optimistic that we might be
at the cusp of a real golden age in
taking all these little ingredients that
we've spent decades on, whether it's
genomics and proteomics and a little bit
of AI. We're at the at a moment right
now, I hope, where we can have this
explosion of
combinatorial intelligence and that
hopefully in an optimistic way, AI could
be useful in accelerating us toward that
future. But I also think to the point of
this book, we have to get institutions
right too. These are discoveries that
are going to happen inside of
institutions and how those institutions
work and how they're funded and the
incentives that are created by law or by
technology really matter in terms of the
world that we build. And so that's why I
think it's really important to not only
be obsessed with what the technology can
do, but how it's instantiated in the
institutions that we have because it's
it ultimately is institutions and
individuals that build the world, not
technology acting on its own. Yeah. And
I should say that you make a really
great case for investing in weird
science, meaning stuff that doesn't on
the surface make sense. We said lizard
venom. You know, there's all this
popular criticism of scientific projects
that sound like a waste of money when in
reality, at least in the scientific
realm, uh projects that seem like they
don't have any positive effect, might
actually end up being the ones that uh
transform human civilization as we know
it because of the unintended discoveries
that happen. and all the Eureka moments,
all the special discoveries
happen truly
uh when you're just passionately
pursuing a cool thing in science. That's
how scientific minds work. And so it
makes sense to invest in things that uh
in in in uh exploring weird shit, the
weird mysteries of the universe. So
anyway, uh Ezra, what gives you hope?
I'm a less temperamentally authentic
person than Derek by a lot, actually.
Yeah. And I would usually give a pretty
similar answer to this question that
Derrick gave, which is, you know,
technological advancement, right? We we
live in an age of of Marvels. I guess
I'll say from the realist perspective
that we live in a more liquid moment
than many that, you know, if one of the
advantages of the '9s of, you know, part
much of the life that I have grown up in
is that much of the structure of
technology of global governance was
fairly stable. we could sort of like
look at it and there were certain not
certainties but but but fairly reliable
guard rails of what was and what wasn't
going to happen and there were
disruptions like 9/11 and the financial
crisis they weren't small and slowly
they broke that entire system but there
you know there I think one of the things
people sort of miss sort of feel about
the way history's accelerated is that
things have just all gotten faster and
less predictable and they really have I
think gotten faster and less predictable
we're in an age it seems to be more like
the early 20th century late 19th century
then um then like the
1990s and that means the possibilities
range very widely right when you think
about AI when you think about biotech
advances when you think about energetic
advances when you think about the sort
of shifting nature of global alliances
of the technological and political
systems the r in the most high variance
period that I think has happened in in
in a very very very long time and that
carries carries tremendous peril. Things
could go terribly and it it carries
tremendous possibility, right? What if
AI is an incredible boon for humanity?
What if we do invent and deploy the
clean energy technologies that deliver
energy abundance, not just a a kind of
answer to the worst of climate change,
but genuine energy abundance, unlocking
new things like des like mass
desalination and um you know, all like
what if we do like I'm an animal
suffering person. I'm a vegetarian. I
care a lot about animal suffering. What
if we did figure out um cultivated meat,
right, that we grow in in, you know,
breweries and on scaffolds and we don't
have to kill tens of billions of animals
that we've raised in unimaginable
suffering every single year, right?
Like, you know, what if we do figure out
how to make government better and more
responsive, right? What if that thesis
antithesis synthesis thing does work
out? But it's not hope. It's like that's
a future you have to create, a future
you have to call into being, a future
you'll have to fight for. So it isn't so
much that I found myself hopeful about
what America or the world would be like
in 2030 or 2040, but I find that I
believe in the possibility of enough
remarkable outcomes that it makes like
the present really worth being engaged
in and you know really worth trying to
you know do your small part to bend the
arc of uh of of the time in the
direction that that you find more just.
Well, thank you to both of you for
fighting
uh for
abundance and writing this manifesto for
abundance and um for all the writing and
the work you do in the podcast and just
being um incredible minds in this world
uh that I'm a fan of. So, uh thank you
for talking today. Thanks very much,
Lex. Thanks so much. Thanks for
listening to this conversation with Ezra
Klein and Derek Thompson. To support
this podcast, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now,
let me leave you with some words from
Napoleon
Bonapart. In politics, stupidity is not
a
handicap. Thank you for listening and
hope to see you next time.