Your Questions (and Criticisms) of Our Recent Shows

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Welcome to another subscriber-only Ask Me Anything.

You all send in a ton of questions.

We are going to respond to a small fraction of them, I think.

Here joining me is our amazing executive producer, Claire Gordon, who has chosen a bunch of questions that I mostly don't want to answer if I had five dreathers.

But Claire, thanks for being here this morning,

jet-lagged from a late-night flight back from California.

Hopefully, it'll make this more interesting.

The first bunch of questions are really synthesized from a ton of responses we got from the last few episodes, which really flooded our inbox.

These are the Mahmoud Khalil and Philippe Sands.

That's right.

And Hazzoni got a lot of applause too.

But definitely the winner in terms of volume of response was Mahmoud Khalil.

Not only in our inbox, but it got a lot of response.

Out in the world, there was a whole first for the show, a whole New York Post cover story in response to the interview, big headline, deport him.

So, my first question is just like, were you surprised that it got that reaction?

I find it unbelievably

saddening

that all these people who, you know, two years ago were styling themselves as great defenders of free speech

listen to an interview with somebody,

listen to them speak,

and the response is not disagreement, it's deport him

As a way of revealing

how unbelievably hollow and cynical

that moment in politics was.

Like the number of people who I understand, like much of their political careers to be built on them as defenders of free speech who again responded by saying, this person who has a green card, is married to a U.S.

citizen, and has a child born here, should be deported.

Whatever you think of what he said

means that your commitment to that idea of free speech was so paper thin.

So I found that depressing, not in a way that was shocking.

I've always been fairly cynical about what a lot of that politics was built on, but I found that, you know, revealing

of how little pretense has even gone in in the Trump era.

to maintaining any kind of consistency

with that form of politics.

I mean, I think it was also revealing of the different things people heard when he spoke.

And there was part of the interview that got the most reaction.

It was also a clip that circulated a lot on social media, was him talking about October 7th

and describing the attack as unavoidable.

To me, it felt frightening that

we had to reach this moment

in the Palestinian struggle.

And I remember I didn't sleep for a number of days and Noor was very worried about

like just

my health.

And it was heavy.

Like I still remember, like I was like, this couldn't happen.

And what do you mean we had to reach this moment?

What moment is this?

I was interning at UNURWA at that point, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, at the UN, at their

New York office.

And as part of my internship,

my research and work was focused on Palestine, on the situation in the West Bank and Angaz.

And you can see that the situation is not sustainable.

You have an Israeli government that's absolutely ignoring Palestinians.

They are trying to make that deal with Saudi and

just happy about their Apraham Accord without

looking at Palestinians as if Palestinians are not part of the equation.

And they circumvented the Palestinian question.

And it's clear, like, it's becoming more and more violent.

Like, you know, by October 6th, over 200 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces and settlers.

Over 40 of them were children.

So that's what I mean by, like, unfortunately, we couldn't avoid such a moment.

A lot of the reaction was

heard in his words, someone who was endorsing violence, someone who was

at least sympathetic, if not just outright supportive of Hamas.

What did you hear when he said that?

My intention with that episode first, just to kind of level set,

was here with somebody who the U.S.

government had in a very profound way tried to silence

for his speech,

moved him around to different detention centers, and made a very public example of him in a way meant to chill not his speech specifically.

The idea that Mahmoud Khalil,

this grad student at Columbia, is in any way a threat to U.S.

foreign policy is an absurdity.

And I think everybody knows it.

But you can make an example of Mahmoud Khalil

as a way of making other people afraid to speak.

So I wanted to hear his story, right?

I was, you know, if you go, I think, to that interview, I'm in many ways more interested in what happened to him.

I didn't bring him on specifically, in my view, as an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I'm interested in his thoughts, but the show has not primarily rooted its coverage there in kind of college activists, not because they don't have things to say or worth hearing, just I don't, I don't think it would be the most sensible way to go about it.

The way I heard him talk about October 7th, which is a way I've heard a lot of the Palestinian guests I've had on the show and who I've spoken to off the show talk about it,

which is to them,

October 7th is not day zero.

To them, October 7th is not where this chapter or anything begins.

October 7th is a

punctuation of tremendous violence.

Maybe murderous, maybe war crimes.

I think Khalil,

when I was was asking him in a follow-up question, said, look, there should be an investigation and people who killed civilians, which he said is always

illegal under international law, should be held accountable for that.

Well, I know it's targeting civilians is wrong.

That's why we've been calling for an international, independent investigation

to hold perpetrators into accountability.

And it's very important, like, for us who believe in international law, that this should happen.

Rowe But they understand

that moment.

I think I am portraying this fairly

as

revolutionary violence that might be very in the way it gets carried out even evil

but it reflects a society in Gaza under tremendous relentless oppression

where

the kind of Israeli policy was to functionally make the experience and lives of the Gazans a non-issue, trying to make the Palestinian issue, as it gets called, disappear.

And out of that comes a lot of things, including, you know, the March of Return and other things that did not get a lot of international coverage, but were more peaceful.

And then ultimately, October 7th.

Now, to be very clear.

I think Hamas is a,

or was, because I'm not sure how much it even really exists at this point as an organization that looks like what it once was.

But

I think very little has done as much damage, including to Palestinians as Samas.

And I think October 7th was

a series of war crimes.

It was a mass murder of civilians,

a mass act of terror and barbarism.

I don't think it can be explained away.

I think that it was also done to elicit an overwhelmingly violent Israeli response.

Sinoar

was not an idiot.

It had to have been understood at every level that if you did breach Israel's defenses and you did carry out a mass murder of Israeli civilians, Israel is going to come in and flatten Gaza.

And that was the project, as I understand it, right?

That's what they wanted.

And the sacrifice of Palestinian civilians was part of their calculation that Hamas, you know, as it did in the second Intifada with suicide bombings against Israeli civilians and teenagers on buses and at nightclubs, that they've always been working with this tactic of leveraging the lives of Palestinian civilians to try to do something that would change the situation of Palestinians.

So I am,

I think Hamas has just done extraordinary damage

to Palestinians, to Israel, to everybody.

But when I talk to Palestinians, they understand Hamas more in a lineage,

whether or not they like them or hate them, a sort of revolutionary and insurgent violence, which much more often does target civilians, which gets out of control.

And they understand the fundamental oppression is coming from the Israeli side.

They look at the death tolls on the two sides.

So when I heard Khalil speak, I think if you listen to Palestinians, which a lot of people in this conversation don't,

the range of acceptable and well-heard opinion tends to come from people with differing levels of commitment to Israel and Zionism.

He didn't say anything that sounded surprising to me.

So, yeah, I understand why it's hard to hear, but I also think how hard it is to hear reflects to some degree how seldom Palestinians are heard in our conversation, because to them, what is often hard to hear is the explaining away,

the normalization of what they understand as now decades and decades of continuous Israeli violence against them and their lives and their existence.

And again, it's not how I see it and not how I see Hamas, but part of my project on the show has always been to accept that there are very different narratives of this conflict, of this moment, not just two, but many, many, many, existing alongside each other.

And there's no capacity to see it in any way clearly if you're only willing to listen to one of them.

Well, that ties into my next question, which is a critique that we've been getting in the inbox for a while, definitely after the episode on family group chats and also to Mahmood Khalil,

also to the Sands episode on genocide, that a lot of these episodes and certainly the cumulative effect of these episodes was pretty one-sided in focusing on criticism of Israel and

not

including as much the larger context of Hamas, not just October 7th, but what Hamas's responsibility in continuing the war and not putting down arms, not surrendering and still having hostages.

And that's gotten a lot of reaction from people.

How do you respond to that?

Israel is at this point

the primary actor in the war.

I wouldn't even call it a war anymore.

I'd call it a siege.

If you believe what I believe about Hamas,

if you believe what the people sending these emails believe about Hamas,

they will tell you, I will tell you in the same breath, basically, Hamas is an organization that does not value civilian life.

that uses civilian life as pawns.

That is why, or partially why, it is classified as a terrorist organization in America.

Yes, do I wish Hamas had done none of this?

I wish Hamas had done none of this.

Do I wish they would give up all their arms immediately?

I do.

Do I wish they would release the hostages immediately?

I do.

The fact that

they have not, will not, do not in their incredibly degraded state does not mean Israel can starve Gaza.

It does not mean Israel can commit war crimes with impunity.

It does not mean Israel can or should

corrupt its own soul

in pursuit of something that at this point is not even defined any longer.

It's also worth saying that that logic goes both ways.

There have been deals from Hamas that Israel could have taken as well.

If Israel would withdraw from Gaza, if it would accept a permanent ceasefire, Hamas would release the hostages.

This is partially why you see protests going on in Israel right now, where the families of both the hostages who have been released and those who remain in captivity are demonstrating and leading demonstrations against the Netanyahu government, because they don't believe, and I don't believe, and nobody believes, that Benjamin Netanyahu's goal is to get the hostages home safely.

It isn't.

The goal he has chosen, which

I and virtually everybody who studies war or talks to people who studies war said was impossible from the outset, was the total and complete destruction and eradication of Hamas, not just as a governing authority or as something that poses a threat to Israel, just as a thing that exists.

They have not been able to do that.

They will not be able to do that.

They have not defined what doing that even looks like or how it will be measured or who will certify that it is done.

And so right now, the thing happening that endangers huge numbers of civilians in Gaza and the hostages

is what Israel is doing.

And

for Israel to be

just continuing to devastate Gaza

and kill this number of children and civilians and have hundreds of people killed lining up for aid, I mean, it is a moral atrocity.

If people think I am focusing on Israel, I am.

Israel is the actor that America has a deep relationship with.

Israel is the actor that we are sending arms to, that we are sending money to, that we are supporting in this war.

These are our arms doing this.

I am a Jewish American with a connection to Israel.

So what they do is meaningful to me.

What they do affects what it means to be Jewish in the world, what it will mean for my children to be Jewish in the world.

So I also care about Israel in a way that I don't care about other countries and other places.

I don't think that is always, I think, Israel is love, but nevertheless.

And

Israel could decide right now to just let the food through.

This famine could end with the word of one man.

If Benjamin Netanyahu and his government wanted there to be enough food, there would be enough food tomorrow.

I think what Israel is doing now is an atrocity, right?

It is heartbreaking.

It needs to stop.

And

I don't think we know what its consequences will be in the long run.

I think we understood in the years after 9-11

that

enraging mass populations over a long period of time sometimes takes a long time to return to you, but it often does return.

And the abandonment of that learning,

the

complete letting go of the idea of what happens if you traumatize entire societies and turn them against you in the most fundamental way, and you create huge numbers of people with a burning desire for vengeance in their hearts who lost mothers and fathers and siblings and cousins and friends and teachers and

grandparents.

I don't know how you look at this and you don't think you don't just look to the future with a kind of horror.

You called it an atrocity several times.

You did not call it a genocide.

You did a whole episode that sort of explored that question and why you don't use that label.

A lot of the reaction to that episode, particularly on YouTube, was,

of course, it's a genocide.

Obviously, this is a genocide.

I'm most offended that you would do this episode at like this point in time, this long into the war.

And also just people who thought having this whole debate about terminology was besides the

point.

How do you take that reaction?

So the labeling of this as a genocide began very, very, very soon after October 7th.

And it began at a time when I think that was obviously the wrong term.

You know, as I've said before on the show, there is no country in the world with a capable military that would not have responded to October, to something like October 7th with

unfathomable force.

If some country bordering China went in and massacred

50,000

Chinese citizens,

if there was a government or terrorist group or drug cartel operating in Mexico that came in and killed 50,000 Americans.

The idea that there would be some very tightly targeted counterterrorism response, even if that might be the wise option,

is

fantasy.

The very, I think, early use of the term genocide, I think, reflects two things.

One is that, as I was saying earlier,

To a lot of Palestinians, this is part of, it's not discontinuous, it's continuous.

What we are seeing now is part of an ongoing effort to erase the Palestinians, the people, make their lives unlivable, make the places they live unlivable.

Do you understand it that way?

I understand Israeli society as split

with there being a part of it

that does favor functionally expulsion of the Palestinians and wants to achieve it by making their lives completely miserable.

Do I think at high levels of Israeli politics that they think that they are going to somehow move all the Palestinians out?

I don't, really.

I don't think they're actually planning that far forward at all.

I think Netanyahu lives for the next day.

Or not necessarily just moving out, but to

expand the settlements in ways that just like Palestinian life is just like completely controlled and constrained and do the same thing in Gaza.

I think, at least in the West Bank, that has been the strategy.

But again, I almost think calling it a strategy that is like being coherently applied is a little bit misleading.

But they have been trying to make their lives miserable.

And the hope is that at some point they will figure out a way to really take over what they call Judea and Samaria.

I think that the faction that wants actual peace and still believes in any kind of coexistence in a peaceful way has become very small.

And then I understand the largest faction in Israeli politics as fundamentally disinterested.

They just don't want to think about the Palestinians.

Their intention,

at least prior to October 7th, was not expulsion.

It was not peace.

It was not make their lives miserable.

It was not make their lives better.

It was don't think about them at all.

Israeli politics is like any politics, very, very fractious.

Like think about our own politics.

Gaza, nobody was thinking about building settlements in in any serious way a couple of years ago.

There is no set of plans being debated.

It's not like you have the far right putting up their plans for what should happen in the West Bank in Gaza, and then the center has its plan, and what remains of the left or the liberal side has its plan.

Like there is still no, what used to get called the day after plan in Gaza.

It's not just that I think Israeli society, to the extent it has decided, at least under Net Yahoo, it is just going to do occupation for a period of time.

But that's never been debated.

What it looks like has never been described to the Israeli people.

What will be the governing structures of that occupation?

Who's doing it?

Nothing there is decided.

It is a society that has, on some level, decided just not to think about a future horizon here.

So then how much does the intent matter versus just the effect?

I think that's a good question.

I guess to go back to the question that you asked me or that.

you know, some of these listeners asked me,

the reason I stay away from the word and have on the show genocide is that I think from very early on, there has been sort of two different ideas there, or maybe more than that.

One is a kind of political project, which I understand and I don't think is without legitimacy

to change the meaning and the global understanding of the Israeli state and what it wants.

The Jewish state is born of the crime

that leads to the word genocide, right?

The Jewish state state is born of the Holocaust.

For Israel to then become the first state in history to be held accountable or understood as, you know, under the international laws it forms, the first state in history to be accused of and convicted of genocide

would profoundly change what it is.

Legally, it doesn't change actually anything.

And this is sort of the other weird side, I think, of this conversation.

What is different if Netanyahu gets convicted of genocide versus crimes against humanity versus war crimes, nothing?

They carry the same penalties in many ways.

Has there been some different level of international protection for the Palestinians because of the preliminary findings around this?

No, there has not been.

So you have this legal definition and legal structure around genocide that has one set of meanings and is much broader than what was entailed in the Holocaust.

And then I think you have a political effort that has, you know, I think the term people used to be trying to use here is apartheid.

That was a question.

Like, could you make people globally see Israel as an apartheid state?

Apartheid being, in recent modern history, one of the worst things a state has done.

I think largely speaking,

that effort has succeeded.

And I agree with it.

I think Israel does run an apartheid state.

It's interestingly succeeded in the last two years.

I remember us doing episodes soon after October 7th and apartheid feeling like,

you know, charged language that.

I mean, it is charged language.

But more editorially sensitive language.

That might be right.

And so, yeah, so now there's this question of genocide.

And for those who just want the label genocide applied to Israel,

they can apply that label to it, right?

I'm not here to stop anybody.

But

the question of

to me what genocide is where it came from

and the incredible historical tragedy that israel is now plausibly guilty of it

tracing that story from its beginning to where it's going

i mean to me that carried a lot of force To others for whom it, to them it's more settled, I mean, fair enough, right?

Like what I try to do on the show is give people

a space in which to think about things.

I think, as you know, as somebody who watches the inbox, there's almost no complaint we get more often

than

how come you just let that thing stand.

Or your vocal fry.

Or my vocal fry.

How come you just let that?

thing this person said stand.

And the answer is the show's not here to do your thinking for you the show is here for you to think in

and i will push and get the answers that i think are the person's real answer but once i understand what they think

my point is not then to come in with like the editorializing that wraps the whole thing in a bow

And it's interesting, my perception of episodes is often very different than the audiences.

What I think a person said, what I think their views obviously really are are sometimes very different than what people hear.

I think that's a good thing about the show.

I think it should be open to interpretation.

And there's something very head spinning about having Khalil on one week.

And you get a New York Post cover, you know, deport him now.

And my inbox is full of people saying, how fucking dare you?

How dare you have him on?

How dare you let him say that?

And then the next week, it's like, from the other side,

you know, how dare you explore like even the question of jipsa?

How dare you not just like take it all settled?

There's not really a way right now

to create work

that

everybody who you might want to reach

can hear.

Yeah, I mean, you have a wildly impossible job in these interviews.

But I will say you do push back differently in different conversations.

And the episode that got a lot of reaction before Mahmoud Khalil, which then got even more reaction, was the Yorm Hazzoni interview,

which interestingly was not about explicitly about Israel-Palestine, although he is.

But implicitly is quite a bit of a.

Implicitly, it sure was.

And a lot of the reaction that we got was sort of circling the idea of

how you heard his theory with regards to race.

You said at one point in the interview where he's making the point that national conservatism is not racialist.

And you said, like, I take that point,

but trying to restore and then maintain, I think his language was like Anglo-Protestant core in the U.S.

and give each country its core smacks a little racialist.

How do you understand the line that he is drawing there?

I think that in this case, I think there are certain words people feel like if they can get the word agreed on, then then the word holds so much power, it will somehow win the argument for them.

And it won't.

So I don't think Yoram Azoni's project is actually racialist because I understand it's actually fundamentally an Israeli project, right?

I first met Yoram when I was on my reporting trip to Israel and I went to see him.

And I remember thinking after I had had coffee with him, that I really understand

better the National Conservative Project being in Israel and understanding it's imported from there because Israel has become such a fundamentally

unified ethno-state,

increasingly right-wing ethno-state.

How does that make it not racialist?

It's not racialist.

This is...

What can we define racialists?

They're not all Ashkenazi Jews.

But I think they see Palestinians as a different race.

Maybe they do, but you cannot look at, you can say Israel is a lot of things and Israeli Jews are a lot of things, but they're not one race under any definition we have of races, right?

Again, people I think who are I think they're redefining, and I think they have a different framework for race than we do in the U.S.

I don't think they do,

but see, I feel like this is the thing: that people think that if you can define it as racialist, then it is religious,

it is maybe ethnic in some way,

but the idea that Arab Jews coming from Egypt, Morocco, Iraq,

and

Russian Jews, and Eastern European Jews, and for that matter, Ethiopian Jews, which are sort of separate and in some ways come with different complications in that society.

The idea that that's a racialist project, I mean, the conflict with the Palestinians, I don't even think is fundamentally racialist either.

It's about land.

I don't think that the issue has to do with a view of like race in Palestinians.

It very much has to do with the politics and supremacy over land and the desire to have full dominance and Jewish supremacy in that land.

It's still about a hierarchy based off of ethnicity with a religious component.

Okay, so fine, but now we're just defining it away from being, I think certainly what in the American terms would be racialist.

Okay.

Yeah.

This feels like that we're getting lost in semantics.

But you understand that his theory

is about privileging certain ethno-religious groups over others that don't necessarily map neatly onto skin color.

I think this comes through very clearly.

I mean, I am happy to say I don't think it's fundamentally or in all of its incarnations going to be built around race, but in every place it's going to be built around something.

That something

is going to be, in my view, probably very, very, very problematic.

Maybe that will map onto race or what we think of as race or what we have like decided to call a race maybe it won't maybe it's going to be some mixture of races um mixture of race and religion mixtures of race and religion and history or just of history it can become many many different things but it's going to be about a core group

that they have somehow decided is the real group

And that group is supposed to maintain a sufficient level of dominance and control over society.

And in, I think, Yoram's view, when that group loses its control over society, loses sufficient numerical majority, whatever it might be,

that society, its cohesion, its unity begins to dissolve.

My view, I think articulated pretty clearly in that episode, is that

that's wrong.

And one way you know it's wrong is that the strongest country in the world does not abide by that.

And that, in fact, the states and particular parts of this country that have driven so much of its success, innovation, its genius, New York, where we are right now, California as another, Texas is another,

are the places at least abide by that approach.

You have to, I think, also understand Hazzoni as in a debate that when he was building these ideas, it did not look like he was winning in Israel.

And

now

Israel has given into itself as a right-wing ethnostate.

And Hazoni and ideas like his are completely preeminent.

They have very little challenge, but

it wasn't always like that.

So he's been in a fight in his country that's more like the ones we're in in this country.

And right now, the other side of that fight is functionally lost.

And

I think that if you look at the way Zionism has been adopted as an almost aspirational identity by the American right wing,

if you look at sort of the American left for a long time going back way before October 7th, identifying with the Palestinian cause was a way of identifying with oppressed peoples around the world.

It had long been, much to the confusion of many American Jews, it had become part of a basket.

of left causes.

You know, you would go to

go see a protest about the Iraq war and you would see a bunch of Free Palestine posters.

But Zionism wasn't quite like that.

And now Zionism, which I've now seen and talked to people on the right who they've adopted it in a way they really hadn't five years ago, to them, it's an embrace of a kind of strength.

Do you think Azoni has played a big role in that?

I don't think specifically him.

I think this is much more to do with,

I mean, maybe some, maybe the NATCOM project has played some role in it, but I also think that it has been part of this moment in which

there is a

maybe a fetishization or a

belief that weird time to do it.

No, but it's not, actually.

It's not a weird time to do it.

Because I think if you look at people like Elon Musk, J.D.

Vance,

in a weird way, Fetterman,

but a lot of different political figures across, you know, who I think are, you know, on the right of center of the spectrum in different ways.

There is a sense that,

I mean, there's not really a different way to put it than this, that American society became liberalized and feminized, and it has lost the

appreciation

of strength, of martial ambition, of aggression, of territorial expansion.

that were what made this country great.

Its frontier spirit, its expansionist spirit.

There's a reason Donald Trump is fixated on territorial expansion, Canada, Greenland, et cetera, maybe Gaza, sometimes when he's telling it.

And this sense that what made countries great in the 18th and 19th, the early 20th century

was somehow pushed to the side by...

it wouldn't have been called this then, but wokeness, neo-Marxism, you know, whatever the sort of enemy du jour is.

And what we've been left with

is these countries denuded of their strength because we're now just countries of lawyers and

bureaucrats and people telling you why you can't do anything.

And we're terrified of risk.

And even words cause us harm and words are violence and we need safe spaces, right?

It's all part of a generalized sense that America became soft.

And Israel sits for many of these people now

as an example of a hard country, a country that did not become soft, that is rich and highly educated.

And I mean, the Israeli stock market has been doing amazingly, right?

Israeli tech companies are very, very strong.

And the people serve in the military.

And when they were attacked.

Even the women serve in the military.

And when they were attacked, they destroyed the people who attacked them and now have decapitated Hezbollah and, you know, bombed Iran.

And so the meaning of both, I mean, there's a meaning around Palestine, but there's a meaning around Zionism that has expanded now.

It's not just about the ethnostate, but is about the martial state.

So I think you have to see some things going on here.

They're not really about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

They're about what kind of country we were

and people wanting to go back to that, thinking that we actually made really profound wrong turns in the 20th and 21st centuries.

And that Donald Trump, with his very 19th century approach to everything,

is bringing us back

to

the world and attitude that fostered our greatness and the cruelty that is part of it.

I mean, there's a reason you have this like attack on empathy as a concept.

Can a woman ever be president, Ezra?

Yes, I think so.

But you're going to have to beat this stuff back.

That's a nice segue to American politics.

Move away from Israel, Palestine, put that to bed.

All right, on to what Democrats should be doing right now.

This question is from Brenton P.

Lately, there's been debate on the left about whether Democrats should continue playing by the rules and acting with restraint or adopt a more aggressive, scorched earth approach, similar to Trump's style.

Is it time to take a tougher stance and push through the issues Democrats care about?

For example, should they consider expanding the Supreme Court, accelerating the transition to green energy while imposing stricter regulations on fossil fuels, or withholding federal medical funding from states that restrict abortion access.

These steps might seem drastic, but given the current political climate, some argued that the traditional approach is no longer effective.

What are your thoughts on this?

I would add to that question about the current seeming race to the bottom on cravenly political gerrymandering that Texas started.

So I think you have to take these in different pieces.

I am very much of the view that if Texas and other red red states are going to do this kind of gerrymandering, that the blue states are going to have to respond in kind, and that the hope for end of this is that people get fed up with gerrymandering and we end the practice nationwide somehow or another.

That's a hopeful end.

It is.

But there's no other approach right now.

This idea that you can unilaterally disarm while the red states are gerrymandering their way to some kind of attempted permanent majority in the House, you can't do that.

I mean, if you look even at just basic game theory, oftentimes in these sorts of dilemmas,

the optimal theory is what's called tit for tit, like if you, or tat for tat, if you prefer,

that you do what the other side does.

And when the other side changes, you also change.

But the idea that you can just let the other side run roughshot over you, that doesn't work.

So I think what Newsom is doing is the right thing.

Not because anybody on the the left wants this to be the place we end up,

but

you can't just hand over control to the people who want everything to end up in a terrible place.

It's very, very, very unfortunate.

Life sometimes gives you bad options and you have to choose the best of them.

I think the thing elsewhere on that list actually reflects questions that we have to think about, not just as politics, right?

There's the way the questioner asked that question.

The other ways aren't effective.

Well, your way might not be effective either, right?

It was very ineffective in many ways for FDR to try to pack the court, though some people credit it with kind of cowing the court.

It seems here to me that Donald Trump cowed the court somewhat.

This will be brought up or explored in a future episode.

But the court, I thought they would kind of give Trump 20-ish% of what he wanted in order to avert a showdown.

I feel like they're giving him 60 or 70% of what he wanted.

It might play out very differently under Democrats.

I don't know the answer to that.

But I am not, and I never have been, against efforts to remake the court.

I would definitely put term limits in place,

not because I think you need term limits, but because I think you actually need retirement ages in politics at this point.

And so for the court, I would like to see 12-year terms.

So you don't have this absolute insanity around lifetime appointments where you're just waiting for people either to die or to retire strategically.

And I do think you have a gerontocracy problem that has gotten worse on the left, by the way, among the Democratic Party.

You look at who are the elderly members of Congress who have died just in this election cycle, and it's Democrats.

I mean, the disaster.

You can really tell the story of American politics in Democratic retirements that did not happen.

What if Ruth Bader Ginsburg had retired in 2013, when many of us, myself included, wrote pieces saying, please retire?

Like Democrats are going to lose the Senate in 2014, and you have no idea what will happen after that.

Please retire.

And we got howled at by people saying, how dare you say that?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is an American hero.

And she did incredible damage to democracy.

There's a very, I think, reasonable argument that if Trump had not had that open seat to promise to the evangelical right, he would not have been able to build the alliance that helped him win what was in 2016 an incredibly close election.

And even if you then say Trump still wins in 2016, at least right now you have a 5-4 court, not a 6-3 court.

Then obviously Joe Biden, you can't run the counterfactuals.

But I think that retirement ages would make a lot of sense.

Then there are other things that wouldn't.

I think a place where Democrats have to be really careful is wielding incredible power to do very unpopular things does not make you politically strong.

And so being attentive to and aware of public opinion is meaningful here.

It's particularly true, by the way, when they have the disadvantage they do in the Senate, right?

The Senate is built to overrepresent rural voters and, you know, states with a lot of rural voters and small states.

And that just means that in order to maintain any kind of majority in the Senate, Democrats have to win.

I mean, I've seen different estimates of it, but

they need to win something like

be overperforming by four to six percentage points, which is quite hard.

And so, you know, right now, if they're going to take back the Senate, they need to win in places like Ohio, Kansas.

That's become very, very difficult for them.

I think people want to see you fighting,

but you have to pick what you're going to wield power on thoughtfully.

Gerrymandering is unpopular.

The amount of money spent on politics is unpopular.

Wielding power incredibly aggressively, if it makes you horrendously unpopular and you already have a disadvantage in the House and Senate is like not a great strategy.

So I do just the only cautionary note I'm offering here is it's fine to be on some level ruthless.

And there are many places where I'd like to see a lot more ruthlessness from Democrats, but that cannot become an excuse for not thinking strategically about where the country is and how to meet it or how to lead it.

Our last MA, I was just remembering, was basically the week your book came out.

I remember that.

Exciting.

It was exciting days for you.

Abundance available anywhere.

You might want to buy a book.

And a lot of people have.

Or an audio book.

Where is it?

Is it still on the charts?

It was.

21 weeks, which is pretty fucking cool.

All right.

I don't think I would have seen that coming.

So just to start off, like, what's been the most exciting thing for you in terms of seeing these ideas get embraced different places?

I think the fact that they've actually gotten embraced different places, that legislation is moving in different parts of the country that is abundance oriented that i'm hearing from the politicians moving it that the book has been a permission structure for them a spur for them a way of thinking about things for them and also to my surprise how big of a role it's playing in other countries so abundance the book has become just a big deal in the UK, where it's become a big book on Downing Street, in Canada, where, you know, Mark Carney's Build, Baby, Build agenda has been very aligned to it.

I'm not saying we were the inspiration for it.

I don't think we were, but it's, we know that a lot of people in that government are reading the book.

In Australia, it's been talked about a lot.

And there have been these articles about how it's become super popular in the Australian government.

It's been really interesting to see a book that was very rooted in American politics for me, somewhat in California and New York and some other big blue states.

I wouldn't have written the book the way I did.

Me and Derek wouldn't have written it the way we did if we didn't think that the problems generalized.

But the degree to which people in other places where I don't know their problems and I don't know their politics feel the problems generalized has been very, very

exciting to me.

Is there a particular part that you see people mostly grabbing on to or as being most immediately reflected in the performance of the people?

People are grabbing on much more, I would say, to the critique of how highly bureaucratized liberal governments work and then fail to work.

They're grabbing much less than I had hoped, and this might be my failure as a promoter of the book's ideas.

They're grabbing on much less than I had hoped to the idea that

abundance is very much about how do you build a goal-oriented liberalism as opposed to a process-oriented liberalism.

But a goal-oriented liberalism requires you to think very hard about your goals.

And one of the arguments of abundance is that we should be picking goals that reflect and lead the way towards much different levels of material prosperity.

So in America, one of the big questions around that is housing, which is the biggest part of most working families' budget.

But we also talk a lot about energy.

And one of the projects of the book is to move the energy conversation beyond just decarbonization and preventing the worst of climate change and to actual clean energy abundance.

The idea of energy is a nucleus of wealth.

And that our conversation about energy and the environment shouldn't just be about avoiding terrible things from happening, but making possible abundant futures that right now are almost unimaginable.

Like that's very important to me.

I mean, there's a reason we have so much about science and technology in the book, right?

These are incredible ways to solve problems that don't even currently appear solvable.

You know, as somebody whose partner has some really difficult health conditions, whether or not medications and treatments appear for the things that afflict like the person I love most,

that's a really important question of healthcare policy to me.

Health insurance that cannot buy treatments for my spouse because those treatments don't exist in some cases, is worth a fuck ton less than health insurance that does, that can.

And so I think we could do a a lot more in terms of

getting people to talk about

a much more future-focused form of liberalism, right?

A liberalism that imagines a future that is quite different and just in different ways than the present.

We do a fairly good job of that in liberalism around redistribution, parceling out what we have very differently.

And that's very important.

I'm not an opponent of that.

I'm not questioning that, right?

I want a better healthcare system than we have.

I want a fairer tax system than we have.

But there's a lot we need to do to to make things that are not currently possible possible.

We can only redistribute what we already have.

What about what we don't yet have?

What future do we want?

What does that future look like?

What does it have that we don't currently have?

And then how do we work backwards to achieve it?

That, I think, is something I'm still trying to figure out how to more effectively inject into abundanced discourse.

That politics is the art of making the impossible possible.

But not just possible.

Politics is the art of making the impossible conceivable.

One of the things that worried me most about Donald Trump at the dawn of his second term was the alliance he had made with the tech right and with Elon Musk and other people who, in addition to being very, very rich and very, very powerful, are also fundamentally influencers around the future, right?

Elon Musk is the most important futurist influencer alive right now.

If you're like a young person and you're really into rockets, the person you're into is Elon Musk.

Like if you look at the, you know, what gets called the Manosphere, but this sort of collection of podcasts, it's very futuristically focused.

They're very interested in AI.

They're interested in

crypto, right?

Oh, yeah, crypto is another big part of this.

That alliance breaking down, not the crypto alliance, which is still there, but the alliance with Musk,

Trump sort of destroying our scientific institutions and scientific funding.

I don't think that that alliance is stable any longer.

And that means that there is an opportunity for liberals to take back the future.

But that requires developing a vision of the future that isn't just about how you don't like what current technology is doing.

It also requires coming up with an agenda in which you put a genuine optimism about what is possible with technology and connect it to a genuine view about how to get that technology and govern it and distribute it fairly, and are able to talk about it in a way that is compelling and exciting to people.

And that I don't see happening yet.

We have time for one last question from Jess Kay about your monk debate experience.

We aired the audio of that on our feed.

Do you have a tale, behind the scenes tail for us?

So the monk debate, we had this debate on,

it was me and Ben Rhodes from Pod Save the World.

And then on the other side, Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation and sort of an architect of Project 2025 and Kellyanne Conway.

Here's what I thought was so interesting about that debate.

I went into that debate very, very worried about how it would go.

Not because I thought anybody would think that in Canada that America was at the dawn of a new golden age, but precisely because nobody would think that and the debate was scored by audience movement, I thought we had an incredibly hard task.

I didn't want the headline to be Rhodes and Klein lose monk debate to Roberts and Conway on whether or not America is in a new golden age.

Even if what had happened was like we had started with all of the audience agreeing with us, and because of that, because we had no targets for persuasion, we lost 2%.

In the end, we started with 85% of the audience agreeing with us and gained a point.

So technically, we won, which is good.

Okay.

I thought we did a pretty good job in that debate.

But if I had been on the other side, I could have beaten us.

And what I found so interesting was when I watched Conway and Roberts, just knowing I'm a good debater, I think.

And the thing you know as a debater is you're trying to win people over.

But here's like the broader vision and, you know, the relationship with Canada is so important to America.

There would have been so many ways to do it.

But to debate that effectively, you would have been needed to be willing to give ground to what the audience already thought and believed.

You would have been needed to portray yourself as an honest broker in the conversation in ways that built your credibility with the audience.

So then when you said,

I understand why this looks kind of crazy to you.

I understand that right now at the beginning of this administration, we're in a period of massive disruption, that tariffs are all over the place.

You're furious.

But what we're doing is resetting the system

to achieve X, Y, and Z.

And here's how we're going to do it.

And here's how it's going to be good for us both.

And I think I could have run that argument if I had needed to.

And they didn't really run that argument.

And I just felt that their argument was just like, everything's been brilliant all the time.

I don't want to say literally that is what they said, but you can go back and listen to it.

It's on our feed.

But when I listened to Roberts and Conway, I just didn't feel like their audience was in that room.

And that

my co-debaters were very worried

about someone from the Trump administration hearing them say something Donald Trump wouldn't like.

And that maybe some enemy of theirs or somebody was in the room or something would have reported it back and then they would have lost influence in the orbit.

I felt like they were being watched.

That's a weird feeling to be feeling.

It was very,

look, I could be totally wrong.

I don't mean to be slandering anybody.

In a way, I'm doing the opposite.

I think they're both better debaters than they showed up as at night

and in obvious ways.

And there were just moments in the conversation where either these habits are so internalized now that they're just second nature for people who are in the Trumpist orbit,

or there is a genuine level of fear

that you will be caught on camera.

or on a tweet or something

saying something that is negative about dear leader and it will get back to dear leader or the people around him and your enemies will use it to knife you.

Do you see this as like, having actually been in a debate stage and like felt that feeling, do you now see this as an affliction more clearly across the Trumpian right?

Well, I've always seen it as an affliction across the Trumpian right.

It's been true for a very long time.

It was less true in the first term.

People were much more willing to criticize Donald Trump.

Now in the second term, they're really not on the right.

And it has made them justify things they never would have justified before.

It creates these weird dynamics.

I think you saw this a bit with the Epstein files.

Oh, this was one of the first places you began to see cracks, but where the initial impulse was to endlessly blame Pam Bondi or Cash Patel.

But you can never say, dear leader, did anything wrong?

The king is always getting bad advice.

The king is never wrong.

And the specific fear underneath that, you think, is like, A, that he has the power to like, if he sends one tweet, he can make your life hell and send the troll armies out against you, but also that your kind of career within Republican politics just might be done.

I've said this, I think, on the show before, but on the one level, there's a lot of room for dissent in the MAGA coalition.

You can have a very wide range of views, say like on vaccines.

I think actually, frankly, a wider range of views than Democrats are currently able to have or were able to have in 2024, at least.

Because in the MAGA coalition,

The thing you cannot have a wide range of views on is one thing.

It's a unidimensional test, which is Donald Trump is great.

You can't have the wrong view on the 2020 election.

You can't have the wrong view on Donald Trump.

You can't be a critic of his.

You can't be what Larry Summers was to like Joe Biden during the inflationary period, where he was out there like really hammering them, but remained actually like, you know, somebody they talked to a lot and were trying to bring back into the tent.

And dissent on policy and debate was like much more open

because it wasn't necessary

to believe that Joe Biden was like the sun god,

or at least to pretend you believe Joe Biden was sun god.

And in the Trump coalition, you have to treat Trump pretty much like the sun god.

And if it gets back that you're not, I mean, all power and influence flows in that world from him.

If he comes out and says Heritage is a trash organization who's been screwing up MAGA for years now, created all his problems of 2025, that's basically the end of Heritage,

at least as a viable player for a while.

If Kellyanne Conway is on the outs with Trump World, that's it.

What are you?

If people don't believe you're close to and listened to by Donald Trump, then you're just, what, some never Trumper?

You're, you know, Liz Cheney, like, who are you?

And so the sense that

people on the right now talk about Donald Trump like they are being watched

by the Stasi is like very alive for me.

And I would see it.

I mean, I think you see it if you turn on Fox News on any given day.

But I just felt it to be true there in a way that I think if it wasn't true, they would have beaten us because in fact, you were never arguing for the people in the room.

You were arguing for one person who you have no idea if he would even ever know this had happened.

But if he ever did and he didn't like it, you were screwed.

So that was what I took away from that debate.

You said I wasn't allowed to end this episode on hope, but is that not hopeful, perhaps, for the Democrats if they're up against a party that has to be so self-censored?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, I want to call, again, I don't think it's hopeful that we have this kind of coalition in charge in America, but if you're asking what are democratic opportunities, yeah, the structure of Trumpism for a talented Democratic candidate or set of candidates offers a lot of opportunity.

Do I see people who seem to me to be taking it?

Not yet.

But, you know, we're not at the point where you have sort of individual voices rising up that much.

Yeah, there's going to be a brittleness to the Republican coalition.

You know, if you're J.D.

Vance

and you want to be the nominee,

or you're Marco Rubio

and Trump is pulling it 36%,

but will slit your throat politically if you say anything went wrong and he did anything wrong.

And yet he and his administration are viewed as like pulsing symbols of corruption and incompetence.

That's going to be a very hard election to win.

Now, will the American people feel that way by then?

I don't know.

But it's going to create some problems for the right if Trump is not seen by the rest of the country as the sun god he insists his own people treat him as.

I think that's hope.

How far we've fallen, Claire.

And we're out of time.

But thank you so much, Ezra.

Thank you, Claire.

This episode of The Astro Clown Show is produced by Claire Gordon and Kristen Lynn.

Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker.

Our senior audio engineers, Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Amin Sehuta and Isaac Jones.

The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassione, Roland Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jack McCordick, and Jan Koble.

Original music by Pat McCusker.

Audience strategy by Christina Samuluski and Shannon Busta.

The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rosestrasser.

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